And yet governments and big business are working together to try to push more women to have kids in order to create cheap labor, more consumers, and dumbed-down taxpayers. Fair Start is fighting back, and taking the money they stole to make sure families work for families, not governments and business.
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.
Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we” that comes before the things we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.
We can take that power back, because every child’s right to the things they need – like having a voice that matters and is heard in their democracies – comes first, and overrides any authority those above us claim.
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.
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.
Today most children born will end up relatively poor, working for wealthy families who made their money ruining our environment and never having to invest in an equal opportunity for all kids.
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.
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.
As the climate crisis intensifies we might all consider getting our money back from those scammy environmental charities who refused to deal seriously with unsustainable growth.
Why?
The solution?
If an entity does not think children deserve a fair start in life, do not give them money.
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.
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.
There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to be a just nation in which individuals are empowered in the creation of actual relations – through birth, development, and emancipation.
The action focuses on the fallacy of birthright white supremacy, and shows a pathway to move nations from treating their residents as subjects and a source of means, instead moving toward treating them as constituents, obligated to follow laws only because nations have the measurable capacity to control the legal system.
The action 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 true democracy.
As foundational to the effort and overcoming barriers, Fair Start is urging state attorneys general to track themultifaceted 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. Fair Start uses the eight concrete metrics now being put toward a zero-baseline form of harm-assessment and standardization at the United Nations. This work goes beyond targeting greenwashing toward finding the concealment of liability for the deaths of millions in the escalating climate crisis.
Every entity in the United States, for example, should comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, sexual identity, etc.
Sovereign nations and entities failed to protect infants from the consequences of historic injustice. This was a horrific mistake, one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life for every child born on the planet. 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.
Imagine a home with many floors. A flood is approaching. Will those on the higher floors remember to unlock the basement so that other can climb to safety?
As discussed below, because of the connection between communication and legal obligation, wecan call out fraudulent sustainability claims and racist, ecocidal outcomes that belie those claims, especially in the animal and environmental protection sectors, to begin the larger move toward constitutive reparations that ensure measurable levels of political equity.
For example, in many cases, law schools and faculty in the United States routinely made claims of beneficial social impact they knew were being reversed daily by deadly inequity, typified by the conflict-driving growth and inequity in the Middle East killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Scholars have noted how national constitutions sweep in those, especially the vulnerable, who never consent to them. The way the U.S. constitution has done that to future generations, and harmed them, gives us a unique opportunity to physically constitute consensual relations through fairness, and become capable of becoming an inclusive and just nation from the bottom up. The U.S. now has a preemptive, or constitutive, obligation to the most vulnerable.
This is not about white men constituting at gunpoint to createa hollow legal system of words rather than empowerment. This is a real opportunity to actually legitimate relations going forward, using measurable benchmarks to ensure children come to exist in the fairly narrow range that makes consent – self-determination – their primary value.
The key? Moving wealth that illegally externalized its costs to now save its victims.
Where else would just relations come from?
Introduction
What is the most just and effective thing you can do to protect your future as the climate, inequity / autocracy, and other crises worsen?
Backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated – as the first and overriding human right orgrundnorm – is the fastest and most just approach. In such a system, all children would get a fair start in life, ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, parental readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives.
These would be 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 of life and is comprehensive by centering on measurable self-determination.
This need have nothing to do with altruism. We need every child born to be self-determining because by definition, if they are not, we are not. We think of justice today in various silos – environmental, children’s, identity, animal, etc. – because to deal with them at once in the intergenerational form,which does unify them all,would have required in the middle of the Twentieth Century the leveling-up of lives for black children and a move towarda concrete range of ecosocial relations.
Instead of doing that, the wealthy, almost all-white families designing the reproductive rights regimes at the time chose the contradiction in terms of “procreative autonomy.” They gutted family law and any policy of birth equity, leaving children of color with a tiny fraction of the wealth of whites at birth. Many of these families then siloed social justice into “downstream” issue areas to avoid upstream, honest equity.
This was a power grab to evade black equity by hiding the antecedent / preambular or overriding right to it. A move that over generations downgraded political freedom to commercial freedom and enabled the catastrophic growth now killing millions.Nobel laureates have seen this as a growth-based pyramid scheme, but they have missed the massive birth equity differences which will mean the children of white wealthy families (like the secretary general of the United Nations) living at deadly cost to countless children of color.
That move – to segregate motherhood into castes and pretend one can have autonomy outside of a being positioned with an influential equity stake in one’s political system – allowed enough growth to also degrade the Earth’s atmosphere. This already kills families and children least responsible for or benefitting from the regime.
It was child inequity that was primarily used to subvert the civil rights movement and evade race and other reparations. This was and is reparations fraud, and thehiding of a political share-equity deficit that is killing children of color. This fraud – like the omissive use of environmental impact language that assumes black lives are worth less – clouds the language and concepts needed for universal reparative justice.
In other words, this created a false form of constitutionalism that ensured obligations to follow the law with no real equity for constituents to influence the content of the law. In fact, because they were seen more as economic inputs than political constituents, with family law completely disconnected from measurable political empowerment of children.
To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, from the base not the heights. But it takes admission of the specific harm and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power toward infants and animals.
In other words, there is an “ought” premise for all communications. Because political equity was never included in family planning, reproductive-focused human rights and child welfare regimes/law, world leaders never actually had to apply the values and positivist inclusivity/representability inherent in legitimacy. That caused horrific harm to legitimacy – and not only welfare – which gives rise to steep and measurable reparations.
By isolating women in the family-planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families for decades have ensured inherited poverty, or commercially exploitative rather than legitimate and inclusive relations. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
That condition derived fundamentally from the use of illegal family entitlements that undermined all civil rights and created a generational apartheid that Fair Start and others will dismantle with women’s networks engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.
Of course, this process must be funded. And it can be, using the extreme wealth we see in the world today that for decades delayed costs onto future generations by illegally violating children’s rights to certain eco-social standards via family planning entitlements.
We can move wealth from those who took it directly to the victims by funding family-planning reparations that create a line beneath which no child should be born. This is basic – or intergenerational – justice,widely accepted as encyclopedic.
The wealthy families and other concentrations of power that owe the costs they never paid to avoid the crisis did not create value in this world. Using a fundamental system of evaluation/cost/benefit that kills millions is generally considered a failure.
Instead, as detailed in this filing before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, they used sleight-of-hand and hidden assumptions to develop a fraudulent entitlement standard (identity or third-party fraud) for national legitimacy and sovereignty.
This standard never derived from the only authoritative source: The measurable sovereignty (where each offsets the influence of others equally, relative to a neutral position) of those subjected to the nation in question.
This enshrined inequitable family planning and birth / developmental positionality, allowed mostly white, generational wealth to ensure its own criteria for evaluating truth and value through dismal standards for child development and education. It allowed wealth to create its own audiences, and demand, for example, to assure among a populace unable to read or understand its own constitution the assumption that governments have any authority to ban teaching things like critical race theory.
Creation oppression – ensured through birth, development and un-emancipatory relations – is uniquely blinding, like a fish not being able to see water. It may not feel like the constant oppression of Brave New World or 1984, but for those dying in sporadic, climate-driven disasters, or acts of mass violence driven by individual disempowerment, would certainly feel their position while dying.
This scheme was illegal, violating children’s rights and pitting people against one another. It was the treating of 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.
If you look closely at the progress and beneficial impacts claimed by the public interest organizations this wealth funded, over the past few decades, you will find benefit and progress only if one assumes there is no need to account for children’s needs. Also, one must presume to use and abuse the needs of the nonhumans / nonhuman habitats these incoming children would rely on. Look closely and you will see micro victories being slowly undone at a macro level, and the setting together of a world that would soon be beset by heatwaves and massive political inequity.
Many working for fair starts in life as the basis of legitimacy used wealth to create the illusion of progress by simply making others look in the wrong direction, away from measurable inclusion and empowerment at birth.
This is common with those like “altruists,” who assumed they owned the wealth with which they could be altruistic, wealth which is owed to make freedom – or mutual self-determination – a workable concept.Wealthy families are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to protect to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable.
There exists a binary choice for all to make – an up-or-down vote: To use the same fundamentally “exclude at birth from power” standard, in terms of creating unsustainable, unjust and top-down power relations based on the subjective whims of adults, or to use a measurable equitystandard based on the needs of children to preempt all else. Those advocating or silently choosing the former are engaged in reparations fraud.
The difference in damages between evaluations using equity/eco/self-determination standards, versus anthro/welfare/other-determination standards that are based on a fallaciously narrow definition of bodily autonomy involves millions of lives and trillions of dollars. The money was stolen through the fraudulent externalization of costs as detailed in our recent filing before the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Fair Start standardizes and measures the death debt at various intervals between 1948 and 2024, and we allocate responsibility in ways cognizant of things like the unsustainable growth and massive disparity of wealth-driving horrors in places like Gaza.
As noted, we are urging states attorneys general to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination, using eight concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations. Because of the connection between communication and legal obligation, wecan use fraudulent sustainability claims, especially in the animal and environmental protection sectors, to begin the larger move toward constitutive reparations that ensure measurable levels of political equity.
Fundamental impact disclosuresthat account for infants entering the worldrelative to concrete freedom standards can resolve the directional problem of top-down governance not being inclusive and position us as self-determining and legitimate. Wealth made at cost to the line is now owed to fund it, with a priority on funding the actual standardization in existing infrastructures like public health and reproductive rights communities. No child should be born and emancipated beneath this line, because it would be more exploitative, more illegitimating, using measures of political equity.
Given the climate harm to future generations, and our obligations to repair the harm, it would be impossible to constitute obligatory relations at the most basic level without some sort of truth and reconciliation process.
Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations capable of representative governancevia the measurable self-determination of its constituents. Family planning reparations enable this process, and given that wealth was already taken and the benefits already consumed, it is owed as share equity for each child.
There is no legitimacy, inclusion, or empowerment based an obligation to follow the law. As early as 2003, activists involved today with Fair Start were urged by their nonprofit employers to promote reforms they knew were being undone by growth and inequity that enriched only a few.
This is the crucial point. We were in no way accomplishing our missions. Instead we used wealth, growth/inequity, and low-threshold child welfare standards to drown out voices and control the criteria others could use to evaluate truth and values.
White wealth is hiding liability and blocking equity
Wealthy families in the Global North are funding a fantasy to continue a farce and evade climate reparations they owe for the harm caused. This is a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need.
These families fund decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into downstream issues, hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, and use a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This benefits the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, rather than the nominal recipients of color..
These families, foundations, and many nonprofits they backed had no real constituents, and they were not accountable to either markets or an electorate. It was scam philanthropy, by co-opting the ideals, rather than the more reactive sectors of business or government that drove the crisis. The rich children and their foundations hold the wealth.
They use the charade of performative social justice – micro campaigns focused on immediate and narrow issues, without accounting for the creation of actual power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation, as “distractivism” to avoid dealing with reality.
Fundraisers in the past attempted to work with Fair Start on condition of not asking funders about the accuracy of their impact claims or how their omissions of inequity deconstituted legitimacy. This would have meant reframing fair starts in life for all kids as charity rather than reparations. It would have also reduced the level of any reparations, something none have authority to do.
This shuffling of standards by sell-out environmental organizations in exchange for short-term funding is what caused the climate crisis. The fraud we committed is obvious if one contrasts the claims of impact with key facts, like growing child inequity, on the days the claims are made.
The solution?
Many at Fair Start admit that we rode freely on generational and racial positions to benefit personally in a way that contradicted our own values. This admission and the inversion of obligation from government and entitlements enables the discursive constituting of political systems and true obligation. It’s the language of basic duty that makes us a “we.”
This linguistic model, like gender or indigenous land occupation models, is a necessary first condition of any legal system – what we might call preambular preemption. But these admissions use time and space to correct the baseline error of abstraction/arbitrariness, relative tothe most demanding ideals, like animal rights. To the extent that most human communication is just an attempt to get into or position oneself within a group, the admission and inversion can truly liberate.
The admission enables those who think the system cannot be changed to realize they simply may not want it to. They might struggle with the way justice has been pitted against our expected birthrights.
Priviledged public interest attorneys usually use the same fundamentally fraudulent standard of birth inequity to undo any good they claim to be doing, following the playbook of economic subversion of the civil rights movement.
Factoring in the growth and political inequity that degraded the carrying capacity of the world’s ecologies, many philanthropists have done more harm than good, masking that an unfair start in life was undoing, each day, their claimed progress. In fact, when one factors in children being born without rights, many organizations spent more on union busting, travel and events than on protecting children in poverty and of color.
Targets for reparations funding includephilanthropic foundations that used fake standards for environmentalism and child welfare Reparations from these targets can and should be first earmarked for standardization.
Further food for thought
Accurate reparations and universal standardization, in a demand now before the United Nations, fixes the problem of birth inequity and the unsustainable growth it drives, vastly undoing the good many claimed to have done.
Lawyers are key to the fraud, and to the fix. They face the moral hazard of benefitting from having expertise and special knowledge of a crucial system, that has no obligation to the law or international standards of human and animal rights.
Most have caved to that hazard, growing wealthy through the window dressing of legal systems in favor of what was really a system of exploitative economic growth and the dilution of legal personhood.
In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), Elizabeth Anderson explores how commercial relations control our lives. But she misses how, at base, those relations came about. The fundamental reason?The absence of equitable and influential shares in democracy as the fundamental of family planning and child welfare. This move 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 those who most benefitted owe in reparations.
Their claims of doing good are being undone every day because there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies they will impact. This is not about population. It’s about having an effective share in the equity of democracy, the fact that any authority to claim wealth, property or authority in governance merely derives from constituting self-determining relations.
But law students and lawyers are also key to the fix. They can derive legal obligations, all the way back, to conditioning the legitimacy of systems and entitlements on the inclusion and empowerment of their constituents.
Conclusion
The legitimacy of legal systems is not just theory. There is a threshold, and a binary choice, shown by a climate crisis killing millions. We will soon urge the BLSA to lead with Fair Start on assessing heat and other impacts on infants – impacts that expose the fraud behind the claims – fraud that gives rise to just demands for legitimating reparations.
Years of unrefuted research shows that as early as 1948 any form of authoritative governance would have had to be investing enough in each child to offset their influence equally, relative to a neutral position like Dasgupta’s / Tucker’s biodiverse optimality.
Of course that would have required children’s share equity in democracy be treated as the first human right. To use the concept of a “we” or impliedly invoke any collective authority would require that. Otherwise you would be engaged in third party fraud – identity and capacity theft – because you can’t use the invocation without the equity.
Define power as the violence of the state and conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm (bring beneath a threshold of some value) others, and freedom becomes the resistance of wealth and other existing entitlements to that power of the state, entitlements that can benefit from growth and evade equity.
This created a fraudulent anthropocentric (versus ecocentric) standard for words like “green” “democratic” “sustainable” etc., and the birth inequity and growth we have seen for decades.
Of course that’s not what power is. It’s any form of human influence, from abusive parenting to emitting pollutants. The border of human power is not represented by lines on a globe; it’s the threshold beneath which no child should be born.
To account for that form of influence, we would probably have to assure all family planning occurs in a collective. Mwesigye and Esther developed and are pioneering that model, an Afrocentric model of women’s circle democracy that well predates John Locke.
Moreover, because constituting as free and equal persons is the prerequisite for legitimate (inclusive and empowering) governance, there is a preemptive right to the resources, obtainable by all means effective. This work of overriding allocation would be limited to the most polluting nations, especially the United States.
One way to implement the fix is to ask anyone making any claim of doing good to reassess it, relative to children’s equity needs as they enter the world on the day the claim is made.
For example, we think philosopher Peter Singer consistently omits children entering the world as a factor when he makes claims, and thus uses the anthropocentric standard.
As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote Singer’s 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.
The discourse of dividing all into the fair, and unfair, will identify those who will insist on using the fraudulent standard, and those who will not. The Defiance anti-apartheid movement rose by resisting the most influential drivers of the lie, and that could occur here as well.
If we want to be free, we owe others as much as they give children entering the world. We owe them that level of protection.
In years of doing this, we never found an effective counterargument, but have seen lots of moves to sabotage our work.
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.
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.
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.
