Tom Paine: Unhappy Birthday, World Bank!

[Robbien]

In 1994, when the IMF and World Bank were celebrating the 50th anniversary of their creation, very few people in this country could tell you anything about the twin fixtures of corporate globalization. "Globalization" itself was only beginning its life as a buzzword, almost always used to celebrate an uncontroversial march of progress into the 21st century.

Ten years, several regional financial crises and hundreds of worldwide protests later, the cheerful anonymity that shielded these institutions from criticism has long since disappeared. This weekend, protesters will rally outside the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank to wish the financial bodies an unhappy 60th birthday. They will highlight the dramatic manner in which the development debate has changed in just a few years. And they will denounce the nefarious IMF/World Bank policies that remain important elements of the Bush administration's imperious foreign policy.

Perhaps the most remarkable change since protesters began aggressively challenging these institutions is how the mainstream has adopted their criticisms. Today the legitimacy of protestors' demands for IMF/World Bank reform—or at least moderate versions of them—is acknowledged by virtually all fair-minded observers of development policy, including a growing number who have defected from the World Bank itself. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the Bank, states that "even those in the Washington establishment, now that rapid capital market liberalization without accompanying regulations"—a core element of neoliberal globalization that contributed mightily to financial collapse in East Asia—"is dangerous." Stiglitz further argues that demands "such as the need for better ways of restructuring debt might have seemed controversial a short while ago. Today they are either in the mainstream or are gradually being accepted."

Building A Protest Movement

Much of the credit for the IMF/World Bank's deepening image crisis of past years belongs to the organizations of the 50 Years Is Enough Network. Since it formed 10 years ago, the aim of 50 Years Is Enough has been to publicize grassroots criticisms of the harms inflicted by the IMF and the World Bank on the developing world, and to advance a series of sweeping reforms. By April 2000, in the wake of the Seattle protests, the numbers of people joining protests grew to 25,000. U.S. mobilizations have been mirrored by raucous demonstrations overseas, many in the countries most affected by IMF/World Bank policy.

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10286