Many promote his dietary focus because they are invested in plant-based companies, companies that embrace growth even though it does more harm to humans and nonhumans than these companies do good. His mistakes here, turning animal liberation into mass consumerism, bleed into his work on Effective Altruism, risking millions of lives with misleading information about entitlements and what has impact. His work siloed off animals from social justice, and the natural alignment we find there.
Cheerful African Ethnicity Infant Carrying Healthy Water for a dehydration concept
He should embrace true animal liberation, and not mislead as to what that means. We don’t liberate animals by humanizing the world.
Solution:
Ask anyone – like Singer – claiming to promote certain values about how their approach to families and child welfare undid and is undoing the values they otherwise promote. Exploiting children to ensure economic growth is the system we are all used to and largely ignore. We do this, rather than requiring equitable investments in their birth and development conditions. That move has now reversed most of the progress in fighting the climate crisis, and inequity. That fundamental injustice, which made a small percentage of mostly white men wealthy by violating human rights, will kill millions.
In the climate crisis reparations in the form of family planning entitlements save lives and restore biodiversity. They return wealth to those who deserve it. We can leave wealth at the top of the economic pyramid, and millions will die, or we can pay it back to the future generations – those on which its true costs are being imposed.
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?
What’s the biggest impact you can have to make the world better for all? It’s probably not what you think.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Food insecurity made worse by climate instability in Uganda.
WHAT’S THE CAUSE?
Wealthy nations disproportionately using resources that exacerbate climate change. There are specific men who benefit from this, and could save millions of lives by leading by example.
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
Distribution of seeds for fruit and vegetables, gardening for self-sufficiency and resiliency.
Opening basic bank accounts/saving plans for children at recognized financial institutions in Uganda.
Sensitizing local populations toward equitable family planning.
Moving wealth from the one percent wealthiest into family planning and ecorestoration entitlements as a form of climate reparations, and the first and overriding human rights. As described in Newsweek, we are unleashing underprivileged women’s and children’s rights with the Seeds for the Future campaign.
Eloísa Trinidad is Executive Director of Chilis on Wheels and a well known liberation activist, drawing all forms of liberation into one form of activism that furthers the interests of all vulnerable entities.
Listen to her vision and methods here:
People can follow Eloisa and connect with her here:
Eloisa is working on food justice, among other things.
TAKE ACTION:
The USDA is inviting public comments from US-based organizations, schools, and individuals on its once-every-five-years proposed revisions to the child nutrition meal patterns. There is a real opportunity for these new rules and regulations to facilitate more nutritious, plant-forward, and culturally appropriate menus. We know this is your goal, so I am providing a resource to help you share your position with USDA by its May 10 deadline for public comments.
The Healthy Future Students and Earth Coalition has created an extensive set of template comments for allied organizations centered on how the updated child nutrition meal patterns can support plant-forward menus and plant-based, climate-friendly, and culturally appropriate options. Additionally, we created a shorter template and toolkit geared toward parents and students.
There are two major ways you can help:
Include some or all of the asks in our template comment to USDA in your organization’s comments by May 10. The top of the template includes instructions for how to submit your comment.
If you have students or caregivers in your network, share the caregiver/student toolkit with your network as soon as possible. The toolkit includes a sample outreach email and social media posts. Personal stories and challenges accessing healthy food are of the utmost importance when submitting comments.
We greatly appreciate your partnership with these two actions. Additionally, please let us know if there is anything our coalition can do to support your efforts around the meal patterns or school food advocacy more broadly.
Please feel free to share this email with partners, organizations, groups, and individuals in your state and across the country.
On India’s Independence Day on August 15, 2019 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on the central and state governments to implement policies to control the country’s population growth rate: “Population explosion will cause many problems for our future generations. We have to be concerned about population explosion. The central as well as state governments should launch schemes to tackle it,” Modi said in his Independence Day address before the nation’s iconic Red Fort in Delhi according to NDTV. The prime minister also called on Indian couples to have smaller families and praised Indian citizens who have already embraced smaller family norms, saying that having fewer children is “an act of patriotism.”
In November, 2022, the Supreme Court refused to entertain the petitions seeking directions to control the population, saying it is for the Central government to look at the issue of population control. The Supreme Court also said that it was not an issue where the court should interfere.
However, in November the Court also ruled that under India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancies Act, 1971 (MTP Act), and its related rules, all women are entitled to safe and legal abortion, regardless of their marital status. This enables legislation that would seek to reduce family size.
At the same time, India shows great disparity in equality of opportunity among children. A recent study used two rounds of Indian National Family Health Surveys and concepts of Inequality of Opportunity and Human Opportunity Indices to measure inequality arising out of unequal coverage of full immunization and minimum nutrition for Indian children. The results suggest overall high level of inequality of opportunity with substantial geographical variations. Changes in inequality of opportunity in the two services during 1992-1993 to 2005-2006 were mixed with some geographical regions outperforming others. The findings also call for substantial policy revisions if the goal of universal full immunization and minimum nutrition has to be achieved. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/41487420
Modi’s call for a smaller family policy can thus be recast as a promoting equity, through measures which mimic calls for reforms to U.S. tax policy using devices such as “baby bonds” which create savings accounts for children, and could be used to incentivize delayed fertility.
More specifically:
1) Cut all benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding.
Moreover, these policies can override conflicting rights and policies because family planning is the first norm from which others derive, accounting for the creation and existence of persons, from whom governance and all of its practical norms derive: See https://bolognalawreview.unibo.it/article/download/13299/12829
The actual policy changes would flow from 1) the UDHR and International Bill of Rights, and a correct interpretation of Article 16, see https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-file-update-to-un-human-rights-council-petition-our-overriding-right-to-nature-and-equity/, to 2) mandate scaled family planning entitlements, like baby bonds, through India’s current family incentives progam. In an effort to encourage Family Planning (FP) adoption, since 1952, the Government of India has been implementing various centrally sponsored schemes that offer financial incentives (FIs) to acceptors as well as service providers, for services related to certain FP methods.
When we talk about freedom we are really concerned with relative self-determination (some level of capacity to consent, or level of choice), which would logically start with an account of our deontological population ethics – including egalitarian thresholds for entry into the world that free us from others – because all systems derive from some level of obligation. The climate crisis has taught us that the borders of human power are not lines on a map, but the creation of humans into the nonhuman world. We would thus have to start with a creation norm, or first and overriding principle / universal family planning policy, that looks to comprise systems of governance where populationgrowth is directly inverse to absolute self-determination. This would look like systems akin to 0123…0, with point zero being the absence of power (nonpolity or nature), self-determination being relative to point zero, and offset equally as new persons enter, up until division or subdivision of the system is required.
That norm would precede and thus override all competing norms and rights, including property rights that would otherwise block the redistribution of wealth and resources children need to be empowered enough to offset others equally over the phase in which they enter our systems.
Even if we reject the demanding norm above we can ask anyone making any sort of claim what minimum levels of: 1) welfare, 2) equality of equality of opportunity, 3) ecological biodiversity and health, 4) ability to meaningfully impact the rules under which one must live, and of 5) efficiency in terms of ensuring high levels of personal development, they would require for each child born.
Most will give answers that show they have little, if any conception, of ensuring any levels for any child. After all, having kids is private stuff – the business of would-be parents.
This is not about traditional notions of population as counting people, but power relations created between people – and with their ecologies – as they are born, and a unity of value (one that far exceeds what Ronald Dworkin saw) that is within reach during this process.
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. Not possible. So we always start everything with an ecosocial fair start in life – and the ecocentrism of starting at zero – in order to maintain the capacity to consent to the power of others. Older theories of justice missed this, never dealing with actual relations because they ignored the creation of those relations. Without this account we cannot be free because we cannot account for our obligations to others, and their obligations to us. Those ignoring or blocking this account inevitably contradict the values they exhibit in their own lives, refusing them to others. They are preconstitutional and a threat to freedom, and can be targeted – as described in this Newsweek writing – as such.
That right to a fair start precedes and overrides all others because we have to first empower each new person equally, and from the time that it was feasible to do this – around the middle of the Twentieth Century – it should have been the baseline for assessing all costs and benefits. The right comes before nations can assign property rights that otherwise derogate from fairness.
Unless someone is willing to claim that people should not be empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live, then they must admit they made a critical mistake by not using that baseline (seeing creation of persons as the first human border of human power and freedom, or compliance with the Children’s Convention that ensures minimum levels of welfare, equity, biodiversity through climate restoration, the efficiency of maximizing each person’s potential, and participatory democracy) in the past, a mistake that harmed many.
This is not altruism. Free people will want the capacity to consent, as equals, to the influence others would have over them – including incoming citizens. They will not submit to sharing democracy with those not prepared by the conditions of their birth and development for self-rule.
In practice this looks like redistributing wealth as climate reparations to pay young women to collectively plan their children with delay and smaller families, with that being done as the praxis of the first and overriding human right as recognized by the United Nations. It would look like avoiding babies dying in the workers’ bathrooms at U.S. slaughterhouses. Wealth at the top was built at cost to freedom by using ecosocially unsustainable family policies that for decades slowly converted town halls to shopping malls via growth and a lack of investment in kids. Those at the top owe the difference in value, with that amount to be used to reverse the process and create natural participatory democracies in the future, the most effective way to protect the most vulnerable.
Many concentrations of wealth and power fund distracting nonprofits that appear to do good work but are actually blocking effective reforms that challenge the power structure. There is an easy way to test these nonprofits – do they advocate for using the Convention, climate restoration, birth equity etc. as a family planning standard? I have seen funders choose organizations that refused to do this, and have been wasting millions of dollars letting growth undo their own work, rather than fund a mostly-volunteer organization whose work would benefit billions of people, but which threatens the growth funders want and rely upon.
I have sat with the heads of foundations (the wealth of which was built by externalizing ecosocial costs on others) who were passing control – in nepotistic moves – to their own children, and who would rather see the missions of the foundations fail than turn to Fair Start reforms.
Free people will fight for a restored and democratic future, and against the shill organizations and those funders behind them that hide this truth about the baseline for costs and benefits, as well as the white supremacy that the hiding – including refusing to ensure birth equity – entails. To think that one is obligated to follow the law when they were created for shopping malls (and media covered falling fertility rates shows that we all were created as such) rather than town halls is called the “constitutive fallacy” – basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower people without disempowering others, and in an objective and measurable way. The acts of mass violence we see today could very well be driven by this disempowerment, and ending them may require the sort of empowerment family reforms can ensure.
Ilya Shapiro is a conservative thought leader who let slip his views in a tweet about persons of color, and has been ostracized and shuttled-off to far-right circles as a result. His visit at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, this week will continue the debate about where his speech belongs.
Is there a way to move beyond this gridlocked debate about speech, and how speaking can itself reflects power differentials? Can we drop the left v. right thing for a moment? Ilya’s views on race relations reveal much more about about him. Our focus on speaking during specific days and moments aside, he and the concentrations of wealth and power he represents – including their denial of the climate crisis – pose a clear threat to the freedom of future generations.
If we were going to look at harm to persons of color, that aspect of him is worse than his words.
Shapiro might be a target because his racist statement belies a willingness to oppress, and put many at risk, to benefit a few.
Is this changing the topic? Missing the idea of speech and power? Look at these sentences and see the pronouns that underlie them – that underlie all thoughts and claims, and then see the relations that underlie the creation of the people referred to by those pronouns. That is power.
True liberalism is concerned with relative self-determination/consent/choice, which would logically start with deontological population ethics, and a creation norm / first principle that would first limit the power others have over us, or where we would choose to be empowered in ways that do not disempower others. He rejects this, committing what is called the constitutive fallacy. His scholarship has risen to esteem not because it is true, but because its premises never threaten the most basic power establishment: Parents’ power over future children and nature, wealthy families’ power over poor families, the power of a coercive state over its people, etc.
Shapiro pretends to limit the power people have over one another, but ultimately embraces oppression and refuses to constitute free communities. He is a precon, ignoring the fact that freedom comes from objective values cabining subjectivity – something that must start in our creation.
If Shapiro were the target of a direct action perhaps the best reasons are not because he should not be allowed to speak. Perhaps he should. It is rather because he rejects the fundamental fairness and Rawlsian freedom that underlies the value of free speech – our first agreeing to first be in groups of free and equal people defined as such by their truly constitutive relations. Embracing that could save millions. Instead he chooses to protect concentrations of wealth and power built on oppression which could – were they today and by many means effective redistributed proportionally from him and his principles – be used to end it.
Countless media stories today are flooding our brains with stories of an underpopulation crisis, falling fertility rates, and women liberated from being mothers-in-waiting.
You would not see many abortion bans either. These conversations are premised on the idea that we can exploit children as cheap labor and voracious consumers.
But the truth is we do actually have to invest that level in kids, at least the minimum spelled out by the Children’s Rights Convention.
People like Elon Musk may be bemoaning falling population numbers, but the children of his native South Africa – and intending mothers – actually have a claim to his wealth to bend the arc of de-growth even further. He certainly owes it, born a rich white kid who fled South Africa with wealth during apartheid.
How those families take what they deserve, the distraction of effective altruism aside, is another matter.
When you’ve done something wrong it’s easier to distract than make amends. And when it comes to family and population policy, a lot of influential people did a lot of wrong.
Here are three types of men pushing that lie. And we can stop them by telling the truth: We have the right to take back the wealth they took, and compensate future generations, by all means effective.
The Investor
Rather than create value, say through true innovation that creates real value, some men rely on women to have kids to grow economies by literally adding bodies. Elon Musk is a great example, though there are many others that qualify.
The Politician
Politicians generally sit atop a pyramid of people, and they expand their power by growing the base. Mitt Romney is a great example of this, and they generally serve the Investor-types, not the people under them.
The Economist/Academic
These are the men who promoted unsustainable systems because it would create amazing short-term benefits while foisting the costs on women, and future generations. Paul Morland and Will MacAskill are great examples of these sorts. They provide legitimacy for the Investors and Politicians.
How do we stop them? We can make them tell the truth: The climate and inequity crises facing the world today are causing, and will cause, immense suffering. These crises fundamentally flow from the policies that enriched these men by putting costs on others. Because family policies are primary, we do not need governments permission to take back the wealth these men took.
