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President
Rafael Correa's INAUGURAL SPEECH:
ECUADOR'S NEW PRESIDENT TELLS NATION IN INAUGURAL
SPEECH: "THE NATION IS BACK, AND WITH IT WORK
RETURNS, JUSTICE RETURNS, AND MILLIONS OF BROTHERS
AND SISTERS EXPELLED FROM THEIR OWN LAND IN THIS
NATIONAL TRAGEDY CALLED MIGRATION, RETURN."
In
his hour-long inaugural speech, Ecuador's new
President Rafael Correa called on his fellow
citizens to bring about a "radical, profound and
rapid change in the reigning economic, political and
social system," which is "perverse," as it is based
on politics and doctrines which "exalt egoism,
competition and greed as the motor of social
development."
He mocked the sacred cows of
neo-liberalism and the IMF and World Bank, "which
disguised a simple ideology as science," and whose
"supposed scientific investigations" are nothing but
multimillion-dollar ideological marketing campaigns
for ideas which are abject absurdities. Absurdities
such as the idea that central banks are autonomous,
an idea which he attacked at three separate points
in the speech. Absurdities such as having "a
strategy of development based on the individualism
of the market." Absurdities such as treating the
dignity of human work as a simple commodity, to
justify its exploitation, through crimes such as
outsourcing, hourly contracts, and "labor
flexibility." Policies which led to a doubling of
unemployment from what it was in the early 1990s,
and which led to exiling millions through so-called
"migration" which ripped apart families and
communities, but whose remittances have become the
only thing which sustains the country.
"It is time to understand that the principal good
which our societies demand is the Moral Good," he
stated. Reforms in the international financial
architecture are required to finally resolve the
problem of the debt, and determine what is
illegitimate debt (either from being the product of
corruption from the outset, or from being paid
several times over) and what is legitimate, which
can be paid, taking social needs into account. He
repeated his proposal that the foreign reserves of
Ibero-American nations be returned to the region,
and used in a "Bank of the South" which can finance
development, rather than parked abroad. Ecuador's
policy will be to fight to implement Bolivar's
concept of the Great South American Nation, he said.
It not being possible to do justice
to the speech in time for today's briefing, we
provide the following extract, which give an idea of
the thinking of this new member of Ibero-America's
"Presidents' Club":
"The economic policy followed by
Ecuador since the late 1980s is faithfully
entrenched in the dominant development paradigm of
Latin America, known as neo-liberalism, with its own
inconsistencies of corruption, the need to maintain
economic subordination and the demand to service the
foreign debt. The results of these policies is
evident, and after 15 years of application, the
consequences have been disastrous....
"The absurdity was reached of
defending as prudent those very policies which
destroyed jobs, like those applied in 2003-2004.
Dogmatism was so extensive, that anything that
neo-liberal dogmatism didn't understand was labelled
populism. On the other hand, any prank of the market
and of capital was presented as technical.... This
brings to mind the example of autonomous central
banks, without any democratic control, the
simplemindedness of free trade, privatizations,
dollarization and so many other atrocities.
New inaugurated President Rafael
Correa spoke of a war on corruption, including
against corrupt structures and laws:
"Weren't the 18 dead retirees we had
in 2003, who had asked for nearly two months for an
increase in their miserable pensions, a matter of
corruption? Wasn't the debt swap of 2000, which
explicitly sought to improve bond prices in the
creditors' favor, while the country was destroyed, a
matter of corruption? Isn't the existence of
completely autonomous central banks, whose opulence
is an insult to the poverty of our people and which,
further, do not answer to democratic controls but
rather to international bureaucracies, a matter of
corruption? Wasn't the Law of Deposit Guarantees,
imposed by the political power of the bankers, which
forced the State to guarantee 100% of bank deposits,
without regard to amounts, days before the
generalized bankruptcy of the banks, a matter of
corruption? All this led to the dollarization of the
economy, when in 1999 the Central Bank tripled
monetary emision to rescue the banks. Today, we no
longer have a national currency; it is no longer the
heroic symbol of the Marshal of Ayacucho. Those
guilty of this destruction, the banks and the
Central Bank, are more prosperous than ever.
"Isn't the existence of absurd laws
like the Law of Fiscal Transparency, which limits
all expenses except debt service, corruption?
"Wasn't that horror called the Fund
of Stabilization, Investment and Public Debt
Reduction--the infamous FEIREP--which used the new
oil revenues to guarantee debt payment and the
pre-announced buyback of the debt, a matter of
corruption? In this way, our money, our natural
resources, our sovereignty, was stolen...."
For the complete text see EIR
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