Please Fund Children’s Bonds Because Children Deserve Them
Dear Warren,
Fair Start Movement’s mission is to replace parent-centric subjective family planning systems with a child-centric model that ensures children are born and raised in conditions consistent – minimally – with the Children’s Rights Convention. Thank you for being a leader in the efforts to assure family planning needs are being met worldwide.
Given recent discussions of your possibly funding a world children’s savings bank, if these reports are true, we urge one simple guideline for such a plan. We urge that the gift recognize that the wealth of many was built on a system of unsustainable growth, per one Nobel Laurate, that included billions of persons having and raising children in conditions that did not satisfy the standards children and their parents deserve, the standards eventually codified in the Children’s Rights Convention. That explosive and unsustainable growth – at increasing cost to children as the climate worsens – enabled the wealth. Because that wealth was produced under a system that externalized its costs, disadvantaged children have moral and legal claim to part of the wealth as a form of restorative justice.
If your plans are to give as reported, please say it is because the children are entitled to it, and as part of a fair system of ecosocial family planning, one which actually complies with the requirements of the international human rights regime.
Without this change, we risk a future where the system by which we made our wealth does more harm to future generations than our philanthropy can do to help them.
Thanks for considering, and for your work to date.
As evidence mounts that the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol was an orchestrated attempt to subvert democracy, one obvious question is how to reverse whatever process made Trump’s attempt possible. At base, what made it possible was an extreme concentration of wealth and power, combined with a large group of supporters who were susceptible to his influence.
No solution is sufficient if it does not address that problem, by fundamentally limiting and decentralizing power into future generations through Fair Start wealth transfers/empowerment. Other fixes just move the problem around. The real fix is to take down pyramidic power schemes, the kind that created Trump.
TAKE ACTION: Real democracy is about empowering people, bottom up. The long run fix for the degrading of our democracies is a universal family planning system that builds town halls, not Trump-owned shopping malls. Urge the United Nations to act, then lawfully engage a wealthy family with Fair Start demands and let us tell your story.
Harvard President Larry Bacow says that Harvard is committed to confronting the climate crisis. Harvard fundamentally built its wealth and prestige on an unsustainable system of growth – family policies – that externalized their costs on others and did nothing to protect nature from the Anthropocene. Is Harvard reversing its position on those family policies? Is it employing a restorative standard for climate mitigation? It is pointing the world towards optimality, or growth that will multiply unforeseen threats – the very thing that happened with greenhouse gasses?
If Harvard is not changing course on family policies Bacow’s statements are misleading, with growth remaining the fundamental driver of the crisis. You cannot make any claim of a policy impact that does not start with, and become fundamentally contingent upon, people and the family policies that create them. And in a democracy, those people – comprised as relatively self-determining – are the baseline to assess costs and benefits.
The same questions can be raised with Harvard’s recent purported commitments to racial justice, child welfare, animal rights, or human rights and democracy. Is it embracing redistributive policies that eliminate the massive birth-wealth gap between black and white children? Does it apply the Children’s Rights Convention as a standard for family planning? What is it doing to prevent our species from overrunning and eliminating others? Growth and inequity have ensured the average person will have little if any impact on their systems of governance. Is Harvard reversing that process?
Quietly undoing downstream fixes with upstream anthropocentric growth and birth inequity is disingenuous, has concentrated power in a few, and foisted social and ecological costs on others. Harvard is one of those concentrations. The family policies it tacitly accepts, which pretend that our social and ecological positions are a matter of some magic fortune, are the fundamental source of injustice. The greatest act of justice, for the vast majority who will live in the future, means recovering those costs and using the wealth to plan just and sustainable families where power is physically limited and decentralized.
Urge Larry Bacow to tell us all the truth about these matters. Contact him here:
617 495 1502 Email: president@harvard.edu
We cannot afford to lose ground on these issues having missed the fundamental driver and allow concentrations of wealth and power to use people to further exacerbate power differentials.
“Behind Elon Musk’s blather about free markets, free speech, and free choice is his goal to be free from accountability,” Robert Reich warns. Like the actions of fellow billionaire Trump, this move to influence the public with false claims and dangerous propaganda threatens democracy. So what does this have to do with a fair start in life? A lot. Unjust birth conditions are the root of inequality. That inequality allows unjust wealth to flow to the hands of a few. When we ensure equity from birth, we build communities where voices are equal and democracy is truly exercised.
In honor of Earth Day 2022, we at the Fair Start Movement encourage ExxonMobil to include every child’s human right to a Fair Start as part of its commitment to meet standards set out in the Paris Agreement.
To the leadership of ExxonMobil,
We members of the Fair Start Movement, on this Earth Day, April 22, 2022, write to inform ExxonMobil of an oversight in your commendable efforts toward sustainability.
You must amend your policy in order to acknowledge the needs and rights of future human generations. Policies that ignore critical factors such as family planning and universal basic human rights will fail. All of us are locked in a global struggle to ensure the existence of our species.
We implore ExxonMobil to take into account the environmental impacts of humankind. Too many children today are born unwanted, into poverty, famine, or war. Our approach to offer a Fair Start to every child born on Earth will ensure that these conditions will be eliminated moving into the future.
We demand that ExxonMobil allocate funds to support restorative ecological policies that acknowledge and actively promote the primary and overriding human right to an ecosocial Fair Start for every child born today and tomorrow.
Fundamental change starts with family policy.
By supporting our and our allies’ initiatives, ExxonMobil will begin to substantively repair damage done by its historical environmental misconduct. You will truly become part of the solution by sustaining and protecting humanity.
Will you commit today, in honor of Earth Day, to right past wrongs? Will you catapult forward the global effort to survive? Will you join our movement’s efforts to ensure every child’s right to a Fair Start?
Earth Day 2022: Exxon Should Pay Reparations for the Climate Crisis That Physically Create Just and Sustainable Communities Through Family Planning Investments
In Exxon’s public commitment to address the climate crisis, the company uses a particular ecological goal or baseline for its risk assessments and climate mitigation strategy that – compliance aside – is at least comparable to the goals of the Paris Climate Accord. While we focus on Exxon in this letter, to be clear, the logic applies to many companies and well beyond the energy sector.
FSM was formed because these goals or baselines are premised on an error. They were developed based on the assumption that nations operate from a place of historical political legitimacy, and can themselves freely define ecological goals, including anthropocentric ones like those of the Paris Accord. That assumption is incorrect. As recent peer-reviewed research shows, nations are constituting, not constituted in the past, and they are either doing so legitimately or not depending on their family policies. Nations cannot simply declare their legitimacy. Legitimacy is a political ideal based relative self-determination that would require, again minimally, that all children enjoy the ecosocial birth and development conditions required by the Children’s Rights Convention.
Resolving this baseline error involves treating legitimacy as contingent on our ongoing fulfillment of our obligations to future generations.
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. This is simply the ideal of the “we,” in “We the People.” The ideal political we, meaning fundamental power relations defined by the goals of the Children’s Convention, is the primary baseline. We cannot think of, or describe, an ecological outcome that is not first contingent upon family planning outcomes, on at least five levels.
If we value human self-determination or freedom, we have to begin from an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – baseline, because that makes relative self-determination possible, freeing us from the influences of others, including the harmful impacts of even the current rise in global temperature. Humans cannot self-determine when their childhood development is defined by the pollution of others. Moreover, climate goals cannot be limited to ecological outcomes, but should include changes in family policy that maximize the resilience, equity, and democratic cooperability of future generations to thrive despite the crisis. Our creation is the intersection of our values.
In other words, if we correct the error described above, the correct goal or baseline must entail our becoming democratic and legitimate groups of free and equal people, which requires concrete and specific restorative ecological policies much more aggressive than the Paris Accord, redistributive and equalizing family planning reforms that recognize the right to nature and level the playing field for all kids, financially and ecologically. A simple litmus test, given these standards, for our being free and equal persons involves whether we first treat the capacity for each person’s self-determination as directly inverse to population growth, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. This is proof that each person is politically, and equally, empowered. Not treating growth as such calls into question the true role of citizens in their own democracy.
We cannot assign property rights in ways that undercut physically constituting and democratically empowering future generations. Our being, and in this case becoming, positioned to determine costs and benefits in a way that is inclusive of the reasoned views of all, is the first baseline.
Again, we can refer to this helpful summary of the baseline problem. All of the solutions to the problem Professor Solum gives jump to what we should do rather than who we should be, and thus ignore the need to be fair people, in terms of the physical power relations determined by our creation, before we can be positioned/empowered to make fair rules/laws. Ideally we would be created/grouped to look like a functional Rawlsian constitutional convention before fundamentally assessing costs and benefits, hence our being an ideal “We the People,” is the first baseline. And for that, the minimal guidelines that would apply to family planning would be the standards we hold up for extant persons, like parental fitness, the Children’s Convention, equality of opportunity, restoration-based climate sequestration targets, biodiversity restoration targets, historic voter-representative ratios, etc. Those point us towards the UN low-variant population, something aggressive family planning incentives – funded with claims to wealth at the top of the economic pyramid – could practically help achieve.
We are writing in the spirit of Earth Day 2022 to urge Exxon to embrace the specific restorative ecological policies described above as the part of the first and overriding human right to a Fair Start in life, and to commit some share of its wealth and resources as Fair Start planning reparations to offset the harm it has done to future generations, relative to baseline discussed above. Exxon could easily practice this change by supporting the child tax credit reforms linked above, while treating them as a fundamental human right.
This is not about liberal or conservative politics. Family planning redistributions – as primary obligations – can replace wasteful tax obligations that would simply create larger governments which do not reflect the will of the people. This is about a commitment to human freedom and equality of opportunity, enabled by policies that ensure children can develop and physically comprise communities that liberate them from the threats they face today. This is something we all should value. Correcting the baseline error described above enables such a future.
Please let us know if Exxon will commit to these changes.
You and 2.5 billion other people likely used one of Unilever’s products today. Unilever is the powerhouse behind more than a thousand household brand names sold globally, including Lipton, Breyer’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Vaseline, and Suave.
In 2013 Unilever launched “Project Sunlight” for “a bright future” – a slick, feel-good campaign to convince couples that the solution to the world’s crises is to bring more children into the world. Watch this video the company produced, and carefully examine the family planning messaging in the mommy blogs the company sponsors.
Unilever claims to support the UN’s global goals and sustainable development. Why then does it encourage would-be parents to ignore environmental and other concerns when planning their families?The company relies on unsustainable growth and higher fertility rates to sell its products, including its worldwide line of baby products under brands like Dove.
Population growth and the consumerism that comes with it is one of the main drivers of climate change, pollution, inequality, and other societal crises. South Africa is weeks away from running out of drinkable water. Our world’s problems require sustainable solutions and a collective approach to sustainable development. That starts with smarter family planning for more sustainable families; not the reckless pronatalism being promoted by Unilever to create more consumers for their products.
Rather than encouraging parents to ignore their concerns and just have kids, Unilever must exercise its corporate responsibility to encourage sustainable family planning.
Tweet Unilever CEO Paul Polman at @PaulPolman and politely suggest the following: Please promote smaller, more sustainable families as part of your #brightfuture campaign.
Today the national child-protection organization Having Kids called upon the leaders of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to amend the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act (“CAPTA”) to require states to enact legislation that allows judges to prohibit offenders convicted of certain felonies from having children as a condition of probation. CAPTA allows states to apply for federal grants for child abuse prevention and treatment programs but also enumerates certain “eligibility requirements” that each state must comply with in order to receive funding.
Having Kids’ proposal seeks an amendment to Section 106 of CAPTA to include, as funding eligibility requirements, that a state have Fair Start order legislation enacted. Such legislation would, in the event of a conviction, temporarily prohibit an offender from having additional children during the pendency of any probation in order to prevent the abuse and neglect of any future children. While the Congressional Findings from the CAPTA Reauthorization Act of 2010 hold that “substantial reductions in the prevalence and incidence of child abuse and neglect and the alleviation of its consequences are matters of the highest national priority,” national statistics from the past 5 years show that the epidemic of child abuse and neglect in the United States is not improving. In 2016, there were an estimated 676,000 children across the country who were victims of abuse and neglect, up 3% from 2012. The number of child fatalities that were the result of abuse and neglect steadily rose each year with 1,750 fatalities in 2016 versus 1,640 in 2012. That is approximately 5 children dying every day in the United States as the result of abuse and/or neglect.
“We believe that in order to truly make an impact in the prevention of child abuse, we must ensure that children are not born into potentially life-threatening situations,” said Anne Green, Executive Director of Having Kids. “It is a matter of national importance that we not only take care of abused children after the fact but do all that we can to prevent the abuse from happening in the first place.”
Take action: Email the senate committee members and tell them that you support Having Kids’ proposal for a Fair Start amendment to the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act.
Recently Prince William and Kate Middleton joked about having a fourth royal child. Many readers will remember that Fair Start Movement wrote to the Royal family some time ago urging them to publicly adopt just and sustainable family planning modeling instead.
Contact the Royal Family here and politely urge them to adopt Fair Start family planning to ensure a future filled with what people need – nature and equity.
FAIR START RESEARCH
A clear link exists between rapid population growth and poverty. Better family planning and smaller families increase economic prospects by allowing greater investment in each child.
According to the World Bank, in 2015, almost 2 billion people (26% of the world’s population) were living on less than $3.20 per day, and nearly half of the world (46%) was living on less than $5.50 a day.
The costs and benefits of overpopulation under globalization are now distributed by class more than by nation. Labor bears the cost of reduced wage income; capital enjoys the benefit of reduced wage costs.
The United State and much of the capitalist world believed that new bodies were needed to produce more labor. This pro-natal, pro-capital belief has created a world in which huge inequities exist. For example, the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, which is more than 60% of the planet’s population.
Family size affects those in developed countries as well as underdeveloped nations: In the U.S., the Kansas City Star reported that of more than 6,000 prisoners in 12 states, 1 in 4 was a product of the foster-care system; there is a foster-care-to-prison pipeline in many states. Foster children are also diagnosed with PTSD at a rate greater than Iraq War veterans, and every year, more than 4,000 former foster care kids end up homeless after leaving the system. Meanwhile, the number of American children in foster care increased 12% between 2012 and 2017.
A recent study from Stanford has found that efforts to mitigate climate change could yield trillions in economic benefits. And the best wayto mitigate climate change is to choose smaller families. Yes, it’s more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation.
By the year 2100, the world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime. If the average woman alive today has between 2 and 3 children, the world population will grow to as many as 16 billion by 2100.
