The Mexican billionaire, worth a reported $73.5 billion, has been plagued by the protesters who may or may not be paid, over the last two years, Bloomberg reports:

The 73-year-old, whose telecommunications empire spans Latin America, the U.S. and Europe, has been increasingly targeted by demonstrators over the past two years. In addition to the event this week at the New York Public Library, marchers hoisted signs during his commencement speech last year at George Washington University. Picketers have also shown up at a New York store owned by Saks Inc. (SKS) — his biggest U.S. investment — and called for California lawmakers to investigate him.

The protests are loosely organized by a group of Latino political organizations that say they’re self-funded and unconnected with Slim’s competitors in Mexico. They’re planning more events — including one later this month in Las Vegas — to spread their message that Slim has overcharged Mexican consumers to enrich himself, an accusation the billionaire denies.

At the library, where Slim was speaking about digital education as part of a lecture series, protesters drowned out his comments with laughter, then stood up and shouted that his charitable giving was a joke. They tossed fake bills around the room that said “$73 billion” — Slim’s estimated wealth. (It’s now $73.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.) Then they began playing the “Imperial Death March” from the “Star Wars” films as they filed out.

Slim owns 7 percent of the New York Times Company. He has visited the White House at least twice during the Obama presidency.

Slim, currently the world’s richest man, has become insanely wealthy through the stranglehold his company, América Móvil SAB, has on Mexico’s telecommunications industry.

Unfortunately for Slim, the Mexican government seems poised to loosen Slim’s grip on the industry.

Mexico is expected to pass new legislation to create competition in the industry, which would spell trouble for Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Mexico’s top three political parties have vowed to pass the law by April 30, which would give the government new latitude in reshaping both the telephone and television market.

América Móvil, owned 40 percent by Mr. Slim and his family, stands to be the hardest hit by the competition push, say analysts. The company, which has a market value of $75 billion, has 261.6 million wireless subscribers in North and South America.

It has commanded a quasi-monopoly in Mexico since the 1990s. It currently controls 70 percent of the country’s mobile phones and 80 percent of its fixed lines, giving it some of the region’s biggest profits. The profits have helped América Móvil carve up other markets with heavy investments from Colombia, where it has 60 percent of the cellphone market to Brazil where it has 24 percent.

The new Mexican regulator will be able to issue tougher sanctions and force asset sales by dominant players—and the company may have less ability to parry these decisions by tying them up in Mexican courts. Under the new law, foreign companies could buy América Móvil’s small Mexican competitors and beef them up with big capital investments, ending a restriction which capped foreign investment in landline companies at 49 percent.

Christopher King, an analyst at brokerage Stifel Nicolaus & Co., puts it this way: “As long as the government is putting these kind of teeth into telecom regulators, it’s bad news for América Móvil. I would say this is the biggest regulatory threat in Mexico.”

Although Slim has publicly said that he welcomes the reform, the markets have not been kind to the company since the news broke.

América Móvil stock has plummeted in New York and seen its lowest price in the Mexican Stock Exchange since April 2009. Additionally, both Moody’s and Credit Suisse have lowered their ratings on the company.

Slim’s stake in the company accounts for roughly half of his $73 billion net worth.

The new laws may not be the only bump on the road ahead for América Móvil.

AT&T recently hinted that it is looking to sell off the 9.6 percent of América Móvil that it owns, a stake worth about $7 billion.

Slim has used his power and connections to turn América Móvil into the giant monopoly. The company has millions of subscribers throughout North and South America, including more than 22 million in the United States.

Slim’s influence extends into the United States as well.

Slim owns more than 7 percent of the New York Times Company, and also loaned the company $250 million in 2009 “amid a particularly rough period in its history.”

This relationship earned Slim a pass from the New York Times when he held a series of closed-door meetings with senior officials in President Barack Obama’s administration such as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

According to visitor logs, Slim has also visited the White House at least twice during Obama’s presidency.

Emphasis should be placed on the hiring of liberal writers and editors. Rupert Murdoch, who employs conservatives as well as liberals and whose eclectic politics do not conform to the intellectual fashions of the day, is the subject of endless negative coverage because his populist outlets dare to question received wisdom. Murdoch is also a passionate newspaperman who loves a good story. The moguls who benefit from the media protection racket tend to be dilettantes who came into their fortune outside of journalism and who see the ownership of a newspaper or magazine or website as an indulgence they can afford to enjoy. (Think of Sidney Harman’s temporary ownership of Newsweek.)

What is most remarkable is that these moguls are exactly the type of characters liberals would otherwise despise and delight in cutting down. Take for example the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim, a Mexican national of Lebanese descent who is insanely wealthy thanks to the endemic cronyism of the Mexican telecommunications industry. He also bailed out the New York Times Company with a $250 million loan in 2009 and as of October 2011 owned a little more than seven percent of the property. What do you know, the Times is not exactly flooding-the-zone with reporting on Slim’s treasure chest, his interconnectedness with global politics, and the outer limits of his ambition. When Slim visited Washington, D.C., in February to huddle with Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, Ron Kirk, Gene Sperling, Julius Genachowski, John Bryson, John Kerry, and others, only Univision and the WFB deigned to mention it.

Warren Buffett is another crony who benefits from bailouts of financial institutions, structures his company to avoid paying taxes, and owes millions of dollars in back taxes. His faith in government seems not to extend to the estate tax, as can be seen in his support for the Giving Pledge, which billionaires take to “pledge their fortunes early in their lives, so that they can have more control over how it’s spent.” Also he is a weirdo who lives on a 12-year-old-boy-diet of Cherry Coke and hamburgers and appears to limit his interviews to attractive women. Ordinarily, of course, liberals would raise hackles over his selfishness and peculiarity. Yet Buffett has invested in the flailing Washington Post Company for decades, bought a majority stake in a local newspaper conglomerate with 25 dailies across the country earlier this year, and of course spouts the liberal Democratic gospel of higher taxes on the wealthy. If liberals don’t owe him for providing them jobs, at least they owe him for copy that reinforces their prejudices. Naturally he has been apotheosized as one of this country’s secular saints. He is called the “Oracle of Omaha,” lionized on the cover of Time magazine (“Warren Buffett is on a Radical Track”) and seemingly immune to serious inquiry or incredulity.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is a mixture of Lee Kuan Yew and Napoleon Bonaparte. He says he knows better than the rest of us when it comes to smoking, eating, governing, term limits, and life in general, and he is prepared to use his $25 billion to shape America so that it produces little (littler?) Bloombergs. His media company, Bloomberg LP, is a behemoth that employs more than 10,000 people.

That is basically the equivalent of an army division covering and influencing financial services, international business, and United States politics. Yet Bloomberg media practice a studied incuriosity when it comes to their namesake. In October for instance New York City’s Campaign Finance Board rebuked the mayor for not reporting $1.2 million in contributions to the Empire State’s Independence Party. Plenty of New York media covered the decision; the Bloomberg properties did not.

Mayor Bloomberg also seems to have been unprepared for the severity of Hurricane Sandy. His response to the disaster in boroughs where he and his rich friends do not live has been less than satisfactory. He was reluctant to postpone the New York City Marathon even though it was scheduled to take place days after one of the worst natural disasters in modern memory and was to start in a borough that had been ravaged by floodwaters.

What did the mayor do? He had the brilliant insight that he would avoid blowback if he could shift media attention to climate change. And he did. The first post-Sandy cover of Bloomberg Businessweek carried the headline, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” and neatly coincided with the mayor’s endorsement of Obama on the basis of climate policy. Bloomberg has been coy but people expect him to leave office in 2013 when he will take up writing, philanthropy, and interfering in the lives of the rest of us.

Chris Hughes is an interesting case not because he is under 30-years-old but because he so perfectly embodies the liberal conception of the undeserving rich. One of the assumptions behind liberal economic policy is that wealth is not a function of work or initiative or guile but of luck. What matters most is not what you do but who you are, where you were born, to whom, and what privileges you enjoy along the way. I used to be skeptical of this theory but, since I started reading profiles of Hughes after he bought the New Republic in March, my skepticism has waned.

One day, historians researching America’s transition to aristocracy will study Hughes’s life story. The North Carolina native went from Andover to Harvard, where he ended up as Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate and thus lucked into the winning numbers in the meritocracy Powerball. Total winnings: some $600 million (the amount fluctuates with Facebook’s stock price). Hughes did not have programming or business skills—it is unclear what skills he has at all—so Zuckerberg made him Facebook’s first press agent. He publicized the revolutionary social network, which does not strike one as particularly hard to do, and parlayed his Facebook experience into a job on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He was riding a wave he had caught inadvertently by sleeping in the same dorm room as Zuckerberg. Where is the special, two-segment, snark-filled panel on “Melissa Harris-Perry” devoted to Hughes, whiteness, and the nature of membership in the American elite?

That particular episode has not aired because Hughes, like many other liberal arts graduates of our prestigious universities with no particular specialties or experience, decided to go into journalism. His social-media start-up Jumo failed. Thanks to Zuckerberg, however, Hughes could achieve his new career goal by simply buying the New Republic, the close-to-a-century old journal of American liberalism. He installed himself as publisher and editor-in-chief and fired Richard Just, the editor with whom he had brokered the deal, in favor of Franklin Foer, a previous editor who had overseen a steep decline in circulation and was known for his 7,000-word retraction and non-apology apology after the Weekly Standard uncovered that he had been publishing a fabulist. One of Foer’s first acts was to increase the amount of soccer blogging on the magazine’s website.

Hughes married his boyfriend Sean Eldridge in July. They celebrated the nuptials at Cipriani Wall Street with 400 guests including Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Gayle King. Their residences include a “4,000-square-foot sparsely furnished loft with 12-foot ceilings on Crosby Street in SoHo,” where they host fundraisers for Democrats, and an 80-acre estate outside the city in Garrison where their neighbors include Roger Ailes and Jacob Weisberg. The house is well described in another positive, 2,500-word profile of Hughes:

The estate, among a grove of trees and manicured fields, consists of a 5,000-square-foot main house with eight fireplaces. (There is a separate 2,800-square-foot guesthouse where Mr. Eldridge keeps an office.) It is a study in matte black and faded amber, with accents of crimson in the carpet in Mr. Hughes’s office, where a drawing of Atlas holding the world was hung. The wood floors are painted charcoal, and several rooms have large-paned windows that, from the den, overlook an unfinished swimming pool. A chandelier made of deer antlers hung in the foyer, where a vintage typewriter was placed on a table near another pair of antlers, which Mr. Eldridge said he found outside.

It is the sort of place, in other words, that the New Republic and its writers normally would mock and deride as the lair of undeserving plutocrats who have benefited from the inequalities of the global economy. And Hughes seems the sort of person who normally would come under the disapproving and scornful gaze of the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, whose genius is for exposing pretenders and poseurs. But what does the famously outspoken and critical and 60-years-old Wieseltier have to say about his new boss?

“In the nineteenth century, there was no Internet, but Balzac is all about young people who come from the countryside to the big city,” he says. “I mean, if you think about it, he has been on one of the most amazing rides that any young person in the history of the world has ever seen.”

One detects the barest hint of irony in that reference to Balzac, for Wieseltier does not specify whether Hughes more closely resembles Rastignac or Vautrin. Or perhaps that is wishful thinking.

“It’s difficult not to get swept up in Hughes’s sincerity, his life-of-the-mind swagger, his vertiginous luck,” writes Carl Swanson, the author of this week’s Hughes encomium. That’s especially true if you or someone you know is employed or would like to be employed by Hughes or by one of his fellow benefactors of progressive journalism. Together with the Democratic hacks that show up at Hughes’s $5 million apartment looking for handouts, these individuals and the institutions they support constitute an indestructible triangle of liberal influence. The rest of us must find solace—as well as the news—in places where progressives fear to tread, where the culture of liberalism is not suffocating, where liberal icons are judged by liberal standards.

It was a costly day for the company’s largest shareholder, Carlos Slim. Slim, who heavily invested in The New York Times Company last year, owns 11.903 million shares. After today’s tumble, Slim lost nearly $29 million.

Lucky for Slim he is still the world’s richest man and still profiting from Obamaphones.

The New York Times has come under fire in the past for failing to cover its owner.

Last week a video of a President Barack Obama supporter in Ohio claiming to have received a free phone from the president—“[Obama] gave us a phone!”—went viral, prompting media outlets to investigate.

Since 1985 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has operated a program called Lifeline, originally designed to provide free landline phone service for low-income individuals. The government subsidizes telecommunications firms providing the service, and those firms also pass on costs to customers via the “Universal Service Charge” on their phone bills.

The program expanded to include cell phones in 2008. That change has rapidly increased the cost to the federal government—$1.6 billion in 2011, up from $772 million in 2008. The number of Lifeline beneficiaries rose from 7.1 million to 12.5 million during the same period; cell phones account for roughly half of that 12.5 million.

One of the major providers of the free cell phones—3.8 million subscribers as of late 2011—is Miami-based TracFone Wireless, a company whose president and CEO, Frederick “F.J.” Pollak, has donated at least $156,500 to Democratic candidates and committees this cycle, including at least $50,000 to the Obama campaign.

Pollak’s wife, Abigail, is a campaign bundler for Obama who has raised more than $632,000 for the president this cycle, and more than $1.5 million since 2007. She has personally contributed more than $200,000 to Democratic candidates and committees since 2008.

The Pollaks hosted Obama at their Miami Beach home in June for a $40,000-per-plate fundraising dinner, and hosted a similar event with Michelle Obama in July 2008. The couple personally donated a combined $66,200 to Obama’s reelection effort that year.

Visitor logs indicate that Frederick and Abigail Pollak have visited the White House seven times. In 2009, the president appointed Abigail to serve on the “Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino.”

TracFone, a direct financial beneficiary of the Lifeline program, receives $10 a month for each subscriber in the form of federal subsidies. The company can make an additional profit selling extra minutes to Lifeline subscribers who exceed their monthly allowance of 250 prepaid minutes.

TracFone and other wireless providers claim that revenue from selling additional minutes to Lifeline customers is low, but decline to publicly release such figures.

The program’s rapidly increasing costs have attracted the attention of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and have prompted calls for reform. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.), for example, found that the program was “ripe for fraud.” In some cases, McCaskill noted in a December 2011 press release, the government was issuing multiple free phones to the same individuals.

“I remain troubled by the expansive potential for the program to be abused, especially since Americans contribute to the program through their monthly phone bills,” McCaskill, who is up for reelection, wrote in a formal letter to the FCC. “The current requirements to determine eligibility often do not require customer documentation for participation in Lifeline, which may result in individuals receiving phones who should not be.”

Rep. Tim Griffin (R., Ark.) has introduced legislation to restore the program to its originally intended purpose—providing landlines for use in emergencies—and stop the federal government from issuing free cell phones. Griffin told the Daily Caller he had heard reports of individuals receiving dozens of phones, some of which were of the expensive smartphone variety.

The FCC in response to such pressure announced in February 2012 to reform the program and “reduce the potential for fraud while cutting red tape for consumers and providers.”

TracFone, which did not return a request for comment, is the U.S. affiliate of America Movil, one of the largest phone service providers in Latin America.

America Movil is one of many business ventures controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, currently the world’s richest man, according to Forbes. Slim’s stake in the firm accounts for more than half of his $70 billion net worth.

Slim—who bailed out the New York Times and is often referred to as “Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly”—has visited the White House at least twice, according to visitor logs.

Univision’s Jordan Fabian reports that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim held a series of closed-door meetings with senior Obama officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Slim is worth an estimated $63 billion, and owns more than seven percent of the New York Times Company – though the eponymous newspaper of record didn’t deem it necessary to report on its partial owners’ D.C. trip. (Slim also loaned the Times $250 million last year, which earned him warrants to bump his holding in the company to nearly 16 percent.)

Often referred to as “Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly,” Slim has been accused of employing mafia-esque tactics to retain control of his 70 percent stake in the country’s telecom industry. Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development accused Slim’s telecommunications companies of overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth in Mexico.

Administration spokesmen were intentionally vague when asked by Fabian about the nature of Slim’s high-level sit-downs:

“Secretary Napolitano met with Mr. Slim on Monday to discuss a number of security-related issues and underscore the Department of Homeland Security’s commitment to continuing our close relationship with Mexican partners to facilitate lawful travel and trade that supports our economy,” according to DHS spokesman Matthew Chandler.

A spokesperson for Kirk would only say that the two met to discuss “various issues of mutual interest.

Slim also participated in a Tuesday afternoon roundtable discussion about telecommunications issues, such as broadband, at the State Department. One of the participants was U.S. Undersecretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs Robert Hormats. …

“The reports also have emphasized that broadband has great significance in advancing toward achievement of the millennium development goals,” according to a readout from the [State] department. “The meeting was designed to explore the commission’s conclusions and its work program for 2012 in light of the development opportunities it has identified.”