Even in the darkest times, some sun must shine. This issue tries to break through the clouds.
Anny Cullum shares the story of the decade long fight by ACORN in England to win the passage of the Renter’s Rights Bill ending at will evictions and winning security of tenure among other rights for tenants. Professor Ed Martin details what needs to be done to bring accountability to institutions that in the US party duopoly undermine democracy and favor elites and the rich. Bruce Boccardy counterposes the feel-good economic news from the stock market and White House with a hard look at the declining fortunes of working people in the US.
In our excerpts, David Griscom reminds us of the valiant and seminal struggle in San Antonio of pecan shellers which helped establish the deep progressive traditions in the city. Ellen David Friedman does something of the same in highlighting the solidarity and creativity of school workers in Durham, North Carolina and the tactics that shaped their victory. Longtime contributors, Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon, write about the great work of the newly formed Federal Unionists Network (FUN) created across union jurisdictions to fightback and organize in the wake of Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE cutbacks and other attacks on federal workers bargaining and organizing rights. These are three great and inspiring stories, against the odds, that are worth reading again and again when you are tired of the struggle and your spirits are lagging.
In the same spirit, Beth Bulter, feminist, community, and environmental organizer for over 50 years with ACORN, remembers John O’Connor, an earlier community and environmental organizer with Massachusetts Fair Share and head of the National Toxics Campaign. She notes that his collection, Fighting Toxics, and his essay “Fighting to Win” remain a road map for organizing, especially in these times where the intersection of climate and community is fundamental.
Mike Miller reviews a biography of Lillian Smith, co-editor of South Today, an important publication during the civil rights era and in the fight against Jim Crow, as well as the author of the novel and play, Strange Fruit. Jill Hurst, longtime labor organizer, union leader and executive, reviews and recommends Friedman’s book, Keep Going, just as she has with her continued work in Burma.
Our regular columnists are unstinting. Phil Mattera works on the cutting edge by looking at the fast-growing prediction markets, their abuses, and, most importantly, the dangerous enabling of the regulator, imperiling participants and the economy. Drummond Pike looks at the loss of social/economic mobility and how elites and the rich have created a new Gilded Age divisions of class and opportunity. John Anderson exposes the grocery monopoly in Canada and its role in price gouging that has increasingly emerged as a central political issue. Gregory Squires argues that insurance companies have revived redlining after what seemed to be a hiatus in the 80s to bring back its tragic impact on the housing market now fifty years later. These are some hard hitting reports! In Backstory, I add a look at the increasing negation of local democracy and governance by state power in numerous countries.
This issue promised to share some shining sun, but I warned that these were dark times, perhaps no darker than other times, but still foreboding and demanding persistent organization and struggle, as all of these pieces argue. It’s still the case, “dare to struggle, dare to win.”
By Anny Cullum
The Renters Rights Act came into force on the 1st May 2026 and has been hailed as a once in a generation change - fundamentally redressing the power imbalance between landlords and tenants in England. ACORN in England played an important role in this victory for tenants, putting the rights of private renters on the political agenda; keeping this on the agenda through the political fall outs of Brexit, COVID, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine; and fighting to get a version of the law that was as strong for tenants as possible in the political climate.
So, what was it all about? Before the 1st May, England’s private renters faced some of the worst conditions and weakest protections of any country in Europe, or in fact most of the global north. The 1988 Housing Act brought in by Margaret Thatcher did away with rent controls and introduced a brand-new mechanism to evict tenants - the Section 21 “no fault eviction”, England's leading cause of homelessness. Using Section 21, a landlord could evict a tenant giving just 2 months’ notice to leave before going to court and getting the bailiffs out, they could do this without having to give any reason to the court at all, and as long as they filed the paperwork and followed the very simple procedures correctly, the law gave judges no power to overturn a Section 21 eviction regardless of the tenant’s circumstances.
Over the following decades the housing market in England became hotter and hotter - a rapidly shrinking social housing stock coupled with the post-2008 rocket increases in house prices has seen the percentage of households living in private rentals double since 1988 to nearly 30% and the number of landlords increase to nearly 3 million individuals (higher than the number of teachers in England). Meanwhile the austerity agenda of the Conservative government in the 2010s saw local governments stripped of the little resources they had to police housing standards and bad practice. The result? An expensive, insecure, and low quality private rented sector where renters have been literally bidding against each other to secure a new home, while the country has the highest percentage of indecent homes in the whole of Europe. Tenants who complained about any problems with their homes ran the perpetual risk of being evicted, and were choosing between putting up with living in a rundown home or running the risk of being kicked out of that home for asking the landlord for repairs.
Enter ACORN. In 2014 when the first group launched in Bristol, private renting was the top issue members wanted to work on. The situation for renters wasn't as dire as it would get over the next 10 years of a worsening housing crisis, but people were fed up with being evicted, of having only short-term contracts and of the rents rising all the time. Over the next 5 years, ACORN would tackle the inevitable outcomes of policies which put all the power in landlords’ hands at the grassroots level. We took direct collective action against landlords who issued evictions to our members rather than fix rotting floor boards or rising damp by turning up at their homes, flyering neighborhoods and picketing their associated businesses. We named and shamed agencies that were stoking and profiteering from spiraling rents with demonstrations and community rallies. We called on local governments to use the little powers they did have to greater effect, pushing through landlord licensing schemes for greater scrutiny and accountability where we had branches. We physically stopped court bailiffs entering our members’ homes to carry out eviction warrants. We registered thousands of renters and homeless people to vote. And we did all this as loudly as we could. Our consistent direct action and campaigning helped renters become a political constituency that politicians knew they could no longer ignore, and kept renters’ issues on their agenda.
In college, a time rather more years ago than I’d like to admit, I was fascinated by what was termed the “Horatio Alger myth” – the idea that anyone born in poverty could raise themselves up and become successful in life, “rags to riches” if you will. We used it as a counter-point to William Domhoff’s Who Rules America in which he posited that social mobility was more myth than fact and that elites had generational staying power. This is an interesting time to renew that debate as we find ourselves descending into a modern Gilded Age 150 years after the first.
The Gilded Age, a term coined, it is said, by Mark Twain, ran from the end of the Civil War through 1900 and was characterized by a vast economic expansion and the creation of the first great American fortunes that made the Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, and others phenomenally wealthy. Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) satirized the idea that vast wealth masked the poverty and despair generated by unregulated capital, harsh labor conditions, and monopolies. The drivers of this economic locomotive included rampant child labor, Jim Crow laws, virtually no government regulation of business, and violent suppression of labor organizing. By the 1880s, the political system had managed to transform the 14th Amendment, passed at the end of the Civil War to ensure freed slaves rights of citizenship, to bizarrely include Corporations as “persons” under its provisions. It mattered little that the Court didn’t actually say this, but rather a “Headnote” added by a Court Reporter and former railroad president named Bancroft Davis asserted this meaning. Within a decade or so, this was being referred to as long settled law, while rapacious corporations had a field day with legal personhood, their wealthy owners reaping the gains. Teddy Roosevelt sparked an early version of progressive response as he railed against business Trusts and their stranglehold over politics and politicians.
In this harsh 19th Century economy, one can begin to understand the allure of Alger’s novels, some serialized, that followed brave, young, white men as they rose from shining shoes to become successful business people pursuing what became known as the American Dream. His first novel, Ragged Dick (1868), created the template and was followed by numerous others. Always, some stroke of luck combined with good character produced the path out of poverty in a bustling city. None were set in the South, needless to say, where Jim Crow laws and sharecropping replaced chattel slavery with little change in the social and economic hierarchy. In the North, though, the capital accumulation game was thriving for those positioned to sit at the table.
Canada’s big three are not automakers, but the grocery giants Empire, Metro, and Loblaws. These three companies effectively control Canada's food supply. Empire owns Safeway, a major player in Western Canada, and Sobeys, which is a bigger player in Central and Atlantic Canada. Loblaws owns Real Canadian Superstore and the parent chain Loblaws. Metro is a major player in English Canada, but dominates the market in Quebec. Together, the big three grocers own 75% of the grocery stores in the country.
If controlling that much of the market was the whole story, that would be bad enough. But it is only the start. Canada’s underregulated food market enables them to control far more than just retail grocery sales.
They also control food production and distribution. Small food producers in Canada often cannot get their products to market because the big three impose mandatory slotting fees, requiring suppliers to pay for shelf space in their stores. Small producers frequently cannot afford these fees and are effectively shut out. One way they gain access is by selling directly to the grocery chains, which then market the products under their own private labels. Empire has Compliments, Loblaws has No Name and President’s Choice, and Metro has Selection. The big three control much of the food trade in Canada and are the ones setting the prices—they buy low and sell high. They win and we all lose.
The big three also control the distribution of food. Loblaws operates Canada’s largest private trucking fleet, moving food from its 22 distribution centers to its 2,450 stores. Like Amazon, it has increasingly turned to automation to reduce lab our costs. Loblaws’ new mega-distribution center in Caledon, Ontario, just outside Toronto, is a staggering 1.2 million square feet and highly automated.
Loblaws, Empire, and Metro own much of the real estate as well. Through massive corporate spin-offs and dedicated Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)—such as Loblaws’ Choice Properties, the largest REIT in Canada—they own the land and buildings where Canadians buy their food, as well as large portions of the big-box stores and strip malls surrounding them. This ownership enables them to prevent potential competitors from selling food nearby.
This is done through restrictive property deeds and covenant controls that choke out competition. When they sign leases or sell land, they insert strict clauses that legally prohibit independent grocers, discount stores, or specialty food shops from selling food anywhere near them. By owning the land, they lock up the best retail locations in Canadian communities, ensuring that small food businesses have nowhere to set up shop while forcing consumers into a market with few alternatives.
All of this adds up to Canada having one of the most concentrated grocery markets in the developed world—far more concentrated than those in the United States or the United Kingdom. This concentration stems from Canada’s weak regulation of the food sector and the lack of strong anti-monopoly laws to protect consumers from corporate oligarchs.
Thankfully, the fight is on.
This is not another screed about Trump, although he is a case study of anti-democratic practice. This is about something that seems to be a global trend. I’m talking about the autocratic impulse to impose control from above and eliminate local voices, votes, and vetoes. The blunt, brazenness of power is increasingly expressed with impunity and no regard for local wishes or input.
Indeed, Trump often expresses his theory of change which is essentially, “because I could.” This was always common, but often more likely imposed with some guile, some semblance or pretense of accountability.
Recently, in New Orleans where I live, I watched the Republican Governor, a Trump wannabe, like so many these days, react to the resounding election of a civil court clerk, who had been jailed in error for many years, by going to the Republican majority legislature and eliminating the position by merging the civil and criminal court positions. The New Orleans City Council and mayor sought to call a special election to fill this newly imposed position over their protest. They, like the voters, were ignored. I recognize this pales next to the elimination of Congressional and legislative seats held by elected Black representatives, both in Louisiana and throughout the southern states. Tennessee stripped out the Memphis-based seat. Louisiana left only one seat despite a Black population of one-third. Mississippi debated getting rid of its one seat in the delta with more than one-third population. The Supreme Court’s twisted conclusions don’t disguise the obvious, and they said as much: this is about power, not the people.
