Jan. 2, 2024 ❧ Mickey belongs to us now, Argentina protests Milei's libertarian rampage, and Nebraska's governor lets kids starve
Plus, minimum wages jump around the country, genocide charges against Israel, a Zuckerbunker in Hawaii, California's "toilet-to-tap" water system, and butterflies' terrific taste!
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Happy NEWS Year!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
2024 IS A MASSIVE YEAR FOR THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
It’s another new year, which means the copyright protections on thousands of classic works, created in 1928, have just expired. They will now enter the public domain, which gives artists the full freedom to use, adapt, remix, slice, and dice them for their own creative purposes. Under America’s ridiculous copyright laws, most works do not enter the public domain until 95 years after their initial creation, often remaining in private hands long after the original creators have died and are no longer able to make money from their creations.
Until this year, private studios were still able to profit from the ownership of classic films like Buster Keaton’s The Cameramen, Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, and the original version of All Quiet on the Western Front. Publishing companies still controlled the rights to the wonderful picture book Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág, the novel Dark Princess by the great Black historian and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, and the spectacularly horny D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which was banned under American obscenity laws for decades before becoming the subject of a Supreme Court case which struck those laws down and unleashed what Fred Kaplan of The New York Times called “an explosion of free speech.” All of the creators of these works had been dead for decades before their works were free to be enjoyed by everyone.
As Cory Doctorow points out on his blog Pluralistic, the cloistering of great works of art in private hands is a cultural tragedy we don’t think about enough:
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
First in 1976, and then again in 1998, Congress retroactively extended copyright's duration by 20 years, for all works, including works whose authors were unknown and long dead, whose proper successors could not be located. Many of these authors were permanently erased from history as every known copy of their works disappeared before they could be brought back into our culture through reproduction, adaptation and re-use (copyright is "strict liability," meaning that even if you pay to clear the rights to a work from someone who has good reason to believe they control those rights, if they're wrong, you are on the hook as an infringer, and the statutory damages run to six figures).
Works that are still in our cultural currents 50 or 70 or 90 years after their creation are an infinitesimal fraction of all the works we create as a species. But these works are – by definition – extraordinarily important to our culture. The creators who made these works were able to plunder a rich public domain of still-current works as inputs to their own enduring creations. The slow-motion arson attack on the public domain meant that two generations of creators were denied the public domain that every other creator in the history of the human race had enjoyed.
As many people know, Disney is the ultimate villain in the battle over public domain—its actions as the most powerful behemoth in media have allowed it to almost single-handedly dictate the terms of copyright law for the last half-century. Fearing the inevitable entry of Mickey Mouse into the public domain in 1984 (at the time, copyrights lasted for 56 years after publication) the Disney corporation lobbied Congress hard to extend the length of copyright protections, which they did in 1976 and again in 1998, to keep the mouse in their clutches as long as possible. Under the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, nicknamed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” by detractors, works did not enter the public domain until 95 years after their initial publication. In the process, Disney dragged countless other works of art with them, keeping them squirreled away behind paywalls and out of public hands long after their creators could no longer profit from them.
Despite their previous success, Disney was not able to get Congress to extend copyright protections for a third time. This means that Walt Disney’s original versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, who first appeared in the cartoons “Steamboat Willie” and “Plane Crazy” are now public domain characters, as both were released more than 95 years ago in 1928. This does not mean that all artists are free to use any iteration of the iconic mice they please—later versions, such as the 1940s era Fantasia Mickey, who dons a wizard’s robe and cap, are still behind the Disney lock and key. But as long as your Mickey is black and white and has soulless dark eyes, as the character did in its 1928 form, you can make him do or say basically anything you want!
22 STATES RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE
The dawn of 2024 also means that a slew of new laws are taking effect—and in 22 of these United States, that includes a higher minimum wage. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 10 million minimum-wage workers got raises on New Year’s Day, amounting to $6.95 billion (with a B!) in additional pay nationwide. What’s more, 38 different cities and counties raised their local minimum wage above the state minimum. Out of all these changes, the biggest increase came in Hawaii, where the hourly minimum went from $12 to $14—two dollars higher, which translates to an extra $1,380 per year for the average worker. Currently, Washington, D.C. has the highest minimum wage for a state or territory at $17, while Seattle has one of the highest for a city at $19.97 for large employers (defined as having 501 employees or more.)
States and municipalities have had to take the minimum wage into their own hands because the federal government has failed abysmally. The national minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 an hour since 2009 when it increased from $6.55 as part of an amendment passed in 2007. Back then, Barack Obama was president and gas cost an average of $2.35 a gallon. Today, you can’t even buy a 3-pack of Hanes socks for $7.25. It’s simply obscene to say that an hour subtracted from a human being’s lifespan, which they can never get back, is worth less than socks. But in 2021, that’s exactly what the U.S. Senate did say, voting down a nationwide increase to $15 by a count of 58-42. Really, the proposal was a half-measure: the “Fight for $15” has been going on for so long that $15 an hour is no longer a living wage in vast swathes of the country. But for the Senators who voted to deny even that much progress, the phrase “enemy of the working class” seems deserved. (Was your Senator among them? Find out here!)
The 2024 pay increases are a step in the right direction, but they’re not enough. Currently, 20 states have no requirement above the federal $7.25 minimum wage. And the subminimum wage for tipped workers and those with disabilities, a uniquely depraved institution, is still with us. In order to have a remotely fair or sustainable labor system, we’d need a much simpler, more radical standard, applied universally. Namely: that in any given area, the minimum wage must always meet or exceed the average cost of living. If the cost of rent or groceries increases, so must workers’ paychecks. Or, as Franklin Roosevelt put it way back in 1933:
No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level - I mean the wages of decent living.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Mark Zuckerberg is building an emergency bunker in Hawaii. The Facebook billionaire’s “underground shelter” is reportedly an elaborate one, taking up 5,000 square feet on (or rather, under) the island of Kauai. It’s just one small part of Ko’olau Ranch, Zuckerberg’s “sprawling” compound in Hawaii, which is estimated to cost him as much as $270 million when it’s complete. And it’s definitely the most worrying part of the project, with the bunker’s amenities including a main door “constructed out of metal and filled in with concrete” —a common design in bomb shelters—and its own self-sufficient food and energy supplies. Hawaii often gets hit by hurricanes, so it makes sense to have some kind of emergency shelter, but the details make it seem like Zuckerberg is prepping for something more apocalyptic. As Douglas Rushkoff wrote in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest, bunker-building has become a popular trend among the Silicon Valley elite; recently, Peter Thiel was refused permission to dig his own hidey-hole in New Zealand. In case of nuclear war, climate disaster, or global revolution, these billionaires want to be sure they survive in luxury, while the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves. Just more evidence, if you needed it, of the fundamentally sociopathic nature of being extremely rich in the first place.
❧ Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen is deliberately starving hungry children in his state. On Friday, Pillen doubled down on his refusal to accept $18 million in federal funding to feed children struggling with poverty and hunger. The money would have gone to the USDA’s Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (or Summer EBT) program and provided $40 a month in food stamps for every eligible child. Started during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the program will run in 28 states this year. If approved for Nebraska, the Associated Press estimates that the funds would have helped 175,000 children “who might otherwise go hungry on some days during the summer.” Nebraska itself would have paid only $300,000 in administrative costs. It might seem like political malpractice for any governor, even a conservative one, to turn down what’s essentially free money for his poorest constituents. Pillen, though, has a simple ideological objection: “I don’t believe in welfare.” He’s not alone, either. In nearby Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds has also refused to enroll her state in the Summer EBT program, bizarrely asserting that “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.” (We might remind Ms. Reynolds that eating is, in fact, more nutritious than not eating, which will be the result of her decision for many.) In Nebraska, an Omaha man named Paul Feilmann stood vigil outside the Governor’s residence, imploring Pillen to change his mind before the January 1 enrollment deadline passed, but he got only silence in return. This is the kind of cold-blooded, “let them eat cake” cruelty that, historically, has gotten rulers chased out of their mansions with pitchforks and torches. If Pillen and Reynolds merely lose their next elections thanks to this move, it’ll be better than they deserve.
❧ Giving new meaning to the nickname “Golden State,” California will soon allow wastewater to be repurposed for human consumption. To cope with the multiple severe droughts the state has undergone in recent years and the drying of major rivers state regulators last month approved rules that will allow state water agencies to treat toilet water and put it back into pipes that will flow to taps in Californian homes, schools, and offices. As gross as this may sound, scientists assure the public that this process—known as “direct potable reuse”—makes wastewater not only safe but safer than the river water and groundwater we use daily because it undergoes more rigorous treatment. One study from Stanford found water that went through the treatment process to be on par with groundwater that has been given the “reverse osmosis” treatment, which is considered the highest standard of cleanliness. Repurposing wastewater for other purposes is not a new thing in California. Adam Beam points out in the AP, that treated wastewater has been used by farmers to grow vegetables, and has been repurposed to create the ice surface used by the Ontario Reign minor league hockey team and to create artificial snow in Lake Tahoe. One brewery in Half Moon Bay even uses recycled water to brew beer.
Nor is California the first to recycle wastewater for consumption. Colorado also approved the wastewater for reuse last year, though it has not yet been rolled out, while many other states are developing treatment facilities for their own wastewater as they face drier climates. Even if it is proven perfectly safe, states are no doubt going to struggle with the understandable “ick” factor as they try to persuade the public. In fairness to the skeptics, this is a bandaid solution to a problem that is being made vastly worse by climate change, which has made California’s weather more extreme on both ends of the spectrum: Between 2019 and 2022, California experienced its driest years on record, a streak that was broken when the state was hit with equally devastating floods as a result of Hurricane Hilary. California is one of the states most affected by climate change, and even if resuing wastewater allows them to get more of a handle on their drought problem, they won’t be solving the underlying problem that is causing those droughts—and many other weather patterns that have wracked the state—to get worse.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ After nearly three months of a merciless bombing campaign that has killed nearly 22,000 people (most of whom have been civilians), Israeli government officials have begun to publicly discuss the permanent removal of Arabs from the Gaza Strip. Israel’s Finance Minister and leader of its far-right Religious Zionism Party, Bezalel Smotrich, on Sunday encouraged the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Smotrich framed this as a humanitarian gesture, saying:
“They want to leave. They have been living in a ghetto for 75 years and are in need.”
Lest you think Smotrich has overnight morphed into Norman Finkelstein (who often likens the conditions of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland), Smotrich fully supports the dispossession and removal of Palestinians. Two years ago, he said that Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion should have “finished the job” by kicking all the Arabs out in 1948.
Of course, the entire reason the people of Gaza are in a “ghetto,” as he puts it, is that they are the descendants of refugees displaced by Israel during its founding. And the reason many now “want to leave” is because they are being bombed every day by Israel and most of their homes are now damaged or destroyed. As of mid-December, more than 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million people had been displaced and forced into a “safe zone” the size of London’s Heathrow airport. If those people leave “voluntarily,” it will only be because Israel’s bombing campaign has made the Strip uninhabitable for them. And that seems to have been the intent. Smotrich later made clear that this removal would be permanent:
“If there were 100,000-200,000 Arabs in the Strip and not two million, the whole conversation about the day after [the war] would be completely different.”
He added that he wants Israeli settlers (whose land grabs in the West Bank have repeatedly been ruled illegal under international law) to retake the land “We’ll need to rule there for a long time… If we want to be there militarily, we need to be there in a civilian fashion,” adding that Israelis would “make the desert bloom.”
There is no other term to describe this other than a violent ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already described his intent to “thin out” the population of Gaza “to a minimum” and endorsed the idea of “voluntary” evacuation of Palestinians while clarifying that he intends for the war to last for the entirety of 2024.
The American government, meanwhile, is wholly complicit— having given Israel billions in military aid and stood alone in the world in vetoing resolution after resolution calling for an end to the slaughter. With massive leverage over Israel’s war-making capabilities, the United States is the only nation in the world with the power to stop this forced displacement of 2 million people. Instead, it is helping to abet what is quickly becoming one of the worst crimes of the 21st century.
⚜ LONG READ: South Africa has invoked the International Convention on Genocide against Israel and called for its leaders to be brought before the International Court of Justice. In Jacobin, Rohini Hensman explains the history of the Genocide Convention and why it applies to Israel’s actions:
Less than a week after the Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the Israeli bombing of Gaza on October 7, 2023, genocide and Holocaust scholar Raz Segal published an article titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” He pointed out that the first three of the five acts, any of which constitute genocide, were being carried out in Gaza. Segal observed that in contrast with many other cases, Israeli leaders had made their intent to destroy Palestinians as such perfectly explicit. He cited as evidence Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
There are numerous other examples of such statements being made by Israeli government officials.
During the first week of the war on Gaza, the Israeli president Isaac Herzog attributed collective guilt to the Palestinian people for the actions of Hamas: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved.”
Galit Distel-Atbaryan, a Knesset member from the ruling Likud party, urged the government to “erase Gaza from the face of the Earth.” She continued: “Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die. And let them die badly. Gaza should be wiped off the map, and fire and brimstone on the heads of the Nazis in Judea and Samaria. Jewish wrath to shake the earth around the world. We need a cruel, vengeful IDF here. Anything less is immoral.”
The Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked a notorious passage from scripture: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” The passage in question includes the following injunction: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
Ezra Yachin, a veteran of the 1948 war who took part in the notorious Deir Yassin massacre, was enlisted to deliver the following message for Israeli soldiers: “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.
Major General Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, presented the spread of disease in Gaza as a weapon of war in an article for the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth: “The international community is warning us against a severe humanitarian disaster and severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this. After all, severe epidemics in the south of Gaza will bring victory closer.”
Eiland went on to dismiss the idea of sparing Palestinian civilians: “Who are the ‘poor’ women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters, or wives of Hamas murderers.” Netanyahu’s coalition partner, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, shared Eiland’s column on his Twitter/X account and said that he “agrees with every word.”
These statements, combined with the mass murder of Palestinians, almost half of them children, reveal that the supposed goals of rooting out Hamas and rescuing hostages are convenient fictions to mislead gullible Israelis and the international community. The supposed goals of rooting out Hamas and rescuing hostages are convenient fictions to mislead gullible Israelis and the international community. Virtually no progress has been made on annihilating Hamas, as the rising death toll of Israeli soldiers shows; it is Palestinian civilians who are being annihilated. Eiland, the man who welcomed the prospect of “severe epidemics” in Gaza, told The New York Times that there was no prospect of an Israeli victory over Hamas on the battlefield after nearly three months of war: “I cannot see any signs of collapse of the military abilities of Hamas nor in their political strength to continue to lead Gaza.” The fact that only one hostage was rescued by military action while at least three were killed by Israeli forces, as well as plans to use sea water to flood tunnels where hostages are being kept, demonstrates a willingness on the part of Netanyahu’s government to kill hostages along with Palestinians and make the strip uninhabitable.
❧ A member of the United States Congress traveled to Uganda to praise its vicious new anti-gay laws. The Congressman in question is Representative Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan’s 5th District, and he didn’t even try to hide his violent homophobia. At Uganda’s National Prayer Breakfast, Walberg gave a speech urging right-wing Ugandans to “stand firm” in defense of their country’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act,” better known to its critics as the “Kill the Gays” law. Passed in May 2023, the law is one of the world’s most extreme. It allows prison sentences of up to 10 years for the “offense of homosexuality,” 20 years for the “promotion” of homosexuality, and worst of all, the death sentence for “aggravated homosexuality,” a vaguely defined charge that can include intercourse where one partner is HIV-positive or is simply a “serial offender.” Even Ted Cruz, no stranger to homophobia himself, tweeted that the law was “horrific & wrong” when Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed it. Tim Walberg, though, has been strongly in favor of it. He reportedly called the opinion of the United Nations and World Health Organization “worthless,” quoted Bible verses about homosexuality, and told Prayer Breakfast attendees to resist “other major countries that are trying to get into you and ultimately change you” with their calls to repeal the law:
Whose side do we want to be on? God’s side. Not the World Bank, not the United States of America, necessarily, not the U.N. God’s side.
This was back in October, and at the time, Walberg’s remarks barely made a blip in the U.S. press (which has a nasty habit of ignoring anything that happens in Africa.) They’re only now beginning to cause a stir, thanks to reporting by Jonathan Larsen for TYT and Chris Walker at Truthout. More than anything, the incident shows just how committed a certain portion of the GOP is to anti-LGBTQ extremism, and the state-sponsored violence they’re willing to endorse when they don’t think anyone’s paying attention. It’s a chilling reminder that people like Tim Walberg must never, ever be allowed to wield power on a national or international scale.
❧ Argentina’s new libertarian president is facing a massive wave of protests to his economic agenda and attempts to give himself unchecked authoritarian powers. Immediately after taking office, amid runaway inflation, Argentina’s self-described “anarcho-capitalist” president unilaterally imposed what he calls “shock treatment” in the form of dramatic austerity measures. He announced that he would cut the value of the Peso in half, a move that has hit the 40 percent of Argentinians below the poverty line hardest, causing prices to skyrocket even further. Milei has since issued a decree declaring a “public emergency” and granting him the power to govern unilaterally until 2025 (and extend his dictatorship to 2027 if he feels like it). It also, in his words, takes a “chainsaw” to Argentina’s economy, getting rid of more than 350 economic regulations. It includes cuts to virtually every public spending program in the country—$20 billion total (5 percent of the country’s total GDP) within the month—slashes the number of federal departments in half, fires thousands of civil servants, gives himself the power to privatize public companies and getting rid of rent controls meant to keep housing affordable. Milei’s decree also virtually abolishes the right to strike by giving employers the right to fire workers whose work stoppages cause losses to company profits.
Led primarily by labor organizers, thousands of Argentinians have taken to the streets in protest. They were met with another draconian decree by Milei, who ordered police to clear all street blockades using violence, while his Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, said that anyone who blocks streets would lose their welfare benefits (the protesters, remember, are in the streets in the first place because they are poor and Milei’s policies are making them poorer). But despite the threats of arrest and destitution, many Argentinians have fought on with a massive protest led by the country’s labor unions on the streets of Buenos Aires last week. In a quote to France 24, one protester—a 45-year-old teacher named Martin Lucero said, “The decree is destructive of all labor rights...The Argentine people chose Milei as president of the nation, not as emperor.”
SOME MORE VERY NORMAL MILEI FACTS
Javier Milei owns five mastiff dogs, four of whom he has named after libertarian economists (their names are Murray, Milton, Robert, and Lucas—the fifth is named Conan, after the Barbarian). Their names are actually the most normal thing about these dogs. They are also clones. According to The New York Times, “They are genetic copies of Mr. Milei’s former dog, also named Conan, and were created in a laboratory in upstate New York”... that lab, called PerPETuate, charged $50,000 for five “clones,” of the original Conan, who has since passed on.
But the president and his dog still share a deep bond that transcends this life. According to Argentina’s La Nacion newspaper, “Milei has come to maintain among his intimates that he and ‘Conan’ met 2000 years ago, in the Roman Colosseum. They were gladiator and lion, but they did not fight. Because ‘the One,’ as the economist alludes to God, told them that they would join forces when the right time arrived. And that moment arrived.”
The elder Conan may actually be the reason Milei is governing Argentina in the first place. Milei says that he decided to run for president after a conversation he had with Conan from beyond the grave via a psychic medium. Milei says Conan gave him the mission of becoming president. And, as president, according to a biography by Argentinian journalist Juan Luis Gonzalez, he regularly consults his dogs for political and economic advice, which would explain quite a lot.
BUTTERFLY FACT OF THE DAY
Butterflies can taste with their feet!
Absurd, you’d think. But that is because you are a know-nothing, mouth-tasting human.
Butterfly mouths, function purely as straws for slurping up nectar, sap, and juice from various plants, with no tastebuds. When they land on a plant, the chemoreceptors in a butterfly’s legs instantly allow them to tell whether the plant they have landed on contains the nectar they subsist on. And butterflies’ leg pallets are quite advanced: just like humans, they can taste salty, sweet, sour, and bitter flavors (no word, however, on Umami). Taste is extremely important to decision-making for butterflies. In addition to seeking food, says one study in Insect Molecular Biology, they also use taste to choose a mate and to decide where to lay their eggs. Presumably, this means that if a butterfly lands on you, you should feel proud, as it’s their way of telling you that you taste delicious!
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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