Treason at an existential level does not rely on positive law conceptions of the crime. It simply could mean acting in a way that substantially degrades the security of free and equal people, especially when done for personal gain.
TAKE ACTION: Musk benefits from the United States, while also threatening it and true democracy, for his personal gain. Urge those close to him, like @Grimezsz, to speak out and ask him to change course, or find and engage him personally and share your story.
As evidence mounts that the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol was an orchestrated attempt to subvert democracy, one obvious question is how to reverse whatever process made Trump’s attempt possible. At base, what made it possible was an extreme concentration of wealth and power, combined with a large group of supporters who were susceptible to his influence.
No solution is sufficient if it does not address that problem, by fundamentally limiting and decentralizing power into future generations through Fair Start wealth transfers/empowerment. Other fixes just move the problem around. The real fix is to take down pyramidic power schemes, the kind that created Trump.
TAKE ACTION: Real democracy is about empowering people, bottom up. The long run fix for the degrading of our democracies is a universal family planning system that builds town halls, not Trump-owned shopping malls. Urge the United Nations to act, then lawfully engage a wealthy family with Fair Start demands and let us tell your story.
“Behind Elon Musk’s blather about free markets, free speech, and free choice is his goal to be free from accountability,” Robert Reich warns. Like the actions of fellow billionaire Trump, this move to influence the public with false claims and dangerous propaganda threatens democracy. So what does this have to do with a fair start in life? A lot. Unjust birth conditions are the root of inequality. That inequality allows unjust wealth to flow to the hands of a few. When we ensure equity from birth, we build communities where voices are equal and democracy is truly exercised.
You and 2.5 billion other people likely used one of Unilever’s products today. Unilever is the powerhouse behind more than a thousand household brand names sold globally, including Lipton, Breyer’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Vaseline, and Suave.
In 2013 Unilever launched “Project Sunlight” for “a bright future” – a slick, feel-good campaign to convince couples that the solution to the world’s crises is to bring more children into the world. Watch this video the company produced, and carefully examine the family planning messaging in the mommy blogs the company sponsors.
Unilever claims to support the UN’s global goals and sustainable development. Why then does it encourage would-be parents to ignore environmental and other concerns when planning their families?The company relies on unsustainable growth and higher fertility rates to sell its products, including its worldwide line of baby products under brands like Dove.
Population growth and the consumerism that comes with it is one of the main drivers of climate change, pollution, inequality, and other societal crises. South Africa is weeks away from running out of drinkable water. Our world’s problems require sustainable solutions and a collective approach to sustainable development. That starts with smarter family planning for more sustainable families; not the reckless pronatalism being promoted by Unilever to create more consumers for their products.
Rather than encouraging parents to ignore their concerns and just have kids, Unilever must exercise its corporate responsibility to encourage sustainable family planning.
Tweet Unilever CEO Paul Polman at @PaulPolman and politely suggest the following: Please promote smaller, more sustainable families as part of your #brightfuture campaign.
The case is straightforward: The Declaration of Independence,
parts of the Constitution, and the Supreme Court have made clear that there is
a fundamental human right to be let alone, or free from others. The
Declaration, in particular, talks about freedom as based on Nature. Being
in nature, or wilderness more specifically, is the height of that experience,
and given that climate change is the greatest threat to nature, climate change
is the greatest threat to that right. How can you be free of others without
nature? If climate change is a bad thing, what’s the state of affairs we are
changing from, and don’t we have a right to that healthy and natural world? Nature is the buffer
between us and others – the thing that individuates us.
And the right to nature is not just part of our legal system. It’s fundamental to the concept of liberty, a necessary condition for any legitimate form of social contract. The right to nature, conceived specifically as a wilderness or regenerative ecological standard, is the highest environmental baseline possible. It’s the gold standard against which any environmental protection efforts must be judged. We are facing the climate crisis and other ecological catastrophes because we’ve failed to protect this right.
There is a particular and fundamental mistake in our language and behavior that impedes freedom. It’s called the constitutive fallacy, or mistaking the first obligation or principle (the grundnorm) as anything downstream from the norm that should create us.
There is another way to say this. Before we can have anything like a written constitution, iconic representatives, or lists of human rights, we would first have to be physically constituting ourselves as free and equal people who can self-determine (much the way we would in a popular constitutional convention), relative to an absence of being determined by others, or a zero-baseline. If government derives its power from the people and people derive from their creation, ensuring a creation norm that maximizes consent — again, imagine a dynamic constitutional convention — acts as a sort of “first election” to bring in future persons as new members (who always constitute the majority of persons) before we ever elect any representatives. And we have to constitute ourselves as if for town halls — with fewer and highly developed people — rather than as crowds of consumers for shopping malls, because the former regulate the latter.
This truly self-determining state of affairs requires, despite our temporal myopia, 1) conceptualizing of power as any form of human influence, and 2) temporalizing our conception of human beings to first assess fairness in the first creation — or procreation — of power relations. These moves constitute us as free and equal people by limiting and decentralizing the power that others have over us. This form of intergenerational justice subsumes all other forms, including distributive, retributive, and ecological, by factoring them into our creation. To the extent we have considered justice in the abstract, we have hidden the fundament: how justice and injustice make us who we are.
How do we know we are moving in the right direction, and that this is happening? Our relative self-determination will be directly inverse to the number of people in our democracies, and those democracies should divide into others at particular thresholds to maintain the baseline.
This dynamic process resolves the fallacy and unifies values like justice, relative autonomy, nature, freedom, equality, etc., at the most fundamental structure of human power. It’s also a pathway to qualitatively determining optimal populations using very specific and current legal standards to determine the values above. We simply cannot create a person without simultaneously impacting all these qualitative values. By seeing freedom as akin to the dynamic emancipation of children, we eliminate false generations of rights that divide values like development and welfare from liberty and we find that truly becoming a citizen requires at a minimum being sufficiently other-regarding to constitute future democracies through collective and child-centric family planning.
Assuring this level of empowerment and equity begins with policies that 1) fulfill minimum levels of welfare approaching birth equity for all future children 2) ensure each child a meaningful voice in their future democracies. This is not about people as numbers, or as population. It’s about making people matter, politically, and freeing them from others’ power — or physical influence, from disparate inherited wealth to ecological impacts — so that they may actually consent or become relatively self-determining. The closest analogy to this, in our current lexicon, is the freedom to associate.
We fund these policies by taking wealth (one form of influence) from the top of the economic pyramid as a matter of right, and thus limiting and decentralizing the power others have over us. This is obligatory, given the irrefutable facts that this wealth 1) was created using an unsustainable and unjust system of growth that violated multiple human rights including the Children’s Convention, environmental rights, the right to equal opportunities in life, and the right to an influential role in one’s democracy, 2) foisted its costs, including the loss of freedom, on future generations, and 3) is most comprehensively and effectively redressed using Fair Start family reforms and redistribution of wealth as equitable family planning incentives. The economic pyramid was built by moving the locus of power and control to the top in the form of wealth and political control (based on the threat of violence), rather than forward into future generations, and to preserve relative self-determination must be redirected.
Again, this is not about population or consumption; it’s about becoming existentially just and abandoning the fallacious reasoning that life is not fair because our creation is not fair — and can’t be.
This shift, which means humans will matter politically, will eliminate the misconception of procreative autonomy in favor of procreative justice. Procreative autonomy largely derives from religious autonomy. But note how it would violate obligations to separate church and state to live under a world defined by others’ religious beliefs, including the ideas that life is not fair because God and creation is not fair.
Consider also traditional political borders: the line on a map between two nations. Existential justice moves past this archaic conception toward a real and primary border of human power — our creation — and accounts for how it determines our freedom, or more accurately, our relative self-determination. Our current political borders mask the way true personal sovereignty is directly inverse to growth, and in ways other political models would not.
The fundamental difference between preconstitutional systems like polities and economies, as opposed to legalities, involves the latter limiting and decentralizing power in the constant recreation of their constituents to make obligations relatively self-reflective. That is what it means to constitute. Any policy that does not start with a Fair Start or comparable transition does not come from a just place, is overridden by Fair Start and is fundamentally illegitimate. The proponents of such policies, precons, will be unable to account for how basic values, such as nature, welfare, equity, and democracy, and the actual people impacted, should relate.
Here are some examples of how to apply Fair Start, practically:
1. Urge the United Nations to interpret Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to have children, in a way that is intergenerationally fair, and compensates future generations for the harm we have already caused them from unfair prior interpretations.
Thomas Friedman’s recent piece on Musk and tech capital as a solution to the climate crisis is a jarring poke in the eye for those who decry more geoengineering as a solution to a crisis created by geoengineering. But Friedman missed the crucial history, and issue, at play. Fundamentally, climate change flows from the failure of world leaders to adopt sustainable family planning policies in the Twentieth Century that would have used nature as a limiting factor.
The solution? Embrace a new family model based on equity and ecological restoration, and use the wealth bubble at the top of the pyramid – the one that buoys up the uber-rich of the world – to fund the transition as a matter of ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life.
Urge @tomfriedman to get it right.
What is Fair Start?
The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life. Let’s stop counting people, and start making people count. How? Move wealth from the top of the economic pyramid and into incentivizing better family planning and more equitable, sustainable families. That wealth was made through poor family planning policies that put costs on women and children. Redirecting that wealth is how to do the most good for children, animals and the environment, and the only way to make people truly free.
Without giving every child an ecosocial Fair Start in life we never come from a just place. Changing that is the first obligation, for all of us, and as such it is achievable by all means effective.
Today many are fighting to change this, get the wealth back, and use it to most effectively reverse the crises we face. We can separate those people from the politicians, fake charities and others protecting the wealth bubble at the top – and hurting our kids – with a simple language test.
It’s not about counting people, it’s about making people count. The borders of just and inclusive nations are not lines on a map; they are comprised of people who trust one another, and engage in consensual and inclusive governance.
For example, if environmentalists claim to be protecting a river, force them to account for the way population growth will drive the climate crisis in ways that will degrade the river and increase demands for its use. Many environmental and animal protection groups raised millions to protect natural spaces that they knew would be destroyed by population growth, growth they were helping promote – furthering the Anthropocene. If child protection advocates claim to be investing more in kids with tax policy for example, as them why they permit children to be born into poverty in the first place, rather than incentivizing better – and even equitable – family planning. If groups claim to promoting democracy, ask them to account for how poor family planning and population growth is diluting our individual roles to the point of meaningless, and degrading the civil qualities of the people around us. But the first norm has to be to simply to create normative people, which can best be visualized as a functional constitutional convention of principles – free people – not representatives, and not with the expectation that the norms will require coercion or incentives because they are not truly reflective of the people involved.
Our world is the way it is because we never held those claiming to promote values to actually account for the truth: People are the most important factor in all policy, and people don’t fall from the sky. If officials or groups do not prioritize giving all kids a #fairstart in life, they are part of the problem, not constituting us as free and equal people (and hence preconstitutional or “precons”) and protecting the bubble of wealth at the top of the pyramid in ways that will hurt our kids.
We are at a fork. The choice is clear. Let’s take what our kids deserve and build truly consensual governance. Now, how?
To constitute ourselves as free people means to limit and decentralize the power people have over one another, and we do that by promoting a simple discourse in which intending parents agree to planning caring, and sustainable families in exchange for their future children’s entitlement to #fairstart funding and incentives taken from the top of the wealth pyramid. That’s a true, or physical, social contract, which is inclusive of the majority of persons – those who will live in the future. It reflects the alleviation of power differentials, the sort rich have over poor, parents have over children, and we all have over our natural ecologies. That is what it means to be sufficiently other-regarding, or empathetic, to constitute ourselves as free people.
We can take the wealth at the top of the wealth pyramid – as matter of the first human right, one that overrides government processes and property rights – and use it to bend the arc of the future to create greater welfare, equity, meaningful democracy, and nature. Or we can leave it at the top and have a future with greater inequity, less nature, and bloated democracies that don’ work. We can become free people, and defeat the precons. The wealth bubble at the top is big enough to bend the arc, and incentivize, the future we deserve. Let’s move that wealth forward.
Take Action
Moving wealth from the top of the economic pyramid to incentivize better family planning and equitable families is the best way to do the most good
Support a federal executive order – the Tell the Truth order – that would require the disclosure of corporations and nonprofits role in the scam described above, so that we can hold people accountable.
The greatest power we have over others is the power of creation, to create future generations – the majority of people – and shape their destinies. We do this through family planning policies, and practice, at the first border of human power.
This child-centric and collective form of family planning is how we constitute communities of free people. Any policy – on any subject – that does not start with a fair start in life is fundamentally unjust, and disregarding of the right of the majority.
We can also pursue policies, like those focused on parents doing whatever they want (the sort of thinking displayed by those who refuse to wear masks in a pandemic), and those that ensure a growing population of workers and consumers to serve concentrations of wealth and power, that do not do not ensure values like welfare, equity, nature, or democracy. This approach is preconstitutional, and not sufficiently other-regarding or child-centric to physically constitute free communities.
We either proceed from an unjust position and remain precons, or choose to be just and free people going forward. Precons are dangerously shortsighted, and the only truly fundamental threat to freedom in the long run.
The right to a Fair Start in life is the first and overriding human right, obligating us to target those concentrations – and people like Ivanka Trump and other wealthy families like the Raymonds – to limit and decentralize their power and pay what they owe. They benefited from, and furthered, a lie at the heart of our systems of human rights and democracy. Government and all political obligations derive from people, who derive from their creation. The duty to ensure a Fair Start in life – the god norm – overrides all other rules, like the property rights that empower people like Ivanka.
Making them first apologize and then pay, via Fair Start incentives and entitlements, is the most just and effective way to compensate future generations for things like the climate crisis, with impacts that are ten to twenty times more effective than the downstream measures other nonprofits are promoting. Don’t get scammed. First things first – let’s start by creating optimal and just populations.
Our forbearers died to protect freedom. What will you do?
