Development: September 2006 Archives

"I want to say to all of you that we want to wager for a just trade, a peoples trade for the people, a trade which resolves the problem of jobs, that trade for companies is important is clear, but trade for micro and small producers, for cooperatives, for associations, collective companies, is more important."

It is an enormous satisfaction to be here present, representing my people, from my homeland, Bolivia and especially the indigenous movement.

I want to tell you, that after 500 years of be looked down upon, at times considered to be savages, animals, in some regions condemned to extermination, thanks to this consciousness and this uprising and to the struggle for the rights of the peoples, we got here to repair the historic damage, to repair 500 years of damage.

During the republic, we were equally discriminated against, marginalised, they never took into account this struggle of the peoples for life, for humanity during the last 20 years, with their application of an economic model--neoliberalism--that continued the looting of our natural resources, the privatisation of our basic services.

Convinced, and we are convinced, that the way of privatisation of basic services is the best way of violating human rights.

"Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it. Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, 'Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.'"[Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.]

Since the year 2000 when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney illegally took occupation of the White House, and more particularly beginning in 2003 when word spread about Patriot I and then Patriot II, and still more recently when information hit the mainstream corporate media that every American is spied on by corporate entities like Verizon and AT&T, that all our phone calls, emails and site visits are being recorded into a gigantic underground database, as a result more and more – perhaps millions of Americans - are raising a hue and cry over the fact that this wretched, evil empire called the Neocon Administration is stripping Americans of their constitutional rights. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), is at the helm of the struggle, as evidenced by their recent book called The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, which delineates how the people’s most fundamental political rights as guaranteed in the US Constitution are being trampled upon as never before in the history of this nation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is close on their tail, filing cases left and right to protect the rights of ordinary citizens. Bush has tossed the Magna Carta into the dustbin and thrown habeas corpus to the winds. Today any American of any color, class or gender can be locked up and held without charges and without trial forever. It is a bleak era in American history. Yet, maybe we need to rethink this issue of being stripped of our constitutional rights since the year 2000. How many of those rights did we actually have before 2000? Maybe we need to do a background check on what rights were guaranteed, if at all, to the American people, and how many of those rights ever got manifested.