New York Times, April 9, 2000
Seattle Protesters Are Back, With a New Target
By JOSEPH KAHN
WASHINGTON, April 8 -- For Beka Economopoulos, a 25-year-old environmental
campaigner with a premature streak of gray in her long black hair, the
drive to shut down the world's financial institutions began in Seattle's
King County Jail.
She and about 250 other women spent five days there shortly after
Thanksgiving last year, most of them arrested for refusing to disperse when
the Seattle police told them to move on. Inside the cells, they planned an
encore.
"For five days they only thing we talked about was how to take this to the
next level," said Ms. Economopoulos, a Washington native who now spends
full time on this mix of environmental and economic causes. "You go through
that, you know, and you're hooked."
Many of the people who disrupted the Seattle meeting of the World Trade
Organization are reassembling in Washington this week, where they have
identified as their targets two older, richer and savvier agents of the
global economy: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Students, church groups, environmentalists and labor unions, a few of them
planning to scale buildings and block traffic, say they want to disrupt the
spring meetings of both groups.
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Many of the protesters view the World Bank and the I.M.F. as global loan
sharks, hooking lower-income nations on cheap debt and then insisting that
they adopt free markets, unlimited investment, privatization and restrained
government spending, or risk a cutoff in new aid.
They are armed with research that they say shows some of the poorest
countries that get World Bank and I.M.F. assistance, particularly in
sub-Saharan Africa, have become dependent on loans.
Even when the policies work, they often come at the expense of the
environment, others argue. The bank and the fund sometimes require aid
recipients to curtail spending and increase exports to earn hard currency.
To meet those targets, governments often slash environmental protection
budgets, they contend.
"You cannot conceive of policies more diametrically opposed to sound
management of resources, " said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of
the Earth.
Some protesters have treated Mr. Sachs and Joseph E. Stiglitz, the recently
departed chief economist of the World Bank, as intellectual leaders. Mr.
Stiglitz's scathing insider critiques have contributed to a raging debate
in universities and in Congress about the effectiveness of the agencies.
Indeed, the protesters have implicit allies on the right. A commission
appointed by the Republican-controlled Congress called last month for an
end to long-term loans of the type criticized by environmentalists. The
commission also said the bank should make more grants, rather than loans.
"Underneath it all is a feeling that globalization has not brought the
benefits to the poor as promised," Mr. Stiglitz said. "The architecture of
the world financial system is decided by finance ministers behind closed
doors, but farmers and small businessmen are the ones who get hurt."
Full article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/040900wto-protest.html
Louis Proyect
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