Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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How did the MORENA coalition not only equal but build on its 2018 victory? Let’s break it down.
✏️ Lessons to Learn / Things that Resonate with People:
- Worker-friendly legislations
- Taking care of the poor
- Mañanera
- Party unity
- Movement unity 🔗 View Highlight
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increased employer contributions to the AFORE system of individual retirement accounts, union reform providing for secret-ballot elections and the mandatory renegotiating of contracts, an outsourcing law prohibiting companies from contracting out their core functions and increasing the formula paid in profit sharing, disability benefits, and a doubling of vacation days and the minimum wage.
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AMLO never distanced himself from the slogan of his first presidential campaign: Por el bien de todos, primero los pobres (“For the good of all, the poor come first”)
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policy terms, this took the form of a universal senior pension, stay-in-school scholarships for public-school students, benefits for working mothers, farm supports and a tree planning and husbandry program, and road-building works using local labor and materials in poor states
✏️ Naturally, just to have the right ammo when discussing this, I would need to know how this gets paid for and sustainably lasts. Especially when you make some of the stuff universal. How does one fund social nets and support? questions #followup 🔗 View Highlight
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Avoiding the means-testing trap advocated by elite policy centers, key programs such as the pension were made universal and locked in at the constitutional level.
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In the depths of the pandemic, when the international financial press was excoriating AMLO for not indebting the country to subsidize business payrolls, these programs provided a lifeline for the half of the country that works in the informal sector and would not have been reached by said subsidies.
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some 5.1 million Mexicans were lifted out of poverty from 2018 to 2022.
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AMLO instituted what was soon to become the set piece of his administration: his morning press conference, known as the mañanera. Equal parts information session, debate club, history lesson, and stand-up routine, the two-to-three-hour daily sessions provided the president with the opportunity to go over the heads of the corporate media, set the agenda, and turn his batting back of a never-ending series of attacks into popular entertainment.
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Whereas in country after country the Right has hijacked the discourses of “values,” “anti-corruption,” and “patriotism,” AMLO deftly found the way to turn all of them on his opponents. First, he focused on the need to live within one’s means, both on a personal and governmental level, in order to prioritize those less well-off. The “pharaonic” state he inherited, in which a golden caste of agency heads, top-level bureaucrats, and judges showered themselves with eye-popping salaries and benefits, gave him endless opportunities to go to war against excess under the battle cry, “There cannot be a rich government with a poor people.”
✏️ He controlled the narrative. Just as with the mananera, here again he calls out against the elites and rich, especially those within the government. He promoted fiscal responsibility as it applies to everyone. 🔗 View Highlight
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a crusade against the corruption that, in conjunction with the mass privatizations of the neoliberal era, hollowed out the state from within, making it easy prey for the infiltration of drug cartels while creating a class of nouveau riche multimillionaires.
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Mindful of the internal election process that tore apart MORENA’s predecessor, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the party adopted, on AMLO’s urging, a candidate selection process based on opinion polling instead of primary voting.
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faced with calls to distance herself from AMLO and prove that she was “her own person,” she refused to take the bait, explaining repeatedly that she represents a movement and that her administration will be dedicated to building a segundo piso, or second floor, on top of the first
✏️ Recognizing that you’re more than just the individual.. you’re part of a movement and you stand in unity and continuity with that movement (and the people before you). 🔗 View Highlight
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the usual media suspects attempted to play the panic card for all they were worth. If voters had so resoundingly rejected their yearslong narrative by exercising their democratic prerogative, then the undemocratic, unelected, and unaccountable financial markets were going to have to step in and correct their excesses.
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Mexico’s Leftists Won Big. Investors are Worried,” screeched the New York Times, adding menacingly that the peso had had its worst week since the pandemic. “Is Mexico’s democracy dying?” worried Fareed Zakaria on CNN. “It really is a testament that Mexico’s democratic system is reversing into a single, dominant hegemonic party,” the Wilson Center’s Lila Abed warned in Politico. “Why is this important to the United States? Because if Mexico doesn’t have a democracy, forget about security cooperation, forget about nearshoring, because companies are not going to want to invest in a country where there’s no separation of powers, where there’s not an independent, autonomous judicial branch, where there’s no clear rules of the game.”
✏️ The ever consistent and demanding propaganda of neoliberalist/globalist agendas at work through “journalism”. Forget the poor.. will someone please spare a concern for the investors and capitalists? 👓 propaganda 🔗 View Highlight
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After some brief postelectoral jitters, stocks calmed, the peso began gaining ground again, and the media narrative moved on. For now. Once the Sheinbaum administration’s battles begin — on energy sovereignty, on migration, on banning GMO corn and glyphosate, on reforming the judicial system — the sensationalist headlines will be back.