To the editor:

Professor Norm Yetman’s class featuring a lecture by George Ritzer about the meaning of globalization entirely misses the point. The concerns of those who oppose corporate globalization have nothing to do with “McDonaldization” or loss of indigenous cultures to Americanization, and everything to do with the disastrous economic policies of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization.

Those who wish to know about the effects of IMF/World Bank policies on countries subject to them could do no better than to research the writings of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist and former chief economist for the World Bank. He began to realize during his tenure at the World Bank that the four-step “economic reform process” imposed by the IMF inevitably led countries to economic disaster.

The four steps include privatization of essential commodities such as electricity and water, “liberalization” of capital markets, market-based pricing, and free trade. Thus follows a predictable sequence of events that plunges over 50 percent of the country into poverty and starvation, cripples the capital markets, empties the country’s treasury, and almost inevitably leads to food riots such as seen recently in Argentina, Indonesia, Bolivia and Ecuador.

The human toll of IMF/World Bank policies what’s being protested as part and parcel of corporate globalization is real and disastrous. Whether McDonald’s or other standardized U.S. exports make it to those countries is immaterial. Those subject to IMF/World bank reforms can’t afford the most minimal food, water or medical supplies, let alone a McDonald’s hamburger. I hope the students in Professor Yetman’s class will look up Joseph Stiglitz and find out what the anti-corporate globalization movement is really about.

Marjorie Swindler,

Lawrence