Let's just say the jury is still out on this one

Wow, Elba Esther Gordillo, aka "La Maestra" esta detenida!

The long time head of the Mexican Teachers Union (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación) has been a powerful retrograde force in Mexican politics, consistently blocking education reform and long rumored to be corrupt.

At least one Mexican "expert" loves the move:

This new development destroys those doubts about the seriousness of the Pena Nieto government to take on the union, and to mobilize the sovereign power of the state against vested interests.


But this is Mexico, where criminalizing political differences is an art form.

La Maestra burned new President Enrique Peña Nieto during the campaign by pulling her political party (the PANAL)out of an alliance with his party (the PRI). And all she wanted to stay in was for multiple family members to be Senators!

So it's far from clear whether this arrest marks a bold move against impunity and a step forward against corruption and toward rule of law, or just the same old "payback's a bitch" political culture at work.

My Guy Bill English Explains the Crisis of Liberalism, In a Nutshell

Gamebill gets a quote in the WSJ. And he's right, of course.

A Silver Lining in Europe; And the political lesson for America. Kaminski, Matthew. Wall Street Journal (Online) [New York, N.Y] 09 Dec 2011

European Union leaders are gathered in Brussels for yet another emergency summit, this time to consider a Franco-German plan for fiscal union. After each previous try to stop the bleeding in the past 18 months, markets saw through the palliative and drove up debt costs.

Yet the fog of crisis obscures what's already changed in Europe. A new social-political bargain has started to form. Though not advertised loudly, the solutions on offer, from Ireland to Italy, all scale back the reach and size of the state. This mental and political shift predates the Greek meltdown. The three Ds-- spiraling debt, unsustainable demographics and looming depression--just hastened the reckoning....

Step back to see a bigger picture. The European model isn't pinched by Greece but rather by two related phenomena. In a world of global competition and free trade, EU countries have failed to keep up. Taxes and regulations needed to cover generous unemployment benefits and pensions have sapped their growth and scared capital away, in turn impairing their ability to meet these costs without huge debts. As Princeton historian Harold James notes, "The redistribution game becomes a lot harder to play in an open economy."

Globalization's other byproduct, immigration, changed the look of Europe. Social safety nets were built in postwar boom years when countries were younger and more homogenous. Relatively few people drew on unemployment benefits or other help, and those who did were the familiar neighbors of those who picked up the tab and considered it their obligation. Political scientists call this "social trust." New arrivals from North Africa and Turkey changed that and put economic strains on the welfare system...

There's a lesson here for America. President Obama insists that the U.S. isn't in similar straits, and he has a point for now. Yet our public debt surpassed the euro zone's in 2008, and now touches 100% of GDP.

In a paper presented at a Witherspoon Institute conference this week, German finance ministry official Ludger Schuknecht, who previously headed fiscal policy surveillance at the ECB, notes that the U.S. increase in its size of government over the past decade was on par with those of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland and the U.K. All the others have tried to rein it in, he writes, but the U.S. "stands out as the country that seems to be quite oblivious to the need for adjustment over the near future." Americans can't say the Germans didn't warn them...

But the terms of debate have to shift here, as they did in Europe's success stories. American reformers, in the words of Harvard political scientist Bill English, need "to make the moral argument that you should spend federal monies to pay for poor children's meals and not fluff union pension schemes."

Insolvency may be a symptom of many Western democracies, but democracy isn't the problem. Voters, who aren't stupid, are as likely to reward as to punish leaders who take the necessary hard steps.

I had not thought of Angela Merkel as a "fluffer" before, but of course that's right.

They see me rollin'. They hatin'

Despite last minute hysterics from the usual suspects, the first Mexican truck rolled across the border on Friday. Mexico has now cancelled the $2 billion in tariffs they put on American products in retaliation for Obama's 2009 cancellation of an earlier Mexican trucking pilot program.

According to the NAFTA agreement of 1994, Mexican trucks were supposed to have full access to border states by 1995 and access to all of the USA by 2000 (Canadian trucks enjoy this same full access)!

The current "program" for letting Mexican trucks in is so protectionist that only 11 companies are going through the certification process. There are electronic monitors to measure how long the trucks are running. There are drug tests and English tests for the drivers. All things we do not mandate for drivers of American trucks. If it really is a safety issue, then these measures should be applied in a non-discriminatory manner.

The mix of protectionism and racism on display here is unseemly to say the least.