Stop Corporate Globalization!
Resist the IMF / World Bank / WTO Triad!

(Go tolong version)

Corporate globalization is no accident! The rules that allow multinational corporations to plunder resources, devastate ecosystems, exploit disempowered workers, and demand policies that prioritize their profits are made in meetings of Finance Ministers, Treasury officials, and Trade Ministers. Although the officials making these decisions represent governments, many of them formally democratic, the blueprint they use is one of corporate empowerment. They assume the people will accept that greater profits for corporations will mean better futures for all.

Massive demonstrations of opposition to that agenda at economic summits in Vancouver, Birmingham (UK), Cologne, Geneva, and most recently and importantly Seattle have shown that many, many people do not accept this logic. This April we will continue to bring this message to the decision-makers as they convene on U.S. soil, making sure they understand that resistance to their agenda is truly global. We will show up to another meeting we werenât invited to, this time in Washington, the home not only of the U.S. government, which has been setting the pace in corporate globalization, but also of the international institutions that enforce the rules, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This time, instead of a huge "summit," we will be intervening at one of the regularly-scheduled business-as-usual meetings of Finance Ministers and international bank-o-crats, one of the meetings where the dirty work of the corporate global economy gets done.

On April 16 and 17 the limousines carrying the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of some 25 countries and the heads of many international institutions (such as the World Trade Organization) are slated to pull up in the driveway of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where the officials will be deposited for the Spring Meetings of the IMF and World Bank. The meeting on Sunday, April 16 is of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, which until September 1999 was known by the even more eerily meaningless name of "the Interim Committee." The Interim Committee has historically guided the policies that the IMF imposes on those countries it lends to, from the high-profile "bailout" countries of Brazil, Russia, South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia to about 90 of the worldâs poorest countries, throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the IMF has virtually dictated economic policy for 20 years. These policies have led to massive impoverishment, unemployment, environmental devastation, and loss of economic sovereignty to corporations. The Interim Committee changed its name as part of a new design to make it more assertive in determining the rules of the global economy. The new International Monetary and Financial Committee is destined, it seems, to become the driverâs seat for corporate globalization.

We cannot let this meeting take place outside the spotlight of public attention. Government officials paving the way for corporate profits ö all the while claiming to work for "development" and "poverty reduction" ö must be put on notice: The people power demonstrated in Seattle will not die. We demand a global economic justice for all. Now!

The Interim Committee / International Monetary & Financial Committee meets twice a year (the Fall meeting will be in Prague in September).

Attendees at the last meeting of the Interim Committee:

Managing Director of the IMF

Finance Ministers of the United States, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Gabon, Germany, Argentina, Denmark, Brazil, South Africa, Canada, Japan, Belgium, India, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands

Central Bank Governors of the United Kingdom, Venezuela, Australia, China, Russia, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia

Observers from the following institutions (in most cases, the heads):