September 23rd to 25th 2005, the weekend of the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund’s annual meetings, holds great importance for millions around the
world. This year, the Mobilization for Global Justice, a Washington DC-based
activist group, will join our allies in the global South, Europe, and the U.S.
as well as with those in the anti-war community to demand an end to the
international system that uses economic and military might to extract resources
and serve corporate interests. We envision a world with true development,
democracy, and security, and where economic policy serves the interests of the
people. We call for creative direct actions on the weekend of September 23rd
to 25th – all the action you can muster to shake the pillars of empire to their
rotten and festering core – and work towards another possible world.

As the U.S. spends millions of public dollars a day on the deadly occupation of
Iraq, the World Bank and IMF are promoting a violence less sensational and far
more insidious. Using the mechanism of international debt, the World Bank and
the IMF are waging a global war on the poor. Through the privatization of
basic services, the prying open of developing countries' economies, and the
capping of spending on healthcare, education, and employment even as military
spending balloons, the institutions ensure that any resources in the global
South – from water to oil, minerals to labor, bananas to money – are
transferred to the benefit of transnational corporations and elites rather than
to local communities.

The extraction of Southern resources facilitated by the World Bank and IMF leads
to an escalation of economic violence and the destruction of real democracy and
development. Forced relocation, hunger, increased poverty, environmental
destruction, and disease are all direct products of World Bank and IMF
policies. Rampant privatization means that communities the world over are
seeing control over local resources wrested from them and delivered to
unaccountable multinational corporations. For women forced to work long hours
for sweatshop wages, for children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic, for families
forced to skip meals, for girls who cannot afford to attend school, for
communities uprooted by dams, mines, and pipelines, this is not real
development, it is violence. For the people of the global South whose lives
are disrupted, worsened, jeopardized, and often ended, this is not true
security; it is not true democracy.

These policies extend even into the U.S.: as residents of Washington DC, we are
the reluctant hosts of the World Bank, the IMF, and other institutions of
empire. With our only public hospital closed, a deteriorating public school
system, a private baseball stadium being built with public funds we see that
the same policies of private gain at public expense imposed on borrowing
countries by the World Bank and IMF are also at work in Washington. The World
Bank and IMF make billions a year in profits, use services provided by the
city, and sit on valuable property downtown, yet they pay no property taxes or
corporate revenue taxes. This is an injustice in a city with a majority
low-income population and is a cruel hypocrisy on the part of the institutions,
which state “poverty reduction” and “economic development” as part of their
goals.

September 23rd to 25th the movements for global justice will defy the corrupt
global system which concentrates economic and military power in a few countries
and whose agents to run riot across the globe, extracting essential resources,
exacerbating climate change, and impoverishing the majority of humanity. The
model of development promoted by the World Bank and IMF is emulated at all
levels – from national governments to city councils – supporting corporate
power and placing profit before people, waging economic and military war and
promoting social and environmental destruction, in its hunger for the world’s
resources.

Join us and the millions around the world dedicated to a world where
development, security, and democracy are no longer tools of rhetoric employed
by the World Bank, the IMF, and the U.S. government but are realities in the
lives of all. Come to Washington DC September 23-25th for a weekend of
spirited action to shake the pillars of empire!

The Mobilization for Global Justice is a Washington DC-based activist group. We
are committed to organizing effective, strategic, and creative direct actions
during the World Bank and IMF fall meetings.

Please visit our website www.globalizethis.org or email us at mgj (at) riseup.net for
updates on the weekend and information on how to get involved.