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Month: January 2019

Trump’s already used national security as an excuse to abuse his power

Published by digby on January 7, 2019

Trump’s already used national security as an excuse to abuse his power


by digby

Why wouldn’t he do it again? My Salon column this morning:

We are in the third week of the Trump shutdown and reality is starting to bite. According to the Washington Post, nobody in the White House had given any consideration to the consequences of a protracted standoff, and were surprised that it resulted in actual disruption and human suffering. That report concludes that administration officials are now focused “on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they can do to intervene.” It’s not going well.

Meanwhile, our national parks are drowning in toxic human waste, security lines at the airport are miserable with TSA agents refusing to work for no pay and even airline pilots are begging the presidentto stop the insanity. That’s just the beginning. At the end of this week federal workers all over the country will miss their paychecks and may start to run out of funds for food and housing.

President Trump insists that federal workers are happy to go without pay in order for him to get his wall. He says they’ll “adjust.” After all, he can relate:

I don’t think I have to explain how absurd that is.

As their first order of business, House Democrats passed the Senate bill which allows the government to reopen by funding the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8 and the rest of the government through the end of the year. That would end the shutdown while they try to work something out on this inane wall issue. Trump had signaled support for that very deal, you’ll recall, until Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh scared him into submission. Now he’s stuck with a shutdown he obviously thought he could bluff his way through.

And from the looks of things, Trump’s allies in the Senate are terrified of Coulter and Limbaugh too. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was formerly a driving force behind bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform but has now joined the screaming banshee caucus, telling Trump that caving in on the wall would end his presidency and hysterically demanding that Democrats sideline negotiators who “see the Border Patrol agents as gassing children.” I don’t know who he’s talking about but it’s worthwhile to point out that Graham once understood that Trump’s wall was folly. During the 2016 campaign he said, “Donald Trump’s plan on immigration is stupid. I find him offensive. … I think the wall Donald Trump is building is between us and Hispanics.”

Right now Trump seems to be trying a two-pronged strategy. The first step is this preposterous notion that he’s offering a big “compromise” by building a wall made of steel rather than concrete, as if that had ever been any kind of sticking point. The man who wrote “The Art of the Deal” seems to think that rather than offering any real concessions in a negotiation he can just make up something the other side never wanted and give it to them. No wonder his businesses went bankrupt four times and he was reduced to marketing his name on cheap consumer goods and playing the fictional character of “Donald Trump” on TV.

If that doesn’t work (and it won’t) he’s threatening to declare a national security state of emergency and unilaterally deploy troops with Pentagon funding to build the wall. This is a shocking idea, but it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. After all, Trump invoked a rarely used national security provision in trade law to unilaterally slap tariffs on steel and aluminum. His recent deployment of troops to the border in response to the so-called threat of poor and desperate women and children seeking asylum is another example. He has already demonstrated a willingness to declare a phony national security crisis which he will then “solve” by invoking extraordinary powers granted to the presidency. There is little reason to doubt he will do it in this case.

Of course, there is no crisis. According to the Pew poll, unauthorized immigration and refugee claims are way down from their historic levels, as is the share of undocumented workers in the labor force. Even Fox News was compelled to challenge the White House on its numbers over the weekend.


Matt Shuham@mattshuham

“I studied up on this”: @FoxNewsSunday fact checks @PressSec on terrorism and border security:
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7:57 AM – Jan 6, 2019
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Twitter Ads info and privacy

The so-called terrorist threat at the border is even more fatuous than the administration’s claims about rampant criminal behavior by immigrants. This latest hysteria began with Trump’s baseless assertion that “Middle Easterners” were marching on the border with the migrant caravan, which suggests this “national security” gambit has been in the works for a while.

Nonetheless, there’s a school of thought that says this is really Trump’s best way out. He can declare himself a strong leader and a big winner while essentially punting the decision to the courts, allowing the government to reopen while the legal issues are hashed out. There is considerable disagreement as to whether or not he will ultimately prevail.

Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman writes in the New York Times that if Trump goes through with using the military for this purpose he would be committing an unconstitutional abuse of his power as commander in chief, adding that if troops obey his command, they’d be committing a federal crime. But according to this chilling article by Elizabeth Goitein in The Atlantic, any president’s ability to evoke these sorts of emergency powers is practically unfettered. After all, Congress has delegated these powers to the president for decades — and for decades presidents have pushed the envelope in dozens of different ways. This time we may finally have a president who is willing to do it for blatantly political purposes and dare anyone who opposes him to do something about it.

There is a long history of judicial deference to the executive branch on national security issues. It will ultimately be up to the five conservative Supreme Court justices to decide if they have the power to step in when the president is clearly concocting a fraudulent emergency for his own reasons. I wouldn’t bet money on them making the right decision.

We can be sure that Democrats in Congress will raise a fuss but unless they are willing to push for an article of impeachment for abuse of power (which they clearly have a right to do) the best we can hope for is that the clock runs out on his term before the court produces an opinion. Validating this action would set a very bad precedent.

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The electric future sneaks up by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 7, 2019

The electric future sneaks up
by Tom Sullivan


Photo Nissan LEAF® from company website.

Electric vehicles are more common than ever around here. The Toyota Prius is everywhere. The Nissan Leaf is slowly coming into its own. A neighbor owns a Tesla. Range is still limited, but improving along with prices. A friend drives a Leaf around town, but keeps her older, gas-powered Subaru for longer trips.

The EV and clean energy industries are not something I’ve watched. But freelance journalist Gregor Macdonald does, as well as watch their impact on oil. He has been publishing a newsletter on “the unfolding story of this global energy transformation” at TerraJoule.us since April 1, 2013 and he wasn’t joking.

Someone else will surely weigh in with the net-carbon footprint downside of building personal vehicles at all, but a long tweet thread of Macdonald’s that caught the attention of Chris Hayes Sunday night was one of the most hopeful(?) things I’ve read in some time.

Macdonald begins bluntly, “China just killed the future of the internal combustion engine.” The transition has arrived sooner than expected. Sale of gas-powered cars is in decline there. “Indeed, the cost-crash for energy transition has been so revolutionary on a global level,” Macdonald writes, “that simple price incentives now taking place at the consumer level are effectively turning what had been costs to gains.”

Electric power generation from wind and solar, Macdonald writes, is expanding and the costs are falling more rapidly than projected. Sale of internal combustion vehicles in California has fallen for the second year in a row. Pure electric (EV) and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) vehicles are at 8.7% of sales in the world’s 5th largest economy. Plus “it takes 70% less energy to move an EV a mile down the road,” Macdonald explains, writing, “Gasoline is in trouble.” He believes we have reached a tipping point, and he is not alone:

Macdonald concludes:

How do large physical systems change? Not overnight. First growth slows. Then growth goes flat. And then the decline. The reason you can’t intuit how much trouble oil and fossil fuels face is because you see easily see the dependency on them, but less so the transition.

The White House still in climate change denial and a proposal to use a 70% marginal tax rate to fund a “Green New Deal” is unlikely to pass a Republican-controlled Senate. News that market forces and technology are slowly doing what politics cannot will not be upbeat enough for climate change activists. But at this moment in 2019, we have to take our good news where we can get it.

The misinformation flow is becoming a gusher

Published by digby on January 7, 2019

The misinformation flow is becoming a gusher

by digby

Axios reports that former Trump administration staffers are seeing Trump devolving:

With the departure of White House chief of staff John Kelly, the misinformation emanating from President Trump has only escalated.

What’s happening: Alumni of this White House see a possible reason. Although Kelly was thwarted in many of his efforts to control the president, one place he made authentic inroads was clamping down on the paper flow to the Oval Office. “Anyone who circumvented that process was going to have a serious problem,” said a former official who saw the transformation up close.

“It has devolved into anarchy,” added another alumnus of Trump’s White House.

“Someone mentioned to me a few days ago it’s like the old [pre-Kelly] days of the administration, just with less people,” this former official continued.

“The wild, wild west. … At least during the early days, he had a bit of a buffer with Hope [Hicks] and [longtime bodyguard] Keith [Schiller] there.”

Wednesday was Kelly’s last formal day in the White House, but his influence had declined since he announced his departure on Dec. 8.

Since then, Trump has made several unusually specific factual assertions that were quickly shown to be inaccurate, suggesting more unvetted information may be reaching him than had been the case in the heyday of Kelly’s control:

Arguably the most notable one: During Wednesday’s devil-may-care, 95-minute Cabinet meeting, Trump said that back in 1979, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan “because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.” A Wall Street Journal editorial scolded: “We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President.”

Walls as a weapon: Trump tweeted last Sunday: “President and Mrs. Obama built/has a ten foot Wall around their D.C. mansion/compound.” The WashPost reported: “Obamas’ neighbors [said] there is no such wall. The 8,200-square-foot structure, despite several security features, is completely visible from the street.”

At the Cabinet meeting, Trump said: “[T]he Vatican has the biggest wall of them all.” Dan Scavino, Trump’s director of social media, had tweeted during the campaign: “Vatican City is 100% surrounded by massive walls.” The NY Times reports: “Vatican City has walls, but they do not enclose the entire territory and visitors can easily enter some parts.”

Also during the Cabinet meeting, per the NY Times, “Trump mocked India for doing no more in Afghanistan than building a library, which generated … head scratching [in New Delhi] because, according to Indian news media, the country has not built a library in Afghanistan in many years.”

And then there’s the president’s depiction of how tariffs work. “China is paying us tremendous tariffs. We’re getting billions and billions of dollars of money pouring into the Treasury,” he said Friday at a Rose Garden news conference. The NY Times points out: “The United States does not send China a bill for the cost of tariffs, which are often passed on to American importers or consumers.”

The WashPost called the Cabinet meeting “a fact-checking nightmare.”

Better rest up: The president believes he pays no price for escalating inaccuracies, even ones that have been repeatedly debunked. (“Bottomless Pinocchios,” the WashPost Fact Checker calls them.)

With most of his human guardrails gone, the unvetted language of Trump’s rallies is once again a staple of his governing.

I hadn’t noticed that the unvetted language of Trump’s rallies wasn’t a staple of his governing, to be honest. During the midterm campaign he ginned up the invented crisis of the “caravan” and used it to make a daft decision to put troops on the border for purely political reasons.

Fly the angry skies

Published by digby on January 7, 2019

Fly the angry skies

by digby

The Airline Pilots Association represents over 60,000 pilots. The president of the association sent a letter to the president:

I am writing to urge you to take the necessary steps to immediately end the shutdown of government agencies that is adversely affecting the safety, security and efficiency of our national airspace system.

DePete explained that the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security operate as both regulators and service providers.

Mechanical inspections, drone oversight and new enhanced communications systems are all threatened.

Worse, air traffic controllers, airspace system maintenance personnel and air marshals are working unpaid.

Moreover, CNN now reports that hundreds of TSA screeners are calling in sick. Could the fact that they’re not being paid have an influence?

This, too, says DePete, could jeopardize safety:

The pressure these civil servants are facing at home should not be ignored. At some point, these dedicated federal employees will encounter personal financial damages that will take a long time from which to recover, if at all.

By writing directly to the president — and merely copying congressional leaders — the pilots appear to be holding him responsible for the potential dangers flowing from the shutdown.

Well, he is:

This stupid wall is insane, kowtowing to Coulter and Limbaugh is pathetic and his tactic of holding his breath until he turns blue simply cannot be enabled.

These people will not be the last to complain.

Clean-up on aisle Syria

Published by digby on January 6, 2019

Clean-up on aisle Syria

by digby

“We have won against ISIS. Our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.

We won, and that’s the way we want it, and (pointing to the sky) that’s the way they want it.”

Apparently, he’s been speaking to the dead.

The Pentagon said the president had ordered the withdrawal be done in 30 days. That’s why he said, “they’re coming back now.”

Well…

President Trump’s national security adviser sought to reassure allies Sunday that the United States would be methodical about withdrawing troops from Syria, promising that the pullout would not occur until the Islamic State was fully eradicated from the country and Turkey could guarantee the safety of Kurdish fighters.

John Bolton’s comments, reported by the Associated Press, are the clearest statement yet from the administration about how officials plan to execute Trump’s abrupt December announcement that he would pull troops from Syria, surprising allies and advisers, sparking an outcry from lawmakers, and prompting the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

“There are objectives that we want to accomplish that condition the withdrawal,” Bolton said while speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, on a trip intended to allay Israeli leaders’ concerns about Trump’s announcement. “The timetable flows from the policy decisions that we need to implement.”

Trump touched off global confusion and panic when he announced via tweet in mid-December that he would order the withdrawal of the 2,000 troops stationed in Syria to help fight the Islamic State — a move that both allies and critics warned could upset the balance of power in the Middle East, emboldening Russia and Iran, and threaten what tenuous stability U.S.-aligned forces had been able to achieve in Syria.

Bolton’s comments come amid reports that Trump had agreed to extend his initial 30-day deadline for withdrawal to four months. When asked whether Bolton’s comments would affect that timeline, a senior administration official said that “there is no specific timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, and reports to the contrary are false.”

Nonetheless, the plans and assurances the national security adviser offered in Israel were confirmation that withdrawal plans are slowing until conditions on the ground match the president’s stated assessment of the situation in Syria. As part of his announcement, Trump said the United States had “defeated ISIS” there — a claim that his advisers and political allies have disputed. ISIS is an alternative acronym for the Islamic State.

Trump’s advisers and GOP allies have warned that pulling out U.S. troops would also leave Kurdish fighters — who had been vital U.S. allies — susceptible to attacks by Turkey, where leaders see the group as a threat to their nation’s sovereignty.

In a Sunday news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bolton said that “the defense of Israel and other friends in the region is absolutely assured” and that the United States would “take care of those who have fought with us against ISIS and other terrorist groups.” He also said that the withdrawal would take place but “in a way to make sure ISIS is defeated and is not able to revive itself and become a threat again.”

But while Bolton’s comments may have come as a relief to some, a top House Democrat stressed that the priorities the national security adviser outlined were “obvious” — and simply highlighted how dangerous Trump’s initial withdrawal announcement was.

I don’t pretend to know the solution to this thorny problem. Thousands of lives are on the line and it seems to me that nobody has the answer for how to mitigate the carnage. But whatever Trump is doing is chaotic lunacy that is clearly dangerous and risky and will likely make things worse. We know he impulsively made the decision on the phone with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan which was so abrupt that even Erdogan himself unsuccessfully tried to walk him back.

He’s nuts and he’s making nuttier and nuttier decisions. Bolton isn’t much better but I think he’s somewhat predictable.
Pompeo’s an Iran hawk but he has at least some credibility in the region. He’s headed out in a couple of days to follow up with more damage control. But damn, depending on those guys to clean up this mess is extremely worrying. They are charter members of the Middle East wrecking crew themselves.

As I said, I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe an abrupt, immediate withdrawal would work out. But making the decision without consulting with allies or even attempting to understand the ramifications is terrifying. It’s a monumental mistake to enable his rash and careless incompetence simply because in one instance it aligns with your own goals. That applies to his political allies and adversaries alike.

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What does this say about his supporters?

Published by digby on January 6, 2019

What does this say about his supporters?

by digby

I just have to ask this once again: how can I possibly respect people who are supporting this lunatic?

He got to the White House through flukes, errors, cheating, celebrity, petulance, and prejudice that gave him 70,000 votes across three states in an anachronistic, undemocratic system. But he’s there now and he’s demonstrated what he is. This man is not right. Anyone can see that.

The fact that tens of millions of Americans, including 90% of self-identified Republicans still support this narcissistic psychopath tells us that the sickness is cultural.  These people admire a man with an extremely abnormal personality disorder and are willing to give him the power over life and death on this planet. America needs to grapple with what that says about us and our system. Something has gone very wrong.

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A little time capsule

Published by digby on January 6, 2019

A little time capsule

by digby

Trump had been wanting to do business in Moscow long before  2015. The above was from a trip he made in the 1980s. According to the article below, which I hadn’t seen before, he went back in the 90s. This article says a Moscow development would be his first foreign deal.

Trump Tours Sites for Luxury Towers

By Jeff Grocott Nov. 06 1996 00:00

If one of the United States’ most notorious developers gets his wish, the next grand addition to the Moscow skyline won’t be a Stalin skyscraper — it will be a Trump Tower.

“We’re looking at building a super-luxury residential tower,” said casino and real-estate mogul Donald Trump, “which I think Moscow desperately wants and needs.”

Trump arrived Tuesday for a three-day visit, during which he said he would be checking out sites for a luxury residential high-rise.

If his Moscow dream is realized, it will mark Trump’s first real-estate development project outside the United States. He picked Moscow, he said, because “it is really a city with a great future, great potential.”

The main stop on Trump’s itinerary was Ducat Place on Ulitsa Gasheka, near Triumfalnaya Ploshchad. The Ducat property is being developed in three stages by cigarette producer Liggett-Ducat Ltd., which holds two back-to-back 49-year leases on the land.

Liggett-Ducat has completed one phase of the project and the second, the 14,000 square meter Ducat Place II office center, is near completion. According to Liggett-Ducat, Trump is here to talk about developing Ducat Place Phase III into Europe’s first Trump Tower.

The force behind Trump’s visit to Moscow was Ben LeBow, chairman of the board of Liggett-Ducat’s U.S.-based parent company, Brooke Group Ltd. “Donald is the preeminent marketeer and developer in the world,” said LeBow. “We want the best for Moscow — and Donald’s it.”

Trump, as usual, is thinking big: He is visiting other potential sites in Moscow and said he is looking at building “beyond one” residential tower here.

Ronald Bernstein, the president of Brooke Overseas Ltd. and Liggett-Ducat Ltd., said other future projects are a possibility. “But we’ll take it one at a time,” he said.

Trump already has a track record for planning opulent business addresses, casinos and hotels — and pulling them off. He was worth an estimated $1.7 billion in 1989 when his assets included New York’s Trump Tower and fabled Plaza Hotel, but a market reversal found him with over $900 million in debt in 1991.

In recent years, he rode his three Atlantic City casinos back to fiscal health, and is now worth an estimated $450 million to $700 million.

He actually never brought his casinos back to financial health as you know.

It’s interesting that the first place Trump wanted to build outside the US was Moscow. It seems to have become his holy grail. I don’t know that it means anything especially. Maybe he’s just always had an affinity for the place. Which would be fine. Except there is evidence that he benefitted from their interference/sabotage of the US election in exchange for money and/or policy changes and that’s not fine. It’s possible that they have some leverage on him even today and that’s not fine either.

And even if he’s completely innocent of all that, his ignorance, corruption and malevolence have allowed foreign governments (including Russia) to manipulate him into decisions that benefit them instead of the American people. That’s not all on them, it’s on equally ignorant and malevolent Americans, particularly the leadership of the Republican Party. These foreign leaders are behaving in a rational manner looking out for their own interests. The US government, under Trump and the GOP, is not.

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Smart cookie

Published by digby on January 6, 2019

Smart cookie

by digby

Trump was very offended that Rashida Tlaib was in a bar and said “motherfucker.”

Well, I thought her comments were disgraceful. This is a person that I don’t know. I assume she’s new. I think she dishonored herself, and I think she dishonored her family. Using language like that in front of her son, and whoever else was there, I thought that was a great dishonor to her and to her family. I thought it was it was highly disrespectful to the United States of America.

In the Oval Office it would have been perfectly acceptable:

*I should note that I don’t give a flying fuck if people curse in bars OR the oval office.

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If they don’t think it’s broke, they won’t fix it by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 6, 2019

If they don’t think it’s broke, they won’t fix it
by Tom Sullivan


Photo from “City Limits: Urban Decay and the Decline of Detroit” via ‘Home, Crisis and the Imagination’ Network.

As the sitting president holds government employees hostage over taxpayer funding for a border wall he promised Mexico would pay for, Americans increasingly feel squeezed by an economy that no longer lives up to its promises.

With 800,000 government workers unsure when their next paychecks will arrive, a few have have put out contribution jars, figuratively speaking, beside the online cash register:

Julie Burr, a single mom and contracted government worker from Kansas City, Missouri, created a GoFundMe page two days after Christmas asking the public for help. “I’m losing pay every day that this government shutdown continues,” Burr wrote. “I’ve taken on extra shifts at my 2nd job but it isn’t going to pay rent and all my bills… I’m in panic mode right now.”

Daily Beast reports over 1,000 such sites have cropped up as the Trump shutdown approaches its third week. Most ask for amounts from $1,000 to $5,000, but have received no donations.

President Donald Trump encouraged landlords to be nice “to be nice and easy” on renters late behind on payments during the partial government shutdown he now wants to re-brand a strike. Trump told reporters on Friday he believes he has the support paycheck workers:

“This really does have a higher purpose than next week’s pay,” Mr. Trump said. “And the people that won’t get next week’s pay or the following week’s pay, I think if you ever really looked at those people, I think they’d say Mr. President, keep going. This is far more important.”

One might call him out of touch, with or without the added expletive.

Alissa Quart, author of “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,” writes in the New York Times:

Shalynn Womack is 60 years old and lives with a lot of economic uncertainty. She’s one of a group, she says, that “didn’t get the life we thought being well-educated would provide.” Ms. Womack, who lives in Tennessee, is still plagued by “the sense that I must have done something terribly wrong somewhere along the way.”

The middle class is being squeezed, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren found while still a Harvard law professor. The working poor as well. Costs have risen. Pay scales have not. Jobs have become less secure and come with fewer benefits. The pain and ire of the endless struggle, Quart finds, “politicians didn’t take seriously enough.” (See the president’s remarks above.) Trump tapped those anxieties in his 2016 campaign, but has done little to alleviate them. Anxious workers are easier to motivate to vote.

Adding to the stress is a culture of secrecy about personal finances that makes people reluctant to admit their struggles, says Anat Shenker-Osorio, author of “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy.” She hears expressions of self-loathing from focus group members convinced their problems are unique, when they are in fact widespread.

Quart continues:

As a result, what the electorate doesn’t need to hear are Horatio Alger stories of how candidates worked their way up from humble origins, with the implied moral that anyone can make it in America with enough hard work. These kinds of tales can insidiously lead middle-class people today to blame themselves more for not flourishing.

Instead, the new Congress and candidates of the future should tell voters that it’s O.K. to be mad about being in debt, that this is a savage society we now live in. They could talk about their own experience of debt, be it student or medical, or the debt of someone in their family. (What makes this a bit harder is how unrelatable, and depressing, the wealth of our Congress still is: in 2015, it was majority millionaire.)

The cultural myth that virtuous Americans are those who can rise from poverty to riches on hard work alone makes it easier for wealthy lawmakers to insist people’s struggle are not part of a larger systemic failure. Or else, to propose solutions premised on an economy that no longer works for average Americans as they believe it does. (It’s working just fine for them.) Republicans and Democrats alike contribute to perpetuating the myth, Shenker-Osorio wrote in a Friday Facebook post:

A solid decade of widely replicated experiments show that belief in economic mobility (ie America as land of opportunity where if you work hard you achieve) inhibits desire for government redress of inequality. Yet, we continue to bow down at the altar of “hard work;” indeed, we campaign on this rhetoric thereby reinforcing our opponents’ lies about those who struggle as culprits of their own misfortune while also undermining our case for a government that actually prevents and solves for the predatory violence of capitalism.

“We all know people who work unbelievably hard and earn almost nothing,” futurist Sara Robinson responds. Meanwhile, a rentier class collects the bulk of the country’s generated wealth:

Ergo: nobody gets what they deserve any more. The cause-and-effect between hard work and a fair reward is completely broken. This assertion may be powerful; I know that it gets the people I talk to, both right and left, nodding vigorously.

It’s also a quick segue from here to a discussion about legal and moral accountability — places where the lines of reward and punishment are also seen as being hopelessly broken. There are no real consequences for anything, good or ill. And this is a profound, rock-bottom crisis for people’s trust in democracy.

Parroting the “hard work” message, even as the way things ought to work, Shenker-Osorio adds, undercuts the lived reality of people who know from hard experience it does not pay off as it once may have, and dampens demand for an economy that works for everyone.

“Show of hands. Who knows someone who ‘works hard and plays by the rules’ and still struggles year after year?” would be a good opener at a town hall meeting.

Arriba, abajo: Roma (***) By Dennis Hartley @denofcinema5

Published by digby on January 6, 2019

Saturday Night at the Movies

Arriba, abajo: Roma (***)

By Dennis Hartley

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma (currently available on Netflix) is one of those contemporary arthouse flicks that has “A Compendium of Classic World Cinema” tattooed on its forehead (either that, or “I’ve Seen Too Many Goddamned Movies” is tattooed on mine).

For example, take the title, which recalls Fellini’s Roma (1972), his semi-autobiographical love letter to the city he lived in for years. Cuaron’s film is his semi-autobiographical love letter to the city he lived in for years; although in this case it refers not to Rome, Italy but to the eponymous neighborhood of Mexico City where he grew up.

The story centers on a young woman named Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) who is employed as a maid for an upper middle-class family living in politically turbulent Mexico City during the early 1970s. There is another maid in the household named Adela (Nancy Garcia), but Cleo looks to be the de facto nanny, showing a close and loving bond with the 4 children.

The father (Fernando Grediaga) is a physician, who travels frequently due to his work. Or so it seems; when he takes an extended trip to Quebec on “business”, the worst fears of his wife Sofia (Marina de Tavira) are confirmed when she learns he’s decided to play house for keeps with his mistress (World Cinema Rule #142…there’s always a mistress).

As Sofia struggles with how she is going to gently break the news to her kids that daddy has split town on them because he is a cheating bastard, the family dynamic is further complicated when Cleo finds herself struggling with how she’s going to gently break the news to her employer that she is with child by her short-term boyfriend Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) who splits town on her faster than you can say “I think I’m pregnant.”

If the narrative is beginning to sound not dissimilar to a tawdry telenovela, you are very perceptive. Cuaron’s cliché-ridden script is not the film’s strongest suit. That said, the man knows how to set up a shot, and his eye is keen (Cuaron pulled cinematography duty here as well). In fact, his B&W photography is stunning enough to forgive a flimsy story.

Where Curaon excels here is in giving the viewer an immersive sense of time and place. There are several memorable set-pieces; most notably a scene wherein the children’s grandmother helps a very pregnant Cleo shop for a crib. That everyday mundanity may not make for riveting cinema, but the situation percolating in the street right in front of the store, which suddenly escalates and engulfs the women in a horrifying manner…does.

I’ll admit being a little late to the party on this film, which has popped up on a surprising number of critics’ “10 best” lists for 2018. I say “surprising” because it has had limited theatrical engagements since late November and has only been streaming on Netflix since December 14th (I stumbled across it quite by accident while scrolling through the network’s maddeningly unsearchable programming menu) It has also been nominated for 3 Golden Globes: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (as I have already discussed, I have to raise a Belushi eyebrow regarding that screenplay nom).

While many of my fellow critics have swooned mightily under its apparent spell, for me Roma is, alas, a mixed bag. Aparicio has a quietly charismatic screen presence and gives a fine, naturalistic performance as Cleo; although you wish she’d been given a little more to do with her substantial screen time beyond playing the quietly suffering, archetypal Noble Peasant. Visually, it’s quite a beautiful film. And there is certainly nothing wrong with emulating and evoking the likes of Fellini, Kalatozov, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and other masters of world cinema. It’s just a bit of a disappointment from Curaon, who has given us some outstanding films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men, and Gravity.

(The 2019 Golden Globes ceremony airs this Sunday on NBC @8pm EST/5pm PST).

Previous posts with related themes:

The Second Mother
La Nana
The Women on the 6th Floor
Bad Hair
The Housemaid

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley