Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (39 page)

The newspaper’s own Mexican correspondent questioned the deal, calling Slim “the consummate monopolist” and asking: “Does being embroiled in a business culture of back-scratching and unseen forces make him a great partner for the
Times
? I don’t think so.”
⁸
The source of Slim’s wealth is his telecommunications monopoly, handed to him by Mexican President Carlos Salinas in 1990.
⁹
As
New York Times
financial reporter Eduardo Porter put it—one year before Slim became the
Times
’ benefactor—Slim got his enormous wealth by “theft.”
¹⁰

HE’S A GENIUS! HE HAS A MONOPOLY!

In 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued a scathing report on Slim, accusing him of impoverishing
Mexico while feathering his own nest with a telephone monopoly. Slim’s control of 70 percent of the mobile market in Mexico—far higher than in any other country in the OECD—allows him to pocket a profit of nearly twice the world average for major telecommunications companies.
¹¹

As Porter put it in the once-trusted pages of the
Times
Business Section: “Mr. Slim is richer even than the robber barons of the gilded age. . . . It takes about nine of the captains of industry and finance of the 19th and early 20th centuries—Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John J. Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Stewart, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, Jay Gould and Marshall Field—to replicate the footprint that Mr. Slim has left on Mexico.”
¹²

At least those magnates created something. Slim was handed a monopoly for a fully developed product, which he has done nothing to improve upon—unless threatening to imprison your competitors is considered a major innovation. When government officials pressured Slim to stop gouging Mexicans for their Telmex phone service in 2006, Slim demanded that the officials be thrown in jail. A spokesman for Slim’s Telmex later admitted the threat, clarifying to the
Columbia Journalism Review
that imprisonment was not the “goal.”
¹³
Well, yeah—obviously. The “goal” was to block government interference in his monopoly so he could keep fleecing Mexicans.

Carlos Slim has shown more gusto for arresting Mexicans than our own border patrol has. “When competitors were eventually allowed in,” the
Times
’ Porter wrote in 2007, “Telmex kept them at bay with some rather creative gambits, like getting a judge to issue an arrest warrant for the top lawyer of a competitor.”
¹⁴
One of Slim’s business rivals, speaking anonymously, told the
New Yorker
about two guys showing up at his office and informing him “that if we didn’t take down our microwave link, Telmex was going to cut all our telecommunications.”
¹⁵

That was done by the man the
New York Times
is in hock to.

Because of Slim’s government-granted monopoly, Mexico is, according to the OECD:

       
   
Dead last among OECD countries in the number of fixed telephone lines per capita—seventeen per one hundred people;

       
   
Second to last in the number of cell phones per person; and

       
   
Third from last in broadband penetration, with Mexico doing better than only Turkey and Chile.
¹⁶

Mexico is far from the poorest Latin American nation—it’s about mid-range—but it has the fewest cell phones per capita of any Central or South American country.
¹⁷
Ninety-eight percent of Venezuelans have cell phones. Only 78 percent of Mexicans do. The internet has changed the world—except in Mexico, where Slim’s monopoly ensures that broadband is twice as expensive as in any other OECD country.
¹⁸
When Mexican professor and journalist Denise Dresser returned to Mexico after several years abroad, she was shocked to discover that the exact same telephone/internet setup she had in Los Angeles would cost three times as much. “I started studying why the Mexican economy doesn’t grow,” Dresser said. “So much led me back to Carlos Slim.”
¹⁹
Her body has never been found. (Joke.) (I think.) In the
Economist
’s ranking of crony countries, the magazine reported that Mexico was one of the worst, “mainly because of Carlos Slim.”
²⁰

Slim steals from the people—and the people love him! “To many Mexicans,” the
New Yorker
said, “Slim’s wealth is a matter of pride.” A 2009 poll found Mexicans ranking Slim “the great leader Mexico needs.”
²¹
They might want to reconsider that. Slim isn’t Mexican. He’s of Lebanese descent. Usually someone in Slim’s position is known as an “imperialist oppressor.”

This is the man to whom the
New York Times
owes its lifeblood.

Without a monopoly, Slim doesn’t look like such a genius. He bought CompUSA in 2000; by 2008, the company had closed its doors.
²²
He bought a gold mine in Mexico just before the floor dropped out on gold. His purchase of a portion of the UK
Independent
in 2008 was, as he admitted, a mistake—“a bad one.”
²³
The single good investment Slim has made may well be his decision to bail the
New York Times
out of imminent collapse.
True, the stock crashed from fifteen dollars to six as soon as Slim began acquiring shares. Even
Times
insiders thought Slim’s investment was “crazy.”
²⁴
But what they don’t understand is that Slim relies on immense, continuing Mexican immigration to the United States, both legal and illegal, for his fortune. Buying pro–illegal immigration coverage in America’s most influential newspaper was a wise business investment.

HOW “THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD” MAKES MONEY ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

One of the ways Slim makes money off of illegal immigration in the United States is by overcharging Mexicans to call home, especially during World Cup soccer season. Slim takes a percentage of all cell phone calls into Mexico—and Telmex’s “interconnection rates” are astronomical.
²⁵
International roaming rates are 37 percent higher in Mexico than the average of all OECD countries.
²⁶

But the main way illegal immigrants benefit Slim is through their remissions. Monopolistic pricing is of little value in a poor country. A monopoly on air in Burundi would not produce the world’s richest man. Luckily for Slim, Mexico is located right next to one of the wealthiest nations in the world. The OECD estimates that Slim’s suffocating telecommunications monopoly costs Mexican consumers $26 billion a year, with more than half of that coming from Slim gouging his customers.
²⁷
They would have $20 billion less to spend without 40 million Mexicans living in the United States.
²⁸

According to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Mexican immigrants or those of Mexican descent send at least $20 billion out of America back to their relatives in Mexico each year.
²⁹
No wonder immigrants are so reliant on welfare—they’re sending so much of it out of the country! Twenty billion dollars is significantly more—about a quarter more—than the amount of money the United States sends to Mexico in direct foreign aid.
³⁰
The $20 billion being sent to immigrants’ grandmothers
in Chiapas is forever eliminated from the American economy—unavailable for investment in American companies, the purchase of American products, or hiring American workers. That’s a cost of immigration that Americans are never told about.

These billions of dollars being drained out of the U.S. economy every year would be bad enough if the money were coming exclusively from cheap-labor employers like Sheldon Adelson. But it’s worse than that. It comes from American taxpayers. Not only do taxpayers have to support Americans who lose their jobs to low-wage immigrant laborers, taxpayers support the immigrants, too. Seventy-five percent of immigrant families from Mexico are on government assistance.
³¹