As liability overtakes charity as the paradigm for life-saving wealth transfers, here is what matters. We have to admit the philanthroscam, in which funders got to be saviors while enjoying inequitable growth that enriched their kids at deadly cost to others. In that scam nonprofit leaders would be saviors too, and in their assessment and reporting they omitted the way that growth undid their progress.
That hid the largest variable driving the climate crisis, and it was all based on violating children’s legal rights.
Read more: How the World Hides Liability for Climate Deaths – CounterPunch.org
Wealthy families in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are funding a fantasy world to evade liability arising from use of what amounts to an equity fraud standard, including liability for climate reparations. This is a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. These families fund decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues, to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.
In most cases the wealthy families that funded the field known as sexual health and reproductive rights benefited more from consumer demand created by growth, than they spent on creating demand for contraceptives and other health interventions. It was a scam, undermining inclusive and representative democracies with growth, just to avoid birth equity and likely to avoid its preemptive effect on conflicting norms like entitlements to generational wealth.
Many funders in the population space refuse to question the UN’s contradictory notion of reproductive autonomy because that would require also looking at the generations of nepotism at the heart of their foundations. Or it might require changing the frame away from “population” and towards the correct framing of an individual’s choice to be free, or self rather than other-determining, in the creation of power relations through birth, development, and emancipation.
Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. These families routinely funded decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.
Practically we ensure true change and children’s rights by entitling would-be parents to parenting delay payments, inverse to wealth and income. Given the first point above, the rights to the wealth needed for the entitlements override the rights of those currently claiming to own the wealth, in part because the owners made the wealth through unsustainable growth and loss of political equity, or the externalizing of costs that required violating children’s birthrights.
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 by relying on the arbitrary privilege of their draw in the birth lottery, while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all. It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that 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.
