What’s the most just and effective reform possible? Ensuring every child a measurably fair start in life.

Why?

Documents like constitutions and treaties do not constitute legal obligations and nations – only people empowering others can do that, and the first necessary condition of that process is ensuring we account for the costs of ensuring all children enter the word above a “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard of democratic empowerment.

How do we assess if the costs are being covered? Those who wish to pay the costs  can never compete against those who refuse, those who would use what one Nobel laureate called a growth Ponzi scheme, exploit infants and animals.

Take anyone’s or any institution’s value assessments and impact claims – these are what situates them in the political system.

Questions: Is the target making political authority and entitlement to wealth contingent on empowering those subject to these things, and first order- children entering the world? Are they constituting a just future? Are they legitimate?

 

 

 

Are they #illegallydiscounting and disenfranchising future lives?

Fact: Growing political inequity would have done more to harm their professed values than they have done to further them, and they are likely knowingly omitting the countervailing impacts of that growth in their value assessments and impact claims.

Anyone can use any AI tool to see this clearly, contrasting claimed impact with the impact of that growth.

Or use this great tool: FalseClaimsChecker,org

 

This is called #illegaldiscounting, a cost/benefit analysis that uses a false premise – legitimate obligation in a legal system that does not empower those subject to it – to enable certain business models.

It is the inherited practice of the illegal conversion of political freedom into market freedom through an almost universal reproductive rights policy / creation ethic that treats having children as more self-determining form the parents than the child created. Welfare gains and market values do not offset the loss of freedom  – the  loss of objective, measureable self-determination – that the discounting requires. 

Illegal discounting entails assuming children deserve what they are born with rather than what their rights and political equity require and discounting costs accordingly. It also involves assuming the legitimacy of a political system in which children of color receive a fraction of what white kids get.

It derives from the privatization of the creation of power relations, an inversion of the meaning of self-determination, by corrupt leaders in the human rights regime decades ago. These leaders subverted racial justice and decolonization efforts by maintaining “separate but equal” ideologies, and the protection of mostly white generational wealth, in the reproductive rights regime over intergenerational justice and a threshold for democratic empowerment of future children.

The standard does not require claimants to actually further the values they claim, and ignores the need for an objective standard – like a “one person, one equal and influential vote” metric – of who we humans should be.This corruption fundamentally created and drove the polycrisis, in part, because public interest became a race to the bottom, with doing good simply meaning doing better than the terrible actors around us. Instead, the objective standard could have ensured anti-legitimacywashing efforts, a much more evolved concept than greenwashing or humanewashing which deal with problems downstream, rather than upstream and preemptively. Those who refuse to discount could never compete against those who do, using wealth made by not paying the costs of child empowerment / legitimate political systems to continue that process.

Climate change solutions that magically enrich some children at deadly cost to others are not solutions at all.

The corruption decoupled political representative ratios from ecological carrying capacities – the resulting inequitable and unsustainable growth – what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme – has been catastrophic, ensuring vast inequity and ecocide, and moving the freedom and self-determination of many into the banks accounts of a few. That wealth now funds a fantasy world of misleading public impact claims to hide the illegitimacy, with sensational micro victories hiding how daily growth undoes the benefits.

This enriches some illegally, at deadly cost to others.

It skews the baseline for things like climate reparations by as much as five times, minimizing life-saving liability because it does not account for actual, or birth-based power relations. Instead it looks at them abstractly.

This has a disenfranchising and discriminatory impact on future generations, relative to things like democratic representative ratios and ecological carrying capacities.

And it flows from bad research, that led to bad policy:

If lawyers had gotten it right, economists would not have been able to discount future lives because to be legitimate, legal systems have to maintain “one person, one equal and influential vote” entry threshold under standards for intergenerational justice. Lawyers (like Heather Gerken, former Dean of Yale Law School) did not, and do not, get it right because they intentionally use the legal fiction of reproductive autonomy to block the threshold, and free ride on arbitrary birth positionalities, as well as concentrations of power and wealth (the endowments as Yale, and Ford Foundation, for example) made by not ensuring the threshold, in a way that erodes all of our freedoms and right to self-determination.

It would be physically impossible to be free / self-determining if we do not now move that wealth to now elevate the threshold, with markers like democratic representative ratios linked to ecological restoration, racial equity etc.

Those moving the wealth are not being altruistic. They are defending their own political freedom, a reason that has historically, and does today, allow extreme measures.

Here is what we can do to stop it:

Take anti-greenwashing legal frameworks and look for #legitimacywashing instead.

Illegal discounting violates unfair competition and civil rights laws because it disenfranchises future generations relative to a zero / legitimate baseline, and is inherently deceptive and discriminatory.

It is preemptively illegal, under constitutional law, because the authority to govern derives from the need to empower those subject to that authority. Illegal discounting converts the possibility of democratic participation into unsustainable, inequitable and disenfranchising growth by discounting the lives of future children beneath a threshold of democratic empowerment.

 

 

 

Major philanthropic institutions and nonprofits in the United States and Europe use it to preserve status quo generational wealth, over the public interest values they proclaim.

That means the same institutions that claim to be fighting climate change have for decades been discounting the damages in things like public interest litigation, in some cases with as much as one fifth the accurate damage assessment.

This is the primary ethical, moral, political, legal question, and because it is existential: Are we valuing others enough to make our benefits and obligations contingent on their empowerment?

What would it take to empower children as they come into the world with a representative ratio pegged to restorative ecological carrying capacities, and racial/political equity?

 

 

 

Then challenge the claims and business models as illegal under unfair competition, civil rights and constitutional law. Only this tests whether political authority and entitlement to wealth is contingent on empowerment. Only this accounts for the inseparability of values from obligation.

The University of Denver recently returned $250k to a funder because of their illegal discounting in regards to their animal law program.

Read the complaint about that here.

Fair Start Movement is now assisting Truth alliance.global to make its own claims against the school for the harm it suffered.

In circles of funders and advocates dedicated to animal protection the question of whether organizations are illegally discounting (ID), devaluing the future lives of animals in their business modeling, is a real issue.

Those who have benefited from the racist and deadly Anthropocene, and still choose to maintain it through law and policy, are not benefiting animals, and – given the numbers of vulnerable entities involved – are the worst example of the “winners take all” phenomenon of those in power pretending to be leaders in justice.

How it works in animal protection (much like a Ponzi):

Funders create their wealth based on inequitable and unsustainable growth – by not paying the costs of empowering children or evading the climate crisis, by discounting black lives, etc. By using illegal discounting, those taking in the wealth do more harm than good to objective values, like animal protection. Fact: The growth creating the wealth kills more animals than as philanthropy it saves.

The funder then invests in the growth-based food or materials industry to make money, funds nonprofit organizations to create market preference for vegan products through downstream activism (distractivism) – after the harm has occurred, and more animals go into the system with more harm to the environment.

The funder and their wealthy kids walk away with the proceeds, the activists get paid their salary and their egos get fed, and animals and vulnerable communities are worse off.

Corrupt lawyers look the other way.

 

 

Trump and those like him (mostly white generational wealth) win, because instead of animal protection blocking the inequitable and disenfranchising growth that created him, the animal protection movement enables the growth by creating a fantasy world of downstream victories to hide it.

Anyone can analyze animal protection claims against inequitable growth (which is tantamount to loss of political equity at a level of illegitimacy) to see this.

I’ve seen undergraduate students spot the Ponzi. And I’ve seen them understand that fundamental or preemptive causation – because who we should be precedes what we should do, as a premise – would apply to legal cases against the fraud.

This discounting has gone on a long time, but as the climate crisis death count rises, so does the liability of those engaged in this, and we may be reaching a point where key targets/examples start to fall. This will transition the driver or philanthropy not from charity to investment, but from investment to liability for the polycrisis.

Anyone can take similar action against similar targets. Learn more here and join the Constitutional Challenge campaign.