Category: Wealth Inequality & Reparations

  • Urging Financial Support and Reparations for Amboseli School Girls

    Urging Financial Support and Reparations for Amboseli School Girls

    Dear Supporters,

    As part of the Tell the Truth campaign, Fair Start is making a special appeal this week. Amboseli is calling on the United Nations to recognize birth equity as the first human right. Now, we need your help to take action.

    From our friend Dickson Lekina:

    I write to you with an urgent plea on behalf of the schoolgirls of Amboseli, Kenya. These bright young women face financial barriers that threaten their access to education. Without support, their futures hang in the balance.

    We seek immediate funding for school fees to ensure their education continues uninterrupted. Additionally, reparations are needed to address the injustices they have endured, helping them heal and build brighter futures.

    By standing with these girls, we uphold the fundamental right to education and gender equality. Your support can break cycles of hardship and empower them to reach their full potential.

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

    With gratitude,
    Dickson Lekina

  • Authority and Wealth Must Empower — Not Harm — People

    Authority and Wealth Must Empower — Not Harm — People

    Deal with the cause, not the symptom. 

    Those who claim to create market value, have an impact upon public interest, and exercise governmental authority must account for the inequity and inequality that exists today. The same way shareholders hold equity in a company, voters and citizens should hold equity in a democracy. Unfortunately, this becomes less true as resources are funneled ever upward and the gulf expands between rich and poor. We see it playing out in real time.

    Many of us have had the best intentions. We have made charitable donations to groups we believed in. We have put a portion of our incomes toward causes we felt were necessary to improve life on Earth.

    Those of us who believed the internet might build positive coalitions and give humanity common cause have been sorely disappointed and disillusioned. In the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries, leaders have consolidated power and have become increasingly less humane and more authoritarian. They have assumed entitlements they had no right to, which among other factors has fundamentally led to the multitude of crises humankind faces today.

    We believe that systems of benefit driven by growth economies are built on direct and indirect violations of the poorest people in the world today. The neoliberal approach taken by the wealthy orchestrators of the consumerist global economy will monetize everything down to the least blade of grass while completely ignoring and lying about homelessness, starvation, torture, and genocide. Let’s build a golf resort in Gaza, shall we?

    Without addressing some of these fundamental issues, we cannot reach our ideal of a just future through equity in birth and development. Nonprofit and animal rights organizations need to get honest with themselves. Their actions have hardly backed up their PR campaigns.

    It’s time to admit that humans are human and are inclined to hoard resources, but this is a tendency we must curb. Until we recognize and acknowledge that every person born has a fundamental right to a fair and equitable start in life, we will not solve our most desperate and dire issues.

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

     

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

    From our partner, Rejoice Africa Foundation:

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

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

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

    how care groups operate, and testimonials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Inequality info graphic

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

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

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment infographic

     

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

     

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

     

    There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going by relying on the arbitrary privilege of their draw in the birth lottery, while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all. It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us.

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Challenging assumptions that hurt our future infographic

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

     

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

     

    Nour Belokda, founder of Children Healers

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

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

     

    Introduction 

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This further cements in place the subversion of civil rights.

     

    Inequality info graphic

     

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

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

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

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

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

    How could we invert that system, in practice? 

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

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment infographic

     

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

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

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

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

     

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

     

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

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

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

    Background 

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

    The lack of investment, the lack of necessitating rights-compliant early childhood development conditions, directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth and enabling some kids much further ahead than others, did more harm than good because it blocked life-saving funds in favor of concentrating and growing generational wealth.

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

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

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

    Those insufficient public interest efforts would have inevitably started with zero actual protections for those the intervenors claimed to protect while entitling the industries they failed to police, treating children of color as deserving a fraction of the resources as white kids and exponentially more risk, meaning that today billions of persons are at extreme risk from a climate crisis they had little to no role in causing.

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

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

     

    World Population vs. Global Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions

     

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

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

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

    There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc. It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy. It’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born into economic use, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

    Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. In fact, funders have blocked some efforts to reform the standards, thereby minimizing climate damage evaluations, including amounts, the weight or priority of claims, universal enforceability, and priority uses of funds. 

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

    1) We can ask key leading social justice organizations:

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

    Climate change and inequality are birth-interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. 

    This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it. If we care about a particular value, like animal liberation, biodiversity, children’s rights, or democracy wouldn’t we be eager to account for a fundamental cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the harm wealth has done to those values, and what it owes going forward? 

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

    These are some of the people who are most harmed.

    These are some of the people who most benefited.

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

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

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

     

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

     

    It can also include academics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This is not altruism.

    Again: It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy, whose authority and entitlements derive from and are conditioned on the creation of liberating relations. Those that think and act otherwise – nonconstitutives – logically fall outside of the scope of protection free, or measurably self-determining persons, must give each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It starts with Telling the Truth: 

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

     

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

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

     

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

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

    Background 

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

    Performative Animal Law 

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

     

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

     

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

    Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking 

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

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

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

     

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

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  • Did You Get Philanthroscammed? The Wealthy Families Behind Your Charities Set Low Bars for Social Justice That Did More Harm Than Good.

    Did You Get Philanthroscammed? The Wealthy Families Behind Your Charities Set Low Bars for Social Justice That Did More Harm Than Good.

    The Fair Start Movement begins simply with the fact that wealth in the world today was made through unsustainable and inequitable growth, at cost to children’s rights, in what some call the #famscam.

    In the scheme, nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into birth and development conditions compliant with children’s rights and  with the measurable political equity from which legitimate governance derives.

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

     

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

     

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

    For years activists with Fair Start – in their prior employments – were urged by vegan investor-funders to focus on food reforms, the benefits of which – for animals and humans – were being undone by money-making growth.

    The results were a catastrophic increase in overall demand and emissions.

    The investor-funder’s kids are now thriving. More vulnerable children are now dying from the increased heat, disease, flooding, and fires.

    Read more here. 

    They did this while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons, and which could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children, is generally considered a failure.

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    Human Population and extinctions infographic

    World Population vs. Global Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions

    Challenging assumptions that hurt our future infographic

  • FSM: See a History of Greenwashing and Reparations Fraud

    FSM: See a History of Greenwashing and Reparations Fraud

    The history 

    What the United Nations calls greenwashing begins as a much more deadly form of entitlement fraud. Wealthy families are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to be protecting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable.

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

     

    You can identify anyone willing to further the fraud by asking whether they back accurate climate reparations or not.  Those who do not are engaged in political equity or constitutive fraud, or choosing to start with zero actual protections for infants and animals in a way that contradicts stated values, enabling the powerful to punch down on the vulnerable

    These families have historically subverted civil rights by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they claim to be doing downstream – a move that masked the drivers of the climate crisis and who it would victimize. If the Three-Fifths Compromise made fractionalized the worth of persons of color, one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth, disparities that violated legally enforceable children’s rights regimes, will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.

    To avoid black birth equity, the mostly white families that designed the near-universal reproductive rights regime bypassed equity entirely when defining reproductive autonomy, such that one can only use a thin form of autonomy to terminate their pregnancy, only to then die in a white-wealth-driven heatwave months later because they cannot afford air conditioning.

    Climate crisis infographic

    This move, of hiding the diminution of equity, relied on a sleight of hand: Defining freedom from power around the authority of the state to use violence, rather than broader definitions that would have captured all entitlements, like those between child and child-maker. The conceptions relied on almost all white and male theorists who abstracted far away from their own birth positionality, leaving us with abstract theories of liberation that would enable a climate crisis deadly to mostly children of color.

    These theories, minus the last two, are based on the misconception of existence without full positionality, and the abstraction of morality away from the creation of relations at birth. This thinking created decoys, like performative civil rights in employment or voting, masking birth inequity that would allow white wealth built on a lie of unsustainable growth. The theorists generally stopped short of requiring governance by free and equal persons because they did not derive an obligation to follow laws back to the measurable empowerment of subjects as constituents. They all seemed to focus on what the rules should be, not the  emancipation or capacity to be part of a rule-making process, probably because they assumed capacity that given their positionality.

    Infographic titled What Should You Know About Heat and Pregnancy? showing a pregnant person by a thermometer. It explains how climate-driven heat risks pregnancy, especially for marginalized communities, and calls for climate and reproductive justice.

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

     

    Top Down Power and Bottom Up Empowerment

    A legal impossibility. 

    Law is different from other disciplines because it norms can be coerced, and firstly on the idea that subjects are  included as equals and thus made constituents. Constitutionalism, at bottom, premises obligation to follow the law on actual inclusion and empowerment.

    Again, given the climate harm to future generations, and our obligations to repair the harm, it would be physically impossible to constitute accurately obligatory relations – legal / obligatory relations – at the most basic level without some sort of truth and reconciliation process around the admission and inversion of empowering future generations more than those at the heights of our economic and political hierarchies. Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations capable of representative governance, via the measurable self-determination of its constituents.

    Where else would the empowering relations come from? If defunding the police makes sense, it’s at least because our legal systems have never included constituents with measurable equity in a way that makes them capable of producing actual representatives, and laws – including property entitlements – that accurately represent the will of those subject to them.

    How to see the fraud?

    The claims these families make and fund are easily falsifiable, as are the claims of the funders backing decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good one seems to do. Focusing downstream, rather than on things like what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black Birth Equity, avoids civil rights that actually account for the creation of power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation.

    What we think of today as procreative or reproductive autonomy was nothing more than cover for not disturbing mostly white birth privilege and positionality. It was the skin of freedom, not the body. Here are some questions one can ask to identify the fraud:

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

     

    If the claimant valued some outcome, who will cover the child inequity and entry costs to that outcome – growth undoing climate mitigation, for example – and evade more of it? Is the claimant doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? Do they start with enabling the powerful over the vulnerable? Did the claimant spend more on undoing their mission than furthering it? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases? How do they define the term power in the context of being free from power? Who is their intended audience?  

    This is a constitutive discourse. Again, this is not about population. It’s about lies and omissions to gain power by exploiting positionality. A concrete goal for a better future might entail functional constitutional conventions, where we can be self-determining rather than determined by others, and in concrete and measurable ways.

    Animal rights, law and policy as the most falsifiable examples of reparations fraud on almost a dozen levels, but also the standard for the highest level of clawback payments. 

    If one factors in children entering the world in inequity, the claims of success and impact made by most animal protection organizations are being undone daily. And they are false, with more vastly animals suffering and dying through the creation of their relations with humans than these organizations save.

    Line graph showing global population (in billions) and CO2 (relative) from 1800 to 2050. Both lines rise slowly at first, then sharply increase around 1950, with population slightly above CO2 in recent decades.

    Those working in animal law, rights, and policy will have made the most falsifiable claims, claims that thus give a toehold for change.

    For example, many of the funders behind animal protections have been pushing what is a social justice movement for the most vulnerable, instead towardtowards investments in growth-based vegan food markets that do more harm to animals – by the numbers – than these funders and their leachy children do good. Many lawyers ostensibly working on behalf of animals made impact claims in this area that were easily being undone, every day, by inequity. Some call this the #demandscam, pretending to with one hand create value you undo with the other, and in a way that benefits the scammer at cost to others. In this case not only did growth do more harm to animals that food reforms did good, but that growth was replacing a chance for democratic relations with commercial ones via low investments in children, while concealing the death debt investors already owed for climate deaths.

    FSM members were actually told, by a leading animal law professor who was accustomed to not having to link legal institutions to the measurable empowerment of their constituents, that fair start reforms were natural rather than positive law, and that one could work to save animals through food reforms while not altering the underlying retrodictive rights that would – each day – undo any gains from food reforms.

    Infographic illustrating the impact of human activity on the planet and animals, showing links between family size, resource use, global warming, extinction, and proposed solutions like smaller families and sustainable practices.

    Given that animal liberation is the highest form of environmentalism (treating ecologies as the homes of entities who have relations, families, and lives of their own rather than a human resource) the cooptation of animal liberation is horrific. The ideal requires equitable human and nonhumans relations. Instead it is funded towardtowards flashy, downstream, low-impact, micro-level campaigns and victories that get easily undone on a macro level.

    It is, by the numbers, the greatest example of “winner take all” greenwashing possible. Funders, and the performative advocates who take their money, decoy us all away from seeing animal law, rights and policy as the most demanding standard for who humans should become, ethically, because they would rather use an illegitimate system to improve their positionality and image than do the work of legitimating the system around liberation of humans and nonhumans.

    By RMBlaney - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113952868

    Humans are animals. Seeing us as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. Animal law is not merely law that refers to animals. Animal law would have to start with a capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals.

    So animal rights, law and policy, if we want to protect nonhumans, is just a system of obligation oriented around the most vulnerable, the most demanding form of law and justice. That system has to have the capacity to actually benefit the beneficiaries, not just pretend to. What does pretending to benefit animals look like? Look at most of the micro victories for animal rights and personhood claimed by organizations over the last few decades, and contrast those with the impacts of growth on animals, and the reality, at a macro level, of embedded nonhuman propertyhood in our archaic reproductive rights regimes. Animal rights in the comprehensive sense is not just ecological – it involves the mots demanding levels of empathy in future generations. 

    Why then not focus on infants and animals, and – at a macro level of inclusive animal personhood – the creation of fundamental power relations between the two? Those like animal rights theorist Peter Singer, and others, do not do so because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality. 

     

    A line graph compares median family wealth by age for White and Black Americans born 1943–51. White wealth is consistently much higher, peaking at $317,500 in their 60s, while Black wealth peaks at $54,800.

    The wealthy families funding animal rights, law and policy, for decades, refused to deal with this issue because they wanted to benefit from a system that quietly harmed animals, while seeming to be their saviors. Animal rights and law, in this sense, starts with the actual creation of power relations as children enter the world, represented by the collective pronouns implied or expressed in all statements, including purportedly “constitutive” statements like “We the People.” It is the most demanding standard, eco or animal centric, rather than anthropocentric, or punching down on the most vulnerable. But for Singer it was more important to raise his position as savior in an illegitimate system rather than focus on a better version of a “we” to legitimate it, and that did much more harm to animals than he did good.

    Claims many animal protection organizations make, like Mercy for Animals, are objectively false, in the sense that the impacts they claim cannot be squared with the reality of human birth, development. and inequity on nonhumans. But many funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis, are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

    Singer’s version of animal rights and law, the abstraction away from the creation of actual relations, is just charade version of animal liberation they need: Value animals in the abstract with one hand, make money on growth and privilege at cost to them with the other.

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

    Effective animal rights in the best sense is personally expensive, not profitable. It’s easier to ignore all of that and let the macro undo good for animals at the micro level. 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. True animal rights mean preemptive standards in things like assessing damages to animals (and children). If captivity harms elephants for example, it’s because it deviates from a biodiverse and less crowded world where elephants are free of most human influence, not deviation from a relatively dismal life at a sanctuary.

    Human Population and extinctions infographic

    Animal law starts with moving away from anthrocentric systems, toward seeing humans as the animals that they are, and situating them in equity, before we should have any sense that they can be free. But, as a close source to Fair Start said: “This is all the organizations will pay you to do. And if you love animals, that’s better than working for nonprofits.” Actually, research in the areas suggests the charade does more harm than good by moving the goalposts of social justice, and that in fact those engaged in it would never do so if they were not otherwise privileged to do so.

    Fair Start initiated whistleblowing in this area as the evidence arose that the climate crisis could actually reduce the carrying capacities of ecosystems, rather than just exceed them, and that birth and developmental positionality was the greatest determinant of one’s prospects to to live or suffer/die in the crisis.

    Implementing the fix: Being effective means addressing the root cause, not the symptom.

    The only way to engage in damage evaluation for reparations, and the fraud hiding them, is to peg them to a functionally inclusive baseline – children entering the world relative to certain counterfactual thresholds – that would not have caused the death of millions of innocent persons.

    Accurate reparations – relative to one’s positioning or membership position in the fundamental system of political obligation – fixes the problem of share inequity in one’s democracy vastly undoing the good many claimed to have done. Without them admitting the harm and fulfilling their obligations it would be impossible for any of us to live in a system of collective self-determination.

    You can take legal action against those entities engaged in the fraud, with climate and race reparations benchmarked to concrete metrics of democratic equity, and a preemptive claim to what is owed that means the state has no legitimate authority to defend the barriers to who owe payments. Fair Start is now moving towardtowards such a system evaluating the full spectrum of harms, and accurate damages, in matters like children dying of climate exacerbated malaria in western Uganda.

    We only owe others as much as they owe entrants into the world, because any claim of inalienable rights assumes fulfillment of a prior duty to others. One can use the discourse mentioned above, the questions, to force others to derive their thinking back to “might makes right” logic, such that they fall outside of any theory of legitimacy or political obligation that would create a duty ensuring their protection by others. Living such a logic makes those who refuse fundamental fairness – those who embrace missing a crucial step in the logic of their oughtness – fall outside of systems of mutual obligation.

    Here are some indicia that an entity is engaged in fundamental, or constitutive reparations fraud: 

    • They will silo justice into downstream issues to avoid dealing with the creation of power relations.
    • They will conflate the difficulty of inverting power systems with their desire to retain their privilege.
    • They will redefine values over time to evade having contradicted themselves when called for payments.

     

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  • Fair Start Fact Checking Animal Rights Philanthropist Brad Goldberg. Take Action.

    Fair Start Fact Checking Animal Rights Philanthropist Brad Goldberg. Take Action.

    The field of animal law, rights, and protection has been around for a long time. It is one of the most aspirational areas of justice, aiming to protect and liberate nonhumans from the horrors humans inflict upon them. But as the climate crisis unfolds, and more animals are harmed each day by humans, we should look for what must have gone wrong in the field to bring us to today.

    Brad Goldberg has been one of the most influential figures in the field of animal rights and law, having used his wealth to in a definitive way, funding and advising organizations, academics and activists for decades. He seeded animal law programs at some of the leading schools in the nation, and has written extensively about funding and activism for animals.

    He funded much of the work that today is considered “animal law,” much of which is based on assumptions about legitimacy and human rights that allow investors (like Brad) to make money on growth-based markets that do more harm to animals than any granular reforms do good.

    But if one closely analyzes his public statements, his giving, and the results of his giving, something foundational is missing. He never seems to account for how children entering the world, and the very different resources they have when they do, impact the lives of animals.

    That’s not ideal, given that is the largest determinant of animals’ lives. Claims of animal protection, in the face of the growth and inequity driving the climate crisis, are some of the most falsifiable impact claims being made in philanthropy. Growth and inequity has done more to harm animals than those working in the field have done to save them.

     

    Infographic from Fair Start Movement detailing how funding every child’s right to a fair start benefits children, climate, animals, democracy, and equality—with brief descriptions and relevant icons for each topic—while highlighting the need to avoid practices like legitimacywashing that can undermine genuine progress.

     

    Is there a more macro way to think about animals? 

    Humans are animals. Seeing ourselves as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law would focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. In other words, animal law cannot merely be law that happens to refers to animals.

    A more functional and less abstract form of animal law would have to start – as a first necessary condition –  with the capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense thus starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals. Nonhuman and human liberation are tied because the creation of our mutual relations is the biggest driver of outcomes.

     

    Climate crisis infographic

     

    Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and in avant garde movements like animal rights and liberation. But by simultaneously individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination- both for humans and animals.

    The base – and in this case the base of what Brad assumed as a legitimate legal system – treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others. 

    This base has historically subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it and most vulnerable to it. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.

    These unsustainable practices and systems ensured children entering under just thresholds, and thus overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. They allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families. 

    Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. Activists working with fair start can literally attest to using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable – especially communities of color –  who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.

     

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

     

    If those Fair Start engages truly value the things (like animal rights) they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic language and systems of constitution and obligation, and to include these things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward. 

    Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good.

    Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.

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

     

    Why Fair Start? 

    Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations – through birth, development, and emancipation – is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, compounding impacts simultaneously.

    Fair Start’s recent action before the United Nations asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy. 

    Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive 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.

     

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

     

    In this effort Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by many entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises.

    Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save both human and nonhuman lives. 

    TAKE ACTION: Urge Brad here to assess how children entering the world over the last several decades impacts his claims about the field of animal law, rights and protection, how that impact alters his legacy, and to consider how – in light of this factor – he would alter his advice to those he funded. 

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