50 Years is Enough Speaking Tour:

Water privatization. Environmental destruction. Corporate greed. Debt. Low-paying jobs. Unaffordable healthcare. Unsafe food. Forced displacement. Economic insecurity.
Struggling against World Bank, the IMF, U.S. military intervention – the global system that creates these conditions, that places corporate rights over human rights. Hear about their struggles and share your strategies.

Hosted by: Loyola's Graduate Association of Sociologists, Sociology Club, and Loyola Campus Greens.

Press Advisory :: For Immediate Release
Date: September 26, 2005

Contact:
Marc Rittle/Graduate Association of Sociologists ~ jrittle (at) luc.edu
Christina Johnson/Sociology Club ~ cjohn29 (at) luc.edu
Loyola Campus Greens ~ campus-greens (at) luc.edu

Activist from South Africa to Speak at Loyola University Chicago
Speaker Will Address World Bank, IMF, Globalization, Iraq War

Last week, during the annual meetings of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF), thousands of people gathered in Washington DC for massive global justice and anti-war demonstrations. Protesters highlighted the connections between the military violence in Iraq - and elsewhere - and the economic violence perpetrated by the IMF and World Bank, a connection made even clearer with the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, to the presidency of the World Bank.

To further highlight these connections, the Graduate Association of Sociologists, the Sociology Club, and the campus Greens are hosting the 50 Years Is Enough Network and United for Peace and Justice Speaker’s Tour at Loyola University Chicago.

The tour includes speakers from the Dominican Republic, India, the United States, and South Africa. Loyola University Chicago will be hosting Nompumelelo “Pinkie” Magwaza, youth organizer and poet, from South Africa. Nompumelelo is a leader in the youth movement for justice in South Africa. A vibrant young woman who got her exposure in the struggle for social justice through volunteering at Jubilee South Africa. Her experiences with Jubilee South Africa and other struggles for social justice enables Nompumelelo to use her poetry as a tool to raise awareness and as a form of information dissemination amongst youth and other sectors of struggle.

What: Nompumelelo “Pinkie” Magwaza, Speaker
When: Friday, September 30, 6-8 p.m.
Where: Damen Hall, Hussey Lounge (10th Floor)
Loyola University Chicago, 6525 N. Sheridan Rd.

The IMF and the World Bank are two of the most influential international institutions – controlled by a few wealthy countries including the U.S. – that lend money to most of the world’s countries. Using their lending power as leverage over client countries, the World Bank and IMF impose policies that open up countries’ markets, natural resources, and labor to exploitation by multinational corporations. In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s executive directives have begun to accomplish the same goals, and the subsequent economic occupation of the country by the World Bank and the IMF will no doubt complete serving up the resources of Iraq to corporate interests.

IMF/World Bank policies such as privatization of services, budget caps on education and healthcare, the elimination of trade tariffs and quotas, and the removal of food subsidies, all contribute to the impoverishment of the majority of the world’s people, the decimation of worker’s rights, loss of livelihoods and lives, and environmental destruction. Similar policies undertaken in the U.S. have similar devastating effects on our communities.

Nompumelelo will discuss the World Bank, the IMF, and the links between economic and military violence both in the global South and here in the U.S. She will talk about the current model of globalization that puts corporate profits over human rights and lives, how it affects their communities, and what they’re doing to resist it.