How Wealth Rules the World - 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. Price exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a host of pressing social and environmental problems - and what we can do about it.
Rebelling Against the Corporate State: Forging a community rights movement
CELDF's popular Community Rights Papers were printed between 2014 – 2017 and re-frame contemporary and historical events through a Community Rights lens. They are compiled here in book format, offering a vision of what is possible when using a rights-based legal framework. 
We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States A revolutionary handbook portraying communities across the U.S. who have responded to environmentally destructive corporate projects by banning them locally. These are the inspiring voices of ordinary citizens and activists practicing a cutting-edge form of organizing developed by CELDF. Instead of fighting against what we don't want, this is about creating, through local community self-government, what we do want. Communities are refusing to cooperate with the unjust laws that favor corporate profit over local sustainability. They are leading the way forward. Across the country, they working to drive their rights into state constitutions and, eventually, in the federal Constitution. |
We the People 2.0 - The Second American Revolution is a visual essay about the loss of democracy in the United States. The film utilizes both original footage as well as found footage to describe a profound change in thinking at the grassroots level. The story unfolds through the eyes of rural people who have faced decades of toxic dumping, drilling and mining in their communities. We learn with them that the reason why, in spite of all their efforts, they “get what they don’t want, again and again,” is because they are, by law, truly powerless in spite of propaganda that says they live in the “best democracy in the world.” These people come to understand that the reason they can’t stop the destruction is that the US has become an oligarchy, run by the corporate few who ignore the rights and will of the people. These people are frontally challenging our corporate state; thereby saving nature and themselves. 
On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability: The Community Rights Movement in the United States Our existing system of law is aimed at constant growth, development, and extraction - and conventional environmental advocacy works around the edges of this system, rather than takes it on directly. Unsurprisingly, more than forty years after our major environmental laws were passed - from species loss, to toxins in the environment, to global warming - things have gotten worse. It's time to change our activism to focus on changing the system itself, rather than continuing to work around it. |
