Fair Start Movement

Category: Freedom & Intergenerational Justice

Fair Starts in Life and Telling the Truth: Dividing the Just from the Unjust to Ensure Freedom

Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk, did more to harm our values and missions than any entities have done good.

The Fair Start Movement offers a transformative approach to building a just, sustainable, and equitable world by focusing on equitable opportunities at birth. Why would we tolerate family systems that treat children of color as worth a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children, and deserving of exponentially more risk of dying in the climate crisis? Our research shows altering reproductive rights systems to ensure children’s rights could save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars, and that there is no legitimate system of valuation that does not start with reparative ecologies benchmarked to infant health and political equity.

From an FSM activist: “A friend and I consistently debate environmentalism. He was born to a wealthy family, enlarged that wealth by holding real estate, the value of which increased because of growth-based demand in California. That wealth – made at horrific environmental cost to mostly children of color – allows him not to work, and to elevate his own children’s choices in life even as other children are born into early deaths. That wealth allows him to travel – even enjoying access to private surf locations local surfers can never afford.”

Climate change and inequality are interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it.

Fair Start activists came together because in the nonprofits in which we have previously worked, our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, was doing more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. And in many cases those organizations went out of their way to hide this. Liability for this will be litigated soon in various fora, including climate tribunals in Africa.

Key Question: “What are you doing to ensure children are born into conditions that don’t undo the benefits of the work you’re doing?” Visual: Infographic showing wealth inequality and its cascading effects (education, health, housing, and climate vulnerability).

Addressing the root causes of inequality and environmental degradation is essential to breaking cycles of systemic harm. The unfairness of the birth lottery robbed us of not only legitimacy, but freedom. There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable.

Inequality and climate change create cascading challenges for children, impacting their health, safety, and development. One of our grassroots partners in Africa lost a 300k pledge when the funder saw the organization calling for birth equity reparations. Charity and inequity yes, fairness not so much.

Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, did more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. We all benefited from this, to one degree or another.

Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.

By ensuring just conditions at birth, we can address root causes of inequality, build resilience, and protect future generations. It’s irrefutable that the authority to govern derives from the governed – from each person having an equitable share or slice of political influence. But family policies have quietly broken the link, degrading democracy at a literally existential level as massive, birth-based disparities in influence grow and the average voice is diluted, drowned out in the crowd.

Fair Start’s intersectional and proactive strategies deliver impactful, scalable solutions for systemic change. Why we need it?

World leaders moved after 1948 to conflate the act of having and not having children under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than treating the former as requiring political equity for the child. This hid the nature of freedom, and the equity each has in their political system, by privatizing the creation of political relations. And it led to the measuring, assessing and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards meant to take oneself out of one’s birth and development context, ensuring children of color were treated as deserving less and placing them at increased risk. This was the hiding, linguistically, of birthright white supremacy and massive death debt with a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation, hiding the need for nations to invest equitably in each child just to have basic authority over citizens – to be “representative.”

This is how we get to a world where leaders can say we are underpopulated, when we have exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity, degraded that capacity, disenfranchised the majority of citizens, and ensured the deaths of millions as temperatures rise.

A few moves we are making:

Tell the Truth Campaign: Litigation to set new standards for environmental and equity disclosures. We can legally require disclosures contrasting claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alters that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs.

Celebrity Role Model Outreach: Engaging celebrities to advocate for the Fair Start model.

Fair Start Justice and Law Reform: Policy changes addressing intergenerational wealth inequality and climate migration.

Fair Start Climate Litigation: Redefining constitutional freedoms to include equitable birth conditions. The work will include unfair competition cases requiring disclosure of how growth undid claimed impacts, and interventions to litigation defrauding victims of climate reparations. Why do we need this? One of our activists was urged to withdraw litigation that would have set accurate measures for climate harm to children, rather than using the “fox guarding the henhouse” measures governments under pressure from the wealthy have created.

Prevent Child Abuse Before It Starts: Legislative reforms to reduce abuse and neglect through Fair Start Orders.

Fair Start Equity-Based AI Reforms: Ensuring AI development includes measurable equity-based family planning standards.

Fair Start Reparations: Projects like the Fertility Delay Fund and climate reparations pilot programs.

Microfinance for Family Planning: Interest-free loans to support equitable family planning.

Fairness Protests: Peaceful actions demanding climate reparations from major polluters.

The Tell the Truth and Act Campaign sets a new standard for accountability, fostering systemic change and equity for future generations. We need fair start, and Fairness Fridays, because while donors loved Meatless Mondays, the inequitable growth driving vegan food sales did much more harm than dietary change good. We have seen “animal rights” funders choosing growth-based food reforms that did more harm to animals than they were doing good, and just to make money, while holding themselves out as animal saviors to the public.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

February 7, 2025
The Second American Revolution? Fake Liberals Ensured Musk and the Climate Crisis. Real Change Goes Beyond Left v. Right.

In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders evaded future children’s interests and political equity as a basis for reproductive rights, mostly likely because it would have required heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions.

Leaders on the left and the right conflated by defining power very narrowly – as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence, so one would be free to terminate pregnancies, only to now die in a heat wave because one had no influence over climate policy, and could not afford air conditioning.

Read the story of what occurred here.

The lack of investment directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth, did good because the outcomes today involve projections of millions dying in the climate crisis.

Those efforts would have also inevitably treated children of color as deserving a fraction of the resources and exponentially more risk, meaning that today billions of persons are at extreme risk from a climate crisis they had little to no role in causing.

We know that this did more harm than good because evading children’s interests brought them into conditions that not only violated their rights, but thereby degraded – through things like extreme heat – the capacity of their ecologies to support what all children need. That inequitable growth simultaneously disenfranchised the average voter, seeding vast political inequity and blocking their ability to halt what was unfolding.

There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc.

It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy.

Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. The omission of information on child entry conditions hides liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids.

The fix?

As described in detail below, an effective solution if to use measurable standards for true social justice and ecological restoration to ensure accurate climate reparations pegged to the self-determination of each child entering the world. Because the creation of one’s positionality relative to others and ecologies is legally preemptive, it enables drastic action to recover reparations.

Humans need law primarily to protect the vulnerable amongst us, so there is no law, or obligation to do what others say, in a system that starts with punching down on the most vulnerable. And if our oppression comes in our creation through a status quo that does not ensure minimum levels of welfare for kids at entry, it then seems impossible to see and remove without an objective touchstone – like offset, or zero, baselines –that change the status quo.

TAKE ACTION: Back efforts at the United Nations that would replace dysfunctional reproductive rights systems with Fair Start.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

February 4, 2025
Urge Leading Animal Liberation Thinker Peter Singer to Tell the Truth

This year Fairstartmovement.org will engage in the Tell the Truth campaign, urging prominent social justice figures to admit failure as the climate crisis accelerates and kills millions.

At the base of all of the failures is their not having accounted for children entering the world, or the actual creation of power relations, when they urged reforms. That factor was undoing, every day, the benefits their reforms would have ensured. Instead, that factor resulted in the enrichment of a small percentage of mostly white families at deadly cost to countless families of color.

I and many others were encouraged to ignore that issue in our activism, for decades, so that the wealthy funders could take advantage of the growth and inequity driving the crisis.

This is not a debate. Tell the Truth means just urging key figures to disclose how the values they championed were undone – over the last three years – as children entered the world without the resources they need, and in ways that degraded their ecologies and disenfranchised them politically.

For example, we can urge Peter Singer to disclose how his animal liberation work, from the numbers of animals suffering and general impacts on welfare to daily violations of rights, was undone in the last three years by growth that benefitted his backers.

Ask him to relate the numbers to zero baselines that account for actual harm including the value of self-determination, like these, and not projections for food investments.

Singer’s work on Effective Altruism reiterated his mistakes in framing animal liberation without accounting for the reality of animals’ lives, which are shaped by the creation of the persons who impact them. His vision of altruism is taking massive wealth made at cost to animals lives, the environment, and children’s rights, and doling it out as band-aid charity to increase welfare. Given the growth-based climate crisis, his framing of the field has done more to enrich a small percentage of mostly wealthy, white kids at deadly cost to countless children of color than increase welfare.

If he cares about animal liberation, wouldn’t he be eager to account for animals lives in the cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the fundamental – birth-based – creation of wealth? He never has, but he can start now.

If we account for the climate crisis the numbers – in both fields he championed – will show him enriching vegan food and other investors, not benefitting animals or vulnerable humans. It’s not about intent. Yes, Exxon and others’ supply-side work drove emissions, but only in response to the same growth-based demand that Singer and others enabled (even if done so simply as a matter of negligence). And Exxon never claimed to be liberating animals.

Animal rights claims are the most falsifiable when we run the numbers. Is hype and a questionable legacy more important than staving off deaths in the crisis?

Contact him here.

A better way? Back reforms at the UN that would entitle future generations to the wealth the failures created.

This goes beyond greenwashing towards fraud, and as deaths mount legal systems are evolving to prohibit drivers of the crisis like moving wealth in deadly ways through omissive messaging.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

January 31, 2025
Vox’s Coverage of the Climate Crisis, Oligarchic Threats to Democracy, and Animal Rights Does More Harm Than Good. Act.

If you comb through coverage on the Vox news site regarding a variety of issues – including the environment, population, democracy, animal rights, etc. – you will see something odd.

They never trace all of these problems back to the source: Unsustainable and inequitable family models that exploit future children for economic growth. Each day those models make the problems being covered worse. Like most concentrations of wealth and power the news outlet’s values do not outweigh their desire to exploit growth and their own birth positionality, even when that exploitation drives a deadly climate crisis. And even when doing so makes their coverage hypocritical.

Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserve fewer resources and more risk, has done more to harm our values and missions than we have done to further them.

Wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights, in what some call the #famscam. In the scheme, nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into birth and development conditions compliant with children’s rights and the political equity from which legitimate governance derives.

They chose a form of unsustainable reproductive autonomy that was akin to the racist separate but equal scams, but one which will kill far more persons. Governments said we were equal and then ensured some children had nothing and others everything under the lie that parental autonomy could exist outside of political equity.

Because of the crisis we owe children and future children reparations based on zeroing out our harming them, using at least eight metrics to assess what we owe.

Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive. People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. What we think of as growth is actually political inequity. We have an overriding or preemptive right to take the wealth that was stolen and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future.

Those who subverted the civil rights movements decades ago, by ignoring children’s rights in the idea of reproductive autonomy, were avoiding the override – the fact that political equity always comes first and would allow the needy to take the correct resources by all means. National borders, rules and entitlements derive from the sovereignty or self-determination of constituents, and that derives from relations developed in birth, development and emancipation.

The many funders that framed and defined social justice over the last several decades never created real value in their vast wealth, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used inequitable family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating their own professed values (like animal protection and children’s rights) and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens.

They did this 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, and which could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children, is generally considered a failure.

The baseline those like Vox uses has subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they seem to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzes 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 in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate 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.

Wealthy, mostly white, families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud – that hides their liability and the illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions.

Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.

Take Action:

Contact Swati, a key lead at Vox, and urge her to report in a way that covers the real driver of the problems we face. Ask her if she thinks all kids deserve a fair start in life.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

January 21, 2025
The Idea of Democracy Without a Fair Start in Life is a Scam

Today the average person has less control over their lives as democracy degrades, and a few take over the lives of many – socially, and ecologically.

We can take that power back, because every child’s right to the things they need – like having a voice that matters and is heard in their democracies – comes first, and overrides any authority those above us claim.

Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today.

It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need. Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.

Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.

No child should ever be born outside a structure of debt/savings accounts that protect all children from the climate crisis by including and empowering them with their universal birthright. Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we” that must come before all we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.

TAKE ACTIONS: 1) Donate here to enable Fair Start to ensure family laws consistent with democracy, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to ensure better family planning, and 3) urge any charity you support – regardless of the issue – to admit not prioritizing funded fair starts in life for all kids did more harm to their missions than they did good.

December 2, 2024
What is the Fair Start Movement? A Constitutional Watchdog Asking Questions and Seeking One Change: To Start All Fully Accounting for Freedom

We make sure those claiming to do good are not quietly undoing it, for their own benefit. We simply ask: For any claim of doing good, how is the one making the claim accounting for the most impactful factor: The resources and empowerment with which children enter the world and are measurably empowered to constitute a legitimate nation.

This question identifies constitutive reparations fraud by publicly asking how claimants account for children entering the world on their claims of beneficial public impact, given that there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact. This is not about population. It’s about lies and omissions to gain power.

If the claimant valued 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 claimant doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? Do they start with enabling the powerful over the vulnerable? Did the claimant spend more on undoing their mission than furthering it? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases?

These questions involve looking for an omission, and a belief that children of color deserve less, and should suffer the brunt of a climate crisis they did not create. The question creates a permanent resistance to oppression by testing authority to see if it is fully derived and conditional, and identify frauds that would use authority without that derivation and conditioning.

Why watchdog? The most just and effective form of social change involves accurate and truthful communication, constitutive language, as itself an act of empowerment.

The Quiet Subversion of Civil Rights Using Child Inequity

Concentrations of wealth and power in the Twentieth Century have used child inequity to subvert the civil rights movement, and evade race and other reparations. This was and is reparations fraud, and the hiding of a share equity deficit that is killing children of color. This fraud – like the omissive use of language that assumes black lives are worth less – clouds the language and concepts needed for universal reparative justice, and the fact that by ignoring ecosocial birth equity, most philanthropy ensured the climate crisis and did more harm than good.

“I advocate that Black birth equity, through reparations, should be the primary action taken to resolve consequences such as corporation induced climate change — in particular, because those who are negatively impacted the most are Black communities in California and their future Black children.” — Dr. Breeze Harper

It was the philanthropy of wealthy families not accountable to election or market forces, rather than small business or government, that for decades envisioned and articulated insufficient standards – devoid of child equity – for social justice, environmentalism, animal liberation, etc. The crises we face today were exacerbated by those standards, which had more to do with growing generational wealth than good outcomes.

These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, 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.

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 will dismantle with women’s networks engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.

These are the efforts to repair that inequity by ensuring no child is born outside of a system of debt and reparations accounting, so that no child is born beneath a line of measurable empowerment. Freedom is an objective and measurable concept, linked to historical ecological and social markers that are tied to birth and development but often ignored. What was owed in birth equity, and one’s influential share in democracy, was instead taken and sold back in growth-based economies.

Reparations Fraud

Reparations fraud is subject to legal action, especially in cases where the evaluation of damages will rob victims of what they deserve because the targets of the reparations claims have already received the benefits, often under false pretenses.

Reparations fraud involves literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out the voices of the victims. It usually starts with siloed forms of justice minus the generic, or active, component of constituting just power relations in the birth, development, and emancipation of the most vulnerable. For example, white animal rights advocates might use base assumptions about the nature of animal law that disable its ability to benefit animals.

The omission of information on child entry conditions hides liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids. The fix? As described in detail below, to use measurable standards for true social justice and ecological restoration to ensure accurate climate reparations pegged to the self-determination of each child entering the world.

Because the creation of one’s positionality relative to others and ecologies is legally preemptive, it enables drastic action to recover reparations. Humans need law for the vulnerable amongst us, so there is no law, or obligation to do what others say, in a system that starts with punching down on the most vulnerable. And if our oppression comes in our creation it becomes almost impossible to see and remove without an objective touchstone – like offset, or zero, baselines.

Not backing the reform raises serious questions about whether entities were trying to create value, or free ride at deadly cost to others on their generational, racial, national and other positionality. Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables – like animals rights, which is the most demanding form of social justice and the most current coopted – as well.

How Do You Hide Reparations Liability? Create Decoys of Social Justice Devoid of Equity.

Many funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis, are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

Wealthy families in polluter nations use low child welfare standards and massive inequity to undo upstream what they are pretending to do downstream – selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children’s needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.

These charades of focusing on symptoms more than cause did more harm than good, clouding the language of liberation. Funding a Fair Start in life with the accurate language and the move towards climate reparations owed is the most just and effective way to free children, animals and the rest of us – exponentially more so than other interventions. It avoids the fraud of dumping costs on future generations, a move that caused a white wealth-driven climate crisis mostly killing persons of color. As discussed below, violence is one of the costs.

For decades FSM members were employed and worked with such entities, and we benefitted at deadly cost to others by omitting information about the fundamental harm we were causing, and in a way that enriched mostly white children and killed mostly children of color. We now work to identify those using the fraudulent standard, especially the most influential.

We identify reparations fraud by publicly asking how they account for children entering the world on their claims of beneficial public impact, given that there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact. Normally the benefits claimed were actually being undone, and in ways that benefited the ones making the claims, at deadly cost to others.

The Way Out: Invert You Obligation from Non-representative Government to the Governed and Most Vulnerable

There is no way to be free without this public process of communicating, this constitutive discourse. There is no racial justice in language that assumes children of color are worth, in terms of birthright, a fraction of the wealth of white children. And there is no justice without subsequent actions that ensure our taking only the equity we all deserve so we can self-determine and make our own choices, rather than determine and choose for others. It is physically impossible to be obligated as a political equal without doing this because there is no more basic system of valuation.

There is no form of autonomy that would not have had to start positioning the person with share equity in their political system.

There is no freedom without share equity in one’s political system, and no system of valuation that would not start with the evaluator’s position in that system. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy, and not skew the criteria needed to assess truth and value by excluding and exploiting others.

Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables as well, and one that continues the performative decoy of social justice, the abstract charade of ignoring creation, that ensured black children are dying in white wealthy driven climate crisis where the death debt carried by wealthy families is only rising. And yet no child’s life is worth the life of another.

Insistence on non-constitutive claims, and benefitting at deadly cost to others, identifies those who choose to free ride on their generational, racial, national and other positionality, and improve their position in an exclusionary and illegitimate system rather than act to legitimate it. To be free is to relate to others as self rather than other determining, and that – as well as representative government or legitimate demand and audiences, is physically impossible without accurate communication of that positioning and obligation, situating oneself as free.

Violence, both from the state and those around us, fundamentally derives from this because it seeds fundamental injustice, making government representatives very non-representative, and breaking any functional form of obligation to follow the law because children are never empowered in the system of making it. Logically, we would owe each other as much as our nation owes children as they enter, defining what we sort of a “we” the nation is. There are the just and unjust, and the latter choose to fall outside of social obligation and protection.

Why? Because there is no inherent authority in government, or inalienable rights, that is not receded with an collective pronoun that implies an obligation. There is no way to constitute justice, and an obligation to follow the law from the top down, enabling the powerful over the vulnerable. Free persons see obligation as deriving from and conditional on being empowered, something fundamentally contingent on the creation at birth of the relations we have with others.

This is not Kantian ethics or intersectionality – both of which hid that which would create the climate crisis. It focused on the primacy of positionality in creation, and obligations to the most vulnerable using zero baseline accounting linked to concrete ecosocial metrics, a zeroing out of debt in the tradition of a businesses practice, rather than the abstract, upside down, and static ethics of old.

For example, when Mbabazi Judith, a three year old in Uganda, died from climate exacerbated malaria, she did so, comprehensively, because she was not positioned to self-determine but rather be determined relative to a unified zero marker that explains many variables from permissible emissions to national representative ratios.  The inclusion and empowerment line can be seen as a mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where the most influential who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions by moving kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving them in inequity. In this case getting all children above the line unifies rather than divides, and evades using the same fundamentally illegal system – based on violating children’s rights that caused the crisis

The wealth we see in the world today was made, firstly, by illegally avoiding paying the costs needed to protect children, animals, the environment – and measurable freedom for all of us. Making sure – at grassroots, organizational, and legal levels – that no child is born without climate reparations accounting does protect them. Once one accounts for the common omission of the impact of children entering the world without what they need, we can see Fair Start as exponentially more just and effective than interventions without the qualifier.

November 6, 2024
Urge the Cato Institute to Embrace the First Necessary Condition of Freedom

What is the Cato Institute’s mission?

The vision of the Cato Institute is a free and open society in which liberty allows every individual to pursue a life of prosperity and meaning in peace.

Photo by Rawpixel.com/BigStock

What is Fair Start?

Concentrations of wealth and power in the Twentieth Century used child inequity to subvert the civil rights movement. Those same entities, including philanthropic funders, in the nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now using media, decoy nonprofits, celebrities, and universities, as well as politicians and government agencies, to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to engage in reparations fraud and drown out the voices of the victims.

Photo by Wavebreak Media Ltd/BigStock

For decades Fair Start members were employed by and worked with such entities, and we benefitted at deadly cost to others by omitting information about the fundamental harm we were causing, and in a way that enriched mostly white children and killed mostly children of color. We now work to identify those doing this – using this fraudulent standard, especially the most influential, and preempt or overcome them. We urge them to admit the same and repair the harm of claiming to do good work that was simultaneously being undone because there were no functional protections for infants entering the world and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact.

There is no way to be free without this public and universal truth and repair process of communicating, and our taking only the equity we all deserve so we can self-determine and make our own choices, rather than determine and choose for others. It is physically impossible to be obligated as a political equal without doing this because there is no more basic system of valuation. Where else would self-determining or constitutive relations come from?

The nature of our environment, and of human reproduction, makes freedom a very specific praxis.

Not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe those outside of it as much protection as they extend to children entering the world. Is that harsh to say? What sort of person would let millions die in an ecological crisis they did not cause because we did not take the measures needed to move the wealth those millions need to live?

Photo by Wavebreak Media Ltd/BigStock

Take Action. Urge Cato’s lead to answer these questions:

How does Cato account for children entering on the values they claim to further? If they did not account, does that mean they spent more on events and travel than furthering their mission? Instead of accounting, could they be free riding on generational, racial, national, and other positionalities and privileges? Do they assume the legitimacy of enabling the powerful over the vulnerable?

Fact: To be self versus other determining, we must orient from an overriding obligation to ensure no child should be born beneath the line or threshold of empowerment that this accounting provides. The line can be seen as a mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where the most influential who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions by moving kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving those kids in inequity. In this case getting all children above the line unifies rather than divides.

November 2, 2024
How Far Can You Go to Defend Freedom for You and Your Kids? No Rule Precedes Ensuring a Fair Start in Life for All Children.

In Winners Take All, The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas explores corruption in nonprofits. But he and the New York Times missed the biggest charade of all, the one most driving the suffering and death unfolding as the climate degrades and temperatures increase.

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color.

Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself. The solution to this problem is to recognize that governments have no inherent authority, but only what is derived from and conditional upon them empowering their constituents, and that includes any authority to entitle wealth made at deadly cost to others that is partially owed in climate reparations.

In this sustainability scam there are always at least two standards for values like sustainable, green, humane, democratic, eco-friendly, etc. There is one standard for the rich investors and their kids, who are often funding the organizations promoting the terms and any impact their work is having in furthering them.

These standards are artificial, arbitrary, and designed to allow a particular form of economic growth that benefits some – mostly whites – at deadly cost to others. This first standard – anthropocentric and adopted circa 1968 by UN agencies bowing to wealthy families – does not require birth equity. It uses an unsustainable form of welfare as the basic currency or value.

The wealthy in polluter nations use this standard to undo upstream, what we are pretending to do downstream – selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children’s needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.

We use this first standard to knowingly undo upstream with one hand, with growth and inequitable shares in our democracies, what we seem to be doing with the other.

This first standard allows significant deviation from the ecosocial baselines, the ecocentric standards, that would have actually prevented the climate crisis. These latter are the real standards – which can be measured along at least eight metrics like restorative levels of greenhouse gas emissions and inclusive-level representative ratios that ensure actual representative democracy. Deviation from these standards – which are based on self-determination or freedom, and the equitable shares in democracy that comes with it – covers the full experience of the climate crisis that is killing millions.

Funders in the polluter nations facing significant climate liability fund institutions – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of impact to support the first standard, and the birthright of wealthy whites to benefit and deadly cost to mostly persons of color.

This allows wealthy families to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, while they use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where they – the Trump family, for example – can use the wealth they made through the scam to attack the democratic process itself and try to step outside of it.

There is an effort underway at the United Nations to require assessments of climate damages be 1) set around the ecocentric standards in order to account for the actual harm, and to avoid using the same standards that created the crisis to enrich a few at deadly cost to many. And 2), to treat that standard and the recovery of climate reparations as the first and overriding human rights, a right that preempts government’s authority to assign wealth contrary to it, and allows citizens to engage in preemptive acts of self-defense to protect themselves and their children.

The concentrations of wealth in the polluter nations face a challenge – having created vulnerable classes in their own countries who have common interest with those in the vulnerable countries most suffering from the crisis. To identify which standard any person or organization supports, they can simply be asked to account for how we should protect children entering the world, and whether they deserve to be protected, ensured equity and enabled to be self-determining, as their birthright. Those who refuse that higher standard, or cannot explain how they are helping to ensure it and offset their benefitting at deadly cost to others, are choosing to exacerbate the crisis and undermines the freedom of all.

You can take legal action

States attorneys generals and other law enforcement agencies are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.

We can identify – on a binary spectrum – those who believe in linking children to debt/savings accounting to move towards self-determination, and those who do not. The rights of those who stand in the way are contingent on their supporting the rights of others, and their children will inherit their death debt if they do not pay it. Knowing the truth – that the default for what is fundamentally permissible depends on how we include and empower others – lets us overcome the most influential barriers to justice, and ensure a better future for all.

October 22, 2024
Forget Left v. Right. A Handful of Wealthy Targets Stand Between You and Freedom.

Human rights and democracy are meant to empower individuals, and thereby free them. But today’s world is very far from ensuring human rights. Why? Human rights and democracy are based on the fundamental condition that individuals are acting as free and equal persons in public affairs.

That fact implies something very specific, an inversion between growth and self-determination, that is missing from our political systems today.

Fact: Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises each person a meaningful role in their own government.

Because of the way we plan our families, people today do not act as free and equal persons. Totally inequitable and unsustainable family planning fueled massive population growth and a massive and growing gulf between rich and poor that disenfranchised the average voice and diluted democracy to something very far from self-rule. Abysmal levels of child development, which enabled unsustainable population growth and massive inequality across the globe, has degraded our democracies, drowning out each person’s voice and effective role in their own governance. Maybe the best long-run indicator of whether we are achieving democracy is compliance with children’s rights – and worldwide we have been and continue to fail in this regard.

The same poor family planning modeling that ensured mass child abuse and neglect, an endless gap between rich and poor, and the ecological crises we face today also diluted each citizen’s role in their political system. Over time that modeling replaced empowered citizens with disempowered consumers. This influential primer spells out how each of our voices matters less as overcrowding worsens.

Current and near universal systems of family planning make no connection between the creation of persons, and their democratic empowerment. This is not necessarily about population, in the traditional sense.

Fact: If the legitimacy of governance derives from the people governed, then consensual governance requires family reforms that would allow the intergenerational and constructive consent of those born, account for how growth reduces the ability of each person to consent to governance by others, and protect an ecological baseline premised on the absence of human power – thereby enabling consent.

At this point, in many democracies, the average individual voice and vote have been diluted to meaningless by growth. In many democracies, like the United States, it is so crowded that it’s actually irrational to vote.

Here is a recent study on the issue. Imagine trying to assemble a constitutional convention in the United States today. Our size alone would preclude a functional system, and yet the legitimacy of our political system is premised on that capacity. One of the best attempts to refute the rule that democracy is inverse to population size proved the rule because the authors had to define democracy so narrowly (as the reduced chance of a faction taking power) to the point of undercutting its fundamental value to try to even make the argument.

That population growth, enabled by the failure to require equitable and personal development and education, has also degraded our ecosystems, compounding the threats to human rights, democracy, and freedom by making the conditions for social cooperation more challenging. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, saw population growth as a core threat to human freedom.

Fact: Each member’s role in a democracy is, cetus paribus, inverse to the size of that democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract 50-51 (Donald A. Cress ed. & trans., Hackett 1987) (1762);

Our current family planning policies, which encourage economic growth irrespective of individual levels of child welfare, fair starts in life, and environmental consequences, have made things worse. The United States is a largely unrepresentative democracy where family planning policies are designed to create large future populations of consumers, workers, and taxpayers, rather than a sustainable number citizens capable of collective self rule. They create people for shopping malls, not town halls.

Fact: To bring the United States representative ratio in line with that which existed at the country’s founding, the House of Representatives would need to balloon to a whopping 5,697 members, or nearly double that of the largest national legislature in the world: China’s National People’s Congress, with 2,980 members. DeSilver, D. (2018).

Is there a solution?

Functional democracies require highly developed citizens, which requires improving birth conditions and seriously investing time, love, and resources into every child born.

There is no way around this. The Children’s Rights Convention was designed to protect human rights that are specific to children, and ensure children’s development. But there have been no serious efforts to link the Convention to better family planning, and actually ensure the Convention’s intended outcomes. We do not apply the Convention upstream, to ensure children are born in sufficient conditions. Because we never never accounted for the role poor family planning plays in creating massive inequality and differences in opportunities in life, we failed to ensure human rights and minimum standards of welfare and equality for children. And as a result, we never ensured that adults become sufficiently developed to engage in the self-rule of true democracy. Without the requisite safeguard of ensuring serious childhood development, world population has exploded and created a negative feedback loop making it harder and harder to create systems of human rights and democracy. Today the average individual has little or no power over the government, their voices are lost in the crowd, and wealthy persons and corporations have significant control over our lives.

We can fix these mistakes.

We can apply serious child welfare requirements, like the Convention, to family planning systems by making those systems more cooperative, with parents working with their communities to bring children into the best conditions possible. That sort of working together embodies a real social contract, one that brings reasonable people on the left and right together, and ensures every child gets a fair start in life and a chance to become an empowered and accountable citizen. This is a social contract that eliminates unearned benefits and undemocratic influence, which reasonable people on both sides should oppose.

By starting at the source, and using Fair Start family planning to decentralize concentrations of power, including governments, large corporations, and wealthy families and individuals, we can shift resources to empower and free future children.

Children’s right to a fair start in life is the genesis of the social contract, consent, and political freedom. And as such we can obtain that right by all means effective. Fair Start Movement is helping push this process of improving family planning forward, through things like child-first Fair Start order legislation and rights to nature litigation that work together to temporalize and reorient our understanding of things like human rights and democracy, and will build a free future for all.

Learn more here.

A Litmus Test for Real Democracy?

Our being free and equal persons involves whether we first treat the capacity for each person’s self-determination as directly inverse to population growth to the addition of other equally empowered people, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. In other words, while many would reasonably trade off the relative self-determination of living alone in the wilds and accept societies with growing populations because of the benefits they bring, they would only do so up to point, rather than losing one’s role in the democratic control of their society. Free people will always act to preserve their equal role, their mattering politically, in the process. In such a dynamic, each person is politically empowered, and empowered equally, such that all groups are arcing down towards optimal and ecocentric population sizes. If people are empowered equally and thus matter politically this direct inversion, relative to neutral position that makes the concept of self-determination coherent, is inevitable. This inversion is crucial, and consistent with the need to invest equitably in each child so that they are empowered parts of functional democracies.

The first reason persons would be obligated to follow laws is if the legal system intentionally includes, and reflects the will, of its constituents. This test determines whether systems are doing that.

Does such a test seem like something most persons would pass today, or is it perhaps too abstract to apply? If we study media and political discourse around population and constant messaging around threat of the “baby bust” to economic growth, including statements by popular thought leaders regarding the crisis of underpopulation, we might infer that many people would fail this test. They would fail to act in the way the test requires. Many may not care about growth because they know the average person does not matter politically, in terms of having an influential voice. This apathy would be justified given the debilitating impact of growth on each person’s political influence – making it irrational to even vote in many societies.

Wealthy and powerful thought leaders support growth because they also know their power is not going to be offset by the addition of new empowered citizens who matter equally. If anything, the average person born today is likely to simply become a consumer, worker, taxpayer, soldier, etc. in systems over which they have no democratic control, and which mostly benefit others. These top-down economic systems are backed by the coercive power of the state, the threat of violence, that defends state-created property rights. Under our test above such people are not living freely and equally, because they are not politically empowered.

September 5, 2024