The leading Republican candidates for president want to unleash military strikes inside Mexico against the cartels — with or without Mexico’s permission — and have not voiced concern about the likely blowback. Donald Trump has promised a naval blockade in a second term. At the debate he skipped last week, rivals promised to counter the border “invasion” with assets shifted from Ukraine. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed to send special forces into Mexico “on day one.”
They could just cutoff exports and watch inflation go insane and the automotive industry grind to a halt. The line between cartel and government gets blurrier by the day, so attacking the cartels in a way is attacking Mexico.
You could argue the cartels do more to help the average person than the government.
You could, but it’s short sighted. Open warfare in the streets kills lucrative business. But as I said in a previous post from polling, the average teen would rather be a Zeta than a cop, that’s says a lot.
It’s just a shit show. If I were Mexican president I would probably just make a deal with the most powerful cartel to help eliminate their competition and further integrate them in government affairs, while allowing them to have free reign over any drug smuggling and possibly actively encourage it… as long as the murders stop. Only can assassinate your rival gang members in planned strikes with help of police or military. I mean they have to be so fed up with the situation. AMLO is a bit of an asshole, but America refuses to stem the massive inflow of guns and do absolutely nothing about curbing drug demand or introducing cheaper legal alternatives.
What line? These are the people who made basic survival a zero sum game, instead of realizing there’s plenty to share if, you know, we didn’t waste billions on stupid stuff so the right people could have everything.
Good! Hurt corporations and force them to bring those jobs back to the US or go bankrupt. At this point I think we should just rip the band-aid off.
Then the costs of labor jump considerably and cars suddenly cost 2x as much. Economics and geopolitics isn’t as simple as you’re making it out to be. Cars are far from the only thing Mexico exports a lot of to the US.
Oh ffs they told us NAFTA would lower our prices and raise living standards on both sides. Idk about Mexican living standards, but that’s about the time a pair of Levi’s jumped from $15 to $30 a pair. Yeah, it was a long time ago.
I’m cool with labor costs normalizing.
I mean that’s a Thursday pretty much in today’s world. And the whole cost of labor thing, I mean it’s not like we don’t have prisoners who we can force to do labor for people. Or like we don’t have Arkansas that’s making child labor cool again. We don’t really have to worry about insurance or crap like that anymore because we’ve create FSAs so now if you don’t have enough money to cover your heart attack, well that’s your fault. And we’ve got 401(k) so if you can’t retire, that’s also your fault.
And I kid about that. But not really. The only reason the cost would jump up is because the whole shifting production to the US is a great excuse for the CEOs to jack the price up and buy their third yacht. But seriously we can totally move production to the US and it actually cost less, the “Oh it’ll cost more!” is some bullshit that’s pandered around by rich white assholes and some folks buy into it. People like to say we have to pay people $100/hr or whatever BS, but we have to pay them that because we jacked up the price of food and housing. And we jacked those things up because fuckers like to speculate in those things and make massive profit off of the paper at the expense of your average person having to pay more.
Like whatever you’ve got as the justification for why we need to pay more in the US, all of those reasons end with “because some rich asshole wanted to become richer” and if we got rid of the asshole we wouldn’t have nearly the cost we’ve got already.
That was my point. Corpos aren’t just going to take less margins if labor costs did increase. And my point doesn’t even necessarily disagree with what you’re saying, because greedy corpos are going to be greedy corpos and will use any excuse to raise costs.
But regardless, my main point was that the economic relationship between Mexico and the US is way more complex than you and the original comment are making it out to be. Unless you’re an economic expert specializing in international trade, I’m not going to really take you armchair opinion seriously on what would happen if Mexico suddenly ceased all business with the US.
That’s the clearest, most concise take on the issue I’ve read so far.
How bout we deport you there?
If you get a choice of destination, I would pick Mérida.