Fair Start Movement

Category: News & Fair Start Headlines

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
Feeling Lost in the Crowd? Target Those Responsible for Deadly and Illegal Growth

Children will die in the climate crisis. Why?

Because a few men in leadership continue to favor profitable population growth over sustainable and equitable family planning entitlements – entitlements that better the way we plan families and has the greatest impact, fulfilling the first human right. Instead of fairness, these man urge birth policies that create growth but violate children’s rights, and now millions will die as the climate crisis escalates.

Continuing growth will ensure those least responsible for climate, inequity and other crises suffer their greatest consequences. We can change course by targeting these men, much the way movements in the past focused on choke points to make true change.

Who is an example of someone that could change course, and thus lead as a role mode in funding family planning entitlements and reparations? Men like John T. Raymond.

To avoid scams, see the truth, and identify the choke points you can ask one simple question of any person or group claiming to do good: What have you been doing to deal with the basic connection between children being born, and things like child welfare, the climate crisis, animal rights, or anything else you might claim to care about?

There are essentially two answers to this question: Those who are actually accounting for children’s rights as the first form of justice in the constituting of actual human power relations, through things like using birth equity as a human right to restore the climate. And those who are not, among whom many are knowingly undoing their own fundraising and other claims, and exploiting future generations and nature to benefit a few.

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This question helps us spot the #famscam. It’s a scam run by nonprofits, media and businesses – making it seem like we are reducing or refining consumption, and reducing climate emissions, through abstract top-down reforms, while quietly, bottom-up increasing the number of consumers to maintain profits margins.

The pro-growth policies they hid undid roughly 3/4ths of the climate mitigation attempted in the last few decades, and ensured there are more animals in factory farms, less wildlife and nature, and greater inequity, than ever before. That undoing will kill millions.

August 19, 2024
Scam Alert: Does the Charity You Fund Support Fair Starts in Life for All Children, or Undo Its Work?

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.

They 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.

As we describe in the letter linked here, Exxon, and its claims, are a great example. They use a basic system of family policies that further vast birth inequity, a form of white supremacy, and which ensure ecocide. This means literally using children to destroy the environment they need to survive in order to create growth-based profits for a few. This means growthwashing is also a form of wokewashing, to the extent it exacerbates birth inequity by hiding more equitable solutions, like baby bonds. Such inequity is actually a vestige of historical inequity that can be traced back to slavery.

Growthwashing, as explained in the letter to Exxon, relies on hiding the fundamental baseline for cost/benefit analysis. That is what makes it especially lethal – it skews whether we owe things like climate reparations, the amount owed, and how they should be used.

The growth in the chart below – at the most fundamental level – made some rich, some poor, and ensured the climate crisis would fall hardest on those least responsible for it.

Doing so is destructive to the environment on multiple levels, as growth has undone almost three-quarters of the reduction in climate emissions attempted in recent years through things like energy transitions, ensured children are born in conditions that violate the Children’s Rights Convention (which mean they will be less able to deal with worsening climates), widened the massive gulf between rich and poor (which largely tracks along race lines), and debilitated the voices of everyday people in their democracies.

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.

Why growthwash at all?

Businesses, and many wealth investors who also control the messaging and campaigns at nonprofits, make money from unsustainable population growth that creates lots of cheap labor, hungry consumers, and a larger tax base. They can make more money by quietly undoing with one hand the benefits to the environment they claim to be creating with the other hand.

I have sat and chatted with wealthy funders backing vegan food companies and nonprofits that made wildly misleading claims about the social and environmental benefits of the products, and who were making money on population -driven growth in markets. They knew what they were doing. I have seen national nonprofits bury research showing the harm growthwashing does, for fear of what their funders – many of whom are moving massive and unearned privilege to their rich white kids – would do if it were revealed. No only were they lying about the impacts of their philanthropy, but they were doing so in a way that harmed p oor kids to enrich their own kids through growth-based investments.

TAKE ACTION: One way to address growthwashing is by requiring the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting requirements include family policies and their impacts. Urge the Biden Administration to require this.

August 11, 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
Two Reasons Freedom Loving Americans Will Target Concentrations of Wealth and Power to Pay Their Share of Ensuring a Fair Start in Life for All Kids.

Reason One: Extreme concentrations of wealth and power were made at cost to your, and your kids’, freedom – as well as our national security.

How? That money was made mostly through unsustainable growth policies that filled the world with dangerous people in order to make money on them, people who came from dysfunctional homes and never got what they needed growing up because we never had to assure their rights as children. More people, who did not trust one another, meant bigger government and less of a say for each.

Those at the top could back policies that made a lot of people, and made money off then, because they never had to invest children’s rights and empowering birth and development conditions. They were making consumers, workers, and taxpayers for Amazon, Inc. and the politicians they bought, not citizens who trust each other – for town halls and main street.

A nation is not some abstract idea – it is first and foremost the quantity and quality of those in it. And free people will only follow laws in systems in which they were empowered with political control, with a meaningful voice in making the laws. Many disregard the authority of politicians for the same good reason they disregard the authority of bosses in large companies – because those at the top represent so many, and with such different interests, they do not and cannot really represent you.

Why is your right to bear arms – your freedom to own a gun – threatened? Mass shootings mean the average American cannot be trusted with guns. Where did these shooters come from? If you cant trust those around you with guns why would you trust them with your democracy?

Why does the average American have a vote that is pretty much worthless, diluted by growth? Why is your access to places like national parks so regulated and threatened, as you wait hours in line? Where does immigration originate from?

If we can do these things, we can be a people with a certain idea of America, of certain unalienable rights, to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle us. But we cannot be a nation, conceived in liberty, without a land in which nature thrives.

Laws of Nature, Not a State of Nature – American Greatness.

Those at the border do not fall from the sky – and the best research treats growth as the key driver of threats to national security. These same growth policies have been used abroad to create those coming to the United States. Billions were made by creating billions of people, who now threaten our future – and your kids’ future – at home and abroad.

Many in the generations that came before died to defend democracy – town halls where we trusted one another. They did not die to ensure economic growth for a nation of consumers in shopping malls, run by far off boards and bureaucrats who leech the wealth.

To the extent wealth made can be used to rebuild democracy – long run – by funding responsible parenting, we deserve to take and use it as such. Doing so is defending freedom – just in a more complex way than we are used to. 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.

Need a more concrete reason to act?

Reason Two: One of those costs is horrific child neglect and abuse, and we can end it.

Guess who really suffers from growth policies based on not ensuring good homes for all kids? Five children die, often tortured to death, and the hands of their parents in the United States each day,

Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States. This is likely an underestimate because many cases are unreported. In 2021, 1,820 children died of abuse and neglect in the United States.

Children living in poverty experience more abuse and neglect. Experiencing poverty can place a lot of stress on families, which may increase the risk for child abuse and neglect. Rates of child abuse and neglect are five times higher for children in families with low socioeconomic status compared to families with a higher socioeconomic status.

Child maltreatment is costly. In the United States, the total lifetime economic burden associated with child abuse and neglect was about $592 billion in 2018.5 This economic burden rivals the cost of other high-profile public health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes.

Photo by JPagetRF Photos/BigStock

No child should be born to parents who are not ready to do a good job. And we can ensure that, through things like financial incentives that pay would-be parents to wait, and show readiness. It works – and we know where those who should fund it live. Why would we not make the wealthy, who benefitted from poor family planning policies and growth, not pay to end it? Why should kids suffer to enrich a few? Halting the torture of children justifies action.

Again, this works. Some funders are moving away from dysfunctional charity, and towards fair start freedom. Others can be urged to do the same.

TAKE ACTION: There is a move before the United Nations to make national sovereignty and authority fully contingent on making each citizen a sovereign, or self-determining, using measurable outcomes. This is the core of freedom and democracy, and it would authorize targeting concentrations of extreme wealth for the freedom they took from us, and our kids. Back that move by sharing the link above, and demanding the UN act.

August 7, 2024
If Your Parents Have Money, They Made It at Deadly Cost to Other Children. Avoid the Death Debt You Will Inherit.

The climate crisis is already killing millions, and is forecast to quickly escalate. Women and children are some of the most likely to die.

Future generations will die in heat waves because of what we – or more specifically older generations – did.

At base, the crisis was caused because our political systems allowed some to accumulate wealth without accounting for the costs that wealth was imposing on the environment and future generations, and also the costs of investing enough in birth, development, and emancipatory conditions for all children that would have protected them even in the face of ecological disaster.

Many would say the wealth was made illegally, in violation of established children’s rights and the right to a healthy environment. Many in the Fair Start Movement have worked for scammy animal rights or environmental charities that were being funded by wealthy families that wanted to hide these facts.

These charities literally started by backing illegal, cost-shifting entitlements in the industries they claimed to oppose because to question those would mean questioning the entitlements of their funders. Instead, they chose less effective campaigns that were being undone by growth. That was a huge mistake,

And they succeeded in hiding the facts and the shifting of wealth – enough to threaten a billion deaths by the end of the century. Anyone claiming to create a benefit is quietly undoing their work and furthering illegitimate and non-inclusive political systems by not first ensuring share equity for children entering the world, which means an equal and influential capacity for all to self-determine the social and ecological influences others have over other them.

Here is how to fix what went wrong. Wealth is owed for the costs it placed on others, and if it is taken to fund young women to plan their families in a way that avoids the harm – and would save millions of lives, it can be taken by all means effective.

As children of wealthy parents, you can help move the funds and avoid carrying the death debt your parents would leave you with.

As things get worse you will be targeted for what your parents did. Don’t fall into that trap.

Why all means effective? Moving money, made illegally, to save millions of lives, morally overrides property rights.

Also, it’s physically impossible to have a legally obligating “we” – the one that expressly or impliedly precedes all legitimate national constitutions, without measurable birth equity, but rich families, corrupt officials, and religious interests worked together – between 1948 and 1968 – to hide this fact and make us think that national sovereignty and entitlements to wealth are magically inherent, rather than having to derive from the measurable sovereignty or self-determination of its subjects.

The only way to ensure share equity is to entitle would-be parents to only bring children into the world above a certain threshold of planned conditions measurable on eight metrics, and given that wealth was made at deadly climate costs to future generations, that wealth must be used to ensure the conditions.

TAKE ACTION: Urge your parents 1) to admit the facts above, and 2) to only fund work that prioritizes share equity override – the right to be measurably empowered before any other right, which will actually protect the most numerous and vulnerable victims of the mistakes prior generations made.

August 7, 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
Don’t Get Scammed by Charities. Without Prioritizing Fair Starts in Life for All Kids They Are Undoing Their Impacts.

Looking closely at at public statements many charities make you will find false and misleading information. The unsustainable growth most never mention is easily undoing the benefit of the impacts claimed, and is accelerating the climate crisis in a way that is killing millions.

This is impact fraud.

Many make the claims because the people funding them rely on growth-driven investments. Greenwashing and growthwashing lawsuits are being filed against the worst of charities.

How wrong are the statements they make? Try three-quarters of the climate mitigation efforts undone by the growth many wealthy funders benefited from at deadly cost to others – and that study was conducted before AI models anticipated new-level heat waves. Let’s not undo what we claim to do with growth that hurts the future – mostly for children of color with no means to fight the growing heat.

What is the fix? As described by Ms. Magazine:

It’s simple = take the costs of our wealth and incentivize women having of children only at a time, place and with resources that offset the costs. There are special savings accounts, and debt recognitions, that make this a reality. That halts growth, and compensates those most harmed.

Can you back our efforts by using your money to reverse the universal paradigm – the lie – of parental autonomy towards concrete and well-enforced rules that ensure child equity? Can you give $1000 today to change the universal rule of who we should become as communities – from exploitative to investive?

Give here.

The changes we seek at the UN are underway on the ground in Uganda.

August 6, 2024