For those who are disgusted with ICANN, and the way that they have abused their position to favor a small minority -- you ain't seen nothing yet! Consider these criticisms of the IMF/WB: DENNIS BRUTUS, http://www.50years.org Now professor emeritus of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Brutus was a political prisoner with Nelson Mandela. A member of Jubilee 2000 South Africa, Brutus said today: "The record of both the World Bank and IMF over a period of more than 50 years shows that they serve the interests of the corporations rather than of people. Their policies have led to increased poverty and misery in much of the developing world. It is time to stop these policies. Seattle represented a tremendous surge for change in the world which will be further developed in Washington. What we seek is a new, just, equitable world in which people are more important than profits." ORONTO DOUGLAS, http://www.foe.org Co-author of the forthcoming "Where Vultures Feast: Forty Years of Shell in the Niger Delta," Douglas was one of the Nigerian lawyers for Ken Saro Wiwa, an activist who was executed in 1995 by Nigeria's military dictatorship because of his opposition to Shell's drilling. Douglas, who is deputy director of Environmental Rights Action, said today: "In Nigeria, through structural adjustment policies, the IMF and World Bank have wiped out the middle class, destroyed our educational system, impoverished the people and been a source of pain in our country. What we have right now is a tiny cabal of extremely rich people and millions of people who are extremely poor. This was not the case before the IMF and World Bank started tinkering with our economy." JEFFREY WINTERS, Co-editor of the upcoming book "Re-inventing the World Bank" and associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University, Winters said today: "The World Bank's public relations budget is roughly five times its budget for project auditing and supervision. One consequence of this is the massive problem of Criminal Debt, that portion of a country's official foreign debt that is stolen by government officials. For many countries in the Third World, this is between 25 to 50 percent of the money loaned -- for Indonesia, it's a third or $10 billion. The population has to pay back 100 percent plus interest. The World Bank's charter requires that it ensure that the monies it lends are used for their intended purpose -- but since its inception the Bank has failed to do this, with the losses accruing to poor people across the developing world." TREVOR NGWANE, http://www.aidc.org.za Representative of Soweto in the Town Council of Johannesburg, Ngwane said today: "The ordinary American citizen is not aware that the policies of the World Bank and IMF are anti-poor and anti-working class. Their structural adjustment policies discourage government spending on social welfare and demand the commodification of essential services like water, electricity and education. When the ANC government took over, we had a policy that every citizen was entitled to 50 liters of water per day since during apartheid many people did not have the water they needed. The World Bank said no, they said there should be user fees for water and advocated outhouses instead, but the water table is high and the soil is porous -- the World Bank plan would have had disastrous health effects. Only through protests were we able to stop it. In South Africa, our vision was to make education free, but the World Bank came with this idea that the user must pay, so schools are being forced to charge. This year, due to budget constraints, the government stopped funding kindergarten." OSCAR OLIVERA, JIM SHULTZ, http://www.americas.org/News/Features/200004_Bolivia_Water/Shultz_and_Kruse http://www.g77.org After Bolivia -- bowing to demands from the World Bank -- privatized the water system in the city of Cochabamba, water rates soared. Workers making $100 per month got $20 water bills. Thousands protested, shutting down the city of half a million for a week in early April; the Bolivian subsidiary of the Bechtel corporation, the new owners of the water system, fled. On April 8, the government declared a state of emergency and shut down independent media. Olivera, a union leader from Cochabamba and Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center, have just come to the U.S. from Bolivia. MEREDETH TURSHEN, Author of "Privatizing Health Services in Africa" and a professor of policy and planning at Rutgers University, Turshen said today: "The IMF and the World Bank have forced, as conditions of badly needed loans, many African countries to dismantle their public health services. One consequence of this is the increased number of reported AIDS cases in Africa. AIDS in Africa is rarely diagnosed with an HIV test -- they can't afford it. Rather, it's diagnosed by symptoms, so many of the 'AIDS' cases are actually TB and other diseases that are easily preventable and treatable if they had minimal health facilities. Attributing the deaths to 'AIDS' covers for the culpability of the West in the deteriorating health conditions in Africa and implies that there's little to be done except get Africans to use condoms, which dovetails with the World Bank's obsession with population control; it also plays to sexual stereotypes. The IMF has also ordered currency devaluations which have severely curtailed drug imports." QUENTIN DRISKELL, http://www.nlg.org An attorney with the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild, Driskell is providing legal assistance to protesters. He said: "There's a complete atmosphere of repression in Washington: the illegitimate preemptive arrests, the expansion of the restricted area around the World Bank building, the storming of the Convergence Center. The authorities seem bent on not allowing peaceful protests to go forward. The tactics that they've resorted to almost seem as if they're trying to goad protesters into acting out. I've been doing political work and protests for 25 years and I've never seen police action like this." [*compiled from the Institute for Public Accuracy] Respectfully, Jay Fenello, New Media Strategies ------------------------------------ http://www.fenello.com 770-392-9480 Aligning with Purpose(sm) ... for a Better World ------------------------------------------------ "If we want to change the world, we have to begin by changing ourselves" -- Deepak Chopra
