Sexual harassment in academic contexts [feedly]

Sexual harassment in academic contexts
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2018/10/sexual-harassment-in-academic-contexts.html

Sexual harassment of women in academic settings is regrettably common and pervasive, and its consequences are grave. At the same time, it is a remarkably difficult problem to solve. The "me-too" movement has shed welcome light on specific individual offenders and has generated more awareness of some aspects of the problem of sexual harassment and misconduct. But we have not yet come to a public awareness of the changes needed to create a genuinely inclusive and non-harassing environment for women across the spectrum of mistreatment that has been documented. The most common institutional response following an incident is to create a program of training and reporting, with a public commitment to investigating complaints and enforcing university or institutional policies rigorously and transparently. These efforts are often well intentioned, but by themselves they are insufficient. They do not address the underlying institutional and cultural features that make sexual harassment so prevalent.

The problem of sexual harassment in institutional contexts is a difficult one because it derives from multiple features of the organization. The ambient culture of the organization is often an important facilitator of harassing behavior -- often enough a patriarchal culture that is deferential to the status of higher-powered individuals at the expense of lower-powered targets. There is the fact that executive leadership in many institutions continues to be predominantly male, who bring with them a set of gendered assumptions that they often fail to recognize. The hierarchical nature of the power relations of an academic institution is conducive to mistreatment of many kinds, including sexual harassment. Bosses to administrative assistants, research directors to post-docs, thesis advisors to PhD candidates -- these unequal relations of power create a conducive environment for sexual harassment in many varieties. In each case the superior actor has enormous power and influence over the career prospects and work lives of the women over whom they exercise power. And then there are the habits of behavior that individuals bring to the workplace and the learning environment -- sometimes habits of masculine entitlement, sometimes disdainful attitudes towards female scholars or scientists, sometimes an underlying willingness to bully others that finds expression in an academic environment. (A recent issue of the Journal of Social Issues (link) devotes substantial research to the topic of toxic leadership in the tech sector and the "masculinity contest culture" that this group of researchers finds to be a root cause of the toxicity this sector displays for women professionals. Research by Jennifer Berdahl, Peter Glick, Natalya Alonso, and more than a dozen other scholars provides in-depth analysis of this common feature of work environments.)

The scope and urgency of the problem of sexual harassment in academic contexts is documented in excellent and expert detail in a recent study report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (link). This report deserves prominent discussion at every university.

The study documents the frequency of sexual harassment in academic and scientific research contexts, and the data are sobering. Here are the results of two indicative studies at Penn State University System and the University of Texas System:

The Penn State survey indicates that 43.4% of undergraduates, 58.9% of graduate students, and 72.8% of medical students have experienced gender harassment, while 5.1% of undergraduates, 6.0% of graduate students, and 5.7% of medical students report having experienced unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. These are staggering results, both in terms of the absolute number of students who were affected and the negative effects that these  experiences had on their ability to fulfill their educational potential. The University of Texas study shows a similar pattern, but also permits us to see meaningful differences across fields of study. Engineering and medicine provide significantly more harmful environments for female students than non-STEM and science disciplines. The authors make a particularly worrisome observation about medicine in this context:

The interviews conducted by RTI International revealed that unique settings such as medical residencies were described as breeding grounds for abusive behavior by superiors. Respondents expressed that this was largely because at this stage of the medical career, expectation of this behavior was widely accepted. The expectations of abusive, grueling conditions in training settings caused several respondents to view sexual harassment as a part of the continuum of what they were expected to endure. (63-64)

The report also does an excellent job of defining the scope of sexual harassment. Media discussion of sexual harassment and misconduct focuses primarily on egregious acts of sexual coercion. However, the  authors of the NAS study note that experts currently encompass sexual coercion, unwanted sexual attention, and gender harassment under this category of harmful interpersonal behavior. The largest sub-category is gender harassment:

"a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes about" members of one gender (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, and Drasgow 1995, 430). (25)

The "iceberg" diagram (p. 32) captures the range of behaviors encompassed by the concept of sexual harassment. (See Leskinen, Cortina, and Kabat 2011 for extensive discussion of the varieties of sexual harassment and the harms associated with gender harassment.)

The report emphasizes organizational features as a root cause of a harassment-friendly environment.

By far, the greatest predictors of the occurrence of sexual harassment are organizational. Individual-level factors (e.g., sexist attitudes, beliefs that rationalize or justify harassment, etc.) that might make someone decide to harass a work colleague, student, or peer are surely important. However, a person that has proclivities for sexual harassment will have those behaviors greatly inhibited when exposed to role models who behave in a professional way as compared with role models who behave in a harassing way, or when in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong consequences for these behaviors. Thus, this section considers some of the organizational and environmental variables that increase the risk of sexual harassment perpetration. (46)

Some of the organizational factors that they refer to include the extreme gender imbalance that exists in many professional work environments, the perceived absence of organizational sanctions for harassing behavior, work environments where sexist views and sexually harassing behavior are modeled, and power differentials (47-49). The authors make the point that gender harassment is chiefly aimed at indicating disrespect towards the target rather than sexual exploitation. This has an important implication for institutional change. An institution that creates a strong core set of values emphasizing civility and respect is less conducive to gender harassment. They summarize this analysis in the statement of findings as well:

Organizational climate is, by far, the greatest predictor of the occurrence of sexual harassment, and ameliorating it can prevent people from sexually harassing others. A person more likely to engage in harassing behaviors is significantly less likely to do so in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong, clear, transparent consequences for these behaviors. (50)

So what can a university or research institution do to reduce and eliminate the likelihood of sexual harassment for women within the institution? Several remedies seem fairly obvious, though difficult.

• Establish a pervasive expectation of civility and respect in the workplace and the learning environment
• Diffuse the concentrations of power that give potential harassers the opportunity to harass women within their domains
• Ensure that the institution honors its values by refusing the "star culture" common in universities that makes high-prestige university members untouchable
• Be vigilant and transparent about the processes of investigation and adjudication through which complaints are considered
• Create effective processes that ensure that complainants do not suffer retaliation
• Consider candidates' receptivity to the values of a respectful, civil, and non-harassing environment during the hiring and appointment process (including research directors, department and program chairs, and other positions of authority)
• Address the gender imbalance that may exist in leadership circles

As the authors put the point in the final chapter of the report:

Preventing and effectively addressing sexual harassment of women in colleges and universities is a significant challenge, but we are optimistic that academic institutions can meet that challenge--if they demonstrate the will to do so. This is because the research shows what will work to prevent sexual harassment and why it will work. A systemwide change to the culture and climate in our nation's colleges and universities can stop the pattern of harassing behavior from impacting the next generation of women entering science, engineering, and medicine. (169)

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How the Clean Water Act has served the environment and the economy

David Keiser, Joseph S. Shapiro 24 October 2018

Many argue that the $1 trillion cost of the 1972 US Clean Water Act outweigh its benefits. The column uses new evidence on grants and water pollution readings to measure its impact. While the Act has decreased US water pollution, the estimated change in home values caused by this has been only one quarter of the grant costs, although this probably understates the full impact of the Act. The analysis suggests that targeting water pollution in more populous areas would improve net social benefits.

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Over the last 20 years, the president or the Supreme Court of the US have restricted, reinstated, and then restricted again Clean Water Act protections for roughly half of US waters. Two Supreme Court decisions in the 2000s – SWANCC and Rapanos – removed the Clean Water Act's protection for wetlands, intermittent streams, and many other waters. The Obama administration's Waters of the United States Rule reinstated these protections, and a 2017 executive order by the Trump administration sought to revise or rescind this rule. 

The 1972 Clean Water Act has a strong rationale. Before 1972, many US rivers were polluted to the extent that they would catch fire, and the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio provided impetus for the passage of the Clean Water Act.

Despite this, the Clean Water Act has been controversial, for two reasons. First, there is no clear evidence that the Clean Water Act has decreased pollution, or even whether water pollution has fallen(Adler et al. 1993). Second, some argue that the Clean Water Act's costs have exceeded its benefits. These costs have exceeded $1 trillion in total (in 2014 dollars). That is more than $100 per person, per year. 

Most analyses have concluded that the Clean Water Act's benefits are smaller than its costs. This includes studies by the Environmental Protection Agency (Lyon and Farrow 1995, Freeman 2000, USEPA 2000a, USEPA 2000b, Keiser et al. forthcoming). This contrasts with analyses of the Clean Air Act, which often find benefits much larger than its costs (USEPA 1997). 

Analyses of the Clean Water Act have been hampered by three challenges:

• limited data on water quality,
• the difficulty of inferring values for clean water by observing human behaviour, and
• separating effects of the Clean Water Act from effects of other changes in policy and the economy. 

We have tried to shed light on these controversies using the most comprehensive set of files on water pollution and its determinants in either academia or government (Keiser and Shapiro, forthcoming). These include 50 million water pollution readings from more than 240,000 monitoring sites in the continental US, from 1962 to 2001. Also we use detailed records on each of 35,000 grants the federal government gave cities in order to improve the treatment of municipal wastewater.

The analysis finds three sets of results.

Water pollution 

Most measures of water pollution declined between 1962 and 2001, though the rate of decline slowed over time. For example, the share of waters unsafe for fishing fell by about 12% between 1972 and 2001 (Figure 1). 

Figure 1 Share of waters not fishable, 1962–2001

Source: Keiser and Shapiro (forthcoming).

Wastewater treatment

The analysis investigates the effect on water pollution of $650 billion in grants that the federal government gave cities to improve wastewater treatment plants. In most cities, sewage and other wastes flow through a network of underground pipes to a plant that treats the waste before discharging it to a river, lake, or other body of water. Upgrading these treatment plants so that ambient water pollution would decrease was a major goal of the Clean Water Act. 

To measure the effects of these grants on pollution, our research compares pollution upstream of a treatment plant that received a grant to pollution downstream of the plant. We did this in years before and after the grant was received, and in plants receiving grants in early or late years. 

These grants substantially decreased water pollution. The average grant project, which cost around $30 million, decreased the probability that downstream waters were unsafe for fishing by about half a percentage point (Figure 2). This benefit extended about 25 miles downstream and lasted for about 30 years. The research also studies these grants' cost-effectiveness. It finds that, using these grants, it cost about $1.5 million per year to make one mile of a river safe for fishing.

Figure 2 The effects of Clean Water Act grants on share of waters not fishable

Source: Keiser and Shapiro (forthcoming).

Home values

The analysis finds some evidence that these grants increased home values within a 25-mile radius around the waters that were cleaned up. The aggregate change in home values, however, was around one quarter of the total cost of these grants.

Figure 3 Ratio of change in housing values to grant costs by county

Source: Keiser and Shapiro (forthcoming).

There are several reasons why this ratio of measured benefits (change in home values) to costs of around 0.25 may understate the true benefit-cost ratio. People may inaccurately perceive the (especially health) benefits these grants provide. This ratio does not count benefits to people who live more than 25 miles away from the rivers, and it abstracts from changes in sewer fees and local taxes. 

One interpretation is that the benefits of these Clean Water Act grants would exceed their costs if the benefits not captured in the housing market analysis exceeded the benefits captured here by a ratio of more than three-to-one. Current research is investigating whether existing analyses have underestimated the benefits of cleaning up rivers to this degree, for example by ignoring health benefits, and so whether the benefits of these investments are greater or less than their costs.

Policy implications

On one hand, Clean Water Act grants largely concluded by 1988. This new analysis stops in 2001, and the waters targeted by these Supreme Court and federal rules is far from a random sample, because they focus on wetlands and intermittent streams while the new analysis studies all rivers. In this sense, the new results do not directly measure any consequences of these current policy changes.

Nonetheless, there are two ways this work may inform current policy debates. 

• The Clean Water Act has decreased US water pollution. This finding is clearest for pollutants that the Clean Water Act targeted, while the analysis finds less improvement in pollutants primarily from agricultural sources that the Clean Water Act traditionally has not regulated. Thus, removing Clean Water Act protections may increase US water pollution, particularly in areas with municipal and industrial discharges. 
• The estimated change in home values due to Clean Water Act grants was smaller than the grants' costs (see Figure 3). This estimated ratio is larger for grants to more densely populated areas. The Clean Water Act, unlike the Clean Air Act, imposes similar water pollution regulations on most US surface waters. These findings are consistent with the idea that targeting water pollution regulations so that they focus on waters that are particularly important for social welfare could increase the ratio of benefits to costs of these regulations. 

Efficient environmental policy balances the benefits and costs of pollution control. For policies such as air pollution regulation, available evidence suggests that the benefits of existing regulation justify its costs. For water quality regulation, available evidence is incomplete, but suggests that re-targeting environmental investments could at least improve their net social benefits.  

References

Adler, R W, J C Landman, and D M Cameron (1993), The Clean Water Act 20 Years Later, NRDC.

Freeman, A M (2000), "Water Pollution Policy", chapter in Public Policies for Environmental Protection, RFF.

Keiser, D A, C L Kling, and J S Shapiro (forthcoming), "The low but uncertain measured benefits of US water quality policy", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Keiser, D A and J S Shapiro (forthcoming), "Consequences of the Clean Water Act and the Demand for Water Quality", Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Lyon, R M and S Farrow (1995), "An Economic Analysis of Clean Water Act Issues", Water Resources Research 31: 213–223.

USEPA (1997), "The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act, 1970 to 1990", USEPA discussion paper.

USEPA (2000a), A Benefits Assessment of Water Pollution Control Programs Since 1972: Part 1, The Benefits of Point Source Controls for Conventional Pollutants in Rivers and Streams: Final Report, USEPA.

USEPA (2000b), A Retrospective Assessment of the Costs of the Clean Water Act: 1972 to 1997: Final Report, USEPA.

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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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Wage roundup: Amplifying new work on an important topic. [feedly]

Wage roundup: Amplifying new work on an important topic.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/wage-roundup/

There's been some interesting wage analysis in recent days and the findings are worth collecting and amplifying. Some of what follows is technical, but the punchlines are straightforward:

–As I've always stressed up in these parts, tight labor markets are especially beneficial to lower-paid workers.

–Even so, wage inequality remains alive, well, and connected to the recent boom in corporate profitability.

–In earlier periods, unemployment rates as low today's would have generated faster wage growth. The reasons for today's under-performance are likely slack, slow productivity growth, and weak worker bargaining clout.

This first figure, from my great pal Larry Mishel and Julia Wolfe, uses high quality administrative data to reveal key aspects of the real annual earnings' story over the past few decades. The top line shows that the average earnings of the top 1 percent—about $720,000 in 2017—are up 157 percent since 1979, compared to 22 percent for the bottom 90 percent (2017 avg: $36,000). FTR, the top 0.1 percent were up 343 percent over these years (2017 avg: $2.8 million).

Moreover, and this is really telling, there are but two periods in the figure when the average for the bottom 90 goes up: the full employment latter 1990s and around 2015. The latter was a year of weirdly low inflation (about zero), so that's anomalous. But that positive slope in the latter 90s confirms the importance to this discussion of very low unemployment. In fact, unemployment is even lower today, but I'll get to that in a moment.

The other important pattern in the figure is the sawtooth movements for the top 1 percent around 2000 and 2007. If you follow the stock market, and particularly the patterns in capital gains realizations, those spikes are familiar, but why should they show up in paychecks? The answer is that in these data come right off W2 wage filings, which include exercised stock options. The diverse pattern between the top and bottom lines in the figure underscores the narrow reach of stock market gains.

But why aren't middle and lower-wage workers seeing much in terms of wage gains these days? This is the topic of very thorough bit of work by Ernie Tedeschi in the New York Times. Ernie goes over pretty much every reason you could come up with regarding the question just posed; here are some of the findings I found most germane:

–If you look solely at unemployment, you'd think the job market is at full capacity. If you look at more broad indicators, you might not be so convinced.

–Low inflation tends to correlate with slower nominal wage growth, but the gap in wage growth between now and 2000—the last time we were at full employment—is only partially explained by slower price growth.

–Contrary to claims by Trump's CEA, as Larry and I showed a while ago, benefit growth can't be crowding out wage growth, because nonwage comp isn't outpacing wages (we showed the nonwage share of comp has been flat in recent years; we also argued, as does Ernie, that demographic change doesn't explain the wage-growth gap).

–Slow productivity is surely in the mix, but it's only a partial explanation.

Let's pause for some analysis of that last point, as productivity is key to this debate (and key to living standards), but sometimes gets short shrift. Also, advocates of this explanation, of which I am one, sometimes argue that it is a more binding constraint than is necessarily the case.

A recent paper by Janet Yellen, which Ernie cites as well, introduces a model that I've sort of replicated (I'm using some different data and not imposing some of the constraints she does on the model's coefficients, though the results I'm about to show are similar if I do so). Yellen's model includes slack, inflation, and productivity growth. All three variables significantly drive nominal wage growth, but here's some evidence that slowing productivity growth helps to explain the gap which is the focus of Ernie's report.

I've run the model using my "mash-up" wage series (five different series combined, so as to avoid cherry-picking) through 2010 and then forecasted forward using the actual values for the independent variables. The first figure shows that the model does a decent job of predicting wage growth out-of-sample. Most notably, even with the decline in unemployment (actually, the gap between unemployment and CBO's estimate of the natural rate), this version of the model does not predict faster wage growth 8 years after the estimation period.

But if I exclude productivity growth (the Yellen model employs a smooth trend in productivity growth), a clear overshoot occurs. It's not a huge effect, for the record, but it's there.

To be clear, I could have done the same exercise with inflation and slack but economists have focused on slow productivity growth because it is, as I show in this post, an essential indicator of potential (average) wage growth, and its slowdown is therefore a real constraint on living standards more broadly.

However, as I also stress in the link just above, the role of bargaining power must not be overlooked in this productivity discussion. Even at low productivity growth, wages can grow more for some groups than others (distribution within the national wage share of income), and the wage share of national income, which has tanked in recent years, can rebalance in favor of workers. In fact, that dynamic is attractive from the Fed's perspective, as it supports non-inflationary wage growth.

The final recent wage report to bring to your attention comes from researchers at Goldman Sachs (no link); it focuses on the distribution of wage pressures as the job market tightens up. Their table below makes a point I've long stressed: the less you earn, the more tight labor markets help you. The coefficient on slack (top row) is 2x that for low-wage as upper-middle-wage workers, and it is insignificant for high-wage workers. Note also, as in the Mishel/Wolfe chart above, the correlation between corporate profits and high-wage growth.

The other important finding from their regressions is the structural downshift of the model's parameters in the post-2010 period, though not for low-wage workers (state minimum wage increases are likely in play here). The last figure shows that using the parameters from their full model predicts average wage growth close to 4 percent by late next year. But if the prediction is made based on the more recent, diminished correlations, then wage growth hardly budges from its current pace, even as they predict the unemployment rate to fall significantly below today's levels.

Source: GS Research

Putting it all together, tight labor markets are as important as ever, though slow productivity growth and weak bargaining clout are still, even at 3.7 percent unemployment, operating as wedge between growth and broadly shared prosperity. The policy implications point towards the importance of patience at the Fed and more collective bargaining (and much better labor policies, including minimum wages/overtime, but that's for another post). Workers need both tight labor markets and the power to steer more of the benefits of a full capacity economy into paychecks, not profits.

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An important correction: The U.S. does have a carbon tax. But it needs some serious attention. [feedly]

An important correction: The U.S. does have a carbon tax. But it needs some serious attention.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/an-important-correction-the-u-s-does-have-a-carbon-tax-but-it-needs-some-serious-attention/

'm am avid listener to the NY Times podcast, The Daily, and I much enjoyed, if that's the right word given the difficult topic, last Friday's show on the urgency of pushing back on climate change. The show included an insightful discussion with recent Nobel laureate William Nordhaus on the importance of taxing carbon.

But somewhere in there (not in the Nordhaus section), it was asserted that the U.S. federal government does not tax carbon. In fact, such a tax exists: it's the federal gas tax. Given that this is the carbon-tax-that-time-forgot, I can understand the mistake (the reporter was probably thinking about more sweeping, new taxes on carbon emissions). But there are two strong reasons for raising it. One, to more accurately price the social cost of carbon consumption, and two, to pay for our eroding transportation infrastructure.

The federal gas tax has been stuck–in nominal terms!–at 18.3 cents per gallon since 1993. It hasn't been adjusted for consumer inflation, for the increased cost of transportation maintenance, for the improved fuel efficiency of today's fleet, or for the slower growth over the past decade in total miles driven (see the figure below, showing a 12-month rolling average of total vehicle miles driven, in billions; people traveled a lot less in the downturn, such that miles driven are down by 480 billion relative to the pre-2007 trend; that's good for the climate; bad for the trust fund coffers).

To be clear, those last two factors are roundly welcomed. But they also mean we're collecting a lot less than we should be, which besides under-pricing carbon, is why a) the federal transportation trust fund is always broke, and b) our roads and mass transit suffer from persistent under-investment, especially in state that haven't picked up some of the slack (the average state gas tax is 24 cents/gallon).

The tax analysts at ITEP do an excellent job of following this issue, but it is one that should be far more prominent. They calculate that to keep pace with the factors just noted, the federal gas tax today would need to be about 50 cents/gallon.

Since the federal gas tax was introduced in the 1930, this is the longest we've gone without raising it. Even President Reagan raised the damn thing (from 4 to 9 cents, in 1983)! As I document here, every once and a while, grown-up politicians propose an increase, often a bipartisan one. (BTW, as electric vehicles become more common–they don't use gas; they do use roads–a per-mile user fee may be necessary to support transportation infrastructure).

As the Daily podcast stressed, there are policy makers who increasingly realize we must tax carbon, though especially in the age of Trump, they tend not to speak up much in this country. Moreover, it's typically easier to add to an existing tax than introduce a new one.

Of course, I admit that it's awfully hard to imagine a federal gas tax increase getting anywhere these days. But we've got to try, and we certainly can't forget that it exists!

 

Source: DOT, Fed Highway Admin.

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Recovery Radio:Recovery Radio: After the Emergency Room, Then What

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Recovery Radio
Post: Recovery Radio: After the Emergency Room, Then What
Link: http://recovery.enlightenradio.org/2018/10/recovery-radio-after-emergency-room.html

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Mexico’s Hopeful New President [feedly]

Mexico's Hopeful New President
http://prospect.org/article/mexicos-hopeful-new-president

The election of the left populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of Mexico is a historic breakthrough for progressives there. It could also offer progressives in the United States a path out of their own political stalemate on immigration and trade.

In his third run for president, 64-year-old "AMLO" broke open the piñata of Mexican politics that had been tightly sealed by neoliberal oligarchs since the early 1980s. He won 31 of the 32 Mexican states, taking 53 percent of the total vote. His coalition, led by the political party he organized just four years ago, swept to control in both houses of the Mexican Congress.

As in his past campaigns, López Obrador was demonized in most of the media as a Latin American caudillo like Hugo Chavez, who would bring Venezuela-type chaos, or the Mexican version of the despised Donald Trump.

The comparisons are pure propaganda; López Obrador has no connection with the military, has spent his life in democratic politics, and could not be less like Trump. From a family of small shopkeepers, he began his political career by defending the land rights of the indigenous poor in his native Tabasco. Since then, he has been a relentless critic of what he calls the "mafioso" Mexican elite, whose greed has spread corruption and tolerated violence throughout the country. He has a modest lifestyle, driving a five-year-old car, flying coach, and promising to cut the president's salary and sell the presidential plane.

Unlike Trump, he is also an astute and pragmatic politician. As mayor of Mexico City between 2000 and 2005, he ran a competent and innovative government—launching programs that ranged from helping the poor and elderly to building elevated highways to ease the congestion that was choking local commerce. He left office with an 85 percent approval rating.

Within days of his election as president, he met with business leaders who had bitterly opposed him, plunged into the practical issues of the upcoming transfer of power in December, and appointed a cabinet of people with recognized experience and expertise—a majority of whom are women.

Yet, as different as they are, López Obrador and Trump are products of a similar historical context. They represent, respectively, left- and right-wing populist/nationalist responses to the economic insecurity and social disruption of corporate-driven globalization.

The similarities end there. Trump is a monstrous parody of capitalist imperialism—bullying, greedy, and unstable—who brazenly uses the presidency to promote his personal business deals in dozens of countries. He plays to his political base with xenophobic rants, while personally profiting from cheap immigrant labor on his worksites and at his homes.

By contrast, López Obrador's nationalism is rooted in a long struggle for democratic control over Mexico's economic and social development.

After 20 years of civil conflict following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the country's exhausted warring factions established a system of broadly representative one-party rule. The system was autocratic, inward-looking, mildly socialist, and consciously distanced from the United States, which had dominated—and dismembered—Mexico over the previous century. The system brought 50 years of peace, steady economic growth, and decreasing inequality to the nation.

But in the early 1980s, the international energy-price bubble burst, plunging oil-exporting Mexico into an economic crisis. Infected by the market-fundamentalism of the Reagan-Thatcher era, a new generation of politicians allied with U.S. business interests opened up Mexico to the global economy. Their instrument was the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, which in turn became the model for the global deregulation of trade and investment that swept the world over the next two decades.

Not surprisingly, NAFTA failed to deliver on the promise of its backers that it would reduce Mexican immigration in the United States. President Clinton also argued that allowing U.S. companies to produce in Mexico would prevent them from going to China. NAFTA, he claimed, would create a growing middle-class job market—and middle-class consumers for American goods—in Mexico. In a similar vein, then-Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari asked Americans, "Do you want our tomatoes or our tomato pickers?"

But these promises turned out to be so much political bait and switch. Instead of a North American strategy for global competition, NAFTA turned out to be a Wall Street strategy to undercut the bargaining position of labor in all three countries. A half-dozen years after NAFTA took effect, Clinton opened up the United States to goods from China in exchange for opening up China to American investors. The privileged U.S. access promised to Mexico was undercut by even cheaper Chinese labor. Many Mexicans—echoing the bitterness of downsized U.S. industrial workers—will tell you that Clinton stabbed them in the back.

Compared with their experience in the previous era, Mexicans since NAFTA have seen slower growth, widening inequality, and less personal safety. As writer Jorge Castañeda Gutman, who later became foreign minister, acknowledged at the time it was adopted, NAFTA was "an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary people in all three societies."

(AP Images)

López Obrador on October 17, 2018

Deregulating the flow of money and goods across the border also turned what had been a modest, illegal business smuggling marijuana into the United States into a huge criminal industry that now encompasses trans-shipping cocaine and heroin from South America and synthetic drugs from the Far East. Narco-traffickers expanded into extortion, robbery, and kidnapping. Drug money infiltrated the courts, the police, and the military. Only 7 percent of the country's crimes are reported, chiefly because of fear of the police. Of those reported, less than 5 percent result in convictions. During the recent elections, at least 145 candidates and political activists were assassinated.

In 2008, the Pentagon started providing aid to the Mexican military to take over the leading role in combating the cartels. But the military is untrained for police work, unaccountable to civilian authority, and itself laced with narco-corruption. Human rights violations have escalated. Last spring, the Mexican government was caught using surveillance systems paid for by the United States to spy on its political opponents. By any measure, the U.S. intervention has been a complete failure; in 2017, the murder rate in Mexico reached its highest level since the government started keeping records 20 years ago.

 

WHILE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION to the United States tripled between 1990 and 2013, a weak U.S. recovery from the crash of 2008 combined with Obama's tougher border policies have since reduced the flow from Mexico. Trump's brutal tactics have taken a further toll. Yet the flow continues; in the first seven months of 2018, the number of undocumented people arrested or turned back at the southern border rose by 140,000 over the same period a year ago. A growing share has come from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, where the combination of criminal violence and chronic poverty is even greater than in Mexico.

Lost in this debate is the uncomfortable reality that Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have long been de facto colonies of U.S. corporate and military interests. For well over a century, we have intervened in the region to support the reactionary business oligarchs and generals who have brutally suppressed both development and democracy.

This is not just ancient history. In 2009, when the elected president of Honduras, himself a member of the oligarchy, outraged the Honduran establishment by attempting a few mild education and labor market reforms, he was kidnapped by U.S.-trained armed forces, taken to a U.S. base, and shipped out of the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the coup, following up with increased aid to the Honduran military and the corrupt government it protects. When protesters demonstrated against this year's rigged election, the military police fired live ammunition at them, killing at least 20 of the demonstrators.

The dirty little secret of migration across our southern border is that it has benefited elites on both sides. The Mexican and Central American oligarchs get to send their most ambitious and energetic—and therefore the most frustrated and politically dangerous—working people out of the country. The U.S. business class gets a large supply of ambitious, energetic, cheap labor. And as the recent numbers suggest, wall or no wall, desperate people will keep finding a way in.

 

AS IF THE PROBLEMS OF inequality, violence, and corruption on López Obrador's plate when he takes office were not enough, there awaits the foul-mouthed Donald Trump, still demanding that Mexico pay for his border wall, which no Mexican politician could possibly do.

But neither can any Mexican leader avoid dealing with Trump. López Obrador, like his progressive counterparts in Canada, originally opposed NAFTA. Leftists in both countries feared that greater integration with the United States would weaken their already fragile national independence. As the humiliating submission of their leaders to Trump's arrogant demand for a renegotiation of NAFTA showed, they were right.

After 24 years of integration under NAFTA, the economies of both Mexico and Canada are much more dependent on their larger neighbor. Mexico especially relies on the U.S. for imports of basic foods and gasoline, and it sells 80 percent of its exports in the United States. López Obrador is fully aware that tearing up the treaty now would plunge Mexico into a depression from which it would take years to recover, and doom his plans for turning the country toward a social democratic future.

López Obrador has been arguing that the central issue is not how the United States treats undocumented Mexican immigrants, but the maldistribution of income and wealth that drives them out of Mexico. The priority should not be making it easier for Mexicans to leave their country, he says, but making it possible for them to stay.

To do this, he has laid out an ambitious plan of economic development along social democratic lines, terming policies of the past a failure. After his election, he declared that neoliberalism was finished in Mexico. His plan includes:

•  Increasing public social spending, particularly in education and pensions for the destitute elderly,
•  Raising private incomes with higher minimum wages and reform of corrupt labor unions,
•  Job creating investments—especially in the impoverished south—in water, transportation, energy, and the targeted expansion of new industries, including exporting to the world's rapidly legalizing marijuana markets.

At the same time, he must make visible progress against the widespread criminal violence and official corruption. As a first step, he wants to de-militarize the war on drugs, sending the army back to its barracks while reforming and professionalizing the civilian police.

This is a huge task, and he will be opposed by powerful international, as well as national, interests—including Wall Street investors, the Pentagon and its contractors who are close to the Mexican military, and the right-wing ideologues both in Mexico and in the U.S. administration and Congress. To have a chance of pulling it off, López Obrador needs time and political space—and minimal interference from the U.S. government.

His immediate need is to get the current negotiations over NAFTA out of the way, even before he takes office. Fortunately for him, the lame-duck Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto has already reached a deal with Trump, who has informed Congress that he will sign it before December 1.

(AP Images)

Luisa María Alcalde Luján

Given Trump's unstable personality, nothing is certain. Canada has not yet joined, and even some Republicans have questioned whether Trump could base a deal with Mexico alone on his authority from Congress to renegotiate the three-nation agreement. But there is little reason to think that the spineless Republicans in Congress won't ultimately give him whatever he asks for.

Moreover, although it is hard for progressives to acknowledge that anything Trump does is positive, the proposed amendments in the deal with Mexico are an actual improvement for workers on both sides of the border. First, they weaken the rights of corporate investors to sue governments for policies that might reduce future profits. Second, they require Mexico to pass legislation ensuring workers' rights to secret ballots in union elections. Third, they mandate that the share of North American content in autos and parts that cross borders without tariffs be raised from 62.5 percent to 75 percent. Fourth, they stipulate that 45 percent of autos be produced by workers making at least $16 per hour, which if finally incorporated into NAFTA could represent a historic breakthrough for making wage levels a part of trade treaties.

The deal does not do much to strengthen enforcement of these new rules. But this could change. López Obrador's designated labor minister, Luisa María Alcalde Luján, is smart, energetic, and committed. She comes from a network of activists (including her parents) that for years has dedicated itself to cleaning up union corruption and promoting worker rights—something that has been totally absent from Mexican governments of the past.

Despite Trump's threats, there is nothing in the deal about building a wall or requiring Mexico to impede emigration to the United States. Trump, of course, is still assuring his base that, somehow, in some unspecified way, his wall will be built and Mexico will pay for it.

 

IN ADDITION TO dealing with the unstable and dangerous mega-power to the north, López Obrador must deal with the violence and chaos spilling over in the form of displaced immigrants from Central America. In a letter to Trump, he suggested that both Mexico and the United States work together on a new project of social and economic development for the region.

No one can expect Trump to take this seriously. But López Obrador's ideas, and the fact that he will be president of Mexico for six years, could kick-start progressives into a desperately needed rethink of America's global priorities.

It is not just Mexico that needs a new internal development path. Rising inequality, chronic trade deficits, and shrinking opportunities for the majority of Americans over the last three decades reflect a dysfunctional economy that is competing in the world by lowering wages and living standards at home.

To escape the downward spiral of low-wage competition, both the United States and Mexico need to rebuild their capacity to compete in the world on the basis of high quality and efficiency. To do this they need time—and each other. Mexico needs stable access to American investment and technology. And the United States needs Mexico and Central America—both to create a larger close-in market for American goods and to limit the forced immigration from south of the border that is a major, if not the major, subject of the nativist demagogy that breeds the reactionary politics clogging our path toward a social democratic future.

NAFTA created a continental market. U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico is almost double its trade with China. People and culture now flow across the borders. What NAFTA has lacked is a democratic politics that would make it work for the ordinary people who were left behind by the original deal.

Opposition to the original agreement in all three countries created what might have been a foundation for that politics. But after critics failed to stop it, the left embraced other concerns. In the United States, the anti-free-trade movement moved on, reaching its peak in the 1999 protests against globalization in Seattle. Today, it has been elbowed out of the trade discussion by Trump. Its internationalist human rights vision has often been misappropriated by policymakers of both parties as a justification for disastrous military interventions.

(AP Images)

Andrés Manuel López Obrador on September 29, 2018, in Mexico City

What goes on in Mexico and Central America has much more impact on the daily lives of more Americans than events almost anyplace else. But among U.S. foreign policy networks, stretching from Congress and federal bureaucracies to academia and multinational corporations, the world south of the Rio Grande is a policy backwater. The media tell us more about who is going to jail in Turkey and China than who is murdered in El Salvador or Mexico.

 

THE IDEA THAT MARKET TIES among nations help create a more peaceful and just world is not wrong. What is wrong is that the neoliberal model systematically erodes the democratic governance necessary to make it work.

With the ascension of López Obrador to Mexico's presidency, the rise to influence of a new generation of progressive Democrats in their party in the United States, and the existing substantial base for progressive politics in Canada, there may be an opportunity for social democrats in all three countries to work together toward transforming NAFTA into a North American economy in which rising living standards for all who live there take priority over profit opportunities for global investors.

The first task is to strengthen cross-border ties among progressives. Within the Mexico/Central American diaspora, there is already a great deal of collaboration on immigration and environmental issues across the border. And, despite their own domestic struggles, some U.S. and Mexican labor unions have cooperated in joint organizing along the border. One recent example of trinational cooperation is the story of Napoleon Gomez, a labor leader prosecuted by the Mexican government on fake charges after he criticized the callous indifference of a powerful mining corporation to a disaster that killed 65 miners in Coahuila. The American steelworkers union helped Gomez flee the country, and Canadian trade unions gave him refuge in Canada. After the Mexican Supreme Court finally dismissed all of the charges against him, he was elected in July to the Mexican Senate as a member of López Obrador's party.

Strengthening such links among continental progressives should be a major priority for American progressives over the next few years. But they need to see progressive movements to our south not just as objects of charitable political help, but as essential partners. There is no social democratic future possible in the U.S. without a strong democratic union movement. But workers on both sides of the border need each other to succeed. Given the ongoing integration of economies, a strong union movement here is not possible without one there.

The Mexican and Central American left does not need eager U.S. progressives rushing to help them reform their countries. Far more useful is an American left inspired to press long-neglected questions about the behavior of its own. Our own left would do well to focus on why the United States maintains military bases in Central America that have nothing to do with U.S. national security, and why the United States aids the Mexican army and police with military technology that often ends up in criminal hands.

The current alliance among progressives, moderates, and establishment neoconservatives to rid our country of Donald Trump is a practical necessity. But no progressive should be lulled into thinking that the social democratic vision of the Sanders/Warren wing of the party is compatible with the bipartisan "deep state" goal of restoring America's post–World War II role as world policeman and de facto board chair of global corporate capitalism.

It's time for another strategy. And for American progressives, the place to begin is here in our own North American neighborhood.

López Obrador has suggested the next step, but he cannot do it alone.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed