Fair Start Movement

Author: Carter Dillard

One Form of Protest to Change the World? To End Child Torture?

When we talk of changing the world we actually mean changing the behavior of the people in it.

We mean changing things like this mother recording the death of her three-year-old after hitting him repeatedly.

Given that the majority of people will be those who live in the future changing behavior, might be best thought of as having and raising kids well. What the heck does that mean? In the Twentieth Century, based on significant developments in the fields of child development, civil society came largely to agree – in what would eventually be called the Children’s Rights Convention – on the birth and development conditions children deserve. These resources would create a world we should all value – filled with nature, equality of opportunity, and democracies where each person would matter.

Changing the way we plan families can end abuse.
See Family Planning: An Overlooked Approach to Child Maltreatment Prevention – Child Welfare Monitor

What went wrong? Governments and big businesses colluded to reinterpret human rights regimes to ensure population-driven economic growth, rather than child-centric family planning consistent with the human rights regime. That move – over time – created the world we live in today – beset by the climate crisis and massive inequity. The men that engineered this scam robbed us of true/participatory democracy, and the freedom of consensual governance, in order to build concentrations of wealth and power.

They used poor family planning and growth to slowly push and crowd people out of town halls and into shopping malls, robbing us of our freedom.

And the charities they paid off to lie to us did just that: With child welfare organizations ignoring the conditions in which children are actually born and raised while helping relatively few numbers of children after the fact, and environmental and animal rights groups focusing on low-impact campaigns while population and inequality exploded, and the groundwork was laid for the climate crisis.

Be effective.

Finding these men, their accomplices, as well as those who inherited the wealth and growth of that scam, and taking their wealth through leaderless resistance organization and by all means effective to fund family reforms that incentivize and entitle families to do what the Convention intended would be the greatest act of justice – impacting more people, and furthering true objective values more fully – than any other one act a person could commit.

We might be inclined to resist such forms of protests because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that are those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.

We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do – including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.

We can think of the child described above as we engage them – and anyone who opposes giving kids a fair start in life – for they are fundamentally to blame for what happened to that child. They reject a change in the way we plan families that would have prevented the child’s death, in order to ensure and exploit growth.

Exxon, and their former leadership who helped ensure the climate crisis, have rejected this change.

TAKE ACTION: TELL EXXON WHAT’S AT STAKE IF IT AND ITS FORMER LEADERS DO NOT EMBRACE FAIR START.

Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power others have over them through Fair Start family reforms like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance where people are actually empowered to make the ultimate rules under which all must live. And there is only really one way to do that: Parental readiness policies that avoid things like parents torturing their children to death, birth equity redistribution of wealth to ensure true equality of opportunity, and a universal ethic and default of sustainable families.

November 17, 2022
Fact-checking the New York Times on the Climate Crisis. Take Action for the Truth.

The New York Times recently reported on the demand by many countries for loss and damage funding due to the climate crisis.

The reporting is based on a false assumption, and thus misinforms readers in a way that exacerbates the crisis and its impact on the most vulnerable people.

The reporting assumes the funding is contingent on the decision-making authority of current governments, like the Biden Administration. That is incorrect. There is a fundamental and existential human right to a safe environment now understood to require climate restoration, and such rights override governmental authority and authorize direct demands for payments – citizen to citizen if used to further the right.

Ignoring that right will lead to children being born into conditions in which they will needlessly suffer, while a handful of wealthy companies – many of whom advertise in the New York Times – profit from the status quo.

By hiding this fact, the reporters place excessive control in the hands of the leaders who caused the crisis and ignore the fundamental driver – power relations between people. Thus, these leaders are not properly held responsible, and the role power relations play in climate injustice is unrecognized. This is especially true given that family reforms and the correctly constructed right to have children (born into a healthy environment) precede and override competing rights and interests, like the property rights that prevent funding for effective family planning incentives/entitlements.

The existence and implications of that right are a fact, a much more important one than many of the facts covered in that article.

TAKE ACTION: URGE @SominiSengupta, @LFFriedman, and @bradplumer to cover the fundamental right to a free and fair future, by all means effective.

November 14, 2022
Lee Raymond, Former Exxon CEO, Exacerbated the Climate Crisis. We Have the Right to Take His Wealth.

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Lee Raymond may have done more to exacerbate the climate crisis than any other one person on the planet. His active burying of the truth of the emerging crisis and how Exxon was responsible stands out among those who have done the greatest harm to our environment.

And yet he and his family – like his son John T. Raymond – are still holding the millions they made through oil and gas, the industry that fundamentally drove the crisis. What they contributed to is literally killing people, exacerbating the deadly droughts in places like the Amboseli.

What should we do? Our government, and many unscrupulous environmental organizations that helped worsen the climate crisis by choosing not to act, will not tell you the truth. Most politicians and nonprofits are exploiting increased consumption that undoes much of the progress they claim, growth that enriched people like the Raymonds. They will accept a status quo where we do not restore the climate or ensure children equality of opportunity, because they protect concentrations of wealth and power, not people.

The truth is that the property rights – like those the Raymond family think they have to their wealth – are conditioned on family policies that constitute communities of free and equal people capable of agreeing to give people such rights. We have a right to take the wealth the Raymond family made through hurting the children of Amboseli, if we use it to pay reparations to Amboseli for this purpose.

Using concentrations of wealth and power to fund family reforms is the most just and effective way to respond to the climate crisis, restoring our environment and building resilience in children at the same time. This would also help guarantee the right to a healthy environment, now recognized by the UN. An ecosocial Fair Start in life for all children is the first human right, and we can ensure it by all means effective. Why? We are before we do, so true justice comes in creation; it is existential.

Free people who want justice will target concentrations of wealth and power, like the Raymond family, to limit and decentralize the power they would otherwise have over us in this way. Free people will help constitute true democracy though funding parental readiness, birth equity for all children, and sustainable families.

TAKE ACTION: FIND AND ENGAGE THE RAYMOND FAMILY, IN A PEACEFUL AND LAWFUL WAY, TO PAY WHAT THEY OWE. THAT WEALTH IS NOT THEIRS.

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November 13, 2022
Take Action: Effective Altruism Without a Fair Start in Life? Not Possible.

What is the most good we can do? This is a question effective altruists (EA) grapple with. And that community, which is large and comprised of many viewpoints, answers the question in a variety of ways.

But doing the most good is a question that has already largely been answered by the Children’s Rights Convention, which acts as a binding assessment of the ecosocial conditions in which children should be born and develop in order to comprise just communities. These conditions include a restored climate, and relatively equal opportunities in life that are currently out of reach (see the chart above).

In other words, while we may wish to do good, we have a primary obligation to protect future generations, and in compliance with the Convention. EA is limited by this human rights regime and deontological population (or really, power) ethics, because while many in EA value economic growth, that growth is conditioned on our complying with human rights norms that – in instruments like the Convention – show how to empower people. We need to first use human rights standards to create people for town halls, rather than the utility-producing shopping malls many in EA favor, because the latter are only legitimate if they are regulated by functional – human rights-compliant – versions of the form.

For example, some in EA might assume a good use of corporate profits would entail charitable donations to things like animal welfare reforms. The reality is that if we do not use human rights to assess the true costs of those profits on people and future generations, we actually end up doing more harm than good to humans and nonhumans, as measured against things that override EA principles, like biding human rights instruments. Instead of a focus on stripped-down welfare, a human rights-based approach enables consent to power – a more basic value the precedes and allows us to truly do good.

Invest more in kids.

Admittedly the Convention has not been applied as a standard for family planning, but it could be, using family planning incentives/entitlements geared as climate reparations for future generations, with distributions/fees scaled inversely to wealth as a means of promoting climate restoration as well as parental readiness, birth equity, and sustainable families. How can we possibly be effective, or efficient, without developing each child to their full potential, in the freeness of nature that Henry David Thoreau described as the fundament of economy?

The climate and inequity crises we face today fundamentally flow from denying the eco-social conditions promised by the Convention (denied to them per one Nobel Laureate to ensure the growth the enriched a few), because in self-governing communities where authority flows bottom up, our fundamental power relations and development becomes the exclusive reason for such outcomes.

The fossil fuel industries currently being targeted at COP27 seem like ideal targets to urge to first fund this transition from parent-centric to child-centric planning. And using the Convention, perhaps reinterpreted as requiring that we take democracy seriously by applying this inversion principle, would avoid what might be called the constitutive fallacy, or treating anything other than a fair creation norm that empowers people (from whom the legitimacy of things like state constitutions derive) equitably – per the inversion – as the ultimate obligation. How can we separate our values from ourselves, and our creation?

Change starts at the beginning.

How can EA accept property rights, for its charitable distributions for example, without this obligation? Property rights cannot derogate from our being free and equal people capable of determining who should have such rights. Assigning them without the changes made here is preconstitutional, and antidemocratic.

Without ensuring minimum levels of welfare for future children, and the autonomy of the nonhuman world that is part of that welfare, EA is simply using its platform to exploit the most vulnerable entities. They were committing a simple baseline error – randomly assigning costs and benefits without first being a group of people who can inclusively engage in such analysis.

If we reject the fundamental fairness described here, we end up with a system that does not allow people to meaningfully participate in creating the rules under which they must live, a system that is thus backed by violence rather than consent. And we would force people to live, disempowered as such, amid massive and growing inequity and in an increasingly hostile environment.

We can use the great concentrations of wealth that growth created (wealth now defended by systems of violence) to fund incentives/entitlements to bend the arc of our existence away from that future, and towards a biodiverse future where each child gets what they need, and participatory democracy – or freedom – is the reality. It would be wrong not to shift that wealth, by all means effective, given that its true costs were externalized on the women and children the incentives/entitlements would go to.

If we do not, and the situation degrades as described above, many people in that situation will turn to self-defensive violence, free people who through effective leaderless resistance models will limit and decentralize the violence-backed power (like the property rights EA now relies upon) others have over them, in part by taking the resources necessary to invest in young women’s constituting true democracy through better family policies.

TAKE ACTION: THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS TO PROMOTE TRUE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE. CHOOSE ONE NOW.

November 12, 2022
Your Parents’ Environmentalism Failed. Let’s Try Something Effective.

As the climate crisis unfolds it should be obvious to everyone that the many large environmental organizations who claimed to be protecting our environment have failed.

They failed because they chose an Anthropocentric baseline for their efforts that treated the nonhuman world of animals and their habitats as a human resource. They failed because they claimed to be making progress on environmental campaigns, knowing those campaigns were being undone by family policies that were pushing unsustainable growth.

What is the fundamental source of the climate crisis?

These are the facts:

More sustainable families are the most effective way to reduce the impact on the climate and animals. Read more.

Fair Start family planning is the most effective way to simultaneously: reduce intergenerational inequalities, strengthen democracy, and preserve a healthy planet.

The proven impacts are 10 to 20 times higher than traditional downstream attempts to protect kids, animals, and the environment. The model converts poor and unsustainable family planning into equality, opportunity, democracy, and nature.

Take action:

There are dozens of ways to promote Fair Start. Learn and act here.

Is it time for the large environmental organizations that failed us to #TellTheTruth? Yes – urge them to do so.

November 11, 2022
Fair Start in the New York Times. Now Take Action.

Kudos to Scott Mortman, a brilliant attorney and thought leader with Fair Start, who nailed the issue of what we owe the future in his letter to the New York Times below.

The climate crisis and worsening inequality are a threat to children everywhere – with effects being felt most by those communities least equipped to endure it.

We can change course. Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning.

Fair Start helps shift unjust concentrations of wealth and power towards funding policies that instead empower all children with equal opportunities in life and a natural, biodiverse environment, by incentivizing and entitling well-planned, well-located, and more equitable families. In short, we promote fundamental justice and freedom by actually accounting for, and improving, fundamental power relations between people, and between people and their ecologies. This is something almost no other group does, and it’s the best way to avoid failed families and parental regret.

Per our Newsweek piece and multiple peer reviews, it is physically impossible for us to orient our lives and actions from a just and empowering place – or for governments to create obligations like property rights – without first ensuring through Fair Start planning truly fair, inclusive and participatory communities that can actually consent to such rules.

Fair Start family planning entitlements, which empower children, get us there.

Now Take Action: Urge Exxon to move from the Paris Agreement to Fair Start as the standard for climate mitigation: https://fairstartmovement.org/earth-day-2022-climate-reparations-existential-justice-and-our-open-letter-to-exxon/

November 10, 2022
Herald the End of Superpower

Writing in The Hill, Benzel and Kotlikoff may be correct that the U.S. is seeing its last days as an economic superpower, relative to China and India. But as the climate crisis deepens now is a great time to assess the costs and benefits of chest-thumping nations trying to outdo one another.

The alternative is the international law regime set up after World War 2, the one designed to prevent nations dominating one another. That regime is just missing one piece: A just system of family policies that would prohibit the growth, and exploitation of future generations, the Benzel and Kotlikoff article highlights.

A just families system would replace growth-based national dominance with the goal of ensuring equitable families that raise children consistent with the Children’s Convention. That would move us away from a superpower, and towards the ideal of human rights: Sustainable and participatory democracies composed of people who truly have equal opportunities to thrive. Rather than vie for supremacy, we should urge the United Nations to do its job and help change family systems to create that future.

November 9, 2022
Matt Ball, Early Fair Start Organizer, Has a New Book Out!

Matt Ball, longtime activist, husband, father, and early member of the Fair Start Movement, recently published his third book, Losing My Religions. A mix of memoir, essays, musings, photography, and travel log, Losing tells the story of Matt’s efforts to make the world a better place, while offering a fearless analysis of his many mistakes.

As one reviewer put it:

[H]e plays with quotes, stories, and a wily, at times even serious irreverence. He lets us into the world of his own joys, realizations, and daily suffering. Family, religion, consciousness, health, life, reality, and everything are given a series of pulsating reflections and staggering vulnerabilities that are hard to put down.

From a professional full-time writer:

A tour de force! The narrative and visuals (everything from Death Valley to chocolate crinkle cookies) are so lively. It’s really unlike anything I’ve read before.

And from Australia:

It’s only just after 7 am now and I read the first 70 pages. It’s very unusual writing and I have found it efficient in that I couldn’t put it down – even though I repeatedly thought I’d only just read one more page.

The ebook version is free; you can get the files and learn more at LosingMyReligions.net

Matt and Anne’s child Elwen, many years ago.

Here’s an excerpt from his chapter, “God, the Greatest Murderer of All Time”:

Abortion is awesome. It isn’t icky. It isn’t a “necessary evil.” It isn’t “I personally oppose abortion, but….” It isn’t something non-politicians should shy away from. Anything that can help women have more control over their reproduction is awesome. Anything that can help make every baby a wanted baby is awesome.

Just consider what the other side is saying: They, through the powers of the state, want to control when a woman can reproduce. They don’t want every child to be a wanted child.

We want every child to be a wanted child.

Think about it: take two pills and expel a tiny clump of cells with less sentience than a cockroach. The world is spared yet another unwanted child, and on average, poverty is reduced. The woman regains control of her life, and in the future, can bring a wanted and provided-for child into the world.

And from “Fight the Power Part 1: To breed or not to breed:”

Of the people you know well, how many were provided a happy, healthy, balanced, lie-free, totally-loved childhood? (Religion counts as a lie.)

And many parents are far less happy than you would think (or than they will let on). As is probably obvious, parents feel internal and external pressure to sing the praises of their children. But simply Google “Are single people happier?” or “Are childfree couples happier?” and you will find seemingly endless studies showing that having kids is definitely not the key to happiness. Doing this search while I write this, the top results say, “the data suggest single people are happier and more satisfied with their lives than commonly believed,” and “Couples without children have happier marriages, according to one of the biggest studies ever of relationships in Britain. Childless men and women are more satisfied with their relationships and more likely to feel valued by their partner.” And this happiness is in spite of our genetic and familial and social pressures to breed.

If you think your life would be empty without a child, your life has bigger problems than a child could or should fill. If you think your life won’t be full without a child, are you sure you want to fill it with pain, screams, worry, regret, poop, worry, anguish, apprehension, guilt, and then a topping of worry?

Matt and Anne.

…

I truly think that there would be a lot more happiness if fewer people got married and many fewer people had kids. Even before the pandemic, this seemed to be happening with folks currently in their twenties and thirties. So maybe more kids these days are breaking free of the pressures and doing what’s right for their own life satisfaction.

And “Test Your Marriage”:

Getting “fixed” was yet another example of how society promotes procreating. As happened to all my friends who got vasectomies, I was questioned very seriously if I really wanted this. (YES.) (Although it was uncomfortable, and seeing smoke rising … down there … well, there were moments….)

But no one grills you about bringing an entirely new person into the world. No one questions you about that decision at all. That. Is. Fucked. Up. Reverse that – make everyone who wants to breed pass an inquisition and let anyone who wants a vasectomy get one free and without hassle – and the world would be a vastly better place.

If you’d like to learn more from Matt’s “half-failed life of airplanes, agony, animals, basketball, bliss, cameras, chaos, cops…,” and discover how his life’s lessons led him to realize the importance of the Fair Start Movement, please check out LosingMyReligions.net. But be warned, you might have this reaction:

I am riveted. For the next 36 hours, I want to curve myself into a comfy chair and read every word, every quote, gaze at every photo…and then read it again.

November 7, 2022
Take Action: Did Peter Singer’s Population Ethics Undo His Work on Animal Liberation? Absolutely.

Peter Singer is regarded by many as a founder of contemporary animal rights, largely based on his book Animal Liberation. But few realize that he has also taken public and influential stances on family and population policies, in this 2018 public lecture, for example. He avoids making concrete conclusions about population policies in this lecture and elsewhere,

Nowhere has he advocated for effective interventions – like overriding property rights to wealth in order to fund Fair Start family planning incentives/entitlements – and other peremptory norm measures would have bent the arc of unsustainable growth downwards towards what many see as optimal world population ranges. Those ranges, like all population matters, actually involve people – and the fundamental creation of power relations between them. And power and population ethics begin with human rights, the objective frame that after WW2 should cabin utility, Effective Altruism, and all other lesser and more subjective forms of policy Singer normally employs.

These are the facts. The growth Singer did not seriously address put more animals in places like factory farms than his ethics – interpreted by many as promoting mere dietary changes – took out. That growth also fundamentally exacerbated the climate crisis, which will be the greatest source of human and nonhuman suffering.

And while fertility rates may be falling, we are far from optimal and many – including Singer’s followers – are pushing to reverse that trend and increase family size to drive economic growth.

How is animal liberation possible in the face of a wave of human population growth causing massive extinction? How is promoting veganism for what is effectively a small percentage of a growing human population that mostly exploits, tortures, and kills nonhumans true animal rights? How does that growth further human rights when the growth enriched relatively few people, at cost to equality and the political stability it brings?

Singer’s work is based on an error called the constitutive fallacy, or ignoring the way our creation and development do and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and nonhumans. Who we are might be different mixes of nurture, or nature, or influential power relations, but all flow (and among self-determining peoples should flow) from our creation. We cannot separate values like nature and equity from who we are and our power relations with others, which stem from our creation.

For example, our economic birth position mostly determines whether we are rich or poor as adults. Another example would be that it is impossible to ensure the empathy people need to treat nonhumans well without addressing the conditions in which people are born and develop because empathy largely depends on years zero to three in childhood maturation.

Another example would be that if we assume we ought to treat nonumans well, we would have to structure an effective legal system that would obligate that. But because there is such massive attenuation (caused by the growth that is eradicating the nonhuman world) between people and their representatives, we cannot do this. Another example would be world leaders attempting to determine the costs and benefits associated with Anthropocentric environmental baselines like the Paris Agreement, a mistake that only accelerated ecocide, rather than using an organic baseline like being relatively self-determining people and the conditioning of wealth on equitable family planning investments that make that possible. (This last example gels with the constitutive fallacy as political adherence to national constitutions, or even international law, as basic and overriding norms, as opposed to adherence the obviously antecedent and more basic family planning norms that create us, the people.)

In other words, in Singer’s prescriptions for animal liberation come from outside of who people ought to actually be, in terms of the creation of the fundamental power relations that define them.

Some have argued that it’s unfair to say that Singer’s population comments (or lack of comments) have “undone” his work for animals, given that virtually no one knows what his views on population are. Per this argument, there are probably zero policy-makers who’ve done anything based on Singer’s population views. Perhaps few or none have decided to procreate or not procreate based on Singer’s silence on the issue.

This response treats population as something, an issue, that we can separate from what we do. But how can we do anything, or suggest that others should do something, without first determining the acceptable power relations that determine who we are, and should be? We cannot separate what we narrowly think of as population – or who we are – from what we do. The former is always a factor and precedes the latter.

Singer’s claim that “we should help animals by not eating them” is wrong on its face because the “we” in his claim – the fundamental creation of power relations that permit growth, relations he accepts – does more harm to animals than changing diets does good. That’s the constitutive fallacy at play. And that mistake – not requiring things like the Children’s Convention standard in family planning policies to improve those relations, which would physically constitute just communities – does more than just harm animals. It fundamentally permits anthropocentric changes that cause irrefutable harm to all, against an absolute standard like infant health.

Backwards family policies fundamentally drive things like extinction, growing levels of birth-based inequity, rising numbers of unhoused persons, the exacerbation of the conditions that drive pandemics, a multiplying of climate impacts on multiple levels, and the degrading systems of participatory democracy. Yet these policies are easily reversible and with policies that actually liberate humans and animals alike by using wealth from the top to incentivize delays in parenting pegged to objective standards of parental readiness, redistribution of wealth between rich and poor kids, and a universal ethic of sustainable families, all of which create functional democracies.

Don’t confuse chaos with freedom. Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions, the impact of bad parenting on communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. They will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple test, in functional democracies.

Singer never seriously addresses this issue, through redistributive birth entitlements that empower us in terms of who we are before turning to what we should do, for example. That mistake of ignoring the primacy of who we should be (and the best answer is fair), given his position of influence and the crucial time for mitigating the climate crisis in which he was working, harmed future generations.

And as a result his work does not effectively protect nonhumans, promote equity, restore democracy, or even protect considered parental desire. An alternative approach which does not make the error would value each person born, and the value of self-determination, above the growth Singer never seriously opposed.

Is this type of fairness a threat to the ongoing processes of decolonization. antiracism, and other forms of anti-oppression? Eliminating the massive birth inequity caused by colonization – the one that disempowers the majority of people, those who will live in the future – and doing so while restoring nonhuman autonomy is the height of anti-oppression. Though admittedly, all of this argument flows from Eurocentric framing and should also be done from more indigenous frames.

It would treat ensuring minimum levels of welfare, and freedom, as more important than total welfare indictors like gross domestic product. It would elevate ethics in the creation of people – and the conditioning of political obligation on family planning policies that ensure people will matter – over the constitutions and governments whose authority to assign property and other rights derive from such people, again something Singer never considered.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer to #tellthetruth and admit that his family and population ethics undid his animal liberation ethics. Urge him to support a pivot from parent-centric family planning to child-centric planning. He should admit that before we can engage in Effective Altruism we are politically obligated to constitute just communities – and total liberation – through socially and ecologically regenerative family reforms like Fair Start.

Without this, his work could in the end do more to protect concentrations of wealth and power than nonhumans.

He should not allow his work on animal ethics to mislead people from the truth that we are committing ecocide through poor family planning, and should support paying back the costs to freedom that population growth has imposed on future generations. Also urge him to lead by example and treat property claims – like the extreme wealth he helped create in the plant-based industry – as conditional on our fulfilling every child’s right to a fair start in life. That wealth, and the power disparity it represents, is defended by the threat of state violence, not the true justification possible amid fair power relations.

November 5, 2022