This issue of Economic Justice News contains an unusually large amount of news about our activities and significant events affecting our work. From the "No Debt, No Sweat" conference to our participation in the events in Johannesburg and Seattle (not to mention South Korea), to the news of the IMFâs attempt to reform its notorious Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) and the resignation of its longtime Managing Director Michel Camdessus, this newsletter chronicles a very busy time indeed.

Participants in the Taegu (South Korea) Round Global Forum, which brought together economists and activists from around the world to consider new, people-centered directions for the global economy, drafted the following letter. We note with some satisfaction that it was eight days later that Michel Camdessus announced his resignation as the IMF's Managing Director on November 9, thus meeting in part the letter's fifth demand. On December 14, as we were going to press with this issue of Economic Justice News, U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers made a speech in which he outlined a new, more limited vision of the IMF, one where its involvement in the world's most impoverished countries would be sharply reduced.

On November 9, Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), announced that he will step down in February 2000.

Over 300 activists from the diverse groups that make up the 50 Years Is Enough Network came to Washington for our fourth national conference – "No Debt, No Sweat: Organizing for Global Justice" – over the weekend of September 23-26.

50 Years Is Enough activists and their allies overcame some significant odds in getting the House Banking Committee to approve an amendment which mandated U.S. efforts to ensure that any debt relief it provided must NOT be linked to structural adjustment style programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. However, the U.S. Treasury Department remains firmly devoted to structural adjustment.

The conference was a tremendous success, with 150 participants representing some 40 countries.

Our starting point is Jubilee not debt. The announcement of Jubilee as an indictment of ALL unjust social and gender structures, the liberation of the entire web of human relationships and the restitution of the missing global community by moving forward in social justice.

On October 1, 1999, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) launched the March of the Americas, a month-long march from Washington, DC to New York City organized to call attention to the ways in which the US government violates the economic human rights of its impoverished citizens.

Activists for economic justice around the world have expressed their alarm about the "new face" being applied to ESAF. In one of the most cynically Orwellian acts in memory, the IMF seems to have decided that what was once "structural adjustment" should now be called "poverty reduction"! While few seem to be taken in at this point, our task will be to make sure that the IMF, through its persistence, does not start to take in elected officials and other decision-makers with this blatant lie.

The opposition to the WTO and the global economic elite is massive and passionate enough that organizers were actually able through direct, non-violent action to force the cancellation of the opening ceremony. Even if some of the media coverage dwelt on the broken windows and graffiti and tear gas, the delegates themselves received a powerful signal, because they know they were blocked by entirely non-violent actions.

On December 1st, a freezing winter day, as protestors in Seattle challenged business as usual at the World Trade Organization, a few dozen people gathered on the east steps of the U.S. Capitol to challenge business as usual in Congress, to speak truth about the burden of debt to that power, and to call for jubilee. Earlier that day (beginning at 6:30 am), many of them -- Franciscans in brown robes -- had been at a suburban metro station to hand out leaflets about Jubilee 2000 and the moral imperative of debt cancellation. All of them were participants in the Rolling Fast, a project of Jubilee 2000 and the Religious Working Group on the World Bank and IMF.

On Friday, October 15, a South Korean trade union became the first anywhere to sue the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for damages caused by the policies it imposes.

On November 23, Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank’s Chief Economist and an outspoken critic of the so-called "Washington Consensus," announced his resignation. In an interview published by the New York Times on December 2, Stiglitz said that "working from the inside was not leading to [timely] responses" and that he had decided that with policies "as misguided as I believe these policies were, you have to either speak out or resign."