Fair Start Movement

Category: Community & Stories

A Story About Deadly Privilege: Why the World Needs Fair Start Reforms

Violating children’s right to a fair start in life, or what they are owed under the Children’s Rights Convention, has done more harm to public interest efforts than any organization has done good because 1) it has allowed inequitable growth – the greatest driver degrading the capacity of the earth to ensure the thriving of human and animal life. And 2) we all managed to do that, to exploit growth rather than invest in children, by treating children of color as deserving many fewer resources and much more risk.

We don’t get to justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring your obligations to them. The solution? We have to accurately derive, state and comply with our first obligations: To actually empower children as they come into the world so that we live in a democracy, and not just an economy.

A friend and I consistently debate environmentalism, He was born into a wealthy, white family, and enlarged that wealth by holding real estate, the value of which increased because of growth-based demand in California. He has also invested in artificial intelligence systems that use illegal code that degrades democracy by promoting political obligation without assurances of political equity.

His wealth – made at horrific environmental cost to mostly children of color – allows him not to work, and to elevate his own children’s choices in life even as other children are born into early deaths. That wealth allows him to travel – even enjoying access to private surf locations local surfers could never afford. He was recently able to surf an artificial wave pool while traveling, which is an environmentally damaging system that allows wealthy investors to profit by replacing something natural, and at deadly cost to vulnerable communities.

In essence, he won a birth lottery that ensured him a life of ease fundamentally built on costs to others, and he favors conservative environmental nonprofits that do not interfere with the fundamental process that will allow him to ensure his eco-social privileges to his children.

When he learned about Fair Start he urged me to focus on getting officials to agree to the standards we promote rather than treat them as fundamental, because that immediately assumes their authority and his entitlements. He knows how to decoy from questions of fundamental entitlements, white wealth, and the first drivers of all outcomes towards existing systems of “justice” controlled by the same false assumptions that ensured the climate crisis.

I could be more culpable than my friend. I worked as a public interest attorney for both the federal government, and many nonprofits, all of which used the same illegal assessment and reporting standards (which in essence, are just forms of language) that caused the climate and political crises we see in the world today. I was using the same standards as my friend, standards enabled by removing political equity from reproductive rights regimes decades ago in efforts to subvert Twentieth Century racial justice movements, a move that more than any other one thing has exacerbated the climate and related crises we see today. In essence, by privatizing family planning, and at the most fundamental level, it created a false version of freedom – on that covered all senses of that value – by taking it outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in one’s political system.

That move obscured the most basic rule that determines whether we are free, in violation of every metric one can imagine, from protecting children and the environment to assuring each person some level of influence in their democracy.

In my public interest work I performed a horrible magic trick: I and others with influence used a fundamental set of assumptions, entitlements, and authorities – standards – in which I received a goodwill increase in my reputation from the work, more money in my accounts, and yet the vulnerable I claimed to represent are now all worse off.

And I mean worse off in terms of the measurably outcomes that underlie things like the laws that deal with children’s rights, animal rights, and civil rights. In all categories, the entities those laws seek to protect are worse off as heat rises, democracy declines, and the distance between the wealthy and impoverished widens.

My friend and I used the same standard that caused the crisis to hide liability for it. He is many things, many of them good. But this is the dilemma of the dysfunctional family system we have all inherited: He benefits at deadly cost to others, and chooses to continue that way in his life. That, in a fundamental way, is who he has chosen to be.

There is an ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and their birth and development itself can alter that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs. That baseline is the objective measure of our value, relative to others. There are no values outside of that system, given climatological impacts on infants, and infant/human health as a basis measure of all value.

Is there a fix?

Fair Start reforms begins simply with our admitting that the wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights because for decades – in what we might call the #famscam – nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into conditions compliant with those rights. Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive.

People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. We all have an overriding or preemptive right and obligation to take the wealth that was stolen by violating children’s rights and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future defined by actual relations, not some abstraction.

That standard – a demand for family planning resources to ensure children’s rights, the right which are the most basic standard for who our species should be – is the key to mutual self-determination, or freedom.

Many entities in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using the same fraudulent impact assessment and reporting standards, ignoring how children entering the world has undone sustainable development impacts, that drove the crisis in order to hide their liability for the death of millions.

The charities my friend supports use those standards.

The Tell the Truth (TTT) Campaign: Justice starts with speaking the truth, and neutral fact checking from a zero harm baseline.

The Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign just asks one question of those like my friend.

If you have claimed to create market value, public interest impact, or to exercise authority as government officials or holders of wealth, please explain how were you accounting for children entering the world relative to their rights and especially to measurable levels of political equity? Just the same way we have equity in a company, we have equity in your democracy. Your share depends on how many others are in it, the varying levels of influence they have, the impact on the environment around the democracy, etc.

We ask this question in the Tell the Truth campaign: How did you account for these things when you made your claims of impact?

We can ask other questions. Would my friend be willing to say that his entailments to his wealth, and the authority of government to use force to protect him and it, derive from and are conditioned on ensuring birth equity for all children? Would my friend change the standards, and elevate birth equity above bodily autonomy and economic growth in reproductive rights regimes, if he could go back in history and do it? Would he choose to sacrifice some of his wealth in exchange for saving lives if he could go back and do it?

The answer is my friend and others were not accounting for such things, because no one ever told them that any measure of value and impact, of governmental authority and entitlement to wealth, starts with empowering people.

The Tell the Truth campaign goes beyond deferring to the will of others, and into the dignity of fundamental rights and obligations, and what we all owe. It allows everyone to relate their experiences to the reality of the most vulnerable: Children entering the world and impacting animals in the actual and first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful.

Fair Start is now pursuing legal action to ensure disclosure requirements – from companies and charities – detailing how growth has compounded children’s rights violations, increasingly degraded ecosystems, and ensured massive political disenfranchisement.

The Fair Start Movement was formed as the world’s first constitutional watchdog to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would choose to avoid liability for the crisis, and to evade the life-saving and legitimating reparations they owe. Our tactic is simple: We take impact claims made by influential entities and key public interest organizations and we assess them against objective measures of ongoing losses of political equity and democratic influence, or a zero-baseline measure of the full spectrum of harm caused by the crisis. Fair Start does not replace downstream public interest interventions; it reorients them from preemptive, rights-based, legitimating, and upstream base.

Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of he rights of children and animals. We contrast impact claims that use the illegal standard that ignores harm to some children with actual harm to all children, relative to a zero baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent base value of being free.

Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurately premised communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that obligation be self-determining.

We have a right to know what entities are doing to the physical capacity for all to self-determine. We are either included in a system of rights, which must include children’s rights as the base, or we are not. Those of us who are not could never justify why basic obligations are owed, given that they do not extend them to others. . The disclosures discussed above can ensure correctly assessing who chooses to be free or self-determining, and who chooses to exploit their positionality at deadly cost to others and thus fall outside of any logical system of liberating mutual protection.

Take action:

All should admit that our collectively not prioritizing a fair start in life for all kids has more harm to our values and missions than we have done to further them. And we should take action to reverse that mistake, and elevate children’s birthrights as the first and overriding human rights.

You can urge the United Nations to do so here.

There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through, clutching at others and dragging them down as they go. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language – a new standard – to ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not that at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally. The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations, and freedoms. Without Tell the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in the language that inevitably determines how we relate to others, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

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

January 16, 2025
What is a Fair Start in Life?

Sufficient funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention (“Convention”) and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations – through birth, development, and emancipation – is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, compounding impacts simultaneously.

We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today to fund reparative justice, wealth that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars. However there are entities now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive and fraudulent messaging that hides their liability and the entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.

This is, in essence, the fraudulent withholding of reparations using a historically racist and unsustainable model – not benchmarked to actual harm – that illegally bypasses children’s rights as the basis for reproductive intergenerational justice. This is an arbitrary model that simply assumes children of color are worth less in terms of the birth and development conditions they deserve. That assumption will now condemn millions of children, mostly of color, to death as the climate crisis intensifies. Fair Start outs those using the fraudulent standard, which is inherently omissive, by simply asking targets to account for the entry of children into the world relative to things like the Convention when making impact claims and to adjust their claims accordingly.

The results are often shocking, with many public interest organizations having spent more on lavish travel, events and other performative things than on furthering their mission. Fair Start assists communities impacted by the fraud to seek claw-back reparations.

We can even focus on the harm from the fraud itself as a trimtab lever, and linguistic model, for larger systemic change and the physical constituting of legitimate relations through accurate language of obligation and the changes in behavior that follow it. The funds from this process can then fund changes in the existing sexual health and reproductive rights field that would treat mothers and infants as the priority class among vulnerable entities under civil rights laws.

It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us.

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

December 9, 2024
Many Regret Having Kids. Why Not Fund Delay and Readiness Instead?

More and more people are coming forward to say they regret having kids, as many others struggle to keep up with the costs of parenting.

And yet governments and big business are working together to try to push more women to have kids in order to create cheap labor, more consumers, and dumbed-down taxpayers. Fair Start is fighting back, and taking the money they stole to make sure families work for families, not governments and business.

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.

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 comes 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 ensure parents are ready to parent before they have kids, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to avoid many from 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
Nour Belokda Speaks Out
Nour Belokda works as Fair Start activist in Washington, D.C.

According to Nour:

As a feminist and female lobbyist from the Middle East living in Washington, D.C., I urge our lawmakers to seize the opportunity for our city to become a leader in implementing the United Nations’ standards on gender equality, child development, and climate resilience. D.C. is in a unique position to serve as a model for transformative policies that empower women and enhance the well-being of children.

By linking debt savings accounts to every child’s birth and increasing support for family planning services, we can equip mothers, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, with the resources they need to create nurturing environments. These initiatives not only support emotional and cognitive development but also foster a more equitable society.

The traumatic experience of my brother, who was attacked with acid, highlights the urgent need for comprehensive policies that confront the roots of violence and promote social justice. Such brutal acts often stem from individuals who have been raised without proper guidance and support. As a female lobbyist, I know firsthand the power of legislation to create meaningful change.

By championing policies that protect women’s rights and children’s futures, we can cultivate a culture of empathy and responsibility in our communities. D.C. has the opportunity to embed these UN standards into our legislative framework, ensuring that every child can thrive in a safe and supportive environment. It is essential for our leaders to act decisively and invest in a future marked by equity, compassion, and a collective commitment to social justice for all.

Why It Matters?

Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations is often the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, simultaneously.

We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars.

However there are entities now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – entitlement and impact fraud – that hides their liability and the entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. As described below Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by these entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises – as these things accelerate.

Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good. In many cases they will have spent more on lavish travel and events, or other incidentals, than actually furthering their mission. Not first constituting systems of legitimate governance capable of representing constituents by ensuring all kids a threshold of intergenerational justice – the influential equity stake in their democracies that is their first birthright – has condemned millions to do in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from the illegitimacy have been enriched.

Despite the interference, many have already begun to engage in this more effective form of constituting a just future – through language and action – by admitting the failure of systems to date, agreeing to change the way be plan families, and exchanging resources. This transfer of wealth made at deadly costs is also required by law. All law must first be interpreted to assure legitimacy, or the measurable inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, so that truly representative governance is possible. In other words, the threshold or border, of empowering development, overrides the authority represented by national borders because it is needed to legitimate such law.

But there are specific barriers blocking this work.

There are many wealthy families and other concentrations of power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis who benefitted from unsustainable reproductive rights models. These models used a false premise (that having children is more personal than interpersonal) to avoid the overriding need to ensure measurable empowerment of each citizen, or to first account for our vast generational, racial and other inequitable positionalities in reforming legal systems.

This hid the overriding nature of the upstream creation of power relations behind the downstream subject area of population, and conflated a false view of bodily autonomy, one based on inequity and a capacity to harm others, with true autonomy or measurable self-determination through positioning in one’s democracy.

The former would enable a woman to terminate her pregnancy only to die months later in a heat wave because she was born with the inherited wealth inequity that comes with being black, could not afford air conditioning, and had little influence over her political system to challenge all of that.

Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and by individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination that triggered a climate crisis killing millions of children of color while enriching their own kids.

This created a fictitious baseline for cost and benefit analysis and national legitimacy, one that has fundamentally driven the climate crisis by exploiting rather than including and measurable empowering, children as they entered the world. The claims of public benefit that arise from it maintain a fantasy world that enriches mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.

This baseline has subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it, and most vulnerable to it. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.

These unsustainable practices and systems ensured children entering under just thresholds, and thus overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. They allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.

These wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud – that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. They are obvious because they start by enabling the industries they claim to fight.

Ensuring Justice for All

Fair Start is now urging states attorneys generals and other responsible agencies to 1) track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world in the U.S. and abroad on their and their mothers’ capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations.

We are asking these and other officials to then 2) contrast these impacts with current and historic (ten years back, as a minimum but in many cases with disclosures needed to 2003) sustainability, equity and other public benefit claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable and fraudulent family entitlements, used by prominent leaders and organizations within their jurisdictions. This tracking enables preemptive reparations, structured to prevent harm to future generations and to ensure their right to self-determine.

Simply put, we are asking officials to assess public benefit impact claims from the accurate baseline for self-determination, relative to real world markers, rather than from the fictitious baseline that assumes black lives are worth less and uses omission to hide white wealth as a driver of the deaths of countless children of color.

This fraudulent standard of entitlement, impact, and legitimacy allows many to benefit at deadly cost to others by claiming beneficial public impacts that are actually being undone each day.

What are the metrics and moves, exemplified in action here?
- Funding would-be mothers delay, readiness and safe locating so that no child is born beneath a concrete line of what their rights guarantee them, without abuse or neglect, and what trust-based (democratic) communities require. Read more here.
- Restoring, not mitigating, climate emissions to natural levels. Read more here.
- Taking the exact resources needed to ensure equality of opportunity for children of color, competitive with white kids. Read more here.
- Conditioning political and economic authority on their moving towards truly representative ratios between officials and their constituents, and recognizing the need for those in positions of influence to carry the risk of any violence not doing so creates. Read more here.
- Benchmarking efficiency to equity measures around the high capacity for humans through equitable development and empowerment, rather than the exploitation that created a climate crisis killing millions of innocents. Read more here.
Equity Fraud

The failed models have used a fictitious baseline and false premise that hid the upstream antecedent language that entailed the creation of power relations, often behind downstream subjects like population, environment, animal rights, human rights, etc. To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society. This moves from the bottom upwards – governance contingent on the measurable emancipation of youth – not inherently authorized top down.

The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems never really created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by treating children as means rather than ends, ensuring dismal standards for child development, education and critical thinking. This slowly converted democratic relations into commercial ones.

This violated children’s rights by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens, and in systems where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness, while wealthier families benefited from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to – through unsustainable growth – kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a value failure.

Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need.

Under the fraudulent entitlement scheme there are two standards for justice: The real or what should have been, measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing equity, and self versus other determination. There was also the widely used decoy standard, which centered on assumed legitimacy of white wealth supremacy at birth, and an illusion of bodily autonomy that conflated freedom with the capacity to harm others.

Those who use the latter are choosing that the least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its greatest cost, with no justification, increasing climate deaths by millions and costs by trillions.

The Fundamental Fix

However, the disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.

Again, to constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base, rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. Covering these child development costs as an obligation liberates more than oppresses.

But this true control of who has influence over us requires measuring from zero. And that would be impossible without the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the changing of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. We thus ask all to admit benefit at deadly cost to others, and to back reparations.

Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? As shown above this “truth and reconciliation” process of removing birth apartheid requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.

It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

Instead of funding those thresholds, those engaged in equity fraud have continued to assume exponential (and very deadly) wealth and resilience disparities are natural – that their and their children’s birthright privileges are just a given – when calculating things like permissible climate emissions.

Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables liberation from this nonsense. It simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.

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 – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine there – was a horrific mistake. It seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of illegitimate policy and that creation was simply art of something humans do rather than a matter of fundamental legitimacy.

But it is 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. If those Fair Start engages truly value the things they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
November 29, 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
Why Should You Focus on Fair Start?

Measurable birth, developmental and emancipatory share equity / self-determination is the first human right.

This article explains what it looks like.

Consider also:

The right should have been used preemptively to override entitlements between 1948 and 1968 as the universal human rights regime was being implemented. Instead, wealthy white families and corrupt leaders privatized the notion of family freedom, taking it out of its environmental and social context, and elevating isolation over equity to protect existing entitlements held by concentrations of wealth and empower, and to ensure those entities would profit from growth.

Regardless, share equity / self-determination is the preemptive human right, and it is protected through constitutive discourse that accurately accounts for positionality, and a binary redirection of each of our abilities to influence the world so as to first empower the most vulnerable – future children and their nonhuman ecologies, which is the thing that makes the freedom of inclusive democracy and any obligation to follow the law possible.

An ecosocial fair start in life is also the standard for evaluating legal damages for the many crises unfolding today, including the rampant impact fraud hiding climate liability, and it is the preemptive standard for all law and policy to resolve the damages.

For most, fair start just means doing what they are doing, but orienting from a position where they do not benefit at cost – often deadly cost – to others, and undo the good work we otherwise do in the world.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to back fair start reforms today.

August 23, 2024
Why Add Fair Start to Your Work? Why Tell the Truth That the Good We Claimed to Do Has Been Undone Because We Ignored Children’s Rights as They Entered the World?

Free persons will make their obligation to follow the laws of their nation contingent on a universal system of empowerment that tends to unite our values. But the chance to do so – and save millions of lives – is not something we ever talk about. Below are two moves you can make to change that.

We formed Fair Start because many of our members, in prior public statements about our work and successes, omitted facts that would have revealed that our claims were inaccurate, with the progress being undone by other factors. These were factors from which we were fundamentally benefiting at deadly cost to others, and our omissions hid life-saving entitlements. I personally omitted these facts – enriching myself, and other white families, at deadly cost to many black children.

Many others are doing the same.

Omitting positionality, and its costs for others

These omissions hid the full impact of our positionality, climatologically and otherwise, in contradiction of the values we all live (like evading deadly heat waves, being counted as an influential equal in politics, wanting at least the choice to have children in safe conditions, etc.) – including the value of self-determination. They also delayed and minimized climate reparations, skewing the baseline used to determine them. At base, the omissions hid that we were benefiting from coercive and obligatory legal systems the protected current entitlements without paying the correlative costs: Ensuring, at birth, children’s rights to political equity.

These omissions hid an obvious error in our thinking about what it means to be free, for nations to be sovereign and legitimate, and the role that laws around the world governing families play in this. The error combined with the climate crisis will mean the death of millions, many of whom could be saved if we admit and reverse the mistake.

Freedom or autonomy to do what you want always follows and flows from the freedom or autonomy of being physically included as an equal in your democracy. Simply as a matter of logic, who we should be comes first, and it derives – and should derive – from our creation and development, relative to others and our environment. Adults with human rights – our first and inescapable obligations to others – would first have had rights as children, rights which would have also defined the reproductive rights that should have guide our creation, so that we are not born into conditions and with power relations that functionally disabled the rights. This is not altruism, but a commitment to being truly free by first limiting who has influence over you, and the amount of influence they have, through family reforms that ensure children enter the world and are raised in conditions consistent with their joining communities of free persons.

Those who accumulated wealth because of a misplaced sense of freedom – freedom from environmental regulations, from being a responsible parent, from the requirement to not take what you did not earn – were just harming others, benefiting by placing the true costs on others. They were acting in a way that determined the lives of others using birth positionality and ecological impacts, not in a free, or relatively self-determining, way. They owe those costs to the future children they harmed.

Equity, or a share of control, as the first move towards freedom

Fair Start means children being born and raised with real equity – where each person eventually can offset the influence of others in a measurable way, and control through rulemaking who has influence or power over them. The first entitlements in any political system belong to would-be parents, not government or the wealthy. They belong to those plan families around child equity using seven concrete metrics based on values we all live day to day. The rules of creation are unique because the values become inextricable in the act, including the value of subjective choice.

The entitlements – structured around antiracism and decolonization – enable parents delaying having kids until they are truly ready, as well as having and raising those kids at a time, in a place, and with resources where those children can truly self-determine and thus legitimate the nations they form. As such we all have more of a right and responsibility to enforce those primary entitlements than the government, or any group, has to deny them.

Obligation to follow the law is conditional on being empowered through birth and developmental positionality. Dare anyone to logically explain to you how we get to a fair system with an unfair start – without the equity of an equal and influential role in making the fundamental rules that limit the influence we have over each other. We get to true reproductive autonomy – in the fullest sense where women who can terminate pregnancies don’t later die in anthropogenic heat waves – via birth equity for future children, without which autonomy becomes impossible.

Starting in 2004 I helped raise millions for animal charities by claiming to use the U.S. legal system to save the lives of animals. The statements I made carried deadly omissions, making them inaccurate. The focus on low impact micro victories hid that progress was being undone – and in deadly ways – on a macro level that was taking infinitely more animals than I was saving. Often we siloed off the issue of nonhuman rights because it was easier to raise money, avoid complexity, and evade additional controversy. Often we avoided the issue of birth equity because leaders did not want to examine their own children’s unearned privileges, or because they had quietly given up on their professed causes while retaining their positions and salaries. The combined impact of those silos, across the spectrum of public interest work, led us to the word in which we live today.

In truth that legal system – like almost all around the world – offered no real protection to nonhumans or the future children that will determine animals’ lives, because it did not financially entitle would-be parents to plan well, in an equitable way that will not harm both the children and the nonhumans. The system, like many others, was on balance – at a macro level – eradicating animals and exacerbating the climate crisis for the most vulnerable humans in what is accurately described as racist ecocide. Through my omissions I hid the error described above and the claims many have to reparations.

This, along with the withdrawal of litigation meant to begin to reverse the error described above, helped many wealthy funders backing those and other organizations evade or reduce liability for the climate crisis. I hid how the legal system was undermining its own legitimacy – acting like a one-sided social contract, robbing future children of their rights to minimum levels of welfare, equality of opportunity, and safe and natural environment, and an equal and influential voice in governance while obligating them to follow laws that protected property rights, for example.

The deadly costs of what is not said

I benefited from hiding the true nature of what I was doing: Fundamentally placing deadly costs on children that undid what I was claiming to do for animals, both socially and ecologically, children like Anthony Avalos who was tortured to death by his caregivers, and Mbabazi Judith, who died in eastern Uganda of the malaria the climate crisis is making more deadly. The system from which I benefitted systematically disenfranchised and treated them as economic inputs – as means, rather than as empowered ends comprising democracies.

Theirs and millions of children’s deaths derived – fundamentally – from a system that benefits me and others by protecting current entitlements, allowing us to determine the lives of others, rather than ensuring the primary parental entitlements that help constitute free nations. It could have been any of us that died in this way, and justice starts with being empathetic enough to avoid these situations by exploiting others as means as they enter the world. Equity does not conflict with autonomy if we ensure it precedes it between birth and emancipation, but the human brain struggles with time frames this large, and many have taken advantage of this fact.

Take Action:

Some are beginning to fix this deadly problem with two simple moves: 1) Making the same admission we make here and urging others to do likewise, moving towards the truth and the language of dynamic and conditional political obligation. Find specific and public statements they have made, and engage them.

Then 2) urge them to begin modeling the changes above, including giving equitable, family planning entitlements as climate reparations, and as our primary obligation even before taxes, to ensure governance and obligation actually flow from the governed. Engage the adult children and employees of those who should be modeling this change the most, and understand what’s at stake.

Freedom, or self-determination, by definition first flows from the restoration of nature (a baseline defined by the relative absence of human influence) achieved via delayed parenting, which is entitled through birth and developmental equity funding pegged inverse to wealth. This is owed as the first and overriding human right, and it allows each to be relatively free at the most fundamental level from the ecological and social influence of others – and thus capable of constituting a system of legitimate governance.

This process does not need violence because unlike our current system it is politically inclusive, or constitutive. All rules should be fair, and that which determines our creation is the first rule. That rule contains an inescapable logic: That if government truly derives from the governed, young women would have justification to obtain funds for life-saving equitable family planning entitlements – to give all kids a fair start in life – and actually constitute legitimate nations and become a “we,” more than the state would have to use violence to keep that wealth where it is.

For example, here we would want a United States Senator to alter and complete legislation for “baby bonds.” In reality, all of his authority is premised on the change because without it he’s not really representing democratically empowered citizens. The same could be said of courts’ authority to judge the legality of protests to constitute a better future. To ignore these limits is to focus on the symbolic, and not the real. The United Nations could easily (and really should) say so and make the first move in taking human rights seriously. There is no inclusive “we” from which to coercively assign property or other rights without this primary process.

This is social change through role modeling. It can actually help evade acts of mass violence – long run – from the many who feel disempowered. It can do so by revealing those who truly benefitted from the political process, and how to reverse it peacefully.

All of this is not a matter of academics or research. It’s just a factual history and a action commitment to not being obligated to follow the laws of nations that do not empower all members in an equitable and measurable way.

Join the Fair Start Tell the Truth and Act Campaign with the two moves above and bend the arc of our species towards a better future.

April 23, 2024
The Mother of Animal Law on Fair Start as the Core of Protecting Animals

Joyce Tischler is rightly regarded by many as key to the flourishing of modern animal law as an area of study, practice, and discipline.

She has this to say about Fair Start, and the idea of getting ahead of the threats animals face by changing our basic family systems:

“I have seen the projection that there will be approximately 9.8 billion human beings on Earth in 2050, followed by the question: how will we feed all of those people? That’s a simplistic question. If our planet is to remain habitable, we need to ask different questions, and develop family planning that limits or reduces the number of humans, in a thoughtful and compassionate way. Fair Start is asking the right questions and developing innovative answers.”

February 25, 2024
Governments and Other Institutions That Kill Their Innocent Citizens Become Illegitimate. Why Is the Climate Catastrophe Any Different, and What Do We Do About It?

According to a growing body of peer-reviewed research, systems that provide no minimum protections for the most vulnerable, protections like equitable birth and development conditions for children and thus protections for the environment they will need, lead to the supporters of such systems contradicting themselves, are inherently illegitimate because they are not inclusive and reflective of their subjects, and thus cannot generate an obligation to follow their laws. By definition, freedom among equals means birth and development against ecocentric or natural ecologies in conditions that ensure equity of opportunity and an influential voice in deciding – and thus legitimating – the rules under which one must live.

What is power? How we think about freedom depends on the answer. For many years political theorists defined power in terms of governments, who have exclusive authority to use violence to enforce their will. The powerful could thus be the government, or those who could invoke the power of the government through the legal system – the wealthy, for example. Freedom was thus defined as resistance to such power, the right to bear arms against an oppressive state, for example. One sees this notion – of resistance to the edicts of others and to do what one wishes – in the way many discuss and practice freedom, especially conservatives or libertarians.

But the climate catastrophe has shown that definition of power to be a failure. Expected changes in world temperature are likely to kill more people than those killed in the history of oppressive governments. The crisis has taught us that power is any form of human influence. That, in turn, must change our view of what freedom means. Freedom – or to be specific, self-determination, derives from conditions of birth and development that ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence, including climatologically, or power over us.

Read more in this recent Law360 article on the subject.

Freedom may now best be conceived as the conditions of influence (cask or other incentives, entitlements, coercion, renown, group belonging, the inclination of humans to imitate one another to ensure group safety, etc.), and polarity, where organizations of free and equal persons can form, dissolve, and reform — more like bubbles than an extended organizational chart. What would it take in the creation and development of persons to ensure they acted as free and equal persons and were able to look each other in the eye without fear or deference – in the formation of groups, the state of affairs implied by the “We” at the beginning of the U.S. Constitution.

What would it take to ensure that across generations we were not imposing our ecological and other costs on future generations? Given that self-determination by definition requires birth and development conditions ensuring all children have an open future, that is where we start – with the right of young women to family planning incentives/entitlements that would enable ecosocial birth and developmental equity, ensuring they have any children only at a time, place and with resources that ensure those children will thrive based on very specific metrics, which would also constitute the most just form of climate reparations. And because being free in this sense is constitutive, or comes first, those women would have claim to such resources that overrode the existing property rights of extreme wealth made at cost to future generations.

A growing body of peer-reviewed research has shown the basis of deadly climate greenwashing – which is killing millions – and originates with child welfare policies that illegitimate political systems because they ensure no minimum threshold of self-determination or freedom. These policies literally set inequitable standards killing millions of those least responsible for the crisis. And those backing them are choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others, when there are clear alternatives – like moving wealth through externalizing deadly costs into the hands of young women able to save many lives. Who we should be, the “ought” of Children’s Rights and the hard metrics of being a legal person as opposed to an economic person, logically always comes first – before what we should do, and the allocation of other entitlements.

These policies are illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get the benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to violently target us for reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them. At the very least young women demanding birth equity reparations would have greater right to use coercion to protect their children than the state would have to defend existing property rights that harm their children. That said, nonviolence is more effective in achieving justice, and there are dozens of ways to make the transition to true freedom.

Despite the many reasons to understand power and freedom in a fully comprehensive way, you will notice concentrations of wealth and power pushing the old view – usually because it benefits them. As a prosecutor I defined power as the authority of government because that was the form of power I wielded. Look at how the New York Times has of late dedicated its reporting to covering governmental officials who hardly represent their constituents in a serious way as the locus of power. To the extent it covers parents – the fundamental sources of authority if government derives from the people, its focus has been on reduced fertility as a threat to the growth-based state.

Instead, the transition towards real freedom means choosing not to back illegitimate political systems that benefit some at the deadly cost to others, and we can test who is making which choice with these easy questions:

What are you doing to ensure the conditions in which children are born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work you discuss? Does the entity you are asking have any minimum protections for children and animals when you look at their actual approach to family planning policy? Will they admit that their failure to ensure such minimums through a correct system of entitlements, historically, is now killing millions of those least responsible for the climate catastrophe?

January 17, 2024