Treason at an existential level does not rely on positive law conceptions of the crime. It simply could mean acting in a way that substantially degrades the security of free and equal people, especially when done for personal gain.
TAKE ACTION: Musk benefits from the United States, while also threatening it and true democracy, for his personal gain. Urge those close to him, like @Grimezsz, to speak out and ask him to change course, or find and engage him personally and share your story.
Amboseli Love is working hard to achieve noble ends and is focused on next generations, like Fair Start.
Per their leadership:
The Amboseli Love is a non-profit organization based in Amboseli Kenya. Our primary focus is on Orphaned children, children living with disability HIV/AIDs, Rescued children from early marriages and most vulnerable in the community. Amboseli Village is located in Loitokitok, Kajiado South in Oloolarashi/Olgulului group ranch communal Land. Most Maasais in Amboseli are nomads and live in Manyatta Villages with population of around fifty families. With wife inheritance and wife sharing within age sets poses increased danger in spread and new born with HIV/AIDS. That’s where we Amboseli Love get in to educate the community on the risks of shared love and take over the affected children, educated, feed and nature them to their full potential.
Fair Start policies are more effective than hoping poor black kids will make friends with rich white ones, which seems to be the upshot policy implication of the Times article. If we truly care about equity, why not promote it in the most effective way? Why not cover the fuller story of people’s lives, including how they begin?
If the Times can push women to have children to solve an economic “baby bust,” and at massive levels of inequity for the children born, surely it can acknowledge the possibility that systems are not just if they are not constituted fairly.
TAKE ACTION: Urge @DLeonhardt to cover what matters to ensure a better future.
Many nonprofits have been touting the success of energy efficiency or other campaigns designed to limit emissions.
The success of these efforts has been largely undone by overconsumption. This happens as demand for things like emissions-producing animal products, and even whole ecosystems, rises with growth. But it also happens at a much larger scale as that growth exacerbates the climate crisis on dozens of other levels, something that is enabled by many organizations’ anthropocentric and extractive environmental policies, and policies that failed to protect nature / the nonhuman world.
The crisis was fundamentally driven by the family policies – both tacit and explicit – that many nonprofits have simply accepted despite the harm they cause to women and children. These policies often quietly placed more children, animals, and ecosystems in harm’s way than the organizations’ campaigns were saving, and in a way that degraded human rights and democracy and empowered a few. I have spoken with leadership at nonprofits who admitted to me that their position on population growth, and their ignoring the massive child inequity that comes with such growth, was undoing their claimed success in fundraising materials, but these leaders were afraid to speak out for of fear of losing funding by being controversial.
Not only were many nonprofits embracing outdated family policies that let their wealthy funders pass massive privileges to their children while other children were being born and raised in horrific conditions, but now those vulnerable children will disproportionately suffer the impacts – long into the future – of the climate crisis.
This is not pure theory. I’ve worked in and with nonprofits in which leadership chose climate and population policies that hid the possibility of things like climate reparations, while also benefitting them personally at cost to the organizations’ stated missions. I have talked with prominent advocates of biodiversity who knew their Anthropocentric family policies were quietly causing extinction that undid their public claims, but who were terrified to change course. I have personally met with funders who for years held themselves out to the public as philanthropists protecting animals, in part by investing in vegan products, though they knew the population growth policies they tacitly or expressly supported and profited from were doing much more to harm animals than their investments were doing to help them. I’ve spoken with public officials who understood that growth policies were akin to a Ponzi pyramid scheme (per one Nobel Laureate) that degraded their own representative capacities while exacerbating inequity and the climate crisis, but who chose to do nothing about it.
Investing more in children, right from the start, in the beginning of justice.
It’s time to break this dynamic of fundamental injustice, and to constitute ourselves – through just family planning – as free and equal people.
TAKE ACTION NOW:
First, understand – based on arguments that now have five positive peer-reviews – that because every child’s right to a Fair Start in life is the first and overriding human right, we have the right and obligation to recover the costs these lies have imposed on future generations, and by all means effective, if we actually use the funds and other resources to protect children. It is impossible to derive fundamental political obligations (like property rights) in ways that derogate from the actual/physical relations of consensual governance, which first depends on how we are created.
If you support a nonprofit that claims to protect children, the environment, animals, or human rights and democracy, urge them to disclose their current family policies. Are they opting for policies that could bring more children into horrific conditions than the number of children the group is actually serving? Are they opting for policies that could place more animals in harm’s way than the group is saving? Are the groups accounting for how growth is driving a climate crisis that is undoing local environmental efforts, or degrading democracy in relationships between people irrespective of formal changes in political systems? Urge them to instead adopt more ethical models like Fair Start or comparable options.
Florida continues to see tens of thousands of children abused each year, with many of them dying in the process. And the state care system, despite changes, continues to fail them.
Fair Start Movement’s mission is to replace parent-centric subjective family planning systems with a child-centric model that ensures children are born and raised in conditions consistent – minimally – with the Children’s Rights Convention, a move enabled via effective family planning incentives/entitlements. We partner with organizations around the world, like the wonderful Rejoice Africa Foundation (formerly Kibengo Youth Care Activists), on Fair Start and other initiatives.
Thank you for being a leader in the efforts to assure family planning needs are being met worldwide. Given recent discussions of your foundations possibly funding a world children’s savings bank, if these reports are true, we urge one simple guideline for such a plan. That guideline would correct the baseline error, or the act of trying to assess costs and benefits without orienting from a position of consensual governance, described further below. We urge that the gift recognize that much of the wealth was built on a system of unsustainable growth and illegitimately externalized costs, per one Nobel Laurate, that included billions having and raising children in conditions that did not satisfy the standards children and their parents deserve, the standards that were eventually codified in the Children’s Rights Convention.
Is there evidence that we see children as economic inputs, rather than citizens, and not deserving of minimum levels of welfare, equity, restored ecologies, and an influential voice in their democracies? The ubiquitous bemoaning of falling fertility rates as a “baby bust” economic crisis, with no plans to assure children the things described as various policies are offered to reverse the crisis, is ample proof.
Our work establishing this fundamental baseline for assessing costs and benefits, and the human rights nature of child-centric planning as oriented to protect the vulnerable parties at stake, has been subject to almost half-a-dozen peer reviews. And the claim that a fair start in life logically precedes governmental authority to issue the property rights on which the wealth was built – because we are before we do – seems irrefutable. How could we be self-determining or free in an anthropocentric world dominated by a singularly human-centric viewpoint, rather than a natural or nonhuman one – built into family planning – that allow humans to consent to the power of others? Without that primacy we never constitute fair, or free and equal, societies. We never create the consensual, inclusive, and participatory town halls necessary to actually regulate the wealth-building economies. Free people will condition their political obligations on their capacity, as equals, to change those obligations. Fair Start enables this.
This is our challenge: If your plans are to give as reported, please designate at least part of the funds – by COP 27 – as human rights entitlements designed to move us towards the fundamental baseline discussed above, one which actually complies with the requirements of the international human rights regime. Surely, as things like the threat of climate-driven mass famine in the Horn of Africa unfold, it’s clear that our current, anthropocentric, isolating, and inequitable system of family planning was a terrible mistake. Fair incentives/entitlements, designed to build the town halls that liberate us, could have prevented that. If children deserve the funds, they deserve the efficacy putting the funds into bending the arc of planning and growth would produce through things like allowing delay and preparation, creating changes in family size, ensuring opportunities for co-investment, encouraging relocation etc. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one and there is a test for whether we are doing that consistent with human rights and democracy.
The entitlements are not paying for people. They are paying to convert – at the most fundamental or creative level – commercial relations into empowering democratic/normative relations, or the sort of town hall relations needed to regulate the second-order forms of shopping malls. If we value democracy it will be unreasonable for intending parents to refuse the empowering funds, and unreasonable for concentrations of wealth and power to refuse to give them. Whether we are part of groups of free and equal people first depends on whether we correct the baseline error described above (reiterated in the Cairo Consensus which wrongly treats the act of having kids as more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the children born) and are part of efforts to ensure people are relatively self-determining through collective child-centric planning, or we are not part of such efforts. There is no obligation that can proceed this – becoming a just people.
Legal systems, markets, customs, etc., can only do so much to guide human behavior. The gaps depend on – and in government by the people should depend upon – the circumstances in which we are born and develop and which lead to our emancipation. The value of democracy – the “We the People” – includes the high quality of life sharing the world with people prepared for such systems – with a common core of objective values, prosocial dispositions, high levels of education and equity, etc. – would entail. The antecedent “we,” that proceeds all action, is actually a reference to power relations between people, and between people and their environment, that for self-governing people should arise from birth and development. Collective child-centric planning can get us there, but because group legitimacy derives from individual choice, each person must choose whether they support or reject fundamental fairness and choose to be part of just or unjust systems.
Without this change in entitlements, we risk a future – as the climate crisis deepens – where the system by which we made our wealth does more harm to future generations than our philanthropy can do to help them. We risk choosing not to constitute ourselves as free and equal people. and remaining part of an unjust and exploitative system. Instead, we can follow the lead of others choosing to reorient entitlements, and through that discourse and action, choose to be part of consensual systems of governance.
Thanks for considering, and for your work to date.
Ask most people to define racism and they will default to blaming individuals for discriminatory preferences. But could there be something larger driving racism? Imagine how a group of people would interact if some of those people had a tenth or even less of the wealth of the rest, and through that inequity, had a comparable lack of ability to set the group’s norms, whether in the context of politics, law, in settings of employment, etc. Would that impact – via power relations – how the group members interact?
There’s no need to imagine such a thing. Persons of color generally have, because of massive and historic birth inequity, less money – and hence less power – than white people.
The role of birth inequity should in no way be seen to diminish other drivers of racism, including the personal animus that does exist, and which has been shown to drive police brutality and other forms of violence inflicted upon the black community. Those forms of violence, and the need to defund the police committing them, as well as other drivers, remain key.
Regardless, the assumption that being born poor is ok may drive much of what we see as racism, and we can certainly understand why concentrations of wealth and power would rather blame it on individual preferences. And they may feel secure because the possibility of true birth equity – or equal opportunities in life – has largely been hidden behind a dominant norm that treats the act of having children as a personal or private matter that entails no or miniscule obligations from the wealthy to those having children who will be born poor.
A recent court case in Germany begins to recognize that nature, or a restored biodiverse ecology, is inseparable from the concepts of liberal democracy and freedom. Our right to nature is what frees us from the power of others.
So what do we do about that right? There are particular men who have, more than others, violated that right and robbed us and our children of freedom. We can target them to pay what they owe, by all means effective.
To move the wealth he made by helping create the climate crisis into the most effective solution to the crisis would be a coup for freedom. Find and engage him, peacefully and lawfully, to pay what he owes, and we will share your story, and help expand the tactic towards others who are also responsible.
Almost every claim of valuing something that we commonly make has been and is being physically undone by a baseline/border error in our universal family planning policies, and the constant violations of the Children’s Convention it causes.
The error makes our political systems fundamentally unjust. The error also makes claims misleading, converting empowering democratic relations that limit and decentralize power into exploitative commercial ones that do the opposite.
Pressing claimants to account for the actual people in their claims – to stop abstracting – demonstrates this. Ask anyone making a policy claim to account for the minimum levels of welfare, equity, restored ecology, and effective democratic voice, they are ensuring for the people – and the future majority that would be impacted by – their claim. If they cannot account for these basic values, they are not making a morally coherent claim.
Many are already moving in that direction with the most effective reforms possible, and choosing not to be part of an unjust, or preconstitutional and anthropocentric, system that exploits rather than invests in kids.
TAKE ACTION: THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS TO HELP BEND THE ARC OF WHO WE ARE TOWARDS JUSTICE.
