The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited Again: Part 8

New York Times Owner Slim’s Mexican Political Connections Historically

In addition to “receiving a million pesos from his mother” in 1966,  New York Times Owner Slim apparently benefitted financially in the following decades from “the fact that Slim was a huge contributor to” former Mexican President “Carlos Salinas de Gortari's PRI party,” according to an Aug. 20, 2007 Fortune magazine article; which also quoted College of William & Marry Professor of Government George Grayson as saying that Slim “made his billions because of an extremely close and advantageous relationship with the Salinas government.” The New Internationalist magazine in its June 1, 2004 issue also recalled that “as it happens Slim was good buddies with then-President CarlosSalinas de Gortari,” “in 1993, at a gala fundraising dinner, Slim—along with 30 other business leaders—pledged an average $25 million each to Gortari’s PRI party,” and “Salinas left office in 1994, was charged with massive fraud and corruption and has been in exile in Ireland ever since.”

(end of part 8)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited Again: Part 7

New York Times Owner Slim’s 1960’s Money-Making

According to Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else book, New York Times Owner Slim “started to make serious money straight out of college, when he was one of the Los Casabolseros or Stock Market Boys, a group of aggressive young men who traded shares on the Mexican stock market.” Then, “by the end of 1965” Slim “had established a brokerage house, acquired a bottling company, and incorporated a real-estate business, Inmobiliaria Carso” and in 1966, “upon receiving a million pesos from his mother…built a twelve-story condominium in Mexico City,” “occupied the ninth floor and rented out the other apartments,” according to Lawrence Wright’s June 1, 2009 article in The New Yorker. So by the age of 26, according to the 2009 American Journalism Review article, “Slim had already accumulated $400,000 in wealth from his business ventures and from his mother.”

(end of part 7)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited Again: Part 6

New York Times Owner Slim’s Billions and Poverty In Mexico

California State University Professor Emeritus Rodolfo Acuna also observed in a Dec. 27, 2013 article which was posted on the CounterPunch website that “as of December 2013” Slim’s “corporate holdings amounted to US $71.2 billion” while “some 50 percent of Mexicans live below the poverty line;” and “critics charge that Slim’s monopoly prevents the growth of smaller companies, and his monopolistic practices have resulted in a shortage of paying jobs, contributing to migration to the United States.” As University of California-San Diego Professor Emeritus Ramon Eduardo Ruiz noted in his 2010 book Mexico: Why A Few Are Rich and The People Poor:

“Of the more than 100 million Mexicans, why do over half live in poverty, some 20 million of them enduring daily hunger, barely able to keep body and soul together?...Mexico…ranks near the top of the list of countries with the most glaring inequalities of wealth and income...One Mexican, Carlos Slim, the telephone magnate, is one of the richest men in the world…Every 24 hours of every month of every year, his income grows at the rate of $22 million dollars, yet 1 out of 5 Mexicans survives on just $2 dollars a day...Unwilling to help their poor, Mexico's elite had chosen to rely on Uncle Sam to give the [Mexican] poor jobs and to feed them, and equally important, to avoid a potential social explosion of the restless [in Mexico]...No country in the world has exported more manpower than Mexico...An average of 450,000 people a year are thought to have crossed into the United States [from Mexico] during the early years of the 21st-century...One fact [in Mexico] stares one in the face. The well-off [in Mexico] hate paying taxes, and Mexico has one of the lowest-tax rates in the world….Over 12 million Mexicans do not have running water in their homes...Carlos Slim...purchased the [Mexican] nation's telephone network...at a bargain price; his monopoly nonetheless...charges some of the world's highest phone rates...”

(end of part 6)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited Again: Part 5

New York Times Owner and Philip Morris International Director Slim’s Special Economic Interests 

In a Mar. 18, 2009 article that was posted on the CounterPunch website, John Ross indicated what the special economic interests of New York Times Owner Slim were in 2009:

“The big guns of Slim’s empire are Telmex, the Mexican phone monopoly that charges higher rates than any other such enterprise in the wide world, with which he was gifted in an excess of crony capitalism by the reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas, and American Mobil – the Mexican tycoon’s cell phone companies dominate 70% of the Latin American market. Also in the Slim portfolio: Inbursa banks; Carso Construction; Prodigy Internet (Mexico’s top provider); the Sanborn’s restaurant and department store chain; double digit chunks of Sears and Saks Fifth Avenue; the Mixup record store chain; El Globo, the nation’s top pan dulce outlet; "La Cigarera", his tobacco cartel in Nayarit state; and....the Historic Center of Mexico City…Now Carlos Slim owns up to 160 buildings in the old quarter and dominates rental property….Slim built his empire on corporate cannibalism…”.

(end of part 5)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited Again: Part 2

Most people who live in New York City—including most of New York City’s over 183,000 Mexican-American residents—don’t think that the human rights of people in Mexico should be violated or that Mexican workers and consumers should be exploited by the Mexican government or the corporations that Mexican billionaires or U.S. billionaires own or control.

Yet one of the richest billionaires in the world—a Mexican billionaire named Carlos Slim—has been one of the owners in recent years of the Big Apple’s New York Times newspaper—which publishes “all the news that fits the rich” each day. As Sherry Ricchiardi noted in an article, titled “A Dubious Benefactor,” that appeared in the April/May 2009 issue of American Journalism Review [AJR]:

“On January 19 [2009], the Times Co. accepted a $250 million loan at 14 percent interest from a controversial billionaire who already owned a 6.9 percent stake in the company.

“The benefactor: Carlos Slim Helú.

“Immediately, questions swirled about the propriety of the nation's leading newspaper getting a bailout from a much-criticized subject of its own news coverage…The industry was abuzz with the apparent conflict of interest…The Times Co. declined requests for an interview about the company's connection to the Mexican billionaire…Slim's son-in-law and spokesman, Arturo Elias Ayub, declined a request for an interview with Slim or a family member for this story…If Slim exercises the warrants he holds from the loan, he will be among the largest single shareholders in the Times Co., owning up to 17 percent of the common shares outstanding...reported Times writer Eric Dash…” 

And in an article, titled “When the World’s Richest Billionaire Owns Your Paper: The New York Times covers Carlos Slim—carefully,” that appeared in the November 2013 issue of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [F.A.I.R.]’s Extra! magazine, Zaid Jilani indicated how the New York Times has been reporting in recent years about the Mexican billionaire that owns much of its stock:

“In 2008, the multibillionaire purchased a 6.4 percent stake in the New York Times Company. Today, he is the second-largest shareholder in the company, with a 13 percent stake…

“A natural topic for coverage would be Slim’s telecommunications monopoly that critics charge has free rein to rip off millions of consumers…The OECD calculated that this virtual monopoly by Slim reduces the living standard of the average Mexican family by over $600 a year...The OECD study did get a passing reference in a 2011 Times article on Mexico’s attempt to break up Slim’s monopoly—which mentioned Slim’s stake in the Times in the print version, but not the online edition. The article, headlined `Mexico Takes Aim at a Titan in Telecom,’ looked at a $1 billion fine that Mexico’s antitrust agency imposed on one ofSlim’s subsidiaries…Places where criticism ofSlim would seem obvious sometimes find him conspicuously absent, as when Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that Mexico has `big energy, telecom’ monopolies that are harming the country’s economy—without naming the Mexican monopolist who owns much of the company that pays Friedman’s salary.

“Incidents of public pushback to Slim’s business practices have also gone unnoted, as when hundreds demonstrated when George Washington University gave him an honorary degree; Mexican immigrant groups threatened boycotts against his telecommunications companies; and activists in the U.S. and Mexico formed the group Two Countries, One Voice to rally against Slim…You’ll find the paper’s sharpest criticism of Slim in an op-ed from 2007, a year before he became an investor in the Times. In it, Eduardo Porter condemns Slim as a `robber baron.’ Porter writes that `Mr. Slim’s sin, if not technically criminal, is like that of Rockefeller, the sin of the monopolist.’…

“Perhaps the paper was feeling like it had given its future investor a raw deal. By December of that year, it published a reported piece callingSlim a `new breed of billionaire’ who “has pledged billions of dollars to his two foundations that will aid health and education.’”

(end of part 2)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Conclusion

New York Times Owner Slim’s U.S. Real Estate Investments

In New York City and other U.S. cities, Slim has also apparently been purchasing more real estate property since he purchased stock in Citigroup and the New York Times Company in 2008. As Adam Piore noted in an Oct. 1, 2010 article in The Real Deal article:

“…New Yorkers know him as…the man who…dropped $44 million on the Duke Semans Mansion on the Upper East Side, but Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has plenty of other real estate holdings outside of New York...While Slim has beefed up his New York real estate portfolio lately, he’s also made moves like gaining control of a prime half-billion-dollar property in Beverly Hills…His New York purchases were made through Inmobiliaria Carso, a closely held entity for Slim’s family that is not required to release as much information… Slim ponied up $140 million in June to buy 417 Fifth Avenue from a joint venture of the Moinian Group and Goldman Sachs’ Whitehall Street Real Estate Fund…."

So don’t expect The New York Times to start publishing many new expose’s of the New York City real estate industry if Mexican Billionaire Oligarch and Philip Morris International board member Carlos Slim increases his share of New York Times Company stock to 19 percent in 2015.

(end of article)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 15

New York Times Owner Slim’s Foreign Investments

Whatever happens within Mexico with regard to anti-monopoly legislation or human rights violations, New York Times Owner Slim and his family’s ability to accumulate billions of dollars each decade may still not be affected that much as long as the capitalist economic system exists around the globe, because an increasing percentage of his 21^st-century profits have been coming from his investments in countries other than Mexico in recent years. As an article in the July 20, 2014 issue of Bloomberg Business Week observed:

“Slim said this week that his America Movil…is bowing to antitrust legislation by selling assets in Mexico to reduce its dominant market share…While America Movil will be reducing dependence on its home market, the world’s second-richest man has been diversified beyond Mexico and telecommunications for years with holdings in banking, mining and construction…America Movil has also expanded, with operations in 17 other countries, from the U.S. to Chile. It also holds stakes in two European phone carriers, Royal KPN NV and Telekom Austria AG…With about 60 percent of America Movil’s sales coming from outside of Mexico today…Slim’s fortune is less dependent on his home country than it used to be…”

In addition, “through America Movil,” New York Times Owner Slim also “committed $60 million” to an Israeli startup, “Mobli as a model of the type of potential investments in Israeli firms,” according to Forbes magazine (12/21/13).

(end of part 15)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 14

Mexico’’s Human Rights Situation and Mexico’s Oligarchs

Despite the passage in 2013 of an anti-monopoly reform bill that would reduce Slim’s share of the Mexican telecommunications consumer market to below 50 percent, the human rights situation in a Mexico whose economy remains dominated by billionaire oligarchs like New York Times Owner Slim still needed improvement. As a 2014 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, for example, observed:

“Upon taking office in December 2012, [Mexican] President Enrique Peña Nieto acknowledged that the``war on drugs’ launched by predecessor Felipe Calderón had led to serious abuses by the security forces. In early 2013, the administration said that more than 26,000 people had been reported disappeared or missing since 2007…Yet the government has made little progress in prosecuting widespread killings, enforced disappearances, and torture committed by soldiers and police in the course of efforts to combat organized crime, including during Peña Nieto’s tenure….Members of all security force branches continue to carry out disappearances during the Peña Nieto administration, in some cases collaborating directly with criminal groups. In June 2013, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said it was investigating 2,443 disappearances in which it had found evidence of the involvement of state agents…From December 2006 to mid-September 2013, the CNDH received 8,150 complaints of abuse by the army, and issued reports on 116 cases in which it found that army personnel had committed serious human rights violations.

“The soldiers who commit these abuses are virtually never brought to justice, largely because such cases continue to be investigated and prosecuted in the military justice system, which lacks independence and transparency…Torture is widely practiced in Mexico to obtain forced confessions and extract information. It is most frequently applied in the period between when victims are arbitrarily detained and when they are handed to prosecutors, when they are often held incommunicado at military bases or other illegal detention sites. Common tactics include beatings, waterboarding, electric shocks, and sexual torture. Many judges continue to accept confessions obtained through torture, despite the constitutional prohibition of such evidence.

“…Between January and September 2013, the National Human Rights Commission received more than 860 complaints of torture or cruel or inhuman treatment by federal officials…Prisons are overpopulated, unhygienic, and fail to provide basic security for most inmates. Prisoners who accuse guards or inmates of attacks or other abuses have no effective system to seek redress.

“Approximately 65 percent of prisons are controlled by organized crime, and corruption and violence are rampant, according to the CNDH. Some 108 inmates had died in 2013, as of November….At least 85 journalists were killed between 2000 and August 2013, and 20 more were disappeared between 2005 and April 2013, according to the CNDH…Independent unions are often blocked from entering negotiations with management, while workers who seek to form independent unions risk losing their jobs...Human rights defenders and activists continue to suffer harassment and attacks…In many cases, there is evidence—including witness testimony or traced cell phones—that state agents are involved in aggressions against human rights defenders…The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions conducted a fact-finding mission to Mexico in April-May 2013, and stated that extrajudicial executions by security forces were widespread and often occurred without accountability…”

So, not surprisingly, as recently as Nov. 8, 2014 Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas Director of Amnesty International--in response to the Nov. 8, 2014 statement by Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam about the 43 Mexican students who disappeared in September 2014—noted that “tragically, the enforced disappearance of these student teachers is just the latest in a long line of horrors to have befallen Guerrero state, and the rest of the country;” and “the warning signs of corruption and violence have been there for all to see for years, and those that negligently ignored them are themselves complicit in this tragedy.”

(end of part 14)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 13

New York Times Owner Slim’s TracFone Connection

The May 10, 2013 Forbes magazine article also observed that New York Times Owner Slim’s TracFone Wireless Inc. mobile phone service firm—the fifth largest in the United States in 2009--was “the largest recipient under the U.S. Federal Communication Commission’s Lifeline program, taking in $451.7 million, or 28%, of payments in 2011, the last year for which records are available” and “has four million TracFone customers participating in the government phone assistance Lifeline program.”

An Oct. 7, 2013 Two Countries One Voice press release also noted that “on July 11, 2013, the California Public Utilities Commission fined New York Times Owner Slim’s TracFone $24 million and settled a battle that has drawn out in both the courts and before the California Public Utilities Commission surrounding the pay-as-you-go mobile provider’s failure to pay fees and surcharges that fund programs for the deaf and poor.” The same press release also observed that “in May 2013, Mexico’s Congress: finally “overwhelmingly passed a far reaching telecommunications reform bill designed to improve competition in Mexico’s phone industry, which is controlled by Carlos Slim,” but that the Two Countries One Voice activist group “will continue to be the voices for the voiceless, giving prominence to the plight of the poor, who are impacted by Slim’s practices.”.

(end of part 13)

The `New York Times''' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 12

U.S. Protests Against New York Times Owner Carlos Slim's Exploitation Of Workers And Consumers

It’s not likely that much news about protests in the United States or Mexico against the exploitation of workers and consumers around the globe by New York Times Owner Carlos Slim will be mentioned much on either Ora.TV shows or on the front page of the New York Times. But in an Aug. 7, 2012 Daily Intelligencer article in New York magazine, Joe Coscarelli noted how some Occupy Wall Street activists were planning to protest outside the Saks Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan, that was then owned by New York Times Owner Slim: 

”…What's left of Occupy Wall Street plans to join forces with Yo Soy 132, the similarly amorphous Mexican student group…for a demonstration against Slim's `monopolistic practices’ at his telecommunications companies. `Carlos Slim is the 1 percent of the 1 percent,’ said one Occupy organizer…`Slim is the world's richest man, the largest stakeholder in Saks Fifth Avenue, and has been accused of overcharging impoverished Mexicans by over $129 billion as owner of Mexico's largest phone company,’ the group stresses. `What better way to protest predatory greed by taking over his Fifth Avenue store?’…

And in its May 10, 2013 issue, Forbes  magazine described another protest against New York Times Owner Slim’s exploitation of workers and consumers that was held in the New York Public Library:

  

“Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim was in the middle of promoting his partnership with Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, during a public event at the New York Public Library on Thursday night, when a group of sixty activists started snickering audibly, escalating to loud guffaws.  The activists, members of Two Countries One Voice, a Latino advocacy group created in 2012 to organize public demonstrations against the world’s richest man,  said that the “laugh-in” was to denounce Slim’s `monopolistic and predatory practices.’…It was interrupted for several minutes by the loud laughing of the protesters and resumed later on when the protesters left the room spreading small Monopoly paper money with Slim’s face printed on it.  `The point of the laugh-in is to expose Slim,’ said Juan Jose Gutierrez, founder of Two Countries One Voice.  `Given Slim’s track record, his interest in suddenly providing educational services to Mexicans is laughable.’…

(end of part 12)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 11

New York Times Owner Slim’s Ora TV-Larry King Connection

As The New Yorker magazine noted in its 2009 article, “under the original terms of the Telmex privatization, the company was prohibited from offering television service” in Mexico. Yet a few years after Carlos Slim became the second-largest holder of stock in the New York Times Company, his America Movil telecommunications firm began funding the Ora.TV digital television network that began airing a Larry King tv show. As a Mar. 12, 2012 press release on the Ora TV website noted:

“Global media industry leaders today announced the creation of Ora.TV, a new digital television venture funded by América Móvil, the leading Latin American wireless service provider that is controlled by Carlos Slim Helú. The announcement marks the return to television of broadcast news legend Larry King, who joins Mr. Slim Helú as a co-founder of the network. Ora.TV will be led by Jon Housman, who until recently was the President of Digital Journalism for News Corporation.

“Ora.TV will create high-quality video programming for digital distribution…The company will produce shows that resemble traditional TV..In addition, Ora is in discussions with other on-air personalities to join King…Carlos Slim Helú is considered one of the world's foremost business leaders with interests in finance, media, telecommunications and other fields. He owns stakes in many companies, including The New York Times, Saks, and is the main investor in Telefonos de Mexico, América Móvil and Grupo Financiero Inbursa. `Ora.TV represents a great opportunity,’ Carlos Slim Helú said….Larry King is joining the network….

"`I am thrilled to be working with Carlos…’ King commented. `The backing of Carlos…is a recipe for success’…”

(end of part 11)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 10

New York Times Owner Slim’s Historic Microsoft-Bill Gates Connection

Besides owning a lot of New York Times stock and sitting next to former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Trilateral Commission member Harold Brown on the Philip Morris International corporate board in recent years, Mexican Billionaire Slim has also historically had a business relationship with U.S. Billionaire Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation and its Prodgy MSN subsidiary. And on Mar. 21, 2000, a Microsoft press release stated:

“Telmex and Microsoft Corp. today announced the formation of T1msn, the result of a joint venture agreement signed last year between the two companies. T1msn will create and operate a leading Spanish-language Internet portal, launched today…

“`Telmex and Microsoft…share a common business vision,’
said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman…

“`This joint venture draws on the skills and strengths of both companies,’ said Carlos Slim, chairman of the board of Telmex…”

(end of part 10)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 9

New York Times Owner Slim’s Historic Rudolph Giuliani Connection

The same New Internationalist (6/1/04) magazine article also revealed how New York City’s former Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s consulting firm was paid $4.3 million in 2004 by “a group of business interests” led by New York Times Owner Slim:

“Like his father before him, Carlos Slim is now eyeing the Mexico City real estate market. And he’s counting on ex-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani for help. Slim…led a group of business interests who paid Giuliani’s consulting firm $4.3 million for a report on how to clean up the city’s historic centre. Both the mayor and the police chief embraced the report’s recommendations. Not surprisingly, they echo Giuliani’s approach in New York – which was basically to make it impossible for the poor to live there. The report calls for a crackdown on street vendors, prostitution, graffiti and homeless kids who watch parked cars for a few pesos. Critics fear the project is an attempt to boost property values for real estate speculators while pushing the poor to the city’s crowded suburban slums…”

(end of part 9)

The `New York Times' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 8

New York Times Owner Slim’s Mexican Political Connections Historically

In addition to “receiving a million pesos from his mother” in 1966,  New York Times Owner Slim apparently benefitted financially in the following decades from “the fact that Slim was a huge contributor to” former Mexican President “Carlos Salinas de Gortari's PRI party,” according to an Aug. 20, 2007 Fortune magazine article; which also quoted College of William & Marry Professor of Government George Grayson as saying that Slim “made his billions because of an extremely close and advantageous relationship with the Salinas government.” The New Internationalist magazine in its June 1, 2004 issue also recalled that “as it happens Slim was good buddies with then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari,” “in 1993, at a gala fundraising dinner, Slim—along with 30 other business leaders—pledged an average $25 million each to Gortari’s PRI party,” and “Salinas left office in 1994, was charged with massive fraud and corruption and has been in exile in Ireland ever since.”

(end of part 8)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 7

New York Times Owner Slim’s 1960’s Money-Making

According to Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else book, New York Times Owner Slim “started to make serious money straight out of college, when he was one of the Los Casabolseros or Stock Market Boys, a group of aggressive young men who traded shares on the Mexican stock market.” Then, “by the end of 1965” Slim “had established a brokerage house, acquired a bottling company, and incorporated a real-estate business, Inmobiliaria Carso” and in 1966, “upon receiving a million pesos from his mother…built a twelve-story condominium in Mexico City,” “occupied the ninth floor and rented out the other apartments,” according to Lawrence Wright’s June 1, 2009 article in The New Yorker. So by the age of 26, according to the 2009 American Journalism Review article, “Slim had already accumulated $400,000 in wealth from his business ventures and from his mother.”

(end of part 7)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 6

New York Times Owner Slim’s Billions and Poverty In Mexico

California State University Professor Emeritus Rodolfo Acuna also observed in a Dec. 27, 2013 article which was posted on the CounterPunch website that “as of December 2013” Slim’s “corporate holdings amounted to US $71.2 billion” while “some 50 percent of Mexicans live below the poverty line;” and “critics charge that Slim’s monopoly prevents the growth of smaller companies, and his monopolistic practices have resulted in a shortage of paying jobs, contributing to migration to the United States.” As University of California-San Diego Professor Emeritus Ramon Eduardo Ruiz noted in his 2010 book Mexico: Why A Few Are Rich and The People Poor:

“Of the more than 100 million Mexicans, why do over half live in poverty, some 20 million of them enduring daily hunger, barely able to keep body and soul together?...Mexico…ranks near the top of the list of countries with the most glaring inequalities of wealth and income...One Mexican, Carlos Slim, the telephone magnate, is one of the richest men in the world…Every 24 hours of every month of every year, his income grows at the rate of $22 million dollars, yet 1 out of 5 Mexicans survives on just $2 dollars a day...Unwilling to help their poor, Mexico's elite had chosen to rely on Uncle Sam to give the [Mexican] poor jobs and to feed them, and equally important, to avoid a potential social explosion of the restless [in Mexico]...No country in the world has exported more manpower than Mexico...An average of 450,000 people a year are thought to have crossed into the United States [from Mexico] during the early years of the 21st-century...One fact [in Mexico] stares one in the face. The well-off [in Mexico] hate paying taxes, and Mexico has one of the lowest-tax rates in the world….Over 12 million Mexicans do not have running water in their homes...Carlos Slim...purchased the [Mexican] nation's telephone network...at a bargain price; his monopoly nonetheless...charges some of the world's highest phone rates...”

(end of part 6)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 5

New York Times Owner and Philip Morris International Director Slim’s Special Economic Interests

In a Mar. 18, 2009 article that was posted on the CounterPunch website, John Ross indicated what the special economic interests of New York Times Owner Slim were in 2009:

“The big guns of Slim’s empire are Telmex, the Mexican phone monopoly that charges higher rates than any other such enterprise in the wide world, with which he was gifted in an excess of crony capitalism by the reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas, and American Mobil – the Mexican tycoon’s cell phone companies dominate 70% of the Latin American market. Also in the Slim portfolio: Inbursa banks; Carso Construction; Prodigy Internet (Mexico’s top provider); the Sanborn’s restaurant and department store chain; double digit chunks of Sears and Saks Fifth Avenue; the Mixup record store chain; El Globo, the nation’s top pan dulce outlet; "La Cigarera", his tobacco cartel in Nayarit state; and....the Historic Center of Mexico City…Now Carlos Slim owns up to 160 buildings in the old quarter and dominates rental property….Slim built his empire on corporate cannibalism…”.

(end of part 5)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 4

New York Times Owner and Philip Morris International Director Slim’s Inherited Wealth

Much of the big money that New York Times Owner Slim used to gain control of his lucrative privatized telecommunications monopoly in Mexico (which—prior to 1990--had been a nationalized, publicly-owned utility company of the Mexican government) and to purchase his New York Times stock was originally “derived from selling cigarettes” to people in Mexico—where 15% to 20% of male deaths and 5% to 10% of female deaths in 2000 were thought attributable to smoking and an estimated 60,000 people died of tobacco-related illnesses in 2010—and his tobacco industry investment profits. As The New Yorker magazine (6/1/09) article also noted, his Cigatam tobacco industry company investment “provided Slim with a critical ingredient for amassing a fortune: steady cash flow.”

Yet some of the money that Mexican Billionaire Slim originally used to invest in his Mexican tobacco industry companies was apparently derived from the wealth he inherited from his father. As Sherry Ricchiardi noted in her 2009 “A Dubious Benefactor” article in the American Journalism Review [AJR], “his father, Julian Slim Haddad, moved to Mexico in 1902 and made a fortune as a merchant and in real estate” and “when he died, Julian Slim left his six children well heeled.” As long ago as 1922, for example, Carlos Slim’s father was apparently worth over 1 million Mexican pesos and apparently owned at least 11 valuable Downtown Mexico City real estate properties.

(end of part 4)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 3

New York Times Owner Slim’s Historic Tobacco Industry/Philip Morris International/Altria Connection

A 2010 research paper by Tiffany Burch, Nathaniel Wander and Jeff Collin, titled “Uneasy money: the Instituto Carlos Slim de la Salud, tobacco philanthropy and conflict of interest in global health”, described some conflicts-of-interest and ethical issues related to New York Times Owner Slim’s foundations that raised some questions about whether or not the New York Times owner is actually a “new breed” of billionaire who has aided health historically:

“In May 2007, the Instituto Carso de la Salud—now Instituto Carlos Slim de la Salud (ICSS)—was endowed with US$500 million to focus on priority health issues in Latin America… ICSS was soon criticized, however, on the grounds that its funding was derived from tobacco industry profits and that its founder Carlos Slim Hélu remained an active industry principal…This research…demonstrates a prima facie conflict of interest between ICSS's health mission and its founder's involvement in cigarette manufacturing and marketing, reflected on ICSS's website as a resounding silence on issues of tobacco and health….”

According to the “Uneasy Money” research paper:

"The Instituto Carlos Slim de la Salud (ICSS) or Carlos Slim Health Institute (originally Instituto Carso de la Salud), was founded as a health charity by Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú and inaugurated on 18 September 2007 by Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Sra. Vivian Fernández, wife of the president of Panama. Backed by health and political elites, ICSS…is partnering with the Clinton Global Initiative…Slim, one of the world's richest men whose holdings include telecommunications, finance and retailing, also owns a 20% stake in the Mexican cigarette manufacturer Cigarrera La Tabacalera Mexicana (Cigatam), with the majority interest currently held by Philip Morris International (PMI). Having previously served on the board of Philip Morris Companies, Inc. (renamed Altria in 2003), Slim joined the board of PMI when it was spun off from the Altria parent in April 2008. His annual compensation from PMI includes a retainer of at least US$100 000, reimbursement of travel and business expenses and shares worth US$140 000….

“…The then editor of Tobacco Control Simon Chapman described Slim as ‘a direct beneficiary of massive sales of tobacco’…This paper documents Slim's…involvement in tobacco corporations, detailing tobacco's significance in the development of his Grupo Carso (GC) and his historic and ongoing strategic value to the global tobacco industry…The documents presented here substantiate a longstanding pattern of financial and political relations between Carlos Slim/GC and Philip Morris/Altria/PMI…..

“The relationships between ICSS, Carlos Slim and the tobacco industry remain rooted in the finances of the Slim/GC commercial enterprise and in the services to the tobacco industry that Slim continues to provide. They have been and remain arguably antithetical to national, regional and global interests in public health…

“…GC (originally Grupo Galas) was incorporated in 1980 ‘to obtain the majority stake in Cigatam, in which Philip Morris was a 29% partner’….By 1995 Cigatam was Mexico's most profitable domestic cigarette company, generating 24% of GC's revenue and 32% of its net income. In 1997, immediately before Slim was elected to its board of directors, the Philip Morris parent company increased its stake in Cigatam to 50%, paying GC US$400 million. Shortly after the inauguration of ICSS in 2007, Slim/GC further profited by selling an additional 30% of Cigatam to PM/Altria at a price of US$1.1 billion. By 2008, Cigatam commanded 55% of the Mexican cigarette market and continued to increase its profits. The Slim/GC enterprise continues to benefit from its remaining 20% share of Cigatam, as well as from holdings in PMI.

“During the early 1980s, Slim/GC also became the largest shareholder in Cigatam's main competitor, Cigarerra La Moderna (CLM), which was partnered with British American Tobacco (BAT), though seemingly less openly than was Cigatam with PM…In 1985, ostensibly ‘to avoid antitrust problems’, Slim sold his 40% stake in CLM (which then held a 75% share of the Mexican market) to competitor/colleague Alfonso Romo Garza for US$32.4 million…Though formally competitors, Cigatam and CLM were described as functionally cooperative, being said to constitute an effective merchandising duopoly that controlled 98% of Mexico's cigarette market in 1997….

“Slim's direct involvement in PM/Altria intensified during his service on the company's board of directors from 1997 to 2006, and he benefited additionally from annual retainers and share accumulations. Altria's 2005 Annual Report, the last full year in which Slim served, showed him owning over 4 million company shares, almost 1.5 times that of then-Chairman Louis Camilleri. In 2000, Slim purchased 3.9 million shares at greatly depressed prices, selling them for a profit of US$63 million 1 year later. Slim retained 1.5 million Altria shares when he retired from its board in the spring of 2006.

“…Tobacco money enabled GC to purchase a share of the privatized Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) from the Mexican government in 1990, which became the basis of GC telecommunications holdings…ICSS's funds originated in the tobacco industry…

“Even before his elevation to its board…Slim had been serving as a Philip Morris conduit to the Mexican government….Slim's value to Philip Morris was further demonstrated when the company made a substantial donation to a Slim family charity consistent with its wider ‘influence’ strategies….In March 2008, less than a year after the launch of the ICSS, Slim became a director for the newly independent Philip Morris International, when it was spun off from the PM/Altria parent company…Specifically, he serves on PMI's Regulatory Affairs and Product Innovations Committee…

“If Slim had no further role than the financing of a health charity, it would still present a problematic case of ‘white coating’—the tobacco industry clothing itself in the respectability and goodwill of medical research and healthcare provision. While Slim appears to have no official role in ICSS per se, he remains the Chairman Emeritus of GC, within which ICSS and its parent the Carlos Slim Foundation, are described as ‘a fundamental part of Carlos Slim Helú's business strategy and culture’…Although Slim does not sit on the ICSS board of nine directors,…three are family members (son Marco Antonio, also CEO of Inbursa and a GC director; son-in-law Arturo Elias, a GC director and a key Telmex executive, described as Slim's spokesman; and daughter Vanessa), a fourth is a GC executive (Raul Zepeda, a Telmex attorney and Inbursa director), two are directors of GC and/or its subsidiaries (Jose Kuri and Roberto Kriete)…

“Finally, it cannot be overemphasized that Slim, who is said to remain in close communication with his three sons and two sons-in-law, the active managers of his business interests, is not simply any wealthy patron. His family holdings were reported to comprise more than 5% of Mexico's 2006 gross domestic product and to account for one-third the value on Mexico's US$422 billion stock exchange. Consistently ranked alongside Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as one of the three richest men in the world, Slim's significance within a national economy 1/14th the size of the US substantially exceeds that of Buffett and Gates…

“ICSS's funding from telecommunication and infrastructure shares ultimately derives from the tobacco industry. By Slim's account, it was the large cash flows generated by cigarette manufacturing, and by our analysis, additional profits from shares in domestic and transnational tobacco companies that financed GC's expansion into these other sectors…The tobacco links at play here are not matters of ancient history: GC, which parents the Carlos Slim Foundation of which ICSS is a subsidiary, retains a 20% share in the pre-eminent tobacco company in the largest market in Spanish-speaking America, and Slim and his family have benefited from owning large volumes of shares in Altria and PMI….By serving PMI, the founder of what would be Latin America's most influential health charity has agreed to promote the long-term interests of the world's leading tobacco transnational....

“The profits, power and prestige of Slim, his family and GC are substantially derived from selling cigarettes; their ongoing engagement in this business suggests their continued acceptance of this activity as unproblematic…ICSS can reasonably be viewed as essentially the tobacco-funded gift of one of the world's richest men….”

(end of part 3)

The `New York Times'' Mexican Billionaire Connection Revisited: Part 2

Most people who live in New York City—including most of New York City’s over 183,000 Mexican-American residents—don’t think that the human rights of people in Mexico should be violated or that Mexican workers and consumers should be exploited by the Mexican government or the corporations that Mexican billionaires or U.S. billionaires own or control.

Yet one of the richest billionaires in the world—a Mexican billionaire named Carlos Slim—has been one of the owners in recent years of the Big Apple’s New York Times newspaper—which publishes “all the news that fits the rich” each day. As Sherry Ricchiardi noted in an article, titled “A Dubious Benefactor,” that appeared in the April/May 2009 issue of American Journalism Review [AJR]:

“On January 19 [2009], the Times Co. accepted a $250 million loan at 14 percent interest from a controversial billionaire who already owned a 6.9 percent stake in the company.

“The benefactor: Carlos Slim Helú.

“Immediately, questions swirled about the propriety of the nation's leading newspaper getting a bailout from a much-criticized subject of its own news coverage…The industry was abuzz with the apparent conflict of interest…The Times Co. declined requests for an interview about the company's connection to the Mexican billionaire…Slim's son-in-law and spokesman, Arturo Elias Ayub, declined a request for an interview with Slim or a family member for this story…If Slim exercises the warrants he holds from the loan, he will be among the largest single shareholders in the Times Co., owning up to 17 percent of the common shares outstanding...reported Times writer Eric Dash…”

And in an article, titled “When the World’s Richest Billionaire Owns Your Paper: The New York Times covers Carlos Slim—carefully,” that appeared in the November 2013 issue of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [F.A.I.R.]’s Extra! magazine, Zaid Jilani indicated how the New York Times has been reporting in recent years about the Mexican billionaire that owns much of its stock:

“In 2008, the multibillionaire purchased a 6.4 percent stake in the New York Times Company. Today, he is the second-largest shareholder in the company, with a 13 percent stake…

“A natural topic for coverage would be Slim’s telecommunications monopoly that critics charge has free rein to rip off millions of consumers…The OECD calculated that this virtual monopoly by Slim reduces the living standard of the average Mexican family by over $600 a year...The OECD study did get a passing reference in a 2011 Times article on Mexico’s attempt to break up Slim’s monopoly—which mentioned Slim’s stake in the Times in the print version, but not the online edition. The article, headlined `Mexico Takes Aim at a Titan in Telecom,’ looked at a $1 billion fine that Mexico’s antitrust agency imposed on one of Slim’s subsidiaries…Places where criticism of Slim would seem obvious sometimes find him conspicuously absent, as when Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that Mexico has `big energy, telecom’ monopolies that are harming the country’s economy—without naming the Mexican monopolist who owns much of the company that pays Friedman’s salary.

“Incidents of public pushback to Slim’s business practices have also gone unnoted, as when hundreds demonstrated when George Washington University gave him an honorary degree; Mexican immigrant groups threatened boycotts against his telecommunications companies; and activists in the U.S. and Mexico formed the group Two Countries, One Voice to rally against Slim…You’ll find the paper’s sharpest criticism of Slim in an op-ed from 2007, a year before he became an investor in the Times. In it, Eduardo Porter condemns Slim as a `robber baron.’ Porter writes that `Mr. Slim’s sin, if not technically criminal, is like that of Rockefeller, the sin of the monopolist.’…

“Perhaps the paper was feeling like it had given its future investor a raw deal. By December of that year, it published a reported piece calling Slim a `new breed of billionaire’ who “has pledged billions of dollars to his two foundations that will aid health and education.’”

(end of part 2)