Guillaume Long, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ecuador: We Claim the Supremacy of Human Beings Over Capital

Image by David Shankbone via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

United Nations General Assembly
September 23, 2016

Statement Summary:

GUILLAUME LONG, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility of Ecuador, said the last decade of the citizen revolution in his country had shown that to achieve development it was necessary to do the opposite of the prescription of the neoliberal hegemony.  Ecuador had been able to recover the faith and hope of a country that had been destroyed, and that could be reflected in tangible results for its people, notably in the reduction of extreme poverty and inequality.  The Powers of hegemony had appropriated widely used words and given them meaning to impose a political and moral agenda on the planet.  The word “development” was not just a technical issue, but a political one, especially when it came to the redistribution of wealth.  “Human rights” included economic and social rights, not just political ones, and were violated not just by States but by multinational corporations as well.

Ecuador, he said, called for an intergovernmental body in the United Nations for tax justice to prevent tax havens, and for the adoption of a legally binding international instrument that would be binding on transnational corporations which violated human rights.  At the Paris conference on climate change, Ecuador also called for the establishment of an international environmental justice court to punish crimes against nature and to establish obligations in terms of ecological debt and the consumption of environmental goods.  “We claim the supremacy of human beings over capital,” he said.  The United Nations also needed to be democratized, he said.  It was necessary to recalibrate the weight of the General Assembly vis-à-vis the Security Council.  The composition and working methods of the Council needed to be changed, and the use of the veto, the exclusive province of the conquering nations of the Second World War, did not ensure the supreme objective of international peace and security.

teleSUR English on Sep 24, 2016

***

Updated: Sept. 26, 2016

Ecuador Proposes Worldwide Elimination of Tax Havens

TheRealNews on Sep 26, 2016

Tax havens do enormous damage to economies around the world, explains Ecuador’s foreign minister Guillaume Long.

from the archives:

Evo Morales: Eradicate Imperialism and Capitalism (United Nations Speech 9.21.16)

Abby Martin: Rejecting Neoliberalism and Imperialism

Abby Martin: Chevron vs. The Amazon, Ending Corporate Tyranny, Part 3 (also with Guillaume Long)

Abby Martin: Chevron vs. The Amazon – The Environmental Trial of the Century, Part 2

Abby Martin: Chevron vs. The Amazon – Inside the Killzone, Part 1

Abby Martin Interviews Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa

Abby Martin: Bringing Corporations to Justice