Many in leadership at public interest organizations face a unique conflict of interest.
They will be interacting with funders who want the organizations to undercut their missions by ignoring growth and inequity, and the exponentially greater impact children entering the world without the necessary resources on any given day have on the organizations’ claims and missions than the organizations’ individual efforts have.
The organizations can undercut their own work by making choices that exacerbate child inequity, and through impact fraud, i.e. making of claims of ogress that ignore the key context. It can also do much greater harm.
Climate and related reparations have to be paid out relative to metric or baseline that measures the damages, and in some cases specifies how the funds are to be used. The baseline commonly used today is the same one that caused the climate crisis, elevating the freedom of current generations over future ones. Moving to a new baseline will save countless innocent lives.
But it requires an accurate picture of costs and benefits. Impact fraud, like claiming to benefit children while backing policies that ensure more children are born into insufficient conditions than the charity actually benefits, clouds the picture.
Ignoring key context, in claims and in organizational programming, creates legal liability. The climate crisis is driven by large environmental organizations that for decades engaged in this fraud, and now millions are dying from the standards the fraud hid and the misconduct it encouraged. Many of those in leadership carry serious liability.
Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most
Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy.
Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes.But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.
Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children.
These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth.
Because leaders at the organizations have the unique ability to conceal this undercutting, because they benefit substantially more than the least compensated employees, as well as the volunteers, of the organization, and because they will control the funding being offered, leaders face a special conflict of interest.
Those at the bottom of the hierarchy , who do not face this conflict and are truly aligned with the mission, have a responsibility to police those at the top of the hierarchy. This is an ongoing process that currently involves whistleblowers at several organizations based in the United States, including several facing retaliation for attempts to unionize and be formally empowered to avoid the fraud. Those continuing the fundamental deceit that created the climate crisis are a threat to all of our futures.
Is it worth the effort to remove corrupt leadership in order to ensure organizational integrity, impact and to save countless lives by ensuring legal entitlements? Many think so.
TAKE ACTION: If you see impact fraud at an organization you are affiliated with, contact Info@fairstartmovement.org and we will refer you to competent legal counsel.
An ecosocial fair start in life is also the standard for evaluating legal damages for the many crises unfolding today, including the rampant impact fraud hiding climate liability, and it is the preemptive standard for all law and policy to resolve the damages.
Fraud Includes Omitting Facts Regarding the Largest Drivers of the Issue Being Discussed, Facts Which Matter Most to the Most Vulnerable
The claims many of these entities make to creating benefits are cancelled out every day as children enter the world in ways that degrade their ecologies, and without the resources they need. For example, wealthy families will often fund animal protection organizations that choose low-impact policies that avoid revealing the impacts of children entering the world on animals, even if that process does more harm to animals than the organizations are doing good.
These are the entitlements that comprise a measurable capacity to engage in democracy (which as the climate crisis unfolds is better understood as physically baselined share equity – equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcome) and beneath minimum rights-based thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and the legitimacy of their political systems, and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.
This is the fundamental driver of the crises we see today.
An editor at a major U.S. media outlet told Fair Start activists that the outlet would never cover the full impacts of growth on animals, while simultaneously covering sensational but low-impact animal rights campaigns. The campaigns are funded by a wealthy family that made money on growth-based food investments which, on balance, did more harm to animals than the family’s philanthropy has done good. The outlet routinely published media urging women to have children, with no safeguards, during the climate crisis, and misleading articles criticizing the idea of equality of opportunity and minimizing the role of family wealth in controlling United States politics. Environmental and animal protection funders, nonprofits, and their media did more to empower the industries they claimed to oppose than the victims they claimed to represent.
Would it not be better to actually benefit nonhumans, and humans, on balance?
Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most
Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy.
Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes.But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.
Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and other EA favored outcomes, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children. These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth, e.g., vegan food investors.
TAKE ACTION AND KNOW HOW TO MEASURE AND COLLECT THE THE DAMAGES CORRECTLY FOR WHAT YOU ARE OWED:
All policy starts with who we should be, or children’s rights and the line or threshold of true self-determination below which children should not be born, and above which children may be born. You either agree to that line as a primary obligation or not.
That line is set to a threshold of zero based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much is easier to see and achieve in a collective setting like care modeling than a nuclear family. This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders.
We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them. Why focus on Singer? Animal liberation, and the legal system necessary to achieve it, is perhaps the highest ideal of human progress to date. Defining that idea in a way that evades critical protections for nonhumans, and enables today’s catastrophic state of affairs, causes harm by decoying efforts away from effective work.
Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assure share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms.
Again, they set line, linked to physical conditions in the world, that creates a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children. For those who made fraudulent claims that are being undone relative to these metrics, and who choose to benefit at deadly cost to others, consider the horror stories at the end of each values when engaging to hold them accountable for choosing fundamental injustice.
This is not intersectionality. Think of the values below all together as different sides of what it means to be free. Many children die every day because they are born without these entitlements, and all are inseparable and determined when we have children above or below the specific line of ecosocial inclusivity.
Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be. Google terms like “conviction” with terms “child abuse” and “child torture.” Those refusing a threshold benefitted from the suffering your are reading about to make money on things like growth-driven investments.
Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections. Current growth and wealth-based high emissions standards have already dilled millions. How should we treat those willing to choose a standard from which they benefit, but that kills others?
Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections. When some choose to other-determine rather than self-determine, by choosing economic families over democratic ones, it robs you of your freedom. How do free persons deal with such threats, and how have they in the past?
Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above. How could your self-determination not be limited by those entering the world? In this value, It would not seem to be limited if the average person were not really being empowered at birth, but being exploited by others. Many died defending notions of freedom that were less clear than what has been laid out here.
Between 1948 and 1968 in the wake of World War II, the United Nations and member states were obligated to use objective values and human rights to limit the power of nations over their citizens, in order for those nations to remain legitimate, sovereign and authorized to make laws and enforce them, as well as to entitle wealth and property. Underlying this process was the assumption that sovereign governments have no inherent authority, but derive it from the sovereignty / self-determination of their citizens.
This defined freedom as the powerful determining the vulnerable, for current over future generations and rich over the poor. It made liberty doing whatever you want to do, and autonomy as somehow existing outside of collective equity or democracy where each person eventually can offset the influence of others in a measurable way, and control through rulemaking who has influence or power over them.
Yes, a woman could choose to terminate her pregnancy or not as an act of bodily autonomy, but not be free from dying (with or without a child) in a growth-exacerbated heat wave because she could not afford air conditioning. That sense of bodily autonomy was not freedom after all. This gave the average person enough room to harm their own progeny, and it defined our criteria for assessing truth and value, our language, our capacities to influence the world around us.
It limited what it meant for us to “be who we should be.”
As many theorists have seen, this is the fundamental paradigm to overcome, this corruption of freedom, to do the most good.
All policy starts with who we should be, or children’s rights and the line or threshold of true self-determination below which children should not be born, and above which children may be born.
You either agree to that line as a primary obligation or not. That line is set to a threshold of zero based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much is easier to see and achieve in a collective setting like care modeling than a nuclear family.
This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
We can test anyone for which side of the binary they fall on by asking them regarding claims they have made about values and impacts, relative to the facts of children entering the world on the day the claims were made. Ask them about the horror stories – the abuse, the ecocide, the disenfranchisement, the power differentials – arising from the zero entitlements and functional protections for children and animals as children entered the world.
Ranking those who make that choice to find the most influential, and targeting those who matter the most in terms of the harm they do is one tactic to ensure change. Among those most problematic are actually those decoys from social justice funded by wealthy investors, those that seem to do good but are meant to hide how creation drives inequity.
They will define values like “green, :”mercy,” or “inclusive” to benefit the rich children of investors, not the truly vulnerable. This clouds the criteria for assessing truth and value. We can’t legitimately create economic demand by violating children’s rights, including the rights to sufficient levels of education to understand how power works. We can’t fill shopping malls that drive animal suffering and extinction by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. Those who do, and pretend to further animal rights, do more harm than good.
Consider that understanding self-determination in this way changes the legitimacy of nations to use violence under the guise of being representative. How could they legitimately uses it to halt would-be parents who would need resources in order to meet the line, and thus be truly inclusive, legitimate and authoritative?
Focusing in the vulnerable in this way also makes permissible registering the children of wealthy families and engaging them directly when they reach the age of majority because family transfers of privilege can be seen as primary and be openly discussed rather than hidden behind the veil of privacy. Many concentrations of wealth and power have shown themselves to be impervious to moral persuasion, and will continue to hold and use illegal entitlements until they think their children will not benefit but lose from their doing so.
This last change is crucial – many will justify to themselves choosing fundamental injustice if they believe they are doing it for their family, especially their children. Many in the Fair Start Movement have known law professors that lied about the impacts of their work, and the liability they were creating, to ensure more wealth for their kids. To smash the illusion of continuing to see family as somehow outside of the social contract, and to instead ensure truth and justice, mean disincentivizing this sort of excuse.
Because a few men in leadership continue to favor profitable population growth over sustainable and equitable family planning entitlements – entitlements that better the way we plan families and has the greatest impact, fulfilling the first human right. Instead of fairness, these man urge birth policies that create growth but violate children’s rights, and now millions will die as the climate crisis escalates.
Continuing growth will ensure those least responsible for climate, inequity and other crises suffer their greatest consequences. We can change course by targeting these men, much the way movements in the past focused on choke points to make true change.
Who is an example of someone that could change course, and thus lead as a role mode in funding family planning entitlements and reparations? Men like John T. Raymond.
To avoid scams, see the truth, and identify the choke points you can ask one simple question of any person or group claiming to do good: What have you been doing to deal with the basic connection between children being born, and things like child welfare, the climate crisis, animal rights, or anything else you might claim to care about?
This question helps us spot the #famscam. It’s a scam run by nonprofits, media and businesses – making it seem like we are reducing or refining consumption, and reducing climate emissions, through abstract top-down reforms, while quietly, bottom-up increasing the number of consumers to maintain profits margins.
The pro-growth policies they hid undid roughly 3/4ths of the climate mitigation attempted in the last few decades, and ensured there are more animals in factory farms, less wildlife and nature, and greater inequity, than ever before. That undoing will kill millions.
The New York Times Co. is an American mass-media company that publishes The New York Times, its associated publications, and other media properties. Its headquarters are in Manhattan, New York City.
Claim: “The Times publishes hundreds of pieces of journalism every day. We apply ethical standards and rigorous reporting to every article, video, podcast, newsletter and interactive we produce.”
Facts:
For years the Times published articles and essays omitting crucial facts, facts that would have shown that the beneficial impacts of the environmental, antiracist, human rights, child welfare, and many other policies and processes being covered were being undone by inequity and growth. Those omissions benefitted Times leadership, at deadly cost to others.
And saying that is not controversial, or controvertible. Google “New York Times” and things like “children’s rights” or “child welfare.” On any given day an essay or article was published lauding such things, the Times omitted that more children that day were being born into conditions that violate their rights than were being protected. Look for actual, functional protections in terms of limits on the conditions in which children could be born, and hence their environment protected.
You won’t find them. Why? Because of the need for growth, growth – having already exceed atmospheric carrying capacities – that would ensure the violation of countless children’s rights in the future. This went well beyond the Ponzi scheme Nobel laureate Steven Chu saw, and into a multi-faceted and deadly thing.
The Times routinely uses and has used terms like sustainable, green, eco, humane, democratic, inclusive or similar value terms to describe policies, states of affairs, and /or objective values/measures which rigorous research and reporting would have shown were being vastly undone by unsustainable and inherently racist policies (like inherited economic inequity) accelerating the climate crisis and deadly inequity. The Times routinely framed environmental issues as liberal, and under an ethos of top down protection, which according to research has divided audiences over the issue, instead of correctly covering the more antecedent, unifying and accurate issue of democratic share equity as a driver of environmental outcomes.
The Times routinely covered issues of animal rights without ever including the driver of animal oppression, the creation – in the birth and development of humans – of our relations with them. The reporting, around things like veganism, treated animal rights as consistent with growth-based consumerism, and dietary change as an on-balance benefit for animals. That is inaccurate, hid the main drivers of climate change and the extraction of wealth ensuring inequitable outcomes, and in many cases was accompanied by stealth advertising.
The Times also routinely covered political institutions and those claiming to represent constituents, while omitting how easily measurable growth and inequity were undermining any possibility of any accurate representation. Times editors and reporters benefited from these omissions, forestalling things like expensive liability in the United States for birth equity reparations that would have moved towards representability. While the Times is critical of symptoms of growth and inequity, like the rise of Donald Trump, its reporting has stymied attempts to change the cause, the fundamental allotment of entitlements that created him. In similar form, the Times routinely covered affirmative action and other more cosmetic fixes to racism, even though that framing is divisive of the vulnerable on both sides of the political spectrum.
A assessment of recent coverage shows more reporting by the Times that would qualify as advertising, including advertising to children, than of violence around the nation and world that is at least partially driven by correctable incentive structures and entitlements that also benefit the Times and its leadership. When it does report, the coverage avoids drivers like economic and other caste-class based motivation, or political disempowerment, in favor other more topical explanations.
While the Times may feel it has been reducing the likelihood of violence of a political nature by not covering that side of violent events, it may be doing the opposite, concealing a backgrounded but fundamentally relevant system driving violence. This driver will become more salient as temperatures rise and growth-based inequity disempowers the average person, crowding them out of town halls where they can self-determine and into shopping malls where they are determined by others.
The coverage above ignored the overriding nature of child development entitlements in favor of downstream concentrations of wealth and power that were exploiting those children. This is not about freedom of speech, or journalistic autonomy, but a powerful entity misreporting facts and values to benefit itself at deadly cost to the vulnerable.
How inaccurate was the reporting, given the omissions?
All facts and values are relative to the thresholds and baselines discussed above, and any reasonable editor would reorient assessments of any story when it became clear that basic assumptions about relative positioning were likely to kill a billion innocent persons.
Failure to account for these crucial facts makes the reporting and essays inaccurate.
Are these omissions racist?
How is it not racist omit as a driver (and also omit research showing the right to override racist entitlements by all means effective) of many stories a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create?
We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
The omissions hid – as many in the Fair Start Movement did in former work – a process that would lead to largely white and wealthy children being enriched from growth-based investments, at deadly cost to mostly black children. Instead, they reported from arbitrary baselines – the same thing that conservative Exxon, and liberal Cass Sunstein for that matter, did.
An analogy: The Times reporting on all of these matters of basic justice and political legitimacy/obligation, which impact the future majority in a way that will kill millions, would be like reporting on events in historic South Africa while omitting mention of the apartheid policy in place, and that policy benefitted those controlling the reporting. But in this case, the intergenerational and racial apartheid of assuming birth, developmental, and emancipatory benefits will kill countless more people.
Concentrations of wealth and power like the Times – like those in white South Africa – did not create value. They helped ensure rules for the game, and most importantly the first rule of who we should be in terms of the creation of power relations, to move the key costs on to others, and to create deadly criteria for truth (academic hierarchies based on birth inequity, for example) and value (like market demand created by not investing in birth and development conditions for all children, but rather exploiting their needs) by ensuring the average person could not patriciate in the rulemaking and was born more as a worker and consumer, than an empowered constituent. Their wealth is owed back, and the demand overrides any government’s right to block the taking of the wealth because the process of investing in equitable birth and development positionality is what makes governance inclusive, capable of representation, and hence legitimate.
TAKE ACTION
The New York Times leadership, including Joseph Kahn, is personally liable (as many in leadership elsewhere are) for the costs and benefits of a deadly but fixable systems of birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality. We are all liable for the costs and benefits of our birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality, and can choose to offset them and be obligated to legitimate systems, coming under their protection, or not.
He and others are liable for making choices and living lives that contradicted their own demonstrated values, like enjoying the absence of heat waves, while ensuring others could not do the same. He and others made choices for the vulnerable, robbing them of their freedom.
Right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. But it’s unclear why those created as economic means would ever have to follow the law, including the entitlements driving the loss of freedom.
If we are in quantity and civic quality created as workers for factories, and consumers for shopping malls, and not created as empowered and influential citizens in town halls where we make the rules, what democratically made laws protect the entitlement of the mall owners? This is not socialism or capitalism but basic constitutionality.
Nonviolence in engagement is crucial, but what seems clear is that the state also cannot use violence to halt constituting an equitable future – via things like care modeling reforms – because it would have no authority to do so.
Background reading:
Between 1948 and 1968, when the United Nations and member states should have been shifting their power from the top down systems of coercion protecting existing entitlements to bottom up systems of inclusion and empowerment. They should have begun the process of inversion. They did the opposite.
Controlled by a handful of mostly white and wealthy men whose criteria for evaluating truth and value came from the castes in which they were born and saw the world, through various mechanisms they avoided the shift from to down power to button up inclusion by conflating the act of having children and not having children under a veil of personal autonomy or privacy, failing to include share equity and children’s rights. They used a mangled version of freedom – freedom from taxes, from governance and regulations, from obligation to animals and the environment, freedom from duties to others, etc. to benefit at cost to others, causing the current state of world affairs. It was an immediate, narrow version of freedom, with one’s true freedom – based on our personal histories and positionality relative to others, veiled behind privacy.
What good is the right to terminate a pregnancy if you die in heat waves driven by others, because you could not afford air conditioning.
More specifically, they treated having children as an act of autonomy, bundled up with the act of not having kids, because that form of autonomy would define the concept of power in a way that avoided questioning certain entitlements. The dangerous and powerful were the men with guns in government, and the castle of the home was an autonomous zone to be protected from it. That’s not the definition of conception of power that makes democracy work – it was used to make listeners assume the status quo for certain entitlements, like generational wealth, that should have been examined.
Power is any form of human influence, the mass aggregate of human activities that is killing millions in the climate crisis, and it begins as we – and our relations to others – are created fundamentally through birth and development. Watch for others entering the world, not the leaders with money and guns they will become. This was power over others, not self-determination for all, and the misconception operated mostly by taking the element of time out of the equation, and assuming certain relations rather than requiring birth and developmental self-determination. But families are not just in the social contract; they are constitutive of it.
Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future, using metrics that combine to create a threshold above which children may be born, but beneath which no child should be born.
Kahn fails this binary, threshold test, because his editing decisions omitted it – for their own benefit and at cost to others.
Why does the baseline matter?
Without this it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us – not who actually has – day to day – influence and power over us. Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.
Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function.
The United States prides itself on being a free nation, but it uses a conception of freedom that starts by exploiting the most vulnerable, at the nexus of our creation. Look for a minimum threshold of wellbeing for future children and animals, and you won’t find one because they are both already earmarked for use in growth.
Had Micah Johnson, instead of filling five police officers, turned his attention to fossil fuel executives in demanding reparations for would-be black mothers harmed by the crisis and inequitable positioning in responding to it, the state would have not been able to legitimately block any nonviolent efforts by Micah to get the funds.
It should be the beneficiaries of a set of rules premised on inclusion for their legitimacy, but which instead fundamentally exploit and exclude, should carry the risk of violence in any confrontation over entitlements (which will mostly be reactionary) it creates. Justice, at base, will mean their not being allowed to benefit from an illusion of including and empowering others.
Many over the years had said that Fair Start Movement was true in its assessment, but that the goals were unrealistic. In a world where a few like Kahn have massive influence, targeting them to admit liability and transfer wealth in a way that would save countless lives – so that we may orient from truly self-determining baselines and die free or self rather than other-determining – is totally realistic, and underway. Who else will be held accountable for the deaths?
Wikipediais a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. There is evidence that many of the articles contain claims that do not account for a key factor that alters their veracity. For example, this article leads with the claim:
The Center for Biological Diversity is a nonprofit membership organization known for its work protecting endangered species through legal action, scientific petitions, creative media and grassroots activism.
It is now widely accepted that individualized attempts to protect endangered species were undone, and are being undone, by insufficient neonatal and child welfare policies designed to enable growth and which drive climate and other macro changes in our ecologies. The Center accepted and benefitted from these policies, as does the Wikimedia Foundation.
To further values like biological diversity, or mercy for individual animals, entities would need to include those values in the first premise of who humans should be and become in terms of the creation of basic power relations, and entities undo the values if they do not include them. While including those values in the premise is not popular with funders or seemingly progressive media whose wealth derives from inequity, that does not change the reality of the impacts – including suffering and death – and the justice owed for those impacts.
An entity either starts with a measurably inclusive and thus liberating system that accounts for the birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality of its members, and relative costs and benefits, or they do not. There is no evidence the Center or Wikimedia Foundation do.
Not doing so risks millions of lives as well as trillions of dollars in climate reparations, and illegitimates political systems by treating subjects as means bound in inequity, rather than empowered ends from whom governance derives. If one wanted to decolonize wealth and the future, one would have to start from a position of not punching down on children and animals – and that requires a constitutive threshold.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
The Center and Wikimedia are hardly alone. Media, like the New York Times Co., routinely misreported the climate crisis in a way that exacerbated it, urging along with many animal protection organizations the sale of vegan products in growth-based economies that were doing more harm than the dietary change was doing good. They are accountable, and if reparations are not paid, the children of their leadership will inherit the debt for the deaths they enabled, when those children become adults.
Many supporters of the Fair Start Movement were urged by funders in their work with other nonprofits to ignore equity as a base value, and to focus downstream, creating false silos like environmentalism, animal protection, human rights and democracy, racial justice, etc. They left out crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit they knew was being undone by inequity in creation under a system liberals, conservatives and almost all shades of political affiliation use. This helped illegally enrich mostly white kids, the children of funders. at deadly cost to millions of black children. There is a way to mitigate the harm – prioritizing the self-determination of all future children, by all means effective.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide. That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
They growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
The growth in the chart below – at the most fundamental level – made some rich, some poor, and ensured the climate crisis would fall hardest on those least responsible for it.
I have sat and chatted with wealthy funders backing vegan food companies and nonprofits that made wildly misleading claims about the social and environmental benefits of the products, and who were making money on population -driven growth in markets. They knew what they were doing. I have seen national nonprofits bury research showing the harm growthwashing does, for fear of what their funders – many of whom are moving massive and unearned privilege to their rich white kids – would do if it were revealed. No only were they lying about the impacts of their philanthropy, but they were doing so in a way that harmed poor kids to enrich their own kids through growth-based investments.
TAKE ACTION: One way to address growthwashing is by requiring the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting requirements include family policies and their impacts. Urge the Biden Administration to require this.
For all the good progressives’ think Klein did, by the numbers his pronatalism – urging women to have kids to grow the economy – did more harm. Klein is especially known for his promotion of veganism as a form of social justice, especially beneficial to animals. Like Vox, Klein misleads about the impact of food reforms.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets.
They were willing to greenwash to further veganism, even at cost to animals. They were herding the well intentioned towards buying their products, in the middle of a climate catastrophe.
Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be.
Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
