xvii, 231 pages ; 25 cm

"Wealth inequality, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are symptoms - the fevers and chills of the economy. The underlying illness, says Business Ethics magazine cofounder Marjorie Kelly, is shareholder primacy: the corporate drive to make profits for shareholders, no matter who pays the cost. We think of shareholder primacy as the natural law of the free market, much as our forebears thought of monarchy as the most natural form of government. In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly demonstrates that this corporate aristocracy is in fact unnatural and irrational. She articulates six aristocratic principles that corporations are built on, principles that we would never accept in our modern democratic system but which we accept unquestioningly in our economy. People designed this system and people can change it, Kelly says. She calls for a movement to build economic democracy in two stages: first, by raising consciousness about wealth discrimination, and second, by aiming for structural change in corporate institutions."--Jacket

Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-218) and index

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