Fair Start Movement

Category: Calls to Action & Petitions

Fair Start Fact Checking Animal Rights Philanthropist Brad Goldberg. Take Action.

The field of animal law, rights, and protection has been around for a long time. It is one of the most aspirational areas of justice, aiming to protect and liberate nonhumans from the horrors humans inflict upon them. But as the climate crisis unfolds, and more animals are harmed each day by humans, we should look for what must have gone wrong in the field to bring us to today.

Brad Goldberg has been one of the most influential figures in the field of animal rights and law, having used his wealth to in a definitive way, funding and advising organizations, academics and activists for decades. He seeded animal law programs at some of the leading schools in the nation, and has written extensively about funding and activism for animals.

He funded much of the work that today is considered “animal law,” much of which is based on assumptions about legitimacy and human rights that allow investors (like Brad) to make money on growth-based markets that do more harm to animals than any granular reforms do good.

But if one closely analyzes his public statements, his giving, and the results of his giving, something foundational is missing. He never seems to account for how children entering the world, and the very different resources they have when they do, impact the lives of animals.

That’s not ideal, given that is the largest determinant of animals’ lives. Claims of animal protection, in the face of the growth and inequity driving the climate crisis, are some of the most falsifiable impact claims being made in philanthropy. Growth and inequity has done more to harm animals than those working in the field have done to save them.

Is there a more macro way to think about animals?

Humans are animals. Seeing ourselves as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law would focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. In other words, animal law cannot merely be law that happens to refers to animals.

A more functional and less abstract form of animal law would have to start – as a first necessary condition – with the capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense thus starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals. Nonhuman and human liberation are tied because the creation of our mutual relations is the biggest driver of outcomes.

Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and in avant garde movements like animal rights and liberation. But by simultaneously individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination- both for humans and animals.

The base – and in this case the base of what Brad assumed as a legitimate legal system – treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others.

This base has historically subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it and most vulnerable to it. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.

These unsustainable practices and systems ensured children entering under just thresholds, and thus overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. They allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.

Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. Activists working with fair start can literally attest to using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable – especially communities of color – who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.

If those Fair Start engages truly value the things (like animal rights) they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic language and systems of constitution and obligation, and to include these things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.

Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good.

Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.

Why Fair Start?

Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations – through birth, development, and emancipation – is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, compounding impacts simultaneously.

Fair Start’s recent action before the United Nations asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.

Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive 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.

In this effort Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by many entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises.

Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save both human and nonhuman lives.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Brad here to assess how children entering the world over the last several decades impacts his claims about the field of animal law, rights and protection, how that impact alters his legacy, and to consider how – in light of this factor – he would alter his advice to those he funded.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

December 8, 2024
$Black children are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children. Take Action.$

Black children are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children. Take Action.

Those same black children will die by the millions in the climate crisis, while many white children get richer and richer. We can change that by taking birth equity seriously.

No child’s life is worth the life of another. The climate and related crises we face today were largely driven by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in near-universal reproductive rights regimes dating back to 1948.

The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity as the overriding value behind political legitimacy. They were evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority.

This created a fake, top-down version of social justice based on hollow legal institutions and laws that never derived from any legitimating authority, but rather hid the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and emancipation. It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.

There were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others. If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority and wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation.

Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.

Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.

No child should ever be born outside a structure of debt/savings accounts that protect all children from the climate crisis by including and empowering them with their universal birthright.

Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we.” Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.

TAKE ACTIONS: 1) Donate here to enable Fair Start to ensure equity is made the center of all law, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to ensure birth equity, and 3) urge any charity you support – regardless of the issue – to admit not prioritizing funded fair starts in life for all kids did more harm to their missions than they did good.

December 2, 2024
Children Are Tortured to Death by Their Parents. Take Action.

The father and stepmother of a Chester County girl who died after years of abuse and torture are now charged with her murder. The autopsy revealed Malinda died from starvation and multiple blunt force injuries. The girl weighed 50 pounds at the time of her death and had suffered around 75 bruises, contusions, ulcers and pressure sores throughout her body, investigators said.

Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.

Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.

Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.

Photo by anekoho/BigStock

The solution?

No child should ever be born outside a structure of debt/savings accounts that protect all children from the climate crisis by including and empowering them with their universal birthright. Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we” that must come before all we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.

TAKE ACTIONS: 1) Donate here to enable Fair Start to fund parents away from having kids until they are ready to parent well, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to avoid many having kids before they are ready, and 3) urge any charity you support – regardless of the issue – to admit not prioritizing funded fair starts in life for all kids did more harm to their missions than they did good.

December 2, 2024
Sign On to Fight for a Fair Start in Life for All Kids
Fair Start maintains an open letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations requiring him, under law, to publicly back standardization of climate damages to benefit the inants being harmed. Those who believe every child has a right to a fair start in life – and reject the illegitimacy and entitlement fraud described below that ensures zero protection for the most vulnerable – have signed it.

Sign On Here

Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars.

Many have already begun to engage in this more effective form of constituting a just future – through language and action – by admitting the failure of systems to date, agreeing to change the way be lan families, and exchanging resources.

This transfer of wealth made at deadly costs is also required by law, through things like the Children’s Rights Convention and under the Right to a Healthy Environment. All law must first be interpreted to assure legitimacy, or the measurable inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, so that truly representative governance is possible. In other words, the threshold or border, of empowering development, overrides the authority represented by national borders because it is needed to legitimate such law.

But there are specific barriers blocking this work.

There are wealthy families and other concentrations of power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis who benefitted from unsustainable reproductive rights models. These models used a false premise (that having children is more personal than interpersonal) to avoid the overriding need to ensure measurable empowerment of each citizen, or to first account for our vast generational, racial and other inequitable positionalities in reforming legal systems.

This subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it, and most vulnerable to it. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.

These unsustainable practices and systems ensured children entering under just thresholds, and thus overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. They allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.

These wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. They are obvious because they start by enabling the industries they claim to fight.

Ensuring Justice for All

Fair Start is now urging states attorneys generals and other responsible agencies to 1) track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world in the U.S. and abroad on their and their mothers’ capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations.

What are the metrics and moves, exemplified in action here?
- Funding would-be mothers delay, readiness and safe locating so that no child is born beneath a concrete line of what their rights guarantee them, without abuse or neglect, and what trust-based (democratic) communities require. Read more here.
- Restoring, not mitigating, climate emissions to natural levels. Read more here.
- Taking the exact resources needed to ensure equality of opportunity for children of color, competitive with white kids. Read more here.
- Conditioning political and economic authority on their moving towards truly representative ratios between officials and their constituents, and recognizing the need for those in positions of influence to carry the risk of any violence not doing so creates. Read more here.
- Benchmarking efficiency to equity measures that would not have created a climate crisis killing millions of innocents. Read more here.
We are asking these and other officials to then 2) contrast these impacts with current and historic (ten years back, as a minimum) sustainability and equity claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable and fraudulent family entitlements, used by prominent leaders and organizations within their jurisdictions. This tracking enables preemptive reparations, structured to prevent harm to future generations and to ensure their right to self-determine.

The failed models used a fictitious baseline and false premise that hid the upstream antecedent language that entailed the creation of power relations, often behind downstream subjects like population, environment, animal rights, human rights, etc. To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society. This moves from the bottom upwards – governance contingent on in emancipation of youth – not inherently authorized top down .

The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems never really created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by treating children as means rather than ends, ensuring dismal standards for child development, education and critical thinking. This slowly converted democratic relations into commercial ones.

This violated children’s rights by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens, and in systems where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness, while wealthier families benefited from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to – through unsustainable growth – kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a value failure.

Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need.

Under the fraudulent entitlement scheme there are two standards for justice: The real or what should have been, measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing equity, and self versus other determination. There was also the widely used decoy standard, which centered on assumed legitimacy of white wealth supremacy at birth, and an illusion of bodily autonomy that conflated freedom with the capacity to harm others.

Those who use the latter are choosing that the least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its greatest cost, with no justification, increasing climate deaths by millions and costs by trillions.

The Fundamental Fix

However, the disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.

Again, to constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base, rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. Covering these child development costs as an obligation liberates more than oppresses.

But this true control of who has influence over us requires measuring from zero. And that would be impossible without the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the changing of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. We thus ask all to admit benefit at deadly cost to others, and to back reparations.

Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? As shown above this “truth and reconciliation” process of removing birth apartheid requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.

It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if persons are not created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice focuses on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

Instead of funding those thresholds, those engaged in equity fraud have continued to assume exponential (and very deadly) wealth and resilience disparities are natural – that their and their children’s birthright privileges are just a given – when calculating things like permissible climate emissions.

Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables liberation from this nonsense. It simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.

Every entity in the United States should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc. But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine there – was a horrific mistake. It seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of illegitimate policy and that creation was simply art of something humans do rather than a matter of fundamental legitimacy.

But it is one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing 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.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
November 27, 2024
Factchecking the Organization “We Don’t Have Time.” Take Action.

Finding: The organization perpetuates inequities by failing to address the climate and social costs of inequitable births.

Their Claim:

“We Don’t Have Time is a movement and a tech startup that leverages the power of social media to hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change.”

“Its principal purpose is to contribute to a reduced climate impact and an ecologically sustainable environment.”

They have published a manifesto here.

Facts:

The organization and its lead, Anette Nordvall, assume for their work fundamentally unsustainable birth inequity and child welfare standards, and consistently publish and platform information that omits the full impacts of children entering the world on the climate and related crises. This benefits their children at deadly cost to others, and replicates the fundamental cause of the crises by being nonconstitutive.

The entity is literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claim to be protecting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable. They do not prioritize zeroing out the harm we are causing, using freedom as the base metric, nor do they admit there are climate reparations liens on the wealth they are using based on that standard.

Key Idea

To “constitute” in the context of governance means to be obligated. Our societal obligation to children offers an opportunity to build a just society from the ground up, focusing on infants and animals instead of serving those in power. Achieving this requires acknowledging the specific harm caused and shifting resources to empower would-be mothers. This ensures no child is born into circumstances that deny them measurable self-determination. This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.

Act:

Urge Anette Nordvall and others in leadership to admit this fact: Our collective failure to require measurable fair starts in life for all children has done more harm to our missions than we have done good. Then urge her and others in leadership to both publicly back and fund this preemptive, specific and universal standard for change and legitimacy.

Backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm – so all children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality.

This does exponentially more good – for children, animals, our environment, and democracy – than any other intervention because it starts at the beginning and is comprehensive of value by centering on measurable self-determination.

You can also contact the Swedish greenwashing oversight agency here.

Background

There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to constitute a just nation where subjects are empowered enough in the creation of actual relations, through birth, development and emancipation, to move from being treated as subjects to being included as constituents, and obligated to follow laws only because they have the measurable capacity to control the legal system. The action seeks to escalate climate and other reparations – specifically designed as family planning entitlements – by trillions of dollars, through the concept of equity fraud, in order to save millions of lives. Many are using illegal tactics to block the high valuation.

These reforms could save millions of lives by addressing the root causes of inequality, but powerful interests are working to block these efforts. Without action, wealthy interests will continue to fund programs that appear helpful on the surface but ultimately deepen inequality by prioritizing their own children’s success at the expense of others. By adopting universal equity standards, we can ensure that no child is left behind, and that future generations inherit a world built on fairness and opportunity.

Fact: The climate and related crises we face today were largely driven by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in near-universal reproductive rights regimes dating back to 1948.

Wealthy nations and families have exploited these systems to concentrate power and wealth, often at the expense of Black families and marginalized communities. They promote superficial solutions—such as charity or public programs—that distract from the deeper issues of systemic inequality. This approach benefits their children while leaving countless children of color in poverty and vulnerable to climate and social crises.

The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity, and what it does to the process of entitling wealth, as the overriding value behind political legitimacy. They were evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority. This created a fake, top-down version of social justice based on hollow legal institutions and laws that never derived from any legitimating authority, but rather hid the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and emancipation.

It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families. There were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others. If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation.

Wealthy families in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding a fantasy world to evade the liability they and their children carry from inequitable growth. They use decoy versions of public interest work – by organizations, academics, media, etc. – the impacts of which are being exponentially undone, each day, by family policies that enrich mostly white families at deadly cost to countless children of color. This involves literally using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable, who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.

There is no legitimacy authority or entitlements without the measurable political equity, or entitling children enough so they offset each other’s influence relative to a neutral position – testable through things like the feasibility of a constitutional convention. Instead, the model urged by these families assured zero functional protections for infants and animals, and used a sleight of hand that conceived of freedom in terms of an arbitrary form of autonomy from the state, rather than as political equity to choose who has influence over you, ecologically and socially. How did we assure justice without improving the conditions in which children are born and develop, given the intergenerational justice requirements of minimum thresholds for all children? How did we become free without honoring the rights of others, especially the future majority?

These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating children’s rights and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. This cannibalized freedom, taking from us what we are owed in democracy and trying to sell it back in commerce. The difference between self-determination relative to zero baseline markers, and exploitation, is what they owe in reparations.

Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. These families routinely funded decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.

As foundational to that, Fair Start is urging states attorneys generals and agencies like, Finansinspektionen (FI) is the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for climate damage evaluation and the only standard for national legitimacy, using the eight concrete metrics now being urged as a zero-baseline form of harm-assessment and standardization at the United Nations. This work goes beyond targeting greenwashing towards finding the concealment of liability for the death of millions in the escalating climate crisis. Every entity in the United States should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc.

But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice was a horrific mistake, one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing 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.

November 19, 2024
Urge the Cato Institute to Embrace the First Necessary Condition of Freedom

What is the Cato Institute’s mission?

The vision of the Cato Institute is a free and open society in which liberty allows every individual to pursue a life of prosperity and meaning in peace.

Photo by Rawpixel.com/BigStock

What is Fair Start?

Concentrations of wealth and power in the Twentieth Century used child inequity to subvert the civil rights movement. Those same entities, including philanthropic funders, in the nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now using media, decoy nonprofits, celebrities, and universities, as well as politicians and government agencies, to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to engage in reparations fraud and drown out the voices of the victims.

Photo by Wavebreak Media Ltd/BigStock

For decades Fair Start members were employed by and worked with such entities, and we benefitted at deadly cost to others by omitting information about the fundamental harm we were causing, and in a way that enriched mostly white children and killed mostly children of color. We now work to identify those doing this – using this fraudulent standard, especially the most influential, and preempt or overcome them. We urge them to admit the same and repair the harm of claiming to do good work that was simultaneously being undone because there were no functional protections for infants entering the world and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact.

There is no way to be free without this public and universal truth and repair process of communicating, and our taking only the equity we all deserve so we can self-determine and make our own choices, rather than determine and choose for others. It is physically impossible to be obligated as a political equal without doing this because there is no more basic system of valuation. Where else would self-determining or constitutive relations come from?

The nature of our environment, and of human reproduction, makes freedom a very specific praxis.

Not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe those outside of it as much protection as they extend to children entering the world. Is that harsh to say? What sort of person would let millions die in an ecological crisis they did not cause because we did not take the measures needed to move the wealth those millions need to live?

Photo by Wavebreak Media Ltd/BigStock

Take Action. Urge Cato’s lead to answer these questions:

How does Cato account for children entering on the values they claim to further? If they did not account, does that mean they spent more on events and travel than furthering their mission? Instead of accounting, could they be free riding on generational, racial, national, and other positionalities and privileges? Do they assume the legitimacy of enabling the powerful over the vulnerable?

Fact: To be self versus other determining, we must orient from an overriding obligation to ensure no child should be born beneath the line or threshold of empowerment that this accounting provides. The line can be seen as a mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where the most influential who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions by moving kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving those kids in inequity. In this case getting all children above the line unifies rather than divides.

November 2, 2024
Do Animal Protection Organizations Like Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States Actually Help Animals? It Depends. Take Action.
If These Organizations Do Not Account for Children Entering the World on Their Claimed Impacts They Are Part of a System Doing More Harm to Their Cause Than They Do Good. Regardless, They Remain Key to Changing It – Moving from the Most Falsifiable Claims Towards the Highest Ideals of Social Justice.

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being undone as children enter the world in inequity. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

This omissions hide liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids. The fix? Use measurable standard for true social justice and ecological restoration to ensure accurate climate reparations pegged to the self-determination of each child entering the world.

Not backing the reform raises serious questions about whether entities were trying to create value, or free ride at deadly cost to others on their generational, racial, national and other positionality. Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables as well.
- Take action: Contact you state attorney general to ask what standard they are using for climate damage assessment and reparations, for example, in greenwash / impact fraud, environmental justice and other cases. Are they making the fundamental mistake that caused the crisis of not deriving back and making conditional any obligation to follow the law to the measurable empowerment of each child entering the world (and thereby our own empowerment)?
Reversing the harm, practically, requires debt and reparations incentive accounting for women’s collectives to plan for each new child entering the world. This accounting uses concrete metrics urging delay/smaller families, readiness, and redistribution of influence from rich to poor kids.

Family defense collectives can link, virtually, between polluter nations to those nations most harmed to ensure the primacy of value (which is not intersectionality,). Without this reform, many organizations will have spent more money on lavish travel and events than on legitimate policies that actually derive back to the creation of actual relations – between humans and nonhumans, for example.
- Fact: It would be impossible to live in legitimate nations without accurate statements and inclusive communications relative to the full picture of costs, benefits and obligations we are all subject to. Such a constitutive discourse situates us and our influence on others, moving from a world where some influence many without consent, towards measurable and true self-determination. Why give to an organization that starts its work with zero protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals? The most just and effective solution, exponentially more effective than other social justice interventions, is for each of us to admit the fundamental mistakes that created the climate and other crises and move to fulfill our reparations obligations as the first human right. The need for this is just hidden by omission, but if fixed will save countless lives and avoid trillions in costs to businesses.
Ignoring minimum thresholds for children as they enter the world goes beyond inaccurate claims. The wealth we see in the world today was made, firstly, by illegally avoiding paying the costs needed to protect children, animals, the environment – and measurable freedom for all of us. Concentrations of wealth and power in the mid-Twentieth Century fraudulently assumed the authority and entitlements they had at the time, and used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring illegal standards for child development and education that violated children’s rights regimes. This treated people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.

Those rejecting fair starts in life as the first obligation on all of us – who we might call noncons – continue simply elevate their unearned positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it and liberating others. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. Without fair starts in life those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.

Thus not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe them as much protection as they extend to children entering the world.

Is that harsh to say? What sort of person would let millions die in an ecological crisis they did not cause because we did not take the measures needed to move the wealth those millions need to live? No child should be born beneath the line or threshold of empowerment that this accounting ensures, and the line can be seen as mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where those who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions and move kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving them in inequity.

The most just and effective solution to the crises we face today, exponentially more effective than other interventions, is to engage in the public and constitutive discourse of admitting the mistakes above, the ones that mean we were all benefitting at deadly cost to others. And, to then fulfil our reparations obligations to future children as their first human right.

TAKE ACTION: Contact the leads – here at HSI and HSUS – and ask how they are accounting for children entering the world on their claims of impact, and legitimacy. Do they think every child has an overriding and measurable right to a fair start in life and the climate reparations necessary to provide it? Do they back standardizing climate liability, impact claims, direct reparations to the victims and measures of fundamental legitimacy? This starts as a yes or no matter, and must be be discussed publicly.
November 1, 2024
What are Animal Rights, Law and Policy ?

Humans are animals. Seeing us as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions.

So, what we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. Animal law is not merely law that refers to animals. Animal law would have to start with a capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals. Nonhuman and human liberation are tied because the creation of our mutual relations is the biggest driver of outcomes.

So animal rights, law and policy, if we want to protect nonhumans, can be seen just a system of obligation oriented around the most vulnerable, the most demanding form of law and justice. That system has to have the capacity to actually benefit the beneficiaries, not just pretend to. What does pretending to benefit animals look like? Look at most of the micro victories for animal rights and personhood claimed by organizations over the last few decades, and contrast those with the impacts of growth on animals, and the reality, at a macro level, of nonhuman propertyhood in our archaic reproductive rights regimes.

Why then not focus on infants and animals, and – at a macro level of inclusive animal personhood – the creation of fundamental power relations between the two? Those like animal rights theorist Peter Singer, and others, do not do so because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality.

The wealthy families funding animal rights, law and policy, for decades, refused to deal with this issue because they wanted to benefit from a profitable system based on growth that quietly harmed animals, while seeming to be their saviors. Doing so while the world has been in ecological overshoot did more than undo the claims of many funders and the organizations they funded – it exacerbated a crisis killing millions.

Animal rights and law, in this sense, starts with the actual creation of power relations as children enter the world, represented by the collective pronouns implied or expressed in all statements, including purportedly “constitutive” statements like “We the People.” It is the most demanding standard, eco or animal centric, rather than anthropocentric, or punching down on the most vulnerable. But for Singer it was more important to raise his position as savior in an illegitimate system rather than focus on the “we” to legitimate it, and that did much more harm to animals than he did good.

But many funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis, are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

Singer’s version of animal rights and law, the abstraction away from the creation of actual relations, is just charade version of animal liberation they need. Value animals in the abstract with one hand, make money on growth and privilege at cost to them with the other.

Effective animal rights in this sense is personally expensive, not profitable. It’s easier to ignore all of that and let the macro undo good for animals at the micro level. True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights. True animal rights mean preemptive standards in things like assessing damages to animals (and children). If captivity harms elephants, it’s because it deviates from a biodiverse and less crowded world where they are free of most human influence, not deviation from a dismal life at a sanctuary.

Animal law starts with moving away from anthrocentric systems, towards seeing humans as the animals that they are, and situating them in equity before there is any sense that they can be free.

Concentrations of wealth and power, especially philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, governments, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to continue the entitlement scam, hiding behind a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color.

To the extent animal law centers on the idea of nonhuman personhood, there has been progress at a meta-level recently. Most entities claiming to protect animals through the legal system only conceptualized of animal personhood in the abstract sense that it would take governmental entities recognizing it for such a thing to exist legally.

Direct Action Everywhere and others before them pushed back on this, treating the right to rescue animals as fundamental, and higher than government’s authority to treat animals as property merely subject to theft. However, most entities claiming to protect animals through the legal system do not recognize any form of macro animal personhood, which would have to start by inverting our current reproductive rights regimes, by requiring future generations of humans be born and raised consistent with species coexistence and total animal liberation.

That blind spot harms nonhumans, humans who suffer in the failed environmentalism of the anthrocentric standards that animal rights should have prevented, and undercuts legality itself by ignoring the need to empower future democratic constituents rather than use low child welfare standards to exploit them as economic inputs for growth.

Funders have actually moved to block macro animal personhood because they make money on growth, and cannot resist seeming to benefit animals while being able to lord their wealth over others.

The fantasy world of animal rights and law as it exists today, without that inversion, was created mostly by entities that were operating without accountability or genuine constituents, have cost businesses trillions of dollars long run. A lot of environmental and other social justice agenda-setting over the last several decades came from institutions driven by philanthropy and familial wealth, entities – rife with nepotism – that are unaccountable to market and electorate forces. The climate/inequity crisis is going to cost business and government more than any other factor in the years to come.

Many businesses and governments now have claims against philanthropy and their low impact corporate campaigns that magically enriched some foundations and families at deadly cost to millions. Violence is one of the costs. Much of the violence we see in the world today derives from this failure, with disempowered persons acting out in systems of government incapable of truly representing them. Instead of those who benefit from this process carrying the risk of violence, innocents are usually targeted.

As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few and create the chaos we all see in the world today. The climate crisis has created a convergence of interest between humans and nonhumans in moving towards equity-based reforms. But not all humans share that interest equally, and as the crisis unfolded a handful of wealthy funders misdirected the animal rights movement towards food sales and away from family/equity reforms, and in a way that benefitted them at deadly cost to humans (most children of color) and nonhumans.

Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.

We have to and can invert that process.

How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? How should we handle those that refuse such fairness, even when it will kill millions as they are born without resources and in the path of danger? Why would anyone have to follow the rules in a system where they are not measurably empowered?

Most claiming to do good work in the world should be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because they compensate for the absence of the values of self-determination in current human reproductive rights regimes and evade harm to those values in the future. This avoids public interest work that is essentially performative, addressed to audiences that then undo the impact.

How can we all move forward?

All can support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world.

Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.

The concentrations of wealth and power you see in the world today have not created value. Instead they first illegally used their wealth to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens whose influence offsets one another. In other words, to properly assess costs and benefits we have to first become groups of people capable of doing so in a way that is actually inclusive and reflective of the group constituents.

You can take legal action.

States attorneys generals and other law enforcement agencies are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.

We can identify – on a binary spectrum – those who believe in linking children to debt/savings accounting to move towards self-determination, and those who do not. The rights of those who stand in the way are contingent on their supporting the rights of others, and their children will inherit their death debt if they do not pay it. Knowing the truth – that the default for what is fundamentally permissible depends on how we include and empower others – lets us overcome the most influential barriers to justice, and ensure a better future for all.

October 27, 2024
Is UNICEF Legit or Doing More Harm Than Good? Ask Leadership the Right Questions on Issues Like Child Abuse and Find Out.

Recently, a 2-month-old by was seriously injured when a 10-year-old girl dropped the baby on a tile floor, authorities in Florida said Monday, announcing the arrest of a 36-year-old woman who they allege instructed the child via the online video game Roblox on how to kill the infant.

Far away, UNICEF’s lead, Catherine Russell recently stated:

Children are the world’s most precious resource. There is no greater cause than championing their rights and wellbeing. I am committed to this cause with all my heart, and I am proud to join the UNICEF family.

Ask Russell – here – how UNICEF accounts for children entering the world without parental delay and readiness entitlements, and how that impacts what UNICEF claims to value, and claims to do? Would she admit children entering the world without the resources they need reverses much of the work UNICEF has claimed do to?

If she can’t say that children have an overriding right to a fair start in life that creates an authoritative demand to the wealth they and their mothers need, she’s hardly being legitimate or inclusive and empowering.

Wouldn’t – given the role of birthing in the climate crisis – that deprivation have done more harm than UNICEF did good? Is UNICEF really just backing a standard that uses children as economic inputs for growth?

Fair Start’s research suggest UNICEF is doing exactly that.

We ask these question because Fair Start, as the fundamental fraud and reparations watchdog, is looking for those choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others by not admitting that birth inequity has undone many claimed impacts, and instead moving towards requiring preemptive and liberating debt/reparations accounting, which encourages parenting delay, readiness, and equity for children as they enter and impact their ecosocial environments.

These questions can divide the world into the fair and unfair – create a true border of human freedom and obligation that can reset national borders from the inside out – and allow us to overcome influential and unfair barriers to self-determination.

A body of growing peer-reviewed research showed it was physically impossible to be free, or self-determining, without this reform because there is no system of values, including representative government, outside of relative positioning to the social and ecological state-of affairs that determine infant health, equitable positioning, and opportunity, without this accounting. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.

That research also showed many organizations masking this fact with omissive claims of entitlement and impact, elevating their positionality in an illegal system operating in violation of child welfare laws rather than legitimating it, and often choosing to benefit their white kids at deadly cost to millions of children of color. Such entities and individuals – nonconstitutives or noncons – fall outside the protections of the scope of social obligation, and deserve as much protection and liberty as they ensure for children entering the world.

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use decoy institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of micro-level social justice impact that hides liability for the macro-level forces undoing the impact.

Wealthy families in polluter nations use these low child welfare standards to undo upstream what they are pretending to do downstream – selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children’s needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.

The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. Not addressing birth and emancipatory inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter.

One of those costs is violence. Nations using illegal violence to defend entitlements without being positioned to actually represent their constituents begets violence, like mass shootings, which usually target innocents rather than the wealthy families benefiting for the representative system.

We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself. The solution to this problem is to recognize that governments have no inherent authority, but only what is derived from and conditional upon them empowering their constituents, and that includes any authority to entitle wealth made at deadly cost to others that is partially owed in climate debt/reparations accounting. Inequity in one’s share in democracy is ineffective.

If you want a better future, find the most influential institutions and individuals engaged in entitlement and impact fraud – those who can be made prominent example of – and ensure they tell the truth and back accounting that legitimates their authority.

October 24, 2024