Violating children’s right to a fair start in life, or what they are owed under the Children’s Rights Convention, has done more harm to public interest efforts than any organization has done good because 1) it has allowed inequitable growth – the greatest driver degrading the capacity of the earth to ensure the thriving of human and animal life. And 2) we all managed to do that, to exploit growth rather than invest in children, by treating children of color as deserving many fewer resources and much more risk.

We don’t get to justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring your obligations to them. The solution? We have to accurately derive, state and comply with our first obligations: To actually empower children as they come into the world so that we live in a democracy, and not just an economy. 

A friend and I consistently debate environmentalism, He was born into a wealthy, white family, and enlarged that wealth by holding real estate, the value of which increased because of growth-based demand in California. He has also invested in artificial intelligence systems that use illegal code that degrades democracy by promoting political obligation without assurances of political equity.

His wealth – made at horrific environmental cost to mostly children of color –  allows him not to work, and to elevate his own children’s choices in life even as other children are born into early deaths. That wealth allows him to travel – even enjoying access to private surf locations local surfers could never afford.

In essence, he won a birth lottery that ensured him a life of ease fundamentally built on costs to others, and he favors conservative environmental nonprofits that do not interfere with the fundamental process that will allow him to ensure his eco-social privileges to his children.

When he learned about Fair Start he urged me to focus on getting officials to agree to the standards we promote rather than treat them as fundamental, because that immediately assumes their authority and his entitlements. He knows how to decoy from questions of fundamental entitlements, white wealth, and the first drivers of all outcomes towards existing systems of “justice” controlled by the same false assumptions that ensured the climate crisis.

I could be more culpable than my friend. I worked as a public interest attorney for both the federal government, and many nonprofits, all of which used the same illegal assessment and reporting standards (which in essence, are just forms of language) that caused the climate and political crises we see in the world today. I was using the same standards as my friend, standards enabled by removing political equity from reproductive rights regimes decades ago in efforts to subvert Twentieth Century racial justice movements, a move that more than any other one thing has exacerbated the climate and related crises we see today. In essence, by privatizing family planning, and at the most fundamental level, it created a false version of freedom – on that covered all senses of that value – by taking it outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in one’s political system.

That move obscured the most basic rule that determines whether we are free, in violation of every metric one can imagine, from protecting children and the environment to assuring each person some level of influence in their democracy.  

In my public interest work I performed a horrible magic trick: I and others with influence used a fundamental set of assumptions, entitlements, and authorities – standards – in which I received a goodwill increase in my reputation from the work, more money in my accounts, and yet the vulnerable I claimed to represent are now all worse off.

And I mean worse off in terms of the measurably outcomes that underlie things like the laws that deal with children’s rights, animal rights, and civil rights. In all categories, the entities those laws seek to protect are worse off as heat rises, democracy declines, and the distance between the wealthy and impoverished widens.    

My friend and I used the same standard that caused the crisis to hide liability for it. He is many things, many of them good. But this is the dilemma of the dysfunctional family system we have all inherited: He benefits at deadly cost to others, and chooses to continue that way in his life. That, in a fundamental way, is who he has chosen to be.

There is an ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and their birth and development itself can alter that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs. That baseline is the objective measure of our value, relative to others. There are no values outside of that system, given climatological impacts on infants, and infant/human health as a basis measure of all value.

Is there a fix?

Fair Start reforms begins simply with our admitting that the wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights because for decades – in what we might call the #famscam – nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into conditions compliant with those rights. Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive.

People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. We all have an overriding or preemptive right and obligation to take the wealth that was stolen by violating children’s rights and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future defined by actual relations, not some abstraction. 

That standard – a demand for family planning resources to ensure children’s rights, the right which are the most basic standard for who our species should be – is the key to mutual self-determination, or freedom. 

Many entities in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using the same fraudulent impact assessment and reporting standards, ignoring how children entering the world has undone sustainable development impacts, that drove the crisis in order to hide their liability for the death of millions.

The charities my friend supports use those standards.

The Tell the Truth (TTT) Campaign: Justice starts with speaking the truth, and neutral fact checking from a zero harm baseline.

The Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign just asks one question of those like my friend.

If you have claimed to create market value, public interest impact, or to exercise authority as government officials or holders of wealth, please explain how were you accounting for children entering the world relative to their rights and especially to measurable levels of political equity? Just the same way we have equity in a company, we have equity in your democracy. Your share depends on how many others are in it, the varying levels of influence they have, the impact on the environment around the democracy, etc.

We ask this question in the Tell the Truth campaign: How did you account for these things when you made your claims of impact?

We can ask other questions. Would my friend be willing to say that his entailments to his wealth, and the authority of government to use force to protect him and it, derive from and are conditioned on ensuring birth equity for all children? Would my friend change the standards, and elevate birth equity above bodily autonomy and economic growth in reproductive rights regimes, if he could go back in history and do it? Would he choose to sacrifice some of his wealth in exchange for saving lives if he could go back and do it? 

The Tell the Truth campaign goes beyond deferring to the will of others, and into the dignity of fundamental rights and obligations, and what we all owe. It allows everyone to relate their experiences to the reality of the most vulnerable: Children entering the world and impacting animals in the actual and first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful. 

Fair Start is now pursuing legal action to ensure disclosure requirements – from companies and charities – detailing how growth has compounded children’s rights violations, increasingly degraded ecosystems, and ensured massive political disenfranchisement.

The Fair Start Movement was formed as the world’s first constitutional watchdog to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would choose to avoid liability for the crisis, and to evade the life-saving and legitimating reparations they owe. Our tactic is simple: We take impact claims made by influential entities and key public interest organizations and we assess them against objective measures of ongoing losses of political equity and democratic influence, or a zero-baseline measure of the full spectrum of harm caused by the crisis. Fair Start does not replace downstream public interest interventions; it reorients them from preemptive, rights-based, legitimating, and upstream base.

Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should  disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of he rights of children and animals. We contrast impact claims that use the illegal standard that ignores harm to some children with actual harm to all children, relative to a zero baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent base value of being free.

Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurately premised communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that obligation be self-determining.

We have a right to know what entities are doing to the physical capacity for all to self-determine.  We are either included in a system of rights, which must include children’s rights as the base, or we are not. Those of us who are not could never justify why basic obligations are owed, given that they do not extend them to others. . The disclosures discussed above can ensure correctly assessing who chooses to be free or self-determining, and who chooses to exploit their positionality at deadly cost to others and thus fall outside of any logical system of liberating mutual protection.

Take action: 

All should admit that our collectively not prioritizing a fair start in life for all kids has more harm to our values and missions than we have done to further them. And we should take action to reverse that mistake, and elevate children’s birthrights as the first and overriding human rights. 

You can urge the United Nations to do so here. 

There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through, clutching at others and dragging them down as they go. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language – a new standard – to ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not that at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally. The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations, and freedoms. Without Tell the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in the language that inevitably determines how we relate to others, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

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