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Chicago conference on anti-globalization Chicago-The Chicago Coalition Against the FTAA sponsored an event Sept. 15 titled, "On the Road to Justice: IMF, World Bank and FTAA Teach-In" on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The day-long conference was planned well in advance of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 and went on despite the fact that travel restrictions arising from those events prevented two activist speakers from attending. The conference was part of a local campaign to organize people to attend the protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings scheduled for the last weekend of September. Those meetings were canceled after the attacks. Invited guest Jonah K. Gokova, chair of the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development, did manage to make it to the meeting. He spoke in the morning plenary session about the impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund economic structural adjustment plans on the lives of the people of his country. He said that the official acronym of the plan, ESAP, is popularly referred to as standing for "Extended Suffering of African People." He expressed a will to develop an alternative to the existing system and said, "we cannot accept that globalization is a program that cannot be changed." Workshops following the plenary session discussed such topics as militarization, privatization of public services, and environmental struggles. -Kevin Michaels |
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