http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/Fidel-Castro-Speech-Summit12apr00.htm<snip>
In Latin America, where neoliberalism has been applied with absolute attachment to doctrine, economic growth in the neoliberal stage has not been higher than that attained under the previous state development policies. After World War II, Latin America had no debt but today we owe almost one trillion dollars. This is the highest per capita debt in the world. Also the income difference between the rich and the poor in the region is the greatest worldwide. There are more poor, unemployed and hungry people in Latin America now than at any other hard time in its history.
Under neoliberalism the world economy has not been growing faster in real terms; however, there is more instability, speculation, external debt and unequal exchange. Likewise, there is a greater tendency to financial crises occurring more often while poverty, inequality and the gap between the wealthy North and the dispossessed South continues to widen.
Crises, instability, turmoil and uncertainty have been the most common words used in the last two years to describe the world economic order.
The deregulation that comes with neoliberalism and the liberalization of the capital account have a deep negative impact on a world economy where speculation blooms in hard currency and derivative markets and mostly speculative daily transactions amount to no less than 3 trillion US dollars.
Our countries are urged to be more transparent with their information and more effective with bank supervision but financial institutions like the hedge funds fail to release information on their activities, are absolutely unregulated and conduct operations that exceed all the reserves kept in the banks of the South countries. In an atmosphere of unrestrained speculation, the movements of short term capital make the South countries vulnerable to any external contingency.
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note the snip - prescient.
Here's the second one
http://everything2.com/e2node/Fidel%2520Castro%2527s%2520speech%2520to%2520the%2520Non-Aligned%2520Movement%2520summit<snip>
The world is being driven into a dead end. Within hardly 150 years, the oil and gas it took the planet 300 million years to accumulate will have been depleted. In just 100 years, the world population has grown from 1.5 billion to over 6 billion people, who will have to depend on energy sources that are still to be researched and developed. Poverty continues to grow while old and new diseases threaten whole nations with annihilation. The world's soil is being eroded and losing its fertility; the climate is changing; the air that we breath, drinking water and the seas are increasingly contaminated.
Authority is being wrenched away from the United Nations, its established procedures are being obstructed and the organisation itself destroyed; development assistance is being reduced; there are continuous demands on the third world countries to pay a $2.5 trillion debt that cannot be paid under the present circumstances, while $1 trillion dollars are spent in ever more sophisticated and deadly weapons. Why and for what?
A similar amount is spent on commercial advertising, sowing consumerist longings that cannot be satisfied in the minds of billions of people. Why and for what? For the first time the human species is running a real risk of extinction due to the insane behaviour of the very same human beings, who are thus becoming the victims of this "civilisation".
However, no one will fight for us, that is, for the overwhelming majority, only we will do it. Only we can save humanity ourselves with the support of millions of manual and intellectual workers from the developed nations who are conscious of the catastrophes befalling their peoples. Only we can do it by sowing ideas, building awareness and mobilising global and North American public opinion. No one needs to be told this. You know it very well. Our most sacred duty is to fight, and fight we will.
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