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. We can do it using the extreme wealth in the world today that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding harm to future generations.
This transfer is also required by law, in things like the Children’s Rights Convention and under the Right to a Healthy Environment. All law must first be interpreted to assure legitimacy, or the measurable inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, so that truly representative government is possible.
But there are specific barriers blocking this work.
There are 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 generational, racial and other positionalities in reforming legal systems.
This subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they claim 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 made fractionalized the worth of persons of color, one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth, disparities that violated 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 models and systems ensured the overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. The models 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 that hides their liability, and illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
- The Weeden Foundation claims: “The Foundation embraces the protection of biodiversity as its overarching priority. Frank Weeden, the Foundation’s founder and original benefactor, established the Weeden Foundation to address the impact of growing human populations and overuse of natural resources on the biological fabric of the planet.”
- Donald E. Weeden, who ran the Foundation for many years and has been influential for decades in international reproductive rights and environmental protection, has also been a leader in securities and other markets that relied upon a fundamental model of inequitable entitlements that ensured the climate crisis. The unsustainable model would have benefitted Donald and his family, at deadly costs to other and to biodiversity.
- Fact: The Weeden family and Foundation do not treat equity as a fundamental value in their work. Under their model the least responsible for the crises we face today suffer the greatest cost.
- Not prioritizing reforms that measurably ensure a fair start in life for all children has done exponentially more harm to biodiversity – given the role of entitlements in the climate crisis – than the Weeden Foundation has done to protect it. Even if other forces, like the church, had blocked equity in negotiating international regimes it was incumbent on leaders not to relinquish it as a goal. They did.
- First constituting a legitimate entitlement system, by ensuring all kids a threshold of intergenerational justice that includes an influential equity stake in their democracies as their first birthright, is first and necessary condition for justice. Instead, under the status quo, nations use a narrow view of autonomy to enable a woman to terminate her pregnancy only to die months later in a heat wave because she was born black and hence with a fraction of the average wealth, could not afford air conditioning, and had little influence over her political system. By dividing bodily autonomy from political equity, and our generational and other positionalities, governments are killing millions.
- The alternative would be for free persons to condition any obligation to follow the law on being empowered. How can states entitle anyone’s wealth, or claim authority to use coercion to defend entitlements, without first including and empowering their constituents.
- The Weeden family and Foundation have benefitted from this inequity, as we all have, at deadly cost to future generations. We have all, to very different degrees harmed the most vulnerable by not ensuring fundamental political reforms that would have required measurable equity for all as the standard for reproductive rights. There is no such thing as public interest work that starts with zero functional protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals.
- The Weeden Foundation also funds anti-immigration activities that run counter to political equity as an effective solution to biodiversity loss and climate migration. There are several reports critical of the Weeden’s role. This suggests a preference for current national entitlement systems over funding equity in a way that would universally reduce family size. Fair Start looks for this contradiction, a fraudulent, sleight-of-hand family policy nesting in contradictory antecedents – the “we” implied in all philanthropic impact claims – that is being used to hide climate reparations. and exacerbate a key driver of the crisis – the slow replacement of democracy with commercial relations.
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 the eight 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) sustainability and equity 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 their right to self-determine.
Under this 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 a 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.
This is a fair question: Are concentrations of wealth, like the Weeden Foundation and other assets held by the family, now partially subject to climate reparations claims? Do they owed enough funds to be used to reform the fundamental reproductive rights models and compensate victims? Will Donald, the foundation and the family back reforms that will offset their benefits, consistent with their stated values?
Donald Weeden’s life is worth no more than the lives of children who will otherwise die in a crisis without a change in incentive structures, and abandonment of models derived from fallacies that benefited Donald and his family.
Donald should admit birth inequity did more harm than he did good, and any role he had in promoting the idea of biodiversity that would be undone upstream by not ensuring infants measurable capacity for self-determination. If he truly valued things like biodiversity he would be eager to cover the costs of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of obligation, and to include the value going forward.
Background: Hidden and deadly racism
The climate and related crises we face today were largely driven by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in near-universal reproductive and human rights regimes dating back to 1948.
The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity as the overriding value behind political legitimacy, and evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority.
These families have historically subverted civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they claim 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 made fractionalized the worth of persons of color, one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth, disparities that violated 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.
By isolating women in the family planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families have for decades ensured inherited poverty, or commercially exploitative rather than legitimate and inclusive relations. “The real trouble with eugenics is not that it can be coercive; it is that the state can use it
to create the citizens it wants to govern.” If we look beyond individuals and towards the nature of our relations, how is the ubiquity of economic pronatalism in the face of the climate crisis not evidence of this occurring?
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” That condition derived fundamentally from the use of illegal family entitlements that undermined all civil rights and created a generational apartheid that Fair Start and others is now dismantling with women’s networks in the United States and Europe engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.
Fundamental illegitimacy
As discussed above this created a fake, top-down version of social justice based on hollow legal institutions and laws that never derived from any legitimating authority, but rather hid the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and emancipation. They did so by using a narrow conception of reproductive autonomy to fundamentally cloud our conception freedom, and our ability to differentiate between self versus other determination.
If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation. Not doing so cannibalized freedom, taking from us what we are owed in democracy and trying to sell it back in commerce. The difference between self-determination relative to zero baseline markers, and exploitation, is what these families owe in reparations. Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations of persons capable of representative governance, via the measurable self-determination of its constituents. Family planning reparations enable this process, and given that wealth was already taken and the benefits already consumed, it is owed as share equity (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) for each child.
Wealthy families and other concentrations of wealth and power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding a fantasy world of charities, media, academics, etc. who use omissive messaging to evade the liability they and their children carry from inequitable growth. They frame what is obligatory as charity. They use decoy versions of public interest work – by organizations, academics, media, etc. – the impacts of which are being exponentially undone, each day, by family policies that enrich mostly white families at deadly cost to countless children of color. This involves literally using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable, who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.
There is no legitimacy authority or entitlements without the measurable political equity, or entitling children enough so they offset each other’s influence relative to a neutral position – testable through things like the feasibility of a constitutional convention. Instead, the model urged by these families assures zero functional protections for infants and animals, and uses a sleight of hand that conceives of freedom in terms of an arbitrary form of autonomy from the state, rather than as political equity to choose who has influence over you, ecologically and socially.
Here are questions for anyone claiming to do good in the world today: How can we assure justice without improving the conditions in which children are born and develop, given the intergenerational justice requirements of minimum thresholds for all children? How do we become free without honoring the rights of others, especially the future majority? If you value some outcome, who will cover the child inequity and entry costs to that outcome – growth undoing climate mitigation, for example – and evade more of it? Is the entity doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases? How do they define the term power in the context of being free from power? Who is their intended audience?
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems have never 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 and education, violating children’s rights and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a 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. These families routinely funded decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.
Taking action
As discussed above, Fair Start is now urging states attorneys generals and other responsible agencies to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using the eight concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations. We are asking these and other officials to contrast these impacts on the most vulnerable and numerous entities, with fraudulent sustainability and equity claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable standards, used by prominent leaders and organizations.
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.
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 costs as an obligation, before taxes, liberates more than oppresses. But this requires, and would be impossible without, the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the linguistic inversion of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
National legitimacy derives from and is contingent upon including in a measurable way subjects as free and equal constituents, so that they have the capacity to choose who has influence over them, and legal institutions have the capacity to represent its constituents. Reorienting from being obligated top-down to empowering from the bottom-up also holds promise to reduce violence by rejecting any legitimate representative authority of the state to use it to block reparations, or to otherwise role model illegitimate violence those around us. If we never treated others as ends in a political system, such that their influence offsets equally, why do they owe us duties, to respect our lives, for example?
There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to constitute a just nation where subjects are empowered enough in the creation of actual relations, through birth, development and emancipation, to move from being treated as subjects to being included as constituents, and obligated to follow laws only because they have the measurable capacity to control the legal system. Those who do not back ensuring all children a fair start in life logically fall outside of any system of collective obligation, and protection.
The action before the UN seeks to escalate climate and other reparations – specifically designed as family planning entitlements – by trillions of dollars, through the concept of equity fraud, in order to save millions of lives. Many are using illegal tactics to block the high valuation.
But the UN work goes beyond targeting greenwashing towards finding the concealment of liability for the death – through a sustainability scam involving both false and omissive claims – of millions in the escalating climate crisis. Some of the most falsifiable claims were made in the animal rights sector, in a #demandscam where charities focused on vegan food reforms that benefitted their funders, knowing full well that growth was undoing the benefits for animals.
By revealing the truth, Fair Start reforms become an evolution of animal rights towards a more macro level: If we can’t steal abused animals because animals are not property, if in fact we are only saving them, then we also can’t reduce them to property in human reproductive rights regimes that ignore their rights, and do not treat children well enough so that they would be inclined to treat animals well.
The base, not an option
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. But the mistake 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. Thresholds of protection for birth, development and emancipation enable a permanent resistance to oppression by linking the measurable needs of the most vulnerable to our own liberation.
Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables this liberation. 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.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
