The New York Review of Books: Mark Weisbrot argues that Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s lead in Mexico’s 2018 presidential race offers a chance for economic and political reform, despite opposition from the country’s corrupt elite and U.S. interests seeking to maintain the status quo.
Dean Baker
Democracy, October 10, 2017
I appreciate the work that Glenn Kessler does as the writer of Washington Post’s Fact Checker column. It’s a difficult job. I don’t always agree with his assessments, but I think he tries to be fair in his analysis. For this reason I was disappointed to see him max out with four Pinocchios over Donald Trump’s trade representative Robert Lighthizer saying that NAFTA led to a government certified loss of 700,000 jobs.
According to Kessler, the basis for this figure is the 757,000 petitions for NAFTA-related trade adjustment assistance that were certified by the Labor Department between Jan. 1, 1994 and Jan. 1, 2001. Kessler raises three major objections to this figure.
First, he argues that the number is old. This is true, but it is difficult to see why that is relevant. There may have been some additional NAFTA related job loss in subsequent years, but that would make the number higher not lower. Complaining that the number is dated would be a bit like criticizing a figure for the number of traffic accidents in 1995. Presumably, there has been no major recalculation of the number of accidents that took place in 1995, so using the originally calculated number would be reasonable for most purposes, even though it is now more than twenty years old.
The second point is that the number could be overstated because the Labor Department was very generous in accepting petitions and likely gave assistance even in instances where the job loss had nothing to do with NAFTA. This is undoubtedly true, but there also had to be many cases where workers lost jobs due to NAFTA, who never filed a petition.
The June 4 governor’s election in the State of Mexico (or Edomex), the most populous state in Mexico, came close to ending the Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s (PRI) nearly nine-decade-long control over the state.
Throughout the campaign and its aftermath, PRI’s illegal election interference, or what the New York Times called “business as usual in the State of Mexico,” 1 was widely documented by independent observers. Even as PRI-controlled election monitors proclaimed their candidate the victor with a slim plurality, evidence of extensive irregularities undermined the results’ legitimacy. The absence of a clear mandate produced a scandal and strengthened the prospects of the leading opposition party ahead of the 2018 presidential elections.
It wasn’t the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), the right-wing party that had interrupted the PRI’s grip on the presidency with the elections of Vicente Fox in 2000 and Felipe Calderón in 2006, that threatened PRI’s stranglehold on the state. Rather, a new political force, the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena), emerged as the most credible challenger to the PRI.
March 2017, Mark Weisbrot, Lara Merling, Vitor Mello, Stephan Lefebvre, and Joseph Sammut
Dean Baker
Truthout, March 27, 2017
Philadelphia Inquirer: Mexico’s weak growth and rising poverty since NAFTA — driven by Washington-backed neoliberal policies — fueled migration, making Trump’s border wall proposal possible despite its economic and environmental costs.
August 2016, Cherrie Bucknor
