In it he is quietly choosing constitutional, property, and family policies that undo the claimed impacts of his reforms in a way that benefits him and his family and at deadly cost to vulnerable entities. Children have a preemptive right to birth and development conditions that ensure political equity and self-determination, a right necessary to legitimate governance. There is no obligation, on any of us, that precedes this existential right, the one that determines who we are.
Complex documents and bodies of impenetrable law do not constitute nations and obligations, even though law professors, whose rarefied positions hinge on that being the case, want us to think so.
People constitute nations.
Sunstein ignores that right, choosing to assume governmental authority and the entitlements of many to control extreme wealth without actually deriving it from, and conditioning it on, the measurable empowerment of those from whom authority and entitlements derive: The people.
He is nonconstitutive. His base model for legitimacy is akin to the one Coca-Cola and Fairlife, LLCs, use, and which is the fundamental driver of their horrific animal cruelty and pollution.
What does that mean in the real world?
Sustein can pose as a climate justice hero, with he and his family enjoying relative wealth and amenities like air-conditioning this summer, while within that same area those born and raised to fuel the economic growth Sunstein prioritized die from heat stress.
If he and his family want justice, will they give access to their air-conditioned homes this summer to those who need it? Their property lines may be better examples of the border between self and other determinaton, or freedom, than national borders. Shall we test justice, in the real world? –
Who is more fitting to suffer the costs of the climate crisis—a influential man responsible for the policies over the last several decades, or Black infants who had nothing to do with benefiting from or making the policies that brought us to today?
If Sunstein does not owe infants their birthright to freedom, why do we owe him and his family any obligations? How would he be included in a “we” group among whom obligations are owed? Would such language, relations, and obligations magically flow from a document like a national constitution? Why orient from a default system of public protection where Sunstein gets the benefits of status quo entitlements and authorities without having to legitimate them through radical birth equity reforms?
We can ask Cass, in our Tell the Truth campaign:
Tell us what was going on in terms of children entering the world without what their rights promise them, on each day you said you were engaged in doing justice, keeping in mind the increasing decline of children’s ecologies, in conditions of increasing political disenfranchisement, and as many of those children were without any of the necessary resources to deal with the consequences?
He will have been undoing his claimed work and ignoring the fact that it would be physically impossible to constitute obligation without a shared conception of a value. The campaign is now urging attorneys generals to measure harm to infants, and the growing debt that falls on the wealth Sunstein helped to avoid its true cost, from a zero baseline that captures the full measure of harm and priority for reparative justice.
This is not complex.
Intergenerational justice requires, as a first priority, minimum thresholds beneath which children should not be born, and there are irrefutable reasons a self-determination threshold would override conflicting interests, like the entitlement some claim to the wealth that is needed to fund those threshold. Funding the thresholds – through fertility delay, readiness, and equity – moves us towards relational optimality, who we should be, which comes before what we can then choose to do.
Operating without that primary form of justice means one is unjust, and doing more harm than good. Sunstein lives in that fantasy world of orienting from injustice while performing a downstream charade, much the way Peter Singer does when he talks about animal liberation, because they are both abstracting from the actual creation – at birth – of real world power relations relative to measures that capture all forms of value.
Want to see that charade clearly? Ask him the Tell the Truth question as applied to his work for animal rights, from 2005 until today. He and others weave a fantasy word of rights, masking the reality of a ballooning of real world suffering and environmental degradation that brings us to today.
Until he changes to a threshold of empowering children to be self-determining, Sunstein will be using collective pronouns in his sentences that reflect relations which undo his claimed impacts. In the real world of actual relations, Sunstein and Singer are both and have been for decades as exploitative of their birth positionality – racial, generational, national, etc. – as the worst polluters.
Instead, Sunstein should be protecting the most vulnerable from the unsustainable and exploitative growth policies he ignored for decades, costing countless lives. Sunstein’s work in government allowed for what one Nobel laureate saw as a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable—and for many, increasingly deadly—economic growth premised on the illegal discounting of the lives of infants (especially of color), and nonhumans. Sunstein used a left v. right charade to hide the reality of the powerful from above dominating the vulnerable below.
- The policies and standard Sunstein uses are illegal because they require violating child welfare, civil rights, environmental, and animal protection laws, including the law of democracy / rule of law, that instead have to be preemptively interpreted to fundamentally derive their legitimacy and content from the measurable empowerment of those subject to those laws.
- Instead the policies and standard use arbitrary baselines and metrics to “equitywash,” which blocks accurate damage assessments and reporting, ensuring the daily undoing of value claims and impacts and costing countless lives as a result. There is no universe in which most of the beneficial impacts claimed occurred—they were simply taken out of context, acting more as a charade enabled by the daily birth-violating of children’s rights than change.
- The standard of omitting growth and other birth-related impacts was designed to protect generational wealth, ensure birth inequity, and derives from the successful subversion, through separate but equal family policies and laws, of twentieth-century racial justice movements. Those laws ensured the cosmetics of employment, housing, educational reforms, only to leave children of color impoverished and now likely to die in heat waves. The standard is the fundamental – existential – cause of authoritarian concentrations of power because this subversion removes the power-decentralizing cost of ensuring actual equity, and children’s rights.
Our benefitting from a system of growth that illegally robs children of birth and development conditions consistent with political equity and their rights has degraded our ecologies and political systems, doing more harm than we are doing good. Sunstein assumes a fundamental system of language, and entitlements, in which children of color receive a fraction of the resources as white children, and exponentially more risk.
Fact: Not deriving and conditioning our obligation to follow the law on its first measurably empowering all through high investments in the birth and development of each child, has done more to harm our freedom, than we have done to further it.
We can’t get to justice, legitimate legal systems and public protection from injustice by others, through the violation of children’s rights—by exploiting others. We can’t constitute a nation without actually obligatory, or constitutional, language that begins with admissions of what we owe children.
Legitimacy and obligation begin with rights, and the birthright of a line of resources, beneath which no child should be born.