Fair Start Movement

Category: Social Justice & Equity

Fundamental Fact/Value Checking Philosopher Peter Singer on Animal Rights

Singer prioritizes food reforms as a form of animals rights and liberation. However, Singer is part of a larger, broken and divisive system of birth privilege that was never equitable or sustainable – and had no protections for animals.

The full title of his famed 1975 book, Animal Liberation, is Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. His failure to promote an “our” consistent with animal liberation – ensuring entitlements first drive smaller and more equitable and empathetic human communities – vastly undid his work and masked the key drivers of the climate and inequity crises killing millions today.

Humans are animals, so inclusive animal personhood just means functional human rights – something Singer undercuts.

Fact: Not ensuring all children a fair start in life, as the first and overriding human right, does more harm to animals than Singer’s work on food reform does good – by far. The inequity and growth he ignores causes more suffering and death to animals, and humans, than vegan food reforms save.

And it’s only getting worse as the climate crisis sets in. Don’t get scammed. Ensuring children a fair start is the most effective way to free children, animals and the rest of us. Instead of backing justice, Singer benefits at deadly cost to others by hiding how his positionality harms humans and nonhumans – allowing him to appear as an altruistic savior when in fact the wealth he guides in the effective altruism movement was made at deadly cost to the animals he claims to value, and in contravention of the utility he uses as a base metric.

What are real animal rights?

Again, humans are animals. Animal rights and law focuses on nonhumans because of their unique vulnerability. Why then not focus on infants and animals, and the creation of fundamental power relations? Those like Singer and others do not because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality. Effective animal rights is expensive.

It’s easier to ignore all of that.

True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights.

Singer uses the same legal approach to intergenerational justice as Exxon. He has for decades, and now continues, to conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm others, free riding on the collective action problem of racial, generational, national, etc. birth positionality, using fraudulent omissions and benefitting from legal systems that oblige others without empowering them.

How is that animal liberation? How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? Would Singer not be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because (among serving other values), they compensate for the absence of animal rights in human reproductive rights regimes, and evade harm to animals in the future?

He (and others, like Heather Gerken, who oversees animal law programming at Yale Law School) should admit they were wrong to not have done this before, and aid in moving the deadly wealth their work mis-entitled – much of it sitting with effective altruism funders – to now save human and nonhuman lives via fertility delay and readiness reparations. We can also make legitimate claims against the privileges of his children, whom he benefited through a performative form of animal liberation at horrific cost to other children.

The animal rights movements has been like a garden club celebrating nature on a micro level, while refusing to intervene in the clear cutting of the forests around the club, often because they benefited from their own silence. That happens enough and ecological catastrophe sets in, while effective altruism and other offshoots now use wealth made at cost to the professed values to drown out black and other more vulnerable voices demanding effective reforms, like treating black birth equity as the overriding human right. Animal rights advocates and lawyers often choose to continue the charade because their illusory audience and impacts seem better than not talking about these things, even if the underlying system undoes them. A better approach would be to choose a system that does not undo the work.

Who is responsible for the climate crisis?

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.

Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.

Singer’s beneficial impact is being undone as children enter the world without the resources their rights require, resources that would empower children to constitute – to be included – in legitimate political systems of self-determining peoples. Singer instead starts his proposed reforms by ensuring the capacity of the powerful to punch down and exploit the vulnerable, and in a way that benefits a few at cost to many. This burdens the children of wealthy families with increasing death debt – a debt which must be paid at some point, and saddles businesses with billions of dollars in increased climate costs.

Singer’s life, and the life of his kids – these are worth no more than other lives.

The fix?

Singer could simply support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. 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 government and the wealthy.

“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”

Martin Luther King

Singer’s work, which does not benefit nonhumans on balance because it ignores the necessary family reforms, replicates the historic undercutting of the civil rights movement by white, wealthy entities – entities that had no intention of allowing equity by ensuring birth, developmental, and emancipatory equity.

We can do better.

Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.

These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefitting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.

This is fraud, falsely claiming entitlements, and hiding the larger impacts, in a way that benefits some at deadly cost to others. You can spot this nonsense when anyone siloes off social justice from the creation at birth of actual power relations, and thus evades the need to include others as ends – and not means – to accurately determine truth and value.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer – here – to admit these truths, and to say whether or not he backs a political system that moves towards equity and self-determination for all, a system where all entitlements derive from including and empowering others? Will be back the idea of an overriding human right to share equity, or continue to just elevate his positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it?

You can also find other icons, quote them in a way that identifies the values they seem to want to further, and then show how their ignoring share inequity in democracy as children enter the world does more harm to their values than they do good.

Ask them: How do you account for children entering the world on what you value, and claim to do? How do you ensure self-determination for all? You are looking for sustainability, or impact, fraud.

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

In the core sustainability scam that drove the crises, many charities focused on sensational, micro-level campaigns while quietly undoing beneficial impacts with macro-level and inequitable family policies that enriched management as well as those funding the entities. You can urge your attorney generals to correctly account for the harms, and ensure preemptive justice for the most harmed.

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

October 16, 2024
Forget Left v. Right. A Handful of Wealthy Targets Stand Between You and Freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there a solution?

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

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

We can fix these mistakes.

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

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

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

Learn more here.

A Litmus Test for Real Democracy?

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

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

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

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

September 5, 2024
Wealthy Animal Protection and Environmental Organizations Created a Fantasy World of Impact That Hid the Climate Crisis, Ensuring Countless Black Children Will Die

As the United Nations has recognized, the climate and related crises killing millions of persons least responsible for the crises are fundamentally driven by ubiquitous and inaccurate impact claims that create a fantasy world – largely funded by wealthy and white concentrations of wealth and power – masking the reality of the Anthropocene and its deadly deprivation of political equity.

Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.

Most claims by animal and environmental protection organizations in the United States have not accounted for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on animals, 1) growth and inequity which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than conservation, dietary change or other common interventions are doing good, including 2) increasing demand for animal habitat and products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering and death to animals and humans.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal and environmental law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.

These organizations show prioritization of growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.

Are charities always on the right side of justice? Compare the assumption of a legitimate baseline to the use of that baseline by Exxon, and the relative impacts of growth versus dietary change.

There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.

Why It Matters

How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most key social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?

The climate crisis will cause unimaginable suffering, and fundamentally derives from illegal entitlements designed around exploiting future generations of humans and nonhumans. It is physically impossible to remove what we do from the context of who we are becoming as a species, and taking claims out of that context ignores loss of equity on at least eight levels, impacts we are all responsible for given our birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – existential impacts which for most of us have exponentially greater impact on others than what we choose to do in life.

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How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create? We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.

Take action: Ensure the organizations you work with specifically account for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals and the environment, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.

Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.

Organizations must work from an equitable orientation of truth, context, and fundamental political obligation, that is not inconsistent with being merciful to animals. Ask their leads whether they think all children deserve a fair start in life, and how ensuring that relates to UN mandated fair climate reparations based on measurable standards of equity which, because they are primary, preempt all conflicting interests.

September 2, 2024
Ezra Klein hid growth impacts that were undoing the public benefits he claimed to further, and helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color. Take Action.
For all the good progressives’ think Klein did, by the numbers his pronatalism – urging women to have kids to grow the economy – did more harm. Klein is especially known for his promotion of veganism as a form of social justice, especially beneficial to animals. Like Vox, Klein misleads about the impact of food reforms.

Their claims do not account for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on farmed animals, 1) which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than dietary change is doing good, including 2) increasing demand for farmed animal products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering to farmed and other animals.

On any given day Klein made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets.

They were willing to greenwash to further veganism, even at cost to animals. They were herding the well intentioned towards buying their products, in the middle of a climate catastrophe.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Klein to admit these facts, stop leaning on women to have kids, and to pay the climate reparations and death debt he owes given his positionality, and which his children – when they become adults – will inherit if he does not.

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
1. Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be.
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood.
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning.
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
August 10, 2024
A Handful of Wealthy Men like John T. Raymond Made Fortunes Driving the Climate Crisis. Engaging Him and Others Could Save Millions of Lives.

Today children are being born in a way that harms their environment and deprives them of the resources they need to deal with that as well as crushing social inequity, a fact that reverses the impacts claimed by almost anyone claiming to do good.

And fossil fuel heirs, like John T. Raymond, are making it worse.

Can we take back the wealth, and by what nonviolent means? In1948 the legitimacy of nations to protect wealth and property rights of those who benefited most from the political systems was made contingent on nations complying with human rights that empower their subjects, the subjects from whom all legal authority derives.

With a billion deaths forecast from the climate crisis, its clear nations have failed to comply – fundamentally because they flouted human rights in the laws and policies surrounding child welfare, exploiting children for economic growth rather than investing in them heavily to make them self-determining citizens in functional democracies – measurable on simple equity metrics.

Nations have no legitimate authority to defend concentrations of wealth and power built at deadly cost to others when demands are made to use portions of the wealth and power to save the lives they threaten.

This is new news to many because universal paradigms around child welfare ignore the obvious fact that justice would begin with children’s rights. Why? Wealthy families and governments at the United Nations in 1968 treated the act of having children as more personal to the parents than interpersonal for the children and the communities they comprise. They did it to avoid having to cover the high costs of ensuring future children’s rights as the basis for reproductive rights and to make money on the growth that a lack of protection would ensure.

That not only set environmental catastrophe in motion, but in ensured the mostly white, rich children of investors benefitting at deadly cost to millions of black children. It also prevented changing things through democratic processes – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – because each person’s share was reduced and their capacity for impact diluted. And even in the last few decades, when the crisis was unfolding, those families funded dishonest charities to lie about what was going on.

Why is this not commonly understood? In part because concentrations of wealth and power used the money to fund charities that greenwashed, creating a false sense of progress.

The animal rights movement in the United States was one of the worst sectors, in this regard – with organizations lying about animal liberation that was being undone by growth from which they were profiting. Many now working with the Fair Start Movement, under reassure from their employers, omitted crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit. This helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.

This is a level of disgusting cynicism justifying direct action.

Because your share equity in a democracy – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – is the basis of legitimacy and any obligation to follow the law (including laws that protect wealth made at deadly cost to others), some are moving to preempt law and policies that interfere with family planning reparations/incentives/entitlements for young women, inverse to wealth and income, that ensure they only have children at a time, place and with resources that offset all the harm the externalization of the wealth’s true costs caused.

Whether individuals back that ask and admit their own greenwashing and benefitting at deadly cost to others, or not, is a litmus test for which side of this fight they are on. Knowing and acting on that is the most just and effective work anyone can do.

To start with legitimacy, or the inclusion of all as political equals in a measurable way, is to be free. Work to free you and your children by peacefully engaging those harming you.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to back democracy, and share equity as the first and overriding human right.

TAKE ACTION: John T, Raymond is one of many men who are holding fortunes made at deadly cost to others. Urge him to admit all of the above, and use his wealth to save lives.

August 9, 2024
Two Reasons Freedom Loving Americans Will Target Concentrations of Wealth and Power to Pay Their Share of Ensuring a Fair Start in Life for All Kids.

Reason One: Extreme concentrations of wealth and power were made at cost to your, and your kids’, freedom – as well as our national security.

How? That money was made mostly through unsustainable growth policies that filled the world with dangerous people in order to make money on them, people who came from dysfunctional homes and never got what they needed growing up because we never had to assure their rights as children. More people, who did not trust one another, meant bigger government and less of a say for each.

Those at the top could back policies that made a lot of people, and made money off then, because they never had to invest children’s rights and empowering birth and development conditions. They were making consumers, workers, and taxpayers for Amazon, Inc. and the politicians they bought, not citizens who trust each other – for town halls and main street.

A nation is not some abstract idea – it is first and foremost the quantity and quality of those in it. And free people will only follow laws in systems in which they were empowered with political control, with a meaningful voice in making the laws. Many disregard the authority of politicians for the same good reason they disregard the authority of bosses in large companies – because those at the top represent so many, and with such different interests, they do not and cannot really represent you.

Why is your right to bear arms – your freedom to own a gun – threatened? Mass shootings mean the average American cannot be trusted with guns. Where did these shooters come from? If you cant trust those around you with guns why would you trust them with your democracy?

Why does the average American have a vote that is pretty much worthless, diluted by growth? Why is your access to places like national parks so regulated and threatened, as you wait hours in line? Where does immigration originate from?

If we can do these things, we can be a people with a certain idea of America, of certain unalienable rights, to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle us. But we cannot be a nation, conceived in liberty, without a land in which nature thrives.

Laws of Nature, Not a State of Nature – American Greatness.

Those at the border do not fall from the sky – and the best research treats growth as the key driver of threats to national security. These same growth policies have been used abroad to create those coming to the United States. Billions were made by creating billions of people, who now threaten our future – and your kids’ future – at home and abroad.

Many in the generations that came before died to defend democracy – town halls where we trusted one another. They did not die to ensure economic growth for a nation of consumers in shopping malls, run by far off boards and bureaucrats who leech the wealth.

To the extent wealth made can be used to rebuild democracy – long run – by funding responsible parenting, we deserve to take and use it as such. Doing so is defending freedom – just in a more complex way than we are used to. For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders. We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them.

Need a more concrete reason to act?

Reason Two: One of those costs is horrific child neglect and abuse, and we can end it.

Guess who really suffers from growth policies based on not ensuring good homes for all kids? Five children die, often tortured to death, and the hands of their parents in the United States each day,

Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States. This is likely an underestimate because many cases are unreported. In 2021, 1,820 children died of abuse and neglect in the United States.

Children living in poverty experience more abuse and neglect. Experiencing poverty can place a lot of stress on families, which may increase the risk for child abuse and neglect. Rates of child abuse and neglect are five times higher for children in families with low socioeconomic status compared to families with a higher socioeconomic status.

Child maltreatment is costly. In the United States, the total lifetime economic burden associated with child abuse and neglect was about $592 billion in 2018.5 This economic burden rivals the cost of other high-profile public health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes.

Photo by JPagetRF Photos/BigStock

No child should be born to parents who are not ready to do a good job. And we can ensure that, through things like financial incentives that pay would-be parents to wait, and show readiness. It works – and we know where those who should fund it live. Why would we not make the wealthy, who benefitted from poor family planning policies and growth, not pay to end it? Why should kids suffer to enrich a few? Halting the torture of children justifies action.

Again, this works. Some funders are moving away from dysfunctional charity, and towards fair start freedom. Others can be urged to do the same.

TAKE ACTION: There is a move before the United Nations to make national sovereignty and authority fully contingent on making each citizen a sovereign, or self-determining, using measurable outcomes. This is the core of freedom and democracy, and it would authorize targeting concentrations of extreme wealth for the freedom they took from us, and our kids. Back that move by sharing the link above, and demanding the UN act.

August 7, 2024
Value Checking Peter Singer
This is a common claim about Singer:

Singer is best known for his views on animal ethics. In his book Animal Liberation he popularized the term speciesism, which he defines as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”. See https://utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/peter-singer/

Singer was instrumental in developing the Effective Altruism framework described as:

Effective altruism (EA) is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. See https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Facts:

There is no evidence that Singer, or most persons and organizations identifying themselves as doing effective altruist work, ever included or now include either the protection of animals or minimum thresholds of wellbeing for children in the basic system of birth, development and emancipatory entitlements from which Singer or the EA adherents were actually benefitting.

Instead they assumed and assume now the existing entitlements – which contradict their work on almost a dozen levels, but which ensure personal benefit to themselves at deadly cost to others. They chose, and continue to choose, top-down coercive systems that do not actually include future generations as empowered citizens, and that exploit a lack of functional protections for animals as well as the children who impact those animals as the children enter the world.

On any given day Singer or EA enthusiasts made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

Millions are dying because of these mistakes. Some might have questioned the legitimacy of a system likely to cause the death of hundreds of millions of persons, and exponentially more nonhumans. There is no evidence Singer or EA enthusiasts are questioning it, even as it enriches them.

Singer, and the funders who backed him, made animal rights more about selling vegan food in unsustainable growth-based economies than what it really is: The fundament of social justice, a requirement to first be a species that co-exists and cares for others. This cost countless lives, but enriched many.

Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most

Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy. Given mounting deaths in the climate crisis, the exploitative and unsustainable growth Singer and EA adherents enabled will do more harm – by the metrics of how they lived, what they said, and the legal systems from which they benefitted – than they will have done good.

Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes. But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.

Animal rights is a human idea, and must come from a legitimate human rights orientation consistent with animal rights outcomes. Micro animal rights, like open rescue, cannot come from a macro orientation of anthrocentric domination.

The public prominence of Singer and EA was funded by wealth made under this illegitimate system, at deadly cost to many, drowning out the voices of the unentitled. Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and other EA favored outcomes, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children. These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth, e.g., vegan food investors.

One in particular was specifically advised that growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and risking ecological catastrophe, but he continued funding the work – lauded by the recipient organizations for doing good. He knowingly risked lives with his lies, and as the crisis unfolds he will be made an example of – to show how it was caused.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer here to admit these facts and to call for EA enthusiasts to back reforms at the United Nations that would prioritize share equity as the fundamental value necessary for legitimating any system. To the extent that he and EA leaders do not, they are hiding liability for climate reparations and illegitimately holding and using wealth – backed by the violence of the state – that could save innocent lives.

For many who understand that their own freedom is contingent on the birth and development thresholds for all children, this will take Singer and EA leaders outside of the protection of a legitimate legal system where each persons is empowered, because Singer and EA leaders would have refused the first term of the social contract – to be fair.

This makes them key targets in efforts to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. Claims of animal liberation, on the edge of countless deaths caused by the Anthropocene, that exacerbate that situation may be the most glaring example of Winners Take All – a but also a chance to make examples of those involved, to show what it means to do better, and to decolonize wealth and the nonhuman world at once.

For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders.

We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them. Why focus on Singer? Animal liberation, and the legal system necessary to achieve it, is perhaps the highest ideal of human progress to date. Defining that idea in a way that evades critical protections for nonhumans, and enables today’s catastrophic state of affairs, causes harm by decoying efforts away from effective work. Singer is well aware of the failings of his work, and should use his substantial wealth and influence to fix obvious errors.

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
1. Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be.
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood.
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning.
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
August 6, 2024
Urge Peter Singer to Discuss Inequity as a Barrier to Animal Liberation

The high human and nonhuman deaths counts we see attributed to the climate crisis assume our current near-universal reproductive rights standard, the one that caused the crisis by ignoring the primary and overriding self-determination rights of future generations. Peter Singer, for decades, backed traditional reproductive rights modeling even though it was doing more harm to animals than his work on animal liberation was doing good.

For decades, I left out crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit that I knew was actually being undone by growing inequity. The statements I made were inaccurate – claiming I was saving animals when on balance I was not – and ensured the death of many by hiding growth and inequity. These omissions helped illegally enrich mostly the white children of the wealthy funders and influencers benefiting from omissions, at impoverishing and often deadly cost to millions of children of color.

Singer did the same, but can correct the harm he caused and also lead Effective Altruism backers to also change course simply by admitting the facts of how children entering the world without sufficient resources for years reversed the good he he promoted, and how inverting our first obligations and influence can allow us to do better.

Because we now owe climate reparations to the future generations harmed by our accumulation of wealth, the true cost of which was placed on them, and mostly children of color who are least responsible for the crisis, those traditional reproductive rights systems will have to change to avoid benefiting a few at deadly cost to many.

Many thought and other leaders who failed future generations and would have to pay for the benefits they enjoyed at cost to others are hiding their liability by omitting information when making claims.

Singer is one of those leaders, and he can save lives by adding the key context to his work on animal liberation – admitting the role of inequity in reversing the liberation he promotes. Read more on Singer’s deadly omissions here and how hi focus on dietary change rather than more fundamental family reforms ensured the subjugation of humans and nonhumans.

Through omission., Singer and others are able to use the failed and illegitimate standards that caused the crisis, or are otherwise trying to reduce the amount owed. That exacerbates the threat of violence, both climate-related and from communities and individuals who feel disempowered and at risk.

We can identify key leaders like Singer to role model the change by asking them about their views on child welfare and reproductive rights, and about how their approach – with no real protections for the children born – has undone many of the good things they publicly claimed to have done. We can ask of all claiming to do good: What are we doing to first ensure – as a fundamental policy – that the conditions in which children are born and raised are being improved using simple metrics, and so we are not undoing and misstating the benefits of the work we otherwise do?

A quiet filing before the United Nations is urging these disclosures as well as changes to the fundamental reproductive rights regime that correct the fundamental problem.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer, at psinger@princeton.edu, to admit that not basing his animal liberation work on share equity undercut the results, and that as the climate crisis unfolds, liberating nonhumans will require no longer exploiting future generations but rather improving their birth and development conditions.

July 27, 2024
The Fuller Project Liberates Women. Urge It to Add One More Effective Move to the Work.

The Fuller Project liberates women by covering stories that impact women, and in ways a lot of advertising driven journalism does not. They are leaders in the field.

This analysis of how AI can be biased and harmful is exemplary.

They can further that great work by also demanding policies which ensure the conditions in which children are being born and raised are being improved using simple metrics like birth and developmental equity and true self-determination, and so that they are not undoing the benefits of the work we otherwise do.

Are we focusing on women today at cost to women who will die in heat waves in the future? Are we ensuring symbolic representation and leadership in companies rather than the more fundamental and measurable political empowerment in the democracies that should control those companies? There is no freedom that does not start with measurable equity.

Our first obligation is to children as they enter the world and are positioned to influence others, rather than any obligation to officials in government or the wealthy whose authority, or defensible claim to own wealth, only derives from the positioning of members of the democracy. Other moves tend to be the fox guarding the henhouse, and evidently lead to disaster.

For example, the Fuller project has shown that AI can be biased and harmful. The most basic fix? All regulation of AI systems, and machine learning, should be based on the fundamental rule that the legitimacy of political systems is contingent on how they empower those subject to the systems, using very concrete metrics. What does that mean?

AI systems are learning and should learn that young women impoverished by the intergenerational inequity that created those like the Trump family have an overriding right to that family’s wealth in order to ensure that future children are born only at a time, place and with resources that offset the climatological and political harms they and their mothers are suffering.

AI comprehends and can crowdsource implementation of this basic logic: Young women who wish to empower any children they will have, and to decentralize opportunities relative to other children around the world, have more political/legal authority than power-taking politicians and unrepresentative courts and agencies. Such women have constitutional authority, not in words from some ancient document assed along by lawyers in some secret code, but in the action actually creating fundamental power relations.

Leaders like Jemima and Mwesigye at RAFUG have really developed and re-created the model in East Uganda with funding redirects from relatively white and well-to-do, but loving, families in the U.S.. And the revolution has begun, with some targets already conceding and choosing a higher authority in the face of evidence that this one change can catalyze the impacts of other reforms, sometimes 20x the long run results (e.g., food+family reforms, rather than food alone).

Learn more about what real justice, for the future majority, looks like here.

There are dozens of ways to do this reform. Gaza today is a reality because we did not make these changes in the last several decades, never making sure Palestinian mothers did not have to raise kids with a tiny fraction of the wealth/resources of the children on the other side of the walls. That would have required heavy investments and more parenting readiness / delay for both sides, thus smaller or more ecocentric families, and thus much less human and nonhuman suffering and death long run.

Let’s not make the mistakes over and over, and benefit a few at cost to many.

This change reorients us from illegitimate systems of top-down coercion (which we and those at Fuller inevitably benefit from at deadly cost to others) rather than bottom-up, inclusive and obligation-conditional systems of political empowerment based on the first human right – an ecosocial fair start in life.

TAKE ACTION: Urge CEO Laurie Hays to elevate fairness at the most fundamental level, and always cover how the act of children entering the world impacts the stories we tell.

Also, go on the offense. Esther Afolaranmi and many others are leading a counterattack on inequity at the UN now (and the ICC next year) and many wise voices are finding ways to back it.

May 28, 2024