Fact: More animals are suffering and dying because of growth, our failure to develop empathy in children, climate change and other related factors, than the ASPCA is saving with their current suite of interventions.
Urge their lead to include Fair Start reforms in their programming.
Why Fair Start?
Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, simultaneously.
We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars.
This is not a choice, but an obligation.
Every entity in the United States is and should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc. But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine in reproductive rights, child welfare and family law – was a horrific mistake killing many. Infants should not pay the price of our mistakes, and world leaders should not be able to evade facing the lies and failures that fundamentally caused the climate crisis.
Being fundamentally illegitimate, or non-inclusive, seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of short-sighted policy. As described below, the solution involves a defiance, truth and reconciliation process, akin to anti-apartheid movements, where we all admit we benefitted at cost to others based on injustice, and we turn to now honor our obligations to the victims through legal, organizational and grassroots reforms.
The Key Barrier: Deadly Omissions
However there are entities now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive and fraudulent messaging that hides their liability and the entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
As described below Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by these entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises – as these things accelerate. Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save lives.
If those Fair Start engages truly value the things (like biodiversity) they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of constitution and obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.
Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good. In many cases they will have spent more on lavish travel and events, or other incidentals, than actually furthering their mission.
Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.
Despite the interference, many have already begun to engage in this more effective form of constituting a just future – through language and action – by admitting the failure of systems to date, agreeing to change the way be plan families, and exchanging resources. This transfer of wealth made at deadly costs is also required by law.
All law must first be interpreted to assure legitimacy, or the measurable inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, so that truly representative governance is possible. In other words, the threshold or border, of empowering development, overrides the authority represented by national borders because it is needed to legitimate such law.
There are many wealthy families and other concentrations of power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis who benefitted from unsustainable reproductive rights models. These models used a false premise (that having children is more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the children born and communities they will comprise) to assume as inherent certain entitlements, and to avoid the overriding need for legitimate governance to ensure measurable empowerment of each citizen.
These families bypassed the first local question in legitimacy: How to first account for our vast generational, racial and other inequitable positionalities in reforming legal systems with objective standards, like human rights. And they seeded a thing in political systems, a capacity to harm others and determine much about their lives, that masqueraded as freedom much the way reproductive freedom devoid of equity does.
This hid the overriding nature of the upstream creation of power relations behind the downstream subject area of population, and conflated a false view of bodily autonomy, one based on inequity and a capacity to harm others, with true autonomy or measurable self-determination through positioning in one’s democracy.
The former would enable a woman to terminate her pregnancy only to die months later in a heat wave because she was born with the inherited wealth inequity that comes with being black, could not afford air conditioning, and had little influence over her political system to challenge all of that.
Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and in avant-garde movements like animal rights and liberation. But by simultaneously individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination. It treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others.
This created a fictitious baseline for cost and benefit analysis and national legitimacy in which we never first account for our own positionality, situating our autonomy with regard to the need for others to have equitable shares in democracy, and relative to key, real world markers like ecological carrying capacities or resources for early childhood development guaranteed by the Children’s Rights Convention. This has fundamentally driven and exacerbated the climate crisis by exploiting rather than including and measurable empowering, children as they entered the world. The claims of public benefit that arise from it maintain a fantasy world that enriches mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.
This baseline has subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it, and most vulnerable to it. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.
These unsustainable practices and systems ensured children entering under just thresholds, and thus overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. They allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.
These wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity fraud – that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions. If you ask the right questions, those engaged in it become obvious: They start by assuming entitlements that contradict the impact they claim, and by enabling the industries they claim to fight.
Ensuring Truth and Justice for All: Zero Baseline Accounting
Fair Start is now urging states attorneys generals and other responsible agencies to 1) track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world in the U.S. and abroad on their and their mothers’ capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations. This includes interpreting our civil rights laws, under things like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as requiring us to treat infants as a priority protected class entitled to funding that would delay and improve birth and development conditions.
That baseline represents an objective and inclusive valuation of freedom, one that includes the key perspective of full context, including impacts on the most vulnerable. Focusing there, on things like what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black Birth Equity, accounts for the creation of power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation.
We are asking these and other officials to then 2) contrast these impacts with current and historic (ten years back, as a minimum but in many cases with disclosures needed to 2003) sustainability, legitimate entitlement and authority, equity and other public benefit claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable and fraudulent family entitlements, used by prominent leaders and organizations within their jurisdictions. This tracking enables preemptive reparations, structured to prevent harm to future generations and to ensure their right to self-determine. The effort is being launched in tandem with filings before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACPHR), setting demands for reparations that can be carried by activists in the United States whose children are also dying from the crisis.
Simply put, we are asking officials to assess public benefit impact claims from the accurate baseline for self-determination, relative to real world markers, rather than from the fictitious baseline that assumes black lives are worth less and uses omission to hide white wealth as a driver of the deaths of countless children of color.
This fraudulent standard of entitlement, impact, and legitimacy allows many to benefit at deadly cost to others by claiming beneficial public impacts that are actually being undone each day.
What are the metrics and moves – different facets of the threshold for self, as opposed to other, determination – exemplified in action here?
- Funding would-be mothers delay, readiness and safe locating so that no child is born beneath a concrete line of what their rights guarantee them, without abuse or neglect, and what trust-based (democratic) communities require including not exploiting children’s positionality. Read more here.
- Restoring, not mitigating, climate emissions to natural levels. Read more here.
- Taking the exact resources needed to ensure equality of opportunity for children of color, competitive with white kids. Read more here.
- Conditioning political and economic authority on their moving towards truly representative ratios between officials and their constituents, and recognizing the need for those in positions of influence to carry the risk of any violence not doing so creates. Read more here.
- Benchmarking efficiency to equity measures around the high capacity for humans through equitable development and empowerment, rather than the exploitation that created a climate crisis killing millions of innocents. Read more here.
Equity Fraud
The failed models have used a fictitious baseline and false premise that hid the upstream antecedent language that entailed the creation of power relations, often behind downstream subjects like population, environment, animal rights, human rights, etc. To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and to do so because of shared obligations, not because a bunch of white men with guns (or money backed by guns) are forcing you to. This moves from the bottom upwards – governance contingent on the measurable emancipation of youth – not inherently authorized top down.
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems never really created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate or the unity of value we find in mutual self-determination. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial ever-increasing overall demand by treating children as means rather than ends, ensuring dismal standards for child development, education and critical thinking. This slowly converted democratic relations into commercial ones.
This violated children’s rights by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens, and in systems where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness, while wealthier families benefited from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to – through unsustainable growth – kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a value failure.
Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. Activists working with fair start can literally attest to using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable – especially communities of color – who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.
Under the fraudulent entitlement scheme there are two standards for justice: The real or what should have been, measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing equity, and self versus other determination. There was also the widely used decoy standard, which centered on assumed legitimacy of white wealth supremacy at birth, and an illusion of bodily autonomy that conflated freedom with the capacity to harm others.
Those who use the latter are choosing that the least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its greatest cost, with no justification, increasing climate deaths by millions and costs by trillions.
The Fundamental Fix
However, the disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
Again, to constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base, rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. Covering these child development costs as an obligation liberates more than oppresses.
But this true control of who has influence over us requires measuring from zero. And that would be impossible without the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the changing of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. We thus ask all to admit benefit at deadly cost to others, and to back reparations.
Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? As shown above this “truth and reconciliation” process of removing birth apartheid requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Instead of funding those thresholds, those engaged in equity fraud have continued to assume exponential (and very deadly) wealth and resilience disparities are natural – that their and their children’s birthright privileges are just a given – when calculating things like permissible climate emissions.
Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables liberation from this nonsense. It simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.
Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create. Again, if those Fair Start chooses to engage truly value the things they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.
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