And because he is in the business of fossil fuels, the wealth he “owns” was made at cost – through the climate crisis – to those in the future. The cost of much of his family’s wealth could be the death of millions.
John T. Raymond is great example of the climate trolley problem, recently covered in Newsweek. What if you could save millions by engaging one man? You can. John. T Raymond is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, money made by externalizing costs and risks on others.
One could argue that the positive law entitlements described in the first link of this paragraph must control in the absence of agreement otherwise, but unpacked that boils down to doing what the government – the men with guns – says, because it is the government. But that, as a reason, is the opposite of the ideal of American freedom.
This is all beyond liberalism or conservatism. We might equally target the lead at the New York Times – Joseph Kahn – for his role, his use of power, in holding up the family system that created John’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: Contact John here through his agents, and urge him to do the right thing, or find and reason with him lawfully and peacefully in person and we will publicize your bravery. Free persons will limit and decentralize the influence others have over them (including climatological influence) by physically constituting just communities, relative to a neutral baseline like a restored climate and nature, such that we are not interfering with the freedom or relative self-determination of others.
John, using some of his wealth to give back to future generations and reorient what we mean by being free, could lead in this regard.
Want to be effective? Target other choke point high-value targets like Vladimir Putin (who financed western oil companies) or Joseph Kahn, lead editor at the New York Times, who urges women to have kids to in order to further grow the economy that is ensuring the climate crisis.
Almost every horrible thing – from child and animal torture to deadly inequality, to unbearable heat waves – we see in the world today was fundamentally caused decades ago, circa 1968, by wealthy world leader’s decision to adopt minimalist universal child welfare and family planning policies.
The most just and effective solution way to reverse the minimalist policies would be to treat birth and developmental equity as the fundamental human right. We could use that baseline to recoup extreme wealth (the true costs of which were placed on others) to fund family planning and birth equity entitlements that promote climate and biodiversity restoration, allow young women to equality of opportunity for their children, parental delay to ensure they have children where, when and with which particular resources that will allow the child to thrive, and through delay ensure a universal ethic of smaller or more ecocentric families.
One can imagine modifying GMI systems via a progressive scale of democracy-building payments, inverse to wealth and income and contingent on positionality, that either charged wealthy young women for having a child before their 27th birthday and/or without certain parental readiness benchmarks, or on the other end of the wealth spectrum, covered significant incentives consistently paid out for them to build birth equity and ensure delay. This scale could be combined with other factors that amount to “survive, self-determine, and thrive” financial kits for the most vulnerable children funded by the parents of the least vulnerable children. Dysfunctional versions of such GMI systems already exist and could be easily modified around a universal metric.
We can move that money – which was made at cost to others – to improve birth and development or leave it at the top and millions will die.
Many concentrations of wealth and power have no intention of compensating those they have harmed, and one tactic they use to avoid paying involves using fake activism and nonprofits to decoy many away from this reform.
I worked for several such charities, was urged to omit the truth, and saw the lies firsthand. Concentrations of wealth and power often don’t openly oppose social justice movements. Instead, they imitate, coaptate, and redirect them.
Charities that seem to promote racial and other forms of equity – using employment or minority business preferences – will quietly support family policies that ensure black children are born with 1/10th the wealth of white children, because of the history of slavery and colonization. By ignoring equity in creation as a means towards autonomy for all, they actually exacerbate the situation, entrenching a left v. right dynamic that could be avoided. For example, we use family planning as a vehicle to redistribute resources rather than government, because we value the efficiency of early intervention as well as the equity of a fair start in life.
Everyone has used terms that expressed or implied public benefit that were inaccurate. Measured against the true north of human and nonhuman health, the background systems they usually did not question and in fact implied the legitimacy of, were benefitting the claimant while unleashing significant and increasing harm to infant humans and nonhumans alike. That true north – the harm – is what we can use, regardless of dysfunctional human political processes and language, to assess damages and create new policy. Avoid this untruth by asking the right questions. Look for words the persons and organizations you engage use – words like green, eco, sustainable, equitable, democratic, human-rights based, humane, restorative, regenerative. These and many other terms are inaccurate if not backed by consistent family policies that ensure minimum levels of wellbeing, equity, democracy, nature, and a sustainable right to have children for all, through birth equity entitlements and wealth GMI distributions that ensue parental delay and readiness, equal opportunities for all children, and smaller or more ecocentric families. Many are getting paid to omit the truth at deadly cost to others. Knowing these things – you can demand the truth.
That inequity, coupled with growth, has ensured that many will die as the climate crisis unfolds, with those who benefitted from the crisis using their wealth to thrive while the least wealthy face the greatest risks. The stakes for a correction are high, with those who benefitted from creating the crisis on the verge of escaping its harm.
A nonviolent revolution moving wealth from the top to fund all of this could ensure freedom for many.
In other words, we have many seeking liberties, and a small group blocking it. A peaceful revolution based on fair starts in life for all kids would by more evolved than other revolutions, happening at the true border of human power: Our creation and development, which is where true self-determination occurs.
Are the charities you fund undoing their own good? Find out before you give, and if organizations do not promote climate restoration via birth equity, and admit mistakes that led to the climate crisis, find out why. Where do your organizations fit in the timeline below?
Many other organizations are implicated in this scam.
But there is a fix.The Tell the Truth campaign.
Be effective.
Just ask the right questions of any person or group claiming to do good: Ask anyone claiming to do any form of good, whether they are conservative, liberal or otherwise inclined, how they have accounted for children being born into the world, and whether they are investing in those children to give them a fair start, or exploiting them for growth. Do they support family planning entitlements that ensure parental delay and readiness, relocation, leveling the playing field for all kids, and smaller or more ecocentric families? Or are they putting millions of innocent lives at risk to make money?
Find out where the organizations – from foundations, to companies, to media, to political parties etc. – you support fit into the FamScam timeline below. Some will claim this is not their issue. How can we do anything that does not involve other persons, and the relationships created through family policy? We can’t. What those insisting on ignoring family reforms really mean is that they are choosing status-quo policies from which they benefit at deadly cost to others. They are choosing injustice, often to benefit their rich kids at cost to others.
2018: The Animal Legal Defense Fund files a federal suit to reverse this process, using an animal liberation or ecocentric standard for climate reforms. The claim is simple – to constitute a free and just society first requires climate restoration via a right to ecosocial birth equity, and this is consistent with guarantees of a right to autonomy in the U.S. Constitution. The suit calls for ppm reductions a third or more greater than the Paris Agreement.
2018-2021: The anthropocentric-based Paris Agreement on climate reform is seen to be a failure, as average temperatures as expected to well exceed 1.5C. At the same time the Fund comes under sustained pressure from Our Children’s Trust and many funders, both of whom embrace an anthropocentric over ecocentric policies for climate reform and climate reparations, to drop the litigation.
Spring2022: The Fund and other organizations quietly withdraw the litigation, choosing status quo policies that minimize climate reparations, and hide their priority over property entitlements, putting millions at risk while many in leadership at the organizations personally benefit. That same year WHO reports rising deaths from an accelerating climate crisis.
June 2023: Additional allegations about the Fund come to light in a long-form article, including an investigation into the Executive Director who withdrew the litigation and was subsequently replaced. The article affirms racism and other issues consistent with the organization’s refusal to promote racial equity in family and environmental policies.
July 2023: Fair Start Movement, in conjunction with the California’s Green Initial Public Offering (IPO), announces a pilot Fair Start Certification standard, and green/growth-washing filings targeting nonprofits, companies, foundations, etc. engaged in the FamScam for deadly harm caused to at-risk victims in nations around the world. The standard 1) uses international human rights law, not purely domestic standards, which is required for the climate crisis – but in a way that includes domestic remedies, 2) sets the highest standard for climate reparations rather than undercutting victims’ claims, 3) mandates direct family-based reparations, which have the greatest impact, and 4) corrects the baseline error or fallacy discussed above, including climate migration and pro-labor/equity employment policy changes.
The Fair Start certification program is a fundamentally a human rights certification. It’s standards track capital itself, and forthcoming state attorney-general complaints, Lanham and other tort litigation – tied to climate loss and damage cases – will target relevant green/growth-washing claim, in many contexts. Because green/growth-washing comes from business, charities, media, politicians, academics, etc., all of whom are responding to capital which is predisposed to green/growth-wash. Our lives and freedom are determined by obligation, and the dominant one is law. The fundamental creation of power/obligation relations – our birth and development – should have been determined over the last several decades by incentivizing resources that would have ensured birth equity for all children, and equal influence over the laws under which we must live. That never happened, but climate reparations are a chance to change.
TAKE ACTION: Ask anyone claiming to do any form of good, whether they are conservative, liberal or otherwise inclined, how they have accounted for children being born into the world, and whether they are investing in those children to give them a fair start, or exploiting them for growth. Do they support family planning entitlements that ensure parental delay and readiness, relocation, leveling the playing field for all kids, and smaller or more ecocentric families? Or are they putting millions of innocent lives at risk to make money?
That’s exactly what many businesses and the nonprofits they support have been doing of late and the climate costs to our freedom, and to future generations, are astronomical.
How do we stop the #Famscam?
TAKE ACTION:
Target companies like Exxon to admit their role in this, and to pay the reparations they owe future generations. Bad family policies that disempower people are causing extreme violence in our communities, hitting innocent victims rather than those at the top who are responsible for and who benefit from the policies.
Urge any nonprofit you support to tell the #wholetruth, and to disclose their family policies – including internal employment and benefit policies – and how they have impacted and will impact the organization’s work and claims of success.
A specific example of this is when civil society groups knowingly undo claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel Laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
Humans are adept at fooling themselves, whether thinking the Earth is flat, or that our ecosystems can absorb limitless amounts of pollution – like climate emissions – before failing. Many might believe they are not racist, but when put to an empirical test, show massive racial bias.
It’s certainly possible that humans could have imagined and theorized concepts like justice, democracy, freedom and liberty without positioning themselves to actually experience those things. The luminary John Rawls is well known for characterizing justice as fairness, and if the first rule in any set of rules is that which accounts for our creation and existence, then for justice – and the freedom he saw as contingent upon that – to exist our creation should be fair. But that’s never been the case, with some children being born into poverty while others are born with million-dollar trust funds, and generations of past inflicting their destruction of the environment – including our climate – on future generations.
Growth limits each person’s time at the podium of democracy.
If government derives from the people, then we have to consent to the power each one of us does and could exercise over one another. And that requires changing the way we plan families to make it more just, at the very least recognizing that children have more at stake in the process of creation that their parents, and using things like the Children’s Convention as a standard for family planning. That move would allow us more consent to each other’s power – ecologically – by restoring nature as a buffer that stops companies like Exxon from threatening us though the climate crisis, and socially by empowering people in a democratic way and with equal opportunities in life.
This leads to an impossibility theorem: If we reject fairness in creation, we either have to 1) reject the idea that government and the obligation to follow the law flows from people as the ultimate authority, 2) we have to reject the idea that people should be politically equal, e.g. have equal time at the podium, 3) we have to reject the idea that people should be empowered in order to make government legitimate, or 4) we have to define power in strange ways that quickly begin to exclude things like climate emissions and bad parenting, and make no sense. “Power” means any form of human influence, which means national borders on a map are nonsense, and the true border of power/consent is the norm that accounts for our creation.
Truly free people will ensure they can choose – through Fair Start – who has power over them. Conversely, preconstitutional people, or precons, will block this process. Targeting them to make public examples of their harming others may be the most effective way to change the direction of our future.
The Children’s Rights Convention sets out what children need to physically constitute just, sustainable and legitimate democracies, and it was designed to address the fundamental or familial political relations that make up the systems we all support (through taxes and otherwise), benefit from, are responsible for, and from which we cannot separate. What we often think of as population is really a matter of fundamental power relations.
And yet the current and almost universal paradigm for family and population policy does nothing to ensure all children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the Convention. That paradigm is based on what is called the constitutive fallacy: Basing our individual obligation to follow the law on things like top down written constitutions rather than just and sustainable family policies that actually empower people bottom up to constitute just and legitimate nations, and do and should account for our actual relations and lived experiences. Law and policy derive from basic systems of rights, which are mandatory obligations.
The powerful do not need those obligations; the vulnerable, including nonhumans and future generations, do.
Who we should be, in terms of the norms that create and develop us, precede and justify what we do. And not accounting for this fact, in all we do, leads to misleading results and a fantasy world of progress that does not exist. And yet many funders have pushed ineffective and distracting projects because those projects do not threaten the fundamental power structure, and its role in degrading democracy.
We can change this paradigm by recognizing that the extreme concentrations of wealth built today were created by not having to comply with the expensive and growth-reducing ecosocial requirements of the Convention, and by redistributing that wealth in the form of family planning reparations and entitlements that move the world towards the restored climates and natural democracies required by human rights.
Free people will condition their obligation to follow the law and respect property rights on this change, and on being democratically empowered using a simple inversion test, because only these changes ensure they will not be impacted by others – through even subtle things like the climate crisis and bad parenting – against their will. The obligation to follow the law stems from systems being fair and free, and systems start with family policy.
But their analysis misses the key question: How are we actually empowering people to participate in making the rules under which they must live, and limiting the power others have over them – including the destructive power inflicted by the climate crisis?
That solution could be as simple as steeply redistributive baby bond legislation designed to incentivize family planning that actually gives all children equal opportunities in life, socially and ecologically. There is no need to ignore the long run threat, while dealing with immediate ones.
Take action: Urge @dleonhardt to cover the story that really matters – how we work together to ensure a natural and democratic future.
