Needed: A Quarantine Against Greed

By Mark Engler, AlterNet. Posted October 1, 2002.

Even without our protests telling them so, it must be obvious to the finance ministers who attend the annual meetings of the IMF/World Bank that their institutions are sick. Those inside the Washington, D.C., headquarters can't feel so healthy after the year that passed. It was a year when corporations that they nurtured and nourished, like Enron, collapsed with little warning and less grace. When countries that had long swallowed their prescriptions, like Argentina, found themselves suffering from nauseous economies and rashes of popular uprising. And when a critic they cut from their innards like a malignant growth, Joseph Stiglitz, walked off with a Nobel Prize.

If they care to listen to the protests, the ministers will hear at least one diagnosis that explains their various ailments: "Infectious greed." And they will learn that, as a remedy, thousands of activists have joined a Saturday march to "Quarantine" them. Here on the streets, Greenpeace wears white sanitary garb. The scores of police present used mass arrests to overwhelm a much smaller number of Anti-Capitalist Convergence protesters on Friday. But now they are also enlisted in the pageant: Their barricades, the action suggests, are needed not so much to keep criticism out, but rather to keep the contagious delegates away from the general public.

There is no doubt that global justice chants echo through the meeting chambers. But it is equally certain that the IMF and World Bank feel less affected by our modest attempt at containment than by a global state of siege that has constrained them in the past year. I was intrigued to watch a short video on the Washington Post web site, in which Citigroup USA Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer exhibits the defensive posture of the meetings: "I think that every time there's a crisis, every time there's a global slowdown, you're bound to have a questioning of the policies that are being followed," he says. "My guess is that if we were in a situation with global growth of 5% and no major crisis in the emerging markets, you wouldn't have these questions."

What is fascinating to me is that Fischer does not need to elaborate the actual questions that compel his response. Here in Washington, D.C., questions push in from all sides. They come from private investors who hesitate to invest their confidence in IMF schemes and from economists -- even from World Bank President James Wolfensohn himself -- eager to disassociate themselves from the "Washington Consensus" that ruled development thinking for two decades. The questions come from a public distrustful of the corporate representatives that hover around the meetings. And most of all, questions come from countries in the global South, where eruptions of outrage greet any IMF and World Bank representatives brave enough to actually face the public, and where even some governments now ask, "Is there a way to break free?"

During the Quarantine march, I walk with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "That a country like Argentina is now considering defaulting to the IMF is something that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago," he says to me. "Or look at Brazil, where the IMF tried to lock in the new government to their policies. It didn't work. They haven't committed.

"There's going to be a lot more countries trying to figure out ways to go around the IMF. It's happening slowly, but it's happening."

The prerogative of the ministers, it seems, is to prove that their malady is nothing so serious -- that it's just a bit of a cold. As we walk along amidst the drums and puppets, Mark Weisbrot and I are joined by a journalist who has just visited the official proceedings.

"Inside, they're guardedly optimistic," she reports.

"Optimistic of what?" Weisbrot asks.

"Optimistic that it won't get worse."

Three weeks ago a bulletin from the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, released to warn of potential terrorist activity in the weeks surrounding the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, devoted a full paragraph to the protests that ultimately assembled this weekend. It infuriates me to think that the individuals who write such alerts are the same people who are charged with protecting the country -- that their "intelligence" cannot distinguish legitimate threats to national security from past instances, dutifully recited in the memo, where a few protesters broke some bank windows. And yet this is not the last time that trade and terror would intermingle during the weekend.

On Friday the police, seeing themselves as defenders of "critical national infrastructure," moved swiftly against radicals who threatened to disrupt traffic as part of a direct action dubbed the "People's Strike." Those who turned out on the streets knew that a crackdown had been forewarned. "Pre-emptive" (a popular term in Washington, D.C. these days) was the word used to describe the police attitude toward arrests. Even so, few among the 650 swept up expected the authorities' response to be so nonchalant, the protections of civil liberty so thin.

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