In part one of his paper, Luke Pickrell explores Mexico’s Supreme Court during the neoliberal period and argues it was made to serve the elite rather than the people.
Wages now make up 30.8% of GDP (4.1 points more than in 2018) and labor poverty fell to 31.9%: the Fourth Transformation reversing decades of neoliberal wealth transfer to those at the top.
“The social sector represents all those forms that do not compulsively pursue the objectives of the capitalist economy. They have as their antecedent all the community and cooperative forms that have not been able to be subsumed under the logic of profit”
FIFA captures sovereign territory through tax exemptions and free infrastructure use; Peña Nieto’s irrevocable concessions shield 2026 World Cup contracts.
12 billion USD in infrastructure investment for an economic impact of 3 billion USD. Meanwhile an opaque agreement with FIFA means big tax breaks for FIFA & foreign corporations.
Mexico faces a historical contradiction: it has a government that speaks as if it has broken with neoliberalism, yet it retains too many of the economic structures that neoliberalism left untouched. It has rhetoric of sovereignty, but financial dependence.
Mexico’s prolonged neoliberal era confirms a public and private drought of investment in the context of a deficient tax system that doesn’t raise more than 11 to 13 percent of GDP.
BlackRock, fracking, public-private partnerships, the financial elites and Mexico’s inertia and budgetary shortcomings.
Marx Arriaga’s firing is a part of an attempt to reverse progress, undo the advances made by AMLO’s administration & to try to privatize and commodify public education once again.
As the tax burden in Mexico is still disproportionately on the working class, pensions and social spending are simply a form of recirculating the working class’ own money, as opposed to having the wealthy contribute a fair share for societal benefit.