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Kamala Harris, Candidate of Economic Change, Breaks With Old Democratic Thinking
The key question remains: have voters heard her?
Nov 04, 2024
In mid-June I went to Nashville for a reunion of old friends who were activists with the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a group founded in 1964 by young Southerners inspired by the sit-in movement and devoted to dismantling racism all over the South and the nation. Like Martin Luther King Jr., we also went to work to end the war in Vietnam. In Nashville we shared stories about having stood up early—when it was dangerous—for racial justice and against a tragic war.
But today, decades later, we were staring into the vacuum of a terrifying potential disaster: Donald Trump—candidate of fascism and racism, enemy of women’s rights, friend of American billionaires and Russian oligarchs, and the guy who wants to dismantle U.S. democracy—could be (re)elected President.
My old friends—who stood up to George Wallace and Richard Nixon back in the day—were all committed to defeating Trump. But back in June many shared a troubled question about the Democratic incumbent. “Biden did a great job in the White House, but isn’t he too old to make the case against Trump—and for a better future—in this election?” Only a few months later—after Biden bravely stepped away and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz began energetically taking on Trump—celebration and optimism have reigned on our follow-up Zoom calls—because now we had a candidate who could talk with the American people—about making life better for working Americans. And many SSOC veterans, especially those in Georgia and North Carolina, have been working hard to build the movement that we hope will win in those key swing states.
Clearly, the Harris team (and Democratic operatives) have made saving democracy and reclaiming abortion rights as their key issues. When your opponent is a self-declared fan of Hitler and an enemy of democracy—and brags about getting rid of Roe v Wade—clearly saving our democratic political system and guaranteeing reproductive rights have got to be key to your primary message to voters. She and Tim Walz have been doing that—with joy and energy. And supporters are working hard to get all those folks who understand the Trump threat to come out to vote.
But an even larger group of Americans keep telling pollsters that the economy is their major concern. Many have faulty memories— of Trump’s White House years as a time of prosperity—and of the Biden-Harris years as COVID-driven chaos and inflation. As a result, many Democratic Party operatives and media pundits have pushed Harris to distance herself from Biden—and, to some extent, she has done so.
Even in the narrow context of today’s political debate, many Americans just don’t want to remember how big a medical and economic mess Trump left for Biden and Harris to clean up.
But this “Don’t talk about Biden” strategy has prevented Harris (and Democrats) from being able to tell a powerful story about the Biden-Harris presidency—and it has limited her ability to talk about what is wrong about the economic system—and to about what kind of economy agenda we need to build for working Americans.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris literally saved the U.S. and the world economy. They won the White House in 2020 in part because Donald Trump showed voters he was incompetent in the face of the COVID pandemic. And as a result of that pandemic-driven economic shutdown, Biden and Harris had to take on and reverse the most serious recession since the Great Depression. The amazing thing is that they actually pulled it off. When Biden and Harris took office, Americans had endured 8 months of official recession—and four years ago, the Trump unemployment rate was 9.2 percent. Deaths from COVID, which began in Trump’s last year in office, far from getting better, were at a deadly all-time high when Biden was sworn in.
Today, as a result of very ambitious policies that Biden and Harris put forward—and got passed through a divided Congress—the U.S. unemployment rate came down to below today’s 4.1%, and—if the Fed doesn’t blow it (or if Trump doesn’t win)—interest rates are coming down and inflation is stabilizing at 2.1% annual rate (down from the peak of 9.06% in June 2022). This Biden-Harris economic recovery is the envy of many other advanced nations that are still struggling to reduce unemployment. And we needed to remind voters that Biden and Harris surprised many economic experts by achieving a “soft landing”—getting jobs growing and bringing inflation down without tipping the economy into another recession. Ronald Reagan didn’t have such a great record when he ran for re-election declaring it was “Morning in America.”
Now clearly, working class Americans, white and black, don’t feel like it is Morning in America. But that feeling that the country is on the wrong track is not a recent development. For decades now, the very wealthy have gotten astronomically richer, and corporations have gained greater and greater control of our political and economic system, while middle-class and working-class people have seen declining real wages and fewer opportunities for themselves and their kids. Americans have been worried about their economic prospects for decades.
But even in the narrow context of today’s political debate, many Americans just don’t want to remember how big a medical and economic mess Trump left for Biden and Harris to clean up. And, since Democrats have been instructed to not talk about the Biden years, voters are now hearing just one explanation from Trump about what caused the post-COVID inflation: “Biden and Harris did it.” In other words, Trump blames the very Biden-Harris policies that helped Americans get through the COVID recession—and got the economy growing robustly.
Although not too many voters have heard it, Democrats have a different explanation: As the pandemic—worsened by Trump’s idiotic failures—literally shut down the global economy, the fragile international supply chain network froze up. And during the long period when the global factory system shut down—everything from food to cars to computer chips were stuck in container ships circling the globe or stuck in ports, huge parts of the U.S. economy were either forced to shut down—consumers experienced major shortages on store shelves or car dealers. Biden and Harris worked successfully to untangle these supply chain problem -- but the temporary shortages created huge opportunities for American corporations to raise prices and keep prices high (known as price gouging) for months and months. The painful result: higher prices for groceries, gas and oil, housing, and other essentials.
The Biden stimulus worked—the economy is growing and the inflation rate has come down for a rare “soft landing.” The Biden economic program wasn’t the cause of inflation. And without the Biden-Harris economic agenda, over the past few years Americans would have been struggling with the worst of both problems: high unemployment AND inflation.
Having revived economic growth and gotten the overall inflation rate going down—now at an annual rate of 2.1%—Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic nominee and began to lay out a positive agenda to take on corporate price manipulation and real shortages in food, housing, energy, and health care.
She vowed to break the power of corporations to take advantage of shortages to raise prices and keep them high. This dynamic is most obvious in the food sector (where corporate concentration gives corporations great power) and in the health care sector, where she and Biden have already begun to force pharmaceutical companies to compete on the price of essential drugs. And public health insurance, like Medicare and Obamacare, are still too dominated by corporate insurance companies. In housing, although interest rates are going down, Harris pledges to fight for a long-term project to build more housing, break the power of speculators in the rental market, and help first-time home buyers with up to $25,000 to cover their down payments. And in energy, where the prices of gasoline and other fuels have come down, she also pledges to continue to support alternative sources of power, like solar and wind, and hydro—all of which will bring down prices for individuals and for utilities.
Keep in mind that Donald Trump has advanced no ideas at all for reducing inflation. He did meet with oil industry CEOs to demand $1 billion to finance his campaign in return for massive huge policy giveaways – and if you think that would lower energy prices, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on all imports would increase inflation dramatically, according to economists right, left, and center.
A Harris presidency would work to reorganize each of these key sectors to bring down prices—while creating new public systems to help families with other basic needs, like free or subsidized child care (and in home senior care), the costs of which is now borne almost entirely struggling middle class and poor families.
Based on polling that shows inflation and the economy are the top issues for many voters, some progressive analysts have been arguing that Kamala Harris and her campaign are not talking enough about her economic agenda.
Pollster Stan Greenberg has been making the case that the Harris-Walz campaign would be pulling strongly ahead if they were doing more to educate voters on Harris’s economic plans. He cites a TV ad tested by the super PAC Future Forward that garners strong support when tested with working people:
In that ad, (Kamala Harris) said, ‘When I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs. We should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home and more than 100 million Americans will get a tax cut. I will help families; letting you keep more of your hard-earned money. As president, I will be laser focused on creating opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability and dignity.’
Greenberg argued “Closing positive with Harris battling for the middle class and helping everyone on their very top issue will engage and unite the Democrats’ base. That will shift the trajectory of this race.”
Certainly, the next two days will tell if he and other progressives are right.
How Harris could have distanced herself from Democratic orthodoxy
Kamala Harris has been constantly pressured—by the media and some Democrats—to show how she would distance herself from Joe Biden and Democratic orthodoxy. As we have seen, the Biden economic agenda was remarkably successful—and that may be one good reason why she refused to attack the Biden-Harris economic strategy. But in response to this pressure, she has shifted her campaign to attacking Trump as an extremist. Greenberg and other progressives argue that she should have campaigned more on her anti-inflation plans and the larger economic agenda she has put forward.
Here's another approach: Kamala Harris—as candidate and as our new President—could distance herself from several generations of Democratic leaders. For decades now, several generations of activist movements have pushed energetically for a new economic agenda for the Democratic party. It has been a hard slog, but we have made progress even with party elites.
1. Inflation killed the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, who was the last Democrat who had to deal with high inflation. Prices were rising by 9.9% and remained high throughout his term. Shorly after he took office a coalition of progressive groups called Consumers Opposed to Inflation in the Necessities met with Carter and made the case that he should fight inflation in the key “basic necessities” sectors where increasing prices were driving inflation. Carter ignored us and instead listened to more conventional voices, and he tried various experiments in “deregulation,” none of which worked. Finally Fed Chair Paul Volker raised interest rates to 19 percent, precipitating a recession. And Carter lost his election to Ronald Reagan, who attacked him for 13 percent inflation and high unemployment. The good news is that Kamala Harris (and Joe Biden) took another path—and that new approach is working.
Kamala Harris—as candidate and as our new President—could distance herself from several generations of Democratic leaders.
2. Trade Policy advanced by conventional Democrats has ignored the economic pain and devastation caused by treaties like Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and his sponsoring of China joining the World Trade Organization. Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama both fiercely promoted another, even more ambitious treaty, known as the The Trans-Pacific Partnership. Eventually, both realized that voters hated these job-killing trade deals, but not until they greatly damaged the Democratic brand with heartland working class voters, and they gave up on the TPP. Many people remember the 1999 “Teamsters and Turtles” demonstrations in Seattle that brought together over 50,000 protesters—union members, environmentalists, family farmers, indigenous rights activists, faith-based groups, and solidarity organizations—to confront global elites attending the ministerial meetings of the WTO. Slowly, those groups have moved Democrats to understand the need for a trade policy that preserves and creates good jobs, reduces global warming and creates prosperity. The Harris campaign has broken with the old “free trade uber alles” agenda of the Democratic Party. And just in time, because she will forge a more functional trade regime that is more progressive than the mindless and opportunistic trade agenda of Donald Trump.
3. Industrial Policy is closely related to trade. For years Democrats joined Republicans to denounce any kind of industrial policy (except for military spending) aimed at making American industry more productive, cleaner, and more competitive—or to help create new high-tech industries that can anchor economic development and replace jobs lost to mechanization. But there has been a citizen movement demanding action. And polls show that most Americans—especially blue-collar workers—strongly support smart industrial policies. Biden and Harris made huge strides in this new direction with the passage of The American Recovery Act, which helped revive all sectors of the economy. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022—to rebuild our semiconductor industry. The Inflation Reduction Act—which included $369 billion for a climate initiative to reduce greenhouse emissions and promote lean energy technologies. This legislation put an annual cap of $2,000 for out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for those insured by Medicare—and helped improve Obamacare, which was a beginning of an industrial policy for the huge and costly American health industry.
4. Investing in a Stronger Social Contract for Middle-Class and Working People—by Ending Austerity, Taxing the Rich, Growing the Economy.
The creation of Social Security by Franklin Roosevelt and Medicare by Lyndon Johnson marked major milestones in the ongoing quest to put an economic floor under the lives of working folks and poor people. After many battles which pitted the vast majority of Americans against Republicans (and conservative Democrats) who wanted to cut benefits or “privatize” these beloved social insurance programs, a new generation of activists have learned to stop attacks—and many are now working to expand and improve Social Security and Medicare, long harmed by conservative governments. And while we must protect the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans are working to transform Obamacare into a more comprehensive and less expensive system of health care.
If we want to live as well as the social democratic countries of the world, we will need to greatly improve our health care system.
Most advanced capitalist countries guarantee child care, pre-care education, paid family and medical leave, and in-home or community care for seniors and people with disabilities and their families. And if we want to live as well as the social democratic countries of the world, we will need to greatly improve our health care system.
Today there is a growing movement to win these expanded social insurance plans that can help make individuals and families more secure—and people who work for small businesses and corporations more productive.
Our crazy system of financing college and trade school education was so bad that when young people started talking about wiping out student debt—and making state universities tuition free, the idea took off like a rocket in the political debate—and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris became the champions of this big change. If Kamala wins the White House, we can expect her to keep pushing.
Popular programs like these are expensive. But our corporations and billionaires pay less in taxes than most other wealthy countries. Big coalitions like Americans for Tax Fairness are working for fair taxes—and an end to the Trump tax giveaways to the rich and corporations—that would provide us the resources we need to invest in a stronger social safety net.
5. Donald Trump thinks global warming is a hoax, but most Americans know we must act boldly to reduce carbon emissions. Unfortunately, for years Democratic leaders tried to achieve this by putting a tax on energy consumption—which would have raised costs to working Americans. Bill Clinton tried to pass a carbon tax in 1006, but even Democrats wouldn’t vote for it.
Eventually, after being schooled by climate activists—and by labor unions, who came to understand that transforming our energy system will mean good jobs—the Biden team proposed and got passed a historic legislation that used Federal funds to invest in energy conservation and new forms of green energy production. Those investments are producing millions of new jobs, many of them union jobs.
6. American workers have a right to be represented by a union. This proposition is increasingly popular today as billionaires and monopolies have come to dominate the economy and work places. The best unions have become creative about helping workers organize to secure rights at work and better lives for their families. And the Biden-Haris administration has not only taken important symbolic steps to support worker struggles—like Biden and Harris’s support for the historic United Auto Workers strike— they have made real change—for example by appointing Jennifer Abruzzo to the post of general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. She has charted a dramatic new path to strengthen and defend workers rights to organize and to challenge anti-labor employers. Democrats have long given lip service to passing a new labor law—known as the Pro Act—to strengthen worker rights. And if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency—with a Congressional majority, she should be expected to write and pass an even tougher labor rights bill that can begin the process of guaranteeing that American workers have the kind of rights at work that workers in other advanced countries won years ago.
If we want a government that works for a better life for Americans, we must get big money out of politics.
7. We must take our democracy back from the wealthy and corporate elites. It is hugely important that we stop Donald Trump’s systematic attacks on our democratic system. But even when we defeat him—we will still have a political system that is dominated by massive amounts of money—including an obscene $134 million this year from crypto-currency investors to buy elections for House, Senate and White House. The U.S. now has a legal framework in which the Supreme Court’s Citizens Uniteddecision allows corporations and billionaires to flood elections with unlimited money—and which allows lobbyists to reward Members of Congress to do their bidding. And in order to use democracy to clean up the system we are going to have to make the U.S. Senate more democratic—by abolishing the filibuster that now requires a super majority in order to pass any significant changes. And grass-roots Democrats have discovered that we need to change party rules to prevent mysterious and evil dark money from dominating the system for nominating Senators and Members of Congress. If we want a government that works for a better life for Americans, we must get big money out of politics.
8. The rich have gotten richer and they have hollowed out the middle class.
The economic gap between the very rich and the rest of us has been growing dramatically for the past 30 years and more.
Income disparities are now so pronounced that America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 139 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent in 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In the 1980s, when the Economic Policy Institute was founded as a think tank for working people, EPI’s early research began to demonstrate that the income and wealth of the richest Americans was pulling away from middle-class and working Americans. At first establishment economists denied the trend—or they said it was only temporary. Today everyone—left, right and center— acknowledges the problem, and the debate is about what to do about it—or about whether we can or should do anything about it. But most working people now know what growing inequality is doing to their families. And they want solutions. And one of the first battles Kamala Harris will face require us to rally the country to put an end to the Trump tax cuts for the rich and corporations that did so much to accelerate inequality of income and wealth.
All of the inter-woven movements for economic change described above aim at making the U.S. a society where there are fewer extremes of wealth and income—and where the very wealthy do not have the power to block the aspirations of the rest of us for a better life.
The New Centrism
In May, the respected New York Times senior reporter David Leonhardt wrote an important article entitled “A New Centrism Is Rising in Washington: Call it neopopulism: a bipartisan attitude that mistrusts the free-market ethos instead of embracing it.” Here’s what he wrote in his article in the Times:
For decades, Washington pursued a set of policies that many voters disliked and that did not come close to delivering their promised results. Many citizens have understandably become frustrated. That frustration has led to the stirrings of a neopopulism that seeks to reinvigorate the American economy and compete with the country’s global rivals.
A defining quality of the new centrism is how much it differs from the centrism that guided Washington in the roughly quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, starting in the 1990s. That centrism—alternately called the Washington Consensus or neoliberalism — was based on the idea that market economics had triumphed. By lowering trade barriers and ending the era of big government, the United States would both create prosperity for its own people and shape the world in its image, spreading democracy to China, Russia and elsewhere.
Winning this election is just the beginning of the work that needs to be done...
That hasn’t worked out. In the U.S., incomes and wealth have grown slowly, except for the affluent, while life expectancy is lower today than in any other high-income country.
Americans lean left on economic policy. Polls show that they support restrictions on trade, higher taxes on the wealthy and a strong safety net. Most Americans are not socialists, but they do favor policies to hold down the cost of living and create good-paying jobs. These views help explain why ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage and expand Medicaid have passed even in red states. They also explain why some parts of Biden’s agenda that Republicans uniformly opposed, such as a law reducing medical costs, are extremely popular. This is where the center of gravity in the country is.
Leonhardt is right that this new neopopulist approach to economics is very popular across the spectrum of Americans—with those who didn’t go to college and those who did, with men as well as women, with people struggling to stay middle class and with working class and poor people—white, Black, Hispanic and Asian. But this new popularity is not just the result of “new thinking” by academics and policy advisers. What he calls this new “centrism” is now making sense to voters and politicians alike because of the work of several generations of progressive activists—from my old friends fighting for civil rights and against a terrible war—to today’s generation of activists fighting for economic equality, to break the power of corporate manipulation of our political system, and to build an economic system that can build a better life for all Americans. That multi-generational movement (See the Solidarity Agenda) has helped shape the Biden-Harris presidency—and we all must hope that our work has helped to put Kamala Harris into the White House. And, after all our work, we will need to take a breath, get some rest—and then get to work to make that new agenda a reality.
Assuming Kamala Harris wins the election, it will be due in part to her campaign to fight back against the Donald Trump’s destructive attacks on women, on democracy, and against his desire for authoritarian power. But her victory will also be due to her ability to lay out an economic agenda that builds on the record of her service with Joe Biden’s administration—which represented a sharp break with Republican and Democratic neoliberalism. But winning this election is just the beginning of the work that needs to be done to create a better life for the American people.
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The US Has No Business Telling Mexico Not to Reform Its Judiciary
The United States might prioritize putting its own house in order and follow Mexico’s example to confront the unelected far-right ideologues who have hijacked U.S. democracy from the bench with total impunity.
Oct 02, 2024
This week Mexico's former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, handed over the reins to Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally in his Morena party and the country's first female head of state. While López Obrador is leaving office with soaring approval ratings, and has overseen significant reductions in poverty and unemployment, recent articles and op-eds use terms like "authoritarian" and "autocratic" to describe his legacy.
The criticism of AMLO and Morena’s supposed "authoritarian bent" has centered on a recently approved package of constitutional reforms to Mexico's judicial system. The Editorial Board of The Washington Post declared that “at stake are judicial independence and the rule of law,” and The Economistwarned that “in America’s biggest trading partner the rule of law and democracy are under attack.” On August 22, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar called the reforms a “major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy.” Shortly afterwards, Canada’s ambassador also criticized the proposal, prompting López Obrador to suspend relations with both embassies.
The reforms, in particular the establishment of popular elections for judges and supreme court justices, will profoundly shake up the Mexican judiciary. However, there is little basis for alleging that they represent a threat to democracy. Whatever the drawbacks or merits of the measures, the United States—where an ultra-conservative Supreme Court has been plagued by egregious conflict of interest scandals—has no business interfering in Mexico’s domestic affairs, let alone a democratic and constitutional process of reform.
With the additional constitutional reforms proposed including measures to enshrine a ban on genetically modified corn, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), and open-pit mining, a democratically elected supreme court willing to uphold such measures represents a genuine threat to big agrobusiness, fossil fuel capital, and extractive enterprises on both sides of the border.
More troublingly, attacks against Mexico’s judicial reform appeared to have more to do with disciplining the incoming Sheinbaum administration and undermining the progressive elements of her party’s agenda than defending democracy and the rule of law.
The judicial package was just one of 20 constitutional reform initiatives submitted to the Mexican congress by AMLO in February. It comes after key measures of the governing Morena party’s agenda were blocked by the country’s high court. The reform provisions include measures to expedite case resolution; enforce gender parity; open supreme court sessions to the public; cap judicial salaries; keep challenged laws or policies active until ruled unconstitutional; and establish bodies to supervise and sanction judicial officials, as well as a less savory move to expand the list of crimes that warrant mandatory pretrial incarceration.
U.S. objections, however, are focused on one key transformation: the democratic election of the judiciary.
Until the reform, Mexico’s federal judges and magistrates, as well as local circuit and district judges, were appointed through a process overseen by the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal (Federal Judiciary Council), an unelected arm of the judicial branch. The supreme court is currently composed of 11 justices including the president of the court who oversees and participates in the plenary. They meet as a full group and in two five-member chambers; the justices are nominated by the president of Mexico, approved by the senate, and serve 15-year terms.
Under the newly approved judicial overhaul, federal judges and magistrates will be popularly elected for nine-year terms, with the possibility of reelection. The same process will take place at the state level for circuit and district courts. Supreme court justices (referred to as ministers in Mexico) and Federal Electoral Tribunal magistrates will also be popularly elected. The number of supreme court ministers will be cut to nine and their terms reduced to 12 years, while the two chambers would be eliminated in favor of the single body.
Contrary to claims of executive overreach, the reforms stipulate that candidates who meet the necessary qualifications be proposed in equal proportions by all three branches of government, then narrowed down via a lottery system. The first elections will take place in June 2025 for the supreme court, Federal Electoral Tribunal, and half of the federal judiciary. By 2027, all sitting magistrates and judges will be up for election.
Throughout AMLO’s presidency (2018–2024), Mexico’s supreme court has served as a backstop against some of the government’s more ambitious reforms, sometimes intervening on behalf of powerful business interests. In a 3-5 decision in March 2021, for example, a supreme court chamber struck down a recently passed Electricity Industry Law for privileging the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission), a public utility, over private sector investors. On two occasions, the court overturned electoral reforms which, like the judicial reform, sought to restructure national election oversight bodies and elect their authorities by popular vote.
Morena argues that the reforms are intended to root out corruption and nepotism in the judicial system and democratize a historically elitist and authoritarian judicial branch. This argument has merit: Internal studies have found family networks of up to 89 relatives employed in the courts; 53.4% of magistrates and 18% of judges had more than four relatives working in the judicial branch in 2022.
Judicial positions in Mexico are lucrative: That same year, more than 1,000 high-ranking judicial employees were taking in between 430,000 and 518,000 pesos per month, well above $21,500 per month at a time when the monthly minimum wage in most of the country stood below $260.
Sheinbaum has defended the new measures, explaining that rather than consolidate executive power, the reform abdicates it.
“With this reform, the next president is renouncing the power to personally name supreme court justices,” she told the public in a recent social media message. “The president is democratically elected. Deputies and senators are democratically elected. Now, judges, magistrates, and justices will be democratically elected.”
Yet the reforms were met with resistance from powerful corporate interests. The U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce warned that, without significant changes, the “social and economic impacts will be inevitable and devastating.”
In his two-page statement criticizing the measure, U.S. Ambassador Salazar wrote that the proposal “will threaten the historic trade relationship we have built,” while the Canadian embassy declared it was a source of concern for private investors.
Major U.S. outlets including The Washington Post and The New York Times also ran incendiary columns that suggested the measure would undermine governance and endanger trade relations.
Their arguments varied. Some contended that elections would provide an opportunity for organized criminal influence; others warned the reforms represented an authoritarian presidential power grab; some merely raised vague concerns about destabilizing the investment climate. Little evidence backs up these claims. Rather than the contents of the reforms, big business, in Mexico and in the United States, appeared to balk at the restructuring of a system that has generally favored its interests.
Much of the criticism took a misogynist tone. The Post’s August 25 editorial espoused a patronizing and not subtly gendered view of President Sheinbaum’s relationship with López Obrador. It referred to AMLO as “her boss” and “her patron,” as though Mexico’s first female president were a promoted secretary and not a veteran politician and climate scientist with the strongest electoral mandate in Mexican history.
At the same time, the measure drew protest from within the Mexican judiciary, prompting marches, work stoppages, and strikes by judges and court workers. They framed their actions as a struggle against a reckless consolidation of executive power and politicization of the bench by the outgoing president. Advocates for reform dismissed these protests as attempts to retain long-held privileges.
The package faced formal challenges from within the judiciary as well. On August 31, a judge in the state of Morelos—herself a vociferous opponent of the reform—issued an injunction to suspend debate in congress at the behest of a group of magistrates who argue they stand to lose their jobs without due process. Simultaneously, a judge in Chiapas issued another injunction to prevent the measure from advancing to state legislatures for ratification. Hours later, a district court judge suspended both injunctions, permitting the process to move forward.
International financial markets also reacted negatively, perhaps because they find the current corrupt judiciary more friendly to their interests than an election-based system that would demand more accountability to public interest and needs. Morgan Stanley downgraded its investment recommendation for Mexico, and Fitch Ratings expressed concerns that the reforms could negatively impact the country’s corporate investment climate. The Mexican peso, which had fallen significantly following Sheinbaum’s commanding June 2 presidential victory, dropped again as the reforms moved forward in congress.
At a moment of political transition, these market moves send a disturbing message tantamount to blackmail to a fledgling administration with an ambitious agenda for a public sector-led sustainable energy transition. With the additional constitutional reforms proposed including measures to enshrine a ban on genetically modified corn, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), and open-pit mining, a democratically elected supreme court willing to uphold such measures represents a genuine threat to big agrobusiness, fossil fuel capital, and extractive enterprises on both sides of the border.
Despite this tidal wave of opposition, the reforms passed the Chamber of Deputies on September 4, were approved in the senate on September 10, and were subsequently ratified by a majority of state legislatures, where Morena and its allies hold commanding majorities. On Sunday, September 16, Mexican Independence Day, the president signed them into law. Far from a presidential imposition, their implementation will be the result of Mexico’s constitutionally established democratic process.
Some critics on the left suggest that the reforms do not go far enough, exempting from popular election military tribunal judges and administrative magistrates. In an analysis for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, distinguished jurist and human rights advocate Carlos Pérez Vasquez argued: “If the radical democratization of justice is the point of the proposed reform, why not go further, returning to our own history to restore, gradually, the existence of popular juries as a central element of the democratic legitimacy of the justice system?”
Nevertheless, accusations that the reforms will undermine judicial independence and politicize a neutral judiciary ignore the reality that Mexico’s judicial branch is already an active political agent, while charges that the measures represent an authoritarian executive power grab willfully mischaracterize the initiative. The reforms may be imperfect, and they may not address the profound structural obstacles to justice in Mexico, but they represent a legitimate political project with support across the country’s national and local representative bodies.
In a recent column, independent Mexican journalist and political analyst Viri Ríos, a critic of the proposal for judicial elections, dismissed the opposition’s claims that they would put the country on a path to dictatorship.
“Personally, I don’t support the judicial reform, but I’m a democrat and therefore I know that my disagreement doesn’t authorize me to call my opponent authoritarian, much less to use everything in my power to subvert the implementation of their agenda,” she wrote. “In a democracy, losing has consequences. Unfortunately, in Mexico it’s clear that the losers don’t want to accept them.”
That the United States, a nation that combines lifetime Supreme Court appointments with a state-by-state system of local judicial selection in which most hold popular elections for lower court judges, could credibly lecture Mexico about judicial reform and the perils of judicial democracy is laughable.
Moreover, Salazar’s threats constituted a brazen intervention into a sovereign nation’s internal politics—hardly a first for a U.S. ambassador, but unacceptable nonetheless. Instead, the United States might prioritize putting its own house in order and follow Mexico’s example to confront the unelected far-right ideologues who have hijacked U.S. democracy from the bench with total impunity.
Mexico has every right to experiment with its forms of democratic self-governance. Maybe the United States should give it a try.
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State Lawmakers Urge US Exit From Toxic ISDS Mechanisms in Trade Deals
"Outdated trade rules like ISDS can pose a real threat to states' sustainable energy initiatives and the good-paying jobs they create," said one lawmaker from Maine.
Aug 06, 2024
More than 300 state lawmakers signed a letter Monday calling on U.S. President Joe Biden to "eliminate the threat of Investor-State Dispute Settlement from all U.S. trade and investment agreements," joining hundreds of civil society groups and dozens of members of Congress in speaking out against rules that allow foreign corporations to challenge state laws.
The legislators—who include Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—expressed support for the official position of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) regarding ISDS, as the conference convened its annual summit in Louisville, Kentucky.
The NCSL opposes trade deals "with investment chapters that provide greater substantive or procedural rights to foreign companies than U.S. companies enjoy under the U.S. Constitution."
The Biden administration has agreed with the NCSL's call to exclude ISDS from any new trade agreements, but the U.S. is currently a party to more than 50 trade and investment deals that contain the rules.
"It's long overdue that we change course. Getting rid of ISDS, which embodies the runaway corporate power embedded in our trade deals, is a great place to start.
ISDS rules empower corporations to sue governments if they claim their profit margins are harmed by public programs, such as public health regulations, environmental rules, food safety guidelines, or climate laws aimed at reducing fossil fuel emissions.
"The outcomes of these cases, which can result in billions of U.S. tax dollars paid to foreign corporations in compensation, are
determined in unaccountable tribunals presided over by unelected corporate lawyers whose rulings are not subject to appeal," reads the Monday letter from state lawmakers, including North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-61), New York state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-28), and Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-42).
According to the letter, "even cases that get dismissed can result in countries paying millions in tribunal costs."
Harrison said in a statement that "the era of corporate-dominated trade policy" has contributed to a loss of 40% of North Carolina's manufacturing jobs.
"It's long overdue that we change course," said Harrison. "Getting rid of ISDS, which embodies the runaway corporate power embedded in our trade deals, is a great place to start. These extreme corporate rights undermine democracy and critical public interest protections here at home and around the globe. I'm glad to see so many colleagues from across the political spectrum joining me in this effort."
Last November, 200 civil society groups demanded the elimination of ISDS within APEP, and three dozen members of Congress wrote to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Secretary of State Antony Blinken last May saying the U.S. should end the system's use in its trade agreements.
Allowing corporations to sue over laws that cut into their profits, wrote the lawmakers on Monday, "threatens the policy space we need to maintain high-level public health standards, create clean energy jobs, protect the digital privacy and data-security of those we represent, and much more."
Maine state Sen. Craig Hickman (D-14) expressed concern about ISDS both as a lawmaker and "an organic farmer committed to curtailing the severe impacts of climate change and strengthening rural economies."
"Outdated trade rules like ISDS can pose a real threat to states' sustainable energy initiatives and the good-paying jobs they create,"
said Hickman. "I urge the administration to eliminate this antiquated mechanism that stands in the way of sustainable food systems and the clean energy economy we need to build for our children and grandchildren."
Note: This article has been edited to correct a reference to U.S. trade deals containing ISDS and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity.
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