Yesterday Yves Smith, "Mexican Business Elite, US Government, Brace for Likely Win by Leftist Obrador as Mexico’s President," turned her gimlet eye to AMLO, and she concluded that while AMLO might not be a revolutionary Marxist, neither is he a neoliberal, which nowadays in the reign of the zombie is radical indeed:
Even in his measured way, Amlo intends to turn Mexico away from neoliberalism, which is enough to make heads explode. The US press either ignores or considerably downplays how poorly Mexico has fared under its tender ministrations. Again from In Defense of Marxism:
Mexico has been immersed in neoliberalism for 32 years and the results are overwhelming: “Under Porfirio Diaz [Mexican general who served as president in the late-19th, early-20th century], 95 percent of the population was poor. In 1981 it had fallen to just over 40 percent. Now it is actually 85 percent”, said Dr. José Luis Calva Téllez, a member of the Institute of Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in an interview with Contralínea. (Contralínea 2015)In addition, the purchasing power of wages dropped by 71.5 percent. It is practically impossible to live on the minimum wage…The driving priority was “macroeconomic management above everything else. More than 1,000 state-owned companies were privatized to stop state intervention in the economy. Foreign trade was liberalized by drastically reducing all taxes or tariffs on foreign products; the Mexican financial system was privatized.”….In the three neoliberal decades, GDP per capita has grown at a rate of 0.6 percent per year; that is, an aggregate growth of 21 percent. That is not to mention the millions of Mexicans who emigrated in search of jobs they do not find in our country. “Counting the emigrants, the growth of GDP per inhabitant is scarcely 0.3 percent per year, or an aggregate growth of 10 percent in 32 years.” (José Luis Calva, Mexico Beyond Neoliberalism: Options Within The Global Change)
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