Beltway Area Indymedia

Call to Action: Dignity, Autonomy, and Solidarity over Greed and Corporate Power!

Disrupt the IMF and the World Bank meetings: Washington DC, October 19-21, 2007
The misery forced on millions by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank is unacceptable and renders them illegitimate.

Audio files:
Intro: 1:25
Congo March: 7:38
IMF Soccer Riot 2007: 2:09

From April 12 to April 15, an unusual set of protests accompanied the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings. This time around, instead of thousands of students, many protesters were first generation Congolese immigrants, union workers, or others harmed by neoliberal economics.

The UNITE HERE protest(covered elsewhere) was a clear threat by hotel workers to strike during the Fall Meeting is they don't get a fair contract.

In an unannounced action on the evening of April 14th, two dozen individuals braved the cold rain and took to the streets with makeshift soccer balls and noisemakers in hand, to send a message to World Bank and IMF delegates in town for the joint spring meetings of the Bank and Fund. Amidst the now infamous Wolfowitz corruption scandal and the subsequent discontent brewing within the Bank, global justice demonstrators went beyond the reformist rhetoric of those calling for the resignation of current World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and called for the closure of the Bank itself.

Members of the Mobilization for Global Justice staged a mock press conference Thursday, a day prior to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring meetings. On the eve of the US annual tax filing deadline of April 16, MGJ called attention to regressive tax policies pushed by the IMF on borrowing countries, which systematically transfer the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor.

Examples of regressive IMF tax policy around the world include:

AUDIO 5 min 42 seconds

Audio: 5 min 42 sec

Unite Here local 25 gathered thousands of hotel workers for a spirited march on the Woodley Park Mariott, a hotel in which some but not all workers have union representation. Even with the union, workers are being pushed to injury and exhaustion, but non-union workers have it even worse.