MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

CFK ratifies model but calls for competitiveness from labour and corporations

The right to strike is guaranteed but not “extortion or blackmail”

Argentine President Cristina Fernández began on Saturday before Congress her second term with a seventy minutes speech strongly focused on domestic issues with clear messages to labour, corporations, the financial sector, the Judiciary but also a “fine tuning” pledge to continue with the current national, popular, inclusive economic development model.

There was no reference to foreign policy besides a tangent mention, from an economic focus, to Argentina’s growing and sustained reliance in the region.

The ceremony had some very emotive spells particularly when at the end of her oath CFK said before the Legislative Assembly that, if she failed to comply with her responsibilities as President, “may God, the nation and him (in reference to her late husband Néstor
Kirchner,) demand it from me”. Likewise CFK paid no heed to protocol and wore a black, lace long-sleeved dress as a sign of mourning and it was her daughter Florencia who helped put on the presidential sash and with the presidential baton.

“Even though this was a day of joy, it’s not easy for this President to be here. I’m missing something. I’m missing someone”, she emphasized.

She then announced that on December 10, the International Day of Human Rights, the international astronomy organization in charge of naming stars in outer space had chosen the name of an Argentine disappeared student from the University of La Plata to identify an asteroid. The student was taken prisoner by the military in 1976 and was never again heard off.

The first woman president re-elected in Argentina and with the greatest margin since the return of democracy (1983) began making a strong plea to the Argentine judiciary so that all human rights violators and pending cases from the last dictatorship are taken to trial and tragic events that happened over thirty years ago can be definitively closed by 2015 when a new president takes office.

On the labour front CFK urged union leaders and organized labour, (which did not turn out to for the ceremony in Congress) to be “responsible” and warned unions that she would not allow for “extortion” or “blackmail” by threatening to go on strike and staging protests.

She recalled a teachers and oil workers strike in her home Patagonia province of Santa Cruz, --who she said are the best paid in Argentina--, which cost an estimated 800 million dollars. “Imagine how many schools, hospitals, public works could have been done with that money”, she said.

CFK underlined that her government guarantees the right to strike, but not to “extortion or blackmail”, and recalled that during former president Juan Peron, founder of the main political movement in Argentina, “there was no right to strike enshrined in the Constitution”.

But CFK also said that the economic policies implemented in Argentina since 2003 have ensured sustained growth at Chinese rates, and corporations and companies overall have made huge profits, and “I’m not against making money”, but everybody has to pay taxes, and profits must be in harmony with world standards. She then called on Congress to approve a fiscal crimes bill and a landholdings bill, not retroactive but to make sure land “which is a strategic asset” remains in the hands of the right people.

During ten minutes CFK spewed data on the economic achievements of her late husband and her administrations underlining how the debt ratio to GDP had dropped dramatically from over 140% to 32%; the creation of five million jobs; how investment had soared boosted by industrialization policies based on a strong domestic market; how international reserves now stood at 46.5 billion dollars and this “in spite of five speculative runs on the reserves by local corporations and banks which cost us 16 billion dollars”.

But Argentina stood up and resisted because numbers are good and “we have a country that has gone through its most important growth process and its GPD is among the largest in the world,” she said.

“None of this would have been possible had we not changed the course of our economy. We took it back home, to the continent, to South America, to the Mercosur. Because we know that one of the best defences against a complicated world is national integration,” she explained.

“Fortunately all heads of state in South America, no matter what our normal differences were, know that in our future we are all holding hands,” she stated.

Further on CFK explained that her administration’s “great challenge” is to improve competitiveness, for which she announced the creation of two state secretariats, the Foreign Trade Secretariat, and the Undersecretary of Competitiveness, which will be part of the Economy Ministry.

“In these times in which we speak of fine-tuning, we will have, within the Economy Ministry, a Foreign Trade Secretariat alongside the Domestic Trade Secretariat, like in all countries of the world“.

“In order to both be the two faces of a coin which ultimately is Argentina’s trade and it can not be divided,” the President said.

CFK then explained that thanks to her government’s industrialization process the country managed to reach several economic goals and adopt certain social measures that would have been impossible otherwise.

In a wider analysis of Argentina’s turn of the millennium collapse of the economy and default, and the current European crisis, CFK urged banks “to go back to a real economy”. They are not the fundamentals of the world economy, “they are only a tool to keep the global economy running”.

“What is happening today is based on a financial economy and not a real economy,“ she said. It's not that we are not interested in the banks, but banks are not the fundamentals of our world economy,” she stressed.

CFK mentioned that back in 1980 global GDP goods and services stood at a ratio of 1 to 1.1 financial assets, but nowadays the ratio has jumped to 1 to 3.1, meaning “the difference is all debt” because while the curve of real income of workers has remained flat, that of the financial system has soared.

“Fortunately Argentina was were pushed out of the world money system and we had to live on our own financial resources, basically trade surpluses and therefore were not impregnated by the toxic assets that are bringing down the global financial system”, said CFK who emphasized Argentine national and popular development policy is geared to the real economy, creating industry and jobs.

CFK also praised the growth of small and medium size businesses. “When society grows as a whole, everybody grows. We should bet on a real economy,” the President said. “Small and medium size companies are the “true generators of work added value in Argentina”.