Pullman. Pilger. Abrams.

The commercial pressures, the forces urging us to buy and discard and buy again; when everything in public life has a logo attached to it, when every public space is disfigured with advertisements, when nothing of public value and importance can take place without commercial sponsorship, when schools and hospitals have to act as if their guiding principle were market forces rather than human need,…, when citizens become consumers and clients, patients, guests, students and passengers are all flattened into customers, what price the school of morals? The answer is: what it would fetch in the market, and not a penny more. Philip Pullman.

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food. John Pilger.

When marginalized groups finally gained access to the ballot, it took time for them to organize around opposition to the specific forms of discrimination and mistreatment that continued to plague them – and longer still for political parties and candidates to respond to such activism. Stacey Abrams.