Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The global impact of the D.C. protests Plus: Are Benetton death penalty ads art? Should organs be for sale?
Apr 20, 2000 |
World Bank and IMF: Good, evil or irrelevant?
BY DARYL LINDSEY
(04/14/00)
I'm an American newspaper reporter in Belarus working on a couple of stories. Belarus is the only country in the region to turn down IMF and World Bank aid, and dictator Alexander Lukashenko would probably be glad to stand beside the protesters in D.C. It's no fun in Belarus. More than 44 percent live below an official minimum subsistence level. Protesters get beat up, arrested and expelled from school and occasionally disappear.
From out here in Eastern Europe, the World Bank and IMF sure look like the good guys. They're pushing to develop a private sector, to create a middle class capable of resisting the regime. The alternatives aren't grass-roots, locally targeted social movements. They're rulers who vary along a spectrum from authoritarian to corrupt.
-- Ben Smith
Although many things that the World Bank and IMF have done in the past are wonderful, they are now out of date and we must now sympathize with the demonstrators in their efforts to modernize the lending process and seriously consider erasing much of the debt that is owed by third world countries. We must start over in the 21st century in our efforts to bring the third world up to the standards of the rest of the world without this incredible burden we have placed on them that does not allow these countries to feed or educate their people. May the United States lead in this movement!
-- Wendy Marsh
Cops 1, protesters 0
BY JAKE TAPPER
(04/18/00)
I'm happy to see someone in the media got at least part of the story right. The cops in D.C. were flat-out brutal -- I personally saw people who lay prone on the ground beaten with billy clubs, protesters were stepped on by horses, and I saw other numerous and random beatings initiated by the cops with no provocation and seemingly no point. Once, at 15th and Pennsylvania, on Sunday afternoon, the cops swept through the street, beating, gassing, and running over protesters, and then returned to their original position behind the barricades. No IMF or Bank delegates came or went, no ground was lost or gained. There was just a terrible, 15-minute melee. Maybe the cops just got bored.
The problem I have with your article is the emphasis on hippies. Sure, at Monday's rally there was a lot of drum beating and dancing and other hippie cavorting, but to be fair we had been sitting in puddles of freezing water for hours. People needed something to make themselves warm. In my weekend in D.C. I saw a wide range of activists, covering all the lifestyle bases, from hippie to punk to nerd to jock. I found this mix actually quite inspiring.
And while the cops may have won the P.R. round, we got two important victories: America has been introduced to the IMF and World Bank in the form of a riot cop, and thousands of young people have seen what modern American police and global corporations think of their right to exercise free speech, and have become that much more radicalized. We'll see what happens this summer at the political conventions. Philadelphia, here I come!
-- Devin Faraci
Bottom line: A bunch of white, overprivileged, narcissistic kids protested without any firsthand experience with the subject at hand and without any tangible demands, costing a predominately African-American city $5 million to keep the peace. That's $5 million that has to come from a city budget that is already spread too thin -- want to take a guess where city officials will make up the difference?
-- Ryan Donmoyer
Three cheers for the brave new activism
BY BILL MCKIBBEN
(04/17/00)
In an otherwise interesting and informative article, Bill McKibben misses an important truth about consumerism and its relation to that quintessentially global thing, the environment. The rich can choose not to consume, whereas the poor are forced not to. And while material satisfaction is far from the only value human beings hold, it is extremely important. So important, in fact, that only the citizens of the West, those who have "cheap and easy everything" attack it.
Imagining a conflict between the greenback and green mountains is a terrible oversimplification. We only became rich by irreversibly altering our natural environment and destroying much of its beauty, and it is naive to expect the world's poor to enrich themselves without doing that. The only way to preserve the poor parts of the world in a pre-industrial state is by preventing poor countries from developing modern, industrialized economies and all the material benefits they bring: longer, healthier and more comfortable lives, far-lower infant mortality and the elimination of death by starvation.
The cost of preserving foreign wilderness is foreign poverty, and the people living in those countries should decide which they want. It is not for the West to intervene in their affairs.
-- Garvan Walshe
Get Salon in your mailbox!