by Karen Coulter
Karen Coulter
2024, paperback
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This book is not based on original research but is an attempt to bring a lot of useful historical research and analysis together under the theme of property rights as foundational to the U.S. legal system and to corporate power. The U.S. legal System and corresponding political/social norms are based on property rights rather than human and ecological rights. This political choice to favor property rights over equal rights is the source of most economic and political power and of social inequality and ecological devastation in what is now known as the United States of America.
While I constrained the scope of this book to primarily the Nineteenth Century and U.S. history, many of the historical truths and analyses may also be helpful to movements around the world that are trying to counter the corporatization of society and destabilizing property relations.
Along with other European colonization systems, this corporatized legal system has perpetuated inequality-based oppression of people and exploitation of the Earth for private profit past socially and ecologically sustainable limits.
While I connect historical and contemporary issue threads, my main goal is to reawaken historical memory and awareness of far different perspectives on rights and property than the current norm, so that they may inform our way forward to overcome tyranny, inequality, and oppression of people and the Earth.
About the Author:
Karen Coulter is Director of the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project in eastern Oregon and a principal activist in POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy.