Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Thousands in Hungary protest PM Viktor Orban's 'slave law'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx_qTjc6W3w
'Europe's problem is its failed economic system, not migration' - Yanis Varoufakis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzjGl9ZhKlI&t=8s
Yanis Varoufakis addressing Generation-s - European Spring, Paris 6 Dec 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er4Usr5KS6c
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma: Art and struggle
By Rafael Azul
17 December 2018
Written and directed by
Alfonso Cuarón
Roma is written and
directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, 2001, Children
of Men, 2006, and Gravity, 2013). Shot entirely in Mexico City, in black
and white, the work is a journey back in time and memory to Cuarón’s childhood
in the city’s Roma neighborhood (he was born in 1961) and dedicated to Cuarón’s
own childhood nanny. The central character is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a
domestic servant in an upper middle-class household.
The film takes place between
mid-winter 1970 and mid-summer 1971, a period of about 18 months, bracketing
the unmarried Cleo’s unwanted pregnancy.
Roma is a sensitive portrait
of a family breaking apart within the broader context of a social crisis. It
follows Cleo, a Mixtec Indian, as she performs her daily chores, which include
caring for the family’s four children.
The film is truly an important
work of art. Cuarón has managed in the form of a filmed essay—a poem about a difficult
period in a family’s life and in Cleo’s—to provide viewers a portrait of human
strength and dignity. He has done so without sentimentality, excessive
romanticism or hero worship. What is especially unusual in our day, the
writer-director (who also photographed and co-produced the work) chooses to
concentrate on the more painful and moving fate of the working class figure,
Cleo, and not on the problems of the various family members, whose own
conditions, of course, are worth examining.
In an early scene, Cleo washes
the family’s clothing on the roof while two of the children play around her. As
the camera pans, one sees other women, on other roofs—each working in the same
matter of fact manner. At the same time, one senses something unique about Cleo
in this scene: she pauses in her work to participate in the fantasy life of the
youngest child, an emotional give-and-take echoed in a dramatic episode toward
the end of the film.
In another of Roma’s memorable
sequences, Cleo takes a city bus to the outskirts of the city. The scene in the
shanty-town, composed of cardboard and tin shacks built around a muddy field,
provides a picture of the life of peasant migrants who have been expelled from
the countryside by the suspension and reversal of Mexico’s pre-war land reform
and the resulting rural misery.
The wretched surroundings in
this marginalized township contrast with the vibrancy and creativity of its
inhabitants.
As Cleo walks to her
destination, the township is being bombarded with political propaganda from an
open-air loudspeaker, cynically praising the benefits that President Luis
Echeverría is bestowing on the community. Interior Minister under the previous
president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría directed the infamous 1968 Tlatelolco
student massacre in which 300 to 400 students were murdered.
An unknown number of students,
workers and peasants died in the so-called Dirty War conducted by the Mexican
authorities in the 1960s and 1970s against political opposition.
In addition to those killed in
the numerous massacres, 1,200 people “disappeared,” according to conservative
estimates. Mexican human rights groups have collected evidence of some 650
cases of civilians who disappeared in the state of Guerrero in south-western
Mexico alone, more than 400 of them from the village of Atoyac de Alvarez. The
survivors of detention tell horrible stories of torture and suffering.
Other images in Roma, the
shadows of men in paramilitary training, children in a field, the arid Mexican
landscape and the militaristic parade of a high school marching band passing
through Roma, are nodal moments in the story and effectively direct viewers’
attentions to the underlying drama and tensions.
In regard to the history Roma treats,
by 1970, Mexico had reached the end of its boom and was entering a long period
of economic and social decomposition, from which it has yet to recover.
The phenomenon of the
urbanization and proletarianization of peasants, from the villages and fields
to the slums, throughout the postwar era, took place across Latin America and
led to the formation of a series of megacities, Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos
Aires, Rio de Janeiro and others, creating, among other things, the army of
exploited domestic servants, service workers, street vendors and street
entertainers like those depicted in the film.
Between 1950 and 1960 there
was an explosive growth in Mexico of landholdings of over 1000 hectares (2500
acres), and an equally volatile growth of very small farms of less than 5
hectares (12 acres)—fifty percent of peasants were left landless. In the film,
Adela (Nancy Garcia), a fellow servant, whispers to Cleo that the government
“took your mother’s land.”
These changes did not take
place without mass peasant resistance.
Of course, individual
responses to social processes will differ widely. But if the character is
intended to represent wider layers, to be “typical,” it may be somewhat
misleading that Cuarón depicts Cleo as merely submissive and hard-working, the
first to get up in the morning, the last to go to sleep at night. She is
someone who knows her place in the home and does not need to be told twice
about things.
Thankful that her boss, Sofia
(Marina de Tavira), does not sack her for being pregnant, Cleo continues to do
all the work expected of her: climbing the many steps to the roof to wash
laundry by hand, mopping the floors, serving meals, etc. Her tasks also include
waking the family’s children, with whom she bonds, and getting them ready for
school. She is particularly fond of the youngest.
There is a suggestion, as the
film evolves, of a special link between the women of the household—Sofia,
struggling with a loveless marriage, her widowed mother and the two female
servants. A drunken, unhappy Sofia tells Cleo at one point that “we women are
always alone.” In any case, the lines of authority are clearly established.
Cleo never complains, never has to be told to do something twice, and never
talks back, even when yelled at unjustly.
The strongest emotional
connection Cleo has to the household is through the children. As it turns out,
her extreme devotion to them eventually forces her to go way beyond the call of
duty.
Another element in the film is
the baleful influence of the United States. Cuarón offers a cultural critique,
depicting Yankees or those Mexicans who imitate them as gun-happy landowners,
whiskey drinkers, philanderers and butchers of animals. In one scene, the
physical training of a murderous paramilitary squad, collectively known as “Los
Halcones” (The Hawks), is shown being overseen by a US (i.e., CIA) official.
Corpus Christi Day massacre
On June 10, 1971, Corpus
Christi Day in the Catholic calendar, hundreds of university students protested
in Mexico City, demanding political freedoms and democratic rights for workers
and peasants, an end to repression of labor struggles and an educational system
oriented toward the elevation of the cultural level of workers and peasants.
The demonstrators were
corralled by the military, while the halcones brutally assaulted
them. About 120 students were murdered. Wounded students who attempted to hide
were attacked and killed, even in hospital emergency rooms. The Corpus Christi
Day massacre is also known as El Halconazo (The Hawk Strike). To this
day, no one in the Mexican establishment has been prosecuted for this
horrendous crime.
To his great credit, Cuarón
dramatizes that horrific event. Cleo and Sofia’s mother, out shopping for a
crib, witness the Corpus Christi bloodshed first hand and are deeply
frightened.
In a powerful and moving
moment, a student, cradling her dying comrade and crying out for help, demands
to know why this is happening. Cleo has a personal connection to one of the
brutal killers. She goes into labor.
The student’s question demands
an answer.
To assess the impact of Roma on
young people, the Mexican webpage “ Reporte Índigo ” spoke to high
school students who had just seen the film.
Referring specifically to the
scene of the halconazo, 18-year-old Abigail Ardavín declared: “Normally
our generation finds it difficult to imagine what happened in the past; it’s
like we cannot weave things together. When one sees how life was then, one can
begin to assess what has happened to our society.”
“There are parts that make you
tremble. I think I liked the story. I am still processing the history. Roma is
great, great history,” added Jair Nieto.
The significance of directing
the attention of young people in particular to important historical events, as
Cuarón has done, can hardly be overestimated.
Though the two films are very
different—products of distinct times and circumstances—Cuarón’s approach and
the film’s name brought to this reviewer’s mind another Roma, Italian
director Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta,
1945). Inseparable from the historical events that surround both films is the
not so small change of human relationships. The use of non-professional actors
gives both films a semi-documentary character.
Finally, it must not be lost
on the viewer that Roma, spelled backwards is Amor, the Spanish word for
love. The real heroine of this film, Libo, was Cuaron’s live-in nanny, to whose
memory the film is dedicated.
Roma has been highly
praised and forecast to win an Academy Award in 2019. It is polished in its
photography and sound and the skill of its performers. Cuarón is a justly
celebrated director. It is worth noting that the filmmaker once explained that
“My biggest source of inspiration was my uncle Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, a
world-known criminologist. He found [Leon] Trotsky’s assassin, introduced me to
people like Gabriel García Márquez and constantly advised me to work with
topics that were personal, framing them in a sociopolitical context.”
However, the impact of the
often tragic events in Mexico and throughout Latin America in the 1960s and
1970s, when Cuarón was growing up, no doubt weigh on the director. Roma is
picturesque, but its long takes in which events unfold before the often unmoving
camera suggest a certain passive and fatalistic view of things. It would seem
reasonable to suggest that this view is bound up with the representation of
Cleo’s unquestioning loyalty and that of all the servants depicted in the movie
(no other section of the working class appears).
In that sense, the overall
vision that Cuarón presents is at odds with the spirit of rebellion and
resistance of Mexican workers and peasants throughout history, in the 1970s and
today. The 1950s and 1960s in Mexico were years of intense class struggle,
involving miners, railroad workers, teachers and other key layers of the
working class. These struggles, which only intensified in the 1970s, surely
would have had a profound impact on those who lived through them.
Unfortunately, Roma leaves
out that part of the story.
Roma’s theatrical release
was limited to a few theaters in the US. It became available on December 14 on
Netflix.
Mass demonstration by Los Angeles teachers
By Dan Conway
17 December 2018
Tens of thousands of Los
Angeles teachers and their supporters converged in a rally and march in
downtown Los Angeles Saturday to demand better pay, smaller class sizes and
increased funding for the 640,000 students in the second-largest school
district in the United States. The demonstration, which involved up to 50,000
protesters, was the latest indication of the resumption of resistance by
educators across the US who have been involved in the largest strike wave by
teachers in decades.
More than 33,000 teachers and
health and human service professionals in the Los Angeles Unified School
District (LAUSD) have been working without a new contract since their old
agreement expired in June 2017. Like state governments and school districts
across the country, LAUSD officials claim there is no money to meet the
teachers’ demands and have offered an insulting three percent annual pay
increase to teachers who live in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas
in America.
Teachers voted by 98 percent
in August to authorize the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union to call the
first city wide strike since 1989. The UTLA has defied the strike mandate and
tied up educators in months of state-supervised mediation and fact-finding.
Anger among rank-and-file teachers is boiling over, however, and the UTLA has
been forced to say it would call a strike sometime next month if no settlement
is reached.
In addition to the teachers
themselves, thousands of students, parents, retirees and other workers
demonstrated at Saturday’s March for Public Education. Many recognized the
historically significant character of their fight, attending with children,
friends and parents as well.
While several of the teachers’
walkouts earlier this year, including West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona,
occurred in states led by Republican governors and state legislatures, the
entire political establishment in Los Angeles and California is run by the
Democratic Party. Like their Republican counterparts, state and local Democrats
in California have starved the public schools of funding, diverted public
resources to for-profit charter schools and used standardized testing and other
punitive teacher evaluation schemes to scapegoat educators for the inevitable
educational problems produced by defunding education and the growth of poverty
and other social ills.
Supporters of the World
Socialist Web Site distributed a statement by
the WSWS Teacher Newsletter, titled, “Los Angeles teachers and the fight
for social equality.” Teachers spoke to the WSWS about years of budget cutting
and underfunding, which have left Los Angeles schools in a deplorable state.
Classrooms are regularly overcrowded with 40 to 50 students often assigned to a
single teacher. Due to shortages of school nurses, medical personnel must
rotate among five or more schools, leaving others uncovered for several days at
a time. Music and art programs are largely nonexistent in all but the most
well-off schools.
“The issues facing LA teachers
are part of a national calamity that has been taking place over the last 30 to
40 years,” Brett, a teacher with 13 years who currently teaches 6th grade at
Orchard Arts and Media Academy in the City of Bell, told the WSWS. “There has
been a lack of public investment all across the board that really starts with
education. The lack of respect for public education is glaring and tragic
because it results in people suffering across this nation. We need to do more
to support everyone because the inequality in our country, the gap between the
rich and the poor, continues to widen.”
“In the LAUSD only 40 percent
of our students are obtaining passing test scores. This is because there is a
lack of investment. The result is class sizes through the roof, and teachers
who are getting demoralized. The corporate agenda is causing massive fissures
throughout the country and it’s not healthy for the well-being of our society,”
Brett concluded.
Tamara, a kindergarten teacher
with more than 20 years’ experience, described the impact of the social crisis
on her students. “The demographics in LA have changed since I started working
here. Today, students have far greater needs, mostly associated with increased
trauma. At my site we only have a school nurse one to two times per week. My
students are dealing with poverty, a scarcity of food and grocery stores near
where they live.
“When they arrive at school,
my job is far more than providing an education, but first and foremost taking
care of their social and emotional needs. The meals they have at school are
their only substantive meals throughout the day.”
Tamara went on to speak about
the general crisis of public education. “On a very basic level, there’s more of
an interest in money than in humans,” she said. “When I think of [LAUSD
superintendent and former investment banker Austin] Beutner, I become enraged.
He’s lived a life of privilege. How is someone who has never spent a day of his
life in the classroom a superintendent? It all comes down to commerce and
business, which are placed above our students’ needs.”
Rudy, a physical education and
health teacher, spoke about the global struggle by educators and workers as a
whole against austerity and social inequality. “The struggle is not only
nationwide. It’s worldwide. They’re trying to privatize everything. That’s why
when things go wrong, they blame us. Even though they created the problems in
the first place.”
Asked what he thought about
the “Yellow Vest” protests in France and throughout Europe, Rudy said, “Workers
in France are in the same situation as American workers. The rich always try to
control the funding and divert it to themselves.”
Several teachers at the Los
Angeles demonstration wore yellow vests in solidarity with their class brothers
and sisters in France.
The school district, which is
made up of Los Angeles and 31 surrounding cities and communities, has the
highest number of homeless students of any district in the state. More than 17,250
LAUSD students were recorded as homeless at the start of the prior 2017-2018
academic year. That figure itself was a fifty percent increase over the
previous year and was the highest number of homeless students in district
history.
Students and their families in
the district have also been the victims of the crackdown and deportation of
immigrants by Trump and the Obama administration before him. California has the
highest number of undocumented immigrants in the US and Los Angeles teachers
often find themselves instructing scores of students afraid that their parents
and relatives could be arrested and deported at a moment’s notice. LAUSD, like
school districts around the country and in the Southwestern US in particular,
has noted marked increases in absenteeism, particularly after the Trump
administration began its crackdown on immigrants in 2017.
While teachers and their
supporters expressed determination to fight, the union speakers at Saturday’s
rally did everything to promote illusions in the Democratic Party. UTLA
president Alex Caputo-Pearl told teachers that “hope was in the air” not due to
a mass movement from below but from “a historic school funding initiative on
the ballot in 2020.” The Democratic Party-backed initiative is similar to measures
in other states that would modestly increase corporate taxes, which were either
ruled off the ballot based on bogus technicalities, or, if passed, did little
to reverse decades of defunding public education.
Caputo-Pearl also celebrated
the recent elections of Democrats Gavin Newsom for governor and Tony Thurmond
for state superintendent as advances for teachers. The UTLA’s promotion of the
Democrats exposes the antiworker character of the unions. California Democrats
have used the governor’s office as well as regular supermajorities in the state
legislature to impose savage austerity and cuts to public education. With a
public-school system that was once one of the best funded in the country, the
state now ranks 43rd in the nation in per-pupil spending. This is despite the
fact that the state is home to 141 billionaires who are centered in Silicon
Valley and Hollywood.
American Federation of
Teachers President Randi Weingarten also spoke at the rally, saying the
national “union would stand with LA teachers, just like we stood with teachers
in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona.” Teachers should take such statements
as a warning. Weingarten (salary $513,000) and her counterpart at the National
Education Association, President Lilia Eskelsen Garcia (salary $414,000), are
both part of the top one percent of income earners in the US and thoroughly
hostile to a mass movement of teachers and other educators against endless
austerity measures, which have fueled the stock market bubble. The AFT and NEA
have spent the last year trying to prevent the outbreak of strikes and where
they have broken out to sabotage and shut them down as quickly as possible
before they could coalesce into a national strike of educators.
The mass protests in Los
Angeles, following on the footsteps of wildcat sickouts by Oakland teachers,
demonstrated the growing determination of educators to fight. This is part of a
broader movement of the working class throughout the US and internationally. To
take this fight forward, however, teachers have to form rank-and-file
committees in every school and community, independent of the unions, to link up
the struggle of educators with far broader sections of the working class. The
fight for living wages and full funding for public education is only possible
if the working class conducts a frontal assault on the entrenched wealth and
power of the corporate and financial oligarchy and both capitalist parties, the
Democrats and Republicans.
Monday, December 17, 2018
Saturday, December 15, 2018
5 war-mongering "democrats"
These five Democrats voted for dirty Saudi oil money instead of peace for Yemen:
Jim Costa,
Al Lawson,
Collin Peterson,
Dutch Rupperberger,
David Scott.
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