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

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.“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 nal#3