Michael Haverty, CEO of the Kansas City Southern railroad perpetrated a grave violation of the “CEO Code” when he talked straight about the “global economy” on CNBC. His railroad has been doing very well because of their lines that go to Mexico. At the 2:39 mark of the video below, you can see him say:
“Automobiles are produced in Mexico, as is steel, appliances, and so on. That’s part of the reason that we’ve invested in Mexico is because so much of the manufacturing of North America is now moving down into Mexico.”
Every other CEO I’ve heard says something like: “The global economy is fantastic! Emerging markets are growing like gangbusters!”
Right? Just idiotic happy-talk. But what happens once all of our factories are moved to Mexico? How does that particular emerging market “growth miracle” continue?
Also, notice that Haverty didn’t say that American factories were moving to Mexico. He said: “North American”. I never thought about it before, but Canada must be losing quite a lot of manufacturing jobs to Mexico also.
If we were really serious about creating jobs in this country, we would boot Mexico out of NAFTA, and go back to the FTA deal that we previously had with Canada. The factories are not going to Canada because they have a similar standard of living as we do. The factories go to Mexico because workers are only pad $2 an hour, or less there.
You are great at finding this stuff Matt. Good job.
What do we do when the factories are ALL in Mexico? We invade and create a new “blue collar” strata to our heirarchy. Not sure what OUR current blue collar folks are gonna do, but maybe they move to Mexico and learn Espanol…If we invade far enough south, we can retake the Panama Canal we gave away a few years ago too.