Stewardship

The character of a social trust for Workforce Pensions, or Civil Society Endowments, is a specialized variation on the lang-standing legal form of ownership for the benefit of another.

Ownership is a legally recognized, protected and enforce bundle of rights and responsibilities with respect to “stuff” that can be exercised by the party holding those rights entirely in their own discretion, for their own proper purposes, for any reason, or no reason. This includes the right not to exercise those rise, but to neglect or abandon them.

Stewardship created through a trust is discretionary, but not arbitrary. The rights created by trust must be exercised. They cannot be neglected, or abandoned (a trustee cannot just “take a hike”).

Also, they can only be exercised for the benefit of the person or parties named in the instruments creating the trust as entitled to that benefit, and only to confer the benefit on those parties that is specified in the documents creating the trust.

The archetypal estate planning trust generally takes one of two forms: a life estate to a remainder or income to an age of competency, in the judgement of the truster/donor creating the trust.

In either case, the trustee steps into the shoes of the beneficiary, to exercise the rights of possession and use of the money or other property transferred in trust, in accordance with the instructions in the constituting documents.

The duration of a private trust for estate planning purposes cannot be perpetual. Such a trust can only function to transfer money or other property between generations both of whom are alive (or in utero) at the moment the trust takes effect (in the case of testamentary trusts, the beneficiary(ies) can only include persons who are alive (or in utero) at the moment to the truster’s death.

A social trust – a trust created for a social purpose, such as a Workforce Pension, or a Civil Society endowments, is governed by different rules.

That is because these trusts are constituted to provide benefits to self-perpetuating populations of beneficiaries, across the generation, continuing on into the future, for as long as forever.

I will argue that this means that the loyalties of the trustees of these forever trusts for self-perpetuating populations extend to the physical conditions, mow an din the future, that support those populations in perpetuating themselves, and their well-being, as self-perpetuating populations; that the safety of the money held in trust cannot be separated from the physical consequences on quality of life and longevity of the financing choices those trustees make..

This is their duty, as stewards of planetary scale forever money, for planetary scale forever purposes.

This is the new 21st Century planetary commons in which we each and all have rights as new 21st Century planetary citizens.

Right that we can, should and must exercise through popular participation in deliberations such as citizens juries and assemblies.