Fair Start Movement

Category: Climate, Environment & Animal Protection

Wealthy Animal Protection and Environmental Organizations Created a Fantasy World of Impact That Hid the Climate Crisis, Ensuring Countless Black Children Will Die

As the United Nations has recognized, the climate and related crises killing millions of persons least responsible for the crises are fundamentally driven by ubiquitous and inaccurate impact claims that create a fantasy world – largely funded by wealthy and white concentrations of wealth and power – masking the reality of the Anthropocene and its deadly deprivation of political equity.

Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.

Most claims by animal and environmental protection organizations in the United States have not accounted for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on animals, 1) growth and inequity which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than conservation, dietary change or other common interventions are doing good, including 2) increasing demand for animal habitat and products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering and death to animals and humans.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal and environmental law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.

These organizations show prioritization of growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.

Are charities always on the right side of justice? Compare the assumption of a legitimate baseline to the use of that baseline by Exxon, and the relative impacts of growth versus dietary change.

There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.

Why It Matters

How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most key social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?

The climate crisis will cause unimaginable suffering, and fundamentally derives from illegal entitlements designed around exploiting future generations of humans and nonhumans. It is physically impossible to remove what we do from the context of who we are becoming as a species, and taking claims out of that context ignores loss of equity on at least eight levels, impacts we are all responsible for given our birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – existential impacts which for most of us have exponentially greater impact on others than what we choose to do in life.

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How is it not racist to back 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? 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.

Take action: Ensure the organizations you work with specifically account for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals and the environment, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.

Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.

Organizations must work from an equitable orientation of truth, context, and fundamental political obligation, that is not inconsistent with being merciful to animals. Ask their leads whether they think all children deserve a fair start in life, and how ensuring that relates to UN mandated fair climate reparations based on measurable standards of equity which, because they are primary, preempt all conflicting interests.

September 2, 2024
Is the Charity You Donate to a Decoy? Rich Families Use Them to Avoid Climate Liability.

Wealthy families make money on growth driven investments, and avoiding any obligation to fund children outside of the family getting a fair start in life. One way to do that is to make those who wish to assist those in need think that they are making progress when they are not.

Decoy nonprofits do this by making claims that hide key factors, like inequity and growth.

Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.

One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide.

That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.

The growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.

https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/01/study-population-growth-cancelling-out-climate-change-progress/

Those lies will help lead to the death of millions in the future.

Growthwashing is one of the worst ways to exacerbate the climate crisis, and it prevents reforms that could save millions of lives. Growthwashing does something else that is uniquely harmful. It hides the impact human rights can have on our lives when we truly understand them, and the way fairness – first and foremost in our creation – overrides conflicting rights and interests, like property rights to wealth, much of which was made by externalizing costs on future generations. Growthwashing hides that we cannot separate our values from who we should be.

Growthwashing hides what we owe to future generations, and instead it enables our quiet exploitation of them. Growthwashing, unlike simple greenwashing, involves robbing us of our freedoms in a variety of ways, in addition to harming us through our environment. It hides our valid claim to resources for young women to plan their families in a way that can save millions of lives.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.

TAKE ACTION: TEST ANY CHARITY YOU BACK. IF THEY REFUSE TO TREAT BIRTH EQUITY AS THE FIRST HUMAN RIGHT, THEY COULD BE A DECOY.

August 31, 2024
Factchecking Grist: Does Their Reporting Exacerbate the Climate Crisis? Take Action.

Grist is a nonprofit media organization that makes this claim:

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices.

Facts:

On any given day Grist made claims about someone or some action creating benefits in terms of ecological protection, those claims were being undone as children entered the world under without entitlements to minimum levels of welfare, share equity in their democracies (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) or entitlements to the legitimate political systems that derive from the share equity of their members.

To further values like ecological protection, entities like Grist would need to include those values in the first premise of who humans should be and become in terms of the creation of basic power relations, and entities undo the values if they do not include them. While including those values in the premise is not popular with funders or seemingly progressive media whose wealth derives from inequity, that does not change the reality of the impacts – including suffering and death – and the justice owed for those impacts.

An entity either starts with a measurably inclusive and thus liberating system that accounts for the birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality of its members, and relative costs and benefits, or they do not.

There is no evidence Grist factors in equity in its coverage, and much evidence that they omit the impacts of inequity.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.

Not orienting from equity risks millions of lives as well as trillions of dollars in climate reparations, and illegitimates political systems by treating subjects as means bound in inequity, rather than empowered ends from whom governance derives. If one wanted to decolonize wealth and the future, one would have to start from a position of not punching down on children and animals – and that requires a constitutive threshold.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal rights projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.

TAKE ACTION: URGE THE LEAD AT GRIST TO COVER ISSUES AND STORIES IN A WAY THAT INCLUDES EQUITY AND ITS ROLE IN DETERMINING OUTCOMES.

August 31, 2024
The Fair Start Movement Identifies the Deadly Impact Fraud Driving Climate Suffering. The Legal Claims Against Fraudsters Are Worth Millions, and Will Save Millions of Lives.
On any given day countless companies and nonprofits funded by wealthy families make claims about creating benefit. The entities routinely omit key facts that would show the benefits being undone, omissions that make the claims fraudulent.

Fraud Includes Omitting Facts Regarding the Largest Drivers of the Issue Being Discussed, Facts Which Matter Most to the Most Vulnerable

The claims many of these entities make to creating benefits are cancelled out every day as children enter the world in ways that degrade their ecologies, and without the resources they need. For example, wealthy families will often fund animal protection organizations that choose low-impact policies that avoid revealing the impacts of children entering the world on animals, even if that process does more harm to animals than the organizations are doing good.

The omissions avoid anyone seeing and examining the harmful underlying illegal entitlements being used by those making the claims. Why? These entities are often orienting from entitlements (like the capital driving fossil fuel production) that are now owed to those suffering deadly costs and must now be used to offset massive harm. The entities, like Exxon, frame all language to avoid discussing basic entitlements.

In contrast, many children enter the world without the first birthright entitlements that allow legitimate cost/benefit analysis, any authoritative distribution of the benefits and burdens of living, and which create an obligation to follow the laws that protect the beneficiaries of any political system.

These are the entitlements that comprise a measurable capacity to engage in democracy (which as the climate crisis unfolds is better understood as physically baselined share equity – equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcome) and beneath minimum rights-based thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and the legitimacy of their political systems, and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

They are also skewing the baseline for climate damage assessments in a way that is killing millions, using the same formula Exxon uses, and which argues that the wealthy have fundamental freedom or birthright to harm whereas future generations have no rights – or survival at best rather than true self-determination.

Understand more from a young Nigerian attorney by listening to how she is urging the UN to halt the fraud.

How inaccurate are the claims, given the omissions?

Try the vast majority of climate mitigation efforts undone by growth, the democratic representatives the Times routinely focuses on barely representing their constituents by any reasonable ratio metric, and wealth disparities that are both exponential, deadly, and largely accounted for by birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality.

This is the fundamental driver of the crises we see today.

An editor at a major U.S. media outlet told Fair Start activists that the outlet would never cover the full impacts of growth on animals, while simultaneously covering sensational but low-impact animal rights campaigns. The campaigns are funded by a wealthy family that made money on growth-based food investments which, on balance, did more harm to animals than the family’s philanthropy has done good. The outlet routinely published media urging women to have children, with no safeguards, during the climate crisis, and misleading articles criticizing the idea of equality of opportunity and minimizing the role of family wealth in controlling United States politics. Environmental and animal protection funders, nonprofits, and their media did more to empower the industries they claimed to oppose than the victims they claimed to represent.

Would it not be better to actually benefit nonhumans, and humans, on balance?

Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most

Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy.

Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes. But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.

Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and other EA favored outcomes, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children. These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth, e.g., vegan food investors.

TAKE ACTION AND KNOW HOW TO MEASURE AND COLLECT THE THE DAMAGES CORRECTLY FOR WHAT YOU ARE OWED:

There is now an effort to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. The United Nations has implied, through decades of work and decisions, that fair starts in life for children, defined by the metrics below, is the first and overriding human right. Urge it to say so expressly.

All policy starts with who we should be, or children’s rights and the line or threshold of true self-determination below which children should not be born, and above which children may be born. You either agree to that line as a primary obligation or not.

That line is set to a threshold of zero based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much is easier to see and achieve in a collective setting like care modeling than a nuclear family. This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.

One either chooses higher climate and related damage assessments (on eight levels at least) based on true freedom, or lower assessments that continue the paradigm of the powerful determining the vulnerable. The former is the standard for terms like “green/sustainable,” “democratic” or “inclusive” that would have saved those dying in the crisis. The latter is the standard rich investors use to make money.

For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders.

We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them. Why focus on Singer? Animal liberation, and the legal system necessary to achieve it, is perhaps the highest ideal of human progress to date. Defining that idea in a way that evades critical protections for nonhumans, and enables today’s catastrophic state of affairs, causes harm by decoying efforts away from effective work.

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assure share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms.

Again, they set line, linked to physical conditions in the world, that creates a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.

We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children. For those who made fraudulent claims that are being undone relative to these metrics, and who choose to benefit at deadly cost to others, consider the horror stories at the end of each values when engaging to hold them accountable for choosing fundamental injustice.

This is not intersectionality. Think of the values below all together as different sides of what it means to be free. Many children die every day because they are born without these entitlements, and all are inseparable and determined when we have children above or below the specific line of ecosocial inclusivity.
1. Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be. Google terms like “conviction” with terms “child abuse” and “child torture.” Those refusing a threshold benefitted from the suffering your are reading about to make money on things like growth-driven investments.
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood. What is it like to know you will work for others, be under their rule, just because of your birth positionality. It’s a life of doubt and subservience, driven by those who refuse equity. When we factor in deadly racism, extreme action is expected to save black lives: How is it not racist to back 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?
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections. Current growth and wealth-based high emissions standards have already dilled millions. How should we treat those willing to choose a standard from which they benefit, but that kills others?
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do not regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning. All of the child neglect and abuse you may find online represents a failure for the parents too, but parental regret for a life largely lost is another measure to see what those refusing delay and readiness for an equity standard of birth and development are ready to saddle others with.
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections. When some choose to other-determine rather than self-determine, by choosing economic families over democratic ones, it robs you of your freedom. How do free persons deal with such threats, and how have they in the past?
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies. How much do you trust those around you, how is that related to those persons not getting what they needed growing up, and how does that impact your quality of life?
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals tracked through birth, development, and emancipatory conditions that comply – minimally – with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment as well as correlative rights and obligations, This means not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly. Many academics urged measures of efficiency that exploited children in a way killing millions. Whether a famous academic, or leading economist, how shall they be held personally accountable for benefitting at cost to others, and through a choice of fundamental systems characterized by top down coercion rather than bottom up inclusion and empowerment?
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above. How could your self-determination not be limited by those entering the world? In this value, It would not seem to be limited if the average person were not really being empowered at birth, but being exploited by others. Many died defending notions of freedom that were less clear than what has been laid out here.
August 21, 2024
A Handful of Wealthy Men like John T. Raymond Made Fortunes Driving the Climate Crisis. Engaging Him and Others Could Save Millions of Lives.

Today children are being born in a way that harms their environment and deprives them of the resources they need to deal with that as well as crushing social inequity, a fact that reverses the impacts claimed by almost anyone claiming to do good.

And fossil fuel heirs, like John T. Raymond, are making it worse.

Can we take back the wealth, and by what nonviolent means? In1948 the legitimacy of nations to protect wealth and property rights of those who benefited most from the political systems was made contingent on nations complying with human rights that empower their subjects, the subjects from whom all legal authority derives.

With a billion deaths forecast from the climate crisis, its clear nations have failed to comply – fundamentally because they flouted human rights in the laws and policies surrounding child welfare, exploiting children for economic growth rather than investing in them heavily to make them self-determining citizens in functional democracies – measurable on simple equity metrics.

Nations have no legitimate authority to defend concentrations of wealth and power built at deadly cost to others when demands are made to use portions of the wealth and power to save the lives they threaten.

This is new news to many because universal paradigms around child welfare ignore the obvious fact that justice would begin with children’s rights. Why? Wealthy families and governments at the United Nations in 1968 treated the act of having children as more personal to the parents than interpersonal for the children and the communities they comprise. They did it to avoid having to cover the high costs of ensuring future children’s rights as the basis for reproductive rights and to make money on the growth that a lack of protection would ensure.

That not only set environmental catastrophe in motion, but in ensured the mostly white, rich children of investors benefitting at deadly cost to millions of black children. It also prevented changing things through democratic processes – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – because each person’s share was reduced and their capacity for impact diluted. And even in the last few decades, when the crisis was unfolding, those families funded dishonest charities to lie about what was going on.

Why is this not commonly understood? In part because concentrations of wealth and power used the money to fund charities that greenwashed, creating a false sense of progress.

The animal rights movement in the United States was one of the worst sectors, in this regard – with organizations lying about animal liberation that was being undone by growth from which they were profiting. Many now working with the Fair Start Movement, under reassure from their employers, omitted crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit. This helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.

This is a level of disgusting cynicism justifying direct action.

Because your share equity in a democracy – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – is the basis of legitimacy and any obligation to follow the law (including laws that protect wealth made at deadly cost to others), some are moving to preempt law and policies that interfere with family planning reparations/incentives/entitlements for young women, inverse to wealth and income, that ensure they only have children at a time, place and with resources that offset all the harm the externalization of the wealth’s true costs caused.

Whether individuals back that ask and admit their own greenwashing and benefitting at deadly cost to others, or not, is a litmus test for which side of this fight they are on. Knowing and acting on that is the most just and effective work anyone can do.

To start with legitimacy, or the inclusion of all as political equals in a measurable way, is to be free. Work to free you and your children by peacefully engaging those harming you.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to back democracy, and share equity as the first and overriding human right.

TAKE ACTION: John T, Raymond is one of many men who are holding fortunes made at deadly cost to others. Urge him to admit all of the above, and use his wealth to save lives.

August 9, 2024
Mercy for Animals

How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most radical of social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?

Why value/factcheck?

As the United Nations has recognized, the climate and related crises killing millions of persons least responsible for the crises are fundamentally driven by ubiquitous and inaccurate impact claims that create a fantasy world – largely funded by wealthy and white concentrations of wealth and power – masking the reality of the Anthropocene and its deadly deprivation of political equity.

Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.

While we use the term “growth” below because of its familiarity, this is really more about power than population, quiet decisions to fundamentally (on eight interconnected levels) exacerbate the crisis by treating children as economic means rather than democratic ends, and whether claims hide impacts on share equity – which is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes, relative to a neutral background or position like the nonhuman world.

Animal protection, the allure of growth, and moral hazard.

Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets. Fair Start supporters have been advised that many organizations claiming to benefit farmed animals were undoing their claimed benefits by omitting the impacts of inequity and growth.

The prominence of many organizations claiming to engage in environmental and animal protection, which can drown out the voices of the vulnerable, is often funded by inequitable growth-based wealth made at deadly cost to humans and animals. And yet animal protection organizations are crucial stakeholders in determining social justice because they purport to further the interests of the most vulnerable entities, thus setting the highest standard for reform. Animal rights is the most demanding of all sectors because adherents claim to value each individual – which demands changes in who we should become that go beyond some environmental ethics that are species level, etc.

Animal lives first and foremost depend on the creation of the humans with whom they interact, and protecting animals would require many changes in this regard. Inaccurate claims in the animal rights sector, just blithely riding on the status quo, are especially problematic, degrading the highest standards for outcomes in animal, human and nonhuman liberation, and doing more harm – on balance – to animals (and humans) than organizations making the claims do good.

This makes them key targets in efforts to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. Claims of animal liberation, on the edge of countless deaths caused by the Anthropocene, that exacerbate that situation may be the most glaring example of Winners Take All – a but also a chance to make examples of those involved, to show what it means to do better, and to decolonize wealth and the nonhuman world at once.

Claims about how humans interact with animals show the greatest disparity between what humans say and do, versus the objective standards necessary to actually legitimate political systems and ensure positive outcomes for animals.

Separating animal liberation (towards consumerism, for example) from fundamental social justice also changes the goals of social justice movements and reduces their efficacy, e.g. consider leading environmental organizations that rejected ecocentric animal liberation as a standard, thereby allowing disastrously high anthrocentric emissions standards that will now kill countless humans, or scabs undercutting unions at animal protection organizations that seek to ensure equity and mission compliance in the face of funder-corrupted leaders.

Animal rights is a human idea, and must come from a legitimate human rights orientation consistent with animal rights outcomes. Micro animal rights, like open rescue, cannot come from a macro orientation of anthrocentric domination that is antithetical to it, claiming as p roperty all of the the nonhuman world and overrunning it. Macro animal rights would mean treating children well enough so that they would treat nonhumans well, and to invest enough in their birth and development to bend the arc of growth towards equity, restoring biodiversity and the nonhuman world, the homes and lives of animals.

Is it wrong, or divisive, to ask questions of and show the inaccuracies of an animal organization? Imagine wanting to work in animal protection as one of the highest ideals of social justice, but having to omit information about your work in a way that, on balance, harmed the larger effort – including for animals. Contrast those upset by being questioned about impact with the millions suffering from the crisis, and you will get a sense of the fantasy worlds of manufactured demand and disgusting confidence in one’s own misentitlements that brought us to catastrophe. Yes, all should have a voice and turn at the podium, but those who are assuring that actually have priority.

Macro animal rights, via family reforms that align human and nonhuman interests, precede and override individual interventions that would otherwise be undone. Anyone truly caring about nonhumans has to admit this.

The claims:

Mercy for Animals is a U.S. based animal protection organization.

The Mercy for Animals website and various reports now make, and for well over a decade, have made 1) claims about specific beneficial impacts for farmed animals achieved through targeted interventions, 2) claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards, and 3) claims about the organization’s commitment to transparency and accuracy.

MFA also uses collective pronouns that express and imply inclusion, and hence a legitimate overall allocation of costs and benefits, certainly one that isn’t enriching some at deadly cost to innocents parties.

Mercy For Animals believes that a world without industrial animal agriculture is possible—if we work together to create it. Imagine a world in which we nourish ourselves with food that is kind to animals and sustainable for the planet and all who share it. We envision a world in which eating is an act of compassion, in which no one is exploited or forced to exploit another.

Facts:

These claims do not account for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on farmed animals, 1) growth and inequity which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than dietary change is doing good, including 2) increasing demand for farmed animal products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering to farmed and other animals. There is no evidence the organization opposes or is seeking to change fundamental policies that prioritize growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.

MFA’s use of collective pronouns that express and imply a basic and legitimate allocation of costs and benefits also constitutes growthwashing. There is no indication that MFA supports or has ever supported macro animal rights policy reforms that alter the flawed baseline, which is devoid of nonhuman and children’s rights, that created the climate crisis. Compare the assumption of a legitimate baseline to the use of that baseline by Exxon, and the relative impacts of growth versus dietary change. MFA personnel, especially the highest paid employees, benefit from this larger system at cost to others.

A former employee in senior leadership had been advised of these issues over a year ago, and took no action.

On any given day MFA made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.

Why It Matters

How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most radical of social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?

The climate crisis will cause unimaginable suffering, and fundamentally derives from illegal entitlements designed around exploiting future generations of humans and nonhumans. It is physically impossible to remove what we do from the context of who we are becoming as a species, and taking claims out of that context ignores loss of equity on at least eight levels, impacts we are all responsible for given our birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – existential impacts which for most of us have exponentially greater impact on others than what we choose to do in life.

Creating the sense that we can be merciful to animals as we quietly choose the most fundamental policies that on balance cause them harm is wrong, hides liability for our having benefitted via fundamental positionality at deadly cost to others (which can never be a “different issue” from what we do – especially when the former undoes the latter) and, by redefining what it means to be merciful, enables influential interests to urge deadly policies that enrich mostly the narcissist, wealthy white children of investors at deadly cost to millions of black children.

How is it not racist to back 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? 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.

Right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. But it’s unclear why those created as economic means would ever have to follow the law – including laws protecting life-saving wealth that should be re-entitled to those subjected to its true costs, as the death debt for the crisis skyrockets.

Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future. Why? Without this it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us. Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.

Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function.

The United States prides itself on being a free nation, but it uses a conception of freedom that starts by exploiting the most vulnerable, at the nexus of our creation. Look for a minimum threshold of wellbeing for future children and animals, and you won’t find one because they are both already earmarked for use in growth.

Both the political left and right back this – it being always easy to exploit the most vulnerable. But we can’t legitimately create economic demand by violating children’s rights. We can’t fill shopping malls that drive animal suffering and extinction by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. Those who do, and pretend to further animal rights, do more harm than good.

Freedom is being – birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality, before it is doing. What could possibly be more primary than our existential positioning in the world, relative to others? And whatever criteria were used to determine the truths and values that gave rise to current influencers (e.g. demand that we manufactured with dismal investments in children and constant advertising), the thought leaders, the officials, wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., these criteria and the legal system that enabled them were fundamentally flawed, and we know this because millions of innocents are dying in the climate crisis largely from the way they were positioned at birth. Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the creation of power relations, and the Take Action asks below – inverting power – are meant to assure truly merciful behavior towards animals.

Take Action

Urge Leah Garces, President at Mercy For Animals (MFA), to ensure the organizations specifically accounts for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals in Mercy for Animals’ website and various reports, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts for farmed animals achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.

MFA need not alter it’s work. It should do that work from an equitable orientation of truth, context, and fundamental political obligation, that is not inconsistent with being merciful to animals.

Also urge Leah to say whether she thinks all children deserve a fair start in life, and how ensuring that relates to UN mandated fair climate reparations based on measurable standards of equity which, because they are primary, preempt all conflicting interests.

Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.

August 8, 2024
Value Checking Peter Singer
This is a common claim about Singer:

Singer is best known for his views on animal ethics. In his book Animal Liberation he popularized the term speciesism, which he defines as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”. See https://utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/peter-singer/

Singer was instrumental in developing the Effective Altruism framework described as:

Effective altruism (EA) is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. See https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Facts:

There is no evidence that Singer, or most persons and organizations identifying themselves as doing effective altruist work, ever included or now include either the protection of animals or minimum thresholds of wellbeing for children in the basic system of birth, development and emancipatory entitlements from which Singer or the EA adherents were actually benefitting.

Instead they assumed and assume now the existing entitlements – which contradict their work on almost a dozen levels, but which ensure personal benefit to themselves at deadly cost to others. They chose, and continue to choose, top-down coercive systems that do not actually include future generations as empowered citizens, and that exploit a lack of functional protections for animals as well as the children who impact those animals as the children enter the world.

On any given day Singer or EA enthusiasts made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

Millions are dying because of these mistakes. Some might have questioned the legitimacy of a system likely to cause the death of hundreds of millions of persons, and exponentially more nonhumans. There is no evidence Singer or EA enthusiasts are questioning it, even as it enriches them.

Singer, and the funders who backed him, made animal rights more about selling vegan food in unsustainable growth-based economies than what it really is: The fundament of social justice, a requirement to first be a species that co-exists and cares for others. This cost countless lives, but enriched many.

Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most

Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy. Given mounting deaths in the climate crisis, the exploitative and unsustainable growth Singer and EA adherents enabled will do more harm – by the metrics of how they lived, what they said, and the legal systems from which they benefitted – than they will have done good.

Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes. But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.

Animal rights is a human idea, and must come from a legitimate human rights orientation consistent with animal rights outcomes. Micro animal rights, like open rescue, cannot come from a macro orientation of anthrocentric domination.

The public prominence of Singer and EA was funded by wealth made under this illegitimate system, at deadly cost to many, drowning out the voices of the unentitled. Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and other EA favored outcomes, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children. These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth, e.g., vegan food investors.

One in particular was specifically advised that growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and risking ecological catastrophe, but he continued funding the work – lauded by the recipient organizations for doing good. He knowingly risked lives with his lies, and as the crisis unfolds he will be made an example of – to show how it was caused.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer here to admit these facts and to call for EA enthusiasts to back reforms at the United Nations that would prioritize share equity as the fundamental value necessary for legitimating any system. To the extent that he and EA leaders do not, they are hiding liability for climate reparations and illegitimately holding and using wealth – backed by the violence of the state – that could save innocent lives.

For many who understand that their own freedom is contingent on the birth and development thresholds for all children, this will take Singer and EA leaders outside of the protection of a legitimate legal system where each persons is empowered, because Singer and EA leaders would have refused the first term of the social contract – to be fair.

This makes them key targets in efforts to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. Claims of animal liberation, on the edge of countless deaths caused by the Anthropocene, that exacerbate that situation may be the most glaring example of Winners Take All – a but also a chance to make examples of those involved, to show what it means to do better, and to decolonize wealth and the nonhuman world at once.

For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders.

We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them. Why focus on Singer? Animal liberation, and the legal system necessary to achieve it, is perhaps the highest ideal of human progress to date. Defining that idea in a way that evades critical protections for nonhumans, and enables today’s catastrophic state of affairs, causes harm by decoying efforts away from effective work. Singer is well aware of the failings of his work, and should use his substantial wealth and influence to fix obvious errors.

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
1. Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be.
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood.
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning.
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
August 6, 2024
Urge Peter Singer to Discuss Inequity as a Barrier to Animal Liberation

The high human and nonhuman deaths counts we see attributed to the climate crisis assume our current near-universal reproductive rights standard, the one that caused the crisis by ignoring the primary and overriding self-determination rights of future generations. Peter Singer, for decades, backed traditional reproductive rights modeling even though it was doing more harm to animals than his work on animal liberation was doing good.

For decades, I left out crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit that I knew was actually being undone by growing inequity. The statements I made were inaccurate – claiming I was saving animals when on balance I was not – and ensured the death of many by hiding growth and inequity. These omissions helped illegally enrich mostly the white children of the wealthy funders and influencers benefiting from omissions, at impoverishing and often deadly cost to millions of children of color.

Singer did the same, but can correct the harm he caused and also lead Effective Altruism backers to also change course simply by admitting the facts of how children entering the world without sufficient resources for years reversed the good he he promoted, and how inverting our first obligations and influence can allow us to do better.

Because we now owe climate reparations to the future generations harmed by our accumulation of wealth, the true cost of which was placed on them, and mostly children of color who are least responsible for the crisis, those traditional reproductive rights systems will have to change to avoid benefiting a few at deadly cost to many.

Many thought and other leaders who failed future generations and would have to pay for the benefits they enjoyed at cost to others are hiding their liability by omitting information when making claims.

Singer is one of those leaders, and he can save lives by adding the key context to his work on animal liberation – admitting the role of inequity in reversing the liberation he promotes. Read more on Singer’s deadly omissions here and how hi focus on dietary change rather than more fundamental family reforms ensured the subjugation of humans and nonhumans.

Through omission., Singer and others are able to use the failed and illegitimate standards that caused the crisis, or are otherwise trying to reduce the amount owed. That exacerbates the threat of violence, both climate-related and from communities and individuals who feel disempowered and at risk.

We can identify key leaders like Singer to role model the change by asking them about their views on child welfare and reproductive rights, and about how their approach – with no real protections for the children born – has undone many of the good things they publicly claimed to have done. We can ask of all claiming to do good: What are we doing to first ensure – as a fundamental policy – that the conditions in which children are born and raised are being improved using simple metrics, and so we are not undoing and misstating the benefits of the work we otherwise do?

A quiet filing before the United Nations is urging these disclosures as well as changes to the fundamental reproductive rights regime that correct the fundamental problem.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer, at psinger@princeton.edu, to admit that not basing his animal liberation work on share equity undercut the results, and that as the climate crisis unfolds, liberating nonhumans will require no longer exploiting future generations but rather improving their birth and development conditions.

July 27, 2024
The Fuller Project Liberates Women. Urge It to Add One More Effective Move to the Work.

The Fuller Project liberates women by covering stories that impact women, and in ways a lot of advertising driven journalism does not. They are leaders in the field.

This analysis of how AI can be biased and harmful is exemplary.

They can further that great work by also demanding policies which ensure the conditions in which children are being born and raised are being improved using simple metrics like birth and developmental equity and true self-determination, and so that they are not undoing the benefits of the work we otherwise do.

Are we focusing on women today at cost to women who will die in heat waves in the future? Are we ensuring symbolic representation and leadership in companies rather than the more fundamental and measurable political empowerment in the democracies that should control those companies? There is no freedom that does not start with measurable equity.

Our first obligation is to children as they enter the world and are positioned to influence others, rather than any obligation to officials in government or the wealthy whose authority, or defensible claim to own wealth, only derives from the positioning of members of the democracy. Other moves tend to be the fox guarding the henhouse, and evidently lead to disaster.

For example, the Fuller project has shown that AI can be biased and harmful. The most basic fix? All regulation of AI systems, and machine learning, should be based on the fundamental rule that the legitimacy of political systems is contingent on how they empower those subject to the systems, using very concrete metrics. What does that mean?

AI systems are learning and should learn that young women impoverished by the intergenerational inequity that created those like the Trump family have an overriding right to that family’s wealth in order to ensure that future children are born only at a time, place and with resources that offset the climatological and political harms they and their mothers are suffering.

AI comprehends and can crowdsource implementation of this basic logic: Young women who wish to empower any children they will have, and to decentralize opportunities relative to other children around the world, have more political/legal authority than power-taking politicians and unrepresentative courts and agencies. Such women have constitutional authority, not in words from some ancient document assed along by lawyers in some secret code, but in the action actually creating fundamental power relations.

Leaders like Jemima and Mwesigye at RAFUG have really developed and re-created the model in East Uganda with funding redirects from relatively white and well-to-do, but loving, families in the U.S.. And the revolution has begun, with some targets already conceding and choosing a higher authority in the face of evidence that this one change can catalyze the impacts of other reforms, sometimes 20x the long run results (e.g., food+family reforms, rather than food alone).

Learn more about what real justice, for the future majority, looks like here.

There are dozens of ways to do this reform. Gaza today is a reality because we did not make these changes in the last several decades, never making sure Palestinian mothers did not have to raise kids with a tiny fraction of the wealth/resources of the children on the other side of the walls. That would have required heavy investments and more parenting readiness / delay for both sides, thus smaller or more ecocentric families, and thus much less human and nonhuman suffering and death long run.

Let’s not make the mistakes over and over, and benefit a few at cost to many.

This change reorients us from illegitimate systems of top-down coercion (which we and those at Fuller inevitably benefit from at deadly cost to others) rather than bottom-up, inclusive and obligation-conditional systems of political empowerment based on the first human right – an ecosocial fair start in life.

TAKE ACTION: Urge CEO Laurie Hays to elevate fairness at the most fundamental level, and always cover how the act of children entering the world impacts the stories we tell.

Also, go on the offense. Esther Afolaranmi and many others are leading a counterattack on inequity at the UN now (and the ICC next year) and many wise voices are finding ways to back it.

May 28, 2024