This press release was released by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund on May 21, 2019.
Crackdowns on local democracy are accelerating, as corporate and state interests continue efforts to repress social movements. In this well-timed book, How Wealth Rules the World, 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?
Read the rest of this press release at its original source HERE.
To order a copy of this book from our own colleague Paul Cienfuegos’ online bookstore, click HERE.