Summary
There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to be a just nation in which individuals are empowered in the creation of actual relations – through birth, development, and emancipation.
The action focuses on the fallacy of birthright white supremacy, and shows a pathway to move nations from treating their residents as subjects and a source of means, instead moving toward treating them as constituents, obligated to follow laws only because nations have the measurable capacity to control the legal system.
The action simply 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 true democracy.
The action in front of the UN seeks to escalate climate and other reparations – specifically designed as family planning entitlements – by trillions of dollars, through the concept of equity/reparations fraud, in order to save millions of lives. Many are using illegal tactics to block the high valuation of reparations.
As foundational to the effort and overcoming barriers, Fair Start is urging state attorneys general to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for climate damage evaluation and the only standard for national legitimacy. Fair Start uses the eight concrete metrics now being put toward a zero-baseline form of harm-assessment and standardization at the United Nations. This work goes beyond targeting greenwashing toward finding the concealment of liability for the deaths of millions in the escalating climate crisis.
Every entity in the United States, for example, should comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, sexual identity, etc.
Sovereign nations and entities failed to protect infants from the consequences of historic injustice. This was a horrific mistake, one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life for every child born on the planet. Antiracism requires removing a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.
Imagine a home with many floors. A flood is approaching. Will those on the higher floors remember to unlock the basement so that other can climb to safety?
As discussed below, because of the connection between communication and legal obligation, we can call out fraudulent sustainability claims and racist, ecocidal outcomes that belie those claims, especially in the animal and environmental protection sectors, to begin the larger move toward constitutive reparations that ensure measurable levels of political equity.
The letters to the attorneys general will identify dozens of cases of fraud. We also have forthcoming filings urging damage and remedy standardization before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Court of Justice, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
For example, in many cases, law schools and faculty in the United States routinely made claims of beneficial social impact they knew were being reversed daily by deadly inequity, typified by the conflict-driving growth and inequity in the Middle East killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Scholars have noted how national constitutions sweep in those, especially the vulnerable, who never consent to them. The way the U.S. constitution has done that to future generations, and harmed them, gives us a unique opportunity to physically constitute consensual relations through fairness, and become capable of becoming an inclusive and just nation from the bottom up. The U.S. now has a preemptive, or constitutive, obligation to the most vulnerable.
This is not about white men constituting at gunpoint to create a hollow legal system of words rather than empowerment. This is a real opportunity to actually legitimate relations going forward, using measurable benchmarks to ensure children come to exist in the fairly narrow range that makes consent – self-determination – their primary value.
The key? Moving wealth that illegally externalized its costs to now save its victims.
Where else would just relations come from?
Introduction
What is the most just and effective thing you can do to protect your future as the climate, inequity / autocracy, and other crises worsen?
Backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm – is the fastest and most just approach. In such a system, all children would get a fair start in life, ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, parental readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives.
These would be measured inverse to privilege and positionality. This does exponentially more good – for children, animals, our environment, and democracy – than any other intervention because it starts at the beginning of life and is comprehensive by centering on measurable self-determination.
This need have nothing to do with altruism. We need every child born to be self-determining because by definition, if they are not, we are not. We think of justice today in various silos – environmental, children’s, identity, animal, etc. – because to deal with them at once in the intergenerational form, which does unify them all, would have required in the middle of the Twentieth Century the leveling-up of lives for black children and a move toward a concrete range of ecosocial relations.
Instead of doing that, the wealthy, almost all-white families designing the reproductive rights regimes at the time chose the contradiction in terms of “procreative autonomy.” They gutted family law and any policy of birth equity, leaving children of color with a tiny fraction of the wealth of whites at birth. Many of these families then siloed social justice into “downstream” issue areas to avoid upstream, honest equity.
This was a power grab to evade black equity by hiding the antecedent / preambular or overriding right to it. A move that over generations downgraded political freedom to commercial freedom and enabled the catastrophic growth now killing millions. Nobel laureates have seen this as a growth-based pyramid scheme, but they have missed the massive birth equity differences which will mean the children of white wealthy families (like the secretary general of the United Nations) living at deadly cost to countless children of color.
That move – to segregate motherhood into castes and pretend one can have autonomy outside of a being positioned with an influential equity stake in one’s political system – allowed enough growth to also degrade the Earth’s atmosphere. This already kills families and children least responsible for or benefitting from the regime.
It was child inequity that was primarily used to subvert the civil rights movement and evade race and other reparations. This was and is reparations fraud, and the hiding of a political share-equity deficit that is killing children of color. This fraud – like the omissive use of environmental impact language that assumes black lives are worth less – clouds the language and concepts needed for universal reparative justice.
In other words, this created a false form of constitutionalism that ensured obligations to follow the law with no real equity for constituents to influence the content of the law. In fact, because they were seen more as economic inputs than political constituents, with family law completely disconnected from measurable political empowerment of children.
To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, from the base not the heights. But it takes admission of the specific harm and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power toward infants and animals.
In other words, there is an “ought” premise for all communications. Because political equity was never included in family planning, reproductive-focused human rights and child welfare regimes/law, world leaders never actually had to apply the values and positivist inclusivity/representability inherent in legitimacy. That caused horrific harm to legitimacy – and not only welfare – which gives rise to steep and measurable reparations.
It was the philanthropy of wealthy families not accountable to election or market forces, rather than small business or government, that for decades envisioned and articulated insufficient standards – devoid of child equity – for social justice. The crises we face today were exacerbated by those unjust standards.
By isolating women in the family-planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families for decades have ensured inherited poverty, or commercially exploitative rather than legitimate and inclusive relations. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
That condition derived fundamentally from the use of illegal family entitlements that undermined all civil rights and created a generational apartheid that Fair Start and others will dismantle with women’s networks engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.
Future children must be positioned as free and equal persons to be able to constitute nations. This hypothesis is testable through things like the feasibility of functional constitutional conventions. How could would-be parents do that in isolation from one another? Equity trades among people of reproductive age require collective family planning rather than isolating women, through things like women’s democratic circles, which may be the best example of the idea of collective self-determination.
Of course, this process must be funded. And it can be, using the extreme wealth we see in the world today that for decades delayed costs onto future generations by illegally violating children’s rights to certain eco-social standards via family planning entitlements.
We can move wealth from those who took it directly to the victims by funding family-planning reparations that create a line beneath which no child should be born. This is basic – or intergenerational – justice, widely accepted as encyclopedic.
The wealthy families and other concentrations of power that owe the costs they never paid to avoid the crisis did not create value in this world. Using a fundamental system of evaluation/cost/benefit that kills millions is generally considered a failure.
Instead, as detailed in this filing before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, they used sleight-of-hand and hidden assumptions to develop a fraudulent entitlement standard (identity or third-party fraud) for national legitimacy and sovereignty.
This standard never derived from the only authoritative source: The measurable sovereignty (where each offsets the influence of others equally, relative to a neutral position) of those subjected to the nation in question.
This enshrined inequitable family planning and birth / developmental positionality, allowed mostly white, generational wealth to ensure its own criteria for evaluating truth and value through dismal standards for child development and education. It allowed wealth to create its own audiences, and demand, for example, to assure among a populace unable to read or understand its own constitution the assumption that governments have any authority to ban teaching things like critical race theory.
Creation oppression – ensured through birth, development and un-emancipatory relations – is uniquely blinding, like a fish not being able to see water. It may not feel like the constant oppression of Brave New World or 1984, but for those dying in sporadic, climate-driven disasters, or acts of mass violence driven by individual disempowerment, would certainly feel their position while dying.
This scheme was illegal, violating children’s rights and pitting people against one another. It was the treating of people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies, where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness.
If you look closely at the progress and beneficial impacts claimed by the public interest organizations this wealth funded, over the past few decades, you will find benefit and progress only if one assumes there is no need to account for children’s needs. Also, one must presume to use and abuse the needs of the nonhumans / nonhuman habitats these incoming children would rely on. Look closely and you will see micro victories being slowly undone at a macro level, and the setting together of a world that would soon be beset by heatwaves and massive political inequity.
Many working for fair starts in life as the basis of legitimacy used wealth to create the illusion of progress by simply making others look in the wrong direction, away from measurable inclusion and empowerment at birth.
This is common with those like “altruists,” who assumed they owned the wealth with which they could be altruistic, wealth which is owed to make freedom – or mutual self-determination – a workable concept. Wealthy families are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to protect to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable.
There exists a binary choice for all to make – an up-or-down vote: To use the same fundamentally “exclude at birth from power” standard, in terms of creating unsustainable, unjust and top-down power relations based on the subjective whims of adults, or to use a measurable equity standard based on the needs of children to preempt all else. Those advocating or silently choosing the former are engaged in reparations fraud.
The difference in damages between evaluations using equity/eco/self-determination standards, versus anthro/welfare/other-determination standards that are based on a fallaciously narrow definition of bodily autonomy involves millions of lives and trillions of dollars. The money was stolen through the fraudulent externalization of costs as detailed in our recent filing before the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Fair Start standardizes and measures the death debt at various intervals between 1948 and 2024, and we allocate responsibility in ways cognizant of things like the unsustainable growth and massive disparity of wealth-driving horrors in places like Gaza.
As noted, we are urging states attorneys general to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination, using eight concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations. Because of the connection between communication and legal obligation, we can use fraudulent sustainability claims, especially in the animal and environmental protection sectors, to begin the larger move toward constitutive reparations that ensure measurable levels of political equity.
- Fundamental impact disclosures that account for infants entering the world relative to concrete freedom standards can resolve the directional problem of top-down governance not being inclusive and position us as self-determining and legitimate. Wealth made at cost to the line is now owed to fund it, with a priority on funding the actual standardization in existing infrastructures like public health and reproductive rights communities. No child should be born and emancipated beneath this line, because it would be more exploitative, more illegitimating, using measures of political equity.
- Given the climate harm to future generations, and our obligations to repair the harm, it would be impossible to constitute obligatory relations at the most basic level without some sort of truth and reconciliation process.
- Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations capable of representative governance via the measurable self-determination of its constituents. Family planning reparations enable this process, and given that wealth was already taken and the benefits already consumed, it is owed as share equity for each child.
There is no legitimacy, inclusion, or empowerment based an obligation to follow the law. As early as 2003, activists involved today with Fair Start were urged by their nonprofit employers to promote reforms they knew were being undone by growth and inequity that enriched only a few.
This is the crucial point. We were in no way accomplishing our missions. Instead we used wealth, growth/inequity, and low-threshold child welfare standards to drown out voices and control the criteria others could use to evaluate truth and values.
The letters to the attorneys general will identify dozens of cases of fraud, after forthcoming filings urging damage and remedy standardization before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Court of Justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
White wealth is hiding liability and blocking equity
Wealthy families in the Global North are funding a fantasy to continue a farce and evade climate reparations they owe for the harm caused. 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 downstream issues, hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, and use a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This benefits the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, rather than the nominal recipients of color..
These families, foundations, and many nonprofits they backed had no real constituents, and they were not accountable to either markets or an electorate. It was scam philanthropy, by co-opting the ideals, rather than the more reactive sectors of business or government that drove the crisis. The rich children and their foundations hold the wealth.
They use the charade of performative social justice – micro campaigns focused on immediate and narrow issues, without accounting for the creation of actual power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation, as “distractivism” to avoid dealing with reality.
Fundraisers in the past attempted to work with Fair Start on condition of not asking funders about the accuracy of their impact claims or how their omissions of inequity deconstituted legitimacy. This would have meant reframing fair starts in life for all kids as charity rather than reparations. It would have also reduced the level of any reparations, something none have authority to do.
This shuffling of standards by sell-out environmental organizations in exchange for short-term funding is what caused the climate crisis. The fraud we committed is obvious if one contrasts the claims of impact with key facts, like growing child inequity, on the days the claims are made.
The solution?
Many at Fair Start admit that we rode freely on generational and racial positions to benefit personally in a way that contradicted our own values. This admission and the inversion of obligation from government and entitlements enables the discursive constituting of political systems and true obligation. It’s the language of basic duty that makes us a “we.”
This linguistic model, like gender or indigenous land occupation models, is a necessary first condition of any legal system – what we might call preambular preemption. But these admissions use time and space to correct the baseline error of abstraction/arbitrariness, relative to the most demanding ideals, like animal rights. To the extent that most human communication is just an attempt to get into or position oneself within a group, the admission and inversion can truly liberate.
The admission enables those who think the system cannot be changed to realize they simply may not want it to. They might struggle with the way justice has been pitted against our expected birthrights.
Priviledged public interest attorneys usually use the same fundamentally fraudulent standard of birth inequity to undo any good they claim to be doing, following the playbook of economic subversion of the civil rights movement.
Factoring in the growth and political inequity that degraded the carrying capacity of the world’s ecologies, many philanthropists have done more harm than good, masking that an unfair start in life was undoing, each day, their claimed progress. In fact, when one factors in children being born without rights, many organizations spent more on union busting, travel and events than on protecting children in poverty and of color.
Targets for reparations funding include philanthropic foundations that used fake standards for environmentalism and child welfare Reparations from these targets can and should be first earmarked for standardization.
Further food for thought
Accurate reparations and universal standardization, in a demand now before the United Nations, fixes the problem of birth inequity and the unsustainable growth it drives, vastly undoing the good many claimed to have done.
Lawyers are key to the fraud, and to the fix. They face the moral hazard of benefitting from having expertise and special knowledge of a crucial system, that has no obligation to the law or international standards of human and animal rights.
Most have caved to that hazard, growing wealthy through the window dressing of legal systems in favor of what was really a system of exploitative economic growth and the dilution of legal personhood.
In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), Elizabeth Anderson explores how commercial relations control our lives. But she misses how, at base, those relations came about. The fundamental reason? The absence of equitable and influential shares in democracy as the fundamental of family planning and child welfare. This move cannibalized freedom, taking from us what we are owed in democracy and trying to sell it back in commerce. The difference between self-determination relative to zero baseline markers, and exploitation, is what those who most benefitted owe in reparations.
Their claims of doing good are being undone every day because there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies they will impact. This is not about population. It’s about having an effective share in the equity of democracy, the fact that any authority to claim wealth, property or authority in governance merely derives from constituting self-determining relations.
But law students and lawyers are also key to the fix. They can derive legal obligations, all the way back, to conditioning the legitimacy of systems and entitlements on the inclusion and empowerment of their constituents.
Conclusion
The legitimacy of legal systems is not just theory. There is a threshold, and a binary choice, shown by a climate crisis killing millions. We will soon urge the BLSA to lead with Fair Start on assessing heat and other impacts on infants – impacts that expose the fraud behind the claims – fraud that gives rise to just demands for legitimating reparations.
