Category: Social Justice & Equity

  • Urging Rich People to Use Care Group Model in Reforms and Paying Reparations

    From our partner, Rejoice Africa Foundation:

    1. Organizations that solely focus on reducing family size and population through contraceptives can overlook why parents choose to use them. Encouraging people to join care groups where they can learn about the benefits of planning and see how others have. benefited can be more effective. These groups can offer resources such as childcare, kitchen garden materials, school fees, school materials, etc., all under the premise of providing a fair eco-social start in life for all children.

    2. Many large organizations and foundations use a centralized system to respond to climate crisis and family reforms, which often yields insufficient results. However, the Fair Start Movement (FSM) and Rejoice Africa Foundation Uganda (RAFUG) have developed a decentralized implementation system that generates transparent and trustworthy results for real beneficiaries affected by parent-centric family planning and climate crisis.

    3. How can we increase funding for such groups? Wealthy nations can also adopt this collective approach to family planning, linking with less wealthy nations to share resources and promote birth equity, parental readiness, and smaller, more eco-centric families.

    how care groups operate, and testimonials.

    Rejoice Africa Foundation has established twenty care groups, each comprising 20 women led by a designated leader (women Care Group Leader) These leaders are responsible for monitoring various initiatives, including kitchen gardens, saving for children, family planning policy, and agroforestry.

    Check out the YouTube videos here: link 1, link 2

    Immaculate, a care group leader from Bugashe in Rwampara district, has overseen initiatives to enhance kitchen gardens, agroforestry, smart cooking, and family reforms. Anonymous donor provided $640 for child savings accounts, and RAFUG established 62 accounts and grants for kitchen gardens. Despite this, wealthy individuals from the global north have yet to contribute funds to support children in the global south.

    Jessica Blome partnered with Fair Start to support care groups and children affected by the global north. The Parent centric family planning model in Rwampara, western Uganda, has failed due to the side effects of contraceptives and myths surrounding their usage.

    Komugisha Ruth ……. “ member of the care group, shared her experience of getting pregnant while using a family planning contraceptive, Implanon. She gave birth to Joan and is now struggling to provide for her basic needs. Joan is not in school, and they do not have land for agriculture or a permanent home. As a result, Ruth has developed a negative perception of parent centric family planning model. She hopes to start a Child-Centrism family planning approach to delay having another child until they are better able to provide for their family”

    Kabugho Jemima story …….” growing up in a poor family of 10 children in Kabarole, Western Uganda. She dropped out of school after primary seven and was forced to marry an older man at the age of 16 to support her younger siblings. She eventually divorced and became a maid for priests, which led to a priest sponsoring her to go back to school for nursing. After witnessing the struggles of refugees in a settlement, Jemima began her activism at age 27, focusing on areas such as agroforestry, sexual reproductive health for adolescent girls, water accessibility, and women and children’s rights”

    Kabugho Jemima co-founded the Rejoice Africa Foundation and encourages people to take responsibility for their actions through a human rewarding system to fight climate change. Despite challenges, Jemima remains focused on her goal of saving the next generation. Sixty women in three care groups have found success in kitchen gardening, allowing them to produce vegetables for personal consumption and sale. Through sack farming, even those without access to land have been able to grow their produce. Members of the care groups report earning $10USD per week from their harvests, providing a source of income and reducing their dependence on others.

    The success of these kitchen gardens has helped women like Paskazia, who previously struggled to provide for her family and resorted to exchanging sex for basic needs. Now, Paskazia no longer engages in such activities and can provide for her family through the income generated by the kitchen garden. Joy, a care group member and mother of three, shared her story with younger women without children. She advised them to delay having children and plan for their future first, citing her own struggles in providing for her children during prolonged drought and poverty. She encouraged other women to do the same and advise younger women in their communities to delay childbirth and plan for their children’s well-being.

    According to Jessica, Fair Start will advocate for defining terms such as “green,” “eco,” and “sustainable” to include full biodiversity restoration and climate action via birth equity as the first human right. This includes equalizing resources between wealthy and poor children, delaying parenting readiness, and promoting smaller families.

    Rejoice Africa Foundation uses of Care Groups for the following reasons:

    Community-Based Approach: The Care Group model involves creating small groups of women with similar experiences and challenges, providing them with a platform to share stories, access information, and advocate for their rights.

    This community-based approach can be valuable for affected women in the context of reparations and family reforms.

    Education and Awareness: The Care Group model prioritizes education and awareness on topics like reproductive health, childcare, nutrition, and financial literacy, promoting equity and empowerment. Facilitators can use this approach to help women understand their rights and available resources, particularly in the context of reparations.

    Skill-building and Empowerment: The Care Group model emphasizes skill-building and empowerment, enabling women to learn practical skills like income generation, leading to greater financial independence. Reparations efforts can include skill-building programs to help women secure a better future for themselves and their children.

    Advocacy and Collective Action: The Care Group model promotes collective advocacy and action, allowing women to voice their concerns and demand justice, seeking restitution for historical injustices.

    Monitoring and Evaluation: The Care Group model has a strong monitoring and evaluation system to ensure program effectiveness and community responsiveness. This can be useful in tracking the impact of reparations efforts and making adjustments to achieve intended goals.

    Sustainability: The Care Group model prioritizes sustainability by empowering women within communities to create a lasting impact that extends beyond specific programs, potentially. resulting in positive and long-lasting effects on the lives of women and their children in the context of reparations.

    in conclusion, if the wealthy can emulate the spirit of Jessica Blome and Enkindle women Care Groups in doing Reparation in this generation, there will be more transparent and accountable for their giving and the next generation will be saved.

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

  • Are Philanthropists Conditioning Funding on Not Talking About Their Full Climate Liability?

    Are Philanthropists Conditioning Funding on Not Talking About Their Full Climate Liability?

    As liability overtakes charity as the paradigm for life-saving wealth transfers, here is what matters. We have to admit the philanthroscam, in which funders got to be saviors while enjoying inequitable growth that enriched their kids at deadly cost to others. In that scam nonprofit leaders would be saviors too, and in their assessment and reporting they omitted the way that growth undid their progress.

    That hid the largest variable driving the climate crisis, and it was all based on violating children’s legal rights. 

    Read more: How the World Hides Liability for Climate Deaths – CounterPunch.org

    Wealthy families in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are funding a fantasy world to evade liability arising from use of what amounts to an equity fraud standard, including liability for climate reparations. This is a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. These families fund decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues, to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.

     

    A comparison chart of Current Family Planning vs. Fair Start Family Planning. The left side lists negatives of current planning; the right side highlights positive outcomes of fair start planning for welfare, equality, and environmental protection.

     

    In most cases the wealthy families that funded the field known as sexual health and reproductive rights benefited more from consumer demand created by growth, than they spent on creating demand for contraceptives and other health interventions. It was a scam, undermining inclusive and representative democracies with growth, just to avoid birth equity and likely to avoid its preemptive effect on conflicting norms like entitlements to generational wealth.

     

    Inequality info graphic

    Many funders in the population space refuse to question the UN’s contradictory notion of reproductive autonomy because that would require also looking at the generations of nepotism at the heart of their foundations. Or it might require changing the frame away from “population” and towards the correct framing of an individual’s choice to be free, or self rather than other-determining, in the creation of power relations through birth, development, and emancipation.

    Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. These families routinely funded decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment infographic

     

    Practically we ensure true change and children’s rights by entitling would-be parents to parenting delay payments, inverse to wealth and income. Given the first point above, the rights to the wealth needed for the entitlements override the rights of those currently claiming to own the wealth, in part because the owners made the wealth through unsustainable growth and loss of political equity, or the externalizing of costs that required violating children’s birthrights.

     

    An Open Letter to ReproAction and the Center for Reproductive Rights: Abortion Rights Can Override Governmental Authority

     

    There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going by relying on the arbitrary privilege of their draw in the birth lottery, while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all. It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that 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.

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

     

  • Six Truths About Freedom You Didn’t Know

    Six Truths About Freedom You Didn’t Know

     

    • Freedom from the power of others starts with rights, and the first right is not about how we act, but rather our creation – children’s birthrights that determine whether they are empowered by the conditions in which they are born and raised, and their level of empowerment and influence relative to others in the world. Freedom is not based on an assessment using fictitious borders like lines on a globe, but rather the true border of being relatively self versus other determining, and controlling who – via creation – we actually have to share the world with. It’s about who actually has influence over you, climatologically, financially, pedagogically, etc. When you fear your fellow citizens, have real influence over your political representatives, suffer in human induced heat waves, cannot access nature, and are controlled by employers, you are not free.

     

    A split infographic compares Current Family Planning with Fair Start Family Planning, listing differences in welfare, equality, and environmental protection for children, while highlighting how practices like legitimacywashing can undermine genuine progress.

     

    • That means our first obligations are not to written constitutions, governments, or the wealthy, but to the future children from whose empowerment those things derive their authority. And that starts with prioritized funding for responsible family planning, where we invest enough in each child to enable them to offset their fundamental political influence equally, relative to a neutral position. Those who reject those obligations to future children fall outside the scope of deserving legal protection because they do not offer it to others in the crucial formation of legal/power relations. They can be accused of and held accountable for reparations fraud, or denying future generations justice. How else should we frame cost/benefit systems, in the constituting of our relations with others, that make some kids billionaires and kill others?

     

    • Do current fraud laws cover that? Remember that law must be interpreted to legitimate itself, and the areas of positive law necessary to carry the Fair Start reform forward, including constitutional, fraud, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental, nationality, democracy, civil rights, and others, must be preemptively interpreted to ensure inclusion and representation. Government and the wealthy can’t avoid liability by writing its own rules in ways that determine that liability. As such, treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as others must be enforced by the ultimate source of authority, the people.

     

    Challenging assumptions that hurt our future infographic

     

    • How do we make this change? Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurately premised communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that obligation if we are to be self-determining. How then could we account for fundamental obligations without ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions? If those who owe future generations for the fraud described above are willing to tell the truth, we urge them to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today.

     

     

    Inequality info graphic

     

     

    • Practically we ensure this change and those rights by entitling would-be parents to parenting delay payments, inverse to wealth and income. Given the first point above, the rights to the wealth needed for the entitlements override the rights of those currently claiming to own the wealth, in part because the owners made the wealth through unsustainable growth and loss of political equity, or the externalizing of costs that required violating children’s birthrights. There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going by relying on the arbitrary privilege of their draw in the birth lottery, while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all. It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that 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.

     

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment infographic

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

  • Fulfill Children’s Birthrights

    Fulfill Children’s Birthrights

    Sternfels and Mckinsey have issued this report on fertility decline, bemoaning its impact on economic growth.

    Mckinsey is worth over $100 billion.

    But here’s the problem. Their report is contradicted by the reality of economic health in places like Japan, where degrowth and strong economic performance go hand in hand. 

    So what is Sternfels and McKinsey doing? He has a bigger problem than being wrong.

    Challenging assumptions that hurt our future infographic

    He and McKinsey are hiding liability for countless deaths in the climate crisis, because their vast wealth was made by not paying the costs – in fundamental systems of cost/benefit analysis based on assumptions about entitlements. Their wealth was made by never paying the full costs of evading the climate crisis, autocracy, and vast inequity.

    They started all of their economic analysis by assuming a right to violate children’s right to a fair start in life, using unsustainable growth enabled by a lack of investment in kids to degrade ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath a key threshold, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk.

    Their wealth was made at cost to our freedom, environmentally, socially, and politically. You feel those costs every dat,

    You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact. In essence the proponents are using a shell/ponzi scheme, identified as such by Nobel laureates, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocent persons around the world. 

    The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health. This is exacerbated by vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our current trajectory, and all of this loss of freedom is measurable by widely accepted metrics used for assessing sustainable development.

    And yet legal systems, and legitimacy, require the measurable inclusion of constituents in order to be representative, and to legitimately claim authority to ensure compliance with the law.

     

    A comparison chart of Current Family Planning vs. Fair Start Family Planning. The left side lists negatives of current planning; the right side highlights positive outcomes of fair start planning for welfare, equality, and environmental protection.

     

    Sternfels and Mckinsey did not create value. They violated birthrights in externalizing costs in order to make money. And they owe that back.

    Moving that wealth can save lives, and there are ways to do it. 

    Stenfels and his family of a wife and three kids denied others the basic things they seemed to value throughout their lives, e.g., 1) seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare while letting at risk children and certainly many members of future generations die in infancy through deprivation and abuse that could have been avoided; 2) expecting equal access to opportunities while the exponentially discriminatory birth positioning of others resign them to a life of servitude, 3) participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed while ignoring the way dilution and positionality ensure the voices of some carry no weight, 4) using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health while others are born into the deadly results of racist ecocide, an outcome that contradicts the efficiency many of these leech-like academics laud in the abstract as they enjoy growth-based investments, and 5) enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions while others and those in the future have no such option, etc.

    This is not a right/left issue. We are all complicit.

    None of us conditioned the legitimacy of our systems on actually fulfilling children’s birthrights, no one can explain legitimacy while continuing that error – or how we get to justice from injustice, and denying that the error underlies all we do clouds liability for climate reparations which can save lives.

     

    Inequality info graphic

    That makes Sternfels what some call a key “legitimating barrier,” spreading misinformation to hide wealth that is owed to future generations, wealth that could be used to save lives.

    Sternfels and other leaders at Mckinsey have thus done more to harm our shared values – like experiencing moderate temperatures and enjoying access to food and water –  than they have done to further them. Sternfels has literally enriched his thee children at deadly cost to countless children of color. There are extensively peer-reviewed reasons his kids could inherit his death debt, a debt universally enforceable through crowdsourced mechanisms.

    How do we ensure he and McKinsey are held accountable?

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment infographic

    Several scammy organizations in high-emission nations have been running animal protection and environmental campaigns – our most demanding ideals – by fundraising on claims of reduced emissions, while total emissions and negative infant outcomes are rising, and the reductions having been vastly undone by growth-based political inequity. More and more children and animals have been brought into conditions with no resources with which to deal with the impact of the growing emissions, lack of political influence, and degrading ecosocial safety systems.

    Human birth and development is the largest determinant of all outcomes we experience. It is thus the fundamental driver of the climate crisis – not just emissions, but political influence to control them, and and the resilience to deal with them. And yet even now, wealthy funders driving social justice reforms are hiding their liability for the violations, costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

    The Fair Start Movement was formed as the world’s first constitutional watchdog to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would choose to avoid liability for the crisis, and for life-saving and legitimating reparations.

     

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

    Our tactic is simple: We take impact claims made by public entities and interest organizations and we assess them against objective measures of ongoing losses of political equity and democratic influence, or a zero-baseline measure of the full spectrum of harm caused by the crisis. Fair Start does not replace downstream public interest interventions; it reorients them from preemptive, rights-based, legitimating and upstream base.

    Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of the rights of children, and animals.

    The disclosure, as explained below, contrasts impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero baseline. Fundamentally orienting from that rule is the first necessary condition of being free, or self-determining, a conclusion backed by some of the leading political theorists in the world.

     

    By Intentionally Ignoring Growth and Inequity Nonprofits, Media and Business Leaders Created a Fantasy World of Progress That Prevented Real Climate Reforms, and Will Kill Millions

    Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurate communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that truth to be self-determining. In that discourse, how could we account for fundamental obligations without first ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions, the fundament of empowering relations?

    If they are willing to admit owing costs to future generations, we urge key barriers to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today. Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “non-constitutive ” barriers: Those entities who refuse to derive authority and entitlement back to demonstrably empowering the constituents from whose political sovereignty these things flow and are conditioned upon.

    TAKE ACTION: Urge Stenfels here to redo the report, but now accounting for this key cost: How children entered the world in conditions that violated their rights; degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health; and exacerbated vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our current trajectory.

    In forthcoming work we will contrast the wealth his children enjoy, at deadly cost to countless children around the world, so that all can judge Sternfels full liability.

    Two panels compare family planning types. Left: diverse family illustration with bright colors, labeled Fair Start family planning with positive points. Right: grayscale crowd in a city, labeled Economic growth-based family planning with negative points.

     

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

     

     

  • Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking for Reparations Fraud, and the Hiding of Liability for Deaths in the Climate Crisis

    Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking for Reparations Fraud, and the Hiding of Liability for Deaths in the Climate Crisis

    (The following requires some familiarity with legal and political theory. For an easier read see: Family Planning Offers the Best Means for Combating Climate Change: An interview with Carter Dillard, Fair Start Movement (mahb.stanford.edu))

    Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, by using unsustainable growth and loss of political equity and effective shares in democracy to degrade ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath a key threshold, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk, has done more to harm our shared values – like experiencing moderate temperatures and enjoying access to food and water – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.

    Why? The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health. This is exacerbated by vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our  current trajectory, and all of this loss of freedom and welfare is measurable by widely accepted metrics used for assessing sustainable development.

    And yet legal systems, and legitimacy, require the measurable inclusion of constituents in order to be representative, and to legitimately claim exclusive use of violence to ensure compliance with the law. Illegitimate use of violence, of course, breeds violence. 

    How could we account for fundamental obligations without first ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions, the fundament of empowering relations?

    And yet several organizations in high-emission nations have been running animal protection and environmental campaigns – our most demanding ideals – by fundraising on claims of reduced emissions, while total emissions and negative infant outcomes are rising, the claimed reductions in emissions having been vastly undone by growth, an enabled by political inequity. More and more children and animals have been brought into conditions with no resources with which to deal with the impact of the growing emissions, lack of political influence, and degrading eco-social safety systems.

    Human birth and development is the largest determinant of all outcomes we experience. It is thus the fundamental driver of the climate crisis – not just emissions, but political influence to control them, and  resilience to deal with them. And yet even now, wealthy funders driving social justice reforms are hiding their liability for the violations and undoing – and undoing that moved wealth into their hands, and undoing that is costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars. 

    The Fair Start Movement was formed as the world’s first constitutional watchdog to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would choose to avoid liability for the crisis, and to evade the life-saving and legitimating reparations they owe. Our tactic is simple: We take impact claims made by influential entities and key public interest organizations and we assess them against objective measures of ongoing losses of political equity and democratic influence, or a zero-baseline measure of the full spectrum of harm caused by the crisis. Fair Start does not replace downstream public interest interventions; it reorients them from preemptive, rights-based, legitimating, and upstream base. 

    Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barrierswho should  disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of he rights of children and animals. We contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent base value of being free.

    Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurately premised communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that obligation be self-determining.

    How then could we account for fundamental obligations without ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions?

    If they are willing to tell the truth, we urge key barriers to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today.

    Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “non-constituitive ” barriers – those who refuse to derive authority and entitlement back to demonstrably empowering the constituents from whose sovereignty these things flow and are conditioned upon. While nonviolence is key these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.  

    Challenging assumptions that hurt our future infographic

    Children Healers is a transformative initiative dedicated to addressing the profound mental and emotional toll experienced by children affected by trauma. By breaking down barriers to mental health care, we empower children to heal, rebuild, and thrive. In partnership with the Fair Start Movement, we advocate for a more equitable world, where children regardless of their background—have access to the resources they need to succeed.

     

    Together, we are focused on ensuring that the most vulnerable children, especially those impacted by the climate crisis, are not left behind. Supporting Children Healers means joining a global effort to provide essential therapeutic services, education, and hope to those who need it most. As we work to create lasting change, we invite you to stand with Children Healers, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to heal and grow in a world that offers them a fair chance at a brighter future.

     

    Nour Belokda, founder of Children Healers

    Every child has a right to come into the world with their needs met. But due to the actions of major contributors to climate change, like Coca-Cola and Exxon, for the last several decades those rights have been diminished to a point where basic rights are treated like a privilege, especially for black and brown people in the U.S. and around the world.
    In the West it’s become disgustingly clear, as we’ve watched Helene ravage the southeast United States, watched fires ravage Altadena, and as we’ve watched the unhoused struggle and suffer just to survive in a country that can consume all while outsourcing its labor needs. The people of the globe, and of the United States, are owed.
    Regina Stone Grover,Rei Stone-Grover MA – Co-Executive Director, Fair Start Movement, Poet, Writer, and Trauma educator; Commit To Healing Vol. 1 https://www.amazon.com/Commit-Healing-Vol-Poetic-Experience/dp/0578900327

    For many years, There has been an error in addressing climate injustices and birth inequality until the world is at threshold and soon bursting. Very many charities and foundations emerged in addressing climate injustices and birth inequalities but the method used by these charities is insufficient in that it lacks the measurable accountability to the death of vulnerable children from harm hidden in Their charity because  they didn’t address the root cause of the crisis. Whereas indigenous emerged from the grassroots from Affected communities with Afrocentric model to address climate injustices and birth inequalities but have limited access to funds to execute this model in saving the next generation.

     

    Introduction 

    The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal, and fundamentally racist, assessment and reporting standard that hides climate damage liability. This standard is based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard – deriving from power grab efforts by wealthy families in the Twentieth Century that subverted the civil rights movements – used the contradiction in terms of procreative autonomy, and by hiding measures of the loss of political equity,  started to silo justice into downstream issue areas that acted as decoys with the work being undone daily by growth. 

    Reproductive rights regimes based on isolated decision making, which ensured long run inequity, have become the base driver of a white wealthy supremacy that will kill countless children of color.

    This move effectively skipped ensuring children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This shifted costs onto mostly children of color, evading hard checks on growth, avoiding racial equity, and ensuring status quo in the direction of power. This racial subversion standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.

    A stark example is  – in the last several decades – the anthropocentric commercialization of animal rights as a form of food salesmanship centered on vegan food, which shows how a radical social justice movement can fall prey to the standard, and continue to make fraudulent impact claims undone every day by inequity and growth. 

    These same wealthy 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.

    If you ask the right questions, those engaged in it become obvious: Their work is inevitably abstract, ignoring the entry into the world of children, and starts by assuming entitlements that contradict the values and impacts they claim, entitlements that enable the industries they claim to fight.

    This further cements in place the subversion of civil rights.

     

    Inequality info graphic

     

    In the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign we ask all how they are first accounting for children entering the world relative to what their rights require, because social  justice reforms should address this – the largest determinants of outcomes – first. 

    We can all start to change that, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like:

    “We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact?” 

    You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact. In essence the proponents are using a shell/ponzi scheme, identified as such by Nobel laureates, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocent persons around the world. 

    Forget left versus right politics and focus on the top-downs: Government over citizens, owners over managers, employers over employees, parents over children and future children, and humans over nonhumans. It’s about a choice of power, a directional binary choice between entitling the powerful or the vulnerable, with the former choice  illegally violating infant and animal rights, rather than creating an inclusive system where the powerful can represent the vulnerable.

    How could we invert that system, in practice? 

    See more below, but in essence one can invert by talking about the vulnerable when assessing and reporting impacts – by talking in a dynamic way about constituting relations, rather than focusing on a static national constitution that has nothing to do with deriving and conditioning authority on the empowerment of subjects. Just the way binary gender language erases nonbinary identities, or nationalistic language erases rightful indigenous land owners, static language erases future children as the priority class of most numerous and vulnerable entities. 

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment infographic

     

    What’s justice? It starts with existence and birth, or developmental and emancipatory positionality – or what we understand to be the commonly accepted idea of intergenerational justice as minimum thresholds for children entering the world, though these thresholds must now be modified to account for the fundamental driver of the climate crisis. 

    Legitimacy requires first accounting for vulnerable children entering the world in conditions that do not fulfill their rights, and at levels that degrade their environment and disenfranchise them politically, as a factor impacting our claims. Was that factor undoing the work we were doing, and maybe even doing more harm to our missions than we were doing good, especially because the status quo standard scored children of color as deserving substantially fewer resources, and exponentially more risk, risk that is now causing them to die in the climate crisis?

    Fair Start’s research shows that – given the millions of deaths being caused by the climate crisis – ignoring this factor meant that many charities on balance did more to enrich the families of wealthy investors/funders than accomplish their missions.

    More vulnerable entities will suffer and die, because of the subversive standard and the protection of generational wealth, than most prominent charities will have saved. 

     

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

     

    By not accounting for the fair or equitable creation of actual power relations at birth, our social justice and public interest work became performative, abstracted from reality in a way that ensured the current crises. As described above, our research also shows that all legal obligations derive from language that accurately captures our first obligations to others, and given our harming future children in the climate crisis, the corrective admissions we call for here are needed to move our language towards mutually empowering all using measurable self-determination as the base value.

    Dignity – and the human rights that derive from it and equity – require orienting from truth, not failed forms of justice derived from injustice.

    Change can start with interim disclaimers like “our work does not account for inequity,” as well as making disclosures under the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign contrasting omissive claims that used the status quo standards with new measures of actual harm to vulnerable infants and animals.

    Background 

    The problem originates from the subversion of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, decades ago, when world leaders removed political equity from reproductive rights regimes, essentially ensuring “separate but equal” standards in families. 

    After World War Two, aspirational standards for social justice, like environmentalism and animal protection, were largely left by governments and businesses to a third sector, civil society.

    But there was an inherent conflict of interest. Large, wealthy families like the Rockefellers largely controlled the sector through their philanthropy, and they had a history of conveying generational wealth rather than ensuring equity. They, and the church, played a crucial role in privatizing reproductive rights regimes, and focusing them on the quantitative issue of population, over the qualitative issue of one’s effective share in one’s democracy – one’s political equity. It was not conservatives or the government that set low standards ensuring the crises we see today. 

    It was nepotistic liberal families who elevated their children over others with unearned privilege. 

    Without political equity, reproductive rights regimes became fundamentally unjust and unsustainable, skewing what it means to be self versus other-determining by wrongly treating the act of having children as more personal to the parents than other-determining for the child. The regimes enabled prior = generations to abuse an unlimited right to have children at cost to the rights of current and future generations, creating massive inequity and ecocidal growth.

    To the extent wealthy and mostly white families owed reparative justice, this was reparations fraud, the evasion of the heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions child rights required.

     

    How Do You Destroy a Planet's Atmosphere? Tell Lies. Fair Start Certification Tells the Truth Infographic

     

    The lack of investment, the lack of necessitating rights-compliant early childhood development conditions, 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 and enabling some kids much further ahead than others, did more harm than good because it blocked life-saving funds in favor of concentrating and growing generational wealth.

    It was not conservatives that fundamentally caused modern ecocide, inequity, and autocratic nationalism. It was the hypocritical liberals behind philanthropy who refused at base to reconcile their generational wealth and unearned privilege with justice, and they thereby set horrifically insufficient goals for social justice movements, siloing justice away from birth equity and into decoy versions of the ideals that through inequitable growth ensured the climate and related crises.

    Those concentrations are so extreme today that they can ensure sustained propaganda of an underpopulation “crisis” in the middle of a growth-driven climate crisis killing millions. They use an illegal standard for cost/benefit assessment and reporting that was designed to benefit the children of wealthy investor-philanthropists by arbitrarily scoring their worth higher than other children, in violation of the rights of all children.

    Continued use of that standard gives rise to justifiable retaliation by those tricked into being obligated to follow the law without being fairly empowered to change it (what we might call the #equiscam).

    Those insufficient public interest efforts would have inevitably started with zero actual protections for those the intervenors claimed to protect while entitling the industries they failed to police, treating children of color as deserving a fraction of the resources as white kids 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.

    The impact claims this philanthropy funded were wildly off base, being undone daily by the growth / political inequity. There is no universe in which those positive impacts occurred – they were simply reported out of context, omitting the largest determinant of outcomes undoing the benefits every day, making social justice a top-down and performative charade, a cosmetic version that started by mis-entitling the powerful and ignoring universally enforceable obligations. 

    Activists now with Fair Start will admit being paid by funders of other nonprofits to create a fantasy world that made it look like there was progress and a better future, when in reality both were just moving money towards themselves as the situation deteriorated for the most vulnerable. The activists used wealth to create a fantasy world that ensured audiences would assume entitlements that were contrary to the organizational missions, while they were shifting benefits away from the vulnerable and to ourselves.

     

    World Population vs. Global Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions

     

    It was like a magic trick. At the end of almost two decades of activism with other organizations, many of our activists could demonstrate how despite their organizations’ claims, they had quietly chosen policies that placed more vulnerable entities in harm’s way, while simultaneously enriching themselves and their funders. We had benefited from a system of racist entitlements, exacerbated them through growth and the creation of a fantasy world of social progress that hid the reality of the crisis, and that enabled us to now enjoy comforts like air conditioning while those least responsible for the crisis died in heat waves. 

    We were leeches free-riding on the inequity and injustice of the birth lottery, benefiting at deadly cost to others while creating a fantasy world of impact that did not exist. 

    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. It’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born into economic use, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

    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. In fact, funders have blocked some efforts to reform the standards, thereby minimizing climate damage evaluations, including amounts, the weight or priority of claims, universal enforceability, and priority uses of funds. 

    The many public interest organizations Fair Start activists are aware of have used concrete illegal practices, often employing a “social justice decoy” — a weaker version of the effective interventions needed, but instead one that would do more to transfer wealth to certain families than ensure mission objectives. One funder in particular, influential in reproductive rights and animal welfare, told me he chose a reproductive rights standard without equity because he benefited from the outcomes.

    But continuing that tradition and policy of ignoring political equity in reproductive rights goes beyond bad acting, like racism. By hiding from policy the actual creation – at birth – of power relations, it skews how we see the world, treating the most interpersonal thing – having kids – as personal. This moves values, like nature, equity and democracy, from defining a subject-level “we” towards being objects in our sentences, which enabled things like discount rates and other top-down inaccuracies that exacerbate the climate crisis. Under this misdirection, the focus will be on emissions, ignoring how growth undoes reductions while bringing children into the world without the resources to deal with the impacts. The crisis is about power relations; emissions are only a tiny aspect of that.  

     

    An Open Letter to ReproAction and the Center for Reproductive Rights: Abortion Rights Can Override Governmental Authority

    For example, funders claiming to protect biodiversity from growth, or animals under the legal system, have siloed the issues away from birth equity in ways that benefited them, and their families, at cost to the values they claimed to be furthering. They have avoided covering costs at the level of subject-equity, and got the benefit of seeming to be saviors at a charade-object level, through charities that focused downstream on issues of biodiversity and animal welfare. 

    Against all of this, Fair Start, or an equity-based focus, is the preemptive standard to assess reparations fraud because governments cannot create their own definitions of legitimacy in lieu of the objective measure for that value.

    There are a few tactics we can use to change the standard: 

    1) We can ask key leading social justice organizations:

    What were you doing to ensure children’s birth rights to development and equity over unsustainable demand for the products you criticize? We can urge key influencers who might act as barriers to fair starts, and whose role modeling and inversion of political system would have a large impact whether they would have chosen to institute such a system decades ago had they known the climate crisis would unfold as it did. 

    This assesses the level of commitment to one’s actual values. This discourse can lead into the process of elevating reparations to a measurable level of self-determination, and treat those reparations as owed and payable to would-be parents to bend down the arc of growth and consumption towards child-rights compliant families that are smaller, equitable and democratic. 

    Every corporation, nonprofits included, may be obligated to read their current civil rights obligations as preemptively directed by that standard. Fair Start is urging the United Nations Human Rights Committee and other human rights bodies to admit fundamental failure – in what one Nobel laureate saw as amounting to a shell-ponzi game of commercializing democracy.  We can then recognize an overriding and fundable right to a fair start in life for all children as the solution. This standard naturally overrides national authority to define citizenship and other designations of political membership. 

     

    Two panels compare family planning types. Left: diverse family illustration with bright colors, labeled Fair Start family planning with positive points. Right: grayscale crowd in a city, labeled Economic growth-based family planning with negative points.

     

    Why? Bringing future children into the world is the largest determinant of outcomes in the long run, and because who we should be – fundamentally relating to one another based on rights and not growth commerce – comes before what we do, we can take radical action to move the incentivizing funds. Would we really think it racist not to hire someone because of their race, but to ignore climate risks to millions because of race-based differences in generational wealth? 

    Climate change and inequality are birth-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. If we care about a particular value, like animal liberation, biodiversity, children’s rights, or democracy wouldn’t we be eager to account for a fundamental cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the harm wealth has done to those values, and what it owes going forward? 

    2) We can identify and make examples of high profile barriers (“noncons,” or those who block constituting a just future), many of whom would have funded social justice “decoy” philanthropy: 

    These are some of the people who are most harmed.

    These are some of the people who most benefited.

    Failure to resolve this injustice takes the debtors outside of deserving public (legal/inclusive) protection because by their bypassing child-rights compliant positionality and formation of relations, it would be impossible to account for their being included in a comprehensive system of obligation/rights that actually accounts for the costs and benefits of birth positionality. While nonviolence is key, these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.  

    They are fundamentally illegal, and not based on an assessment using fictitious borders like lines on a globe, but the true border to self v. other determination controlled by who – via creation – we actually share the world with. In such an assessment and the horrors of the climate crisis, those seen as leaders become targets. 

    They deserve as much as they necessitate for the most vulnerable. No rights for infants in creation, rights that act as cost limits on our behavior, means no rights for the cost evaders. It was this override, the primacy of creation positionality and its impact on political equity, that those behind the racial subversion standard described above were likely terrified of, and hiding. 

     

    Several hands of different skin tones are stacked together. Overlaid text reads, The most powerful social justice is a fair start in life. Join the coalition. The Fair Start Movement logo appears at the bottom.

     

    But their wealth was fundamentally made at cost to our freedom, and the freedom of others, and there is no reason we should not take it back in order to fundamentally liberate. Their behavior, each day, is evidence of whether they ensure legitimacy, or collective freedom from power, or assume illegal entitlements to benefit at deadly cost to others while masquerading as free. 

    This tactic can begin by asking government officials, wealthy individuals and families, and key leaders across all sectors whether they think kids deserve a fair start on life; how they are accounting for entitlements that ensure children only being born into conditions that comply with their rights under the Children’s Convention so that we can all share a legitimate, or a rights-based, political system; and to admit their entitlements derive from and are conditioned upon an obligation to measurably empower the constituents in a way that actually justifies governance.

    This can include focusing on the adult children of key targets, who under the preemptive standards above would inherit the death debt of their parents.   

     

    A comparison chart of Current Family Planning vs. Fair Start Family Planning. The left side lists negatives of current planning; the right side highlights positive outcomes of fair start planning for welfare, equality, and environmental protection.

     

    It can also include academics.

    For decades the majority of assumptions in population ethics, as a field, have been fundamentally premised on welfare improvements that the climate crisis has now reversed. Moreover, those assumptions ignored the need to use self-determination or political equity as the fundamental value for social organization, because welfare cannot account for political obligation and unless current systems were designed to kill millions, they failed on even a welfare standard. 

    Abstract academic debates about ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to exacerbate the results of the climate crisis by forestalling law and policy reforms. Many of the debates derive from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism described above – the historic entitlement of wealthy families to exploit birth positionality ensured by colonized nations. 

    Academia should be objective and that doesn’t mean ignoring one’s positionality. It actually means first accounting for it, especially to avoid contradictory exploitation and entitlements that conflict with one’s values. 

    There is no accurate evaluation, no assessment of values, without inclusive positioning.

    Most of the academics in these debates contradict in their writings the basic things they seemed to value throughout their lives, e.g., 1) seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare while letting at risk children and certainly many members of future generations die in infancy through deprivation and abuse that could have been avoided; 2) expecting equal access to opportunities while the exponentially discriminatory birth positioning of others resign them to a life of servitude, 3) participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed while ignoring the way dilution and positionality ensure the voices of some carry no weight, 4) using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health while others are born into the deadly results of racist ecocide, an outcome that contradicts the efficiency many of these leech-like academics laud in the abstract as they enjoy growth-based investments, and 5) enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions while others and those in the future have no such option, etc.

    You can identify these academics because they will avoid discussions of how shared values relate to the actual creation of power relations. They will pontificate on values while enjoying the benefits of their birth lottery outcome. They will silo off values, like animals’ rights, from the issue of who the humans – the performance of which those rights depend on – should be. They will avoid discussions of their full positionality. They will avoid explicitly conditioning state authority, and the justification of violence, on empowering each person equally. They will choose a false default position of illegal entitlements while they pontificate, and through positionality, harm others. 

    If the micro-liberation of nonhumans looks like open rescues at factory farms, the macro would look like “real new deal” social contract demands for reparations in exchange for child-centric planning that would ensure a truly climate-restored and bio-diverse future in which humans are empathetic enough to be inclined to treat nonhumans well. But many academics, whose interests do not align with macro reforms, ignore the latter.

    Regardless, there is no room for continued debate under the status quo entitlements, as the death rate climbs. Illegal power derives from the illusion of representative authority, which is used to to justify the exclusive right to use of violence.

    That illegitimacy, that abuse, is what breeds all violence. How do we react well? 

    A beach littered with plastic trash under a cloudy sky. Overlaid text reads: The decision to have kids has to go beyond ourselves and toward thinking about the children who will be born, and the society and world they will inhabit.

    Free persons will only follow rules that are fair, and the first rule accounts for our creation or positioning into the system of rules, so that we are more self-determining than determined by others. The most basic legal rule of all – after World War Two and objective limits (human rights) on subjective individual and national sovereignty – requires representatives and property-rights claimants to derive their authority from those they claim to represent, from an objective system of empowerment. 

    Because of the racial subversion standard, that never occurred. Leaders exploited the arbitrary nature of the birth lottery, rather than ending it. That subversion is so internalized today that major figures in justice advocacy, like Martha Nussbaum and Michael Sandel, never even touch on the main driver of the climate crisis. God did not create them into relative positions of safety and benefit, bad policy did.

    Telling the truth allows us to see who is sufficiently other-regarding to be included in the “we,” or those who support capacity for self determination, versus those who were engaged in a performative version of justice without covering the actual costs. 

     

    A hazy, polluted city skyline with the quote: Explain to future generations that it was good for the economy when they can’t farm the land, breathe the air, or drink the water. - Unknown. Having Kids logo at bottom.

     

     Telling the truth allows everyone to relate their experiences to the dynamic reality of the most vulnerable, children entering the world and impacting animals – in the actual first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful. 

    All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base. Language that accurately reflects and forms obligations has to be accessible to the people who are engaged in the discourse – meaning it definitely is not a traditional national constitution. 

    There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down with them. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all.

    Above all, this is the most important thing to remember: 

    Law must be interpreted to legitimate itself, and the areas of positive law necessary to carry the Fair Start reform forward, including constitutional, fraud, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental, nationality, democracy, civil rights, and others, must be preemptively interpreted to ensure inclusion and representation. As such, treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as others must be enforced by the ultimate source of authority, the people, through things like the Tell the Truth campaign, and demand for reparations payments from key concentrations of wealth and power to class representatives of collective family defense systems.   

    Infographic titled Better Family Planning, Simply Put with icons and three points: Delaying parenthood, smaller families, and community support, each explained with brief text and blue graphics.

    This is not altruism.

    Again: It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that 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, whose authority and entitlements derive from and are conditioned on the creation of liberating relations. Those that think and act otherwise – nonconstitutives – logically fall outside of the scope of protection free, or measurably self-determining persons, must give each other.

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

  • What is Animal Law? Don’t Get Scammed. It’s a High Ideal Being Hidden by Wealth.

    What is Animal Law? Don’t Get Scammed. It’s a High Ideal Being Hidden by Wealth.

    Humans are animals. Seeing ourselves us as such moves us away from the Anthropocentric thinking that has ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. Animal law starts with a capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with the future humans who will determine much about animals’ lives.

    How else would we account for unreported and unreportable animal cruelty, which comprises that vast majority of such acts? How else would the law account for avoiding that? What logically would precede ensuring relations likely to prevent it?  

    Animal law in the best sense thus starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations between humans and nonhumans, relations capable of empowering future persons in legal systems, and benefitting animals. Nonhuman and human liberation are tied because the creation of our mutual relations is the biggest driver of outcomes. Animal law and fields like humane education have to start with the capacity to benefit animals, on balance, and when it derives from a legitimate place it does. 

    In the last several decades many organizations claiming to further the field of animal law have consistently omitted the fact that most of the benefits of their work was being undone by growth on many levels, and loss of political equity / the influence one has over their legal systems.

    There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. They are just being stated out of context. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable

    The undoing of their claimed beneficial work, and their masking of growth as the fundamental driver of the climate crisis, was enabled by the assessment and reporting standards that caused the climate crisis, standards that ignore illegal violations of vulnerable children’s birthrights. In other words, leaders at these organizations chose a version of animal law that – at base – excluded animal protection as a factor impacting how we invest in children coming into the world, and on balance this emaciated version of animal law did more harm to animals than these organizations did to benefit them.

    It was a version of animal law that did not, on balance, have the capacity to benefit animals because it does not account for the actual relations between humans and nonhumans, the relations that necessitate the need for protections. It was a version of animal law designed for the benefit of animal lawyers, not for the benefit of animals. 

    We can fix this mess by moving what we claim to value – animal protection and liberation – into our fundamental constitutional regimes. How?

    It starts with Telling the Truth: 

    Facts: We have all collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life, by allowing unsustainable growth, trading economic growth for loss of political equity, ensuring the degrading of ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath key thresholds, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk. This has done more to harm our shared values – animal protection and liberation, experiencing moderate temperatures, enjoying access to food and water, etc.  – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.

     

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

    Line graph showing world population (billions) from 1950 to 2100. It displays observed values, median projection, 80% and 95% prediction intervals, and scenarios for ±0.5 child, with population rising then diverging in future projections.

     

    “Animal law” does not mean talking about abstract directives that refer to animals, and relying in good intentions and symbolic acts to achieve animal protection. Yes, advocates may have better intentions than Exxon, but how much do animals care about our intentions, and why not measure justice from an objective standard rather than use bad actors as the standard?

    It’s first and foremost about having functionally protective, legal relations with nonhumans, an idea better reflected in the preambles of constitutions than any reference or lack of reference to animals per se.    

    Background 

    Humans are animals and our birth and development – our creation – is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior that impacts nonhumans, exponentially. Our creation also determines how – through participatory democracy and representation, or what is really just political equity or our functional shared in democracy – our legal systems function.

    Animal law starts with that issue – the creation of humans – the first necessary condition for something to be animal law and capable of protecting them. It starts at the subject level of our grammar, the “we” in our constitutions, or the creation-accounted-for existence of our relations with them.

    AI systems adept at assessing racial injustice can detect equity values at the subject-level of value claims (and those values will alter the human-animal relations), versus the object level of those claims. Consider the need to distinguish between something like equity in hiring decisions versus who is birth-positioned to make those hiring decisions.  A goal for permissible climate emissions as the object of a sentence differs greatly from a low emissions standard implicit in the “we” subject of the same claim, with that collective subject implying the ability of all referenced to be free from harmful emissions. Permissible emissions as a goal/object frames the political system as consensual and legitimate (especially from the perspective of nonhumans), which it would not be without restoration as a condition of the collective subject.

     

    Infographic titled Inequality and the Climate Crisis: How did we get here? with text blocks explaining causes like prioritizing economy over rights, disenfranchisement, ignoring the 1/10th wealth gap, and impacts on families. It also highlights how practices such as legitimacywashing contribute to the problem by masking systemic failures under a veneer of responsibility.

    But instead, these issues are rarely discussed because creation ethics, unlike food, zoning, shelter, etc. policies, involve big questions of racial equity, climate reparations, personal responsibility in parenting, de-growth and liability for charitable fraud that hid the drivers of the climate crisis.

    Creation ethics as a subject, threaten the nepotistic families and funders who for decades have used their wealth to define animal law in a narrow way, relying on advocates eager to get the benefits of well compensated but low-impact charade work, contrary to the interests of nonhumans and vulnerable humans. Every day growth undoes the impacts and benefits animal lawyers and others advocates claim to produce. But few will admit that.

    Performative Animal Law 

    It’s easier to engage in performative animal law where we just talk about how legal language refers to animals, while the actual benefits to animals and vulnerable humans are undone via inequity and growth, and we enjoy the benefits of our growth based investments and institutions. It’ s easier to use wealth made at cost to animals to create interventions that are being undone daily, in ways that benefit those creating the interventions more than animals, using large media budgets to drown out possible interventions that would on balance benefit animals. But there is no such thing as anthrocentric animal law.

     

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

     

    You don’t get to justice by starting with injustice, by violating children’s rights in the birth-creation of actual relations. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact.

    For example, circa 2003 Fair Start advocates previously working with the Humane Society of the United States (“HSUS”) embarked on a policy to frame farmed animals as the most numerous class of animals subject suffering at the hands of humans. We did this while partnering with Whole Foods and other entities intent on commercializing the growing anger HSUS and others would create by publicizing the treatment of farmed animals. We had found a way to monetize the idea of animal liberation, but not actually accomplish it.

    In reality, the most numerous class of animals are future animals, and HSUS was employing the same discount rate to future animals as growth-economists were applying to future persons. In reality, the most impactful intervention for humans and nonhumans would have centered around growing calls at the time for the promotion of a small family ethics, law and policy.

     

    A chart with circles of varying sizes showing the impact of different actions on reducing carbon emissions. The largest circle says “Have one fewer child 58.6”. Other actions include living car-free, recycling, and using green energy.

    But HSUS and others chose to focus on food reforms, all of which assumed growth-based food markets. While the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas, looked at issues of human justice, that turn – to focus on food sales over fundamental justice – is the greatest example of the phenomenon he saw, once we measure by the numbers of victims impacted.

    A split infographic compares Current Family Planning with Fair Start Family Planning, listing differences in welfare, equality, and environmental protection for children, while highlighting how practices like legitimacywashing can undermine genuine progress.

     

    Many of the funders, legal advocates and activists working on these issues at the time would go on to make a lot of money in the food sector, in the years to follow, having used sensational campaigns centered on granular/micro issues of animal suffering that overshadowed the macro forces – like growth-driven demand – undoing the work. That growth driving more and more animals into suffering and acting as the largest diver of climate outcomes.

    How does this relate to animal law specifically? Animal law is arguably the most demanding form of social justice, and thus a good measure for how systems fare in being just or unjust. It purports, in referring to a legal system capable of actually protecting nonhumans, to be inclusive of the vulnerable in a measurable way.

    Animal law goes beyond impacts, and requires assessments about how we are including future children into legal systems in ways that empower those children and legitimate the systems. Look closely at all of the content being created and framed as “animal law,” from 2003 until today. You will see a lot of focus on food and similar downstream-only interventions. Look then for comparable work on family reforms that would have benefitted nonhumans, and vulnerable humans, alike. You will be surprised to find little if any, and with some of the organizations actually encouraging growth that ignores children’s rights in favor of economic growth.

    In many cases the funding of animal nonprofits exemplifies a next-level expansion of the corruption that is well documented in philanthropy: The use of well-funded messaging, media, academia, etc. to limit the ability of audiences to use accurate criteria to judge the truth and value of claims and impact. 

    In one case, those designing programming at Harvard University define the scope of their work in an inaccurate way that implies a beneficial overall impact on animals that is totally unsupported by their work. When political  equity is factored in, the scope privileges those funding the work more than the animals they claim to protect. The site refers to the program as “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system,” and yet nothing in their policies or work addresses the fundamental driver of animal suffering and death because that driver—anthrocentric growth—benefits the school and their funders. 

    One senior funder, associated with the program, is known for creating digests of animal law developments. That funder has refused requests to cover developments in abortion access precedent as “animal law” because, according to their representative at the time, the idea of “animal law” required legal developments that discussed animals. They ignore legal reforms around abortion access as a benefit to animals, despite the disproportionate benefit abortion access has for animals, relative to food. They define animal law in ways that ignore the largest determinants for animals, things like the notion of black birth equity as an overriding human right. 

    The funder uses a metric for impact that omits growth and other birth-related impacts, which ensures birth inequity, and derives from the successful subversion, through separate but equal family policies and laws, of Twentieth Century racial justice movements. The policies and standard work by weighting autonomy or self-determination outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in their democracy, which makes value assessments (and things like discount rates) wildly inaccurate. One’s arbitrary birth positionality, one’s draw in the birth lottery in terms of race, intergenerational positioning, nationality, etc., is assumed to be fate or the hand of some magical deity, rather than a product of bad policy requiring contemporaneous offsets to ensure the political equity that legitimates governance.

    That standard  – which is the same one used by a notorious milk brand – is key for the funder, because their entity is highly nepotistic, spending more on family members compensation than on policies capable of actually benefitting animals. Many of the entities relying on funds from funder avoid talking about this issue for obvious, but unethical, reasons. That silence ensures funds meant to benefit animals don’t – on balance – have that effect, while deadly inequity between humans grows.

    To be clear, the funder is choosing a system that retains unearned birth-based positionalities and privileges that enrich some at deadly cost to others , and in a way that undercuts their commitment to animal rights, law and policy.

    In another case, after a professor at Princeton endorsed an Fair Start letter calling for the Dean of Yale Law School to invert her analysis of equity and reparations under the binary system we describe here, faculty at the school engaged the author, copying their supervisor at work, ostensibly because the blog exposed massive disparities between the values and impact claimed by the school, and true impact relative to the equity measures that would have avoided the climate crisis.

    Yale Law School has yet to make changes to their omissive claims.

    These claims ignore unjust family policies, and the daily undoing of the claimed benefits, on many levels.

     

    Don't Get Scammed: Charities, Media and Big Business Use Family Policy to Quietly Undo Progress. Ask This One Question Before Giving, Believing, or Buying Infographic

    In fact, many animal lawyers have continued to double down, explicitly embracing anthropocentric systems that have benefitted their funders more than animals. Why does all of this matter? Demands for climate reparations are growing, and many will be wondering what those attorneys and advocates working under the mantle of protecting the most vulnerable were doing during the most crucial years of us all knowing the climate crisis was unfolding, years when we were able to do something about it.

    Animal lawyers, more than most, will have questions to answer for their role.

    Were they advocating for performative behavior-changing standards without changing the fundamental relations being created, focusing on micro propertyhood, while hiding a much more lethal form of macro propertyhood? What role did funders making money on the latter, those who did not want to question their or their kids’ birth-based national, intergenerational, racial, etc. positionality, have in that fallacy? 

    If we have account for way inequity and growth undoes our claimed good work for animals, in which fantasy world were we actually benefitting animals? Some recent direct action efforts give promise that animal law can move towards animal liberation, and not just talking about it while living in ways – fundamental ways – that hypocritically undo it.  But unless direct action animal liberation movements also include macro animal liberation reforms, they too are not serving nonhumans on balance. 

    Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking 

    The Fair Start Movement was formed to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would use it to avoid liability for the crisis, and for life-saving and legitimating climate reparations.

    An Open Letter to ReproAction and the Center for Reproductive Rights: Abortion Rights Can Override Governmental Authority

    Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in growth, and the violations of children’s’ birthrights that enabled that growth. In this process we contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero-harm baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent understanding of freedom.

    We then urge those key barriers to admit the undoing, and shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today. Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “nonconstitutive” targets blocking that process, often by creating a fantasy world of inaccurate impacts.

    The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies,  nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal assessment and reporting standard to hide climate damage liability, a standard based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard – deriving from Twentieth Century power grab efforts to subvert civil rights movements – siloes justice away from birth equity into downstream issue areas that act as decoys, hiding a growing lack of birth-based political equity.

     

    Two illustrations compare family planning models: At left, a diverse happy family stands together with icons for community and health. At right, a monochrome crowd in a city. Text contrasts fair start (rights-based) with economic growth-based planning.

     

    This power grab effectively skipped children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This was a way to shift costs, evade hard checks on growth, avoid racial equity, and ensure status quo in the direction of power. The illegal; standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.

     

    Infographic explaining Fair Start impacts: Smaller families are 20x more effective at reducing climate impact. One million species face extinction. By 2100, population may double. Early childhood programs offer 13% ROI; family planning yields 600% ROI.
    Be effective.

     

    A stark example is the anthropocentric commercialization of animal rights as a form of food salesmanship – the selling vegan food in growth-based markets devoid of racial and other measures of social justice, as animal liberation. Animal rights as food consumerism shows how a radical social justice movement can fall prey to the illegal standard, as organizations continue to make fraudulent impact claims undone every day by inequity and growth. 

    Any most of the companies that diverted funds away from successful reforms actually failed.

    We can all start to change this, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like: “We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis – the one that does not require child-rights based family planning. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact? Were your impacts being undone?”

     

    A comparison chart of Current Family Planning vs. Fair Start Family Planning. The left side lists negatives of current planning; the right side highlights positive outcomes of fair start planning for welfare, equality, and environmental protection.

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

     

  • For Years I Left Out Crucial Facts While Claiming to Create Public Benefit That I Knew Was Being Undone by Growth. This Helped Illegally Enrich Mostly White Children at Deadly Cost to Millions of Children of Color.

    For Years I Left Out Crucial Facts While Claiming to Create Public Benefit That I Knew Was Being Undone by Growth. This Helped Illegally Enrich Mostly White Children at Deadly Cost to Millions of Children of Color.

    Those working in public interest often make claims, and choose definitions of things like “humane,” “green,” “child welfare,” “democratic,” “inclusive,” “legitimate” and “sustainable,” that give enough wiggle room for influential officials and funders to make money on inequity and growth driven investments, at cost to the freedom and lives of many. 

    They benchmark claims for the wealthy, not the vulnerable, and many are dying as a result. Like me, their statements #leftout that they begin from a system of entitlements that do not actually protect the most vulnerable, and likely undo the good they claim to be doing. These moves hid expensive liability that could move resources and save lives.  

    The statements they and I made were seriously inaccurate, skewing objective values that are based on physical thresholds in the world to benefit some at grave harm to others. The result? Wrongly enriched white kids at deadly cost to millions of black children, and the devaluation of climate loss and damage claims – often achieved  through unethical tactics – that could near trillions of dollars. There is a way to find others doing what I did, and reverse this wrong: Contrast what is said by anyone claiming to do good with facts regarding children entering the world on the day the statements were made, relative to concrete metrics like welfare, equity, capacity for democratic influence, the degradation of the ecological baseline needed to be free, levels of trust, and efficiency. This will show those making the statements undercutting what they claim to value in order to themselves benefit – often at deadly cost to those others.

    This back and fourth dialogue will show many starting from a self-serving position that risks millions of human lives and countless animals. 

     

    Climate driven drought in the Amboseli, Kenya.

    • Between 2000 and roughly 2021, as a federal attorney, as someone teaching law, as a public interest litigator, and as someone creating content for media like the New York Times and other outlets, I avoided subjects that impact United Nations assessed climate “loss and damage” liability, and in ways that protect extreme wealth made at deadly cost to others. This illegally benefited some at deadly cost to many, in violation of things like the human right to a healthy environment.

     

    • I used wealth made at deadly cost to black children to promote low impact public interest work that wrongly implied the legitimacy of basic entitlements, further exacerbating risks to millions of other children. Often we focused on food law to benefit animals, because diet does not implicate positionality relative to discussions of share equity. This created an illusion of truth and value. I claimed a role in effective immigration and national security work, and victories in legal cases for animals and the environment, the impacts of which I and others knew were being undone by inequitable growth policies that violated human rights – policies from which we benefitted. Even when advised of the inaccurate nature of their claims,  many organizations and their funders have simply persisted.

     

    Bar chart income vs wealth. White people are far ahead

     

     

    • Animal rights and law is an area of public interest  that shows the greatest disparity between what was said, and the actual policies chosen. In many universities I taught content, like cases, statutes, and treaties, as authoritative and justly enforceable through violence, knowing such claims were based on a fallacy that served me while deriving others of their entitlements. Whatever those cases, statutes, and treaties seemed to do in terms of ensuring beneficial change, they were being undone by insufficient neonatal and child welfare systems used to grow economies, a policy many animal rights lawyers ignore because it benefits them. I had one prominent environmental / animal rights professor urge me to avoid discussions of the need for ecocentric over anthrocentric family reforms, knowing that this would mean his children benefitting – through growth-based investments and otherwise – at deadly cost to others.

     

    How Do You Destroy a Planet's Atmosphere? Tell Lies. Fair Start Certification Tells the Truth Infographic

     

     

    • For the animal rights work I did, the omission hid that we did not help animals on balance, once growth and share inequity was taken into account. This created an illusion of truth and value by letting listeners assume certain entitlements, including ones antithetical to our mission. We also did this by ignoring conflicts of interests, including my own. To ensure legal systems actually protect animals would take massive reforms we never seriously attempted because we could raise funds – in what some have called off-ramp distractivism – without taking on such a massive thing. We knew donors often wear #blinders. It also let us silo off our work from unifying forms of social justice, at cost to those advocates and immediate benefit to us, and it let us ignore the way inequity-driven noncompliance with the law undoes the value of legal victories.

     

    • As social justice and animal rights lawyers we inevitably decried violence, but never backed the idea of defunding the police or military because that was a form of violence that benefited us – including the way growth-based birth inequity enriches white kids at cost to children of color. We wanted the benefit of a legal system in terms of coercively obligating others to do things in a system where we held prestige and rank, but not to cover the high costs of actually empowering others with influence over that system. When it came to others’ children, we could benefit again, exploiting them for growth even at disastrous cost to animals. 

     

     

    Infographic showing humans impact on global warming, wildlife extinction, and habitat loss. Highlights overpopulation, animal farming, emissions, and advocates for smaller families and green energy as solutions. Hand-drawn charts and illustrations.

     

     

    A group of students and adults gather outdoors for a tree-planting event. Two men plant a sapling in the soil while others observe. A banner in the background promotes environmental preservation.

     

    • This account is from a leader on climate reforms in Africa:
      • An anonymous funder from the United Kingdom pledged to support Rejoice Africa Foundation with $300,000USD to do water project as charity, but not as obligations to cover the harm caused by the true costs of wealth. The wealthy funder, seeing our demands for reparation, then declined the pledge to support the water project in Uganda, as I was struggling to look for funders to pay such obligations because they allow us the dignity of living in the spirit of human rights, as equals who should not be harmed without restorative justice.
      • It was around this time that a child in a nearby village – Judith –  died of Malaria – as the disease worsened, driven by the costs of wealth and with those costs – the climate crisis, the greater breeding of mosquitoes, no prevention measures in place.
      • Immediately after a while , another wealthy funder from the USA funded a conference with $50000USD, continuing to ignore obligations. The conference did nothing for children like Judith, and very little even for the animals the funder wanted to protect. What could they show? Many wealthy funders from global north have avoided funding Rejoice Africa Foundation because they want to pay as charity not as obligation hence causing conflict of results in climate reality in avoiding climate liability. Rejoice Africa Foundation would double work a $50k grant as an obligation. But most funders are busy not accepting to fund this initiative. Rejoice Africa Foundation would like to call funders to reconsider funding this initiative and invest $50k in women and children as the primary obligation to stop climate genocide.
      • [Note: Mwesigye Robert suffered from Malaria while fundraising for $3k in February/2024. Malaria in Uganda: 100% of total children go to health facilities every day. 40% are diagnosed with Malaria and 20 % of these children would get fully treated with anti-malarial and 15 % of these would go to buy treatment from private health facilities. 5% die from complicated Malaria due to lack of adequate treatment for Malaria. Yet in global north Countries, children don’t suffer from Malaria unless they are traveling back from Africa. Wealth imbalance is the cause of this and now leading to climate genocide.]

     

     

    • I omitted information because it benefitted me, and those that employed or funded me, or that published my work. My claims and work became a decoy, sensational minutiae, benefitting wealthy funders by evading costly investments in future generations, ones that would impede growth. Wealth made at deadly cost to others was literally used to drown out mostly black voices, voices that could have saved human and nonhuman lives. In some cases I urged others to avoid discussions of white supremacy, when the evidence is clear that gargantuan race-wealth disparities drive daily power relations all around us. 

     

     

    Infographic titled Inequality and the Climate Crisis: How did we get here? with text blocks explaining causes like prioritizing economy over rights, disenfranchisement, ignoring the 1/10th wealth gap, and impacts on families. It also highlights how practices such as legitimacywashing contribute to the problem by masking systemic failures under a veneer of responsibility.

     

     

     

    • For example, one animal law funder who helped build programming at several leading laws schools made claims about benefitting animals. His underlying policy choices instead:

     

    For Years I Left Out Crucial Facts While Claiming to Create Public Benefit That I Knew Was Being Undone by Growth. This Helped Illegally Enrich Mostly White Children at Deadly Cost to Millions of Children of Color - Infographic

     

    • Elizabeth is the Founder and Executive Director of For All Animals (FAA) and for decades has overseen communications for nonprofits: She said:
    • “To truly measure the impact of our efforts to protect animals and the environment, we cannot review metrics in a vacuum. It is far too easy to manipulate impact by hyper-focusing on one positive outcome or extrapolating beyond acceptable mathematical standards. This not only presents a false narrative of success, but typically ignores the negative reactive implications. Fair Start’s approach requires us to examine individual crises as part of a whole, and highlights the global impact the recognition of a basic legal right to equity could bring.

     

    • We can’t fill shopping malls by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. The money that had been made by cutting many off is owed to first change the system, by elevating birth equity as the basis of all sovereignty. Self-determination, by any conception, means laws that protect the lives of beneficiaries of any political system only derive their legitimacy from the prior act of including and empowering – in a measurable way – future generations, rather than exploiting them and thereby disenfranchising and harming all of us.

     

    Infographic comparing Top Down Power vs. Bottom Up Empowerment for birth equity, listing social impacts of each approach—including potential risks like legitimacywashing when using top-down strategies. Includes icons of people, scales, graduation cap, and supportive hands.

     

    • We would all rightly ostracize anyone refusing to hire persons of color, and yet we embrace those defending their wealth made at cost to millions of black lives, when it could still save countless others.  Many funders are changing their views on entitlements to avoid these deaths, and  mounting #deathdebt if they do not.

     

     

    • Had I been asked the questions above, regarding children simultaneously entering the world as I made claims, I would have had to reveal failings in my and others’ assumptions. That would have prompted the beginnings of beneficial change.

     

    A comparison chart of Current Family Planning vs. Fair Start Family Planning. The left side lists negatives of current planning; the right side highlights positive outcomes of fair start planning for welfare, equality, and environmental protection.

     

    • The longer we wait, the more innocents will die. All justice starts with human rights and the dignity of expecting, in equity, the power you and your children are owed. Humans can only constitute the future through and accurate language of obligation and the creation of just power relations. It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as, and act under an obligation of, being ruled by persons who will parent and the children they will have, rather than by those at the top, officials, wealthy families, celebrities, etc., who hide the mistake above, and who should only have influence to the extent the creation of others ensures measurable equity and the equal offset of their power.

     

    By Intentionally Ignoring Growth and Inequity Nonprofits, Media and Business Leaders Created a Fantasy World of Progress That Prevented Real Climate Reforms, and Will Kill Millions

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

  • Urging You to Back Preemptive Claims for Political Equity, in Birth and Development, as the First Human Right 

    Urging You to Back Preemptive Claims for Political Equity, in Birth and Development, as the First Human Right 

    Fair Start formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies,  nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal assessment and reporting standard, one designed to evade the costs of complying with the Children’s Rights Convention. The standard is used to hide climate damage liability, and is based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths with it.

    The standard – deriving from efforts to subvert civil rights movements – centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation – in birth and development – of power relations and political equity.

    We can all change that standard, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like:

    “We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this relies on use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact?” 

    You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice. 

     

    Infographic comparing Top Down Power vs. Bottom Up Empowerment for birth equity, listing social impacts of each approach—including potential risks like legitimacywashing when using top-down strategies. Includes icons of people, scales, graduation cap, and supportive hands.

     

    What’s justice?

    It starts with existence, with birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – or what we understand to be the commonly accepted idea of intergenerational justice as minimum thresholds for children entering the world, though those thresholds must necessarily modified to account for the fundamental driver of the climate crisis. That driver, at based, is the failure of world leaders to elevate measurable political equity as the value from which legitimate governance and legal obligation derives.  

    Legitimacy requires accounting for vulnerable children entering the world in conditions that do not fulfill their rights, and at levels that degraded their environment and disenfranchised them politically, as a factor impacting our claims. Was that factor undoing the work we were doing, and maybe even doing more harm to our missions than we were doing good, especially because the status quo scored children of color as deserving substantially fewer resources and political influence, and exponentially more risk that is now causing them to die in the climate crisis?

    Fair Start’s research shows that ignoring this factor meant that many charities on balance did more to enrich the families of wealthy investors/funders than accomplish their missions.

     

    Infographic titled Inequality and the Climate Crisis: How did we get here? with text blocks explaining causes like prioritizing economy over rights, disenfranchisement, ignoring the 1/10th wealth gap, and impacts on families. It also highlights how practices such as legitimacywashing contribute to the problem by masking systemic failures under a veneer of responsibility.

     

    By not accounting for the fair or equitable creation of actual power relations at birth, our social justice and public interest work became performative, abstracted from reality in a way that ensured the current crises. Our peer-reviewed research also shows that all legal obligations derive from language that accurately captures our first obligations to others, and given our harming future children in the climate crisis, the corrective admissions we call for here will move our language towards mutually empowering all using measurable self-determination – not disempowering exploitation for unsustainable economic growth – as the base value.

    Dignity requires orienting from truth, from reaerations, not failed forms of charity and after-the-fact justice derived from injustice.

    Change can start with interim disclaimers like “our work does not account for inequity,” as well as making disclosures under the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign contrasting omissive claims that used the status quo standards with measures of actual harm to vulnerable infants and animals.

    Background 

    The core problem originates from the subversion of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, decades ago, when world leaders removed political equity from reproductive rights regimes, essentially ensuring “separate but equal” standards in families. Without political equity, reproductive rights regimes became fundamentally unjust and unsustainable, skewing what it means to be self versus other-determining by wrongly treating the act of having children as more personal to the parents than other-determining for the child. The regimes enabled prior  generations to abuse an unlimited right to have children at cost to the rights of current and future generations, creating massive inequity and ecocidal growth.

    To the extent wealthy, mostly white, families owed reparative justice, this was reparations fraud, the evasion of the heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions child rights required.

    The lack of investment, the lack of necessitating rights compliant early childhood development conditions, 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 it blocked life-saving funds in favor of concentrating and growing generational wealth. 

     

    World Population vs. Global Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions

     

    Those concentrations are so extreme today that they can ensure sustained propaganda of an underpopulation “crisis” in the middle of a growth-driven climate crisis killing millions. They use an illegal standard for cost/benefit assessment and reporting that was designed to benefit the children of wealthy investor-philanthropists by arbitrarily scoring their worth higher than other children, in violation of the rights of all children. Continued use of that standard gives rise to justifiable retaliation. 

    Those insufficient public interest efforts would have inevitably treated children of color as deserving a fraction of the resources and political  influence, 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. The impact claims this philanthropy funded were wildly off base, being undone daily by the growth driving political inequity (while enriching many of the funders).

    There is no universe in which those positive impacts actually occurred – they were simply reported out of the context of negative offset, omitting the largest determinant undoing the benefits every day, making social justice a top-down and performative charade.

     

    Don't Get Scammed: Charities, Media and Big Business Use Family Policy to Quietly Undo Progress. Ask This One Question Before Giving, Believing, or Buying Infographic

     

    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. It’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

    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. In fact, funders have blocked some efforts to reform the standards, thereby minimizing climate damage evaluations, including amounts, the weight or priority of claims, universal enforceability, and priority uses of funds. 

     

    An Open Letter to ReproAction and the Center for Reproductive Rights: Abortion Rights Can Override Governmental Authority

    But continuing that tradition and policy of ignoring political equity in reproductive rights goes beyond racism. By hiding from policy the actual creation – at birth – of power relations, it skews how we see the world, treating the most interpersonal thing – having kids – as personal. This moves values, like nature, equity and democracy, from defining a subject-level “we” towards being minimized objects in our sentences, which has enabled things like discount rates and other top-down inaccuracies that exacerbated the climate crisis. The focus will be on emissions, ignoring how growth undoes reductions while bringing children into the world without the resources to deal with the impacts. 

    For example, funders claiming to protect biodiversity from growth, or animals under the legal system, have siloed the issues away from birth equity in ways that benefited them, and their families, at cost to the values they claimed to be furthering. They have avoided covering costs at the level of subject-equity, and got the benefit of seeming to be saviors at a charade-object level, through charities that focused downstream on issues of biodiversity and animal welfare. 

    Against all of this, Fair Start, or equity, is the preemptive standard to assess reparations and reparations fraud because governments cannot create their own definitions of legitimacy in lieu of the objective measure for that value.

    There are a few tactics we can use to change the standard: 

    1) Elevate reparations to the highest level of measurable level of self-determination, and treat them owed and payable to would-be parents to bend down the arc of growth and consumption towards child-rights compliant families that are smaller, equitable and democratic. Every corporation, nonprofits included, may be obligated to read their current civil rights obligations as preemptively directed by that standard. Fair Start is urging the United Nations Human Rights Committee and other human rights bodies to admit fundamental failure and to recognize an overriding and fundable right to a fair start in life for all children as the solution. This standard overrides national authority to define citizenship and other designations of political membership. 

     

    Two illustrations compare family planning models: At left, a diverse happy family stands together with icons for community and health. At right, a monochrome crowd in a city. Text contrasts fair start (rights-based) with economic growth-based planning.

    Why? Bringing future children into the world is the largest determinant of outcomes in the long run, and because who we should be – fundamentally relating to one another based on rights and not growth commerce – comes before what we do, we can take radical action to move the incentivizing funds. Would we really think it racist to deny employment to someone because of their race, but to ignore climate risks to millions because of race-based differences in generational wealth? 

    Climate change and inequality are birth-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.

    If we care about a particular value, like animal liberation, wouldn’t we be eager to account for a fundamental cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the harm wealth has done, and what it owes going forward? 

    2) Identify and make examples of high profile barriers (nonconstitutive free riders, or “noncons”), many of whom would have funded social justice decoy philanthropy. 

    These are some of the people who are most harmed.

    These are some of the people who most benefited.

     

    A comparison chart of Current Family Planning vs. Fair Start Family Planning. The left side lists negatives of current planning; the right side highlights positive outcomes of fair start planning for welfare, equality, and environmental protection.

    Failure to resolve this injustice takes the debtors outside of deserving public (legal/inclusive representative) protection because their bypassing child-rights compliant positionality and formation of relations, means impossible to account for their being included in a comprehensive system of obligation/rights that actually accounts for the costs and benefits of birth positionality. They are not included in any organization of mutual obligation, and deserve as much as they necessitate for the most vulnerable.

    Their wealth was fundamentally made at cost to our freedom, and the freedom of others, and there is no reason we should not take it back in order to fundamentally liberate. Their behavior, each day, is evidence of whether they ensure legitimacy, or collective freedom from power, or assume illegal entitlements to benefit at deadly cost to others while masquerading as free. 

    This tactic can begin by asking government officials, wealthy individuals and families, and key leaders across all sectors whether they think kids deserve a fair start on life; how they are accounting for entitlements that ensure children only being born into conditions that comply with their rights under the Children’s Convention so that we can all share a legitimate, or rights-based, political system; and to admit their entitlements derive from and are conditioned upon an obligation to measurably empower the constituents in a way that actually justifies governance.

    This can include focusing on the adult children of key targets, who under the preemptive standards above would inherit the death debt of their parents.   

    Line graph showing world population (billions) from 1950 to 2100. It displays observed values, median projection, 80% and 95% prediction intervals, and scenarios for ±0.5 child, with population rising then diverging in future projections.

    For decades the majority of assumptions in population ethics, as a field, have been fundamentally premised on welfare improvements that the climate crisis has now reversed. There is no room for continued debate under the status quo entitlements, as the death rate climbs. Illegal power derives from the illusion of representative authority, used to to justify the exclusive right to the use of violence. But free persons will only follow rules that are fair, and the first rule accounts for our creation or positioning into the system of rules, so that we are more self-determining than determined by others.

    3) The Fair Start Tell the Truth (TTT) campaign: In the campaign we take omissive impact claims that were relative to an impact and assessment standard that scored children of color as deserving less resources and more risk, and instead include the full impacts to create contrast. Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are thus preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with shared values to be self-determining.

    There is no such thing as an inclusive, representative, and hence legitimate legal system without that.

    The TTT campaign allows everyone to relate their experiences to the dynamic reality of the most vulnerable, children entering the world and impacting animals – in the actual first creation of unjust power relations – rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful. All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base.

    Language that accurately reflects and forms obligations has to be accessible to the people who are engaged in the discourse – meaning it definitely is not a traditional constitution in the sense of abstract words. To exemplify this Fair Start is targeting key examples of fraud that go well beyond greenwashing, and in some cases involve criminal conduct that will be investigated before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

     

    Infographic titled Better Family Planning, Simply Put with icons and three points: Delaying parenthood, smaller families, and community support, each explained with brief text and blue graphics.

    There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through, clutching at the others around them as they fall. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

    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.

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

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

    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