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.
Publicly subsidized, private profitable. The anthem of the upper-tier.
While the share of wages in national income has increased in Mexico, trade liberalization, displacement of domestic production by imports, high interest rates & waning public spending hamper growth & maintain continuity with the much-maligned neoliberal period.
A promising vision from President Sheinbaum for public water management rapidly disappeared. Yet again the Mexican state openly assumes the role it has always played under neoliberalism: facilitating access to natural resources for special interests.
Capitalists will continue to seek to increase profits at the expense of wages and produce inequality, but it is possible to temper this trend with a balance of political forces favorable to the people.