by Ann Coulter
13
CARLOS SLIM: THE NEW YORK TIMES’ SUGAR DADDY
CAN WE TRUST ANYTHING THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION?
In 2008, the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, saved the Times from bankruptcy. When that guy saves your company, you dance to his tune. So it’s worth mentioning that Slim’s fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally.
That is, unless the Times is some bizarre exception to the normal pattern of corruption—which you can read about at this very minute in the Times. If a tobacco company owned Fox News, would we believe their reports on the dangers of smoking? (Guess what else Slim owns? A tobacco company!) The Times impugns David and Charles Koch for funneling “secret cash” into a “right-wing political zeppelin.”1 The Kochs’ funding of Americans for Prosperity is hardly “secret.” What most people think of as “secret cash” is more like Carlos Slim’s purchase of favorable editorial opinion in the Newspaper of Record.
It would be fun to have a “Sugar Daddy–Off” with the New York Times: Whose Sugar Daddy Is More Loathsome? The Koch Brothers? The Olin Foundation? Monsanto? Halliburton? Every time, Carlos Slim would win by a landslide. Normally, Slim is the kind of businessman the Times—along with every other sentient human being—would find repugnant.
Frequently listed as the richest man in the world, Slim acquired his fortune through a corrupt inside deal giving him a monopoly on telecommunications services in Mexico. But in order to make money from his monopoly, Slim needs lots of Mexicans living in the United States, sending money to their relatives back in Oaxaca. Otherwise, Mexicans couldn’t pay him—and they wouldn’t have much need for phone service, either—other than to call in ransom demands.
Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”3
What a difference one thieving Mexican billionaire makes!
True, it’s not unusual for the Times to root for the destruction of the United States. Maybe, in this particular instance, the Times agrees with every single thing Slim says. Perhaps there was a secret meeting with Slim: You may have saved us, Carlos Slim, but this newspaper will be in no way cognizant of your financial interest in continued illegal immigration. You’re just very lucky that we happen to agree with you. However, if you get into offshore drilling, we will take a VERY strong position against you.
On the other hand, there’s no question but that the Times has become exceptionally shrill on immigration since Slim saved the company from bankruptcy.
CARLOS SLIM: FAT, PUDGY WHITE KNIGHT
In 2008, the Times was hemorrhaging money. Evidently people were finding more economical means to line their birdcages. In less than a decade, the stock had collapsed from $45 a share to $15 a share. Ratings agencies were threatening to lower the Times’ debt rating to junk bond status.4 By the fall of 2008, advertising sales were cratering, and the company had a $400 million line of financing coming due in May 2009—with no hope of borrowing any more money. Poor minorities don’t get in as much trouble with zero-down mortgages as the Newspaper of Record had with its loans.
The Times began offering buyouts to the news staff and then, not getting enough of them, warned of firings. Company-wide spending cuts of $230 million were announced.5 (The announcements were published in the Times, so few people noticed.) As the clock ticked on the Times’ $400 million credit line, insiders were predicting catastrophe for the Old Gray Lady. “For the first time,” one Times employee said, “people really are thinking this place could go bankrupt.”6 According to New York magazine: “Fantasies about a white-knight businessman who might ‘save’ the Times with a cash infusion abound in the newsroom and in media circles across the city.”7
The white-knight fantasies ran more toward Michael Bloomberg or Google executives than a Mexican robber baron, but beggars can’t be choosers. And that’s how the New York Times got in bed with a monopolist looter whose wealth depends on millions of Mexicans moving to the United States.
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 b
ody 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
Then they turn around and give the money to Carlos Slim. Seventy-three percent of legal Mexican immigrants send money back to their native land and 83 percent of illegal immigrants do.32 Only because $20 billion is being sent by immigrants out of the United States, back to Mexico, can Slim continue to gouge customers for his crappy products. The majority of the money sent by immigrants to Mexico is used for “consumption”—i.e., to buy Carlos Slim’s telephone service, shop at Carlos Slim’s department stores, and eat in Carlos Slim’s restaurants.33 Slim’s businesses account for 40 percent of all publicly traded companies on Mexico’s main stock market index. He owns more than two hundred businesses—banks, retail outlets, restaurant chains, hotels, an airline, a mining company, Sears Mexico, a bottling company, a cigarette manufacturer, and construction, insurance, and real estate companies.
What would all those businesses be worth in Burundi?
That’s why, in 2014, Slim was exhorting Mexican youth to cross illegally into the United States for jobs. The stated purpose of Obama’s open defiance of American immigration laws was to avoid punishing “children” who were brought to the United States by their parents. Slim didn’t care about that. (Then again, neither did Obama.) He just wanted more Mexicans working in America and sending dollars back to him. As the CEO of the “Carlos Slim Foundation” explained, “[O]ur goal is to reduce the access barriers for them to reach this potential . . . to build not just them but their families, so they’re able to contribute to the economy”—i.e., the Mexican economy owned by Carlos Slim.34
Slim’s income stream takes a circuitous route, going from American taxpayers, to government assistance programs, to the immigrant, to his relatives in Mexico, to services, food, and clothes sold by . . . Carlos Slim! It would be simpler if Americans cut Slim a check for $20 billion every year, but taxpayers might object to being bilked to support a Mexican plutocrat.
THE NYT PROTECTS SLIM’S INCOME STREAM
So the media hide the truth about this massive theft from the taxpayers to fund a foreign racketeer. One begins to understand why Slim wanted control of the “Newspaper of Record.” Since Slim saved the paper in 2008, the Times has been fervent in support of illegal immigration. Oddly, for a newspaper based in America, the Times celebrates the vast amounts of money being sucked out of the U.S. economy. The Times thinks it’s great that “the poor themselves” decide how much money to transfer from our economy to their home countries’ economies.35 But that’s because such remittances are a crucial part of Slim’s business plan.
In 2014, when banks raised their fees for transfers of money out of the United States to avoid abetting money laundering, the Times rebuked the financial institutions, saying, “[I]t is not credible for banks to suggest that it’s too hard to tell suspicious transfers to, say, Sudan, from legitimate remittances to, say . . .” Guess which country? Guess! That’s right: “Mexico.” Rushing to protect Slim’s money stream, the Times editorial demanded that “other secure, low-cost options” be found, even suggesting that the World Bank get into the remittance business.36
The Times chose to publish this editorial on transfers of money to Mexico at a time when there was other news in the world—the U.S. primary elections, a Supreme Court decision on religious freedom and Obamacare, new Obamacare website “glitches,” illegal aliens pouring across the border, more shootings in Chicago, an Ebola virus outbreak in Africa, Russia violating a missile treaty, Israeli airstrikes on Palestinians, new Snowden revelations about the CIA spying on Germany, global warming still incinerating the planet, and the Republicans’ infernal War on Women.
True, people have different ideas about what constitutes a major stop-the-presses story and what is D-Section stuff, but making it easier for foreigners to transfer money out of the U.S. economy was an odd choice for an editorial. Instead of another hard-hitting piece on “the glass ceiling,” the Times chose to devote valuable editorial space to fretting over a potential slowdown in Carlos Slim’s collection of $20 billion from Mexicans living in the United States. It would be as if the Times had been rescued by Google—and then began indignantly defending corporate tax havens.
The New York Times is far more compromised by having Carlos Slim as its sugar daddy than any conservative is by the Koch Brothers. The Times is not just beholden to Slim; he holds the very life of the paper in his pinky-ringed, perfumed, fat Mexican hand. Normally, it’s easy to predict the New York Times’ position on any issue, because: a) it never changes; and b) it is
referenced on a weekly basis in the pages of the Times. But that’s not true of immigration. Since Slim waddled in, the Times has altered its stance from mild concern about illegal immigration to bubble-headed cheerleading for illegal immigration.
Cheerleaders: OUR TEAM IS AWESOME.
But seriously, you have to admit that Duke has a better basketball team than Yeshiva.
Cheerleaders: NO! YESHIVA ROCKS! WE RULE!
How else can one explain the Times responding to a surge of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the country by calling for Congress to grant them amnesty? And with passion! According to the Times, Obama’s “most urgent priority” in response to an invasion along our southern border “should be giving these children lawyers and caregivers.”37 This wasn’t run-of-the-mill liberal insanity. A few days earlier, Washington Post editor Charles Lane wrote: “Only by showing people there is nothing to be gained by paying traffickers for the traumatic voyage through Mexico will the chaos cease.”38 Of course, Lane hadn’t been bailed out of bankruptcy by Carlos Slim.
THE TIMES CHANGES ITS TUNE
If the lunacy of the Times’ editorials doesn’t grab you, how about the fact that the newspaper has become noticeably hysterical about illegal immigration since Carlos Slim came on board? In 1997—the pre-Slim days—the Times had editorialized: “Fighting illegal immigration is a difficult and important job. But Congress should do it in a way that will deter illegal entry at the border.”39 Another editorial that year complained that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had “done a poor job of keeping out illegal aliens, deporting criminals [and] processing requests for asylum.”40 This wasn’t even Bush-bashing—Clinton was president!