CELDF Presents How Wealth Rules

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is making available a serialization of Ben Price’s book. Read this award-winning book in free installments of downloadable pdf files shared below and join Ben Price for periodic webinars to discuss the book in the sequence of shared chapters. Register below for the next discussion and be sure to read in advance the installment to be discussed.

“HOW WEALTH RULES THE WORLD
Saving Our Communities and Freedoms
from the Dictatorship of Property”

by Ben G. Price

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.

“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. . . They vested greater rights in property than in people and put us on the disastrous route to environmental devastation and social chaos. 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. [Here is] your invitation to join that fight.”

– Thom Hartmann, author and broadcast journalist

“Read How Wealth Rules. . .  share it, discuss it, and organize around it as if your family’s and friends’ lives depended on it—because they do.”

– John Stauber, author of bestsellers including Toxic Sludge Is Good for You; Trust Us, We’re Experts; and Weapons of Mass Deception

If you’d like a print copy of the entire book