Fair Start Movement

Category: Race, Class & Human Rights

$Black children are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children. Take Action.$

Black children are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children. Take Action.

Those same black children will die by the millions in the climate crisis, while many white children get richer and richer. We can change that by taking birth equity seriously.

No child’s life is worth the life of another. The climate and related crises we face today were largely driven by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in near-universal reproductive rights regimes dating back to 1948.

The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity as the overriding value behind political legitimacy. They were evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority.

This created a fake, top-down version of social justice based on hollow legal institutions and laws that never derived from any legitimating authority, but rather hid the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and emancipation. It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.

There were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others. If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority and wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation.

Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.

Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.

No child should ever be born outside a structure of debt/savings accounts that protect all children from the climate crisis by including and empowering them with their universal birthright.

Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we.” Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.

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

December 2, 2024
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
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
#ImpactScam: The Climate Crisis is Killing Women and Infants. Who Will Pay for That?
- The climate crisis is now killing women and infants, with hundreds of millions at risk, mostly persons of color that had nothing to do with causing the crisis. This is racist ecocide, and trillions of animals likely to suffer and die as the crisis unfolds. Ask anyone making a claim about furthering particular values to account for how the family planning norms, policies and relative ranking of obligations they never accounted for has undone those values and created the deadly climate crisis and vast inequity.
- There is a way to reverse this, ensuring all children a fair start in life. A young Nigerian attorney – Esther Afolaranmi – has called on the United Nations to recognize that political legitimacy, the obligation to follow the law, begins by ensuring all children a fair start in life. The changes would prioritize climate reparations as family planning entitlements to ensure legitimate (politically inclusive) systems where children are born only at a time, place, and with resources that reverse climate and other harms and empower them.
- Some are blocking this reform. We need to out them.
- Of anyone claiming to do right in the world, we simply ask: What are we doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work we are otherwise doing in the world? Yes many are doing good, but they can do better and avoid green-growthwshing by disclosing their current and historic policy impacts on child-welfare.
- By asking this question we are looking for those whose work literally starts with a system that causes grave harm to women and infants, without adequate compensation. Such people do so to benefit, usually from unsustainable and inequitable growth, at deadly cost to others – or the deliberate creation of an impoverished labor and consumer class that could absorb the costs of their wealth.
- The process of climate justice starts by recognizing birth equity as the first human right or obligation to others, which means any person can ensure distribution for family planning incentives and birthright entitlements by any means effective – thus crowdsourcing the emergency enforcement of climate justice. This will save countless lives, and reduce the migration and other costs of the climate crisis by trillions of dollars.
The reform is already underway in Africa.

This process reverse that which fundamentally caused the climate crisis through growth that ignored reasonable thresholds of welfare in family planning for mothers and infants, and this the nonhuman world they would consume and destroy. Wealthy whites funded nonprofits that undid their own work, quietly, through family policies that exacerbated the climate crisis and racial inequity.

How would free and equal persons every be able to organize themselves to make these changes?

These systems – based on the violation of children’s rights – are illegitimate because they do not comply with the first human rights, children’s rights, or what creators owe those whom they create. Given the primacy of children’s rights and the hundreds of millions of lives at stake, young women engaged in fair start demands would have greater justification for using coercion to assure what their child needs than unrepresentative government would have to defend illegitimate property rights created and maintained at deadly cost to primarily children of color. People, not written constitutions, constitute nations and people are born with the need for resources to develop – they are not “simply here” (even though our brains have trouble thinking otherwise).

The idea that there is such a thing as legitimate governance that does not start with children’s rights is called the #childscam: A move by a handful of wealthy white men in 1968 to elevate their children over others by ensuring to down systems of power without bottom up justice. They used the institutions of governance to assign themselves and others property rights without legitimating those institutions. They got the benefit without covering the costs.

They made wealth by using low child-welfare standards to enable growth, turning town halls into shopping malls and influential citizens into disempowered consumers. We can all take that wealth back as reparations to young women and their future generations to reverse the process, legitimate governance, and become free. The biggest obstacle to freedom is knowing how social, or other-regarding, we have to be to be included in a free nation. Well, legitimate governance derives from emancipated people, we all have to be other-regarding enough to invest in young women enough for them to have children that will be emaciated, testable on several levels.

In other words, there is no legitimate “We the people” from which to orient obligation without first addressing the need to reverse and compensate climate impacts on infants. We cannot derive obligation from others by first evading it for ourselves. We cannot derive obligation from its absence.

This is not charity or altruism. According to a raft of positive peer-reviews it is impossible to ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence or power over us, to be free, without reforming family policy around every child’s right to a fair start in life, testable by sufficient investments in each child to create equal offsets and degrowth relative to nature.

When we support such systems we are backing a process that undoes the things – like basic health, equality of opportunity, and relative levels of self-determination – that how we all have lived our lives showed we all value. We are included in legitimate systems – living in integrity of who we should be ecologically, and deserving of legal protection, when we extent these basic values to others.

Many have benefitted form unsustainable growth that is likely to kill many in the future. They should now cover the costs, and help avoid the deaths. Older generations made their wealth at cost to future generations, and I’ve witnessed wealthy funders choose to back charities that hid and exacerbated that fact, and sad employees at charities who refuse to speak out because they fear for their jobs.

But who we should be comes first, and we should not be women and infants dying from a disaster the wealthy caused.

TAKE ACTION: Back the Fair Start reform at the UN, and ask the question above to get towards true justice.

Here are a few facts:

Climate change is now harming fetal and infant health harm, primarily in vulnerable families of color, as heat increases threaten to kill millions in the future. Roughly three quarters of attempts to mitigate the crisis has been undone by pro-growth policies, policies that exacerbated the one-tenth wealth gap between black and white families. This is happening because a handful of largely wealthy white men chose economic growth as the baseline for policymaking, rather than equity and democracy-building children’s rights that would actually legitimate – through inclusivity – nation-states. They chose to exploit a false sense of autonomy to exchange participatory democracy for economic growth.

Investing in women rather than exploiting and isolating them without equity funding would have significantly mitigated the climate crisis. Instead these men evaded investing child-rights based family planning, and further birth-privileged their own wealthy progeny while profiting from the unsustainable growth that allowed lack of child-rights allowed.

This divided social justice / public interest movements into less effective silos – like misperceptions of animal rights – that did not threaten the status quo the way birth-equity (equally empowering shares in your democratic system of voting) would have. This in turn undercut democracy, leading to the oligarchic threats the United States faces today.

This now means they – the disenfranchised – will suffer the brunt of a crisis for which they were least responsible, including violations of their right to have even one child in healthy and safe conditions. And because of basic vote dilution, voter suppression, and other factors, they will be unable to use democratic processes to protect themselves, and may rationally choose other measures. And in the face of all of this, many governments driven by industry are paying women to have more children with no easy safeguards like “survive and thrive” baby bonds in place, while wealthy families and foundations reliant on growth fund charities engaged in distractivism.
January 9, 2024
Women are Influencers in Climate Restoration at Frontline Communities

A woman in the family is important person in climate restoration and therefore Rejoice Africa Foundation is giving all appreciations to women in RAFUG in using women care groups in doing climate restoration, requesting for reparations, reforming children rights and filing the petition to the United Nations.

Kabugho Jemima, a woman from Uganda, will start leadership of Rejoice Africa Foundation on 1/January/2024 up to onwards until there’s success in reforming children’s rights and climate restoration using women Care groups.

Who is Kabugho Jemima?

Jemima said:

My journey towards becoming a climate justice activist was not straightforward.

I was born in Kabarole western Uganda from a poor family of 10 children of which four are males and six females am the third born child my parents were poor to give us basic needs in life. My parents forced me to get married to old man at age of 16 years , my parents wanted dowries to support my younger brothers and sisters , I dropped out school after completing primary seven and obeyed my parents to and get married .

During my stay in marriage I got challenges with my husband and divorced him with a lame child, then my parents chased me away from home and left to be maid for church priests in town, I exhibited discipline and commitment to my job then one day one priest picked interest of sponsoring to back to school, I started a gain schooling up to Nursing Profession but my dream was to be a doctor. Growing up in a big family it was challenging, my parents used to depend on agriculture of food crop and we had small portion of land that could not provide us enough food. Fortunately, I got a job to work in the refugee settlement in western Uganda where I was getting salary to support my younger sisters and brothers, witnessed how refugees struggle in the Refugees settlement.

At the age of 27 and nurse by professional, I began my activism passion by engaging in planting trees, community gathering teaching them importance of family planning and delayed parenthood, teaching adolescent girls how to cope up with puberty stages and advising them on prevention of sexually transmitted and how to use sanitary pads .My passion to discourage early girls marriage , teenager pregnancy while promoting girls education and improving food security in the community and desire to make a difference led me to continue my activism work. I’m focused on various areas such as agroforestry, sexual reproductive health for adolescent girls, water accessibility and women and children rights. I have also mentored students in various schools to create climate awareness through singing, poems, storytelling and skits about climate change.

Her work did not perish, and I was soon called to start Rejoice Africa Foundation as the co-founder. In this role, I have participated in the development of Rejoice Africa Foundation.

However, I realized that creating systemic change was not enough. I understood that the fight against climate change required a shift in mindset and individual responsibility. I embarked on a mission to build a mindset shift change by encouraging people to take responsibility for their actions through a human rewarding system.

My work as a climate justice activist has not been easy for me, but I remain focused to meet my goal of saving the next generation.

The future are in our hands , if we don’t respond to climate change , soon the earth will reach on climate devastating situations and it will be hard to reverse this.

Both rich and poor will be affected!

Respond now or never?

December 19, 2023
Addendum to the Open Letter sent Jan 29th, 2023 to Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi Regarding India’s Human Rights Obligations in Developing New Family and Population Policies
March 19, 2023
- On India’s Independence Day on August 15, 2019 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on the central and state governments to implement policies to control the country’s population growth rate: “Population explosion will cause many problems for our future generations. We have to be concerned about population explosion. The central as well as state governments should launch schemes to tackle it,” Modi said in his Independence Day address before the nation’s iconic Red Fort in Delhi according to NDTV. The prime minister also called on Indian couples to have smaller families and praised Indian citizens who have already embraced smaller family norms, saying that having fewer children is “an act of patriotism.”
- This tracks recent activity in India’s Supreme Court dealing with the central government’s obligation to develop family reforms. See https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/supreme-court-notice-to-centre-on-population-control-plea/articleshow/93945701.cms
- In November, 2022, the Supreme Court refused to entertain the petitions seeking directions to control the population, saying it is for the Central government to look at the issue of population control. The Supreme Court also said that it was not an issue where the court should interfere.
However, in November the Court also ruled that under India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancies Act, 1971 (MTP Act), and its related rules, all women are entitled to safe and legal abortion, regardless of their marital status. This enables legislation that would seek to reduce family size.

At the same time, India shows great disparity in equality of opportunity among children. A recent study used two rounds of Indian National Family Health Surveys and concepts of Inequality of Opportunity and Human Opportunity Indices to measure inequality arising out of unequal coverage of full immunization and minimum nutrition for Indian children. The results suggest overall high level of inequality of opportunity with substantial geographical variations. Changes in inequality of opportunity in the two services during 1992-1993 to 2005-2006 were mixed with some geographical regions outperforming others. The findings also call for substantial policy revisions if the goal of universal full immunization and minimum nutrition has to be achieved. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/41487420

Modi’s call for a smaller family policy can thus be recast as a promoting equity, through measures which mimic calls for reforms to U.S. tax policy using devices such as “baby bonds” which create savings accounts for children, and could be used to incentivize delayed fertility.

More specifically:

1) Cut all benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding.

2) Use those savings as cash incentives to power up family planning and early childhood investment systems to a) target child abuse by amending the child abuse law, b) incentivize delaying having kids until parents are really ready, and c) promote more sustainable and equitable families for all regardless of income, as well as fostering and adoption – changes that have twenty times the impact on climate emissions, relative to short term fixes. Those changes – made as part of recognizing our sacred constitutional right to nature – would create massive long-run savings and catalyze sustainable development. We could start to give all kids a Fair Start in life. d) Back comparable Indian programs to Smart Beginnings (in the U.S.) up in time to focus on family planning, and based upon redistribution of wealth in ways that give all kids a Fair Start in life.

UN data shows the family planning incentives are effective: See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3578697/, and can be scaled and inserted into existing policy regimes, including in India: See https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/undesa_pd_2021_wpp-fertility_policies.pdf

These policies better conform to international law. While the Cairo Consensus endorsed a limitless right to have children, see https://www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS/article/view/678, the actual binding sources do not: See https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/5715?show=full. And as such they evade the problem of a limitless right to have children treating future children as property: See https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/djglp/vol17/iss1/2/

Moreover, these policies can override conflicting rights and policies because family planning is the first norm from which others derive, accounting for the creation and existence of persons, from whom governance and all of its practical norms derive: See https://bolognalawreview.unibo.it/article/download/13299/12829

Be effective.

These policies reverse established externalities in Cairo and other measures which create costs for some while benefiting others: See https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2009/0817/economic-scene-is-population-growth-a-ponzi-scheme

The actual policy changes would flow from 1) the UDHR and International Bill of Rights, and a correct interpretation of Article 16, see https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-file-update-to-un-human-rights-council-petition-our-overriding-right-to-nature-and-equity/, to 2) mandate scaled family planning entitlements, like baby bonds, through India’s current family incentives progam. In an effort to encourage Family Planning (FP) adoption, since 1952, the Government of India has been implementing various centrally sponsored schemes that offer financial incentives (FIs) to acceptors as well as service providers, for services related to certain FP methods.

The target for such FI’s would be birth into conditions compliant with the Children’s Rights Convention: See https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/auilr/vol25/iss3/3

One way to fund these programs involve climate “loss and damage” reparations, see https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/11/01/loss-and-damage-what-is-it-and-will-there-be-progress-at-cop27/, which ideally will go to benefit the future generations – through measures that improve birth conditions – most harmed by the crisis.
April 5, 2023
We Are Right to Target Ilya Shapiro, but for Reasons Beyond His Racism

Ilya Shapiro is a conservative thought leader who let slip his views in a tweet about persons of color, and has been ostracized and shuttled-off to far-right circles as a result. His visit at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, this week will continue the debate about where his speech belongs.

Is there a way to move beyond this gridlocked debate about speech, and how speaking can itself reflects power differentials? Can we drop the left v. right thing for a moment? Ilya’s views on race relations reveal much more about about him. Our focus on speaking during specific days and moments aside, he and the concentrations of wealth and power he represents – including their denial of the climate crisis – pose a clear threat to the freedom of future generations.

If we were going to look at harm to persons of color, that aspect of him is worse than his words.

Why? All of his speech and writings – especially his pro-birth advocacy under constitutional law – suggest that while he cloaks himself in the idea of freedom, he actually rejects its first necessary condition: That every child has a right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, and that such a right overrides the property rights – here and now – of the interests Shapiro represents.

As explained in our letter to Dean Gerken at Yale Law School, Shapiro may not understand that concentrations of wealth and power – like the Supreme Court itself and fixed adherence to arbitrary standards he believes made Kentanji Brown Jackson a “lesser” choice – are themselves the product of a deeply unfair system of family planning that entrenched inequity, degraded democracy, and is destroying the ecologies future generations need to be free in a way that will kill millions.

His positions also reject animal rights, subjecting trillions of animals to suffering and death as the Plantationocene spreads across the planet.

Shapiro might be a target because his racist statement belies a willingness to oppress, and put many at risk, to benefit a few.

Is this changing the topic? Missing the idea of speech and power? Look at these sentences and see the pronouns that underlie them – that underlie all thoughts and claims, and then see the relations that underlie the creation of the people referred to by those pronouns. That is power.

True liberalism is concerned with relative self-determination/consent/choice, which would logically start with deontological population ethics, and a creation norm / first principle that would first limit the power others have over us, or where we would choose to be empowered in ways that do not disempower others. He rejects this, committing what is called the constitutive fallacy. His scholarship has risen to esteem not because it is true, but because its premises never threaten the most basic power establishment: Parents’ power over future children and nature, wealthy families’ power over poor families, the power of a coercive state over its people, etc.

Shapiro pretends to limit the power people have over one another, but ultimately embraces oppression and refuses to constitute free communities. He is a precon, ignoring the fact that freedom comes from objective values cabining subjectivity – something that must start in our creation.

If Shapiro were the target of a direct action perhaps the best reasons are not because he should not be allowed to speak. Perhaps he should. It is rather because he rejects the fundamental fairness and Rawlsian freedom that underlies the value of free speech – our first agreeing to first be in groups of free and equal people defined as such by their truly constitutive relations. Embracing that could save millions. Instead he chooses to protect concentrations of wealth and power built on oppression which could – were they today and by many means effective redistributed proportionally from him and his principles – be used to end it.

March 5, 2023
The Fake Underpopulation Crisis: Three Different Types of Men Pushing Women to Have Kids, and How to Stop Them

When you’ve done something wrong it’s easier to distract than make amends. And when it comes to family and population policy, a lot of influential people did a lot of wrong.

They chose totally unsustainable growth, and inequitable family policies, that that destroyed biodiversity and created vast inequity. And they did it in blatant violation of human rights and international law. One of those men is Joseph Kahn, lead at the New York Times.

So rather than paying back the wealth they made by imposing costs on others they have come up with a brilliant distraction – an underpopulation crisis. In the middle of a climate catastrophe and inequity that could drive class warfare, the real problem is that women are not having enough kids to maintain the same system that created these problems.

Here are three types of men pushing that lie. And we can stop them by telling the truth: We have the right to take back the wealth they took, and compensate future generations, by all means effective.

The Investor

Rather than create value, say through true innovation that creates real value, some men rely on women to have kids to grow economies by literally adding bodies. Elon Musk is a great example, though there are many others that qualify.

The Politician

Politicians generally sit atop a pyramid of people, and they expand their power by growing the base. Mitt Romney is a great example of this, and they generally serve the Investor-types, not the people under them.

The Economist/Academic

These are the men who promoted unsustainable systems because it would create amazing short-term benefits while foisting the costs on women, and future generations. Paul Morland and Will MacAskill are great examples of these sorts. They provide legitimacy for the Investors and Politicians.

How do we stop them? We can make them tell the truth: The climate and inequity crises facing the world today are causing, and will cause, immense suffering. These crises fundamentally flow from the policies that enriched these men by putting costs on others. Because family policies are primary, we do not need governments permission to take back the wealth these men took.

TAKE ACTION: THE UNITED NATIONS IS CLOSER THAN EVER TO AUTHORIZING FAMILY/CLIMATE REPARATIONS THAT WOULD LET US TARGET THESE MEN AND OTHERS LIKE THEM. URGE THE SECRETARY GENERAL TO SAY THE MAGIC WORDS – “A FAIR START IN LIFE IS THE FIRST AND OVERRIDING HUMAN RIGHT.”

February 24, 2023