How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property

Product Description

Crackdowns on local democracy are accelerating, as corporate and state interests continue efforts to repress social movements. In this well-timed book, Ben Price presciently reveals structures of power and law that facilitate blatant corporate supremacy in the United States.

Price uses his years of experience as a community organizer and a careful reading of history to show how a legal paradigm that facilitated slavery and the fossil fuel economy has endured and adapted over time – today barricading our communities and squelching dissent.

Many books have been written about wealth, power and politics in the United States. Most of them make intuitive sense. Wealthy people use their power to influence and control politics. But Ben Price’s new book is often counterintuitive as he explores how wealth itself is imbued with power. He answers questions such as:

How is the American Legislative Exchange Council – a modern states’ rights, free market capitalist group – the intellectual and political descendant of George Washington’s Federalist Party?
How was the Fourteenth Amendment that emancipated African American slaves from their status as property used by a reactionary Supreme Court to grant legal “personhood” to private corporations?
How are cities seen under our legal doctrine as “public corporations,” devoid of real governing authority?

Further, Price identifies key counterrevolutions in U.S. history that squelched the transformative potential of the Civil War and American Revolution, and traces the roots of colonial and imperial systems of control. He links them to modern “free trade” agreements and other antidemocratic structures used to supersede democracy to this day.

For some, this will come as no surprise. For others, it will be a rude, though necessary, awakening. “The white man’s municipalities are just reservations, like ours,” said a resident of Pine Ridge Reservation, who Price spoke with. “The difference is, we know we live on reservations. The white man doesn’t.”

Crucially, Price shares insight into how social movements can plant seeds of a new legal system that makes the liberty, civil rights and dignity of humans and ecosystems its ultimate purpose. In fact, he introduces the reader to people who are doing just that.

Review

“This wonderful book makes clear some of the power mechanisms by which the rich steal from the poor and the powerful are killing the planet. Better, it makes clear means by which we can and must fight back.”

—Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, The Myth of Human Supremacy, and The Culture of Make Believe
 
“Indigenous people have said for hundreds of years that a society based on conquest is not sustainable. Time to move past empire. The UN has just reaffirmed that for Mother Earth to be healthy, capitalism and corporate control cannot continue. The rights of corporations cannot supersede the rights of nature.”

—Winona LaDuke, Executive Director, Honor the Earth
 
“In this book you can discover what intrepid communities across the country have learned and why they’ve taken up the community rights strategy. The Federalists who wrote the US Constitution were counterrevolutionaries bent on pushing the American Revolution off course. No believers in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, they vested greater rights in property than in people and put us on the disastrous route to environmental devastation and social chaos we are witnessing today. Modern-day Federalists and the system of government they inherited keep us ever on that course, through judicial adherence to precedent. Correcting the counterrevolutionary agenda that allows wealth to govern our lives instead of democratically assembled communities of people will require a full-blown people’s movement. Ben Price has written your invitation to join that fight.”

—Thom Hartmann, author of over twenty books including Cracking the Code and Unequal Protection
 
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