ACORN Radio

After a fatal fire late in 2022, residents got organised with @acorn_bristol to campaign for fire safety measures, and they won! Shaban, a leader of Bristol Towers United, chats with Bristol's head organizer about how £100m worth of fire safety measures will now be implemented across all of Bristol’s council tower blocks👊
Details👇
- £46m to remove potentially dangerous cladding
- £32.7m for sprinkler systems for all 62 tower blocks
- £12.4m for round the clock fire wardens at 38 blocks (until the cladding is removed or sprinklers installed)
- £8.7m for new fire alarm systems

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Transitions music by the inestimable Eliza Edens: https://www.eliza-edens.com/

Questions? Comments? E-mail research@acorninternational.org.

Support ACORN's work around the world here: https://acorninternational.org/index.php/acorn-advocates/

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Transitions music by the inestimable Eliza Edens: https://www.eliza-edens.com/

Questions? Comments? E-mail research@acorninternational.org.

Support ACORN's work around the world here: https://acorninternational.org/index.php/acorn-advocates/

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Subscribe to Social Policy, the journal of contemporary movements for social change in the workplace, the community, and the world: https://socialpolicy.org/

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Support ACORN's work around the world here: https://acorninternational.org/index.php/acorn-advocates/

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Questions? Comments? E-mail research@acorninternational.org.

Support ACORN's work around the world here: https://acorninternational.org/index.php/acorn-advocates/

Subscribe to Social Policy, the journal of contemporary movements for social change in the workplace, the community, and the world: https://socialpolicy.org/

Questions? Comments? E-mail research@acorninternational.org.

Support ACORN's work around the world here: https://acorninternational.org/index.php/acorn-advocates/

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Wade interviews Phil Allen, Jr. about the recently-published, “The Prophetic Lens: The Camera and Black Moral Agency From MLK to Darnella Frazier” and the way video and cameras are tools for social change.

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Red Hot City is "an incisive examination of how growth-at-all-costs planning and policy have exacerbated inequality and racial division in Atlanta.

Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification while the suburbs have become more diverse, with many affluent suburbs trying to push back against this diversity. Exploring the city’s past and future, Red Hot City tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them.

Dan Immergluck documents the trends that are inverting Atlanta’s late-twentieth-century “poor-in-the-core” urban model. New emphasis on capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs far from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities.

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By Toby Terrar. Read it in the Fall 2022 edition of Social Policy.

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Check out Manny's book here. 

"The burgeoning bottled water industry presents a paradox: Why do people choose expensive, environmentally destructive bottled water, rather than cheaper, sustainable, and more rigorously regulated tap water? The Profits of Distrust links citizens' choices about the water they drink to civic life more broadly, marshalling a rich variety of data on public opinion, consumer behavior, political participation, geography, and water quality. Basic services are the bedrock of democratic legitimacy. Failing, inequitable basic services cause citizen-consumers to abandon government in favor of commercial competitors. This vicious cycle of distrust undermines democracy while commercial firms reap the profits of distrust – disproportionately so from the poor and racial/ethnic minority communities. But the vicious cycle can also be virtuous: excellent basic services build trust in government and foster greater engagement between citizens and the state. Rebuilding confidence in American democracy starts with literally rebuilding the basic infrastructure that sustains life."

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Mary Gundel went viral on Tik Tok and has taken that energy into forming Dollar Store Workers United. 

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Check out the book here. "Despite the disapproval that "visibly" Muslim women face in the West, the U.S. does not ban the hijab or niqab. Nevertheless, it does find a way to manage assertive Muslim women. How so? Subtly and without outright confrontation: through the courts, bureaucratic processes and liberal discourses. From a range of juridical decisions connected not only by a distinctly neocolonial gaze, but also through the tacit dimension of race, Muslim women-among other women of color-are reconceived as neonates who must be taught to behave: as Americans, as professional women, and as autonomous, mildly independent subjects.

Focusing on the discrimination claims of Muslim women, this study examines juridical and political approaches that dismiss Muslim women and other populations of color as culturally backward, misguided in their thinking, and gratuitously nonconformist. Likewise, it analyses the experience of racial dismissal through excruciation: the phenomenon by which vulnerable populations are pressed into hopeless performances of cultural assimilation. Racial dismissal is excavated through legal opinions, court transcripts, and other encounters between Muslim women and the state. Ultimately, this work finds that the racial address of dismissal and the phenomena of excruciation have been pivotal to a liberal juridical order that otherwise claims neutrality. By concentrating on the treatment of Muslim women, this book uncovers dynamics of social and racial division which have inhabited and bolstered liberal legal neutrality from its inception. This book's framework, while focusing on Muslim women in the U.S., is a template for understanding how exclusion is juridically implemented for other racialized and marginalized populations."

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Celebrating 38 years of our KABF, Little Rock's community radio station!

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In Our Veterans, Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early, and Jasper Craven explore the physical, emotional, social, economic, and psychological impact of military service and the problems that veterans face when they return to civilian life. The authors critically examine the role of advocacy organizations, philanthropies, corporations, and politicians who purport to be “pro-veteran.” They describe the ongoing debate about the cost, quality, and effectiveness of healthcare provided or outsourced by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). They also examine generational divisions and political tensions among veterans, as revealed in the tumultuous events of 2020, from Black Lives Matter protests to the Trump-Biden presidential contest. Frank and revealing, Our Veterans proposes a new agenda for veterans affairs linking service provision to veterans to the quest for broader social programs benefiting all Americans.

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"Anthropocene Alliance (A2) has 125 member-communities in 35 U.S. states and territories. They are impacted by flooding, toxic waste, wildfires, and drought and heat — all compounded by reckless development and climate change. The consequence is broken lives and a ravaged environment.

The goal of A2 is to help communities fight back. We do that by providing them organizing support, scientific and technical guidance, and better access to foundation and government funding. Most of all, our work consists of listening to our frontline leaders. Their experience, research, and solidarity guide everything we do, and offer a path toward environmental and social justice.

Supported by outstanding partner organizations with expertise in engineering, hydrology, public health, planning, and the law, A2 leaders have successfully halted developments in climate-vulnerable areas; implemented nature-based hazard mitigation strategies; organized home buyouts; and pushed for clean-ups at superfund sites, toxic landfills, and petrochemical plants.

We support everyone we can, but our special priority is people who have suffered the worst  environmental impacts for the longest time; that usually means low-income, Black, Latinx, Native American and other underserved communities."

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Our Rural Power Project just published findings about the shocking lack of diversity in the leadership of rural electric co-operatives. Read the report here.

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"Deeply personal, astutely political, Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War recounts the thirteen-year journey of Jonathan Melrod to harness working-class militancy and jump start a revolution on the shop floor of American Motors. Melrod faces termination, dodges the FBI, outwits collaborators in the UAW, and becomes the central figure in a lawsuit against the labor newsletter Fighting Times, as he strives to build a class-conscious workers’ movement from the bottom up.

A radical to the core, Melrod was a key part of campus insurrection at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He left campus for the factory in 1973, hired along with hundreds of youthful job seekers onto the mind-numbing assembly line. Fighting Times paints a portrait of these rebellious and alienated young hires, many of whom were Black Vietnam vets.

Containing dozens of archival photographs, Fighting Times captures the journey of a militant antiracist revolutionary who rose to the highest elected ranks of his UAW local without compromising his politics or his dedication to building a class-conscious workers’ movement. The book will arm and inspire a new generation of labor organizers with the skills and attitude to challenge the odds and fight the egregious abuses of the exploitative capitalist system."

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Check out the book here!

"An illuminating, in-depth look at competition in suburban high schools with growing numbers of Asian Americans, where white parents are determined to ensure that their children remain at the head of the class.

The American suburb conjures an image of picturesque privilege: manicured lawns, quiet streets, and—most important to parents—high-quality schools. These elite enclaves are also historically white, allowing many white Americans to safeguard their privileges by using public schools to help their children enter top colleges. That’s changing, however, as Asian American professionals increasingly move into wealthy suburban areas to give their kids that same leg up for their college applications and future careers.

As Natasha Warikoo shows in Race at the Top, white and Asian parents alike will do anything to help their children get to the top of the achievement pile. She takes us into the affluent suburban East Coast school she calls “Woodcrest High,” with a student body about one-half white and one-third Asian American. As increasing numbers of Woodcrest’s Asian American students earn star-pupil status, many whites feel displaced from the top of the academic hierarchy, and their frustrations grow. To maintain their children’s edge, some white parents complain to the school that schoolwork has become too rigorous. They also emphasize excellence in extracurriculars like sports and theater, which maintains their children’s advantage.

Warikoo reveals how, even when they are bested, white families in Woodcrest work to change the rules in their favor so they can remain the winners of the meritocracy game. Along the way, Warikoo explores urgent issues of racial and economic inequality that play out in affluent suburban American high schools. Caught in a race for power and privilege at the very top of society, what families in towns like Woodcrest fail to see is that everyone in their race is getting a medal—the children who actually lose are those living beyond their town’s boundaries."

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"Medical doctor and epidemiologist John Wright recorded the dramatic life and death events as his hospital went into battle against Covid.

His 350-page diary tells how Bradford Royal Infirmary tore up the usual disinfection protocols and sterilised respirators with gin donated from distilleries and of how public health was hampered by the fake news that non-white patients would be left to die.

There are heart-wrenching accounts. On one occasion staff nurse Sophie Bryant-Miles asked the hospital chaplain to perform a marriage ceremony wearing full PPE knowing that the groom had only hours to live. The patient struggled to say the words because of his breathing, the bride because of tears.

Another critically ill patient – seven-month pregnant university graduate Mehpara Naqvi – bravely put her baby’s life first, demanding a C-section. “I just don’t think I am going to make it so I think you should save my baby.” She survived against the odds but only found out she was a mother seven days later after being brought out of a coma.

Harrowing rationing decisions had to be made in the early days in Bradford as elsewhere. John Wright noted: “We are used to people dying in hospital but we are not used to saying ‘you are going to die because I can’t give this ventilator because someone needs it more’.”

As a veteran of cholera, HIV and ebola epidemics in Africa, John Wright is well qualified to write about the difficulties that confronted the teams tackling the Covid pandemic in hard-pressed towns such as Bradford."

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Wade's thoughts on the Wall Street Journal's coverage of "non-profit" hospitals' dismal level of charity care. 

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"This is the first book to lay out how climate change has become an economic issue above all and how that has changed everything from the business to politics to the outlook for the future. Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a national, nonpartisan organization dedicated to providing business perspectives on environmental issues, shows readers how this new reality will impact their industries, businesses, jobs, and communities and transform our country’s economy. Climatenomics will be essential reading for anyone who cares about business, politics, or the future of our planet."

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How A Community Voice got it!

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Support ACORN's work around the world here.

Subscribe to Social Policy, the journal of contemporary movements for social change in the workplace, the community, and the world.

Questions? Comments? E-mail research@acorninternational.org.

Support ACORN's work around the world here.

Subscribe to Social Policy, the journal of contemporary movements for social change in the workplace, the community, and the world.

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Branches from across England and Wales came together to assess ACORN UK's 8 years of progress and to plot the course ahead. 

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Check out the book here.

A pathbreaking work for the next stage of the #MeToo movement, showing how we can address sexual harms with fairness to both victims and the accused, and exposing the sexism that shapes today's contentious debates about due process

Over the past few years, a remarkable number of sexual harassment victims have come forward with their stories, demanding consequences for their assailants and broad societal change. Each prominent allegation, however, has also set off a wave of questions – some posed in good faith, some distinctly not – about the rights of the accused. The national conversation has grown polarized, inflamed by a public narrative that wrongly presents feminism and fair process as warring interests.

Sexual Justice is an intervention, pointing the way to common ground. Drawing on core principles of civil rights law, and the personal experiences of victims and the accused, Alexandra Brodsky details how schools, workplaces, and other institutions can – indeed, must – address sexual harms in ways fair to all. She shows why these allegations cannot be left to police and prosecutors alone, and outlines the key principles of fair proceedings outside the courts. Brodsky explains how contemporary debates continue the long, sexist history of “rape exceptionalism,” in which sexual allegations are treated as uniquely suspect. And she calls on readers to resist the anti-feminist backlash that hijacks the rhetoric of due process to protect male impunity.

Vivid and eye-opening, at once intellectually rigorous and profoundly empathetic, Sexual Justice clears up common misunderstandings about sexual harassment, traces the forgotten histories that underlie our current predicament, and illuminates the way to a more just world.

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Jason Linkins' piece in New Republic was music to our ears. Let's get ACORN going again!

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How the shootings in Uvalde have impacted workers' demands for greater security, including for our sister labor union, Local 100. 

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Updates on our French affiliate's fight for women's right to free expression. Check out Alliance Citoyenne here. 

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Check out the book here, by Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta.

The Future We Need  positions the struggle to build collective bargaining power as a central element in the effort to build a healthy democracy. It offers new approaches to how we build worker power in a world in which the economy has dramatically changed over the last century—evolving collective bargaining as we know it to match the needs of modern people, not only to change their wages and working conditions, but to be able to govern over more aspects of their lives. It explores existing levers of power and new ones we must build for workers to have the ability to collectively negotiate their conditions in today and tomorrow’s context. Stories of working people weave throughout the book, humanizing the theoretical frameworks. Perhaps most importantly, these stories illustrate the necessity of centralizing the fight against white supremacy and gender discrimination, which is evidenced in nearly all case studies and stories throughout the book.

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The Supreme Court in FEC vs. Ted Cruz for Senate ruled that candidates can now reimburse any and every cent they 'lend' themselves to run for office with campaign funds...removing yet another barrier to all-out rule by the rich!

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Wade's contribution to the Working Class Perspectives blog. This is a rare opportunity for workers, and institutional labor needs to do everything it can to organize in this window. Our own contribution is the Workers Organizing and Support Center. 

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A co-sign of Chloe Maxmin's urgent warning to Democrats. They need to get talking to rural people! We know a thing or two about that from our Rural Power Project. 

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Mark 'River' Peoples talks to Wade about the Big Muddy's estuaries and wildlife habitat and the Mississippi River Restoration and Resilience Initiative (MRRRI), which the Mississippi River Network is working to get passed.

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Leslie Samuelrich of GreenCentury talks to Wade about her effort to win a seat on the McDonald's board to get the company to change course on factory farming, especially its abysmal treatment of pigs. 

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Check out the book here. 

Power grabs, partisan stand-offs, propaganda, and riots make for tantalizing fiction, but what do we do when that drama becomes a reality all around us? For a country founded as an escape from British tyranny, the United States seems to have devolved into a land where tyrants rise to power, sycophants blindly follow, and the entire nation suffers.

As ancient Greek philosophers warned us, chaotic tragedy unfolds in the absence of reason, and the only cure is a return to wisdom and virtue. America’s founding fathers knew this lesson all too well and dreamed of an enlightened citizenry guided by better-than-ideological dictators.

Using contemporary events to illuminate universal human weaknesses, Andrew Fiala charts the perennial history of tyrannical takeovers and the masses who support them and ultimately suffer under their rule. Ultimately, Fiala also points to a solution. Knowing the cyclical nature of tyranny, we can build safeguards against our worst inclinations and keep alive the freedoms our founding fathers envisioned for this nation.

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In which we go ahead with a press conference on our hospital price transparency report despite falling caterpillars and a tornado warning. 

A senior editor at Mother Jones dives into the lives of the extremely rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they inhabit—and the insidious ways this realm harms us all.

Check out the book here.

Have you ever fantasized about being ridiculously wealthy? Probably. Striking it rich is among the most resilient of American fantasies, surviving war and peace, expansions and recessions, economic meltdowns and global pandemics. We dream of the jackpot, the big exit, the life-altering payday, in whatever form that takes. (Americans spent $81 billion on lottery tickets in 2019, more than the GDPs of most nations.) We would escape “essential” day jobs and cramped living spaces, bury our debts, buy that sweet spread, and bail out struggling friends and relations. But rarely do we follow the fantasy to its conclusion—to ponder the social, psychological, and societal downsides of great affluence and the fact that so few possess it.

What is it actually like to be blessed with riches in an era of plagues, political rancor, and near-Dickensian economic differences? How mind-boggling are the opportunities and access, how problematic the downsides? Does the experience differ depending on whether the money is earned or unearned, where it comes from, and whether you are male or female, white or black? Finally, how does our collective lust for affluence, and our stubborn belief in social mobility, explain how we got to the point where forty percent of Americans have literally no wealth at all?

These are all questions that Jackpot sets out to explore. The result of deep reporting and dozens of interviews with fortunate citizens—company founders and executives, superstar coders, investors, inheritors, lottery winners, lobbyists, lawmakers, academics, sports agents, wealth and philanthropy professionals, concierges, luxury realtors, Bentley dealers, and even a woman who trains billionaires’ nannies in physical combat, Jackpot is a compassionate, character-rich, perversely humorous, and ultimately troubling journey into the American wealth fantasy and where it has taken us.

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Paul Ford at DS9 Capital takes us into the mind-bendingly complex world of health insurance and talks health equity with Wade. 

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An interview about the 47 year old war in west Sahara with Stephen Zunes after the invasion of Morocco that is a timely reminder of how long it may take to block such activities, like the ones we see in Ukraine. Find the book here  and more of Dr. Zunes' writings at his website.

Dr. Zunes is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. Recognized as one the country’s leading scholars of U.S. Middle East policy and of strategic nonviolent action, Professor Zunes serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, and a contributing editor of Tikkun.

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Crystal leads the Food Research and Action Center's work on the child nutrition programs that serve school-age children. She analyzes policy to advocate for legislative and regulatory improvements to increase low-income children’s access to the nutrition programs; develops strategy and direct field efforts to achieve program improvements; provides technical assistance; conducts training; and develops materials for national, state, and local organizations. Crystal is the author or co-author of numerous publications, including FRAC’s annual participation reports on school breakfast, summer nutrition, afterschool suppers, and community eligibility. She frequently speaks at national and state conferences and meetings. Her previous work experience includes the Center for Community Change as a policy analyst on transportation issues and Housing Comes First, Missouri’s statewide low-income housing coalition, as Director of Tenant Organizing. She holds a B.A. in philosophy and sociology from Carroll College and an M.S.W. from Washington University.

Wade covers ACORN's report on hospital price transparency in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Long story short: it's bad. 

Author of Dangerous Medicine: Check out Sydney's work here or on Twitter. 

Sydney is, as she puts it, an "author, historian, sociologist. Passionate about ethics & the politics of power in biomedicine."

Frank is the co-founder of two leading international non-governmental organizations fighting corruption — Transparency International and the Partnership for Transparency Fund (Frank is the Chair of the PTF Board).  He teaches at Georgetown University, writes regular “blog” articles on corruption for theGlobalist.com and lectures extensively.  Frank is also a specialist in international economics and finance with more than 50 years of experience in these fields – first as an international journalist, then as the Director of Information & Public Affairs at the World Bank official and, from 1990 to 2017, as the president and CEO of a consulting firm, Vogl Communications Inc.

The Ecology Democracy Network was started by Ken Pentel in 2008 to create a new pro-active way of doing politics that will care for our collective home, Earth. The network is young, but growing quickly - take a look around to see what you think, and get involved!