Cuba bets on specialty coffee to boost industry

Author: AFP

|Update: 19.11.2022 

Farmer Jesus Chaviano displays his coffee beans at his plantation in Jibacoa, Villa Clara province, Cuba / © AFP

In the lush, fertile mountains of Cuba, farmer Jesus Chaviano dreams of adding his arabica beans to a list of specialty coffees the country hopes will lift an industry in decline.

It's harvest time on Chaviano's eight-hectare (20-acre) plantation in the central Guamuaya mountain range, and his 42,000 coffee plants burst with ripe reddish fruit in the shadow of avocado and banana trees.

At 800 meters (2,600 feet) altitude, conditions are ideal for the eight varieties of high-quality arabica coffee beans he planted with his "own hands."


While Cuba has been growing coffee for almost 300 years, it has never produced the specialty coffees beloved worldwide for their unique flavor profiles that come from careful cultivation in a specific terroir.

View of the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba, where specialty coffee crops are cultivated in Villa Clara province, Cuba / © AFP

In the past two decades, the appeal of high-end coffee has soared, and so has its price on the international market.

"I think that needs to be the path we take: going after specialty coffees. Not large quantities... small batches that we can sell well," said Chaviano, 46.

As the island catches on to the appeal of high-end coffee, the first five specialty coffees will be unveiled in December at the first-ever Cuba-Cafe producers fair, which is being held in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba.

A variety of Cuban specialty coffees are displayed at a coffee improvement center in Jibacoa, Villa Clara province, Cuba / © AFP

The name and origins of the chosen coffees are being kept secret.

"We are taking the first concrete steps to add value to this coffee," said Ramon Ramos, the scientific director of Cuba's National Institute for Agroforestry Research. He added that "with the same production, the same yield, it will be sold at a much higher price."

-'It's the future'-

Coffee farmer Jesus Chaviano washes beans at his farm in Jibacoa, Villa Clara province, Cuba / © AFP

According to Ramos, the price for 1,000 kilograms of commercial coffee varies between $4,000 and $5,000. Meanwhile, a kilogram of specialty coffee can sell for "up to $10,000."

According to the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) a coffee must score above 80 points on a 100-point scale to reach the required standard, after being evaluated by "a certified coffee taster."

The final score will influence the price at which it is sold.

"It's the future," says Chaviano, who built his house in the middle of his plantation, in the style of the French colonists who fled Haiti in the 18th century and brought the culture of coffee cultivation to Cuba.

In 1960, Cuba produced more than 60,000 tonnes of coffee. Last year, this figure stood at only 11,500 tonnes, less than half of what is consumed locally.

Farmer Jesus Chaviano stands amid his coffee bushes at his plantation in Jibacoa, Villa Clara province, Cuba / © AFP

According to official figures, only 1,365 tonnes were exported.

Experts say climate change -- drastically reducing coffee-growing areas worldwide -- is partly to blame for the drop in production.

In Cuba, the emigration of plantation workers has also impacted the industry.

"Why did the country once produce a lot of coffee, but now it can't produce coffee?" asked Chaviano.

"I'm focused on doing it right and demonstrating that it's possible to produce coffee, and quality coffee," but "you have to put your heart into it," he added.

In 2021, his yield was one tonne of coffee per hectare, four times the national average.

- 'We can do it'-

A technician shows an in vitro plant grown at a coffee improvement center in Jibacoa, Villa Clara province, Cuba / © AFP

Some 25 kilometers from his farm, researchers at the Jibacoa Agroforestry Research Station, have been tasked with training and providing technology to producers to improve their yields.

Director Ciro Sanchez, said the goal is to produce 30,000 tonnes of coffee by 2030.

To achieve this, the aim is to recover some plantations in areas affected by climate change, by planting more resistant varieties of coffee. Sanchez also wants to prioritize the growth of "high-quality arabica" in mountainous areas.

Chaviano is optimistic that one day his coffee will be one of the feted specialty brands being exported from Cuba.

"We can do it. We just need to work!" he said.

Why EU can't count on Turkey to protect asylum seekers


Published in:EUobserver
Bill Frelick
Director, Refugee and Migrant Rights Division

HRW


Click to expand Image
Turkish security forces detain a group of migrants in Van Province, near Turkey’s border with Iran. August 21, 2021. © 2022 AP Photo/Emrah Gürel

The world owes thanks to Turkey for hosting the world's largest number of refugees, more than 3.9 million. It may seem counterintuitive to say that EU members shouldn't consider Turkey a "safe third country" for refugees and asylum seekers, but it isn't.

Safe third country designations enable countries to summarily reject asylum seekers on their territories on the presumption the country they travelled through, or some other country, can be trusted to examine their refugee claims and protect qualifying refugees from being forced to return to places where their lives would be at risk.

In June 2021, Greece declared Turkey to be a safe third country for asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, and a few other countries.

When a Syrian or Afghan asylum seeker appears to have entered from Turkey, Greece now places that person's refugee claim in an accelerated procedure without considering the substance of their claim.

There are multiple reasons Turkey cannot be considered a safe third country.

Lack of access to asylum procedures is one. The likelihood of a fair hearing for those who do get access is another. Turkey's accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention also includes a geographical limitation whereby it only fully recognises as refugees people fleeing persecution in Europe.

But the main reason is that Turkey does not respect the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits the return of refugees to places where their lives or freedom would be threatened.

Greece actually has no legal way of readmitting rejected asylum seekers to Turkey. Although a much-heralded migration deal with Turkey was announced by the European Council in March 2016. Ankara has not been willing to readmit rejected asylum seekers from Greece since at least March 2020, despite 6 billion euros from the EU to seal the deal.

So Greece continues its unlawful practice of pushing asylum seekers and migrants arriving at its borders, back to Turkey.

Victims' testimonies

Victims have told us that this often involves stripping and beating them, then dumping them in the seasonally frigid waters of the Evros River.

Turkey is doing the same thing on its southern and eastern borders.

This year, Turkey's interior ministry reported 238,448 "irregular migrants whose entrance to our country has been prevented" as of 20 October.

A 20-year-old medical student from Ghazni, Afghanistan, whom I met in Istanbul, told me about his encounter with Turkish border authorities shortly after he crossed into Turkey from Iran in December 2021.

Turkish border guards started shooting. His group of 150 was corralled: "Two soldiers held down my hands and feet. Then the commander beat me on my knees with a metal stick. He did this to all the single men…then they forced us back across the border to Iran at a time and place where there were no Iranian border guards."

The safe third country concept is embedded in the EU's Asylum Procedures Directive. It says another country can only be considered safe if "the possibility exists to request refugee status and, if found to be a refugee, to receive protection in accordance with the Geneva Convention."

But many Afghans inside Turkey are routinely prevented from accessing any procedure to assess their claims for international protection and many are being deported to Afghanistan with little to no examination of their refugee claims.

This happened to a 16-year-old boy I talked with from Herat, Afghanistan who said his father was killed by the Taliban. "The day before I was deported, a guard at the Edirne Removal Center told me I had to sign a deportation paper. I refused to sign it. He hit me on my arm with a metal police baton."

The next day, the boy said, another official took his hand and forced his fingerprint on the paper.

"No one ever asked if I was afraid to go back to Afghanistan. On the paper was written that my return was voluntary, but I cried a lot and begged them not to deport me." He was deported on 17 May.

Turkey deported 44,768 Afghan nationals in the first eight months of 2022, a 150-percent increase from the first eight months of 2021, before the Taliban takeover.

Whether or not formalised readmissions from the EU to Turkey are implemented, asylum seekers who apply for asylum in Greece or other EU countries should not be denied the chance to make refugee claims on the false premise that Turkey will allow them to register, examine their claims, and provide effective protection to those who need it.

Probe of Baltimore archdiocese identifies 158 priests, over 600 victims

4 DAYS AGO

US state of Maryland investigation identifies scores of Roman Catholic priests accused of sexually and physically abusing and torturing hundreds of victims over the past 80 years

.

"Once again, the church has lied about the number of abusive priests," says David Lorenz of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. (AP)

An investigation by Maryland's attorney general has identified 158 Roman Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Baltimore accused of sexually and physically abusing more than 600 victims over the past 80 years, according to court records.

Attorney General Brian Frosh announced that his office completed a 463-page report on the investigation on Thursday, which began in 2019.

He filed a motion in Baltimore Circuit Court to make the report public. Court permission is required because the report contains information from grand jury subpoenas. It's unclear when the court will make a decision.

"For decades, survivors reported sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests and for decades the Church covered up the abuse rather than holding the abusers accountable and protecting its congregations," according to the court filing. "The Archdiocese of Baltimore was no exception."

The report, titled "Clergy Abuse in Maryland," identifies 115 priests who were prosecuted for sex abuse and/or identified publicly by the archdiocese as having been "credibly accused" of sexual abuse. It also includes an additional 43 priests accused of sexual abuse but not identified publicly by the archdiocese, the court filing said.

"The Report summarises the sexual abuse and physical torture perpetrated by all 158 priests and the Archdiocese's response to that abuse," the court filing said.

In a letter released on Thursday evening, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore apologised "to the victim-survivors who were harmed by a minister of the Church and who were harmed by those who failed to protect them, who failed to respond to them with care and compassion and who failed to hold abusers accountable for their sinful and criminal behaviour."

"Upon reading today's motion, we feel renewed shame, deep remorse and heartfelt sympathy, most especially to those who suffered from the actions of representatives of the very Church entrusted with their spiritual and physical well-being," Lori wrote

'There are hundreds more'

David Lorenz, the Maryland leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, described the news of the report and numbers of victims as "absolutely horrendous."

"Once again, the church has lied about the number of abusive priests," Lorenz said in a statement. "Many parishes were dumping grounds for predators, some housed almost ten. It is very clear that nobody was safe. Sadly, it is no different than any diocese or secular report in the country."

While the court filing noted that more than 600 victims were identified, it also said "there are almost certainly hundreds more, as the Department of Justice's Annual Crime Victimization Report has demonstrated that most incidents of sexual assault go unreported."

Both boys and girls were abused, according to the court filing, with ages ranging from preschool through young adulthood.

"Although no parish was safe, some congregations and schools were assigned multiple abusive priests, and a few had more than one sexually abusive priest at the same time," the court filing said. "One congregation was assigned eleven sexually abusive priests over 40 years."

The sexual abuse was so pervasive, the court filing said, that victims were sometimes reporting sexual abuse to priests who were perpetrators themselves.

The investigation also revealed that the archdiocese failed to report many allegations of sexual abuse, conduct adequate investigations of alleged abuse, remove abusers from the ministry or restrict their access to children.

"Instead, it went to great lengths to keep the abuse secret," the court filing said. "While the Archdiocese reported a large number of allegations to police, especially in later years, for decades it worked to ensure that the perpetrators would not face justice."

Forty-three priests not identified, prosecuted

In the court filing, Frosh argues that "publicly airing the transgressions of the Church is critical to holding people and institutions accountable and improving the way sexual abuse allegations are handled going forward."

"More importantly, it is vital to protecting children and the entire community," the filing said.

The court filing also noted that of the 43 priests that have not been publicly identified or prosecuted, 30 have died.

"For those priests that have died, this additional secrecy interest is less compelling," the filing said.

The attorney general's office redacted all identifying information for the 13 living church officials who have been accused of sexual abuse but who have not been listed as credibly accused by the archdiocese and who have not been prosecuted.

In 2019, Frosh launched a criminal investigation of child sexual abuse perpetrated by priests and other employees of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Hundreds of thousands of documents dating back to the 1940s were produced in response to grand jury subpoenas.

As part of its investigation, the attorney general’s office created an email address and telephone hotline for people to report information. Over 300 hundred people contacted the office, and investigators interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses.

More than 300 'predator' priests abused children in Pennsylvania – report

READ MORE: Canadian Cardinal Ouellet accused of sexual assault

READ MORE: Over 600 minors 'abused' by clerics in German diocese

 

Mourners hit streets as Iran protests take bloody turn

Agencies Published November 18, 2022

PARIS: Hundreds of mourners poured onto the streets of an Iranian city on Thursday, defying a lethal crackdown on protests over Mahsa Amini’s death that shows signs of turning even bloodier. Iran’s foreign minister and media raised the spectre of civil war.

This week’s protests coincide with the third anniversary of “Bloody Aban” — or Bloody November — when hundreds were killed in a crackdown on street violence that erupted over a shock overnight decision to hike fuel prices.

Security forces on Thursday killed one protester in Bukan and two in Sanandaj, where mourners were paying tribute to “four victims of the popular resistance” 40 days after they were slain, the Oslo-based Hengaw rights group said.

The state news agency IRNA later confirmed that police colonel Hassan Youssefi was killed after being stabbed repeatedly in Sanandaj, about 200 kilometres west of the capital Tehran. People had thronged the streets even as the sound of gunfire was heard in a video published by Hengaw.

Two Basij members stabbed to death in Mashhad, two shot dead in Isfahan

IRNA said “rioters” had damaged and burned public property in Bukan, including setting fire to the municipality building. It added that police later dispersed them.

Mashhad riots

Separately, two Basij members were stabbed to death and three others injured as they sought to intervene to prevent “rioters” from threatening shopkeepers in the northeastern city of Mashhad, the news agency said.

“Death to the dictator,” protesters chanted in another online video as they marched down a street in Sanandaj filled with bonfires, directing their fury at Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The tradition in Iran of holding a “chehelom” mourning ceremony 40 days after a death has fuelled the demonstrations that have become the regime’s biggest challenge from the street in decades.

Elsewhere, Hengaw accused the security forces of killing at least 10 people within a 24-hour period up until late Wednesday at protests in several cities.

Isfahan killings

In a separate attack hours later in Iran’s third city Isfahan, two assailants on a motorcycle shot dead two members of the Basij paramilitary force and wounded another two, Fars news agency said.

IRNA later reported a police colonel who was injured Wednesday in Isfahan died of his wounds on Thursday in hospital.

Another police colonel was stabbed to death in Sanandaj, IRNA said.

In the southwestern city of Izeh, “a terrorist group took advantage of a gathering of protesters” to shoot dead seven people — including a 45-year-old woman, two children aged nine and 13, IRNA said. Three police officers and two Basij members were wounded, a security official told state TV.

But a family member of the nine-year-old boy killed on Wednesday, identified as Kian Pirfalak, accused security forces of carrying out the attack. The accusation came in a tweet shared by US-funded Radio Farda.

‘Civil war’

Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abollahian accused Israel and its allies of plotting a “civil war in” the Islamic republic.

But, he tweeted, they “must know that Iran is not Libya or Sudan” and that the “wisdom of our people has thwarted their plan”.

Fars news agency, which is close to the authorities, said the attacks show “that those who want to dismantle the country have entered into the armed action phase”.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2022

Nepal Election 2022: Why Have The Maoists Failed To Deliver In Nepal?

The expectations raised by the Maoist revolution have failed to deliver good governance to the long-suffering people of Nepal. Personal ambitions have led to divisions within the rank and file. A look at the Left in Nepal.

Nepali Maoists supporters dance and wave flags during a victory celebration

 | Getty Images

Seema Guha
UPDATED: 22 NOV 2022

May 28, 2008, was a day to remember. Joyous crowds poured out onto the streets of the capital Kathmandu and other cities as well as the villages to greet the announcement in Parliament that the monarchy was abolished. The unpopular King Gyanendra was given 15 days to leave the royal palace. There was euphoria in the air as people looked forward to a better future with palace intrigues dead and buried. Hope was in the air.

After a gruelling decade of armed conflict (1996-2006), the Maoists finally succeeded in getting rid of the last king of the Shah dynasty that had ruled Nepal for over 200 years.

Two years earlier in 2006, the Maoists signed a peace agreement with the government and promised to renounce violence, lay down their arms and join the democratic process. That agreement led to the end of the armed confrontation between the Maoist rebels and government troops that had ravaged the country. Nepalese politics was poised to take a new turn. Expectations were high from the Maoists, with many believing that they were in a position to deliver a clean and efficient government far removed from the squabbling traditional politicians that played the power game to perfection.

The Maoists put Nepal on track to become a modern democracy with people’s representatives right down to the local level. The new Republican Constitution unveiled in 2015, was contested by tribal groups and the Indian-origin Madeshis who felt that they had been given a raw deal. Overall, however, there were many positives in the new Constitution, with the devolution of power to the provinces.

However, people were in for disappointment. Though the revolution succeeded in getting rid of the monarchy, the Maoists failed to deliver on governance. Instead, there was infighting, splits, and instability, when Nepal was in dire need of a government that worked to recover from 10 years of civil strife.

Earlier in 2015, Maoists helped KP Sharma Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPM-UML) to become prime minister. But this was short-lived. The Maoists withdrew support and formed a government under Pushpa Kamal Dahal commonly known as Prachanda. That too did not last and the Nepali Congress chief Sher Bahadur Deuba became PM. Oli once again became PM in 2017 after the Communist Party of Nepal Maoist Centre, and the CPM-UML stitched up a solid pre-poll alliance. The unified Nepal Communist Party won a resounding victory with a two-thirds majority in parliament. But that did not last for a full term either. People realised that the Maoists were no different from the rest of the pack when it came to power politics.
Why have the Communists failed to deliver good governance in Nepal?

"The Left across the world have failed to deliver, and Nepal is no exception. The world has changed dramatically in the last few decades and the Left everywhere has been unable to cope with the transformation brought in by new technology and people’s rising expectations,’’ says Baburam Bhattarai, one of the prominent leaders of the Maoist insurrection together with Prachanda that brought the Nepal government to its knees. He is bang on. The old-style textbook Communism has not been able to deal with the sweeping changes that the world has undergone in the last couple of decades. He said that sustainable development, and environmental concerns, highlighted by climate change, are now major issues, and mass movements are springing up around these vital problems. Somehow the traditional Left has not been able to deliver on these concerns, according to Bhattarai. The Left needs to adapt to change.

"The Left has to change its strategy. The traditional kind of mobilisation no longer resonates with the masses. We need to adapt to the ground situation and opt for a Left which is more socialist and democratic. Liberal, progressive democracy is suited to the changing times," said Bhattarai. Having broken away from his former comrade in arms, he has his own party the Socialist Party of Nepal shaped to tackle the problems of today’s world. He is part of Sher Bahadur Deuba’s Nepali Congress alliance.

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"I am very proud that we succeeded in getting rid of the monarchy and making Nepal a Republic. But we failed in delivering a just economic, social, and cultural agenda to the people. Having opted for parliamentary democracy, we are facing the accompanying challenges. In a parliamentary democracy, capturing power and remaining in power is primary. Morality is forgotten as bickering happens sometimes for personal ambition, occasionally on ideological grounds. Splits follow and weaken the Left.’’

Yet, the Left continues to be popular among ordinary citizens despite various factions. Unlike in India where the Left has little impact on national politics, Nepal’s Communists are the movers and shakers of the nation’s political life. The two alliances fighting for power are led by Khadga Prasad Oli of the CPN-UML and Nepali Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deuba, the current prime minister. The Deuba camp has left partners like Pushpa Kamal Dahal, as well as Prachanda’s former comrade in arms, Baburam Bhattarai. So, whichever alliance finally wins the elections, the Left representative will continue to be strong.

"Nepali politics has done okay if you consider the fact that democracy survives despite heart-stopping challenges such as the royal palace massacre, the Maoist insurgency, the 2015 blockade, and deep schisms within society,’’ says Kanak Mani Dixit, a journalist and civil liberties activist based in Kathmandu. "Today, Nepal has a federal structure and elected local governments. However, politics has failed to deliver in the sense that people remain poor while the politicians prosper, running a kleptocracy in cahoots with dalals and dons.’’

He was particularly scathing about prime minister Deuba and Prachanda who are today in an opportunistic alliance. "The Nepali Congress of Sher Bahadur Deuba and CPN-UML of Khadga Prasad Oli have become less connected to the people, but the most opportunistic and unprincipled politician of Nepal is Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda). The CPN-UML did a failed party unification with him, and Sher Bahadur Deuba has bounded over ideological differences to have a pre-election alliance with the very man who conducted selected killings of the Nepali Congress cadre during the conflict years. This is the level of unprincipled politics we are seeing in Nepal, and the weakening of Dahal and his Maoist cohort through the elections would be the best thing that could happen to Nepal. But that may be asking for too much."

The Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) was founded in 1949 with the aim of establishing a new people’s democracy. Class struggle, armed revolution, land reforms, and the dictatorship of the proletariat were part of the agenda. Abolishing the monarchy was always central of the Communists. The Naxalbari uprising of 1967 was a major event at that time. And Oli as a young man wanted to emulate Kanu Sanyal’s experiment in north Bengal, which was ruthlessly crushed by the Indian state. Various splits in the CPN ensured that Oli broke away.

For the ordinary people of Nepal, it does not matter which alliance gets to rule. What is needed is governance. It is time for the Left to change with the times or perish.

REST IN POWER
Staughton Lynd, Historian and Activist Turned Labor Lawyer, Dies at 92

After being blacklisted from academia for his antiwar activity, he became an organizer among steel workers in the industrial Midwest.

The activist and historian Staughton Lynd in 2019. “At age 16 and 17, I wanted to find a way to change the world,” he said in 2010. “Just as I do at age 79.”Credit...Dustin Franz for The New York Times


By Clay Risen
Published Nov. 18, 2022

Updated Nov. 20, 2022

Staughton Lynd, a historian and lawyer who over a long and varied career organized schools for Black children in Mississippi, led antiwar protests in Washington and fought for labor rights in the industrial Midwest, died on Thursday in the town of Warren, in northeast Ohio. He was 92.

His wife and frequent collaborator, Alice Lynd, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by multiple organ failure.

Mr. Lynd was one of the last of a generation of radical academics — including his friend and colleague Howard Zinn — who in the 1960s overthrew their predecessors’ obsession with detached, objective scholarship in favor of political engagement.

Many of his colleagues stayed within the bounds of academia, but Mr. Lynd burst beyond them. As a young professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, he led students in marches against nuclear weapons. In 1964 he was one of the main organizers behind Freedom Summer, which brought Northern college students to Mississippi to teach and organize in Black communities.

When the Vietnam War was still relatively new and most Americans still supported it, he organized antiwar protests in Washington. He was among the first of about 350 people arrested during one demonstration — though not before neo-Nazis, staging a counter protest, dumped paint on him and two other marchers, David Dellinger and Bob Moses. A photo of the three bespattered men appeared in Life magazine.

Mr. Lynd was spattered with paint during an antiwar protest in Washington in 1965. He was among the first of about 350 people arrested during the demonstration. 

Credit...Nat Finkelstein Estate

In 1965 Mr. Lynd joined another radical historian, Herbert Aptheker, and a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden, on a trip to North Vietnam. There they met with Communist leaders and made global headlines, but also numerous enemies back home. The trip effectively ended Mr. Lynd’s career at Yale, where he had moved just a year before.

Mr. Lynd was not a communist, though he was often mistaken for one. Instead he made his own way on the left, drawing equal inspiration from Marxism, American abolitionism and Quaker pacifism — a diversity that helped explain his involvement with so many different movements.

“Staughton was very unusual,” Gar Alperovitz, a historian who wrote several books with Mr. Lynd, said in a phone interview. “He walked a path that was his own. And when it intersected with the activist groups on the progressive left, he would be involved. But he was a very moral political figure rather than a tactical one.”

In age he fell between the Old Left, which cut its teeth in the 1930s and ’40s, and the New, which was coming up in the ’60s. There was no question where his loyalty lay: He reveled in the impassioned spontaneity he encountered as a professor on college campuses, and students flocked to him in turn.

At Yale they would cram into his office or gather on his living room floor to hear him take on all comers, staking positions to the left even of outspoken liberals like the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a frequent verbal sparring partner.

Even as he developed a following as an agitator, he built a reputation as a pathbreaking historian. His best-known book, “The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism” (1968), opened new ground by identifying members of the Revolutionary War generation who embraced abolition and equality, and it won praise even from establishment historians.

“Of all the New Left historians, only Staughton Lynd appears able to combine the techniques of historical scholarship with the commitment to social reform,” David Herbert Donald wrote in a 1968 review in Commentary.

But his academic star soon fizzled out. By the end of the 1960s, his outspoken activism had drawn the attention of the F.B.I. and gotten him blacklisted from higher education, even from small urban colleges in Chicago, where he and his family had moved in 1968.

From left, the historian Herbert Aptheker, the activist Tom Hayden, the Rev. A.J. Muste and Mr. Lynd in January 1966 discussing the trip that Mr. Aptheker, Mr. Hayden and Mr. Lynd took to North Vietnam the previous year.

Credit...Patrick Burns/The New York Times

He pivoted, involving himself in labor organizing among the factories that lined the southern shores of Lake Michigan. He received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1976, after which he and his wife moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where workers, union leaders and owners were fighting over the impending closure of the city’s steel mills.

To the frustration of both the union bosses and the mill owners, he sided with the rank and file, writing a handbook for workers trying to navigate the legal system. In the early 1980s he helped lead a high-profile effort to turn the mills over to a worker-owned cooperative. Though the effort failed, it brought him renewed acclaim on the left.

He did much of his later work alongside his wife. She wrote several books with him and, after getting her own law degree, joined him as a partner. They officially retired in 1996 but continued taking pro bono cases, this time with a focus on the death penalty and prison reform.

“Whether in his pathbreaking historical work on the roots of American radicalism, his active participation in campaigns for civil rights, his crucial role in steps toward democratization of the economy, Staughton Lynd was always in the forefront of struggle, a model of integrity, courage, and farsighted understanding of what must be done if there is to be a livable world,” the linguist and left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky wrote in an email.

Staughton Craig Lynd was born on Nov. 22, 1929, the same year that his parents, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, published their book “Middletown,” based on their research in Muncie, Ind. It was one of the first books to offer a comprehensive study of an American community, and it established them as two of the country’s best-known academics.

The Lynds lived in New York City — Robert Lynd taught at Columbia, while Helen Lynd taught at Sarah Lawrence College — but Staughton was born in a hospital in Philadelphia because his mother preferred the doctors there.

He grew up among the New York intellectual set, attending the Ethical Culture School and the Fieldston School, and entered Harvard in 1946.

He studied social relations, a popular but now defunct major. In his free time he dabbled in radical politics, joining the Communist Party-aligned John Reed Club and briefly participating in two Trotskyist organizations on campus.

During the 1950 summer school session he met Alice Niles, a student at Radcliffe. They married the next year.

Along with his wife, he is survived by his son, Lee Lynd; his daughters Barbara Bond and Marta Lynd-Altan; seven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

After graduating in 1951, he spent time studying urban planning before being drafted into the Army in 1953. As a conscientious objector, he was given a noncombat role, despite the continuing Korean War.

A year later, though, he received a dishonorable discharge after Army investigators dug up his Communist affiliations in college; they also highlighted his mother’s career as a “modern” professional woman.

He and others with similar disqualifications appealed, and the Supreme Court eventually ordered the Army to give them honorable discharges instead. The change in status allowed Mr. Lynd to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, which he used to pay for graduate school.

But first, he and Alice spent three years living on a Quaker commune in northern Georgia. They then spent six months in a similar community in New Jersey, where he first met Mr. Dellinger, a like-minded pacifist who brought him on as an editor at his magazine, Liberation.

The Lynds finally returned to New York City, where Mr. Lynd worked for a tenants’ rights organization on the Lower East Side and pursued a history doctorate at Columbia.

He received his degree, with a dissertation on New York State during the Revolutionary War, in 1962. By then he and Alice were already in Atlanta, where he got a job teaching at Spelman (and where Mrs. Lynd babysat the children of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a neighbor).

Among his colleagues was Mr. Zinn, who would be fired for his activism in 1963, and among his students was Alice Walker, who would go on to write “The Color Purple.”

Mr. Lynd became actively involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and grew particularly close to one of its leaders, Bob Moses, a similarly cerebral activist. In 1964 Mr. Lynd was chosen to oversee the educational component of Freedom Summer, instituting curriculums and training teachers for the many schools that were to open across Mississippi.

He was in Oxford, Ohio, where organizers gathered before heading to Mississippi, when he first heard about the kidnapping and murder of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.

“I’ll never forget Mickey Schwerner’s wife, Rita, pacing one of the rooms all night long, waiting for word of some kind,” he wrote in The Bill of Rights Journal in 1988.

That fall Mr. Lynd joined the Yale history department, though by then he was spending more and more of his time as an activist.

In June 1965 he joined another antiwar protester in a lonely demonstration outside the Pentagon. Almost immediately, dozens of military police officers had surrounded them.

“What in the cotton-picking world do you think you’re doing?” he recalled one of them asking.

He straightened himself up, looked at the officer, and replied: “You don’t understand. We’re the first of thousands.”

His trip later that year to North Vietnam, and a 1966 trip to London, where he blasted American foreign policy on the BBC, persuaded the State Department to revoke his passport.

Mr. Lynd leaving a State Department hearing in 1966 at which he asked to have his passport reinstated. It had been revoked after his trip to North Vietnam and a trip to London during which he criticized U.S. foreign policy.

Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images

Mr. Lynd’s activism brought waves of criticism from alumni and pressure on Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, to fire him. Mr. Brewster resisted, but he let it be known, quietly, that Mr. Lynd was unlikely to receive tenure.

In 1968 the Lynds moved again, to Chicago, where Mr. Lynd was eager to get involved with the labor movement. He taught briefly at two local schools, Roosevelt University and Columbia College, and applied unsuccessfully to others. But he failed to find a permanent contract — the result, he insisted, of a concerted effort to blacklist him from teaching.

He then worked briefly for the social activist Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, and he and Alice Lynd wrote an oral history of Chicago labor, “Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers” (1973).

Mr. Lynd wrote more than 20 more books and extended pamphlets, mostly about labor organizing and prison reform. An exception was “Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together” (2009), written with his wife.


A year later, an interviewer for Harvard Magazine asked him why, after such a long career, he was still so active.

“At age 16 and 17, I wanted to find a way to change the world,” he said. “Just as I do at age 79.”

Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of “Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey.” @risenc

REST IN POWER

Activist Carol Leigh, who coined term 'sex work', dies at 71

Carol Leigh, a San Francisco activist who is credited with coining the term "sex work" and who sought for decades to improve conditions for prostitutes and others in the adult entertainment business, has died. She was 71.

Carol Leigh PTI

PTI
UPDATED: 18 NOV 2022 

Carol Leigh, a San Francisco activist who is credited with coining the term "sex work" and who sought for decades to improve conditions for prostitutes and others in the adult entertainment business, has died. She was 71.

Kate Marquez, the executor of her estate, said Leigh died on Wednesday of cancer, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Thursday.

A former prostitute, Leigh devoted herself to campaigning on behalf of those in the "sex work industry", a term she coined as the title for a panel discussion she attended at a feminist anti-pornography conference in 1978, according to an essay she wrote.

The term has become generally used by public health officials, academic researchers, and others.

"Carol defined sex work as a labor issue, not a crime, not a sin," Marquez said. "It is a job done by a million people in this country who are stigmatized and criminalized by working to support their families."

"Ultimately, Leigh argued that until sex workers are included in the conversations about feminism, sexuality and legality -- conversations from which they have historically been excluded -- sex workers will remain fragmented rather than collective, and stigmatization will abound," said a tweet on Thursday from SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement), which describes itself as a sex worker-led collective founded in the United Kingdom in 2009.

Leigh co-founded BAYSWAN, also known as Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network, which according to its website works with human rights activists to address problems such as human trafficking in the industry as well as labor and civil rights violations.

Leigh was deeply involved in advocacy for and aid to sex workers both in the United States and overseas and her concerns ranged from decriminalization to poverty, drug use, and HIV. She also was a video artist and produced award-winning documentaries on "women's issues and gay/lesbian issues", according to her BAYSWAN biography.

She wrote and frequently performed a one-woman political satire play called "The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot", and wrote a 2004 book titled "Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Work of Scarlot Harlot." She also helped produce the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival.

Born in New York City, Leigh had a bachelor's degree in creative writing when she moved to San Francisco in 1977. She began working as a prostitute to earn money but her focus changed after she was raped by two men at a sex studio in 1979, she told SFGate in a 1996 interview.

She could not file a crime report because her workplace would have been closed.

"The fact that I could not go to the police to report the rape meant that I was not going to be able to protect other women from these rapists," she said. "And I vowed to do something to change that."

Leigh's papers will be archived at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Marquez said.

(Inputs from PTI)

COP27

What the greens learned from Big Oil

A former Greenpeace boss now leads critical talks for Germany. But power comes with compromise.

Former Greenpeace head Jennifer Morgan is Germany’s top climate envoy at COP27 

| Sean Gallup/Getty Images

BY KARL MATHIESEN

POLITICO
NOVEMBER 17, 2022

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Fossil fuel lobbyists can only dream of the kind of access the green movement has at this year’s U.N. climate conference.

Take, for example, Jennifer Morgan. Until February she was head of Greenpeace International. Now she is Germany’s top climate envoy and has been handed the job of finding agreement between almost 200 countries on the most explosive issue at the COP27 talks: Who pays for the damage caused by climate change?

More and more climate activists are treading this path, from being on the outside making demands to working inside some of the most powerful governments in the world. It’s a shift that affords them unmatched power to shape global affairs and guide the planet to a safer climate. But it comes at the price of moral purity.

Morgan's job switch attracted criticism from environmentalists that view the German government as opponents, said Fridays for Future activist Luisa Neubauer, a youth activist who counts Morgan as a friend and mentor. "People have to sort of change sides and I think we are really hard on them."

But Neubauer sees it as necessary for the movement to achieve its broader goals.

“I think she’s a pioneer," she said. "Just like the fossil fuel industries put people everywhere, we need to put people in powerful positions and then not it take personally when that means they have to say yes to some things that we just don't like.”

Morgan insists the most important things haven't changed. “I am in a different role, but I am working for the exact same goals I have been fighting for my whole life: bringing down emissions, accelerating the global energy transition and more solidarity with the most vulnerable," she told POLITICO.

In Germany, environmentalists have never had more power. But in the face of the energy crisis, Greens co-leaders, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (who is Morgan’s boss) and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck have had to swallow huge ideological gobstoppers in the form of extending the life of nuclear plants and Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s push for African gas.

Environmentalist and former French minister Nicolas Hulot, who quit Emmanuel Macron's team in 2018 citing an “accumulation of disappointments” on climate policy, serves as a cautionary tale for those who grab the scepter.

The reparations issue that Morgan is steering at COP27, known as loss and damage, exposes how far her public position has had to stretch.

On Tuesday evening, Morgan was huddled with her advisers in a brightly lit tent on the conference grounds. A pack of negotiators from the world’s developing countries were marching toward the room, carrying with them an uncompromising demand for a new fund that would transfer reparations from the rich countries that cause climate change to the poor.

Just one year ago at COP26 in Glasgow, in the height of her Greenpeace pomp, Morgan was standing shoulder to shoulder with Pacific islanders and other extremely vulnerable nations against the wealthy polluters that have caused climate change.

Greenpeace this year is backing the poor countries' call for a new fund. But Morgan's new employers in the German government — along with the EU and U.S. — had resisted creating a reparations fund at these talks, if ever. Late on Thursday, the EU, backed by Berlin, finally did make an offer to vulnerable countries to set up the fund.

It’s “one of the most controversial issues ever,” Morgan told POLITICO. With the talks scheduled to end on Friday, she was straining to find a compromise that would satisfy her country, the countries she once championed single-mindedly, and the holdouts.

Morgan has traded bomb-throwing for bomb-catching. In two interviews and various off-record briefings to the press during COP27, she often checked herself, looking vaguely pained and said: “I don’t think I want to go on the record on that.”

"As an activist, my public voice was all I had to bring about change. This position gives me a different set of tools. My job now is not to demand action from others but to act and achieve results," she said.

This self-censorship in public is the most obvious trade-off she has to make. “When you're an NGO, no one has to listen to anything that you say. But you have a lot more control over what it is you can say,” said Kalee Kreider, a former environmental adviser and spokesperson for Al Gore who met Morgan at COP3, back in 1997. In government, it’s the opposite.

Yet more and more of Morgan’s fellow activists are also making the jump and governments in need of climate expertise are willing employers.

In the lead up to COP27, Morgan was asked by the British government to prepare a key report on climate finance. Her co-author was Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, also a former director of Greenpeace.

At a lower level, the U.K. government stacked the unit that worked on COP26 with around 20 staff seconded or hired from green think tanks or NGOs. A senior U.K. official, who was not authorized to speak to the press, said it gave the government access to decades of expertise, connections and — crucially — helped bring the green movement on board.

It’s a calculation that’s changing as some governments get more proactive. When Morgan was unveiled by Baerbock as the “face” of German climate diplomacy, she said the newly elected government was now where she could “make the biggest difference.”

For her part, Baerbock nabbed someone who has long been a player at U.N. climate talks. Even as Greenpeace boss, Morgan was one of the few Westerners with the ear of China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua. No matter the job, said Kreider, “she's not a person that changes or blows with the wind … a lot of trust and respect comes from that.”

Still, Morgan’s move into power poses a challenge to the activists who count her as a friend. Her public backing for a German-led disaster risk insurance scheme is seen by many green activists as a “tactic” to wriggle away from direct payments to communities that have been devastated by climate change, said Neubauer. That is a charge Baerbock forcefully rejected in Egypt on Thursday, saying the initiative was a "building block."

While the power is needed, finding the right trade-off between ideals and deals will take work. “I think on the other side, we haven't figured out yet how to play this inside-outside game without eventually all compromising way too much,” Neubauer said.

This story has been updated.

To the far right: Bella Ciao

Will Europe manage to survive the attacks on democracy from within?

Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni was leaving hundreds of refugees and migrants in peril at sea, refusing to allow vulnerable people to disembark safely in Italy | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty images

BY PEDRO MARQUES
NOVEMBER 18, 2022 
Pedro Marques is a member of the European Parliament and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats’ vice-president for social and external Affairs, political planning and communications.

After becoming Italy’s prime minister just a few weeks ago, Giorgia Meloni arrived in Brussels for her introductory tour of the European institutions.

But at the very same time leaders were rolling out the red carpet to welcome her with open arms, even extending an early invitation to speak at an upcoming plenary session of the European Parliament, Meloni was leaving hundreds of refugees and migrants in peril at sea, refusing to allow vulnerable people to disembark safely in Italy.


Hailing from a party with fascist roots, the Italian leader became prime minister in a coalition comprised of friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin and another far-right party. Yet, European presidents and commissioners have made every effort to make Meloni feel welcome. “She has changed,” they say.

So, while fascists are still unacceptable, post-fascists are now apparently welcome to join the club, so long as they watch their tone and target their hatred toward migrants or those who are “different” — just not the European Union.

From Hungary and Poland all the way to Italy, the coalition of right-wing populists keeps growing. Apparently, for a good number of European leaders it seems too hard to imagine Europe working against such a coalition. And while we are witnessing the normalization of the far right, the European project is at risk of saying goodbye to its identity.

As Europe, we are — or were — a project that wanted to integrate everyone, a project united in diversity for peace and progress.

We are a prosperous but ageing continent, which will wither and wane if we fail to share the European dream with those who seek it. Demographic change means there will be fewer and fewer individuals of working age in relation to our inactive population — and this trend will continue for decades. We are in desperate need of those who want to contribute to our societies.

Of course, we have the right to build a family any way we want, with as many children as we see fit. We have the right to healthcare, which allows us to live longer. However, we also have a responsibility to share this well-being and support the European social model with an integration policy based on equal rights and obligations. Otherwise, our well-being won’t be long lasting.

Are the pro-European left and center-left capable of saying this, though?

As union representation has dwindled, our capacity to speak directly to many millions of workers has eroded. Can we win back these millions who have defected to populists due to successive crises and enduring inequalities?

It’s up to progressives to rebuild the coalition of workers in low- and middle-income households, to put forward policies for social justice, to stop pollution and climate change, to regulate globalization, to integrate those who help us to prosper and to stand up against fear and hate. We have to take these arguments directly to citizens, and use all the communication tools and channels available to us that can close the gap between people and policymaking. This is also how we counter fake news and hate speech.

Interestingly, it seems the center right certainly hasn’t learned any lessons from history.

While the conservatives’ need to cling to power was more important than standing up to dangerous fringe parties — hence their successive coalitions and accommodations with the far right — at the very least, they could have learned from the mistakes of the left when, at the turn of the century, it copied the liberal deregulation policies of the right, only to disappear from power for years.

Lacking an institutional solution for the current tension between democrats and those who repeatedly violate the rule of law and use blackmail on a daily basis, how will Europe finally deal with the rise of the far right? Still plagued by inward looking national selfishness, will it manage to survive the attacks on democracy from within?

The list of those complicit in the damage to Europe’s identity is growing by the day. Every time we concede, our values take another blow. And it looks like we will be stuck discussing how to act against violations of the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, or the rights of minorities and migrants for years to come.

Jamie Raskin: Trump thought he could enter the Capitol on January 6 'like Mussolini being carried on the shoulders of his supporters'

Cheryl Teh
Nov 17, 2022, 

A January 6 panel member spoke to MSNBC after interviewing Secret Service agent Robert Engel.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin said the panel learned how Trump was "incensed" about not being able to "join the mob."

He said Trump likely thought he would enter "like Mussolini being carried on the shoulders of his supporters."

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House panel investigating the January 6 riot, told MSNBC on Thursday that former President Donald Trump likely thought he would get a hero's welcome from his supporters at the Capitol.

"Everything that we've heard tells me that the former president was incensed," Raskin replied. "He was enraged and there was conflict about whether or not he would go to the Capitol, and he was adamant that he be able to do that."

"I imagine that he thought that he would enter like Mussolini being carried on the shoulders of his supporters and enter the Capitol," Raskin said, likening Trump to the Italian fascist dictator.

Raskin was speaking after Secret Service agent Robert Engel — who was with Trump during the riot — testified to the House panel on Thursday.

The agent's testimony comes after he was mentioned by former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, during her interview with the January 6 panel in June. Hutchinson testified that Trump lunged at Engel and tried to grab the steering wheel of his SUV while demanding to be brought to the Capitol.

Raskin said he could not reveal specific details about Engel's testimony at this juncture. However, he did say that the panel had learned how Trump was "incensed and enraged" about not being allowed to go to Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. Raskin added that Trump was "adamant that he be able to join the mob and approach and enter the Capitol with them."

"Donald Trump really went to bed the night before on the evening of January 5 believing that he was going to be staying in office for another four years," Raskin added. "And he believed that through the day."

The House panel in October unanimously voted to subpoena Trump, following several hearings chock-full of damning testimony about the former president's conduct on January 6, 2021. Trump's refusal to comply with this subpoena could lead to him being held in contempt of Congress and be prosecuted.

In response to the subpoena, Trump sent a 14-page document to the January 6 panel that started with the sentence, "THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!" The document also contained multiple baseless claims of election fraud.

Trump this month also filed a lawsuit against the January 6 committee in an attempt to block its subpoena. Lawyers for the former president are arguing that Congress does not have the authority to subpoena him, a former president.

Trump's lawsuit, however, means that the former president could potentially delay testifying until well after the panel is slated to dissolve along with the 117th Congress on January 3, 2023.

A representative at Trump's post-presidential press office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.