Fox Tells Mexicans: 'Let Them Eat Cream'
by Gretchen Small
Aug. 6 (EIRNS)Following the official announcement that unemployment in Mexico is at its highest since he took office in 2000, President Vicente Fox asked his Secretaries of Labor and Economy to join him on his July 26 Saturday radio show, where he announced, with great pomp, that "we have left aside the idea of a neo-liberal economy.... Starting now, our absolute priority is the strengthening of internal markets."
Before his listeners could begin to hope that their President had suddenly recognized reality, Fox made clear that his government has no plans to invest in job creation, but intends to continue with its policy of strict "fiscal discipline." Fox said, instead, that his government will encourage individuals to invent their own jobs. Mexico must "advance from being a country of workers, to a country of entrepreneurs," he intoned, as his Secretary of Economics, Fernando Canales, explained that what they are recommending is "self-employment."
A few days later, Canales elaborated this economic "strategy" before a Congressional committee. The Congressmen present listened, incredulous, as the lunatic free-trader went on about how the Fox government planned to help those with "the simplest idea," such as baking cakes in their home, or putting up a taco stand on the street; those who do not sell the corn produced on our farms as corn on the cob, "but as grains complemented with cream." Adding cream to corn exemplifies how Mexico can "add greater aggregate value" to its products, said Canales! - Losing Control -
Fox has, in fact, championed this feudal "micro-business" strategy (a World Bank favorite) since before he was elected. But he staged his "I'm not a neo-liberal" show, in an attempt to make it appear that his government is doing something, as opposition to his non-government grows on every side.
Ferment over the economic breakdown75 million of Mexico's 100 million people today live in povertyis exploding. Mass marches have been called by major peasant and farm organizations for Aug. 8 in cities across the country, against the government's failure to assist the bankrupt farm sector.
The way things are going, the President may soon decide to cancel his public appearances. In the first days of August, he held a public meeting to discuss the problems of education. The woman invited to speak for the students held up her diploma, reported that she had graduated with top honors, and said she had no job. What, Mr. President, is the point of education, if there are no jobs for those who study? So, too, when Fox followed up with a meeting on health, the chosen spokesman of the medical field asked why the President bothered to hold these meetings, if there are no hospitals, nor clinics, nor medicines with which to work?
On the other side, the foreign financiers who put Fox in the office, are squeezing him to deliver on the economic "reforms" needed to increase their looting of Mexico: eliminating labor protections, and opening the oil and electricity sectors, in particular, to foreign investment. - A Sign of Real Desperation -
Fox's PAN Party was so badly whomped in the July 6 mid-term elections, however, that he doesn't have the base in Congress to get those reforms through. He turned for help to George Bush the elder's corrupt buddy (and Mexico's former President) Carlos Salinas, the man who put through the genocidal North American Free Trade Accord (NAFTA) during his term in office, 1989-94. Some call the deal Fox and Salinas struck, one of "co-government": Salinas is to line up his faction in the PRI Party behind the reforms, in return for which the despised former President is permitted again to play king-maker in Mexican politics, in the jockeying for the 2006 Presidential elections.
The financiers' hopes rose when a well-known Salinas agent, Elba Ester Gordillo, was elected head of the PRI faction in the Chamber of Deputies in July (although not by a great margin). The financiers figured that she could deliver the PRI votes, and Fox those of his PAN Party, to pass the reforms.
However, PRI Senator Manuel Bartlett, who led the successful fight a year ago to defeat efforts to privatize the energy sector, declared on July 23, that the privatization of Mexico's energy sector will not go through. "PRI members are very clear on what our national interest is: preserving energy for Mexicans, and preserving sovereignty," he told the press.
Bartlett is a man of deeds as well as words. On June 25, he and PRI Congressman Salvador Rocha Diaz filed a bombshell suit before the Federal Superior Accounting Office, demanding that 225 licenses to generate electricity granted to private parties under the former Zedillo and current Fox governments, be investigated for being in "flagrant violation" of national laws and the Constitution.
On July 28, the two chairs of the Chamber of Deputies' Energy Committee, one of them a PRI member, announced that should the Executive branch proceed with schemes which de facto privatize natural gas, they will bring a suit before the Supreme Court.
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