Foreword

We the people of the United States are not the middle-class democracy of, by, and for the people many of us grew up believing our nation to be. Our current awakening to this truth is a first step toward achieving our aspiration of real democracy and a society that truly works for all.

To take the next step, we must understand why achieving the aspiration has so long eluded us. This makes Ben Price’s book, How Wealth Rules the World, a distinctive and essential read for our time.

I was among those who grew up believing that the United States modeled the middle-class democracy to which most of the world’s people aspire. With that belief as my guide, I devoted some thirty years of my early professional life to sharing the supposed lessons of US success with the world’s less fortunate. This included twenty-one years living and working as a development professional in Ethiopia, Central America, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Over these years, I began to see results very different from what I had gone abroad to serve. I observed “development” forcing people off the lands and waters from which they met their daily needs. A tiny number of people were lifted to new levels of opulence and a few to new levels of material comfort. Most, however, were reduced to a daily struggle to survive even more brutal than the hardships they might previously have endured.

The real shock came when I realized that many in so-called advanced countries, including the United States, were experiencing a similar downward spiral. Eventually, I returned home to share what I had learned while abroad about the truth behind America’s global mission. I documented that story in my book When Corporations Rule the World.

In How Wealth Rules the World, Price adds another layer of analysis to reveal a yet deeper truth and its roots in US history. He reveals how the inspiring and visionary words of the US Declaration of Independence mask the reality that the United States was born of the European conquest of the Western hemisphere, the theft of lands from the hemisphere’s indigenous people, and the conversion of those lands into prosperous plantations by indentured servants fleeing extreme poverty in Europe and by slaves brutally abducted from Africa.

The rules of the new nation were written by members of a landed aristocracy resting on a foundation of stolen lands worked by their enslaved and indentured servants. Exactly whose rights and freedoms might we have expected these founder’s preferred rules to guarantee?

It would come as no surprise that, as Price reminds us, the original US Constitution limited political power to white male property owners and that the first human rights victory of the citizens of the new nation came when white males without property won the right to vote. Nonwhite males followed only much later. Women, of course, came later still.

So, do we in the United States finally have democracy? Hardly. We are no longer ruled by a landed gentry, but rule remains in the hands of a propertied aristocracy. It isn’t just some innocent fluke of history.

As Price elaborates, the legal code of the rights of property was inserted into the Constitution written by and for the owners of stolen property and the enslaved who worked it. It is not much of a stretch to suggest that the original Constitution was written to enshrine a US dictatorship of the propertied class.

I’m especially intrigued by the distinction Price makes between personal property that an individual has earned through his or her labor and privileged property that secures the rights of a propertied elite.

I often note that I believe private property is such a good thing that everyone should have some. By this I mean that all people should have a secure right to the property on which they depend for their basic livelihood. The land, tools, skills, and/or business from which the person makes a living for herself and her family. The place of lodging he calls home. These are the things in which every person should have an ownership stake as an individual or as a family or cooperative member.

Privileged property, as Price describes it, is property used by one person to extract unearned profits and/or to enjoy luxuries far beyond his personal need by controlling and limiting or prohibiting access by others to a means of living. It is a very important distinction between the right to make a living and the right to make a killing.

As Price describes, using a clever legal sleight of hand, the founders who drafted the Constitution made property into a rights-bearing canteen to be drunk from only by the holders of privileged property. They thereby assured that a propertied aristocracy of men like themselves would hold the powers of self-governance securely in their own exclusive hands.

As subsequent human rights victories led to constitutional amendments that weakened the rights of the propertied, a judiciary schooled in rights-of-property legal doctrine regularly stepped in to assume for itself the Constitutional power to issue decisions that restored and strengthened the founders’ “original intention.”

Consequently, the real power in our system resides not with We the People, or even with the institutions that make the rules. It resides with a court system that has taken unto itself the power to interpret the rules. This all comes together to secure the power of the US Supreme Court—as ultimate representative of the interests of the owners of privileged property—to be the ultimate decider among the three branches of the US government.

I have long suspected that the founders might well have anticipated that a Supreme Court staffed by graduates of elite law schools—in their day exclusively white males born of wealthy families—would be the ultimate arbiter of the rules. I have also long wondered about the twisted legal logic of the Supreme Court justices who granted the rights of personhood to corporations owned by private shareholders. Isn’t an owned person a slave?

The system of rule by property in the name of democracy that the US founders put in place is one of history’s greatest and most successful deceptions. Libertarian think tanks, neoliberal economists, and lawyers in service to the propertied class have more recently taken the deception global through the World Trade Organization and international trade and investment agreements.

I am struck by the truth of Price’s extraordinary and perceptive observation that the US Constitution, which defined economic relations between thirteen formerly independent colonies with its clauses on contracts and interstate commerce, was effectively the first North American trade agreement securing the interests of big business and wealth concentration.

The division between the super-rich and everyone else continues to grow on a now global scale to create the greatest wealth gap in human history. As of 2018, the six richest people in the world owned more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. The combined wealth of the three richest US citizens exceeded that of the poorest half of the US population.¹

If democracy was the founders’ intention, they failed terribly. If it was to secure elite privilege and an ever-growing gap between rich and poor, they succeeded beyond anything they could possibly have imagined.

What the US founders may have intended, however, is currently irrelevant. We the People—all people—have the right and the imperative to create the democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people that we have never had. How Wealth Rules the World unlocks the code that stripped us of our rights and that we must now strip from the laws and legal institutions by which we govern ourselves.

David C. Korten, author, When Corporations
Rule the World and Change the Story,
Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth