Leading literature on political theory suggests we can recoup those costs by all means effective because fair creation norms – the ensure climate restoration and birth equity – precede government’s authority to issue property rights to the contrary.
The immigration issue she raises does not alter this problem – those children will be born somewhere, and rather than exploiting them Prarthana should be promoting systems that ensure they are born and raised in ecosocial conditions that comply with the Children’s Convention.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Prarthana at her LinkedIn to change course and promote investing in children, not exploiting them for growth.
And urge Fortune’s editor here to run articles that build a better future, not more of the same thinking that created the ecocide and inequity we face today. Fortune has the resources to improve our future, or continue systems that hurt people. They should choose the future.
The climate crisis is causing many to forgo children, even when they want them. Why consign a child to such an uncertain and dangerous future?
How did this situation develop? Clearly having large and unsustainable families impacts the right of future persons to themselves have children, as growth degrades our ecosystems.
Fair Start helps shift unjust concentrations of wealth and power towards funding policies that instead empower all children with equal opportunities in life and a natural, biodiverse environment, by incentivizing and entitling well-planned, well-located, sustainable and more equitable families. In short, we promote fundamental justice and freedom by actually accounting for, and improving, fundamental power relations between people, and between people and their ecologies. This is not charity – this is fundamental justice, or ensuring that the true costs of wealth are paid back into communities in the most effective way possible.
What’s the solution to the Baldwin problem? How do we prevent some families from impacting others families, and violating their rights?
TAKE ACTION: Urge Alec Baldwin – @AlecBaldwin – and Hilaria Baldwin – https://www.instagram.com/hilariabaldwin/?hl=en – to support just family planning policies that do not put costs on others.
So if we wish to make the world a better place, we have to change the way we plan families.
Fair Start helps shift unjust concentrations of wealth and power towards funding policies that instead empower all children with equal opportunities in life and a natural, biodiverse environment, by incentivizing and entitling well-planned, well-located, sustainable and more equitable families. In short, we promote fundamental justice and freedom by actually accounting for, and improving, fundamental power relations between people, and between people and their ecologies. This is not charity – this is fundamental justice, or ensuring that the true costs of wealth are paid back into communities in the most effective way possible.
Dietary change also does little to ensure equal opportunities among children, or to build democracy.
If we want to look for the root causes of the recent slew of mass shootings, look to our family and family planning policies. They determine fundamental power relations, the degree to which people are and feel empowered, and – in early childhood – many of the psychological capabilities that determine how we act later in life.
Want to end mass shootings, many of which occur because people feel disempowered? Help Fair Start get rid of bad family policies.
TAKE ACTION: The United Nations is failing its mission by refusing to use the Children’s Rights Convention as a standard for family planning. Urge them to change course.
TAKE ACTION: Mass shootings are a cost of family policies that benefitted just. Target them – people like the former CEO of Exxon – for benefitting from a system of growth that puts costs on others.
The Climate Crisis Happened Because World Leaders Evaded Regenerative Family Policies. Enacting Those Policies Now Is a Must Do.
Anytime you hear that something is sustainable, or even better, regenerative, consider asking the person making that claim what family policies underly it. Businesses and sham nonprofits claim to be sustainable all the time. And yet inevitably they are intentionally undoing progress on things like climate emissions by pushing population-growth policies that produce unmaintainable profits through cheap labor, and lots of consumers.
That lie – using family policies to undo with one what we do with the other – fundamentally created the climate crisis. Taking the money the lie created, from companies like Exxon, and using it to fund truly regenerative family reforms does the greatest good in the long run.
Don’t confuse chaos with freedom. Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions, the impact of bad parenting on children and communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. And that limiting starts where power begins, with better family policies that focus on what children need, and the degree to which we are willing to actually empower (versus exploit) them. There is no other way to enable people in a democratic and bottom-up way. The act of deriving political obligation and freedom from something other than a just creation norm that actually accounts for fair power relations is a scam perpetrated on the vulnerable by powerful people.
Free people – on both ends of that creation – will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple inversion test, in functional democracies where children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the democracy-building Children’s Rights Convention.
That test shows whether someone is orienting from a fundamentally just or unjust position. Fair and empowering creation is what obligates us to follow the law because it ensures we help make it. And we can start empowering people with discourse and direct action that makes property rights conditional on investing what we need in children and paying the true costs of wealth. Property is contingent on our constituting democracies where we are actually empowered – in order to obtain the resources to fund better family planning and stop things – like constant violence – that flow at the bottom from disempowerment. Many funders are recognizing this and acting accordingly, and you can too.
Every week parents are arrested for severely abusing their own young children, in some cases torturing them. In news stories, you may never connect that to the fact that scientists have now determined the world has completely failed to reach its goal of avoiding at least a deadly 1.5C temperature rise due to the climate crisis.
But the truth is the stories are connected.
These problems both flow fundamentally from family policies that do not comply with the Children’s Rights Convention, assuring children – especially infants – the eco-social conditions they need to actually constitute just and free communities in the long run. The Convention functionally requires a natural environment and parents who are ready before they have kids. Nations ignored these requirements in family planning policies to make money by exploiting people as economic inputs. And many charities went along with the lie, often because funders pressured them to.
We are fixing that, targeting unjust concentrations of wealth that formed because of the failed family policies, the ones that allowed massive population growth rather than investing more in women and children.
TAKE ACTION: URGE EXXON TO PAY WHAT IT OWES TO SOLVE THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM DRIVING SO MANY CRISES.
The Council for the District of Columbia made history recently by moving towards #birthequity with baby bonds. Why should only rich kids get trust funds? Isn’t freedom about equality of opportunity?
TALE ACTION: Urge the Council to adopt Fair Start, and you can also work from the bottom up – urging relatively wealthy residents of the Washington D.C. area to lead by example and support Fair Start moves by donating in ways that all children get a fair start in life.
Given that the majority of people will be those who live in the future changing behavior, might be best thought of as having and raising kids well. What the heck does that mean? In the Twentieth Century, based on significant developments in the fields of child development, civil society came largely to agree – in what would eventually be called the Children’s Rights Convention – on the birth and development conditions children deserve. These resources would create a world we should all value – filled with nature, equality of opportunity, and democracies where each person would matter.
What went wrong? Governments and big businesses colluded to reinterpret human rights regimes to ensure population-driven economic growth, rather than child-centric family planning consistent with the human rights regime. That move – over time – created the world we live in today – beset by the climate crisis and massive inequity. The men that engineered this scam robbed us of true/participatory democracy, and the freedom of consensual governance, in order to build concentrations of wealth and power.
They used poor family planning and growth to slowly push and crowd people out of town halls and into shopping malls, robbing us of our freedom.
We might be inclined to resist such forms of protests because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that are those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.
We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do – including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.
We can think of the child described above as we engage them – and anyone who opposes giving kids a fair start in life – for they are fundamentally to blame for what happened to that child. They reject a change in the way we plan families that would have prevented the child’s death, in order to ensure and exploit growth.
Children are the future. Isn’t that what everyone says? It is a lovely sentiment. Sadly, very little is done to secure that future. Without a fair start to life, millions of children are doomed. This is where Fair Start Movement comes in.
We believe that all children deserve the same rights; they should all be born at the same starting line. This line is more of a zig-zag, though, as those in power invest in keeping the wealthy at the top and everyone else to fend for themselves. And as we have seen, this method is only making things worse for the rest of us.
Fair Start Movement focuses on two things: (1) push for family planning practices where would-be parents wait until they are mentally, emotionally, and financially ready to have children, (2) educating people on why sustainable families are better for the individuals and society as our planet’s resources are depleting quickly, and (3) advocate for policies that invest in programs and services that help all children, not only those born into wealthy families.
For as long as I can remember, the message has been “having children is your purpose, and the more children the better!” I made a choice of not having children because honestly, I do not want to bring a child into the world as it is, especially with the environmental issues we face. But there are millions of families out there who will continue to have children and we need to change things for them.
What we have been doing as a society is not working. When one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with around 720 BILLIONAIRES, how can we justify unhoused, starving children? Things need to change.
