August 27, 2007

"Mexico's new robber barons" (Carlos Slim)

Eduardo Porter - a member of the New York Times editorial board who's apparently a Mexican citizen - offers a discussion of the world's richest man - Mexico's Carlos Slim - here. I haven't yet found it at the NYT's site; perhaps it won't appear since they're one of the enablers of the elites that he decries:

Slim's treasure is equivalent to slightly less than 7 percent of Mexico's total production of goods and services - one out of every 14 dollars' worth of stuff made by all the people in the country... The income distribution in the United States may be fast approaching Mexican levels of inequality, but in relative terms, [Bill Gates] isn't even in Slim's league. His $58 billion fortune is less than 0.5 percent of the nation's GDP... It takes about nine of the captains of industry and finance of the 19th and early 20th centuries - Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John J. Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Stewart, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, Jay Gould and Marshall Field - to replicate the footprint that Slim has left on Mexico... ...But the momentous scale is not the most galling aspect of Slim's riches. There's the issue of theft... ...When competitors were eventually allowed in, Telmex kept them at bay with some rather creative gambits, like getting a judge to issue an arrest warrant for the top lawyer of a competitor... ...The United States today is heading toward a Mexican-style social contract. The concentration of 44 percent of the nation's income among the top 10 percent of taxpayers is on a par with Mexico's disparities. It's getting hard to find government officials in Washington without deep ties to corporate interests...

This follows the WSJ's "The Secrets of the World's Richest Man" (link) earlier this month, which has much more on how he gained his wealth. In a slightly unexpected move, they criticize him on the same grounds as Porter. And, of course, like the NYT, the Wall Street Journal is one of the enablers of the income disparity in Mexico.

Posted to Immigration2007b at August 27, 2007 12:59 PM