October 2, 2008   ECrisis continues with astonishment at how easily the media is duped by president- errr make that Dictator Correa. His seduction of the world's media, easily seduced as it is these days, continues with little accuracy or fact checking in sight, making a mockery of a once primary profession.
 
Venezuelans today- every day- want travel VISAS to the USA: 600 or more a day. It is tough enough to get travel VISAS to come to the USA but the USA is considering shuttering its consular service for Venezuelans. We are all well aware that every single drug legalizing buffoon who adores Correa's new communism in Ecuador also has no regard for any nation's essential law and order. Ecuador is foremost in this. In fact, Ecuador will sell anyone- any day of the year- full documentation papers to enable any criminal, any day, to be called an Ecuadorean and move about the cabin freely. Indeed, Ecuadoreans today are now the world's largest passport, VISA and fake papers producer in the universe. Just ask Rafael Correa: his Venezuelan written constitution grants instant legitimacy to any criminal on this planet with no questions asked. Correa calls this human rights: we call it criminal.
 
The ASSOCIATED PRESS is little better than a shill/ a propaganda mouth organ for the Correa regime as it reports falsely, as it did on 9-30-08 that Correa is some benign and fabulous minor autocrat. The AP dishonestly writes, "Although nowhere near as radical as similar projects in Venezuela and Bolivia, critics complain it gives Correa far too much control over the economy and the judicial and legislative branches. The new constitution also gives the government greater fiscal control over local and provincial authorities, eroding their power over public works projects and bureaucracies.

"I'm only here to serve my homeland. I'm not interested in power," he [Correa] told the foreign correspondents.
Correa is expected to swiftly overhaul the judiciary, the Central Bank and other key institutions, giving the U.S. -and European-trained economist greater liberty to fashion what he calls a "new political model." Soaring oil prices have helped him build it. Some in Correa's badly splintered and debilitated opposition contend he's creating a Venezuela-style autocracy. But Correa has kept the Venezuelan president at arm's length. And unlike Chavez and Morales, Correa has not moved to nationalize telecommunications and electrical utility companies. “We repeat: the AP is lying.

What the AP and all the propagandists forget to report is that Correa has been enabling drug runners, the FARC and every vermin that crawled on Earth..."only here to serve my homeland" he says while debasing all norms to serve his personal sociopathic afflictions that criminals just want to help the poor. Indeed- they also want to rape, plunder and murder but Correa tells us he is "not interested in power" because he just got himself handed total powers.
 
Here is a new update:
 
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The Wall Street Journal                        
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
OCTOBER 1, 2008
Pelosi's Trade Priorities
She denies free trade to our ally in South America.

Our politicians are lucky that most Americans are too busy to follow their antics, because voters would surely howl over Nancy Pelosi's trade priorities this week. The House voted to give duty-free access to the U.S. market for Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia for another year, even as it has refused to hold a vote on a two-way trade deal with Colombia.

That's right. Colombia will still be able to export its goods here without tariffs through 2009, but American exporters will continue to face high barriers in Colombia that the free-trade deal would reduce. So the same "fair trade" crowd that bemoans the U.S. trade deficit wants to have only one-way free trade with Latin America -- free for them to sell to us, but not for us to sell to them. Has anyone told the UAW about all those Caterpillar machinery exports to Colombia that Democrats are blocking?

Colombia is also the only one of the Andean nations that really deserves these trade preferences. The Bush Administration is proposing to remove Bolivia from the list because it isn't cooperating on coca eradication. Ecuador is still on the list, though it is abusing property rights and is attempting a dubious legal raid on Chevron. Peru already has a trade deal with the U.S.

Colombia is our best ally in the region, as well as a democracy with a market economy in a region threatened by Venezuela strongman Hugo Chavez and his ideology. Colombia doesn't need preferential, one-way trade that treats that country like a mere low-wage exporter; it needs a permanent two-way trade agreement that will help transform its economy and let it join the ranks of the world's tiger economies. But that makes too much sense for Mrs. Pelosi's House.
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And so it came to pass that on Thursday night, the U.S. Senate followed the U.S. House and lumped Peru and Colombia in with Ecuador and Bolivia and gifted all four nations full ATPDEA trade give aways. Although Peru and Colombia are standing strong against the FARC and technically should enjoy full FTA status, Ecuador and Bolivia clearly are not. But the U.S. Congress cares nothing about the facts, the inherent disaster inside the Andes and gifted fraudulently Ecuador and Bolivia the U.S. taxpayer giveaways called free trade to enable the Andeans narcostates in their flourishing.  The Senate added a six month and one year review for Ecuador and sent the legislation back to the Andean drug zone legalizing team called Nancy Pelosi's US House of Representatives which may or may not strip the Senate review requirement which, of course under the Soros-Obama leadership will do nothing at all about the Andean drug corridor except to lie some more and enable Plan Ecuador as they already do. This concurrently certainly enables Rafael Correa to amass his fleet of unmanned drones to patrol against Colombians and legitimate actors under the fake excuse that he will be fighting against contraband runners when everyone knows that Correa's team assists illicit trans shipments, drug running in particular and human beings as well. These drones will be shared with Hugo Chavez, the Russo-Iranian cartels and Correa's money launderers, also called his Cabinet. Hugo Chavez, who will indeed be running Ecuador's military soon enough, is on a binge of aggressive weapons buying:     

                  

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY writes on 10-1-08, "Chavez is also well on the way to making the hemisphere his playground. He has used oil cash to buy off leaders in Argentina; bankroll vassal states in Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia; win new friends in Paraguay; meddle in elections in Peru, El Salvador and Mexico; and finance terrorists in Colombia.

Now he's extended his influence in unexpected new places such as Costa Rica, Honduras, St. Vincent, the Grenadines and Dominica, all of which have made disturbing diplomatic moves in his direction. Fewer and fewer U.S. allies will be left standing against this Chavista tide of corrupt oil largesse."

Axis of Doom 
 
But Heather Hodges wants you to know that in advance of the U.S. Congressional votes on ATPDEA, she is quite willing to over ride her job requirements [called truth in representation] in stating the facts, proving her Soros-backed pro drugs bona fides:
 
MiamiHerald.com
Posted on Tue, Sep. 30, 2008
U.S. ambassador says Ecuador solid on drugs
The U.S. ambassador to Ecuador says the country's anti-drug efforts influenced the decision by the U.S. House of Representatives to extend a trade promotion program in Ecuador for another 10 months.
The Andean Trade Preferences Act was launched in 1991 to eliminate most tariffs on goods from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru to break the countries' dependence on the cultivation and sale of illegal drugs.

Ambassador Heather Hodges says that the House vote on Monday to extend the program to December 2009 reflects Ecuador's effective work in fighting trafficking.

The House also voted to extend the program for Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. A date for the Senate vote on the bill is pending.

However, a better review on Correa's cartel nation starts to emerge here
At Large
Nature as a Privileged Minority
By Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz
Published 10/1/2008 12:07:45 AM

This past Sunday, Ecuadorans overwhelmingly approved a new constitution, the twentieth such document in that nation's history since 1830. But this constitution is markedly different from all the others, and its most notable feature is nothing less than giving nature the same rights as human beings. "Persons and people have the fundamental rights guaranteed in this Constitution and in the international human rights instruments. Nature is subject to those rights given by this Constitution and Law."

While this is the most notable feature, the entire document is full of socialistic doctrine. President Rafael Correa can now remain in office until 2017, dissolve Congress at will, and has taken over control of the country's monetary policy from the central bank. According to the Financial Times, he can also grab and redistribute idle farmland, appoint controlling majorities in the supreme, constitutional, and electoral courts and he has exclusive authority over the budget. Plus the document bans big landholdings, allows for popular referenda without the authorization of the congress, and raises mandatory spending on health, education, and social security.

The country's Catholic bishops vocally opposed the new document on three grounds -- that through the ambiguous language of "reproductive rights" it would allow for abortion, that it allows for same-sex civil unions to have the same status as marriage, and that it doesn't allow parents the freedom to choose the schooling they think best fits their own children's needs. That last objection translates into the constitution requiring children to attend state-run schools.

In other words, we are seeing the making of another Hugo Chavez-like Venezuela. Whether or not it will turn out to have similar militaristic overtones remains to be seen. So far, the overwhelming vote in favor of the document shows that Correa has a popular mandate, which will initially make it easy for him to implement changes. Those who were most outspokenly against him were the wealthy. According to some reports, indigenous tribes were willing to go along with the constitution, but they did so begrudgingly.

How long that popularity will last is unclear. The provisions making nature into a juridic person could be the constitution's economic undoing. There are five articles on nature in the document and the fourth one states:

The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

The application of this and other key provisions to Ecuador's largest export, oil, is going to have a major impact on the country's future. Oil revenues make up more than half of the Ecuador's export earnings and one-quarter of its public sector income. Drilling or exploring for oil in environmentally sensitive areas could become increasingly difficult with the constitutional provisions on nature in place. This is especially true since any Ecuadoran can now represent nature in any court of law in the country. And that's not going to help Ecuador's economy, which grew by only two percent last year, according to the Economist, and has a poverty rate of 38 percent.

ECUADOR'S GRANTING of juridic personhood to nature is unique in the world, but the country is not completely alone. Spain will be granting human rights to all 350 apes in its territory. Switzerland is telling farmers not to lop flowers off as they return from mowing their fields since those flowers have a right to exist as they are. The European Court of Human Rights will be hearing a case that could grant a chimpanzee the status of a person in Austria. And in an editorial watching amusedly as Ecuador begins its grand experiment, the Los Angeles Times reported that Australia, Italy, South Africa, and Nepal (which is also in the midst of writing a constitution) have all started looking at similar juridic person provisions.

While we in the U.S. might think it's only the crazy Europeans and backwater countries like Ecuador that are into this stuff, we shouldn't be so smug. Ecuador turned to a little-known public interest law firm called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in Chambersburg, Pa., for advice on the nature's rights language of its constitution. The reason: CELDF has already convinced some small municipalities here to pass similar legislation. These towns have a clear purpose in mind, which is to keep large corporations out of their territories. They don't want factory farms being set up or corporations dumping chemical sludge on their fields or giant box-stores like Wal-Mart and Target coming into their towns.

However, CELDF has another purpose in mind -- the removal of the juridic person status given to U.S. corporations. This law incenses them and they blame it for the rise of big-box retailers and the disappearance of Mom and Pop shops all over the country. While that may or may not be an accurate reading of history, what is clear is that the law is an accurate law. For behind every corporation is a group of people who run that corporation. Behind nature is...what?

For monotheists, it's "an enormous gift from God to humanity," as Pope Benedict XVI recently said. For the people of CELDF, nature is an end in itself. Article 1 of the Rights of Nature section in the Ecuadoran constitution reads, "Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution." Pachamama is the name of an Andean goddess that roughly translated means "Mother Nature." So much for Rafael Correa being what the press has termed "a devout Catholic."

Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz is a freelance writer in Minnesota, and president and co-founder of Catholic Radio International.

We repeat our assertion that Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela [by vote or by presidential fiat] are in bloc building lock step. The so called opposition in Bolivia shares a short analysis of the Chavez-Morales constitution here:
The opposition's criticisms of Bolivia's draft CPE
October 2, 2008                     

The similarities with Correa's so called constitution are striking in a parallel road map in the Andes.

What ambassador Heather Hodges and Correa do not want you to know is that Correa and Morales's constitutions gift legitimacy to all things that are illegitimate, including legalizing narcotics. Hodges wants you to pretend, as does Correa, that this is how matters should be and that the scores of paid US AID-George Soros actors across the Andes under NED monies are right that drugs must be legal and move freely.
 
Here from NOTICIAS 24  is Hodges 10-2-08 getting her reward- after waiting almost two months- with credentialing in the wings, for not saying one word in criticism, assisting the Carter Center and Soros's groups to lie a lot about the Ecuadorean constitution and the abysmal state of Correa's criminal empire in Quito:    


 
                   
La nueva embajadora de Estados Unidos en Ecuador, Heather Hodges oficializó su cargo ante el presidente Rafael Correa, tras esperar dos meses para recibir audiencia.
 
And this pro Correa propaganda photo, repulsive as it is, embrace of Correa's narcozone which is not diplomacy and is not warranted:
 
                   

La nueva embajadora llegó al país el 8 de agosto para reemplazar a Linda Jewell y desde entonces no había podido entrevistarse con el mandatario ecuatoriano.

Hodges's patron saint- the Soros team up with Peter Romero and numerous pro drugs advocates must be thrilled with these two performance artists.

Today we read in the media that Correa is once again  confirming his status as lobbyist to jigger justice against the hapless Chevron Texaco case while co funding numerous specious cases. Jones Day has not got a clue how to defend Chevron in this.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis