Just a quick personal reflection, to encourage comrades to join this group in whatever way possible...
In October 1995, when the 50 Years movement was at its peak, a SA township leader (Mzwanele Mayekiso, who is moving to NYC in a couple of weeks to study planning at Columbia U.) and I had a chance to join a Haitian grassroots leader and a Nepalese anti-dam NGO activist on a panel at the 50 Years meeting. It was an awesome experience for us, to find more than a thousand like-minded radical social movement people from across the world -- the Philippines, Malaysia, Australia, India, Eastern Europe, East and West Africa, most of Latin America, and especially Nicaragua and Costa Rica -- who had major struggles underway against the BWIs. They had quite a contrasting style and language to some of the inside-the-beltway NGOs, but it seems to me that what with the natural ebb and flow of these global anti-hegemonic networks, those differences -- such as whether the core demand should be to shut down (defund) the WB or to reform it -- have faded. The rise of the Wolfensohn/Stiglitz reformers and what from outside we perceive as resistance from, perhaps surprisingly, Southern national leaders (who are threatened, for instance, by WB Inspection Panel investigations of the bribery and corruption associated with WB projects), gives a different and perhaps more mature and nuanced tone to this event.
The only disappointment at the last one of these meetings was Comrade Henwood, who after his usual breathtaking and charmingly cynical talk on the state-of-the-world financial system, gave us no hints of subversive political implications. But now he's got a last chapter in his book and will have no problem expanding from its gringo-centrism for his talk to the conference this year, right?