Spring Break in Washington

A few thousand college kids and dropouts with too much time on their hands decided to celebrate Spring Break in Washington, D.C., last weekend by disrupting the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Although they failed to shut down the meetings, these children of the children of the 1960s did manage to make fools of themselves, and several hundred of them were arrested, which turned the protest into an excellent - if unfocused - adventure.

Who were these demonstrators? Some of them were the same folks who trashed Seattle last December during a meeting of the World Trade Organization. New York Times columnist William Safire described them as "anarchists allied with tree-huggers, prayer vigilantes, foreign-debt cancelers, Luddite globophobes and gutsy human rights activists" seeking to relive the Battle of Seattle. Add to that motley crew 10,000 AFL-CIO members marching arm-in-arm with 5,000 Teamsters to protest trade with China.

And what do these diverse groups have in common? All of them are against "globalization," which refers to the increasing interdependence of the global economy. "The Mobilization for Social Justice" - a coalition of environmental, labor, anti-poverty and anti-corporate groups - believes the rules and regulations of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are fundamentally unfair to working people and poor people around the world. Unfortunately, this ragtag coalition also includes a few violent anarchists and Communists, who hate capitalism, multinational corporations and profits.

While they didn't shut down the IMF and World Bank meetings, and despite their weird (and sometimes disgusting) behavior, the demonstrators did make some valid points. As Washington Post reporter John Burgess noted, "Without the people on the street, it's unlikely that the word 'poverty' would have cropped up quite so often."

For the first time, economic and trade ministers and international economists talked about the Poverty Reduction Strategy and the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility, which are detailed plans to alleviate Third World poverty. Of course the best way to help poor countries is to give them some debt relief and better access to rich countries' markets, but that's an uphill battle in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere in the First World.

The protestors didn't help themselves when they acted like idiots and clashed with D.C. police, like college kids on Spring Break. Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher described them as "overindulged children searching for ways to upset their elders."

He encountered a young woman with a drum who called herself "Skunk Rising." She wore a ski cap and a bandanna over her face because "'people are targeted ... if they know who you are.' They? 'The oppressors.' Ah, them," wrote Fisher. The oppressors - ah, that would be us, the American taxpayers. Go figure.

Another Post columnist, Michael Kelly, observed that "tens of thousands of magenta-haired nose-ringers who, in their great crusade to stop the world's finance ministers from doing lunch, had taken a hard-pressed police department away from its long, losing battle to protect the city's poor from the city's predators." That was the reality of the situation in our nation's capital. Kelly also reminded the demonstrators of some basic truths:

n "Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; it is the sincerest form of imitation.

n "That whole thing your parents did back then - you know, the revolution in the streets, the trashing of the dean's office, the purposely shocking sartorial and tonsorial styles, the stoned grooving to bad, pretentious music, the nakedness and the love-ins - well, it was pretty stupid the first time around.

n "Your dad at least had a compelling reason for, like, trashing The System, man; he was trying to do his bit to stop the war in Vietnam ..."

Last Monday, it rained in Washington and that put a damper on the proceedings except for the arrests of 500 to 600 protestors "by police obliging their wish to be taken into custody" (to get out of the rain, no doubt), according to the Associated Press.

The Reno Gazette-Journal's knee-jerk liberal columnist, Cory Farley, even questioned the demonstrators' commitment to their own cause, quoting one young protestor's complaint that "These plastic twist ties (disposable handcuffs) are really uncomfortable." And another whining that "There was nothing to eat (in jail) but bologna sandwiches and juice, and it was zero percent real fruit." Doesn't that just tug at your heartstrings?

Anyway, the IMF and World Bank went on about their business, which is to help developing nations put their economic houses in order. The IMF provides its 182 members with funds to help them overcome balance-of-payments difficulties while the World Bank is the world's largest source of development assistance, providing nearly $30 billion annually to finance infrastructure projects such as roads, power plants and schools. The United States is the largest single contributor to these organizations, accounting for almost 20 percent of total funding.

The Washington Post concluded that the economic meetings had produced mixed results: "On the positive side, the emerging markets that succumbed in 1997 and '98 to financial crises have recovered far more quickly than expected."

On the other hand, however, "countries too poor to aspire to a financial crisis" remain mired in poverty. That's the main challenge facing the international financial organizations.

Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.