As protests continue in Washington against policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the following are available for interviews:
CAROL WELCH
International policy analyst for Friends of the Earth and coauthor of the recent report “The IMF: Selling the Environment Short,” Welch said today: “The IMF deals in environmental destruction. It pushes countries to exploit natural resources to meet short-term financial needs. In Cameroon, exports of raw logs increased 50 percent in a three-year IMF program.”
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CHERYL PAYER
Author of The Debt Trap: The IMF and the Third World and Lent and Lost: Foreign Credit and Third World Development, Payer said: “The IMF and World Bank have forced countries to spend down their reserves — rather than conserving them — and to borrow without regard to countries’ ability to pay.”
WALDEN BELLO
Professor at the University of the Philippines and director of Focus on the Global South, Bello is author of Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis, which foresaw the 1997 Asian economic collapse. On Saturday, he debated top officials from the IMF and World Bank at a public forum in Washington. Today he said: “What we have with the IMF and World Bank is a 55-year history of dismal failure and repeated promises of reform that were not implemented. The abolition of these institutions is long overdue.”
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PATRICK BOND
An associate professor at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and a specialist in international development finance, Bond said today: “The next step to close the World Bank is a global boycott of its bonds by schools, churches, unions and communities — as the financial sanctions campaign did to apartheid South Africa. The World Bank should be replaced by local development finance, exchange controls, debt cancellation and democratized trade finance.”
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MARK WEISBROT
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Globalization: A Primer, Weisbrot said today: “The IMF and the World Bank experiment has clearly failed. Russia lost 40 percent of its income within five years of adopting the IMF’s program in 1992…”
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RUSS DAVIS
For 19 years, Davis worked at a GE plant making aircraft engines. Last August, he was laid off. The plant has shrunk from 9,000 to 2,000 workers. A member of the International Union of Electrical Workers, Davis said today: “Rather than blaming Mexican workers, unions are realizing that we have a common enemy…”
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MICHAEL BEER
Director of Nonviolence International, Beer has assisted nonviolent movements around the world and has been training protesters with the Mobilization for Global Justice in Washington.
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For more information, contact at IPA: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
