Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Meatless Mondays, the brainchild of Sid Lerner, have been a big hit:

“Inspired by the meat reduction campaigns of World War I and II, Sid conceived of and launched Meatless Monday with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2003. The simple concept of “cutting out meat one day per week” was clear, memorable, and easy to understand and encouraged participants to take small steps towards lifestyle changes. Meatless Monday materials, resources, and programming were made free to the public and could be easily customized for any organization, community or individual.”

 

Those involved in the Fair Start Movement assisted charities funded by Lerner and his family to promote dietary change as a way to benefit animals, the environment, and human health. 

 

 

The problem: Upstream inequitable family policies, which are used to enable unsustainable growth, have done more harm to human health and animal rights than downstream efforts like dietary reforms have done good.   

Matless Mondays are great, but if we want a better future, they have to be combined with Fairness Fridays.

What’s that? Fairness Fridays is a commitment to give an hour, one day a week, to backing Fair Start universal equity reforms that move wealth made from unsustainable and inequitable growth into the hands of would-be parents to maximize equity in future generations:

There are dozens of ways to take action on your Fairness Friday. 

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 and free all of us. It is also required by law, in things like the Children’s Rights Convention and under the Right to a Healthy Environment.

But there are specific barriers blocking this work. Wealthy families and other concentrations of wealth and power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging that hides macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. 

 

 

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. But this requires, and would be impossible without, the  admission of the specific harm we have caused and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power 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. 

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 current historic sustainability and equity claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable standards, used by prominent leaders and organizations. 

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 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. 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 

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. It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families. Under this scheme there were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others.

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 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. But this requires, and would be impossible without, the  admission of the specific harm we have caused and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power 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.

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 because this work goes beyond targeting greenwashing towards finding the concealment of liability for the death – through a sustainability scam involving both false and omissive claims (with the most falsifiable claims made in the animal rights sector) – of millions in the escalating climate crisis.

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 it is one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.

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Problem:

The human and reproductive rights regimes instituted in 1948 included no minimum and concretely measurable standards of welfare, equity, or freedom for future children, a mistake that ensured vast inequality and growth leading to the climate and other crises we see today. Reproductive autonomy centered on self-determination, but only for parents, not children and the communities they would impact and comprise.

 

 

Not ensuring child equity involved assuming a contradictory premise – non-empowerment – for the legitimacy of government. This made social justice interventions largely performative – not tied to the creation at birth of actual power relations. Good evidence of this involves projected death rates in the climate crisis.

This extended a form of historic reparations fraud that undercut the civil rights movement and resulted in the exploiting of positionality and future children for growth rather than including and empowering each child. The mistake – conflating the zeroing out of entitlements to ensure self-determination and equity, instead with some detached notion of bodily autonomy – is now undoing much of the good philanthropy has done to date. This fact is evident if we assess beneficial impact claims against the impacts of children entering the world, relative to children’s rights standards, on the day the claims are made.

 

 

Solution:

Fair Start is instituting a preemptive human right to a fair start in life, using children’s rights standards, to supplant the current inequitable and unsustainable human and reproductive rights regimes. We are using those standards, and zero baseline accounting around accepted standards of intergenerational justice, to assess climate reparations as family planning entitlements, inverse to wealth. The entitlements encourage collective family planning, parenting delay, readiness, and equity.

 

 

Because the legitimacy and authority of governance derives from its subjects, such a preemptive right is already inherent and practicable, and Fair Start is moving at the linguistic (with truth and reconciliation admissions), legal (e.g., preempting all damage assessment impact child welfare matters), organizational (via certification) and grassroots levels (via women’s defense collectives) to secure reparations for the accounting to assure no child is born beneath a line of minimum standards of welfare, equity, or freedom.

That line is the border between power and freedom that precedes national borders on map. Children deserve the self-determination or freedom that is required for legitimate governance – persons positioned to organize and free and equals, not the reparations scam that cause the crisis. We are all obligated to first constitute, not to any constitution that is merely derivative and conditional.

What Is Fairness at Base? Preemptive Discourses and Reparations That Change Birth and Development Conditions to Ensure Real Freedom, and Not the Freedom to Harm Causing the Climate and Other Crises Killing So Many 

Summary 

Climate reparations for kids enable political legitimacy, thus preempt all conflicting laws, and must be measured and used in a very specific way: Funding the having of children only above an ecosocial and political threshold or line of equity and thus self-determination.

Under the International Bill of Human Rights anyone can use any means effective to assist moving wealth at the top to young women in order to plan to save the next generation because constitutive entitlements always come first. Ask anyone or any organization who made a claim of creating some beneficial impact for how they accounted for the impact of children entering the world on the day the claims were made. You will find zero actual or functional protections for infants and animals almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like share equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.

Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals and nonhuman habitat humans would otherwise consume. They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because of an obscure policy mistake by the United Nations between 1948 and 1968.

How could there be a constitutive process enabling the use of collective pronouns in constitutions and covenants if each person could not choose to orient from such a norm, rather than from the directives of those claiming to represent? Had Micah Johnson, or Ashli Babbitt, known this they might have done other than they did. The world today is in crisis because we created many who could not understand what you are reading here. 

Regardless, we can fix it.

Member states to the human rights regime have no authority to protect concentrations of wealth and power holding entitlements, when that money is owed to young women who are the only ones who can have and raise kids with share equity, such that governments can actually be sovereign, actually represent the constituents born and raised by the mothers, and have actual/legitimate authority to enforce any entitlements at all. Where else would government get authority?

There is no obligation without inclusion, and no inclusion without equal influence offsets relative to zero (0, 1, 2…0). All rules should be fair; the first rule should creates rule-makers. 

Through this standard and process we will avoid impact scams that threaten to cut reparations by trillions, and increase the death count by tens of millions. The borders of human power are not lines on a map, but an ecosocial threshold/line of share equity – the only irreducible obligation. To exist is to be in a seamless web of benefit and cost with countless others. Freedom means bending those so that all make choices for themselves, not others.

We all have to work to get all children over the line as they enter the world so they can constitute their own borders, and that line is being seen as the tradition and enforced isolation of would-be parents being broken every day in favor of collective work in care groups around the world, and as activists ready to target the adult children of concentrations of wealth and power who owe the most. How could there be a “We the people ….” obligating us without a collective decision-making process? It would be physically possible. The threshold/line is the true border of human power and freedom. Fair Start is not everything, but it is the first step to all things, 

This not about population – this is relational power, on eight levels, that inverts from would-be parents lording over future generations toward measurable and legally entitled empowerment and inclusion of the vulnerable before they arrive. The wealthy can pay, or poor children will die. Those we ask to choose can either say their benefitting at deadly cost to others was correct, or refute the system at based and assist in correcting. Our UN effort inverts the system to help ensure the right result, by all means effective. 

History

Critical legal errors made between 1948 and 1968 began a series of events leading to the climate, inequity, and democracy crises killing so many today. The errors involved letting false assumptions about existing entitlements take root, ones that centered in family law and policy.

They included a narrow conception of power that focused on the use of violence by the state and its derivatives, rather than things like the power of parents over their kids, our power over the environment, how wealth lets some control others, etc. This narrowing – of human freedom – was done to protect the entitlements of wealthy families from scrutiny as the human rights regime was being formed, and at base cut the values that comprise self-determination out of the premise of who we should be.  

The assumptions bypassed ensuring democratic share equity – where each person has a minimum and measurable level of self-determination, as well as the necessary critical children’s / environmental rights, in reproductive rights systems. Instead, having children was deemed a matter personal to the parents, with no functional obligations to others – a move that allowed the mostly white officials and wealthy families that designed this standard to privilege their children and benefit from investments in unsustainable growth.

Because having kids was wrongly assumed to be more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the kids and community, freedom was – at an existential level – wrongly seen doing what one wished, not actually being positioned relative to others and one’s environment, to be free. The errors created chaos – which accounts for the sense that something unfixable is at work. 

 

This seeded a fundamental form of political illegitimacy. Rather than ensure that national sovereignty derived from the individual sovereignty of each constituent, the entitlements – through ensuring growth, vast inequity, and sub self-determination standards of child development – slowly converted broad political freedom into an attempt at economic freedom, as subjects began to crowd, distrust, disempower, and pollute each other out of town halls and into factories and shopping malls. There is no theory of law or legitimacy that can get around the basic need for share equity.

Key theorists, from Raz, to Dworkin, to Finnis, and even Kelsen – all made the same mistakes, mistaking bodily autonomy for share equity, which is now ensuring the death of millions. To think governments have authority to defend wealth made at deadly cost, when it could be used to save the lives of those it risked, is a fallacy and those engaged in it fall outside the protection of the social contract for obvious reasons.

 

 

 

Thus, demand, market valuation, legality and legitimacy, etc. – the many benchmarking values we use today – all were artificially manufactured to avoid costs that would have evaded the climate crisis, through a process of not investing enough in persons to empower them with real choice. All oughts or values derive from the idea of who – as free persons – we should be, and that begins with children’s birth and development standards pegged to concrete thresholds, like greenhouse gas emissions standards below 280 ppm. There is an objective morality marked by our relation to nature, and through it and our backgrounds, our relations to others. 

The status quo standard, the inequity/unsustainability standard, enabled collection of wealth by enabling greenwashing and other deadly impact frauds (where the claimant was doing more harm than good, by their own metrics), and by skewing cost/benefit analysis to place deadly costs on others, mostly women and children of color with no political influence. The climate crisis shows a fundamental failure in criteria for evaluating truth and value, because we never  included children as ends, versus using them as means, and as such ensured growth that overshot carrying capacities, and many children with no means to deal with the consequences.

 

 

It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” from which to live our lives until we change these facts because without a change we start by exploiting and thereby harming, rather than empowering in a way that is measurable with clear benchmarks, others. It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” if we start with zero actual protections for infants and animals, and zero actual protections is the case in our legal system today, almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.

They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because if the mistakes described above, 

And all along, it became increasingly, physically impossible for the legal system to ensure laws were made by persons who were actually representative. As share equity dissipated, so did the representatives authority, but corrupt legal institutions and their representatives ignored this – exacerbating the crisis in what might be called the “authoriscam.” The mistakes mean wealth and many other entitlements recognized after 1968 are suspect, and their legitimacy may rest on the payments of climate reparations and death debts.   

The Problem Today 

The result of the above is massive white wealth supremacy today and an accepted paradigm of colonizing future generations with our costs, with those least benefiting from the crisis suffering deadly costs. 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, male billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? The inequity/unsustainability standard is still in wide use, millions are dying, and this is just the beginning. 

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There are identity politics rising because member states sold away the democratic voice of their subjects, and national identity with it. There can’t be a meritocracy if we never included persons in a way that allowed them to assess and determine what merit means, and the climate crisis hints whatever criteria were used were way off.

We have to revise all cost/benefit models now ensuring inaccurate results because they are used an underlying  democratic standard to obligate people to follow laws, but never actually included them as democratic constituents, but rather exploited them as economic means for growth. We now owe the difference to avoid children dying in heat waves we created, and then put them in. In other words, leaders defined terms like “sustainable” and “green” based on ensuring growth-based profits for their rich, and normally white, kids. They did not benchmark them based on the actual harm, on eight levels, killing millions of black infants.

This is the fox guarding the henhouse. Leaders today are assuming legitimacy to hide actual harm with low legal standards, the legitimacy of which was based on actually avoiding the harm. Legal institutions can use legal fictions after they have authority – they cannot use them to get authority, and imagine self-determination and inclusion/empowerment when the values are simply not there.

 

 

What is equity and self-determination?

Yes a woman needs the autonomy of terminating a fetus that would otherwise come to rule her life, but if she then dies in a heatwave because she has insufficient resources she was never really free, and anything that said or suggested it was “green” without actually having done what was necessary to avoid her death – using at least eight metrics – is greenwashing, and one way the metrics add together is to assess whether she had an equal and influential role in determining the rules that would have limited the power others had over her. Here, it seems, not much.

Everything we think, say, or do, begins with a collective orientation that is hidden behind the illusion of human bodily autonomy that created the climate crisis, and if we are to be free, in that orientation the addition of new constituents must offset the influence of each constituent by one, relative to a restored nonhuman world. That requires a threshold beneath which children should not be born, and above which any may be born with a collective exchange in care model collective planning that ensure offset via the threshold or line. Fair Start will soon be suing to fund accounts that would fund the thresholds

 

 

Much of today’s law and policy is based on the idea that humans act of out of self-interest. But there is a more fundamental driver of human behavior, linked to humans’ inclination to imitate rather than innovate beneficial behavior, in which humans choose criteria to evaluate truth and value that align with their (usually privileged) birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality. Not having kids out of self-interest in the climate crisis mitigates harm. Imagining you are saving animals in the Anthropocene, and leading others to see you that way, framing reality as such, when the entitlements around your birth positionality did more harm than good to animals, is deadly.

Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the accurate linguistic creation of power relations. The fundamental mistake we all seem to be making is that our obligation is inverted: It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as first obligated to persons who will parent, 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 equitable positioning.

Young women would have more justification to use coercion to get the resources they need, if to constitute, than the unrepresentative officers with guns defending wealth have to use it. This primacy of a discourse and the 1, and process inverting the direction of power, allows us to name high profile individuals that should be engaged. They are treated as members of a democracy, which is only constituted of individuals, and not as members of something that makes them beyond reach. And leaders of media urging racist and genocidal pronatalism in the climate crisis deserve what they get.

 

 

The Fix

There is a move underway at the UN and in many nations to correct the errors, and preempt any conflicting law or policy, rather than use the fundamental entitlement system that caused the crisis.

• Using the old standard and recreating the fantasy world of self-determination – even in the most basic language of impact we see everyday – that caused the climate crisis interferes with measuring actual harm for the crisis who owes what to whom. 
• The risk of retaliatory violence is growing as temperatures rise and the wealth – the deadly costs of which fell on others –  is denied the victims. In fact, much of the violence – including mass shootings – are misreported, with media omitting the political drivers of the acts. In terms of bearing the correct legal (inclusion in one’s democracy in a measurably empowering way) burdens and barriers, it should be more likely that leaders of concentrations of wealth and power die for not saving children, than children die for not being saved. But violence can be evaded. 
• The solution is clear and many are moving towards it: Measurable share equity, or having an equal and influential role in limiting the climatological, social and other forms of influence others have over you, and that harm your self-determination. 
• Member states to the human rights regime have no authority to protect concentrations of wealth and power holding entitlements, when that money is owed to young women who are the only ones who can have and raise kids with share equity, such that governments can actually be sovereign, actually  represent the constituents born and raised by the mothers, and have actual/legitimate authority to enforce any entitlements at all. Where else would government get authority? There is no “we the people” without each individual being measurably empowered in that collective, and if one tried to benefit from as system law and order premised on inclusion such that others are left to self-determine as ends of offset each voice and influence equally relative to nature (e.g., 0,1, 2 . . .), there should exist none paying low costs and getting high returns by treating others as means. One is either using accurate, constitutive and legitimating language and action, or not. 
• There is precedent for crossing lines to ensure the wealth is moved, like the Defiance work of the African National Congress. The key to this move is disabling current illegitimate entitlements – which drive everything – through the revelation of the fraud they create, and the death debt that encumber them and can be collected any anyone, anywhere.

 

 

An Inescapable Binary 

The inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard that should have been used by 1968, represents an unavoidable binary distinction. It differentiates along at least eight concrete values/metrics that measure the space between self v. other determining persons, (permissible emissions, political representative ratios, children’s wealth, etc.) and would result in trillions of dollars difference in reparations, and millions of lives saved.

The UN and related domestic legal actions implementing the preemption – dozens – would 1) standardize public benefit claims to avoid deadly and fundamental impact fraud 2) standardize climate and related crises loss and damage evaluations to account for all actual harm relative to real world baselines necessary for legitimate political systems and entitlements, 3) recognize the partial preemption of any conflicting entitlements with this process, and 4) recognize the right to entitle future generations with self-determination and share equity in their democracies as the basis of national legitimacy, and by all means effective.

This standardizes around actual harm (under 280 parts per million), rather than using the same standard – under pressure from the same wealthy families funding greenwashing – that caused the crisis (over 400). That’s the fox guarding the henhouse. Under this standard, every child born beneath the line creates a death debt the children of the wealthy carry. And to make some beg for charity when the thing is owed as a human right violates human dignity, and invites direct justice. 

The threshold (which is the first point of political relativity for everything) is operationalized via a debt/savings account and a more collective form of family planning, and uses investments in a wide variety of resources including delay, time, cash, corporate shares, obligations that preempt taxes, time commitments, training and aid internships, etc., as well as parenting delay towards readiness, relocation, education and training, co-investments, etc.

 

 

The threshold, through debt and savings, can incentivize both the wealthy and vulnerable to change family planning, covering one’s debt before having kids, or alternatively, adding co-payments to the accounts before having kids. Accounts for particular collectives, care groups, fund kids only over the line, and also determine how actions can unwittingly move the line up, making it harder to get kids over.

The threshold is not a human choice. It is an objective measure of actual harm created by a fragile ecosystem and human needs that determine the impacts of birth, developmental and emancipatory conditions. The threshold is that, from which deviation caused massive harm. It is the antithesis of the fantasy world of “sustainability” created by wealthy persons who seek to now use it to minimize justice.

Piloting the change 

There are pilots underway in various regions, including the United States, and while the UN human rights regime preemptively mandates the measurable threshold, activists are quickly evolving away from the eurocentric framework and towards Afrocentric care-based subsystems that mimic the origins of democracy in women’s care circles, 

This process begins and centers on a discourse of intergenerational truth and reconciliation and mirrors the African National Congress Defiance anti-apartheid model of inverting illegitimacy and illegal entitlements. It uses a one question language test referred to as the constitutive discourse which converts the abstract preambles of constitutive legal instruments, which are needed to legitimate our power relations, to functional and inclusive processes. 

 

 

A discourse to accelerate the change 

The old social contract went something like men with money and guns writing rules for all others to follow, and drawing borders around themselves. This version sets a line – or border between freedom and power – beneath which children should not be born, and uses collective family planning discussions to get all kids over the line. Those kids can then write and follow their own rules.

The line or threshold is a full-dimensional border that can be used comparable to other apartheid-dismantling efforts.

There is a concrete discourse that urges target audiences to factor in the impact of children entering the world on any day the members of the audience made inaccurate social benefit claims publicly using the unsustainability standard which inevitably (we start everything we do with a decision, on the binary, about who we should be) contradicts the values of the speaker, and then ensuring the target audiences investing in young women using the fairness metrics as compensation for the fraud, and benefit at cost, that led to the crises.

 

 

The test lets anyone know which side of the binary someone falls – the inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard. It lets us know who is punching down on the most vulnerable, in a universal circle of accountability, inclusion, and listening. And it ensures future generations will understand issue like what is covered here – which is not the case for most persons living today. 

Many concentrations of wealth are retaliating, and taking extreme measures to hide the errors, avoid climate and other liability, and minimize or scuttle reparations. Defensive litigation is coming. Given the stakes as temperatures rise and inequity grows, there is the serious risk of violence. We need to make sure entitlements minimize that risk, not exacerbate it. 

 

 

Future actions will test the model:

If a poor family needs access to air conditioning to survive, we will ensure the trespass laws defending the homes of the wealthy who benefited from the climate crisis cost-externalization scheme are preempted, and those in need get access. We will also ensure the death debt of concentrations of wealth attach to the adult children of the debtors, and will eventually be collected. 

This is the binary choice, and every day we lose by letting debtors hide and avoid it: We can leave illegitimate wealth where it is or move it and save innocent lives as we invert the political system from top down coercion by non-representatives in what amounts to spamocacy, to bottom up investment and measurable inclusion. 

 

 

Truth and reconciliation can mitigate the risk and unify around the value of measurable self-determination. Nothing has a more just, beneficial and liberating impact on children, animals, and the environment.

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.

The framework standards – moving towards fluid borders, and functional constitutional conventions

• 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.
• 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?
• 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? How should we treat those that defined “green” to allow wealthy, white families to make money on growth-based investments, rather than a green that would have saved black infants’ lives.
• 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.
• 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?

 

• 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? The test for this high level of trust is called the lesser power asymmetry. 
• 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. What are humans able to do if treated as ends? 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?
• 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. Intergenerational justice is hard because humans – even the greatest social justice warriors – often want to privilege their children and use it as an excuse to harm others.

 

Measuring Loss and Damage: 

There are efforts underway to measure and award loss and damage for climate change. But all fundamentally recreate the error that drove much of the crisis after 1948: The absence of sufficient environmental protections in family planning regimes, both to limit emissions well below 300 ppm and to ensure minimum levels of welfare and resources for all children to deal with adversity, like rising temperatures.

The current loss and damage evaluations ignore this fundamental error, and would award based on arbitrary baselines that minimize the awards. Moreover, they ignore irrefutable arguments regarding any national legitimacy and political obligation deriving from the measurable self-determination of its constituents, that would treat high-evaluation reparations as preemptive of any conflicting laws and policies. The action before UN seeks to standardize this evaluation, and avoid “the fox guarding the henhouse” with the concentrations of wealth and power, including governments, that caused the crisis dealing with it in a way that benefits them at deadly cost to others.

 

 

In Walden we learn that a basket weaver could not expect to succeed in the “free” markets being created by those colonizing his lands. But even Thoreau missed the fundamental value of nature in constituting power relations towards equity and freedom. To the extent the beadworkers of  Amboseli face the same threat from the likes of Elon Musk and his sort, we can make harsh examples of moving their illegitimate wealth as a fundamental act of liberation. To use god’s standard, nature, to entitle justice is the avenging hand of a higher power. The beadworkers offerings are inherently valuable, as we ensure we treat others as ends, not means. 

Why then engage the UN, or member states at all, if there is an authority higher binding them? They become instrumental, and useful, but without the withering lie of having the last word, and as demands for intergenerational justice stretch into decades of action that view will lift those demanding share equity.

TAKE ACTION: Use the discourse and truth and reconciliation above to bifurcate concentrations of wealth and power, whether an individual or institution, into free persons and unfree barriers. Rank the latter by their ability to make the change you know is needed, and scale up influence on the most influential barriers until they break. This work deals with the first border between you, any kids you have or care about, and freedom.