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Showing posts from July, 2023

AMLO's Tenure - An Assessment

  The AMLO Project An interesting view of the AMLO project as the presidency of Lopez Obrador is winding down, offered by Edwin Ackerman in Sidecar.  The overview of the article is as follows:  "We can therefore assess AMLO’s administration based on three fundamental criteria: the reinstatement of class cleavage as a primary organizer of the political field; the effort to reconcentrate the power of a state apparatus hollowed out by decades of neoliberal governance; and the break with an economic paradigm based on institutionalized corruption. Let’s consider each of these in turn."   These are the things that any progressive government would need to do in the context of Mexico’s rather deep submersion into neoliberalism.  With respect to class politics, Ackerman points to the redistributive politics of the AMLO administration in terms of cash transfers to various categories of persons in need (students, seniors, etc) and increased tax enforcement, which extracted...

War with Mexico

 Critique of Republican Plan to Invade Mexico This op ed by Jean Guerrerro brings together many of the key threads of a critique of the Republican proposal to use military force against Mexican cartels.  Here are the key elements.  There is a lot of public support for militarizing the war on drugs as a way of responding to the overdose deaths of U.S. citizens on synthetic opioids.  At the heart of this the rage of family members who would personally like to shoot every single drug dealer.  One of the dangers here is that this is an issue with deep visceral support from a large segment of the population that would like to see perpetrators of harm inflicted on their children punished.  Why, asks Guerrero, don’t we bomb the Sackler family.  They’re just as culpable.  Instead, they’re being given pretty lenient treatment by the Department of Justice in the form of legal judgements that strip them of some but not all of their wealth.  This undersc...