Deal with the cause not the symptom.
The one question to move towards justice: If one were claiming to create market value, public interest impact, or to exercise authority as government officials or those entitled to their wealth, please ask that person how they were accounting for children entering the world relative to their rights (and especially to political equity) as they made their claims?
Just the same way we have equity in a company, we have equity in our democracies. Our share depends on how many others are in it, the varying levels of influence we and they have, the impact on the environment around the democracy and how it makes us each less self-determining, etc.
How does that variable impact the accuracy of our value claims?
The answer is that few of us were accounting for such things, because no one ever told us that how we measure value and impact, and derive governmental authority and entitlement to wealth, is actually conditional on empowering people and not harming them.
Instead world leaders in the Twentieth Century assumed entitlements and authority they should not have, which fundamentally led to the crisis.
Leading thinkers like Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum have assumed the same, for decades.
Instead free persons who whish to make choices for themselves, rather than making choices for others, will admit they were not accounting for this, and that they operated based on the false assumptions noted above.
Those who do not admit the error choose to free ride on unjust systems of birth positionality, and they threaten us all. 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 in the degradation of the environment around us
Fact: Our benefitting from growth economics built on violations of children’s birth rights did more harm than any of us did good. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact. The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health, the only true measure of value.
We can’t get to justice from injustice and constitute a just future without actual or measurable equity in birth and development. How do you constitute a just nation? Through language – by admitting and Telling the Truth about justice undone daily by birth inequity – which is language that accurately captures our first obligations, deriving back and conditioning wealth and authority on our actually being obligated to empower people.
Fair Start is a permanent, universal method for just resistance to and freedom from illegal power, which is any power that is not derived from the people.
Why Fair Start?
The Fair Start Movement was formed to engage in fundamental fact checking and reparations recovery, rooting out reparations fraud enabled by the assumptions above. We identify those who use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis, often because they are avoiding liability for the crisis, and for the life-saving and legitimating reparations they owe. Abstracting from the creation of power relations, from the birth and development of kids, ignoring the undoing of our work, makes justice performative.
Fact: Decades ago, world leaders collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life, by using unsustainable growth and loss of political equity to degrade eco-social birth and development conditions beneath a key threshold, all based on separate but equal family planning policies that assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk.
So we can ask anyone claiming to add value to the world: How were you accounting for your work being undone by violations of children’s birthrights? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back, and condition it on, ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our base systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
Facts:
- The concentrations of generational wealth funding and driving public interest claims omit the daily undoing because that would show the liability of those funding the work to first fund birth equity.
- To be obligated, if we assume all are political equals in the sense of each person having one vote, would begin with our being born, raised and enabled to be measurably self-determining, which means our vote offset others equally, relative to zero.
- No one has to follow laws in a system that doesn’t actually empower them. All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base. Language that accurately reflects and forms obligations has to be accessible to the people who are engaged in the discourse – meaning it definitely is not reflected in traditional national constitutions which do not communicate well to the average person.
- People, not documents like written constitutions, constitute nations by ensuring rights-based conditions and equitable relations in the birth and development of each child. But in the Twentieth Century world leaders evaded their obligation to reconstitute nations as such under human rights regimes, ignoring child welfare until after children had been born, and the conditions and relations were largely fixed.
- This is not capitalism or socialism, or any left v. right ideology. It’s about inclusive legitimacy, versus illegitimacy.
- Violence, fundamentally, flows from the use of it by nations that do not represent their constituents because they did not empower them as such, including them into the social contract. Instead, almost all have, for decades, used children as economic inputs rather than empowered constituents.
- Because Fair Start is an overriding form of justice, the adult children of wealthy families that do not pay the costs of their benefits inherit their parents death debts.
The Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign just asks the questions above.
The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health, the only true measure of value. This is exacerbated by vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our current trajectory, using a shell/ponzi scheme that slowly degrades democratic influence in favor of economic growth, identified as such by Nobel laureates, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocent persons around the world. All of this loss of freedom and welfare is measurable by widely accepted metrics used for assessing sustainable development
Fair Start activists in prior employment used wealth, and false assessment and reporting standards, to create a fantasy world of social justice impacts based on entitlements that made our claimed mission impossible, drowning out the truth that hid the drivers causing the world we are experiencing today. Many others did the same.
Reporting public benefit impacts out of context is harmful because it allows some kids to benefit at deadly cost to others, hiding violations of children’s rights that cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars, harming families and businesses throughout places like Uganda.
Total Liberation
Much of the work of Fair Start was inspired the animal liberation work of Direct Action Everywhere, which treated animal personhood a serious matter of social justice, relative to more performative work of other animal protection efforts. But if we assess animal protection work in the context of the most vulnerable, animals impacted by children born into the world who deprived of their birthright development conditions, the impacts at a macro level are infinitesimal, undone every day by inequitable growth.
Instead we can orient from a more macro level that treats humans as they animals they are unifies justice at the base, through Fair Start reforms that treat measurable inclusion and empowerment as the first obligation. This is better than using racist and unsustainable assumptions justifying birth inequity, assumptions that undo the work we do for animals, every day.
Do you believe all kids deserve a fair start in life, yes or no? If yes you will back this reform. We can either confront those lying to protect wealth made illegally and at deadly cost to others, and use that money to ensure justice and save lives, or not. The choice is easy.
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