Melinda French Gates recently said this about what the wealthy owe others:
“Great wealth does not shield you,” French Gates says. “I have an absurd amount of wealth and I’m doing my very best to give it away. … But what I want people to know is that I’m a human being and they may put a label on me, but that label doesn’t really define who I am. … By being my authentic self, I hope they can see, OK, she’s gone through struggles and hardship too, but come out the other side and so maybe I can as well.”
Fair Start, by contacting her foundations this week, is urging her to Tell the Truth.
You can message her here.
All of our not accounting, in our value and impact assessments and claims, for how for children enter the world relative to what their rights require has done more harm to our values and goals than we have done to further them. This is especially so because ignoring their birthrights both violated and degraded the ecological, social, and olitical thresholds necessary for justice and national legitimacy, and treated children of color as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk than white children, discounting their lives to enrich others through growth. This single largest driver of the crisies we see today – not paying costs of functional legal rights for the future majority, which ensures growth and demand that undoes social justice imact, an undoing which we hide through omission.
Admitting this failure as part of the process of deriving and conditioning our obligation to follow the law on understanding our self-determination in the context of others – the intergenerational freedom and justice that makes representative and consensual governance possible – is the first step towards righting this wrong and not free-riding on our birth positionality. We admit we were not accounting for children entering the world in conditions consistent with their rights and political equity, the first measures necessary for national legitimacy and the assignment of entitlements to things like wealth. This did more to hide liability than further our missions. It entailed using the same flawed value assessment and reporting model, the most basic criteria for evaluation, that caused the political and ecological crises we see today to conceal liability for them.
The solution, described below, starts with zero-baseline harm reporting that evades the subversion of rights and commercialization of freedom. Without this freedom it’s physically impossible to otherwise control who has power over you, and wealth made at costs to values – like nature – is used to further degrade them.
This step is part of preempting conflicting standards that interfere with justice, which we cannot get to without starting with intergenerational justice as we constitute future relations. A world with rich infants and dying, impoverished infants, reflects illegal exclusion and a failure to constitute legitimately. Tital liberation starts with elevating the most vulnerable, infants and the animals with whom they will share the world.
We are asking Melinda:
When you make claims of adding value and beneficial impact, how were you accounting for children entering the world relative to what their rights require and reparations for the violations of those rights?
Chances are you were not, and not accounting for it did more harm to your values than you were doing to further them because it meant you were oerating in violation of children’s birthrights to measurable political, social, and ecological thresholds. That meant your claim derived from an illegal standard that ensures equitywashing, or manufactured numbers to the hide illegal costs and damages falling on others.
TRhe standard is illegal because it removes rights from our creation.
Equitywashing comes before green or humane washing, ensuring incusive criteria to accuratey asses the latter and in ways that avoid things like a climate crisis enriching some and killing others.
There is more suffering than ever in the world today because of that standard, which evades children’s brithrights – and the need to legitimate authority and entitlements via legitimacy thresholds – to instead ensure cheap labor and consumer demand. The rich were playing both sides, funding the industry and those who jumped in to say they were opposed.
This is not population. This is not something different – a different object – from you or anyone else, at all. It’s the orientation of the collective subject-pronoun, the obligated “we,” in our language.
The Fraudulent Standard
Because of the errors described below, you were using a fraudulent and illegal assessment and reporting standard that omits how children entering the world in conditions of inequitable growth that violate fundamental human rights – degrading political equity – undoes the value and impact you claim to make. If one makes impact claims out of the context of child entry and rights, they are doing harm than good, creating this fantasy world that skews and denies reparations to those who deserve them.
This omissive standard risks millions of lives, will cost businesses trillions of dollars, and its use constitutes the fraudulent withholding of equity reparations. Using this standard makes it impossible to meet our commitments, which imply context, and the protecting of key social, ecological and political thresholds.
Much of the wealth in the world today was made at cost to, and in violation of, children’s birth and development rights, including to political equity (or equal offets relative to zero). This illegal shifting of costs and degrading of the threshold of self-determination continued well after it was clear we’ve been in overshoot of the ecological, social and political metrics/thresholds that frame those rights.
Children’s rights mean we should only bring kids into certain conditions and that if we did that, the future would be better. And when we say “should,” that uniquely overrides all else because intergenerational/existential justice, or who we should be, always comes before what we do.
Those who hold wealth did not create value. They benefited from the violation of children’s birthrights to move costs, converting democracy into something more commercial, rather than legitimating their wealth and the state authority protecting it.
Who created Trump and Musk? Use of the illegal standard described here shows liberals caring more about the free money coming from their growth-based investmemnts than values, values ike moderate temperatures, access to water and nature, participatory democracy, equal opportunity etc.
Our first hurdle is to overcome the idea that having kids is just about the freedom of the parents. It’s also about the freedom of the child and the community they form. And that second freedom is unique because all authority to govern and to own wealth first derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons, with one person/one vote or equal self-determination.
But by 1968, governments had used the standard – which omits how children entering the world change our claimed impacts – to take equity out of reproductive rights systems so that inclusion never occurred. Instead, the illegal discounting of infants’ and animals’ rights, economic growth became the standard in a shell/ponzi scheme that took one’s freedom taken out of one’s birth positional context.
They assumed rather than legitimated their authority and entitlements, and by treating reproductive rights as based on parental whim rather than children’s rightr, power relations became subjective/commercial. The fundamental criteria use to evaluate – our rules – failed to evade the climate crisis because people were effectively excluded, bu growth and inequity, from making those rules.
Justice was taken out of where the power differentials, especially in the long run, were being made the greatest. This was equity fraud, avoiding protections inherent in the overriding right to democratic equity by only applying protections after children entered the world, in band-aid fashion, rather than before.
The standard is derived from the twentieth-century subversion of racial justice movements by wealthy white families who – using the concept of separate but equal – privatized the reproductive rights regime, maintaining an illegal and arbitrary birth lottery that gutted the rule of law by removing children’s rights and political equity, where we can offset each other’s fundamental influence over the rules, and from neutral baseline like the nonhuman world. The subversion separated the one person / one vote rule from the creation, at birth, of power relations, and how one’s birth ositionality could dilute the value of one’s vote.
This was a power grab, where governments just assumed authority and entitlements without actually legitimating them through rights.
This meant zero functional protections for infants as they entered the world, and the animals they would impact. That “population” is the closest common concept to this shows how deep the subversion runs. There were two standards: An illegitimate one designed to enrich wealthy white children that assumed governmental authority and entitlements to wealth and the legitimate standard of actually including children of color that was passed over.
This gutted what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black birth equity, which benefited some children at deadly cost to others through unsustainable and inequitable growth. Operating outside of those rights, those parameters, harms others. The standard, using manufactured numbers, treats children of color as deserving exponentially fewer resources and more risk, including the violence inherent in unrepresentative government.
We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
The standard allowed public interest organizations to maintain demand for products and cheaper labor, simultaneously undoing upstream the impacts they claimed to be making downstream through decoy, symbolic or charade-like interventions that used wealth made at cost to rights and objective values, to force attention on the symptoms and not the cause. By creating a fantasy world of change being undone daily by birth inequity, philanthropists were laid the groundwork for the threats our democracies now face.
The omission of daily undoing, through inequitable growth, is the subversion.
The focus of the animal rights movement for the last several decades on food, or performative micro-interventions undone by treating animals as property in our reproductive rights and constitutional law regimes, is exemplary. The funders did not care whether they were actually, on balance, saving animals as they long as they appeared to be. This, given the number of animals involved and what was known about growth, constituted the greatest example of the “winners take all” form of corruption the world has seen to date. Funders had not chosen animals over racial jutice but rather subverted both, doing more to protect white generational wealth than accomlish stated missions.
There is no such thing as an anthrocentric animal rights activist, and macro animal liberation requires equity reparations for future families that restore nature. Without macro animal personood, at a subject level of our thinking and commuciations, micro acts of animal protection becomes a charade.
It’s not about intent, but rather than consequences of our actions, and the language – using words like “humane” for a system increasingly causing suffering – under which we acted.
The wealth derived from that subversion today via foundations and otherwise funds media, nonprofits, academics (who were never neutral because they never accounted, as a default requirement for benefitting from the system, for their birth positionality), etc. who free ride on the birth lottery and continue to make false claims to protect the wealth. But we can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis and allowed generations of illegal wealth to compound in order to evade liability for it — that’s fraud. And the constitutional language that resolves it will be accessible to all, not owned by some. Would we have to go to court to get a decision as to the overriding nature of birth equity? The court’s authority derives from it.
The subversion took the idea of freedom, or autonomy, outside of one’s equity in one’s democracy and ability to influence political outcomes. But there is a first right to representative or consensual governance through inclusion and empowerment. Government can’t make up their own authority, including to define fraud in the basic allocation of costs and benefits, and entitle wealth to whom they choose. This is not about capitalism or socialism. This is about legitimacy and illegitimacy and the obligation to derive national sovereignty from individual sovereignty.
One way to tell the story involves abortion policy
The illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave because she could not afford air conditioning. could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc.
The victim would have been taught and likely assumed that she had just been unlucky in her being born without wealth, when in fact she would have had the right to derive her obligation to the political system and condition her compliance with the law, on the state reversing that state of affairs, which derived from a very specific policy decision dating back to the 1960s. She was never free because she was never empowered, and in that situation, there is little reason to follow the rules. That is what commercialized/privatized/diluted freedom, and consumerism as social justice, and degraded democracy look like. Fundamental causation is existential, and her birth exclusion was the unjust cause of all she experienced. Any lesser account makes assumptions that hides things.
The subversion and standard enabled entities through their positionality to define and use terms like “sustainable,” green,” and “humane” around the needs of wealthy white children and their trusts, creating a fantasy world of good being undone daily by deadly inequitable growth at deadly cost to countless children of color.
But it is physically impossible to be free, as in objectively self-determining as opposed to other-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to first ensure that persons are created, developed, and emancipated in ways that equally offset their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position like nature/the nonhuman world. Legitimacy is a physical state of capacity to have consensual representative government derived from how we relate to one another.
Representative governance, and things like entitlement to wealth, derive from a legitimate legal system in which people are first obligated to one another, which is what it means in a constitution to say “we the people.” Our first obligations are to each other, in the creation at birth of the power relations between us. Ensuring our obligations to children are how we fist become politically obligated to one another, unless one gives up the idea of government by the people and consensual governance. We don’t get to maximize welfare through economic growth and massive inequality, at cost of self-determination, because that latter value is what is necessary to legitimate the former and subject it to consensual governance.
The subversion hid this fact.
If we do not agree to invest enough in children’s birth and development conditions, enough to offset their capacity to influence others relative to a neutral or zero position, then constituents are not being empowered equally, and representatives and officials do not represent us at all. Our values are operating at the object-level of our communication, where they can be undone, rather than at a subject level that reflects the creation of power relations. Animal personhood and liberation, in a macrosense, works at the subject level. That can be reversed, as discussed below, by collective family planning systems. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one.
The solution
Instead we should derive and condition governmental authority, any entitlement to wealth, and any obligation to follow the law on any constituents subject to those things being measurably empowered and towards a discreet future defined by liberating parameters. This is feasible through care modeling and collective planning to ensure readiness, delay, equity, and relocation if needed, as well as a preemptive right and obligation to move wealth to fund civil rights reforms that focus on birth equity.
This ensures a preemptive standard to avoid governments hiding their own liability for actual harms associated with the climate crisis, governments whose work is preempted by the need to first legitimize ther authority. A fair start in life for all children is the first law, and no one is above the law.
There’s a counterfactual world, a legal world in which the subversion didn’t happen, in which wealth was not made illegally at cost to children’s and others’ rights. That is measure of reparative justice owed. Things like racial justice and animal liberation align once we abandon the standard that allows us to violate – in creation – the rights of others, exploiting children and animals by bringing the latter in beneath the threshold of things we owe them.
Things like AI governance reforms around better base code that ensures no obligation to follow the law without being empowered to change it, and using crowdsourcing for the enforcement of life-saving and self-defensive equity reparations to empower can change this. For example, those negotiating the Paris Agreement on climate assumed authority and entitlements rather than actually legitimating them – a move that will kill countless innocent victims. Telling the Truth resolves this.
We can’t get to justice from injustice or obligations from others by first violating our obligations to them. Change starts with the most vulnerable, infants and animals, and their rights to be measurably free.
Telling the truth is a constitutive discourse, the only means to a just and legitimate future.
We ask these questions of anyone claiming to add value to the world:
How were you accounting for your work being undone each day by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back and condition it on ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
The illegal standard is designed to hide deadly costs and liability.
And the preemptive standard, as both a means of interpreting law and actually creating obligation to future children, requires the disclosure of that information through a truth and reconciliation process meant to ensure the full payment of damages by creating a situation where children are capable of forming self-determining communities.
Changing away from the subversion and its standard, reorienting by Telling the Truth in response to the questions above, could save millions of lives and trillions of dollars while constituting a just future through a discourse that includes all in the ongoing formation of a protective social contract. Children entering the world relative to standard of self-determination or sovereignty is the only source from which governmental sovereignty and authority can derive, including authority to assign property rights to wealth. The Children’s Rights Convention, replaces national sovereignty as the basis for international law because the latter derives from the former. Otherwise, you are using a false premise where one go from adult reproductive rights to protect autonomy, to adult human rights to protect autonomy, with children’s rights thrown in – as abandaid after the fact – rather than as a check on the creation of power relations.
If we want to be in a legitimate political system, we need to first account for our existence, our birth-based positionality, and privilege, or we cannot be truly self-determining, deriving governmental authority, entitlements to wealth, and obligation to follow the law on measurable and equitable empowerment for all as children enter the world. If we can’t fully account for our birth-based position in the social contract, we fall outside its scope of obligation – why would we be collectively obligated to those who cannot account? Tell the Truth devides the free from the unfree.
Elevating infants and animals enables authority, the rule of law, and justice. Anything else is too late.
Take Action
Fair Start, by contacting her foundations this week, is urging her to Tell the Truth.
You can message her here.
You can also call on leadership at the United Nations to justify their authority by showing how they are rights-empowering children as they enter the world, rather than exploiting them as economic inputs.
