To avoid greenwashing scams and see the truth about what is impacting your and your family’s future you can ask one simple question of any person or group claiming to do good:
What have you been doing to deal with the basic connection between children being born, and things like child welfare, the climate crisis, animal rights, or anything else you might claim to care about?
This one question helps us spot the #famscam. It’s a scam run by nonprofits, advertising-driven media and big businesses – making it seem like we are reducing or refining consumption, and reducing climate emissions, through abstract top-down reforms, while quietly, bottom-up increasing the number of consumers to maintain profits margins. Animal “rights” organizations that do nothing about animal-killing growth, while making money on it by partnering with vegan food companies who rely on that growth, is a great example of the scam.
That process, rather than investing more in children, degrades the natural, nonhuman world you and your children need to thrive, creates vast inequality, and dilutes your voice in town halls that make the rules under which you live.
There are essentially two answers to this question:
This moved wealth from women and children into the hands of relatively small group of men, and hid the way just family policies can override political processes and the entitlements they try to assign to the wealthiest and most powerful.
Who has more at stake in the act of creating a child – the adults or the kid? If we really think about it, children do. Adults can and do walk away from the children they create all the time. Children cannot walk away from their lives. So fundamental justice begins from the bottom, like democracy, with child-centric policies that include climate reforms, as described in this Newsweek piece. Prior political theories missed this, and did not account for our birth and development as the most basic power relations and obligations, because they treated power as flowing top down, not truly deriving from people and not about real relations to the extent they ignored ensuring the creation of persons in conditions – and with relations – consistent with minimums like the Children’s Rights Convention.
Not making this change and ending what we might call the #famscam means those least responsible for the crisis – including future generations – will be the most harmed. There is no greater injustice.
And because everything we do originates from the obligations to those around us, a process that is dynamic as persons enter and leave the world, we all have a choice to orient our lives from a relatively just, or child-centric, or unjust fundamental position – and to take direct action to liberate ourselves and others accordingly – as described in the Newsweek piece above.
Freedom begins with human rights and democracy, or the limiting of subjective human influence with objective norms. But because of our failure to orient family policies more around what children need than what parents want, this crucial limiting never occurred.
If you support a child welfare organization: Does it urge communities and parents to ensure minimum levels of welfare for kids, before they are born, in order to avoid less effective interventions later in life?
If you support an environmental or animal protection organization: Does it promote sustainable families, by far the most effective way to ensure a healthy environment, biodiversity, and less animal suffering?
If you support social justice organizations working on racial, economic, gender, or other forms of equality: Do they promote family planning policies that a) level the playing field for all kids so that they truly have equal opportunities In life, and b) advance gender equity by eliminating all forms of pronatalism, or pushing people to have kids?
If you support organizations promoting human rights and democracy: Do they promote family planning policies that will ensure each person has an effective voice in their political systems and is not lost in the crowd?
The comment – combined with an assessment of her policies more generally – shows that Boebert does not orient from a sufficiently just and reasonable position, and thus falls outside of the realm of reasonability necessary to be part of a social contract that is the basis of American freedom.
Similarly, nothing in her policies suggests she would ensure minimum levels of social development for each child born. No reasonable person would submit to a democracy where other citizens are not developed to participate in that democracy – to join others as equals in a town hall debate to control the rules under which they should live. They certainly would not submit to millions of others raised with no such levels. Is it hard to define welfare and social development for all of this? The Children’s Convention did the defining, decades ago.
In other words, Boebert’s not constituting a just and free society because she is ignoring the necessary development of its members. She believes it’s ok for peopleyou do not trust to have power over you, or she rejects the idea that governance and obligation to follow laws derives from the people.
Free people will condition their obligation to follow the law and respect property rights on this change, and on being democratically empowered using a simple inversion test, because only these changes ensure they will not be impacted by others – through even subtle things like the climate crisis and bad parenting – against their will. The obligation to follow the law stems from systems being fair and free, and systems start with family policy.
Boebert is preconstitutional, promoting an fantasy world of freedom that ignores actual power relations, and their creation or constituting of their relations.
Take action: Urge Boebert here to adopt Fair Start modeling in her policies to correct all of this, and to be reasonable in a way that enables democracy, and the freedom it allows.
Fact: The New York Times spent more time reporting on falling fertility rates as a threat to economic growth over the past several years than covering either the beneficial impact of that fall on the climate crisis, or on peer-reviewed research that showed the change in fertility rates could catalyze fundamental changes in United Nations’ policy that could would have the greatest long-run impact on child welfare, inequity, and climate/biodiversity restoration.
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.Find and engage Kahn in person to #TellThe Truth and pay what he owes. Freedom entails converting the family norms that created today’s crowding shopping malls into policies that instead build democracy, converting concentrations of wealth and power into universal family planning entitlements that ensure all children have what they need to comprise town halls of self-determining citizens.
Many nonprofits raised billions of dollars over the last several decades claiming to have protected various ecosystems, saved animals from factory farms, hauled children out of dangerous conditions, or improved human rights and democracy.
Businesses sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising their green, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and other claims.
Fair Start reforms work by taking the wealth made through unsustainable growth – which externalized costs on the most vulnerable – and using that wealth to invest in equitable family planning that creates smaller, more equitable and biodiverse communities where each person is empowered with an effective voice in their democracy.
None of those claims told the whole story, and they almost always omitted a crucial fact.
Those claims hid the fact that those making the claim maintained policies simultaneously increasing demand in a way that was undoing the claims, and ensuring ongoing and unsustainable population growth. That growth – the whole time – was reversing the beneficial impacts underlying the claims being made, growth that was enriching leadership at the entities described above, and exacerbating the climate crisis – reversing roughly 3/4ths of the climate emissions reductions the world was attempting.
The climate crisis will cause extreme suffering and death to the vulnerable many nonprofits and others claimed to be protecting.
The claims almost always left out the fact that the claimants’ family and population growth policies were putting more animals in factory farms and other horrible places, ensuring more children were born and raised in conditions of suffering and deprivation, and ensuring each person had less of an effective voice in their political systems – the systems that might have otherwise prevented the crisis. The claims at the same time hid the need for fundamental family reforms that, through family planning incentives/entitlements, could have saved millions of lives.
These claims all hid the impacts of what one Nobel laureate called a pyramid scheme of unsustainable but profitable overpopulation in rich, industrialized and high climate emissions nations, growth all of these entities knew was simultaneously undoing the majority of climate change and other environmental protection efforts, and ensuring dangerous and destabilizing vast inequity between rich and poor. The claims hid the fact that the entities described above – or really their senior leadership – chose self-serving family policies that were undoing the claims by increasing demand for ecocidal, but profitable, production and pollution.
And the wave of deadly climate emissions that flowed directly from the population growth and expanding inequity these claims routinely omitted and covered up will now help ensure the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
Why cover up these growth-based or fundamental impacts? The family reforms that would prevent them, when correctly researched and assessed, ensure all children a fair start in life by overriding current property rights to ensure that all children get enough of what they need in order to physically compromise legitimate democracies cable of actually and fairly assigning property rights. Fair starts come first.
If justice and systems of justice (that obligate us) start with fairness to all, how do we get there without fair starts in life for all kids? We do not. Being free means being obligated only to follow laws which begin by empowering each person, to be relatively self-determining, in a measurable way.
These lies disempower us at the most fundamental level.
That growth has also been converting the freedom of functional democracies comprised of citizens who were born and raised with what the Children’s Rights Convention promises them into a system of overcrowded shopping malls filled with people born and raised in conditions that fell well below the Convention standards and who are all the while destroying their own ecosystems.
I’ve sat with uber-wealthy funders who were making money on growth through things like their plant-based investments, growth which was doing more harm to animals than the nonprofits, media and businesses they funded were doing good through their low-impact campaigns, and these funders simply decided to continue what they were doing. I’ve sat with foundation managers given the position by their wealthy parents who refuse to fund campaigns that simply urge conversations about birth equity. I’ve seen tenured professors at leading law schools choose to promote funding for family models that undercut everything they proclaimed to value because those models gave their kids – their rich, white kids – underserved head starts and massive privileges in life.
We can reverse this process by moving the wealth that was made at cost to others into programs like the Seeds for the Future campaign, a process of reforesting the land, and creating savings accounts for kids in a way that pays them back for what we did, and sets a norm of smaller and more equitable families as the first human right and obligation.
We can also target those, like Lee Raymond, as well as his son John T. Raymond, who both converted our freedom – in nature and functional town halls – into their wealth, to return the costs they foisted on others to give back the costs and, do so by all means effective.
It externalized the costs of the extreme wealth we see today, against the most fundamental baseline for true cost / benefit analysis. Many have tried to hide that baseline, because its use in assessing the climate reparations described below would mean wealthy families and nations would have to pay substantial amounts.
Climate reparations are a chance to reverse this mistake and ensure Convention compliance through climate restoration and birth-equity family planning entitlements, which pay that specific percentage wealth made – through growth and otherwise – by externalizing costs against a baseline of ecosocial child development consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention.
We cannot be inclusive without this change. We are otherwise not empathetic enough, giving kids what they need under the Convention, to constitute legitimate communities. And as such, we are never actually limiting the power others have over us. We should not be forced to live in a world impacted by children who did not get what they needed growing up just because wealthy investors want to use them as cheap labor and hungry consumers. That is oppression on all levels, and free people will target those behind this process to end the it, and to limit the power others – those with whom we share the world – have over us. They power up, bottom up.
Engage in the #WholeTruth campaign to urge leaders, nonprofits and businesses to tell the truth about their approach to families, and the impact it has and will have on whatever they claimed to do, or will do.
Call in (rather than out) those who refused to invest enough in family planning that complies with the Children’s Convention, including the climate restoration and birth equity in envisions. That refusal signifies not being sufficiently other-regarding to constitute just communities that actually empower, and thereby liberate, us all.
Test people and institutions to see whether they are fundamentally unjust and a threat to freedom: Will they sign a letter to the the Climate Conference of the Parties urging them to support fair starts in life over growth-based profits?
It’s common to see nonprofits fundraising with pictures of sad dogs, hungry children, black people being disenfranchised, people dying in crackdowns on democracy by dictators, or polar ice melts in a climate crisis that is ravaging the world.
But does giving money to groups that silo – that focus on these individualized forms of justice – really make the world a better place? Not really. Usually nonprofits ignore the intersection that binds all forms of justice together – not what we could do – but who we could be.
That is the baseline for all justice, the one fundamental thing always present in and underlying all claims: People, and people who are disproportionally a product of the conditions in which they are born and develop. We cannot separate our values, like climate restoration, from who we should be. I’ve worked in well-known national nonprofits that made millions while knowingly undoing their work by choosing unjust policies – in what they thought were unrelated areas.
Ask anyone making claims of progress in creating a better world to tell the #wholetruth by disclosing their approach to families:
What are they doing to ensure all children in the world birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, like birth equity, backed by climate/biodiversity restoration?
Are they ensuring minimum levels of welfare for all kids, and equality of opportunity?
How are they ensuring all children born will have an effective voice in their democracies?
Chances are the person or organization making the claim is quietly undoing their progress by using an outdated approach to families, one that hurts kids, deepens inequity, destroys the environment, and makes sure the voice of most people does not matter in politics.
While many environmental organizations call for ways to reduce consumption to protect the environment, inevitably they are undoing the progress by accepting and even promoting growth-based family policies that undo the progress.
What’s the solution?
The mass consumption that created the climate-crisis is baked into our political system because we are all – on the left and right of the political spectrum – accepting of family polices that create many consumers and workers for shopping malls, rather than investing more, and more equitably, in children so that they can comprise town halls – functional democracies – where they can be free.
And it’s important to frame this issue in terms of our political role, because while environmental protection is important, it only happens (as all things do) in the context of political systems – in the process of choosing democracy over economic growth.
We can change that, and one step involves targeting the executive directors of large environmental organizations to admit the harm their quiet approach to family policy has caused, and to do better.
TAKE ACTION: URGE HEAD OF SIERRA CLUB BEN JEALOUS – @BenJealous – TO ADMIT THE CLUB CHOSE FAMILY POLICIES THEIR UNDERCUT THEIR MISSION AND CLAIMS OF SUCCESS, AND WHICH – PER STUDIES LIKE THIS – EXACERBATED THE CLIMATE CRISIS.
Recent fundraising efforts by UNICEF are inaccurate. The organization is not pegging family planning policies and practices to the standards of the Children’s Rights Convention. That means children are constantly born into conditions – under the approval of the UN – that violate the Convention. Pulling them out later is not enough.
Fact: UNICEF is reading the Convention in ways that guarantee children will not actually be protected, that their very creation will degrade the social and ecological conditions they need to thrive, and that they will be exploited by the powerful due to the conditions in which they will be born and raised.
That has to change. It is the fundament of injustice, destabilizing societies by trading human rights and democracy for economic growth, and justifying violence by those who claim the world is simply not fair.
