NJOKI NJOROGE NJEHU
Director of 50 Years Is Enough Network, Njehu will be in Cologne with other members of the Jubilee 2000 movement. “So far the proposals the G-7 have put forward are woefully inadequate,” she said. “They are still maintaining adherence to IMF structural adjustment programs as qualifying criteria for countries to receive minimal levels of debt relief. We want food, medicine, shelter, schools that work and clean water… The international Jubilee 2000 movement and people in impoverished countries have called for debt cancellation by the year 2000… Thousands will be in Cologne on Saturday [June 19] to deliver this message to G-7 heads of government. The debts must be canceled.”
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MARIA LUISA MENDONCA
Director of the Brazil Program for Global Exchange, Mendonca said: “Brazil sends more money to the World Bank than it receives. The IMF and World Bank are busy encouraging the government of Brazil to protect foreign investors and speculators while unemployment is 20 percent and rising; 400,000 small-scale farmers lost their land in the last four years; and salaries have remained stagnant for the past five years. The G-7 meeting holds no promise of positive change for Brazil’s poor and working-class majority.”
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ELLEN FRANK
Associate professor of economics at Emmanuel College in Boston, Frank said: “The economic policies that G-7 countries have — through the IMF — forced on the developing countries do benefit some groups in the United States. Multinational corporations are big winners since they reap huge profits from the resulting lower prices of raw materials, even as they charge the same prices for finished products. But small businesses and most workers are hurt by the global instability: export markets have collapsed for many goods, and wages have fallen worldwide.”
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WILLIAM DARITY JR.
Darity, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said Thursday: “Every one of the G-7 countries has a problem of inter-group, race and/or ethnically based employment, income and social status disparities. Illustrating the continuation of the ‘last hired, first fired’ phenomenon for African Americans, it took years of sustained economic growth in this country to make inroads on black youth unemployment. Similarly, Germany’s Turkish and other immigrant workers, France and the U.K.’s African, Middle Eastern and South Asian workers, Japan’s Korean workers and Canada’s non-white workers are in the same position as minority workers in the United States. But the G-7 leaders focus exclusively on commercial policies and they refuse to challenge the economic interests of the groups who benefit most from those policies.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167