CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY

According to Chris Hedges, liberal institutions are to blame for the downward spiral of the American political system. In his Big Thinkinglecture at Congress 2012, he argues that the liberal class—the press, universities, liberal religious institutions, labour unions and the Democratic Party—have forsaken their core values and sold out to corporate interests. Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitorand National Public Radio, and the author of such books as War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), American Fascists (2007), I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008) and Empire of Illusion(2009). He is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.

TONY SUTTON—Despite their tribulations, the characters in Bruder’s book show amazing resilience, good humour and cameradie as, exhausted at Christmas, the culmination of the hardest and busiest work period at Amazon, they pack their possessions into a motley caravan of dilapidated vehicles and drive away to converge on the winter-cooled deserts of Nevada, California and Arizona.

MARTA HARNECKER—This increase in the prices of necessary goods does harm to the Venezuelan people, but it also works against sectors of the bourgeoisie that produce goods for everyday use. However, to increase popular dissatisfaction they create artificial shortages by not putting these items on shop shelves in a regular and opportune way and in sufficient quantities.

ALEX LANTIER—EU austerity overseen by Syriza has blighted millions of lives, throwing the working class back decades. The ending of universal healthcare has meant a surge of deaths by preventable diseases, or because cancers are discovered only in late stages of the disease due to a suspension of testing. In the workplaces, workers are routinely forced to agree to pay back part of their salary to employers as a precondition to find employment, or to forgo their salary for long periods of time. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were forced to leave their country to try to find jobs.