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

This book examines how antidemocratic forces in the U.S. have evolved through history to repress communities and destroy the environment.

Ben Price reveals how corporate and state interests are systematically cracking down on social movements to insure corporate supremacy in the United States. Combining an illuminating analysis of history with his experience as a leader of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, he demonstrates how a legal paradigm that facilitated slavery and the fossil fuel economy remains an antidemocratic force in the country to this day.

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 structures used to supersede modern democracy.

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.