‘Big-Box Swindle’ announced as latest MFU Book Club selection

Montana Farmers Union is excited to announce “Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses” by Stacy Mitchell as the next MFU Book Club selection. 

Book Club participants will join other people passionate about rural life in discussing the book with the author herself during a Zoom call at 7 p.m., June 22.

In her book, Mitchell examines how, in less than two decades, large retail chains have become the most powerful corporations in America and illustrates how mega-retailers are fueling pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising pollution and diminished civic engagement — and she shows how a growing number of communities and independent businesses are effectively fighting back.

Mitchell is a writer, strategist, and policy advocate whose work focuses on dismantling concentrated corporate power and building thriving communities and a healthy democracy. She is Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an organization that for five decades has challenged the wisdom of neoliberalism and championed local, community-oriented models — from municipal broadband to distributed solar power, community banks, family farms, and local businesses.