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Mars One is dead, but these aspiring "Martians" are still hellbent on going

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When Megan Kane was a sophomore in high school, her geography class watched a documentary on NASA’s planned 2020 mission to Mars. She decided that day that she wanted to go, and today she’s one of the so-called “Mars 100” chosen for a one-way trip to the red planet — but stuck in limbo.

NASA’s proposed 2020 mission isn’t happening after all. But Kane is holding out hope for Mars One, a private endeavor by Dutch engineer and business whiz Bas Lansdorp. In 2012, Lansdorp announced the multibillion-dollar mission to send humans on a one-way trip to Mars. He planned to fund it as a reality show, in space. More than 200,000 people applied, and Kane was one of the 100 chosen. But Mars One went bankrupt this year, and Kane and the other remaining candidates are on hold while Mars One scrambles to find a new investor.

Kane equates the exploration of another planet to the faith and risk taken by explorers discovering America. “I realized that this was a frontier. This was someplace we could actually go, that I could go and explore and contribute to the future of the human race,” she said. “Every major decision in my life, since I was inspired and decided that I was going to Mars when I was 16, has been based on that [high school documentary].”

Despite the odds, Kane and her fellow would-be Martians are as invested and determined as ever.

“Every time I falter, thinking ‘Can I do it?,’ I go, of course I can,’ “ says Kane. “I can do it. I just have to be dedicated. I have to follow through. So, it’s Mars or bust.”

This segment originally aired March 29, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

How the West Can Save Masculinity

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What if the men who obsess over the decline of the West actually helped to restore it? There is no doubt that life is moving at a faster pace than ever before, accelerated by technology and intensified by our growing divisions. But inside the whirlwind lies a burning question: are there still effective ways to promote masculine virtue?

My previous piece on the weak men of the online West triggered some alt-right and racially-inclined individuals, who accused me of “virtue signaling.” Others claimed I was portraying all immigration skeptics as one step away from slaughtering innocents (I never said that). New Zealand terrorist Brenton Tarrant fled in fear from a 48-year-old unarmed congregant who chased him with a credit card machine. Anders Breivik disguised himself as a cop, gunned down an island of defenseless teens, and then surrendered to police, relying on Norway’s lenient justice system. These are cowards, and not just in some vaguely intuited way.

Of course, the vast majority of miserable men never snap and kill others. In fact, statistics show the majority of unhappy or economically depressed males are slowly killing themselves with drugs, drink, and fast food. Nor are such men who waste away necessarily cowardly: in some cases they’ve simply never had the opportunity to show what they’re made of.

Many boys today have grown up in an educational and cultural environment that believes masculine impulses are inherently harmful. Whether it’s heavy drinking, marital infidelity, fighting, bullying, or general selfishness, men have certainly not always displayed admirable traits. But to state that these traits are masculinity itself? That’s a leap. Conversely, men have historically—and in contemporary times too—risen to great heights of heroism, self-sacrifice, and noble strength to defend their families, communities, and faiths. What has changed is not so much the shortcomings of men but the technology that is allowing larger numbers of them not to develop positive masculine qualities that simply had to be developed 100 years ago to survive. Necessity is not only the mother of invention; it is also in many ways the mother of real men.

The chasm between what a man could be and the subtly mocking screen staring listlessly back at him—Nietzsche’s modified abyss of sorts—is a powerful recipe for radicalism. Men have always craved a reason to matter, a mate and a mission. Sadly, today’s generation of boys are being fed prefabricated and juvenile narratives on YouTube channels by pick-up artists or spending hours immersed in video games trying to forget the disappointment they feel.

So how do we fix it? I suggest six practical steps we can take.

Provide strong role models

Ideally, a man’s role model would be his father. In reality, though, men who come from single-mother families or suboptimal situations will have to find role models elsewhere, such as in coaches, religious leaders, the fathers of their friends, and community figures. Some behaviors we now think of as “manly” are in fact socially constructed parodies of masculinity. As fellow TAC contributor Ben Sixsmith points out, is sitting and drinking beer while watching sports on a screen really “manly”? Young men need role models who do real things, from fixing cars and machines to playing sports and musical instruments to helping neighbors. Men who have the time and motivation should also consider mentoring, joining organizations like Big Brothers to help out.

Having estimable role models also means teaching young men practical and helpful lessons about women and courting. The phenomenon of incels, for example, which some such as Simon DeDeo of Carnegie Mellon University argue is overinflated, is a cause for concern even if it is not as numerically staggering as some suggest. As Glenn Stanton noted, “young men have fallen head-over-heels in love with the screens that deliver their daily dose of ‘Fortnite’ and porn. It’s not that they’ve lost the ability to engage with an actual, living, breathing woman. Few ever developed such skills.”

Promote clear consequences

Humans evolved out of tribes where their actions and interactions had clear consequences. Generally, if you cheated the tribe or committed a crime, you were exiled or severely punished. Catastrophes like the 2008 financial meltdown and the Iraq war, to name two relatively recent examples, are not just “mistakes.” In a healthy society, those who caused them would be regarded as treasonous and forced to pay for their mistakes. When young men see nickel-and-dime crimes punished with years of incarceration while the biggest thugs run free, they lose faith in the integrity of the system and become cynical. It’s time to clean corruption out of government and stop giving a pass to a prison-industrial complex that profits from the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of non-violent criminals.

Build an economy of purpose

As men labor and earn money, they need to feel like more than just numbers. It is not just automation and deindustrialization that are bringing men down; it is the way that materialism and impersonal profit have come to dominate everything, subsuming community life and family. Men are not made to be bit players in their own lives. Legislators and policymakers need to develop an actionable plan to build an economy of purpose designed for families. Fixing America’s broken food system is one way to revitalize the heartland, and bolstering rural and agrarian life is another way that blinkered pro-urban militancy can be countered. Cities should never be the enemy, but neither should the country accept being left behind by superhighways and city-centric legislation. Healthy hard work, from the physical to the intellectual, will always be in style. Men need an economy of purpose where that work isn’t just for the money, but actually accomplishes something tangible, from building houses to designing new software.

Reforming our media and culture

Graphic content is almost beside the point, since the real harm done by media is in its deeper messaging. Nihilism, hedonism, and cruelty prevail, as degenerate films are churned out, undermining the younger generation’s faith in humanity. Another major target of popular media is, of course, masculinity: demonizing men, promoting the idea that courage and strength are just romanticized bunk. Examples of truly boorish and unacceptable male behavior are routinely conflated with masculinity itself. Many nefarious influences seek to divide us instead of fostering productive discussions of femininity and masculinity. There’s a world of difference between a guy who is an aggressive, intemperate jerk and a tough but respectful man.

Society needs to take a long, hard look at the past few decades of pop culture. While many will argue that this simply reflects the tastes of society, there is ample research demonstrating that media actively shape preferences and trends. It’s time for governments to consider media that glorify drugs, crime, and unhealthy sexual behavior as a psychological and social threat. Dominant new media structures can be created without the schmaltz that’s often characterized past attempts at wholesome programming. Inspiring films about historical heroism, overcoming adversity in life and sports, comedies that are actually funny and don’t dwell on bizarre sexual innuendo and nihilism, biographical movies like Unplanned about an abortion clinic director who becomes a pro-life leader—these are all good examples.

Putting the social mission front and center

For those who are non-religious, activities and camps centered on coherent missions can be positive, including environmentalism, which can be compatible with conservatism. Other positive missions might include community revitalization projects, volunteering to help the less fortunate, using one’s profession to make changes within an industry, using unemployment to study a language or learn a new skill, and simply finding friends to share conversations and camaraderie with. When men lack such missions, they can become resentful about their alienation and even become violent. The accused 2017 Minnesota mosque bomber Michael Hari left as his only comment to the media a poem he’d written entitled “We Are Men!” A few lines stand out, showing how masculinity can be twisted without a proper purpose: “Men built this unjust system / And men can destroy it! / We are men!”

Portraying sex differences as complementary, not combative

Saying men and women are “equal” does a disservice to both. Men and women are complementary, not concepts dreamed up in a sterile boardroom. It is important to work towards a society where both sexes regard each other once again as partners, not as economic competitors or guilty representatives of historical wrongs. Western culture needs to start celebrating women for their strength and love, instead of subtly (and overtly) demonizing some of them, such as housekeepers and the religious. Living in a society of actual respect means respecting women and men and appreciating the positive contributions both can make. Strong families build strong countries.

There’s no manual for becoming a man. Nonetheless, there are concrete steps men can take towards positive masculine ideals.

As says Proverbs 27: 17-19, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. Whoever tends a fig tree will eat its fruit, and he who guards his master will be honored. As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects the man.”

Paul Brian is a freelance journalist. He has reported for BBC, Reuters, and Foreign Policy, and contributed to The Week, The Federalist, and others. You can follow him on Twitter @paulrbrian or visit his website www.paulrbrian.com.

Chelsea Manning’s ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Moment

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Chelsea Manning, the Army whistleblower who released hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents to Wikileaks in 2011 and who called attention to war crimes committed by U.S. troops, is back in jail. In fact, she’s been there for a month—not that the mainstream media cares. What’s another whistleblower locked up?

But Manning isn’t being held in the federal lockup in Alexandria, Virginia, for providing classified information to the media. She was already sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for that. (She served seven years before President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.) This time, she’s been thrown behind bars for an indeterminate period of incarceration because she refused to testify before the Wikileaks grand jury. And to make matters worse, she was reportedly held in solitary confinement (or, as sheriff Dana Lawhorne called it, “administrative segregation”) until April 5.  

While the hive media has been all but silent, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at least spoke out in support of Manning last week, calling her jail conditions “torture.”

What Manning is doing, in my view, is heroic for myriad reasons. There is no need to rehash what she—then Private First Class Bradley Manning—did in 2011. You don’t have to like Chelsea to acknowledge that she’s a whistleblower. There’s a legal definition of whistleblowing. It is bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or safety. That’s exactly what she did when she downloaded and delivered to Wikileaks thousands of pages of government documents that exposed the real truth about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most damning of these for the government were the “Collateral Murder” video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and the Guantanamo files.

But the price that she has paid has been very high. Manning spent two of her seven years in prison in solitary confinement, a situation the United Nations has characterized as a form of torture. She twice attempted suicide the first time she was in solitary. And she was forced to remain naked for a year in solitary because she was a suicide risk. Authorities were afraid she would use her clothes to hang herself.

In early March, Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The media reported that the Justice Department’s prosecutors wanted her to testify about her relationship with Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange and how she was able to pass classified documents to him in 2011. Manning contended that she had already testified to those questions in her own trial in 2012, and that all the feds had to do was enter into the record the transcript of her trial.

The feds wouldn’t relent. But neither would Manning. She said she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Then the government offered her qualified immunity. Nothing she said before the grand jury would be used against her. (Except if she contradicted her 2011 testimony. That’s a trick the feds love to use to charge people with perjury or with making a false statement. More on that in a minute.) Manning held firm, however. Even with the qualified immunity offer, she said that she would invoke her First Amendment right to freedom of speech, her Fourth Amendment right against illegal search and seizure, and her Sixth Amendment right to due process. She wouldn’t budge, and the Justice Department asked the judge to hold her indefinitely in contempt of court. That is how Manning found herself behind bars again.

When Manning was arrested and charged with contempt of court, I tweeted:

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I said this—and I believe every word of it—because Manning’s actions remind me of those of folk singer and legendary activist Pete Seeger, a personal hero of mine.

Pete Seeger was a member of the Communist Party USA from the early 1940s until 1949, when he split with the party over Josef Stalin’s atrocities. Still, he remained friendly with many party members. In 1955, Seeger, along with folksingers and members of his band The Weavers—Lee Hayes, Mil Lampell, and Ronnie Gilbert—were subpoenaed to testify before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where they were asked to name names. Hayes, Lampell, and Gilbert all pleaded the Fifth so as not to incriminate themselves. They urged Seeger to do the same. But he did not.

Instead, Seeger went before the HUAC and refused to answer any questions, citing his constitutional rights under the First Amendment. He told the Committee, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my associations, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

Seeger was charged with 10 felony counts of contempt of Congress—similar to Manning’s charge of contempt of court—convicted, and sentenced to 10 concurrent one-year terms in a federal prison. The conviction was overturned a year later on a technicality.

Like Manning, Seeger could have taken the easy way out. But he didn’t. He could have just taken the Fifth. He could have answered each question with “I don’t recall.” But he chose to make a political point, to take a stand. That was courageous in 1955 and it is courageous in 2019.

Seeger got caught up in the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. The situation for Manning, though, is more sinister. Contrary to popular belief, President Obama did not pardon Manning in the final days of his administration. Instead, he commuted her sentence, simply releasing her from prison. The conviction still stands and Manning is still in legal jeopardy. Prosecutors could still decide to charge her with crimes related to the original charges. With that said, was Manning’s subpoena a ham-fisted attempt to get her to contradict herself in new testimony, thus inviting another felony charge for perjury or making a false statement? Were prosecutors trying to get Manning to implicate herself in some process felony? Or were they simply trying to force her to turn rat on Julian Assange?

Again, Manning could have simply answered each question with “I don’t recall.” She would have been home in time for dinner. Instead, she made a political point—one that all of us should want to emulate. That point is “Don’t tread on me.” That point is “I’m willing to jeopardize my freedom to protect yours.”

I say often that in my time at the CIA, I learned that CIA culture is such that employees are taught that everything in life is a shade of gray. But that is simply not true. Some things are black and white, right or wrong. This is one of those things. It’s the government that’s the enemy here, not Manning or Assange.

Remember, the American people own the information that Manning and Assange are accused of releasing. We have a right to know what our government is doing in our name. We have a right to know whether the government is covering up crimes. We have a right to know when—and why—those Americans who commit war crimes or crimes against humanity are not being prosecuted. The mainstream media doesn’t tell us. But Wikileaks does.

We wouldn’t know about some of the most egregious war crimes of the past two decades without Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to share their politics. You don’t have to want to go out and have a beer with them. But you do have to respect what they’ve done.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst and case officer and senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He served two years in prison (2013-15) for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. He is currently an activist, a radio host, and the author of the recent book The Convenient Terrorist: Two Whistleblowers’ Stories of Torture, Terror, Secret Wars and CIA Lies with Joseph Hickman.

Is Mexico on the Brink of a Labor Revolution?

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On a Wednesday afternoon in late March, dozens of striking metalworkers gathered outside the gates of a steel factory three miles south of the Texas border. “Get out corrupt unions!” a banner read. The event was broadcast on Facebook Live, receiving over 10,000 views within hours. Messages of support streamed in from across Mexico, and the Mexican diaspora as far away as Texas, Florida, France, and Dubai. It was a calm day—workers grilled chicken thighs and sausages over charcoal in the shade of palm trees; a reporter asked for interviews. Four days later, on March 31, state police in riot gear would show up outside the plant, beating workers and tearing apart their encampment. The metal workers, who earn roughly $2 an hour, had been on strike over their wages for 55 days without pay.

The strike is part of an ongoing struggle between workers and U.S. manufacturing suppliers in Matamoros, a Mexican border city of half a million, known to many in the U.S. only as a migrant checkpoint. Since January 12, around 50,000 workers have gone on strike in Matamoros—including those employed by or supplying to Walmart, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Ford, Telsa, and Auto Zone. Another 15,000 non-union workers have staged illegal work stoppages. It’s the largest strike the city has seen in 30 years in a country with a long history of endemic, and at times violent, worker suppression. The so-called maquiladora industry workers in Matamoros, some of them deported migrants from the U.S., have demanded a 20 percent raise and a onetime bonus of 32,000 pesos ($1,655), calling themselves the “20/32 movement.” In recent weeks, 90 out of 95 factories in Matamoros have conceded to workers, leading labor analysts to predict, at long last, an upheaval of traditional labor relations in Mexico—what has been called “a labor spring.”

For decades, pro-government unions in Mexico have suppressed workers’ collective bargaining rights by colluding with factories to keep wages low—enticing U.S. industrialists to move their manufacturing operations south of the border. But now, the country has its first leftist, labor-friendly president in modern Mexican history. And the United States has offered another stimulus to union activity: Amidst the new protections for the pharmaceutical industry, provisions that require more car parts to be made in the United States, and the tightening of intellectual property laws, the Trump administration’s overhaul of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) in 2018 also included provisions that require Mexico to recognize independent unions, hold democratic union elections for contracts and leadership, and establish independent labor courts. “It’s been 30 years of union suppression. Thirty years without real raises for workers,” said Alfonso Bouzas, a labor expert at the Universidad Nacional Autónomo de México in Mexico City. “Now we’re going to have more and more labor movements in Mexico.”

The trigger for the strikes, odd though it may sound, was a wage increase. On January 1, Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador doubled the minimum wage on the U.S.-Mexico border to $9.20 a day (the rest of Mexico received a 16 percent increase to $5.30 a day). Most manufacturing workers in Matamoros already earned this amount. They soon became aware of a provision in their union contracts—unique to Matamoros—that requires companies to match federal minimum wage increases.

Two weeks later, “wildcat” strikes, i.e. those not authorized by union leadership, broke out in 45 maquiladoras across Matamoros—mostly auto-parts manufacturers, including Adient, which claims to make one in every three automotive seats in the world. Soon, workers at grocery stores like Sam’s Club, Walmart, and even the city’s main milk distributor, Leche Vaquita, went on strike. Within 10 days, Matamoros’s maquiladora association estimates that companies lost $100 million. Employers across the city threatened to call in federal forces, shut down operations, and leave the city. This week, the Tamaulipas state police were called in to break up encampments at steelworks factories, and a human resources manager at a Coca-Cola bottling plant ordered non-union employees to attack striking workers, including a pregnant woman. But only two plants have shuttered to date, and the federal police have not been deployed.

The movement has also travelled over social media to the industrial cities of Reynosa, Agua Prieta and Ciudad Victoria in northern Mexico, where workers have staged their own wildcat strikes. “We consider this a battle definitively won by the workers,” said Susana Prieto Terrazas, a labor lawyer who lives in El Paso, Texas and the unofficial leader of the 20/32 movement, who has amassed over 80,000 followers on Facebook. In recent weeks, she’s received phone calls from workers in the border cities of Reynosa, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez, asking her to replicate her movement in their cities.

“No one had ever doubled the minimum wage before. This was a totally unprecedented situation,” said Ben Davis, the director of international affairs for the United Steelworkers union, who has worked with the Mexican metalworkers union since the 1990s and recently travelled to Matamoros as part of an international delegation. “No one in Lopez Obrador’s government thought ‘hey something might happen on the northern border if we raise the minimum wage.’ It was a surprise to everybody.”

Over the past several decades, vast swaths of manufacturing areas in the United States have suffered the loss of unionized jobs to Mexico, where labor is one-tenth of the cost. Less discussed is that those jobs, once outsourced, do not support a middle-class lifestyle for Mexican workers, either. In 1992, before the passage of NAFTA, maquiladora workers earned the equivalent of nearly $19.50 a day. Today, they earn just half of that. Many peddle goods, like used clothing, sweet bread, or tamales to survive, as the price of basic goods in the Mexican borderlands is much higher than the rest of the country, sometimes even surpassing those in U.S. border cities: A pound of Serrano chilies in Matamoros costs $2.84, over half the daily minimum wage before the recent increase. A maquiladora worker I met in 2017 who worked for the German electronics company Bosch in Ciudad Juárez, another border city, told me it took him a month to save up enough money to take his family to the movie theater.

But the revamping of the free trade agreement between the United States and Mexico, at the urging of Donald Trump, could reverse some of the post-NAFTA trends, if its terms can be enforced. In part, that’s because Trump is more protectionist than prior Republican presidents. Trump’s U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, one of his more progressive appointees who grew up in a depressed blue-collar town in Ohio, fought tooth and nail for the new deal to include increased labor protections for workers both in Mexico and the United States, much to the ire of other Republican legislators. These provisions also helped induce Democrats and their union allies to back the NAFTA revision, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Such protections tend to appeal to U.S. unions for two reasons, somewhat in tension with one another: First, they would improve labor protections for Mexican workers. Second, the increased cost of labor in Mexico might keep manufacturing jobs from fleeing to Mexico in the first place, an outcome that would satisfy both unions and Trump. “Our unions have pointed out problems in Mexican labor law for many years,” said Finnegan, the global worker’s rights coordinator at the AFL-CIO. In theory, the new deal addresses some of those. “The big question remains enforcement. We have lots of doubts.” On Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi said that the House will not pass the USMCA unless Mexico implements labor reforms first. “We have to see that [Mexico passes] the legislation, that they have the factors in place that will make sure it’s implemented and they demonstrate some commitments in sincerity, because it’s a big issue how workers are treated in Mexico,” she said.

In recent years, under international pressure, the Mexican government has shown some willingness to enact reforms. The killed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) required Mexico do away with corrupt labor courts and give workers a vote in union elections. Last year, Mexican government ratified constitutional reforms, including Convention 98, of the International Labor Organization, to guarantee free and independent unions. These reforms now sit before the Mexican Congress, and are expected to pass in April.

Some experts argue that the ongoing strikes in Matamoros are unlikely to reshape Mexico in the short term: The city was uniquely ripe for strikes and work stoppages because of its history. Decades before NAFTA, in the 1970s, General Motors and Delco moved their electronics manufacturing from Michigan to Matamoros, where they could pay workers a fraction of U.S. wages. Matamoros became a GM company town; and in turn, GM was willing to let Mexican workers unionize and build a robust labor movement under one of Mexico’s largest umbrella unions, the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM). One worker named Agapito González gained notoriety among factory owners and folk hero status among workers when he fought and won a 43 percent salary increase in Matamoros factories, as well as the 40-hour workweek compensated at the rate of 53 hours of work. “Workers in Matamoros are some of the most militant in Mexico,” said Cirila Quintero, a labor expert at the Colegio Frontera Norte in Matamoros. “Their grandparents and parents were unionized, so they know their rights.”

But after NAFTA passed in 1994, even the CTM unions in Matamoros hemorrhaged control to Mexico’s ruling political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). A quiet pact to suppress wages evolved over the intervening decades between Mexican political elites and corporations; the unions were tightly controlled and foreign investment flowed in from the United States.

In most of Mexico, a robust union movement never developed. Ever since the first plants began trickling into the borderlands of Mexico in 1965, following a transnational border industrialization program, Mexican workers have been excluded from every aspect of the collective bargaining process, from negotiating contracts to electing leadership. Outside of Matamoros, many unionized workers do not know that their plant is unionized, and rarely think of striking. (Ninety percent of Mexican manufacturing workers are unionized.) “You might see something on your pay stub that says you paid union dues, but that’s it,” said Davis, the union official from United Steelworkers.

Whether a full-blown labor spring comes to Mexico hinges mostly on the enforcement of new democratic labor laws—specifically, whether Mexico really allows independent unions to form, which would mean coming down hard on powerful union bosses with ties to conservative political parties. Yet as with so many grassroots movements these days, social media has also become a factor, allowing workers to coordinate across Matamoros, and spreading awareness about unions throughout Mexico. As of early April, the 20/32 movement’s Facebook group had over 5,400 members, where workers from around Mexico post inspirational quotes from the Latin American revolutionaries like Jose Martí and Che Guevara and photos of children holding signs outside factories that read “Sí, se puede” and “For a better future, I support my dad.” Videos of thousands of workers dressed in red and black marching through the streets of downtown Matamoros and rallying by a monument to Benito Juarez in the plaza mayor in recent months have gone viral in Mexico, some reaching as many as 80,000 views on Facebook.

Pro-government unions still rule over workers in Mexico, but in coming months and years, President Lopez Obrador will likely be siding with Mexico’s working class on labor issues. This will certainly result in new struggles between big business and workers, with Matamoros as a model. If any lesson can be gleaned from the New Deal in the United States, it’s that improved labor rights often beget more strikes, more wage increases, and loftier demands from workers—as they have in this case in Matamoros. Eventually, fewer U.S. companies may move to Mexico. But with increased legal protections, more spending power, and the president on their side, Mexico’s middle class could also mushroom, transforming both the country’s economy and its politics. Already in Matamoros, 70,000 workers have won.

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