Many nonprofits over the past decade claimed great success in saving animals or children, protecting the environment, or ensuring human rights and democracy. Instead they were quietly supporting family policies (including internal employment policies) that were undoing progress on all of those fronts – and accelerating the climate crisis.
It’s been up to nonprofit leadership to resist this, and do what is best for the entities they claim to represent. Failure to do can constitute consumer deception, and lead to litigation. And publicizing the truth of how family policy impacts our lives, and using that truth to lever wealth from the top and into future generations is the most good we can do. Litigation can make it happen.
TAKE ACTION:
If you suspect a charity you support made misleading statements contact us at Carter@FairStartMovement.org, and urge any charity you support to take part in the @WholeTruth campaign to save millions of lives from a crisis family reforms can help mitigate.
The fundamental baseline for any form of cost/benefit analysis, assuming we take human rights, democracy and relative self-determination seriously, must be inclusive political systems characterized by climate restoration and birth equity, achieved through family planning reforms that ensure all children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention.
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. That baseline halts the Ponzi scheme demography Nobel laureate Steven Chu wisely noted was the basis of much economic growth.
In the Forum’s public commitment to address the climate crisis, the company uses a particular ecological goal or baseline for its risk assessments and climate mitigation strategy that – compliance aside – is at least comparable to the goals of the Paris Climate Accord. While we focus on the Forum in this letter, to be clear, the logic applies to many entities
The Fair Start Movement was formed because these goals or baselines are premised on an error. They were developed based on the assumption that nations operate from a place of historical political legitimacy, and can themselves freely define ecological goals, including anthropocentric ones like those of the Paris Accord. That assumption is incorrect. As recent peer-reviewed research shows, nations are constituting, not constituted in the past, and they are either doing so legitimately or not depending on their family policies. Nations cannot simply declare their legitimacy. Legitimacy is a political ideal based relative self-determination that would require, again minimally, that all children enjoy the ecosocial birth and development conditions required by the Children’s Rights Convention.
Resolving this baseline error involves treating legitimacy as contingent on our ongoing fulfillment of our obligations to future generations.
In other words, to properly assess costs and benefits we have to first become groups of people capable of doing so in a way that is actually inclusive and reflective of the group constituents. This is simply the ideal of the “we,” in “We the People.” The ideal political we, meaning fundamental power relations defined by the goals of the Children’s Convention, is the primary baseline. We cannot think of, or describe, an ecological outcome that is not first contingent upon family planning outcomes, on at least five levels.
If we value human self-determination or freedom, we have to begin from an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – baseline, because that makes relative self-determination possible, freeing us from the influences of others, including the harmful impacts of even the current rise in global temperature. Humans cannot self-determine when their childhood development is defined by the pollution of others. Moreover, climate goals cannot be limited to ecological outcomes, but should include changes in family policy that maximize the resilience, equity, and democratic cooperability of future generations to thrive despite the crisis. Our creation is the intersection of our values.
In other words, if we correct the error described above, the correct goal or baseline must entail our becoming democratic and legitimate groups of free and equal people, which requires concrete and specific restorative ecological policies much more aggressive than the Paris Accord, redistributive and equalizing family planning reforms that recognize the right to nature and level the playing field for all kids, financially and ecologically. A simple litmus test, given these standards, for our being free and equal persons involves whether we first treat the capacity for each person’s self-determination as directly inverse to population growth, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. This is proof that each person is politically, and equally, empowered. Not treating growth as such calls into question the true role of citizens in their own democracy.
Moreover, because this unifying goal or baseline is primary in nature, it overrides state issued property rights and entitlements enjoyed by members of the Forum, enabling intending parents claims to wealth at the top as part of their constituting just and sustainable societies. Our becoming just and sustainable people comes first. A helpful analogy relies on what is generally called the “myth of ownership,” which requires that ownership of wealth first account for the societal costs the creation of that wealth entails. Based on our research, the costs to our being free and equal people positioned to truly consent to the influence of others are first costs we must account for.
We cannot assign property rights in ways that undercut physically constituting and democratically empowering future generations. Our being, and in this case becoming, positioned to determine costs and benefits in a way that is inclusive of the reasoned views of all, is the first baseline.
Again, we can refer to this helpful summary of the baseline problem. All of the solutions to the problem Professor Solum gives jump to what we should do rather than who we should be, and thus ignore the need to be fair people, in terms of the physical power relations determined by our creation, before we can be positioned/empowered to make fair rules/laws. Ideally we would be created/grouped to look like a functional Rawlsian constitutional convention before fundamentally assessing costs and benefits, hence our being an ideal “We the People,” is the first baseline. And for that, the minimal guidelines that would apply to family planning would be the standards we hold up for extant persons, like parental fitness, the Children’s Convention, equality of opportunity, restoration-based climate sequestration targets, biodiversity restoration targets, historic voter-representative ratios, etc. Those point us towards the UN low-variant population, something aggressive family planning incentives – funded with claims to wealth at the top of the economic pyramid – could practically help achieve.
We are writing to urge the Forum to embrace the specific restorative ecological policies described above as the part of the first and overriding human right to a Fair Start in life, and to commit some share of its wealth and resources as Fair Start planning reparations to offset the harm it has done to future generations, relative to baseline discussed above. The Forum could easily practice this change by supporting the child tax credit reforms linked above, while treating them as a fundamental human right.
This is not about liberal or conservative politics. Family planning redistributions – as primary obligations – can replace wasteful tax obligations that would simply create larger governments which do not reflect the will of the people. This is about a commitment to human freedom and equality of opportunity, enabled by policies that ensure children can develop and physically comprise communities that liberate them from the threats they face today. This is something we all should value. Correcting the baseline error described above enables such a future.
Please let us know if the Forum will commit to these changes.
Sincerely,
The Team at Fair Start Movement
TAKE ACTION: Urge Klaus Schwab, @ProfKlausSchwab, to change baselines. There is no need to respect property rights that do not flow from inclusive and reflective political systems. The baseline the Forum promotes now converts your empowerment and freedom to wealth for their members.
Gabriel Fernandez was tortured and killed by his parents because the United States treats the act of having children as more personal and private than interpersonal, and subject to obligations like emotional readiness that protect those with the most at stake – future children. That’s an obvious mistake.
But it’s not a mistake. The privacy model was developed by wealthy elites in the 20th Century who 1) did not want to invest in all children but preferred to privilege their own, and 2) knew that ensuring child welfare in family planning would limit the population growth that creates great returns on investment.
Gabriel is not alone – 5 children die at the hands of their parents in the United States each week.
THERE IS ONE FUNDAMEMTAL CAUSE – OUR FAMILY POLICIES.
TAKE ACTION: The New York Times is complicit if upholding the privacy, over parental readiness, model. Urge Jessica Grose, @JessGrose, to write about these issues and save children like Gabriel.
That consensus is the fundamental source of most animal suffering and death. This is irrefutable.
A specific example of the scam is when civil society organizations knowingly undo the progress they are claiming in fundraising and other materials with outdated growth-based family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy.
And even when shown the undoing, many groups have continued on course, opting for downstream “distractivism” projects and upstream growth policies that will continue to undo the claimed progress in their campaigns. That makes the messaging in those campaigns misleading, as on balance the work does not help animals or other categories of subjects, human or nonhuman.
Many are fighting back against that, and for true freedom. And those who benefitted from unsustainable growth policies that did nothing to level the playing field between rich and poor kids know they are in trouble, now coming up with outlandish claims and a fake “underpopulation” crisis to decoy us away from justice.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will feel obligated to follow the law, including laws that create property rights, when they are empowered.
Please consider the dozens of ways to adopt Fair Start modeling, rather than the Cairo Consensus, as the base of your work and please take part in the #thewholetruth campaign, which allows groups to publicly explain the impact of family policies on their work.
A specific example of this is when civil society groups knowingly undo claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel Laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
A specific example of this is when civil society organizations knowingly undo claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel Laureate – grow economies that benefitted a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
Right now most political systems around the world base their family policies on a lie, that the act of having children should be based on parental autonomy, what parents want, rather than child equity, or what children need. Decades ago rich world leaders created this lie in order to avoid paying their fare share to collectively invest in children – through things like planning incentives – and to ensure them what things like the Children’s Rights Convention promises. They preferred to exploit the unsustainable growth that not investing created, and the growth-based economics that created the climate crisis.
Faced with this reality, and the fact that the New York Times rose to influence upon that unsustainable growth, its lead – Joe Khan – simply wants more growth. On balance, the outlet’s reporting (much of which should be labeled as opinion) pushes women to have more kids, irrespective of the conditions in which they are born, in order to enrich people at the top of the economic pyramid who – per one Nobel Laureate – rely on growth to make money through investment.
If you wanted to do the most good in this world, and to change the arc of our future to ensure the freedom and democracy things like the Children’s Convention could create, you would target Kahn and other concentrations of influence (online or in person) to admit the truth of what they do, and support changing course. Freedom is impossible without fairness because we have no way to consent to the influence of other people, and to bring that liberty we can focus on these concentrations to pay what they owe, what they took by imposing the costs of their power on our freedom.
This is something you can do.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Joe Khan at @nycscribe, or engage him in person, to admit that he’s harming children and the environment by supporting unsustainable growth that benefits a few.
A specific example of this is when civil society organizations knowingly undoing claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
Many are fighting back against that, and for true freedom. And those who benefitted from unsustainable growth policies that did nothing to level the playing field between rich and poor kids know they are in trouble, now coming up with outlandish claims and a fake “underpopulation” crisis to decoy us away from justice.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will feel obligated to follow the law, including laws that create property rights, when they are empowered. They will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
How? He embraced anthropocentric population growth over the true liberation of animals, something only possible through rewilding and Fair Start family policies that require parental readiness, redistribution of wealth for child equity, and a default of smaller families.
Moreover, his approach has bred a generation of “distractivists” who pretend to help animals by selling vegan food products to a growing population, while even pushing for more growth, that on balance is at war with animals. They are using their wealth and power profit by imposing costs on others, disempowering the majority, and in a way that exacerbates acts of violence that are hitting innocent rather than those responsible for pushing unjust systems.
Singer committed the “constitutive fallacy,” or basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Urge Singer to embrace Fair Start reforms, or a comparably effective approach, here.
The first measure of doing good is not welfare or utility, it is consent, and whether we are constituting – physically – just and liberating societies. Singer, given his position, has the capacity to tell the truth and help change family policies in a way that could save millions of lives. Doing the most good means targeting concentrations of influence, like Singer, and using them to bend the arc of growth towards justice.
