Reply #1: His fortune went massive via monopolistic practices in the '80s-'90s privatization era [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

and by buying politicians (the Salinas government).

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Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world

The son of a Mexico City shopkeeper has built a staggering $59 billion fortune. Fortune's Stephanie Mehta tells the inside story of how he made it to the top.

By Stephanie N. Mehta, Fortune senior writer

August 20 2007: 12:12 PM EDT


"Portly and often puffing a cigar, Slim could pass for a latter-day Latin American J.P. Morgan. But with his dominant stakes in everything from phones to finance, his business profile more closely resembles that of John D. Rockefeller, who likewise thrived in a loosely regulated environment. .... The average Mexican encounters a Slim-owned business when she visits an ATM, drives a car, stops for coffee, and especially when she picks up the phone - Slim's Teléfonos de México controls 92% of the country's phone lines, and his América Móvil wireless service has a 70% market share. George W. Grayson, a professor of government at the College of William & Mary, coined the term 'Slimlandia' to describe how entrenched the Slim family's companies are in the daily life of Mexicans.

"It's not a reverential term. Many Mexicans hoped privatization, which began in the early 1990s, would create competition and drive prices down drastically. That hasn't happened. 'Slim is one of a dozen fat cats in Mexico who impede that country's growth because they run monopolies or oligopolies,' says Grayson. "'b]The Mexican economy is highly inefficient, and it is losing its competitive standing vis-à-vis other countries because of people like Slim.'"

http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/03/news/international/carlosslim.fortune/

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These billionaires create a dead "marketplace" then use their billions to kill nascent competitors, and purchase governments to freeze their massive advantages in place and devour and control more lucrative markets--as we see in Slim's case--92% of the country's phone lines meanwhile leveraging that monopoly to gain a wireless monopoly (70%). He's now using his multibillions to move into and control telecommunications in the rest of Latin America.

This is NOT capitalism, it is PREDATORY capitalism. It is NOT a "marketplace." It is Gangsterland--maybe in Slim's case without the violence--I don't know. That much money seems always to have its armies and enforcers. But, in any case, the principle is the same--one guy controls everything--accumulates money, land, resources and power--and uses that to get MORE money, land, resources and power, and every advantage imaginable in driving out the competition.

Imagine you are a small seller of beets that you grow yourself and bring to an ancient market town to sell--and there you find that an owner of vast fertile lands, who uses slave labor, not only has carted in tons of better beets that his agents can sell cheap, undercutting your modest price, but also tons of every other food product, plus reams of cloth woven by the wives of the slave farm workers, cartloads of pottery from his slave labor pottery works in a neighboring town, and other products, and he thus drives every small seller in this "marketplace" into ruin and poverty. They become beggars. And from his powerful position, he then starts jacking up the prices, squeezing his monopolized customers for every peso.

He also buys the marketplace land itself, and extorts payment from any enterprising small sellers who maybe try to bring pickled beets to the market--investing more time and skill in their product--or finer cloth or prettier, stronger pots. They, too, remain poor, or are driven out, or he steals their technical secrets and ruins them that way. He then buys up all the gold mines and controls the currency and on and on.

The king--in modern times, "we the people," the sovereigns of democracy--should intervene, but he does not, and we do not because we don't really have a democracy; we have a capitalocracy--predatory capitalism. In that ancient marketplace case--with relevance today--intervention would be land reform, to divide up the fertile lands in a more equitable way; a progressive tax--the more you make, the more you pay; grants/loans to the smaller sellers' co-ops; free public education--to train people in higher skills and bootstrap the poor; banning slave labor--making the rich landowner pay decent wages, etc.

But the thing is that this Gangster now owns the king. Reform is not possible. A decent, equitable, healthy society--with a marketplace that is full of variety and fun, because there are many sellers of many things--is not possible, and the society descends into fascism, violence, massive dislocation, vast poverty, illicit markets (drug trafficking), repression, chaos, ruin. The ruin of the "small seller" is the ruin of the nation.

Yet another principle of the common good is violated by the big gangster buying the marketplace land--that the very rich can buy up the infrastructure and thus dictate the rules to everyone else. The king--and in a democracy, the people--should be providing the infrastructure, through fair taxation and investment in common good projects--whether it's telephone lines, wireless, electrification or common spaces. Certain things should be owned by all, and managed in a democratic way, so that all may have a decent life. NO ONE should own 92% of vital infrastructure. That is perhaps the biggest error of the 1980s and 1990s--the billionairization of our common infrastructure. (--although there are so many grave errors of that period, it's hard to choose).

This money.cnn.com article is not particularly kind to this multi-billionaire (big gangster) but that's probably because it's shilling for some U.S. gangster who wants Mexico's and the rest of Latin America's telecommunications. Would they do the same (a "warts and all" article) about a U.S.-based monopolist--say, the Gap clothing store empire of Donald Fisher, so similar to the Carlos Slim empire (sons and all) but with the addition of literal slave labor operations in the Mariana Islands (where Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy clothes are sewn)? And what of John McCain's interest in telecommunications in Honduras, a comparable industry, where the U.S. supported a rightwing coup d'etat to aid McCain's and others' interests? Slim is not a real gangster, that I know of. And he doesn't use slave labor, that I know of. "Big gangster" for him is just a metaphor. That is how I mean it. But the Fisher/Gap empire, because it is based on slave labor, and McCain's, Chiquita's and other interests in Honduras, because they also involve slave labor as well as murder, massive repression and fascist government, ARE fairly called "big gangsters." Will money.cnn.com take them apart as they do this Mexican oligarch? Have they? I don't think so.

And guess what? I just read page 2 of this article, and I was right. They rag on Slim's monopolies because AT&T wanted in! Ha!

I fear for Argentina with such a big monopolist moving in on it. Governments crumble before that kind of money. Democracies are destroyed--as ours has been. We need to find out more about this--Argentina's regulatory framework, the views of Cristina Fernandez's (leftist) government, UNASUR's view, etc. Billionairization leads to corruption and ruin, inevitably. EVERY society throughout history that has developed these vast rich/poor discrepancies has fallen. This is the biggest threat that "western civilization" has ever faced. Latin America's huge leftist democracy movement has been a bastion against it--a surprising and amazing and very big movement AWAY from predatory capitalism. There could well be a far rightwing/corporate political agenda behind this new Carlos Slim monopolistic move into Argentina and other countries.