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The right-wing press is all agog, and if it’s being honest a bit dizzy and disoriented: A man it has been taught—and teaches—to fear and loathe, a man whose very existence is anathema to them, a man who is in more or less open warfare with its second-favorite (maybe third now that Boris Johnson’s in No. 10?) world leader, a man who has turned the seemingly admirable phrase “open society” into a code word for “secret world government” to it, a man who dares to be worth an order of magnitude more than the president, a man who embodies the International Jew it hates, has said something nice, however qualified, about Donald Trump. Worse, he’s playing its racist and nativist tendencies like the collapsing pound, positioning himself to the right of the president on China and warning that our deal-obsessed leader, having shed himself of his uncompromising, war-obsessed National Security Adviser, might not grind the Middle Kingdom to dust. And he’s done it in the pages of its house organ, the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
The greatest—and perhaps only—foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration has been the development of a coherent and genuinely bipartisan policy toward Xi Jinping ’s China. The administration rightly declared Beijing a strategic rival and placed Huawei, China’s multinational telecommunications giant, on the Commerce Department’s so-called “entity list” as a national-security threat…. The current situation strongly favors the U.S. However, President Trump may soon undermine his own China policy and cede the advantage to Beijing…. In my view, he wants to arrange a meeting with President Xi Jinping as the 2020 election approaches and make a trade deal with him, and he wants Huawei’s status on the table as one of his bargaining chips.
You can see the dilemma faced by the likes of Fox News and the Washington Examiner, caught as they are between two ironclad principles: that everything George Soros says and believes is wrong, that indeed his whole existence is essentially a crime, and that every rare word of praise uttered by a celebrity, no matter how minor, about the president must be played up as much as possible. As it turns out—and much to the president’s satisfaction, one must imagine, the latter proves the more important standard. As Soros himself says, there’s an election next year.
Will Trump Sell Out the U.S. on Huawei? [WSJ]
Soros calls Trump’s China stance his ‘greatest’ foreign policy achievement, warns on Huawei [Fox News]
George Soros praises Trump’s China policy but urges hard line on Huawei [Washington Examiner]
(Photo by Thos Robinson/Getty Images for USO of Metropolitan New York)
During WWII, what Biglaw founding partner served as the president of the National Jewish Welfare Board — one of the six institutions that ultimately founded the USO?
Hint: He also served on the National Advisory Panel to Study Juvenile Delinquency, an executive board member of the Boy Scouts, and a member of the New York State Commission Against Discrimination.
See the answer on the next page.
To state it extremely generously, Donald Trump’s supposed support of the men and women serving in our military, and their families, is superficial. He does say he supports the military — a lot. But what he actually does paints a grossly different picture.
Trump said in 2018 that the amount set aside in the nation’s next budget for the military would be the “most amount ever.” That was a lie. The Defense Authorization Act Trump signed for fiscal year 2019 included a Pentagon budget of $716 billion, far less than the historically high $950 billion budget (in today’s money) that was set aside for the U.S. military to close out World War II in 1945. Trump’s supposedly record-setting military budget wasn’t even as much as the $726 billion Obama designated for the military in 2011.
Another oft-repeated Trump lie is that he gave military personnel their first raise in 10 years. In fact, the troops have gotten a raise every year since 1983, and every year since 1961, if you discount an administrative quirk in 1983. To be fair, the military pay increases of 2.4 percent and 2.6 percent in 2018 and 2019, respectively, were among the largest of the last 10 years, although they still pale in comparison to the 3.4 percent military pay increase President Obama signed into law for 2010. I guess it’s the least Trump can do in return for diverting servicemembers to his failing golf resort in Scotland.
The most recent, and probably highest profile, example of Trump using the troops as a political cudgel while simultaneously picking their pockets is the $3.6 billion in military funding he diverted to build his border wall. Among other things, this money was supposed to have gone to construct military training facilities, hangars, arms ranges, and schools for children on bases.
While it’s cruel and wasteful to take away money meant to help educate the children of America’s servicemembers and put it toward a border wall that even the Cato Institute agrees we don’t need, at least that move had a purpose behind it. But in one of the dumbest tweets of a presidency rife with dumb tweets, it seems Trump recently severely impaired the utility of a $2.5 billion U.S. military spy satellite for no real reason at all.
On August 30, Trump tweeted an image of an Iranian rocket launch pad, apparently in an attempt to troll Iran about their recent failed satellite launch. Although Trump did not say where the image came from, people who can do calculus immediately figured out that it was almost certainly from an American military satellite known as USA 224 that was launched in 2011. Satellites are visible to anyone with a powerful enough telescope and a dark enough backyard. While satellite watchers had already been able to see USA 224 gliding overhead, and were able to calculate its orbit, they otherwise knew next to nothing about the highly classified object.
But Trump’s August 30 tweet all but confirmed that USA 224 is one of America’s multibillion-dollar KH-11 spy satellites. Amateur researchers were able to use the shadows in the image Trump tweeted as sun dials to verify the time at which the image was taken. The Iranian launch pad was directly below the calculated orbit of where USA 224 was at the time.
Melissa Hanham, a Viennese satellite imagery expert interviewed by NPR, said she was amazed by the clarity of the image, given that the high speed of satellites and the fact that they must peer down through miles of atmosphere tend to blur satellite images. “I imagine adversaries are going to take a look at this image and reverse-engineer it to figure out how the sensor itself works and what kind of post-production techniques they’re using,” she told NPR news.
While there has been speculation that a handful of images released publicly by the military in the 90s came from much earlier versions of KH-11 satellites, before Trump’s tweet, the only definitively known examples of KH-11 satellite images were those leaked to a British military magazine by a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst in 1984. For releasing those images, the analyst served two years in prison for espionage.
We can and should have a real debate about how we use military resources, what military funding priorities should be, and where we can trim the fat off the military budget. But lying about military spending, raiding military funds to prop up pointless vanity projects, and recklessly tweeting intel about our expensive spy satellites are not good ways to go about it.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
Most of us who made it a habit to attend our high school english classes know the author John Steinbeck as the scrivener responsible for many canonical classics, such as The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. His works are read and cherished the world around and his literary legacy is unimpeachable.
But, to most, his legacy in the courts of these United States has been less examined. Here also, though, has Steinbeck made his mark, as various of his kin have been fighting, as the court puts it, over “his intellectual property for almost half of a century.” The latest chapter arises in the case captioned Kaffage v. Estate of Steinbeck and concerns a challenge at the Ninth Circuit to a Los Angeles jury’s finding that Gail Knight Steinbeck and the estate of Thomas Steinbeck had gone way, way, way east of Eden and were responsible for $5.25 million in compensatory damages and $7.9 million in punitive damages. The damages were to be paid to Elaine Steinbeck’s estate, which prevailed on its claims for slander of title, breach of contract, and tortious interference with economic advantage.
This epic battle between Gail, the first John’s wife (and her estate) and the first John’s sons from a previous marriage (and their offspring and in-laws, referred to collectively herein as “offspring”) has been almost as action packed and dramatic as the travails of George and Lennie, and with almost as many dead mice.
When the first John passed away, he left the copyrights in his works to Gail, his wife, and left some dough but no copyrights to his sons. Per 17 USC 304, one of the termination provisions of the Copyright Act, though, the sons acquired certain copyrights (or copyright-adjacent rights) via the passage of time. To address these rights, Gail and the sons entered into a settlement agreement in 1974 that established their shares of revenues resultant from the Steinbeck copyrights.
As it would happen, a mere two years later the Copyright Act was amended and Section 304 was rewritten in such a way that “no agreement to the contrary” could divest one of their 304 rights. This amendment would serve as a basis for the offspring to challenge the 1974 agreement as an “agreement to the contrary” and negotiate a new compact in1983 that increased their revenue shares.
At this point, it was contemplated that peace would prevail amongst the extended Steinbeck clan. But in litigation, like in life, “some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.” The court cites this passage from the Grapes of Wrath in a not-so subtle allusion to the three-decades-plus of court battles that have followed the 1983 agreement.
In 2010, a court in New York conclusively decided that the 1983 agreement was binding on the parties and addressed in toto the copyright and other claims pending before that court. Undeterred, the Steinbeck offspring, as the court laments, “continued spending time and treasure asserting rights courts had already told them they did not have.” In November 2017, the Ninth Circuit held once-and-for-all (or at least attempted to) that the 1983 agreement bound the parties and that the 2010 New York decision confirmed that the offspring held no copyright interests in the Steinbeck works.
With this win pocketed, Elaine’s estate brought to trial its own claims, arguing to the jury that the Steinbeck offspring had run around town claiming to own the Steinbeck copyrights and had in so doing scuttled numerous potential deals for film remakes and other viable projects. As evidenced by the jury award mentioned above, the decision-makers were convinced that the offspring’s acts damaged Elaine’s estate’s ability to monetize the Steinbeck copyrights.
The Ninth Circuit upheld the compensatory damages against the offspring but vacated the punitive damages because the record was inadequate. It found that Elaine’s estate “failed to meet her burden of placing into the record [‘]meaningful evidence[’] of Gail’s financial condition and ability to pay any punitive damages award sufficient to permit us to conduct the comparative analysis on appeal required by California law.” As such evidence is required by precedent like Kelly v. Haag, 145 Cal.App.4th 910, 52 Cal. Rptr. 3d 126, 130 (2006), the damages award was vacated. This may seem harsh, as the court could have remanded for development of that record, but one can read between the lines of the court’s opinion to ascertain that they want this case to be done, and now.
The opinion minces no words in its decree, mandating that the offspring “must now stop attempting to relitigate” settled matters and “must also stop representing to the marketplace that they have any intellectual property rights or control over John Steinbeck’s works.”
This stern admonishment was warranted because documents produced at trial established that when Elaine’s estate was negotiating film rights for The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, the offspring worked to “insert themselves and thwart negotiations” by “riddl[ing them] with lawsuits.” And, the court adroitly notes, “the record stands as persuasive evidence that they made good on the threat.”
The offspring had previously “vowed they will not stop litigating their interests in profiting from John Steinbeck’s literary works until Gail draws her last breath,” and it seems like they meant that which they said. The court, after reciting a Bleak House passage denigrating endless litigation, closes the opinion by hopefully noting that “this dispute is indeed over.” Only time will tell.
Scott Alan Burroughs, Esq. practices with Doniger / Burroughs, an art law firm based in Venice, California. He represents artists and content creators of all stripes and writes and speaks regularly on copyright issues. He can be reached at scott@copyrightLA.com, and you can follow his law firm on Instagram: @veniceartlaw.
The former economics professor, appointed last year to get the economy out of a two-decade rut, named a nine-member panel consisting of academics, bankers and the governor and two deputy governors of the nation’s central bank.
The committee, first mooted in March, is a step toward setting a benchmark interest rate and introducing inflation targeting as Zimbabwe’s newly introduced currency plunges and consumer prices surge.
Ncube reintroduced the Zimbabwe dollar, which the country had abandoned in 2009, and banned the use of foreign currency in June. The unit, a precursor of which was tied to the U.S. dollar at parity in February, is now trading at 11.99 to the dollar.
While Ncube has suspended the release of annual inflation statistics until February, economists estimate that the rate is between 230% and 570%. The nation’s 400,000 civil servants are demanding increased pay after the devaluation decimated their spending power.
The introduction of the MPC will help provide oversight of the central bank, though its mandate remains unclear, said Lloyd Mlotshwa, head of equities at brokerage IH Securities Ltd. in Harare, the capital.
“Until their terms of reference are clarified, it’s difficult to gauge how effective the monetary policy committee will be,” he said. “For example, if there is a vote on interest rates, does each member have one vote?”
The MPC members include Kumbirai Katsande, a former managing director of Nestle SA’s Zimbabwean unit, and Douglas Munatsi, the former chief executive officer of ABC Holdings Ltd., which owns lender BancABC. Also included are Eddie Cross, a former opposition politician, and Ashok Chakravarti, an economics professor at the University of Zimbabwe.
Ncube also named an 11-member board to the central bank, after the tenure of the previous directorate expired in May.
Those appointed include Caleb Fundanga, the former governor of the Bank of Zambia, Jerry Parwada, a finance professor at Edith Cowan University in Australia and Katsande, according to a statement emailed by the Treasury on Wednesday.
The board will be chaired by John Mangudya, the central bank governor. He will be deputized by Katsande.
South Africa will be sending a delegation from both the ANC and its government to former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s funeral at the weekend.
ANC secretary general Ace Magashule said President Cyril Ramaphosa, would lead the delegation as both head of state and leader of the party.
The delegation would be made up of ANC leaders, government officials and many other leaders, he said. This was because Mugabe had “played a very important role as a pan-African in South Africa”.
Magashule made the comments on Tuesday morning as he made his way to Zimbabwe for a meeting of some of the continent’s liberation movements.
The ANC has had a long history of working with Mugabe and his political party Zanu-PF, a sister liberation movement, which played a role in South Africa’s own struggle for democracy.
Mugabe died last week at the age of 95 in a Singaporean hospital.
Various African leaders are expected to attend his funeral on Saturday, which is expected to be followed by a burial at Heroes’ Acre on Sunday in Harare.
Mugabe’s remains are also expected to return to Zimbabwe on Wednesday.
“He was a part of us, he had been part of us. He is one of the leaders who brought Zimbabwe to where it is,” said Magashule of the controversial leader who was once celebrated and ended up being criticised for clinging to power for far too long.
Mugabe had been in power from 1980 until 2017, when he was overthrown in a military coup leaves a legacy that over the years evolved from liberation hero to political and economic misrule.
“It’s not only Mugabe but the party he represented that brought the economic freedom to the people of Zimbabwe, he gave them education, people from Zimbabwe are highly educated. He actually ensured they get the land, an issue we are grappling with,” said Magashule.
“Aluta continua for a better Africa, a better South Africa and for a better Zimbabwe. Our people must never lose hope,” said Magashule.
Post published in: Featured
However, the party’s 20th anniversary bash has been moved to Saturday, 28th September 2019 in the wake of Mr. Mugabe’s funeral.
Our 20th anniversary celebrations are meant to be a birthday bash and in the true spirit of ubuntu, even in the village, one does not hold a birthday
party when there is a funeral in the neighbourhood. The cultural deportment is to postpone the celebration and allow the funeral to proceed.
The MDC is a party tooted in the African values. Notwithstanding our legendary differences with Mr. Mugabe; we have no reason to exhibit barbarity by hosting a national festivity during his funeral. We have never glossed over Mr. Mugabe’s transgressions but we will allow his funeral and burial to proceed ahead of our anniversary celebrations. We are a proud African political movement and the decision to defer our 20th birthday bash is in keeping with our African civility.
As we officially commemorate this party formed exactly 20 years ago to the day, we note that it has indeed been a tenuous journey of courage, growth and the people’s victories.
Indeed, 20 is a significant number.
In the bible, we learn that for 20 years Jacob waited to get possession of his wives and property, and to be freed from the control of Laban his father-in-law. For 20 years the children of Israel waited to be freed of Jabin, the king of Canaan who oppressed them.
Therefore the number 20 is about spiritual progression and karma, reaping what is sown.
Zimbabweans were brutalized in the course of our journey, some were raped while others were callously murdered and paid the ultimate price.
Today, we remember them.
Happy birthday, MDC.
[email protected]: Celebrating Courage, Growth and the People’s Victories.
Luke Tamborinyoka
MDC Deputy National Spokesperson
The death of Robert Mugabe, the 95-year-old former president of Zimbabwe, on Friday elicited a mixed and somewhat subdued response from Zimbabweans, in part because he had already suffered his political death after being overthrown by the military in 2017.
Zimbabweans had celebrated the end of Mr. Mugabe’s 37-year-rule with enthusiasm on the streets and on social media. Until the coup, we Zimbabweans had been resigned to living under Mr. Mugabe’s rule till his death. There was a feeling he would outlive us.
After his ouster, Mr. Mugabe’s presidential portrait was replaced in public buildings by that of his longtime associate Emmerson Mnangagwa, who created a certain narrative of the coup: Emmerson was the dutiful son who merely took the reins from Robert, the ailing father and liberation hero who was being abused by his much younger second wife, Grace and her cronies, a faction of politicians who were born too late to participate in the war of the 1970s that ended white minority rule.
Speaking of Mr. Mugabe’s legacy has always been a difficult task without falling into the false dichotomies created by the tensions between his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front and the West over transferring settler-owned land to black Zimbabweans.
The 1979 agreement that ended the conflict between Mr. Mugabe’s fighters and the white government gave political control to the black majority but ensured that the most productive farmland in this mostly agricultural nation remained in the hands of a few thousand white settlers. Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, committed to raising hundreds of millions of dollars to buy white-owned land and redistribute it, but under the agreement white owners couldn’t be forced to sell for at least 10 years.
When Mr. Mugabe was elected prime minister in 1980, in his famous inaugural address, he urged Zimbabweans to “to forget our grim past, forgive and forget.” He gained greater popularity as his government embarked on huge social spending programs, which included the creation of an excellent education system.
But Mr. Mugabe swiftly moved to consolidate power. In 1982, arms believed to belong to former guerrilla fighters associated with Joshua Nkomo, a key leader in the liberation struggle and a contender to being the first black prime minister of the country, were found. Mr. Mugabe stripped Mr. Nkomo, who came from the Ndebele minority group, of his cabinet post and accused him of plotting a coup.
Soon the Fifth Brigade, a Korean-trained military unit reporting to Mr. Mnangagwa, then the minister of national security, killed more than 20,000 Ndebele people, who were accused of being “dissidents” supporting Mr. Nkomo. The Constitution was amended to give Mr. Mugabe even greater powers in an executive presidency.
In the late 1980s, an economic crisis forced Mr. Mugabe’s government to turn to a structural adjustment program by the International Monetary Fund in 1991. Unemployment and inflation rose, and do did popular disenchantment with Mr. Mugabe’s rule. Organized labor and civil rights groups led the dissenting voices. Pressure mounted on Mr. Mugabe to revamp an economy anchored on a white landowning class allied with international capital.
In 1997, as Mr. Mugabe’s government attempted to speed up land redistribution through the expropriation of 1,471 farms, Britain reneged on the commitment to finance land reform. A British official argued that a Labour government “without links to former colonial interests” had no “special responsibility” to pay for redistribution.
Increasingly agitated rural communities, veterans, local politicians and black business owners continued to pressure the ruling party to use its two-thirds majority to transform the agricultural sector, which contributed about 20 percent of the gross domestic product in the 1990s.
By 2000, veterans of the liberation war were fed up with the Mugabe government’s refusal to deliver fundamental land reform. On Easter weekend in 2000, 170,000 black families occupied 3,000 farms owned by white farmers. Mr. Mugabe’s government, seeing the occupation’s popularity with Zimbabweans, formalized it as its fast-track land redistribution program.
The economic fallout spread as inflation began to rise, the currency became worthless and lines outside supermarkets, banks, fuel stations, hospitals and workplaces lengthened. Mr. Mugabe became more repressive.
Zimbabwe and its economic meltdown after 2000 have been portrayed by the West as occurring in a vacuum set off by a “senseless land grab,” a narrative that ignores the historical basis for radical land redistribution and Britain’s betrayal of the 1979 agreement.
That Western narrative also skips over the fact that the land reform is far from being an unmitigated disaster. In 2016, tobacco exports brought in $887 million, 31 percent of the country’s total foreign revenue. This wealth is no longer the preserve of 1,500 mostly white large-scale tobacco growers but generated by 100,000 black farmers, of which 70,000 are small holders.
The loss of “white lands” and white lives — reportedly five white farmers were killed in the land seizures in 2000 — has determined the Western world’s attitude toward Zimbabwe. But Mr. Mugabe’s failures and repressive tactics were deemed relevant only when they threatened white settler and Western interests, as the Western silence over the killings of Ndebele people illustrated.
The brutal history of colonialism and imperialism has created a strain of pan-Africanism that largely defines itself by opposition to the West and ignores the excesses of Africa’s post-colonial rulers. In South Africa and other parts of the Africa, Mr. Mugabe was seen by certain quarters as a pan-Africanist revolutionary who was willing to stand up to the West. But that strain of pan-Africanism neglects Mr. Mugabe’s excesses, the killings of Ndebele people, rigging of the 2002 and 2008 elections, forcible clearance of slums, political abductions and widespread corruption.
Since Mr. Mugabe’s ouster, Mr. Mnangagwa, the new president, has revealed himself as the new face of the old Zimbabwe. Mr. Mnangagwa has tried to fashion his “post-Mugabe” government as a new liberal order keen to normalize relations with the West, with slogans like “Zimbabwe is open for business” and “The people’s voice is the voice of God.”
But the July 2018 election, in which six people were killed by security forces during violence over disputed results, have undermined his political legitimacy. Recently, Mr. Mnangagwa’s forces used tear gas, batons and whips to crush protests over deteriorating economic conditions. Since January, Mr. Mnangagwa’s forces have used tear gas, batons, whips and bullets to crush protests over deteriorating economic conditions, killing at least 17 people.
There was a time when many Zimbabweans believed that Mr. Mugabe’s death would signal something new for the country. But his demise means nothing when the repressive system he helped establish is thriving.
The wait for Mr. Mugabe’s departure weighed down so heavily on our hearts and minds that it constrained the spirit of radical political imagination that delivered us from colonial rule. We limited our political imagination to the end of colonialism, with dire consequences for our post-independence years. Now with Mr. Mugabe gone, we need to understand the Zimbabwe’s future is not a matter of the old dying and the new being born.
Beyond opposing the current president, Zimbabwe needs a genuinely pan-African mass movement that is pro-land-reform, pro-indigenization, pro-poor, pro-women and pro-L. G.B.T.Q to challenge the broader system of Big Man politics he represents.
We need a progressive movement that will be anti-corruption, anti-injustice and anti-violence while addressing the historical injustices of colonial rule and state-sponsored violence. Zimbabwe’s future lies in pulling generations together to truly reimagine ourselves and our politics to ensure that our nation benefits all of its people.
Panashe Chigumadzi is the author of “These Bones Will Rise Again,” a book about the coup that deposed Robert Mugabe.
A loaf of bread now costs Z$9.45 (81 U.S. cents), compared with Z$6.80 before, Dennis Wallah, president of the National Bakers Association of Zimbabwe, said in by phone Tuesday from the capital, Harare. The state-run Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe on Monday hiked wheat prices to Z$2,200 from Z$1,600.
Other input costs are also increasing, Wallah said.
“Everything else in terms of the cost of production has been going up; fuel and electricity,” he said. “The amount of diesel we are using has also gone up and this contributes to the cost of a loaf.”