columnists-from-the-united-states

"With rare exceptions, we in the movement have to be understood by anybody who wants to hear. We have to be available, accessible, with words of one syllable that relate to people's real experiences of life and struggle."

"...being fully antiracist is dependent on international connections, on knowing the various ways in which people live and struggle, and incorporating that into what you stand for and what you must be supporting. So then whatever you are doing, you are accountable also to them. There is no other way to be antiracist except what you do takes into account other people's struggles and ensures that you never do anything that undermines other people's struggles. This is not easy but it's absolutely crucial."

"The claim that women are liberated if some women take jobs at the top is a capitalist fantasy. The same is true for people of color, and sexuality, and every sector."

"Black Lives Matter has meant so much everywhere, including in Haiti and Palestine, and it strengthens other movements for justice against murder by the state—the human rights defenders in Honduras and Thailand who are being assassinated by corporate agents for defending Indigenous and small farmers’ right to land, for example."

"(about her work with Mariarosa Dalla Costa in 1972) …we were developing a new perspective that was international and far more comprehensive. Up to then, the working class was defined as waged workers at the “point of production”—the only ones who could make fundamental change. We were redefining the working class to include housewives and all the unwaged. It was not only antisexist, it was antiracist and saw the reproduction of labor power, in fact of the whole human race everywhere, as work at the service of capitalist accumulation. We said if you work for capital, waged or unwaged, you are part of the working class, the subversive class."

"(asked about the main thesis of the 1952 book A Woman’s Place) …It was that women are engaged in the work of making society, of making children - that is an enormous job - and that the separation between women and men is harmful to all of us."

"...if any sector of women begins to spell out their own situation and how life is for them, others can identify, say, “Yes, that is an element of my life, as well.” That’s been true with lesbian women. It’s been true with single mothers. It’s been true with prostitutes. It’s been true with women with disabilities also. You know, you know the ways in which you are constrained better by hearing the experience of others who are even more constrained than you are. And it’s certainly true with women in prison, as well."

"(asked about the pamphlet she published in 1974 Sex, Race and Class) SJ: The point was that by that time, there were - there was a real problem with how do you balance the movement of black people, the movement of immigrants, the movement of women, the movement of lesbian and gay people. How do they relate to each other? And there was a kind of competition for priorities. And I wrote the pamphlet to say, “Look, we are all in the same struggle, and there is a connection between all of us that we must draw out. But in order for that connection to be made, each sector will make its own autonomous case, and on that basis we can unite.” How exactly? I don’t know, because I wasn’t the left in that way. I didn’t feel I had to have the answers, only the questions. And that’s what “Sex, Race and Class” is about, really."

"(AG: you have said you can’t confront the American state spontaneously.) SJ: You always spontaneously react against the American state. You know, it is one of the most brutal ever in history. But on the other hand, you must organize against it. Spontaneity is not enough. Spontaneity is the basis on which you organize. And the question that C. L. R. James posed all those years ago is still our question: how do you organize in a way that does not prevent the spontaneity and the experience and the outpouring of all that you feel and think? You know, organization has tended to be a kind of repression, in spite of the fact that you’re going for liberation. And how do you form an organization that is not a repression, that is a discipline that demands accountability, but does not repress either your experience or your ideas or your spontaneous responses? That’s what we’ve been addressing for 40 years. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Wages for Housework Campaign, so I’ve spent 40 years of my life doing this. I’ve learned an enormous amount from others and with others."

"women’s struggles are labor politics, but they’re unwaged labor politics. And they’re not less important or more important but integral to the entire picture. There is waged work in the society, and there is unwaged work in the society, and they’re both absolutely crucial to the accumulation of capital and to its destruction."

"The relationships on which the whole society rests are in wreck condition, are in disastrous condition because women are going out to work. It’s not just a few minutes a day. It’s taking care of the relationships that are the foundation of our lives. That’s what women do. And when we can’t do that, when most of us can’t do that, we are either furious, resentful, or we begin to be uncaring ourselves. And that has happened to some women. It’s happened to all of us to some degree. That we don’t want to know about how the people that we would ordinarily have been taking care of, how they’re suffering. We don’t want to know. We can’t cope with the knowledge of the mess that people we love are in, as a result of the fact that we have no time to take care of them. I think there are really a lot of women in that situation. They call it the Sandwich Generation. They call it whatever they like. Any nice little name they give it, it’s definitely the suffering of the carer as well as those that they care for, obviously, which is why the carer is suffering."

"Like so many things, it all started with a small obsession. When I was only seven or eight, I used to lie in my comfortable old German bed at night, in every respect a most loved and blessed child, and think about it. What, I would wonder for reasons I have never totally understood, if only one person had the truth and that person was a woman? She would not voice it because the women I knew did not speak out, and so the world would be denied this crucial truth."

"… her travels … became more frequent after she left the in 1974 to become a Washington-based syndicated columnist, with her work carried in more than 120 newspapers. She boldly ventured into many dangerous climes and into face-to-face encounters not only with Castro and a number of U.S. presidents, but also with such world leaders as Argentina’s , Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Yasser Arafat and, in the first interview he granted to a Western journalist, Saddam Hussein when he was Iraq’s vice president in 1973."

"Israeli officials will tell you privately that "If the Arabs were ever to win, we would use the atom bomb.""

"In the United States today, the government performs many of its functions more or less effectively. The mail is delivered (sometimes); the population, or at least part of it, is counted (sort of); and taxes are collected (you bet). You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin."

"Undoubtedly the priests of the Roman Catholic Church did many unjust things during the period of Spanish domination in the New World, but the number of good and noble deeds done by them (deeds the bulk of which is unrecorded) completely dwarfs the evil."

"As a journalist, he was used to being lied to."

"I got what he was saying. It wasn’t just about crunching numbers. It was about understanding them. It was about seeing the unexpected connections."

"I now know the answer to the riddle as to which came first, the chicken or the egg? The correct answer is, “Yes.”"

"Don’t underestimate the power of nerds with access to Internet search engines."

"“You’re a theoretician. I’m more at home in applied physics.” He reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Ah yes, the great divide in physics. It’s like the nature versus nurture arguments the biologists and psychologists have.” “I wonder what they argue about in the chemistry department,” I wondered. “Probably who has to pick up the check, if they’re anything like the professors I know. If it doesn’t smell or blow up, they seem more interested in mixing drinks than chemicals.”"

"There are times when you’re incredibly sensitive and insightful. This isn’t one of them."

"College, after all, was a place where one had most of the privileges of adulthood and very few of the responsibilities. Who wouldn’t want to stay there forever if one could?"

"You’ve heard of “Rocks for Jocks,” the gimme course that departments of geology often offer? The physics department offering was called—among the faculty, anyway, “Quarks for Dorks.” Lucky me, I got to teach it."

"“Let me guess. Las Vegas had time machines as well.” “No,” said Price, “but they had something just as troublesome: the Treasury Department.”"

", former managing director at turned journalist and author of All the President’s Bankers, says that rather than make sincere promises Trump simply attacked weaknesses, taking advantage of widespread anger at Wall Street to score points against first his Republican opponents and then . , she points out, was his finance adviser the whole time. “There were more apparent Wall Street connections through Hillary Clinton because of the foundation, the speeches and because of that were real,” she says, “but these are bipartisan relationships; Wall Street is a bipartisan opportunist.” (That relationship is visible in New York City, where , formerly of Goldman Sachs, serves as deputy mayor to .)"

"If stood out to voters from the rest of the , aside from a willingness to say directly the kinds of things usually carefully dogwhistled, it was in his rants about trade and his lack of interest in dismantling the remnants of the welfare state. For white Americans anxiously looking at their disappearing stability, Mr. Trump was a bomb they were willing to throw at a system they felt was failing them. He emotionally echoed their outrage and gave them a place to direct their anger, the age-old right-wing populist trick of refracting it both upward at elites and downward at minorities."

"... the expectation that we will love our jobs isn't actually all that old. Once upon a time, it was assumed, to put it bluntly, that work sucked, and that people would avoid it if at all humanly possible. From the until about about thirty or forty years ago, the tended to live off its wealth. The ancient Greeks had slaves and —a lower class of workers, including manual laborers, skilled artisans, and tradespeople—to do the work so that the upper classes could enjoy their leisure time and participate in community life. If you've ever read a novel and wondered how those people who don't seem to do much of anything (except hem and haw about whom to marry) got by, you get the general picture. Work, to the wealthy, was for someone else to do."

"... Mr. Rutten ... really does know what he's talking about when it's come to religion ... Not to make it too intimate, too warm or friendly ... the critical thing is this: what is most important to him is most hateful to me."

"During a 40-year career, Rutten moved seamlessly across The Times’ — city bureau chief, metro reporter, editorial writer, assistant national editor, book critic and columnist. He was part of The Times’ team of journalists that won the for the paper’s coverage of the . “Original in thought and lyrical in print, his work is witty, well-reported, passionate, yet staunchly nonpartisan,” Times staff writer Thomas Curwen wrote in the paper’s 2005 Pulitzer nomination of Rutten for commentary. Rutten used his “Regarding Media” column to untangle the complexities of L.A., the nation’s s and the eccentricities of s."

"When the social and political history of Los Angeles in the late 20th century comes to be written, it’s likely that two men will stand out as fundamentally transformative leaders. One will be , the five-term mayor who changed the city’s politics and realigned its economic course; the other will be Cardinal , the Hollywood-born prelate who has led what is now America’s largest as archbishop for the last quarter-century, a post from which he will retire Sunday on his 75th birthday, as church law requires."

"One of American politics’ most comforting nostrums is the notion that we always are united by far more than what divides us. It’s a sentiment repeats frequently in his speeches, and both the president and California Gov. are relying on it to help them move toward resolution of government’s worst budgetary crisis in generations. A comprehensive new survey of the American electorate by the nonpartisan , however, indicates that the most politically engaged Americans now are fundamentally opposed to compromise, divided on virtually every basic national question and separated from each other by everything from their race to the choice of where they get their news. Moreover, the increasing numbers of independents, who’ve theoretically pushed national politics to the center with their preference for middle-of-the-road policies, no longer are particularly moderate. California has traversed this sort of political landscape for more than a decade, and now the rest of the nation seems poised to discover that it’s a difficult and discomforting place."

"The Christian worldview teaches that there is a short tether binding beliefs to the values and behaviors that flow from them. If the beliefs are false, then the behavior will eventually — but inevitably — be warped...."

"As the coronavirus crisis unfolds and media and Democratic bashing of President Donald Trump continues, a curious thing is happening – his numbers are going up."

"He did crap the bed today. The only question is whether he’s gonna roll around in it or get up and change the sheets."

"People might expect it to be funny and not just a constant political screed against one party"

"There’s a long, long trail a-winding Into the land of my dreams, Where the nightingales are singing And a white moon beams; There’s a long, long night of waiting Until my dreams all come true, Till the day when I’ll be going down That long, long trail with you."

"Nothing is less funny these days than the state of movie comedy."

"Watch his mind as it contemplates a hostile universe whose violent whims Buster understands, withstands and, miraculously, tames. Watch his camera taking his picture (Keaton directed or supervised all his best films); it is as cool as the star it captured in its glass... The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all — intuitively."

"Objectivity has been the lodestar for journalism for a long time, and there’s a lot of legitimate reasons that people wanted to have a feeling of fairness and neutrality in the journalism that they’re reading."

"The debate around AI is too focused on whether AI is going to kill us or not. It’s like talking about flying cars and how we're going to regulate them when we haven't regulated the cars that are on the roads."

"Once, when his wife suggested that he attend church on Sunday for the sake of the children, Hale answered, “My creed is truth, wherever it may lead, and I believe that no creed is finer than this (the 100-inch telescope).”"

"Whatever gravity was, it must work, because he (Galileo) had the math to prove it."

"The universe is a work in progress."

"It is indeed like that, how often we are held by prejudice, so that we either do not admit what is before our eyes or bow as much as possible to a preconceived opinion because of the perverse wont of human nature. Nor do I except myself from that weakness."

"The independent strong woman was a bad woman, even in the radical press. Irene and I had a vision of the free new woman growing in her own pattern-a new crop, new protein, new communication, new connections, new conceptions-birthing out of terrible hunger and anger."

"Irene Paull is a voice of our time, of all the struggles, of the wars and depressions. Early she protested the violent, oppressed life of the Duluth harbor and the timber industry, the anti-Semitism, the exploitation of the immigrants in labor. She became a voice of the people, collecting the poems of lumberjacks."

"Irene Paull worked against injustice all her life, and part of that work was her exquisite writing"

"From the labor movement of the 1930s to the the civil rights, peace, and women's movements of the 1950s through the 1970s, Irene Paull conveys the richness of ethnic, working-class and oppositional cultures within the fortress of America. Her voice rings as true as it did sixty years ago."

"Irene Paull was an intensely feminine, brilliantly intelligent and morally passionate woman. The privilege of publishing her stories in Jewish Currents, and the luxury of the friendship I enjoyed with her (mostly through her remarkable letters), have been among the ornaments of my personal and professional life."