Ben Price reveals that our Constitution and legal system were intentionally designed to give more rights to the wealthy propertied class than the rest of us and exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a host of pressing social and environmental problems-and what we can do about it.
Many of today's social and environmental problems-homelessness, gun violence, fracking, prison privatization, and many more-resist resolution because the "rights of property" undermine the rights of people. The law attaches the power to rule to pooled wealth, which is owned by a minority. This situation is crippling communities, harming people, and destroying our world.
Ben Price tells the story of how the Federalists secretly drafted the Constitution as a counter-revolutionary document. It restored to the colonial 1% privileges overturned by the revolution, avoiding a popular backlash by bestowing rights on wealth itself, rather than creating a British-style personal aristocracy. These rights of property deprive the majority of their ability to self-govern and weaponize government in ways that let the opulent minority use corporations and the Constitution itself to block local policies that compete with their interests. These problems go far deeper than Citizens United or any other Supreme Court ruling; they are embedded in the very structure of our Constitution, law and government. But Price describes the community rights movement that is challenging the rights of property, and what we all can do to return America to what the revolutionary generation intended.