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Category: Campaigns & Accountability
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The Fraud Killing Mostly Black Babies
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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.
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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.
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Fact/Value Checking the United Nations Secretary General. Take Action.
The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres today said:
“As we mark World Cities Day, let us celebrate the power of youth to build green, resilient and inclusive cities that meet the needs and aspirations of future generations.”
Fact: Neither the United Nations nor Guterres is ensuring such power. The statement is false.
He personally, and the United Nations human rights bodies, are using a fundamental system that exploits children more than it empowers them. In fact, the Secretary General’s son benefits from this illegitimate process at deadly cost to others.
How does Guterres actually account for children entering the world on what he claims to value and the good work he claims to do? How he is delaying children entering the world to create great conditions for them? Is he taking any action to constitute just nations, and ensure the good he claims to do is not being undone as children enter the world without what their rights promise them – things like equity, and health with reparations and debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world?
No he is not.
And it is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform. 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.
What do we really owe to those who exploit children for economic growth rather than legitimately protecting and including infants as they enter the world?
By asking these questions you are looking for something called entitlement and impact fraud, originating in the formation of human rights regimes in the middle of the Twentieth Century. The fraud entailed assuming entitlements in violation of the constitutive self-determination of peoples through birth, developmental and emancipatory share equity in democracy, and – for decades – hiding those entitlements in a way that ensure the crisis.
This has been an ongoing sustainability scam that drives the climate crisis, with many charities focused on sensational, micro-level campaigns while quietly undoing beneficial impacts with macro-level and inequitable family policies that enriched management as well as those funding the entities.
Anthrocentric systems are inherently legitimate
Humans are animals. What we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species. but because of their unique vulnerability. 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. 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. Guterres and the United Nations will have to eventually move 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.
This fantasy world, 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.
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.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
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Fair Start today moves to standardize climate damage evaluations at the United Nations, and override any conflicting standards. Take action.
Today the Fair Start Movement has updated a legal action at the United Nations, originally filed November, 2021, as detailed here.
The filing today adds many new parties from Africa, India and elsewhere – and argues the current common formula for climate reparations and their priority use is based on the same fundamental false assumptions that created the crisis, and sets the awards too low – devaluing harms by trillions of dollars and ensuring millions of deaths of mostly black persons.
The filing solves what is the greatest collective action problem humans have every faced: Bringing children into the world in a way that ensures their measurable self-determination, rather than the massive inequity and ecocide we see today. The authority to govern derives from and is conditional on this, so the update urges action now even short of a formal statement.
The model the filing shows as overriding the current reproductive rights regime need not be ideal. It only has to be be better than than the current system, which is not hard to do given that it offers little in any protection for the values we all share.
This devaluation derives from a system of fundamental entitlement and impact fraud – a charade to protect illegitimate concentrations of wealth and power – begun at the United Nations between 1948 and 1968 that circumvented democratic processes, protecting concentrations of familial and church wealth that should have been directed to women and children. That move – at the most fundamental level – ensured the climate crisis and millions of deaths.
The filing argues that current climate responses are essentially the fox guarding the henhouse, and instead urges an alternative model based on the highest standard of environmental protection: Bottom up measurable self-determination ensured through incentivizing changes in the birth, developmental, and emancipatory conditions of every child, rather than exploiting children for growth and treating liberty as the freedom to harm others.
Esther Afolaranmi, the lead attorney on the filing, said this: “Do we all admit we benefitted at horrific cost to others, and saw the good we did set back by inequity? The evidence is overwhelming. If we can admit that we can move forward with mandatory reparations that override the United States and European states authority to protect wealth gathered illegally – in violation of the Children’s Convention – and at deadly cost to others.”
The legal action uses the preemptive standard that should have defined human rights and constitutional entitlements as early as 1968, and avoids the most fundamental driver of the crisis: Some privileging their children at deadly cost to other children, including the millions already dying as the crisis accelerates.
The legal action sets in motion a child-entitling process much like anti-apartheid work of the African National Congress in its Defiance campaigns, which includes a truth and reconciliation process where key audiences admit how inequitable growth undid their public benefit claims and assist in funding reparative family planning, or face impact fraud litigation. The action argues for “constitutive” preemption of constitutional, environmental, consumer deception, and other areas of law that use the fundamental false assumptions that created the crisis.
Read our cover letter, and general engagement form, below – and act.
COVER LETTER TO PETITION TO THE UNITED NATIONS: ADDRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL DEGRADATION AND ITS IMPACT ON FUTURE GENERATIONS
To:The Secretary-General of the United NationsUnited Nations Headquarters, New York, NY 10017 USA
I. Introduction
We, the Fair Start Movement (FSM), together with our global partners from Africa, China, South America, India, and women’s advocacy groups, present this petition to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). We submit this as a continuation of our ongoing efforts to address fundamental legal oversights that allow environmental and social degradation to threaten the rights of future generations. We highlight the inadequacy of current international frameworks in recognizing and protecting these rights.
II. The Problem: Structural Flaws in Human Rights Regimes
Since 2008, FSM has consistently raised concerns about the failure of international human rights regimes to adequately ensure democratic equity and a “fair start” for all children. This failure is rooted in the absence of a standardized approach to public benefit claims and climate-related damage evaluations, allowing for rampant entitlement mismanagement that disproportionately affects the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly people of color.
The wealth amassed by a few, especially in developed nations, was acquired without paying the true social and environmental costs. The rich have amassed wealth at the cost of others’ well-being, including future generations who bear the brunt of environmental destruction. This ongoing crisis is exacerbated by the inequitable allocation of resources, as wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, while millions are left to suffer the consequences of environmental degradation.
III. The Core Issues: Legal Authority for Fairness
- Public Benefit Claims: Current legal frameworks lack standardized mechanisms to prevent fraudulent or inflated claims related to environmental and public benefit initiatives. This results in mismanagement of resources that should be directed toward addressing climate-related damage.
- Climate Crisis Loss and Damage Evaluations: The failure to establish proper baselines for evaluating the harm caused by climate change prevents a clear assessment of the true impact on communities. This has allowed for continued environmental harm without adequate legal accountability or compensation mechanisms.
- Equity for Future Generations: The right to self-determination for future generations is fundamental to national legitimacy. Governments cannot claim legitimacy if they continue to ignore the rights of children to equal participation in democratic processes. There is an urgent need for legal recognition of these rights, especially as it pertains to their environmental inheritance.
IV. Historical Oversight in International Law
The international human rights regime, established between 1948 and 1968, failed to prioritize democratic equity for future generations. Instead, it embraced a flawed framework that prioritized procreative autonomy—a value that benefited wealthy, often white families, while failing to ensure adequate investment in vulnerable populations. This oversight allowed unsustainable growth models to flourish, exacerbating global inequality and environmental collapse.
The lack of focus on equitable birthrights within the human rights framework has led to a crisis where marginalized populations, particularly in the Global South, suffer the most from a climate crisis they did not create. The legal frameworks of many nations and international bodies must be realigned to prioritize ecological and democratic equity for future generations, as the current systems continue to exacerbate inequality.
V. The Legal Basis for Reform
Under existing international law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is already a recognized obligation to protect the rights of children and the environment. However, these rights must be extended and strengthened to include a legally enforceable “Fair Start” principle that mandates equitable birth conditions and development opportunities for all children.
- Article 24 of the ICCPR emphasizes the protection of children without discrimination. This must be expanded to ensure that all children are given equal access to resources, education, and a healthy environment, starting from birth.
- Article 6 of the ICCPR guarantees the right to life, which must be interpreted to include protection from environmental degradation. This protection is not merely a moral obligation but a legal one, requiring the reallocation of resources from wealthy nations to support vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by climate change.
VI. A Fair Start for All Children
To address the climate crisis effectively, we propose integrating the “Fair Start for All Children” model into international legal frameworks. This model emphasizes:
- Family Planning and Delayed Parenthood: Encouraging sustainable family planning practices that align with environmental and social equity goals. This includes ensuring that children are born into conditions that support their full development and capacity for self-determination.
- Redistributive Justice: Redirecting wealth from those who have accumulated it through unsustainable practices to fund environmental reparations and support vulnerable populations. This can be achieved through the establishment of planning accounts for young parents, ensuring they have the resources necessary to raise children in safe and equitable environments.
- Recognition of Collective Rights: Encouraging collective models of family planning and care that move away from individualistic approaches, which have historically benefited the wealthy at the expense of the vulnerable. Such collective efforts would ensure that all communities share the burden and benefits of environmental and social reform.
VII. Holding Wealthy Nations Accountable
The climate crisis has exposed the deep inequalities embedded in international economic and social systems. Wealthy nations, particularly in the Global North, are primarily responsible for the environmental harm that now disproportionately affects poorer countries. It is imperative that:
- Reparations for Climate Damage: Wealthy nations must be held legally accountable for their role in exacerbating climate change. This includes providing financial and technical assistance to developing countries to help mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.
- Redistribution of Wealth: Wealth accumulated through unsustainable practices must be redirected to support initiatives aimed at reversing the damage caused by climate change. This includes funding sustainable development projects, renewable energy initiatives, and ecological restoration programs in the most affected regions.
- Legal Accountability: International and national legal systems must evolve to hold individuals, corporations, and nations accountable for their role in environmental degradation. This includes establishing mechanisms for litigating and compensating for climate-related harms, as well as enforcing stronger environmental regulations.
VIII. The Urgency of Action
The time to act is now. The failure to address these issues threatens not only the survival of future generations but also the legitimacy of political and legal systems worldwide. We urge the United Nations and its member states to:
- Implement legal reforms that standardize public benefit and climate damage claims to prevent further fraud and mismanagement.
- Prioritize the rights of future generations by incorporating the “Fair Start” principle into international human rights frameworks.
- Hold wealthy nations accountable for their disproportionate role in causing the climate crisis and ensure that resources are equitably distributed to mitigate its effects.
IX. Conclusion
This petition calls upon the United Nations to take immediate and decisive action to address the root causes of environmental degradation and social inequity. The rights of future generations must be protected through legal reforms that ensure democratic equity, fair distribution of resources, and accountability for those responsible for climate damage. Only by enacting these changes can we hope to secure a just and sustainable future for all.
USE OUR ENGAGEMENT FORM BELOW TO JOIN THE FAIR START MOVEMENT
[Fill in the name of a person or organization] is doing great work, but to avoid them undoing it they should admit that children entering the world without what their rights promise them is cancelling the benefits of the work for most, driving up the costs of race and climate reparations – the death debt, reversing sustainable development, and ensuring violence as temperatures rise.
[Fact / Value Check: If the person or organization does not back overriding current systems to measurable empower and repay children for climate harms as they enter the world, are they doing more harm than good?]
Many have admitted the undoing – vegans, for example, who know inequity/growth does more harm than dietary change does good and have started to fix the problem by admitting the undoing and instead backing fair starts in life for all children as the preemptive standard for national legitimacy.
This inversion of power systems offsets our positionality, and any false claims we might have made (as many now working with Fair Start previously did), to allow unifying self-determination for all. Rights to wealth are not inherent but contingent on each child in the nation being empowered with equity and thus emancipated in particular ways.
At bottom, if we can’t admit we failed and reorient ourselves, we will be saying that mostly children of color who had nothing to do with climate and related crises should suffer and die, while mostly white families who benefited and, in many cases, perpetuated the crisis by exploiting children rather than creating value should live and profit. These entities generally did not create value so much as create their own audiences and demand by preventing sufficient investments in children to make them self-determining in quantity and civic quality, enough to evade growth-based catastrophe.
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Factchecking Grist: Does Their Reporting Exacerbate the Climate Crisis? Take Action.
Grist is a nonprofit media organization that makes this claim:
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices.
Facts:
On any given day Grist made claims about someone or some action creating benefits in terms of ecological protection, those claims were being undone as children entered the world under without entitlements to minimum levels of welfare, share equity in their democracies (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) or entitlements to the legitimate political systems that derive from the share equity of their members.
To further values like ecological protection, entities like Grist would need to include those values in the first premise of who humans should be and become in terms of the creation of basic power relations, and entities undo the values if they do not include them. While including those values in the premise is not popular with funders or seemingly progressive media whose wealth derives from inequity, that does not change the reality of the impacts – including suffering and death – and the justice owed for those impacts.
An entity either starts with a measurably inclusive and thus liberating system that accounts for the birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality of its members, and relative costs and benefits, or they do not.
There is no evidence Grist factors in equity in its coverage, and much evidence that they omit the impacts of inequity.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
Not orienting from equity risks millions of lives as well as trillions of dollars in climate reparations, and illegitimates political systems by treating subjects as means bound in inequity, rather than empowered ends from whom governance derives. If one wanted to decolonize wealth and the future, one would have to start from a position of not punching down on children and animals – and that requires a constitutive threshold.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal rights projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: URGE THE LEAD AT GRIST TO COVER ISSUES AND STORIES IN A WAY THAT INCLUDES EQUITY AND ITS ROLE IN DETERMINING OUTCOMES.
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The Lilly Endowment Grant for the National Park Foundation Signals Progress. One Change Could Add Much. Take Action.
The National Park Foundation has announced great news:
The National Park Foundation (NPF) today announced a historic $100 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. This transformative grant — the largest ever received by NPF and the largest grant benefitting national parks — celebrates a pivotal moment in safeguarding the future of America’s treasured national parks.
The Lilly Endowment’s gift is great.
But on the day this was announced children were entering the world under a standard that undid much of the chance to safeguard the future of America’s treasured national parks. That standard ensures no minimum threshold for their birth, development, and emancipation, or any threshold to limit growth that would be consistent with protecting parks, ensuring the equity for all to access parks, or the chance for kids to one day protect parks for those even further in the future by being assured an effective role in their democracies.
Read more here from Yale University about kids, climate, and nature.
There is a move underway to fix this, one that urges the United Nations to change the standard, and make it the first and overriding human right.
Take Action: Respectfully urge the Lilly Endowment and the National Park Foundation to consider backing the action at the UN here.
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An Authentic Life Means Choosing for Yourself, and Not Making Choices for Others. Take Action.
We can’t really become ourselves, and live authentic lives where we self-determine rather than determine the lives of others, without ensuring all children a fair start in life as the first human right.
Without this right in place, we have been able to exploit race/wealth based birth positionality and growth to benefit ourselves at deadly climatological other costs to others.
By concrete metrics (current emissions standards of around 400 ppm v. the under 280 ppm needed to rewild the earth) this means choices that seem like our own, to harm the environment for example, are really choices we are making for others – like future generations and animals.
This mistake in systems of rights let me, as a white public interest lawyer from a privileged background, make inaccurate claims about beneficial impacts that were being undone by inequity. Here is the fix – moving from birth inequity to birth equity and full autonomy.
The current systems of family entitlements allows us to benefit while impacting the future majority in a way that will kill millions because each of us is not forced to account for the birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality that gives some – mostly whites – a massive head start in life, and everyone living today the ability to make choices for others in the future instead of similarly making choices for themselves.
If we want to run life as a race, we should try doing it without a head start. We should do it with rules that are based on the values we all live, and rules that don’t immediately position some over others, that don’t exclude most from rulemaking and access to accurate criteria for assessing truth and value, or that ruin the track for future runners such that they die by the millions.
We should be runners, and not choosing for others in ways that don’t allow them to run.
We should understand that there is a difference between being popular, and being right. Millions dying from a climate crisis suggests we were not right, and should start all we do assessing why. Growth creating demand at cost to freedom, and even access to the criteria to accurately asses truth and value, suggest culprits.
By the numbers, most least lives that are anything but self-determining, or free. Why? Because this most basic rules was never in place: Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future, using metrics that combine to create a threshold above which children may be born, but beneath which no child should be born.
Without this it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us – not who actually has – day to day – influence and power over us.
Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.
Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function. Those who wish to die orienting their lives from a position of freedom should consider this.
Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence
- Welfare standards for birth, development, and emancipation – 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 the right to determine the lives of others with the entitlements they assumed – as the standard for who we should be. An example might be flexible savings accounts containing ten thousand dollars, in place before any child is born, to ensure everyone can have at least one child safely if they choose to.
- Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood. The savings accounts above would be funded by debt from wealthy families to further this offset.
- 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.
- Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning. Would-be parents contributing twenty-five percent to the savings and debt accounts, including through credit earned by parental readiness training, would further this goal.
- Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
- Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
- Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly. Partha Dasgupta’s modeling is a good measure of such efficiency.
- 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.
The way many see the world today would be like seeing events in historic South Africa while ignoring the apartheid policy in place, and that policy benefitted those doing the ignoring. But in this case, the intergenerational and racial apartheid of assuming birth, developmental, and emancipatory benefits will kill countless more people. Concentrations of wealth and power – like those who have funded and thereby defined fields like child welfare and animal rights laws in a way that is doing more harm than good – did not create value.
They helped ensure rules for the game, and most importantly the first rule of who we should be in terms of the creation of power relations, to move the key costs on to others, and to create deadly criteria for truth and value (like demand created by not investing in birth and development conditions) by ensuring the average person could not patriciate in the rulemaking. Their wealth is owed back, and the demand overrides any government’s right to block it because the process of investing in equitable birth and development positionality is what makes governance inclusive, capable of representation, and hence legitimate.
National legitimacy, and the ability of nations to assign entitlements to wealth and to protect the lives and property of the wealthy, is contingent on human rights that empower subjects as political equals. This is the first human right, the right to share equity – or an equal and influential role in self-determining limitation of the power and influence others have over you.
Whether nations are assuring the right can be measured with discrete metrics – metrics that were hidden by those structuring human rights in favor of using arbitrary standards, like market demand manufactured through low standards for child welfare and development. The sovereignty and legitimacy of nations derives from the sovereignty – or self-determination – of its subjects, and an easy measure is whether each new child born into the world is seen as capable of offsetting or countermanding the vote and voice of existing persons, relative to a neutral threshold.
That would show they are truly empowered as political equals, and we would invest heavily in them – starting with a reproductive rights model actually based on children’s rights to conditions of birth and development that ensured inclusion – to ensure they used that power responsibly.
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Work in Public Interest? Test Your Leadership for Impact Fraud, and Report Them If Needed
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.
How could anything be public interest that starts with a set of entitlements designed to exploit the most vulnerable by not funding a line below which children should not be born, and above which they may?
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.
