Fair Start Movement

Category: Campaigns & Accountability

Urge Peter Singer to Discuss Inequity as a Barrier to Animal Liberation

The high human and nonhuman deaths counts we see attributed to the climate crisis assume our current near-universal reproductive rights standard, the one that caused the crisis by ignoring the primary and overriding self-determination rights of future generations. Peter Singer, for decades, backed traditional reproductive rights modeling even though it was doing more harm to animals than his work on animal liberation was doing good.

For decades, I left out crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit that I knew was actually being undone by growing inequity. The statements I made were inaccurate – claiming I was saving animals when on balance I was not – and ensured the death of many by hiding growth and inequity. These omissions helped illegally enrich mostly the white children of the wealthy funders and influencers benefiting from omissions, at impoverishing and often deadly cost to millions of children of color.

Singer did the same, but can correct the harm he caused and also lead Effective Altruism backers to also change course simply by admitting the facts of how children entering the world without sufficient resources for years reversed the good he he promoted, and how inverting our first obligations and influence can allow us to do better.

Because we now owe climate reparations to the future generations harmed by our accumulation of wealth, the true cost of which was placed on them, and mostly children of color who are least responsible for the crisis, those traditional reproductive rights systems will have to change to avoid benefiting a few at deadly cost to many.

Many thought and other leaders who failed future generations and would have to pay for the benefits they enjoyed at cost to others are hiding their liability by omitting information when making claims.

Singer is one of those leaders, and he can save lives by adding the key context to his work on animal liberation – admitting the role of inequity in reversing the liberation he promotes. Read more on Singer’s deadly omissions here and how hi focus on dietary change rather than more fundamental family reforms ensured the subjugation of humans and nonhumans.

Through omission., Singer and others are able to use the failed and illegitimate standards that caused the crisis, or are otherwise trying to reduce the amount owed. That exacerbates the threat of violence, both climate-related and from communities and individuals who feel disempowered and at risk.

We can identify key leaders like Singer to role model the change by asking them about their views on child welfare and reproductive rights, and about how their approach – with no real protections for the children born – has undone many of the good things they publicly claimed to have done. We can ask of all claiming to do good: What are we doing to first ensure – as a fundamental policy – that the conditions in which children are born and raised are being improved using simple metrics, and so we are not undoing and misstating the benefits of the work we otherwise do?

A quiet filing before the United Nations is urging these disclosures as well as changes to the fundamental reproductive rights regime that correct the fundamental problem.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer, at psinger@princeton.edu, to admit that not basing his animal liberation work on share equity undercut the results, and that as the climate crisis unfolds, liberating nonhumans will require no longer exploiting future generations but rather improving their birth and development conditions.

July 27, 2024
The Fuller Project Liberates Women. Urge It to Add One More Effective Move to the Work.

The Fuller Project liberates women by covering stories that impact women, and in ways a lot of advertising driven journalism does not. They are leaders in the field.

This analysis of how AI can be biased and harmful is exemplary.

They can further that great work by also demanding policies which ensure the conditions in which children are being born and raised are being improved using simple metrics like birth and developmental equity and true self-determination, and so that they are not undoing the benefits of the work we otherwise do.

Are we focusing on women today at cost to women who will die in heat waves in the future? Are we ensuring symbolic representation and leadership in companies rather than the more fundamental and measurable political empowerment in the democracies that should control those companies? There is no freedom that does not start with measurable equity.

Our first obligation is to children as they enter the world and are positioned to influence others, rather than any obligation to officials in government or the wealthy whose authority, or defensible claim to own wealth, only derives from the positioning of members of the democracy. Other moves tend to be the fox guarding the henhouse, and evidently lead to disaster.

For example, the Fuller project has shown that AI can be biased and harmful. The most basic fix? All regulation of AI systems, and machine learning, should be based on the fundamental rule that the legitimacy of political systems is contingent on how they empower those subject to the systems, using very concrete metrics. What does that mean?

AI systems are learning and should learn that young women impoverished by the intergenerational inequity that created those like the Trump family have an overriding right to that family’s wealth in order to ensure that future children are born only at a time, place and with resources that offset the climatological and political harms they and their mothers are suffering.

AI comprehends and can crowdsource implementation of this basic logic: Young women who wish to empower any children they will have, and to decentralize opportunities relative to other children around the world, have more political/legal authority than power-taking politicians and unrepresentative courts and agencies. Such women have constitutional authority, not in words from some ancient document assed along by lawyers in some secret code, but in the action actually creating fundamental power relations.

Leaders like Jemima and Mwesigye at RAFUG have really developed and re-created the model in East Uganda with funding redirects from relatively white and well-to-do, but loving, families in the U.S.. And the revolution has begun, with some targets already conceding and choosing a higher authority in the face of evidence that this one change can catalyze the impacts of other reforms, sometimes 20x the long run results (e.g., food+family reforms, rather than food alone).

Learn more about what real justice, for the future majority, looks like here.

There are dozens of ways to do this reform. Gaza today is a reality because we did not make these changes in the last several decades, never making sure Palestinian mothers did not have to raise kids with a tiny fraction of the wealth/resources of the children on the other side of the walls. That would have required heavy investments and more parenting readiness / delay for both sides, thus smaller or more ecocentric families, and thus much less human and nonhuman suffering and death long run.

Let’s not make the mistakes over and over, and benefit a few at cost to many.

This change reorients us from illegitimate systems of top-down coercion (which we and those at Fuller inevitably benefit from at deadly cost to others) rather than bottom-up, inclusive and obligation-conditional systems of political empowerment based on the first human right – an ecosocial fair start in life.

TAKE ACTION: Urge CEO Laurie Hays to elevate fairness at the most fundamental level, and always cover how the act of children entering the world impacts the stories we tell.

Also, go on the offense. Esther Afolaranmi and many others are leading a counterattack on inequity at the UN now (and the ICC next year) and many wise voices are finding ways to back it.

May 28, 2024
The Climate Crisis Is a Chance to Fix Democracy at the Most Basic Level. Ask Those Around You This Question.
Ask anyone claiming to do good in their work to account this variable: How children being born into the world and raised impacts the claims they make.

You will find that:
- If they claimed to help children, they will have omitted the fact that more children were born into conditions that violated what they considered to be the standard of care than their after-the fact policies would have saved. You will also find they benefited, at deadly cost to others, from omitting that fact.
- If they claimed to help animals or the environment, they will have omitted the fact that the family policies they ignored meant greater harm to animals and the environment than their after-the fact policies would have saved. You will also find they benefited, at deadly cost to others, from omitting that fact.
- If they claimed to further human rights and democracy, or the racial and other forms of equity on which those ideals derive, they will have omitted the fact that the horrific child welfare standards they accepted would have reversed the progress claimed, using simple measures like representative ratios, than their after-the fact-policies would have saved. You will also find they benefited, at deadly cost to oethers, from omitting that fact.
Would those being protected have wanted to the full story to be told?

Many at Fair Start, in former work, made the same omissions, omissions that resulted in the death of many, omissions that hid the reparations liabilities of a relatively small group of wealthy and mostly white families. Many came from the animal rights movement, where the contrast between what was claimed, and the reality, is the greatest in terms of numbers of animals impacted and way concepts like animal law have been perverted by many wealthy funders who backed things like vegan food investments because they benefiited from them, whike choosing family systems that on balanve harmed animals and children.

They and many others – through their omissions – hid an error made by world leaders between 1948 and 1968, an error that some exploited. to favor wealthy white elites, and create the disparity we see today. You can see the error if you examine a very reliable summary of legal baselines, something that determines what our fundamental obligations are and the costs and benefits associated with them.

Note that there is no specification of a concrete ecological baseline that would have prevented the climate crisis, or an equity standard that would have avoided those least responsible for the crisis absorbing most of its deadly costs. That is a very material omission, one that hides the primary obligations – based on equity – we owe would-be parents.

Freedom, or self-determination, by definition first flows from the restoration of nature (a baseline defined by the relative absence of human influence) achieved via delayed parenting, which is entitled through birth and developmental equity funding pegged inverse to wealth. This is owed as the first and overriding human right, and it allows each to be relatively free – from the ecological and social influence of others – and thus capable of constituting a system of legitimate governance. Ignoring this fact created the state of affairs we see today, and the inevitable death of millions. One of the leading political philosophers in the nation has backed this truth.

The omissions make the baselines in the summary static, inverted relative to the environment humans need, and dangerously abstract. Legal theorists generally debate whether something is law or the supreme authority/obligation, based on whether it derives from 1) social sources and processes, 2) particular values, and/or 3) values specific to law (or what many call the rule of law). All of these are evidently problematic without accounting for how children enter the world and are raised. This assessment should be unique to issues of birth equity because it alone requires dealing with the creation of legal relations – generally occurring at birth.

And this is clear: That omission benefitted mostly wealthy white families at deadly cost to countless children of color. We constitute ourselves as free persons by changing the way we speak, and through that how we see the world.

Here is the fix, and start by demanding those claiming to do good in the world not make deadly omissions.
April 26, 2024
Why Add Fair Start to Your Work? Why Tell the Truth That the Good We Claimed to Do Has Been Undone Because We Ignored Children’s Rights as They Entered the World?

Free persons will make their obligation to follow the laws of their nation contingent on a universal system of empowerment that tends to unite our values. But the chance to do so – and save millions of lives – is not something we ever talk about. Below are two moves you can make to change that.

We formed Fair Start because many of our members, in prior public statements about our work and successes, omitted facts that would have revealed that our claims were inaccurate, with the progress being undone by other factors. These were factors from which we were fundamentally benefiting at deadly cost to others, and our omissions hid life-saving entitlements. I personally omitted these facts – enriching myself, and other white families, at deadly cost to many black children.

Many others are doing the same.

Omitting positionality, and its costs for others

These omissions hid the full impact of our positionality, climatologically and otherwise, in contradiction of the values we all live (like evading deadly heat waves, being counted as an influential equal in politics, wanting at least the choice to have children in safe conditions, etc.) – including the value of self-determination. They also delayed and minimized climate reparations, skewing the baseline used to determine them. At base, the omissions hid that we were benefiting from coercive and obligatory legal systems the protected current entitlements without paying the correlative costs: Ensuring, at birth, children’s rights to political equity.

These omissions hid an obvious error in our thinking about what it means to be free, for nations to be sovereign and legitimate, and the role that laws around the world governing families play in this. The error combined with the climate crisis will mean the death of millions, many of whom could be saved if we admit and reverse the mistake.

Freedom or autonomy to do what you want always follows and flows from the freedom or autonomy of being physically included as an equal in your democracy. Simply as a matter of logic, who we should be comes first, and it derives – and should derive – from our creation and development, relative to others and our environment. Adults with human rights – our first and inescapable obligations to others – would first have had rights as children, rights which would have also defined the reproductive rights that should have guide our creation, so that we are not born into conditions and with power relations that functionally disabled the rights. This is not altruism, but a commitment to being truly free by first limiting who has influence over you, and the amount of influence they have, through family reforms that ensure children enter the world and are raised in conditions consistent with their joining communities of free persons.

Those who accumulated wealth because of a misplaced sense of freedom – freedom from environmental regulations, from being a responsible parent, from the requirement to not take what you did not earn – were just harming others, benefiting by placing the true costs on others. They were acting in a way that determined the lives of others using birth positionality and ecological impacts, not in a free, or relatively self-determining, way. They owe those costs to the future children they harmed.

Equity, or a share of control, as the first move towards freedom

Fair Start means children being born and raised with real equity – where each person eventually can offset the influence of others in a measurable way, and control through rulemaking who has influence or power over them. The first entitlements in any political system belong to would-be parents, not government or the wealthy. They belong to those plan families around child equity using seven concrete metrics based on values we all live day to day. The rules of creation are unique because the values become inextricable in the act, including the value of subjective choice.

The entitlements – structured around antiracism and decolonization – enable parents delaying having kids until they are truly ready, as well as having and raising those kids at a time, in a place, and with resources where those children can truly self-determine and thus legitimate the nations they form. As such we all have more of a right and responsibility to enforce those primary entitlements than the government, or any group, has to deny them.

Obligation to follow the law is conditional on being empowered through birth and developmental positionality. Dare anyone to logically explain to you how we get to a fair system with an unfair start – without the equity of an equal and influential role in making the fundamental rules that limit the influence we have over each other. We get to true reproductive autonomy – in the fullest sense where women who can terminate pregnancies don’t later die in anthropogenic heat waves – via birth equity for future children, without which autonomy becomes impossible.

Starting in 2004 I helped raise millions for animal charities by claiming to use the U.S. legal system to save the lives of animals. The statements I made carried deadly omissions, making them inaccurate. The focus on low impact micro victories hid that progress was being undone – and in deadly ways – on a macro level that was taking infinitely more animals than I was saving. Often we siloed off the issue of nonhuman rights because it was easier to raise money, avoid complexity, and evade additional controversy. Often we avoided the issue of birth equity because leaders did not want to examine their own children’s unearned privileges, or because they had quietly given up on their professed causes while retaining their positions and salaries. The combined impact of those silos, across the spectrum of public interest work, led us to the word in which we live today.

In truth that legal system – like almost all around the world – offered no real protection to nonhumans or the future children that will determine animals’ lives, because it did not financially entitle would-be parents to plan well, in an equitable way that will not harm both the children and the nonhumans. The system, like many others, was on balance – at a macro level – eradicating animals and exacerbating the climate crisis for the most vulnerable humans in what is accurately described as racist ecocide. Through my omissions I hid the error described above and the claims many have to reparations.

This, along with the withdrawal of litigation meant to begin to reverse the error described above, helped many wealthy funders backing those and other organizations evade or reduce liability for the climate crisis. I hid how the legal system was undermining its own legitimacy – acting like a one-sided social contract, robbing future children of their rights to minimum levels of welfare, equality of opportunity, and safe and natural environment, and an equal and influential voice in governance while obligating them to follow laws that protected property rights, for example.

The deadly costs of what is not said

I benefited from hiding the true nature of what I was doing: Fundamentally placing deadly costs on children that undid what I was claiming to do for animals, both socially and ecologically, children like Anthony Avalos who was tortured to death by his caregivers, and Mbabazi Judith, who died in eastern Uganda of the malaria the climate crisis is making more deadly. The system from which I benefitted systematically disenfranchised and treated them as economic inputs – as means, rather than as empowered ends comprising democracies.

Theirs and millions of children’s deaths derived – fundamentally – from a system that benefits me and others by protecting current entitlements, allowing us to determine the lives of others, rather than ensuring the primary parental entitlements that help constitute free nations. It could have been any of us that died in this way, and justice starts with being empathetic enough to avoid these situations by exploiting others as means as they enter the world. Equity does not conflict with autonomy if we ensure it precedes it between birth and emancipation, but the human brain struggles with time frames this large, and many have taken advantage of this fact.

Take Action:

Some are beginning to fix this deadly problem with two simple moves: 1) Making the same admission we make here and urging others to do likewise, moving towards the truth and the language of dynamic and conditional political obligation. Find specific and public statements they have made, and engage them.

Then 2) urge them to begin modeling the changes above, including giving equitable, family planning entitlements as climate reparations, and as our primary obligation even before taxes, to ensure governance and obligation actually flow from the governed. Engage the adult children and employees of those who should be modeling this change the most, and understand what’s at stake.

Freedom, or self-determination, by definition first flows from the restoration of nature (a baseline defined by the relative absence of human influence) achieved via delayed parenting, which is entitled through birth and developmental equity funding pegged inverse to wealth. This is owed as the first and overriding human right, and it allows each to be relatively free at the most fundamental level from the ecological and social influence of others – and thus capable of constituting a system of legitimate governance.

This process does not need violence because unlike our current system it is politically inclusive, or constitutive. All rules should be fair, and that which determines our creation is the first rule. That rule contains an inescapable logic: That if government truly derives from the governed, young women would have justification to obtain funds for life-saving equitable family planning entitlements – to give all kids a fair start in life – and actually constitute legitimate nations and become a “we,” more than the state would have to use violence to keep that wealth where it is.

For example, here we would want a United States Senator to alter and complete legislation for “baby bonds.” In reality, all of his authority is premised on the change because without it he’s not really representing democratically empowered citizens. The same could be said of courts’ authority to judge the legality of protests to constitute a better future. To ignore these limits is to focus on the symbolic, and not the real. The United Nations could easily (and really should) say so and make the first move in taking human rights seriously. There is no inclusive “we” from which to coercively assign property or other rights without this primary process.

This is social change through role modeling. It can actually help evade acts of mass violence – long run – from the many who feel disempowered. It can do so by revealing those who truly benefitted from the political process, and how to reverse it peacefully.

All of this is not a matter of academics or research. It’s just a factual history and a action commitment to not being obligated to follow the laws of nations that do not empower all members in an equitable and measurable way.

Join the Fair Start Tell the Truth and Act Campaign with the two moves above and bend the arc of our species towards a better future.

April 23, 2024
The Mother of Animal Law on Fair Start as the Core of Protecting Animals

Joyce Tischler is rightly regarded by many as key to the flourishing of modern animal law as an area of study, practice, and discipline.

She has this to say about Fair Start, and the idea of getting ahead of the threats animals face by changing our basic family systems:

“I have seen the projection that there will be approximately 9.8 billion human beings on Earth in 2050, followed by the question: how will we feed all of those people? That’s a simplistic question. If our planet is to remain habitable, we need to ask different questions, and develop family planning that limits or reduces the number of humans, in a thoughtful and compassionate way. Fair Start is asking the right questions and developing innovative answers.”

February 25, 2024
Take Action: The Fundamental Driver of the Climate Catastrophe – the “I” word – Few Will Discuss. Have the Discussion.
A mistake in mid-20th century environmental policymaking allowed extreme wealth to be made at deadly cost to others, and according to a growing body of peer-reviewed research, in violation of the most fundamental human right. As the climate worsens we can move that extreme wealth into reparations and save lives or let many, who did not caused the crisis, die. No legitimate nation will choose the latter.
- In the wake of the horrors of World War II the United Nations limited state sovereignty with human rights obligations that protect inherent rights to self-determination for each person.
- Self-determination or freedom, among equals, begins by definition with birth and development conditions that empower each person with a role in making the law and thus protecting the fundamental capacity for each to choose who has influence or power over them. That includes climatological influence by fossil fuel companies. That is the value of birth equity – being included with an equal and influential share of control and thus freedom from and with others. We are empowered by a first principle that empowers all. By almost every theory of legitimacy, we are obligated to follow the law, as opposed to the rules of religion for example, because we are supposed to be included in the processes that create the law, offsetting each other’s voice equally as we grow because we are politically equal. That is why the law is allowed to be dominant and we are obligated to follow it. This legal equity is not meant to be abstract, but reflected in how – because we were emancipated by our childhoods – we interact with each other every day and the specific sense of empowerment and freedom we should feel.
- But rather than meet this standard and the handful of concrete benchmarks that measure it – like investing heavily in young women inverse to their wealth, as well as ensuring the human right to a natural (or nonhuman/self-determining) environment – between 1948 and 1968 world leaders opted for less expensive interventions that protected existing concentrations of wealth. They also chose legal systems that evaded inclusion and participation, instead using violence and other forms of coercion. They hid the crucial importance of birth positionality and equity behind parental (which often meant patriarchal) autonomy, religion, and the state sovereignty that should have been contingent upon it. The family planning system they used wasn’t even sustainable of its own values for more than a handful of generations, with many would-be parents today feeling their choices limited (climatologically, for example) by the choices of those who came before. That growth, enabled by a lack of obligation to ensure children their rights, alone caused a significant amount of deadly climate emissions.
- These men made fundamental decisions, in international agreements, about costs, benefits and valuation without meaningfully including those who would be affected – which would have been the first logical move. To be clear: This meant legally enforceable entitlements, like the being born with a million-dollar trust fund while other children died in infancy from lack of resources, were premised on a standard for legitimacy the nations responsible never had to meet. If there is meritocracy today, it is because some use birth positionality to exclude others, and on their own define merit with arbitrary criteria like gross domestic product, that have now created an ecological crisis killing millions.
- This mistake fundamentally drives – on many levels – the climate crisis today, in terms of emissions, how we experience their impacts, how our legal systems are able to respond to the crisis, etc.
- The most just and effective response to the crisis is to finally meet the legitimacy standard, and move wealth made at deadly cost to others into family planning and birth equity reparations. Until we do this, some benefit at deadly cost to others, most of whom had little role in creating the crisis. No form of justice should tolerate that, and it’s unclear how we are obligated to follow the laws of such a system.
- Most crucially, the extreme wealth that could otherwise save lives in the form of family planning reparations is amassed, held and often backing the industries causing the crisis, despite this illegitimacy.
- Many who benefited from this mistake and amassed significant wealth and power will go far to avoid this discussion and reduce their climate liability, using their money to offer decoy alternatives and fake forms of social justice, create noise, and fearmonger around the idea that equity is a threat to economic growth, or autonomy (when it actually must precede autonomy, as is implied by the equal “we” premise we find in all constitutions). They will ignore the necessary first premise, that of consensual collective action, missing from almost all population ethics of the past, the ethics that enabled the crisis. Remember that their influence, including the valuation used to decide who is influential, was derived from a coercive system of entitlements that never sufficiently included others in the process to obtain the legitimacy those in power pretended it had. Many of those not included will suffer and die in heat waves as a result.
- We can force the illegitimacy discussion by asking one question, for ourselves and others: What are we doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and resources, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work we otherwise do? Legitimacy, or including others, is fundamental. This is not like other work. We are all obligated to it because it comes first: It’s about who we should be in terms of our most fundamental, or dominant, relations. To the extent we personally are not doing this work, we remain part of unjust systems of benefit because the first move in governance – choosing who has power over us – should derive from the people, not the government.
- In the world today there is a robust system of investing in young women. One thing we can all do is help move that system quickly towards climate and ecological restoration by urging the United Nations to treat birth equity – defined above – as the first and overriding human right, to use that as the baseline for climate justice and liability, and escalate reparative payments as planning entitlements.
- Any lesser standard robs those harmed of what justice entitles them, and hides the primacy of their right/obligation to physically constitute just nations and legitimate power relations – a right that logically comes before any justification of the state to use violence to protect extreme wealth made at deadly cost to others.
- But we cannot wait for the same governments who enabled the crisis, and other concentrations of wealth and power who benefit from illegitimacy and have conflicts of interest, to act. Many millions of lives are at stake. Also, because the first move in governance should derive from the people, not the government, we should act first.
- Some are already paying these reparations and can role model their behavior and influence others to do the same. One method of starting this conversation involves finding instances in where those you want to give have used misleading language, like the word “sustainable,” to mask a system from which they benefitted at deadly cost to others. Show them the facts, the primacy of children’s rights, and the horror stories that come from ignoring them – the horrific child abuse and suffering of animals that comes from growth and lack of equity planning, the brutal weight of being born to work while others thrive, how heat actually kills someone, how little control many actually have over their futures – of what is actually going on. As an attorney/employee I had to omit these facts from claims I made about the impact of my work, even though it made the claims inaccurate. Seeing my own specific role in harming others through something as fundamental as language, and my use of it to perpetuate lies about the legal system I was using and the world around me spurred me to act.
- Relate these things to the basic values they will have pursued throughout their lives, e.g., seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions, etc. Urge them to see their role in a system robbing others of these things and to change course in the ways they can.
- Fair Start is urging two leading California institutions, Stanford University and the California Attorney General, to change in just this way.
- There are dozens of other actions you can take.
January 28, 2024
The False Premise We Can See All Around Us, and the Deadly #ImpactFraud it Allows

A phrase like “false premise” sounds like philosophy talk, and hardly relevant to our day to day life. But all it really means is that someone is making an argument, or doing something, which they would justify by referring to something that is not true.

The premise we all live under is that we are obligated do certain things, like follow the law because we are included in legitimate systems of governance that empower each of us. The premise is that there is a legitimate/obligatory “we” (one that creates oughtness) from which we all think and act.

Right now the climate crisis is harming women and infants, mostly women and infants of color who are least responsible for the crisis. Most governments are making that situation worse by urging women to have more children to ensure economic growth, and nonprofits – funded by wealthy families – are making the situation worse by growthwashing and ensuring #ImpactFraud. As has been the case in our history, wealthy power is getting ahead of ideals – like animal law – and redefining them for its purpose. The difference today? Millions of lives are at risk.

It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” from which to live our lives until we change these facts because without a change we start by exploiting and thereby harming, rather than empowering in a way that is measurable with clear benchmarks, others. It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” if we start with zero actual protections for infants and animals, and zero actual protections is the case in our legal system today, almost universally.

Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume. They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because of an obscure policy mistake by the United Nations between 1948 and 1968.

Fact: The contributions of those who ignore their false premise, like many academics working on population ethics, began with them being born into a coercive legal system of entitlements from which they benefitted at deadly cost to others. That system, the dominant system controlling our actions because it alone is meant to be inclusive and reflective of its subjects, never was because of the falsity described here.

Actual inclusion and empowerment is what creates value and choices in the world. Growth, without minimum levels for those born with nothing, only benefits those who want cheap labor, lots of consumer demand, and a bigger tax base. There is no obligation without including those subject to the obligation, equitably, in the process. No reasonable person would start with that “ought” because constitutions do not start with the exploitation of their constituents, and the loss3 of self-determination. You can see this all around you. How much do you trust those with whom you share the world? And could that have been different had there been different family planning policies in place to give kids what they actually needed – the beginning of justice, where common good is aligned?

Instead governments could reverse this harm with one simple change at the United Nations – using child-rights as their basis for legitimacy, and funding birth equity level family planning entitlements as the priority climate reparations so that women have children at a time, place, and with resources that ensure those children thrive. A legitimate remise, an obligatory we, would start with minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed through birth and development conditions that ensure a role in making the law and and protecting the capacity for each to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over them, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions, etc. Consumers do not need to be emancipated in this way. Citizens do.

There are easy ways to ensure this. And all start by moving wealth made at cost to future generations and the nonhuman world, under noninclusive cost/benefit baselines that violated human rights, into family planning reparations. Without the change we benefit at deadly cost to others – skipping over the first thing we ought to do and who we ought to be. That is not a “we.” All rules should be fair, and that which determines our creation is the first rule. That rule contains an inescapable logic: That if government truly derives from the governed, young women would have justification to obtain funds for life-saving equitable family planning entitlements – to give all kids a fair start in life – and actually constitute legitimate nations and become a “we,” more than the state would have to use violence to keep that wealth where it is. The United Nations could easily (and really should) say so and make the first move in taking human rights seriously. There is no inclusive “we” from which to coercively assign property or other rights without this primary process.

And what this means is that processes that would make us a “we” – like an AI managed system of social credit designed around prioritizing resource distribution for birth equity – override those that do not. That process would have more justification for leaning on holdouts than the government, which should become a function of this process, would have to block it. We might begin this process in the animal law/rights and children’s rights movements, where the false premise has had done the most harm and contradicted the things we said we value. Our generations can’t get the benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to target us for strict liability reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them.

What is an example of the #ImpactFraud mentioned above? Many animal or child welfare organizations claiming to do good start from a fundamental policy position with zero actual protections for infants and animals (the false premise), and in a way that undoes the values they claim to further. I was paid to omit the fundamental policies that were undoing the claims I made as an animal lawyer – and by those who wanted to take advantage of growth. I have lived the lies of people and institutions reacting to climate reparations liability by trying to hide that liability, deny their role, reduce the standard, etc.

An alternative are child and animal welfare organizations that engage in direct action and bypass illusory legal systems when needed. They are more reflective of the ideals of law, gearing their behavior bottom up, around the most vulnerable, which demonstrates the empathy required for a true legal system.

This is not about population, but about power and the first rule that limits it in order to free us.

TAKE ACTION: Challenge those you interact with if they use the false premise, and back disclosure requirements about the impacts of child welfare policy on the world, and the change to child rights-based legitimacy. Target #ImpactScammers to save lives.

January 20, 2024
Don’t Get Scammed. Some Nonprofits Are Undoing Their Own Work by Quietly Putting Their Funders’ Wealth Over Their Mission.

Ask any nonprofit:

What are you doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work you discuss?

Does the entity you are asking have any minimum protections for children and animals, when you look at their actual approach to family planning policy? Will they admit that their failure to ensure such minimums through a correct system of entitlements, historically, is now killing millions of those least responsible for the climate catastrophe?

In asking these question you are looking for the #Impactscam: A growing body of peer-reviewed research had shown the basis of deadly climate greenwashing – which is killing millions – originates with child welfare policies that illegitimate political systems because they ensure no minimum threshold of self-determination or freedom. These policies literally set inequitable standards killing millions of those least responsible for the crisis. And those backing them are choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others, when there are clear alternatives – like moving wealth through externalizing deadly costs into the hands of young women able to save many lives.

These policies illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to violently target us for reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them. At the very least young women demanding birth equity reparations would have greater right to use coercion to protect their children than the state would have to defend existing property rights that harm their children. That said, nonviolence is more effective in achieving justice

Instead of changing the policies many organizations are hiding them – aware that they face liability for greenwashing, where the growth they embraced historically did more harm to their causes than their efforts did good. Many of them are going out of their way to evade liability, and thereby – at least inadvertently – reduce the reparations victims would be awarded.

The most just and effective solution? There are legal actions pending before the United Nations and other agencies urging more inclusive legitimacy. Self-determination derives by definition from conditions of development that ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over us – to be free. According to a growing body of research, there would be no legitimate political entity to assign wealth or incentives that precedes this obligation. Who we should be, the “ought” of Children’s Rights and the hard metrics of being a legal person as opposed to an economic person, logically always comes first – before what we should do, and the allocation of other entitlements.

But there are ways to move towards fulfilling this obligation, upstream, and we work downstream on more traditional projects.

Take Action: Work with the Fair Start movement to factcheck claims by nonprofits. Read more here.

January 15, 2024
How the New York Times Helped Create Trump

Forget the easy categories of the New York Times being liberal or conservative.

Look at how the New York Times has for around the last decade, covered in their reporting and the opinions they chose to promote, family policy both in the United States and abroad.

Their reporting on family planning policy – what it was and what it should be – almost uniformly falls into the left side of this divide in the image below, rather than the right. They routinely backed Trump’s family policy – one based on economic growth rather that birth and developmental equity one that undercuts human rights and democracy based on a handful of clear metrics. They backed systems that fundamentally created consumers and workers for shopping malls, not influential citizens for town halls.

They did so even though the human rights regime requires policies on the right, below.

Extreme wealth like that of the Trump family accumulated after 1948 – when the international human rights regime was solidified – was made at deadly cost to the world’s most vulnerable because world leaders evaded using the first human rights, children’s rights connected to a healthy and natural environment, as the fundamental standard for political legitimacy and cost/benefit analysis. Instead, under pressure from elites, they used an unsustainable system of growth that exploited children’s birth positionality (especially their nationality), one now likely to kill hundreds of millions of those least responsible for the crisis.

The New York Times routinely promotes that Trumpian growth policy – family policy based on quantity over quality. They did so to evade wealth transfers children’s rights entitle, to privilege their own children while creating a worker class that could absorb emissions and other costs, to lock in top down and racist systems of coercive power over bottom up justice, and to benefit from unsustainable and now deadly growth-based investments. They benefitted from the illusion of representative government that was in fact becoming just centralized coercive power, in order to build the wealth and control the Trump family is now abusing, without paying the actual costs of its equity, and in the process threatening global security. This is not about population as much as power relations, and not about growth as much as inequity, understood as an equal and influential role in determining the rules – formal and informal – one has to live under.

This now means they – the disenfranchised – will suffer the brunt of a crisis for which they were least responsible, including violations of their right to have even one child in healthy and safe conditions. And because of basic vote dilution, voter suppression, and other factors, they will be unable to use democratic processes to protect themselves, and may rationally choose other measures. And in the face of all of this, many governments driven by industry are paying women to have more children with no easy safeguards like “survive and thrive” baby bonds in place, while wealthy families and foundations reliant on growth fund charities engaged in distractivism.

The idea that there is such a thing as legitimate governance that does not start with children’s rights is called the #childscam: A move by a handful of wealthy white men in 1968 to elevate their children over others by ensuring to down systems of power without bottom up justice. They used the institutions of governance to assign themselves and others property rights without legitimating those institutions. They got the benefit without covering the costs.

The New York Times has never seriously covered the simple fact that all children deserve a fair start in life, understood as the capacity to control the influence others have over them.

January 10, 2024