February 12, 2008 (LPAC)--The giant public-private "infrastructure" plan unveiled by Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Feb. 6, and billed as the way Mexico must survive the financial collapse, is straight fascist, Rohatyn corporatism. Calderon laid it all on the table, in a speech yesterday to Harvard University's Kennedy School. Mexico's future is as a labor-intensive economy, he asserted, but it must build highways, ports, etc., to ship out the goods its cheap labor produces, even more cheaply. Financing for this infrastructure program will come from (1) money "saved" by the privatization of public sector workers' social security passed in 2007, and (2) privatizing what public infrastructure now exists. Last year, the government privatized three highways, and made double ($4 billion) what it had expected to make from the sale, he bragged.
Goldman Sachs, it turns out, got those highways.
On Feb. 6, with Lazard-linked multi-billionaire Carlos Slim in the audience, Calderon announced that he was setting up a National Infrastructure Fund (FONADIN) for this giant so-called public-private partnership" program. The FONADIN's main source of funding is to come from the sale of many more public highways. The next day, the government put two more highways up for auction.
That same day, Dallas Fed Governor Richard Fisher (who voted against the recent interest rate reduction) spoke at a conference in Mexico City, where he also laid down the policy line. Mexico "should invest resources to exploit its advantages...," he said. "Infrastructure is one of the most sensitive issues in Mexico to which more attention should be paid."
Calderon's highway scam has some history to it. This is the second time that most of these highways will have been privatized! When Mexico's private highways went bankrupt in the 1995 blow-out of Mexico's total debt, the government took them over, and bailed out the private construction and management firms, and the national and international bondholders alike. The government having assumed all the bad debt, the roads are now being sold back to private interests, to profit from the tolls all over again!
Calderon's Feb. 10-13 trip to the United States is being billed back home as a visit to the "Mexican community." He has a revealing concept of "Mexican community." His first stop was Wall Street, and his first meeting was with the Council of Americas, presided over by David Rockefeller. A private meeting with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and the Vice President of the New York Federal Reserve, Timothy Geither, followed.
