Fair Start Movement

Category: Climate, Environment & Animal Protection

Sick of Rich Kids Who Don’t Deserve What They Have? Us Too.

Today most children born will end up relatively poor, working for wealthy families who made their money ruining our environment and never having to invest in an equal opportunity for all kids.

Fair Start is inverting that system with debt/saving accounts that gives meaning to the idea of equity, and planned parenting.

Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.

Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.

Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.

No child should ever be born outside a structure of debt/savings accounts that protect all children from the climate crisis by including and empowering them with their universal birthright. Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we” that must come before all we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.

TAKE ACTIONS: 1) Donate here to enable Fair Start to make equity the center of family law, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to avoid having kids before they are ready, and 3) urge any charity you support – regardless of the issue – to admit not prioritizing funded fair starts in life for all kids did more harm to their missions than they did good.

December 2, 2024
Scam Alert: Environmental Charities Allowed Growth to Undo Their Claimed Impacts

As the climate crisis intensifies we might all consider getting our money back from those scammy environmental charities who refused to deal seriously with unsustainable growth.

Why?

The solution?

If an entity does not think children deserve a fair start in life, do not give them money.

Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.

Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.

Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.

No child should ever be born outside a structure of debt/savings accounts that protect all children from the climate crisis by including and empowering them with their universal birthright. Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we” that must come before the things we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.

TAKE ACTIONS: 1) Donate here to enable Fair Start to block parents from having kids until they are ready to parent well and have sustainably sized families, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to avoid having kids before they are ready, and 3) urge any charity you support – regardless of the issue – to admit not prioritizing funded fair starts in life for all kids did more harm to their missions than they did good.

December 2, 2024
Factchecking the Organization “We Don’t Have Time.” Take Action.

Finding: The organization perpetuates inequities by failing to address the climate and social costs of inequitable births.

Their Claim:

“We Don’t Have Time is a movement and a tech startup that leverages the power of social media to hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change.”

“Its principal purpose is to contribute to a reduced climate impact and an ecologically sustainable environment.”

They have published a manifesto here.

Facts:

The organization and its lead, Anette Nordvall, assume for their work fundamentally unsustainable birth inequity and child welfare standards, and consistently publish and platform information that omits the full impacts of children entering the world on the climate and related crises. This benefits their children at deadly cost to others, and replicates the fundamental cause of the crises by being nonconstitutive.

The entity is literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claim to be protecting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable. They do not prioritize zeroing out the harm we are causing, using freedom as the base metric, nor do they admit there are climate reparations liens on the wealth they are using based on that standard.

Key Idea

To “constitute” in the context of governance means to be obligated. Our societal obligation to children offers an opportunity to build a just society from the ground up, focusing on infants and animals instead of serving those in power. Achieving this requires acknowledging the specific harm caused and shifting resources to empower would-be mothers. This ensures no child is born into circumstances that deny them measurable self-determination. This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.

Act:

Urge Anette Nordvall and others in leadership to admit this fact: Our collective failure to require measurable fair starts in life for all children has done more harm to our missions than we have done good. Then urge her and others in leadership to both publicly back and fund this preemptive, specific and universal standard for change and legitimacy.

Backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm – so all children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality.

This does exponentially more good – for children, animals, our environment, and democracy – than any other intervention because it starts at the beginning and is comprehensive of value by centering on measurable self-determination.

You can also contact the Swedish greenwashing oversight agency here.

Background

There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to constitute a just nation where subjects are empowered enough in the creation of actual relations, through birth, development and emancipation, to move from being treated as subjects to being included as constituents, and obligated to follow laws only because they have the measurable capacity to control the legal system. The action seeks to escalate climate and other reparations – specifically designed as family planning entitlements – by trillions of dollars, through the concept of equity fraud, in order to save millions of lives. Many are using illegal tactics to block the high valuation.

These reforms could save millions of lives by addressing the root causes of inequality, but powerful interests are working to block these efforts. Without action, wealthy interests will continue to fund programs that appear helpful on the surface but ultimately deepen inequality by prioritizing their own children’s success at the expense of others. By adopting universal equity standards, we can ensure that no child is left behind, and that future generations inherit a world built on fairness and opportunity.

Fact: The climate and related crises we face today were largely driven by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in near-universal reproductive rights regimes dating back to 1948.

Wealthy nations and families have exploited these systems to concentrate power and wealth, often at the expense of Black families and marginalized communities. They promote superficial solutions—such as charity or public programs—that distract from the deeper issues of systemic inequality. This approach benefits their children while leaving countless children of color in poverty and vulnerable to climate and social crises.

The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity, and what it does to the process of entitling wealth, as the overriding value behind political legitimacy. They were evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority. This created a fake, top-down version of social justice based on hollow legal institutions and laws that never derived from any legitimating authority, but rather hid the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and emancipation.

It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families. There were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others. If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation.

Wealthy families in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding a fantasy world to evade the liability they and their children carry from inequitable growth. They use decoy versions of public interest work – by organizations, academics, media, etc. – the impacts of which are being exponentially undone, each day, by family policies that enrich mostly white families at deadly cost to countless children of color. This involves literally using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable, who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.

There is no legitimacy authority or entitlements without the measurable political equity, or entitling children enough so they offset each other’s influence relative to a neutral position – testable through things like the feasibility of a constitutional convention. Instead, the model urged by these families assured zero functional protections for infants and animals, and used a sleight of hand that conceived of freedom in terms of an arbitrary form of autonomy from the state, rather than as political equity to choose who has influence over you, ecologically and socially. How did we assure justice without improving the conditions in which children are born and develop, given the intergenerational justice requirements of minimum thresholds for all children? How did we become free without honoring the rights of others, especially the future majority?

These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating children’s rights and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. This cannibalized freedom, taking from us what we are owed in democracy and trying to sell it back in commerce. The difference between self-determination relative to zero baseline markers, and exploitation, is what they owe in reparations.

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. These families routinely funded decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.

As foundational to that, Fair Start is urging states attorneys generals and agencies like, Finansinspektionen (FI) is the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for climate damage evaluation and the only standard for national legitimacy, using the eight concrete metrics now being urged as a zero-baseline form of harm-assessment and standardization at the United Nations. This work goes beyond targeting greenwashing towards finding the concealment of liability for the death of millions in the escalating climate crisis. Every entity in the United States 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 was a horrific mistake, one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing a system of 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.

November 19, 2024
Do Animal Protection Organizations Like Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States Actually Help Animals? It Depends. Take Action.
If These Organizations Do Not Account for Children Entering the World on Their Claimed Impacts They Are Part of a System Doing More Harm to Their Cause Than They Do Good. Regardless, They Remain Key to Changing It – Moving from the Most Falsifiable Claims Towards the Highest Ideals of Social Justice.

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being undone as children enter the world in inequity. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

This omissions hide liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids. The fix? Use measurable standard for true social justice and ecological restoration to ensure accurate climate reparations pegged to the self-determination of each child entering the world.

Not backing the reform raises serious questions about whether entities were trying to create value, or free ride at deadly cost to others on their generational, racial, national and other positionality. Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables as well.
- Take action: Contact you state attorney general to ask what standard they are using for climate damage assessment and reparations, for example, in greenwash / impact fraud, environmental justice and other cases. Are they making the fundamental mistake that caused the crisis of not deriving back and making conditional any obligation to follow the law to the measurable empowerment of each child entering the world (and thereby our own empowerment)?
Reversing the harm, practically, requires debt and reparations incentive accounting for women’s collectives to plan for each new child entering the world. This accounting uses concrete metrics urging delay/smaller families, readiness, and redistribution of influence from rich to poor kids.

Family defense collectives can link, virtually, between polluter nations to those nations most harmed to ensure the primacy of value (which is not intersectionality,). Without this reform, many organizations will have spent more money on lavish travel and events than on legitimate policies that actually derive back to the creation of actual relations – between humans and nonhumans, for example.
- Fact: It would be impossible to live in legitimate nations without accurate statements and inclusive communications relative to the full picture of costs, benefits and obligations we are all subject to. Such a constitutive discourse situates us and our influence on others, moving from a world where some influence many without consent, towards measurable and true self-determination. Why give to an organization that starts its work with zero protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals? The most just and effective solution, exponentially more effective than other social justice interventions, is for each of us to admit the fundamental mistakes that created the climate and other crises and move to fulfill our reparations obligations as the first human right. The need for this is just hidden by omission, but if fixed will save countless lives and avoid trillions in costs to businesses.
Ignoring minimum thresholds for children as they enter the world goes beyond inaccurate claims. The wealth we see in the world today was made, firstly, by illegally avoiding paying the costs needed to protect children, animals, the environment – and measurable freedom for all of us. Concentrations of wealth and power in the mid-Twentieth Century fraudulently assumed the authority and entitlements they had at the time, and used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring illegal standards for child development and education that violated children’s rights regimes. This treated people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.

Those rejecting fair starts in life as the first obligation on all of us – who we might call noncons – continue simply elevate their unearned positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it and liberating others. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. Without fair starts in life 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 government and the wealthy.

Thus not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe them as much protection as they extend to children entering the world.

Is that harsh to say? What sort of person would let millions die in an ecological crisis they did not cause because we did not take the measures needed to move the wealth those millions need to live? No child should be born beneath the line or threshold of empowerment that this accounting ensures, and the line can be seen as mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where those who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions and move kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving them in inequity.

The most just and effective solution to the crises we face today, exponentially more effective than other interventions, is to engage in the public and constitutive discourse of admitting the mistakes above, the ones that mean we were all benefitting at deadly cost to others. And, to then fulfil our reparations obligations to future children as their first human right.

TAKE ACTION: Contact the leads – here at HSI and HSUS – and ask how they are accounting for children entering the world on their claims of impact, and legitimacy. Do they think every child has an overriding and measurable right to a fair start in life and the climate reparations necessary to provide it? Do they back standardizing climate liability, impact claims, direct reparations to the victims and measures of fundamental legitimacy? This starts as a yes or no matter, and must be be discussed publicly.
November 1, 2024
What are Animal Rights, Law and Policy ?

Humans are animals. Seeing us as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions.

So, what we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. Animal law is not merely law that refers to animals. Animal law would have to start with a capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals. Nonhuman and human liberation are tied because the creation of our mutual relations is the biggest driver of outcomes.

So animal rights, law and policy, if we want to protect nonhumans, can be seen just a system of obligation oriented around the most vulnerable, the most demanding form of law and justice. That system has to have the capacity to actually benefit the beneficiaries, not just pretend to. What does pretending to benefit animals look like? Look at most of the micro victories for animal rights and personhood claimed by organizations over the last few decades, and contrast those with the impacts of growth on animals, and the reality, at a macro level, of nonhuman propertyhood in our archaic reproductive rights regimes.

Why then not focus on infants and animals, and – at a macro level of inclusive animal personhood – the creation of fundamental power relations between the two? Those like animal rights theorist Peter Singer, and others, do not do so because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality.

The wealthy families funding animal rights, law and policy, for decades, refused to deal with this issue because they wanted to benefit from a profitable system based on growth that quietly harmed animals, while seeming to be their saviors. Doing so while the world has been in ecological overshoot did more than undo the claims of many funders and the organizations they funded – it exacerbated a crisis killing millions.

Animal rights and law, in this sense, starts with the actual creation of power relations as children enter the world, represented by the collective pronouns implied or expressed in all statements, including purportedly “constitutive” statements like “We the People.” It is the most demanding standard, eco or animal centric, rather than anthropocentric, or punching down on the most vulnerable. But for Singer it was more important to raise his position as savior in an illegitimate system rather than focus on the “we” to legitimate it, and that did much more harm to animals than he did good.

But many funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis, are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

Singer’s version of animal rights and law, the abstraction away from the creation of actual relations, is just charade version of animal liberation they need. Value animals in the abstract with one hand, make money on growth and privilege at cost to them with the other.

Effective animal rights in this sense is personally expensive, not profitable. It’s easier to ignore all of that and let the macro undo good for animals at the micro level. True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights. True animal rights mean preemptive standards in things like assessing damages to animals (and children). If captivity harms elephants, it’s because it deviates from a biodiverse and less crowded world where they are free of most human influence, not deviation from a dismal life at a sanctuary.

Animal law starts with moving away from anthrocentric systems, towards seeing humans as the animals that they are, and situating them in equity before there is any sense that they can be free.

Concentrations of wealth and power, especially philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, governments, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to continue the entitlement scam, hiding behind a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color.

To the extent animal law centers on the idea of nonhuman personhood, there has been progress at a meta-level recently. Most entities claiming to protect animals through the legal system only conceptualized of animal personhood in the abstract sense that it would take governmental entities recognizing it for such a thing to exist legally.

Direct Action Everywhere and others before them pushed back on this, treating the right to rescue animals as fundamental, and higher than government’s authority to treat animals as property merely subject to theft. However, most entities claiming to protect animals through the legal system do not recognize any form of macro animal personhood, which would have to start by inverting our current reproductive rights regimes, by requiring future generations of humans be born and raised consistent with species coexistence and total animal liberation.

That blind spot harms nonhumans, humans who suffer in the failed environmentalism of the anthrocentric standards that animal rights should have prevented, and undercuts legality itself by ignoring the need to empower future democratic constituents rather than use low child welfare standards to exploit them as economic inputs for growth.

Funders have actually moved to block macro animal personhood because they make money on growth, and cannot resist seeming to benefit animals while being able to lord their wealth over others.

The fantasy world of animal rights and law as it exists today, without that inversion, was created mostly by entities that were operating without accountability or genuine constituents, have cost businesses trillions of dollars long run. A lot of environmental and other social justice agenda-setting over the last several decades came from institutions driven by philanthropy and familial wealth, entities – rife with nepotism – that are unaccountable to market and electorate forces. The climate/inequity crisis is going to cost business and government more than any other factor in the years to come.

Many businesses and governments now have claims against philanthropy and their low impact corporate campaigns that magically enriched some foundations and families at deadly cost to millions. Violence is one of the costs. Much of the violence we see in the world today derives from this failure, with disempowered persons acting out in systems of government incapable of truly representing them. Instead of those who benefit from this process carrying the risk of violence, innocents are usually targeted.

As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few and create the chaos we all see in the world today. The climate crisis has created a convergence of interest between humans and nonhumans in moving towards equity-based reforms. But not all humans share that interest equally, and as the crisis unfolded a handful of wealthy funders misdirected the animal rights movement towards food sales and away from family/equity reforms, and in a way that benefitted them at deadly cost to humans (most children of color) and nonhumans.

Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.

We have to and can invert that process.

How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? How should we handle those that refuse such fairness, even when it will kill millions as they are born without resources and in the path of danger? Why would anyone have to follow the rules in a system where they are not measurably empowered?

Most claiming to do good work in the world should be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because they compensate for the absence of the values of self-determination in current human reproductive rights regimes and evade harm to those values in the future. This avoids public interest work that is essentially performative, addressed to audiences that then undo the impact.

How can we all move forward?

All can support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world.

Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.

The concentrations of wealth and power you see in the world today have not created value. Instead they first illegally used their wealth to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens whose influence offsets one another. 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.

You can take legal action.

States attorneys generals and other law enforcement agencies are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.

We can identify – on a binary spectrum – those who believe in linking children to debt/savings accounting to move towards self-determination, and those who do not. The rights of those who stand in the way are contingent on their supporting the rights of others, and their children will inherit their death debt if they do not pay it. Knowing the truth – that the default for what is fundamentally permissible depends on how we include and empower others – lets us overcome the most influential barriers to justice, and ensure a better future for all.

October 27, 2024
Fundamental Fact/Value Checking Philosopher Peter Singer on Animal Rights

Singer prioritizes food reforms as a form of animals rights and liberation. However, Singer is part of a larger, broken and divisive system of birth privilege that was never equitable or sustainable – and had no protections for animals.

The full title of his famed 1975 book, Animal Liberation, is Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. His failure to promote an “our” consistent with animal liberation – ensuring entitlements first drive smaller and more equitable and empathetic human communities – vastly undid his work and masked the key drivers of the climate and inequity crises killing millions today.

Humans are animals, so inclusive animal personhood just means functional human rights – something Singer undercuts.

Fact: Not ensuring all children a fair start in life, as the first and overriding human right, does more harm to animals than Singer’s work on food reform does good – by far. The inequity and growth he ignores causes more suffering and death to animals, and humans, than vegan food reforms save.

And it’s only getting worse as the climate crisis sets in. Don’t get scammed. Ensuring children a fair start is the most effective way to free children, animals and the rest of us. Instead of backing justice, Singer benefits at deadly cost to others by hiding how his positionality harms humans and nonhumans – allowing him to appear as an altruistic savior when in fact the wealth he guides in the effective altruism movement was made at deadly cost to the animals he claims to value, and in contravention of the utility he uses as a base metric.

What are real animal rights?

Again, humans are animals. Animal rights and law focuses on nonhumans because of their unique vulnerability. Why then not focus on infants and animals, and the creation of fundamental power relations? Those like Singer and others do not because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality. Effective animal rights is expensive.

It’s easier to ignore all of that.

True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights.

Singer uses the same legal approach to intergenerational justice as Exxon. He has for decades, and now continues, to conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm others, free riding on the collective action problem of racial, generational, national, etc. birth positionality, using fraudulent omissions and benefitting from legal systems that oblige others without empowering them.

How is that animal liberation? How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? Would Singer not be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because (among serving other values), they compensate for the absence of animal rights in human reproductive rights regimes, and evade harm to animals in the future?

He (and others, like Heather Gerken, who oversees animal law programming at Yale Law School) should admit they were wrong to not have done this before, and aid in moving the deadly wealth their work mis-entitled – much of it sitting with effective altruism funders – to now save human and nonhuman lives via fertility delay and readiness reparations. We can also make legitimate claims against the privileges of his children, whom he benefited through a performative form of animal liberation at horrific cost to other children.

The animal rights movements has been like a garden club celebrating nature on a micro level, while refusing to intervene in the clear cutting of the forests around the club, often because they benefited from their own silence. That happens enough and ecological catastrophe sets in, while effective altruism and other offshoots now use wealth made at cost to the professed values to drown out black and other more vulnerable voices demanding effective reforms, like treating black birth equity as the overriding human right. Animal rights advocates and lawyers often choose to continue the charade because their illusory audience and impacts seem better than not talking about these things, even if the underlying system undoes them. A better approach would be to choose a system that does not undo the work.

Who is responsible for the climate crisis?

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.

Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.

Singer’s beneficial impact is being undone as children enter the world without the resources their rights require, resources that would empower children to constitute – to be included – in legitimate political systems of self-determining peoples. Singer instead starts his proposed reforms by ensuring the capacity of the powerful to punch down and exploit the vulnerable, and in a way that benefits a few at cost to many. This burdens the children of wealthy families with increasing death debt – a debt which must be paid at some point, and saddles businesses with billions of dollars in increased climate costs.

Singer’s life, and the life of his kids – these are worth no more than other lives.

The fix?

Singer could simply support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. 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 government and the wealthy.

“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”

Martin Luther King

Singer’s work, which does not benefit nonhumans on balance because it ignores the necessary family reforms, replicates the historic undercutting of the civil rights movement by white, wealthy entities – entities that had no intention of allowing equity by ensuring birth, developmental, and emancipatory equity.

We can do better.

Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.

These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefitting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.

This is fraud, falsely claiming entitlements, and hiding the larger impacts, in a way that benefits some at deadly cost to others. You can spot this nonsense when anyone siloes off social justice from the creation at birth of actual power relations, and thus evades the need to include others as ends – and not means – to accurately determine truth and value.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer – here – to admit these truths, and to say whether or not he backs a political system that moves towards equity and self-determination for all, a system where all entitlements derive from including and empowering others? Will be back the idea of an overriding human right to share equity, or continue to just elevate his positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it?

You can also find other icons, quote them in a way that identifies the values they seem to want to further, and then show how their ignoring share inequity in democracy as children enter the world does more harm to their values than they do good.

Ask them: How do you account for children entering the world on what you value, and claim to do? How do you ensure self-determination for all? You are looking for sustainability, or impact, fraud.

You can also take legal action. States attorneys generals are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.

In the core sustainability scam that drove the crises, many charities focused on sensational, micro-level campaigns while quietly undoing beneficial impacts with macro-level and inequitable family policies that enriched management as well as those funding the entities. You can urge your attorney generals to correctly account for the harms, and ensure preemptive justice for the most harmed.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

October 16, 2024
Did the charity you give to make the climate crisis worse?

Ask anyone claiming to good work in the world on any given day to account for #children being born that day without what the Children’s Rights Convention promises those kids in resources and rights. Then ask the person claiming to do good to reassess their claims. You will see a lot of good that many claimed to do actually fall away, by metrics we all believe in, with harm escalating as temperatures rise.

Fair Start Movement intends to prove in court that the practice of excluding key context from public benefit claims – for decades – exacerbated the climate crisis in the worst ways possible, skewing how we perceived the problem. We will also show that taking back and using the wealth some accumulated from these deadly omissions, to now compensate #mothers and children is the most just and effective way to better the world for all.

A lot of those who made #wealth on false claims are betting the average person is too distracted, uncaring or uneducated to understand what I just wrote. We hope, in grassroots action, to prove that wrong too.

Learn more at FairStartMovement.org

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

October 13, 2024
Fair Start today moves to standardize climate damage evaluations at the United Nations, and override any conflicting standards. Take action.
Today the Fair Start Movement has updated a legal action at the United Nations, originally filed November, 2021, as detailed here.

The filing today adds many new parties from Africa, India and elsewhere – and argues the current common formula for climate reparations and their priority use is based on the same fundamental false assumptions that created the crisis, and sets the awards too low – devaluing harms by trillions of dollars and ensuring millions of deaths of mostly black persons.

The filing solves what is the greatest collective action problem humans have every faced: Bringing children into the world in a way that ensures their measurable self-determination, rather than the massive inequity and ecocide we see today. The authority to govern derives from and is conditional on this, so the update urges action now even short of a formal statement.

The model the filing shows as overriding the current reproductive rights regime need not be ideal. It only has to be be better than than the current system, which is not hard to do given that it offers little in any protection for the values we all share.

This devaluation derives from a system of fundamental entitlement and impact fraud – a charade to protect illegitimate concentrations of wealth and power – begun at the United Nations between 1948 and 1968 that circumvented democratic processes, protecting concentrations of familial and church wealth that should have been directed to women and children. That move – at the most fundamental level – ensured the climate crisis and millions of deaths.

Read the new filing here.

The filing argues that current climate responses are essentially the fox guarding the henhouse, and instead urges an alternative model based on the highest standard of environmental protection: Bottom up measurable self-determination ensured through incentivizing changes in the birth, developmental, and emancipatory conditions of every child, rather than exploiting children for growth and treating liberty as the freedom to harm others.

Esther Afolaranmi, the lead attorney on the filing, said this: “Do we all admit we benefitted at horrific cost to others, and saw the good we did set back by inequity? The evidence is overwhelming. If we can admit that we can move forward with mandatory reparations that override the United States and European states authority to protect wealth gathered illegally – in violation of the Children’s Convention – and at deadly cost to others.”

The legal action uses the preemptive standard that should have defined human rights and constitutional entitlements as early as 1968, and avoids the most fundamental driver of the crisis: Some privileging their children at deadly cost to other children, including the millions already dying as the crisis accelerates.

The legal action sets in motion a child-entitling process much like anti-apartheid work of the African National Congress in its Defiance campaigns, which includes a truth and reconciliation process where key audiences admit how inequitable growth undid their public benefit claims and assist in funding reparative family planning, or face impact fraud litigation. The action argues for “constitutive” preemption of constitutional, environmental, consumer deception, and other areas of law that use the fundamental false assumptions that created the crisis.

Read our cover letter, and general engagement form, below – and act.

COVER LETTER TO PETITION TO THE UNITED NATIONS: ADDRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL DEGRADATION AND ITS IMPACT ON FUTURE GENERATIONS

To:

The Secretary-General of the United Nations
United Nations Headquarters, New York, NY 10017 USA

I. Introduction

We, the Fair Start Movement (FSM), together with our global partners from Africa, China, South America, India, and women’s advocacy groups, present this petition to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). We submit this as a continuation of our ongoing efforts to address fundamental legal oversights that allow environmental and social degradation to threaten the rights of future generations. We highlight the inadequacy of current international frameworks in recognizing and protecting these rights.

II. The Problem: Structural Flaws in Human Rights Regimes

Since 2008, FSM has consistently raised concerns about the failure of international human rights regimes to adequately ensure democratic equity and a “fair start” for all children. This failure is rooted in the absence of a standardized approach to public benefit claims and climate-related damage evaluations, allowing for rampant entitlement mismanagement that disproportionately affects the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly people of color.

The wealth amassed by a few, especially in developed nations, was acquired without paying the true social and environmental costs. The rich have amassed wealth at the cost of others’ well-being, including future generations who bear the brunt of environmental destruction. This ongoing crisis is exacerbated by the inequitable allocation of resources, as wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, while millions are left to suffer the consequences of environmental degradation.

III. The Core Issues: Legal Authority for Fairness
1. Public Benefit Claims: Current legal frameworks lack standardized mechanisms to prevent fraudulent or inflated claims related to environmental and public benefit initiatives. This results in mismanagement of resources that should be directed toward addressing climate-related damage.
2. Climate Crisis Loss and Damage Evaluations: The failure to establish proper baselines for evaluating the harm caused by climate change prevents a clear assessment of the true impact on communities. This has allowed for continued environmental harm without adequate legal accountability or compensation mechanisms.
3. Equity for Future Generations: The right to self-determination for future generations is fundamental to national legitimacy. Governments cannot claim legitimacy if they continue to ignore the rights of children to equal participation in democratic processes. There is an urgent need for legal recognition of these rights, especially as it pertains to their environmental inheritance.
IV. Historical Oversight in International Law

The international human rights regime, established between 1948 and 1968, failed to prioritize democratic equity for future generations. Instead, it embraced a flawed framework that prioritized procreative autonomy—a value that benefited wealthy, often white families, while failing to ensure adequate investment in vulnerable populations. This oversight allowed unsustainable growth models to flourish, exacerbating global inequality and environmental collapse.

The lack of focus on equitable birthrights within the human rights framework has led to a crisis where marginalized populations, particularly in the Global South, suffer the most from a climate crisis they did not create. The legal frameworks of many nations and international bodies must be realigned to prioritize ecological and democratic equity for future generations, as the current systems continue to exacerbate inequality.

V. The Legal Basis for Reform

Under existing international law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is already a recognized obligation to protect the rights of children and the environment. However, these rights must be extended and strengthened to include a legally enforceable “Fair Start” principle that mandates equitable birth conditions and development opportunities for all children.
1. Article 24 of the ICCPR emphasizes the protection of children without discrimination. This must be expanded to ensure that all children are given equal access to resources, education, and a healthy environment, starting from birth.
2. Article 6 of the ICCPR guarantees the right to life, which must be interpreted to include protection from environmental degradation. This protection is not merely a moral obligation but a legal one, requiring the reallocation of resources from wealthy nations to support vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by climate change.
VI. A Fair Start for All Children

To address the climate crisis effectively, we propose integrating the “Fair Start for All Children” model into international legal frameworks. This model emphasizes:
- Family Planning and Delayed Parenthood: Encouraging sustainable family planning practices that align with environmental and social equity goals. This includes ensuring that children are born into conditions that support their full development and capacity for self-determination.
- Redistributive Justice: Redirecting wealth from those who have accumulated it through unsustainable practices to fund environmental reparations and support vulnerable populations. This can be achieved through the establishment of planning accounts for young parents, ensuring they have the resources necessary to raise children in safe and equitable environments.
- Recognition of Collective Rights: Encouraging collective models of family planning and care that move away from individualistic approaches, which have historically benefited the wealthy at the expense of the vulnerable. Such collective efforts would ensure that all communities share the burden and benefits of environmental and social reform.
VII. Holding Wealthy Nations Accountable

The climate crisis has exposed the deep inequalities embedded in international economic and social systems. Wealthy nations, particularly in the Global North, are primarily responsible for the environmental harm that now disproportionately affects poorer countries. It is imperative that:
1. Reparations for Climate Damage: Wealthy nations must be held legally accountable for their role in exacerbating climate change. This includes providing financial and technical assistance to developing countries to help mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.
2. Redistribution of Wealth: Wealth accumulated through unsustainable practices must be redirected to support initiatives aimed at reversing the damage caused by climate change. This includes funding sustainable development projects, renewable energy initiatives, and ecological restoration programs in the most affected regions.
3. Legal Accountability: International and national legal systems must evolve to hold individuals, corporations, and nations accountable for their role in environmental degradation. This includes establishing mechanisms for litigating and compensating for climate-related harms, as well as enforcing stronger environmental regulations.
VIII. The Urgency of Action

The time to act is now. The failure to address these issues threatens not only the survival of future generations but also the legitimacy of political and legal systems worldwide. We urge the United Nations and its member states to:
- Implement legal reforms that standardize public benefit and climate damage claims to prevent further fraud and mismanagement.
- Prioritize the rights of future generations by incorporating the “Fair Start” principle into international human rights frameworks.
- Hold wealthy nations accountable for their disproportionate role in causing the climate crisis and ensure that resources are equitably distributed to mitigate its effects.
IX. Conclusion

This petition calls upon the United Nations to take immediate and decisive action to address the root causes of environmental degradation and social inequity. The rights of future generations must be protected through legal reforms that ensure democratic equity, fair distribution of resources, and accountability for those responsible for climate damage. Only by enacting these changes can we hope to secure a just and sustainable future for all.
USE OUR ENGAGEMENT FORM BELOW TO JOIN THE FAIR START MOVEMENT

[Fill in the name of a person or organization] is doing great work, but to avoid them undoing it they should admit that children entering the world without what their rights promise them is cancelling the benefits of the work for most, driving up the costs of race and climate reparations – the death debt, reversing sustainable development, and ensuring violence as temperatures rise.

[Fact / Value Check: If the person or organization does not back overriding current systems to measurable empower and repay children for climate harms as they enter the world, are they doing more harm than good?]

Many have admitted the undoing – vegans, for example, who know inequity/growth does more harm than dietary change does good and have started to fix the problem by admitting the undoing and instead backing fair starts in life for all children as the preemptive standard for national legitimacy.

This inversion of power systems offsets our positionality, and any false claims we might have made (as many now working with Fair Start previously did), to allow unifying self-determination for all. Rights to wealth are not inherent but contingent on each child in the nation being empowered with equity and thus emancipated in particular ways.

At bottom, if we can’t admit we failed and reorient ourselves, we will be saying that mostly children of color who had nothing to do with climate and related crises should suffer and die, while mostly white families who benefited and, in many cases, perpetuated the crisis by exploiting children rather than creating value should live and profit. These entities generally did not create value so much as create their own audiences and demand by preventing sufficient investments in children to make them self-determining in quantity and civic quality, enough to evade growth-based catastrophe.
October 3, 2024
Guest Blog: The Strong Financial Drive for Profit is Causing Harm to People, Animals, and the Environment.

Guest Contributor: Ayubu Nnko, founder and CEO of Education for African Animals Welfare Organization, based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

He is leading EAAW organization that focuses on animal issues while focusing focuses their hands-on efforts in Makalama and Iramba district,located in Singida Region because of it’s severity in rabies cases, number of less cared animals like dogs, cats, donkeys and low level of awareness on animal welfare in these areas. EAAW is also leading the Cage Free activities for layers in Tanzania while emphasizing and educating communities on plant diet for ethical and health reasons.

Some people with great financial ability, have been helping to develop the business of raising animals for food as part of their prestige, or because they have a great ability to buy food and products derived from animals. This has been done without considering the harm they cause. They may or may not be aware of this, although there are various reports that explain the effects caused by large animal farms, the environment and the effect on humans to a large extent due to its results.

It is saddening to see that animals suffer while others enjoy it. Animal agriculture produces 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions which has a global warming impact 296 times greater than carbon dioxide. It causes harm to many innocent people while the powerful do not suffer from the harm they cause. They have the opportunity to create an alternative or to continue living while their actions cause pain to millions of people, especially the powerless.

Studies show that raising livestock for human consumption generates nearly 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is greater than all transportation emissions combined. This is the reason why it is important to insist that the majority of people abandon the use of foods and products derived from animals in order to reduce these serious effects on animals and the current and future generations.

According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If the world is to meet its target of limiting global warming to well below 2C, some degree of diet shift will be necessary.

Organizations that support animal welfare work have a great responsibility to ensure that the owners of large farms raising animals for food and other products, are responsible for supporting campaigns to eliminate the use of animal products, but they also support animal welfare activities to avoid those great effects that affect the world now and in the future.

It is sad that the immense poverty that is caused by the imbalance of the economic opportunities is continuing to cause suffering whereby poverty, unemployment and ongoing climate change continue to be a hindrance in addressing animal welfare problems in Africa.

The Fair Start Movement is in collaborations with Africa based organizations through the Seeds for the Future projects in Uganda and Tanzania among others. They are trying to bring in the balance where women can get enough food for their families while serving for their children, and through the improved environment, animals can have enough food which is part of their welfare.

September 5, 2024