The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres today said:
“As we mark World Cities Day, let us celebrate the power of youth to build green, resilient and inclusive cities that meet the needs and aspirations of future generations.”
Fact: Neither the United Nations nor Guterres is ensuring such power. The statement is false.
He personally, and the United Nations human rights bodies, are using a fundamental system that exploits children more than it empowers them. In fact, the Secretary General’s son benefits from this illegitimate process at deadly cost to others.
How does Guterres actually account for children entering the world on what he claims to value and the good work he claims to do? How he is delaying children entering the world to create great conditions for them? Is he taking any action to constitute just nations, and ensure the good he claims to do is not being undone as children enter the world without what their rights promise them – things like equity, and health with reparations and debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world?
No he is not.
And it is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.
What do we really owe to those who exploit children for economic growth rather than legitimately protecting and including infants as they enter the world?
By asking these questions you are looking for something called entitlement and impact fraud, originating in the formation of human rights regimes in the middle of the Twentieth Century. The fraud entailed assuming entitlements in violation of the constitutive self-determination of peoples through birth, developmental and emancipatory share equity in democracy, and – for decades – hiding those entitlements in a way that ensure the crisis.
This has been an ongoing sustainability scam that drives the climate crisis, with many charities focused on sensational, micro-level campaigns while quietly undoing beneficial impacts with macro-level and inequitable family policies that enriched management as well as those funding the entities.
Anthrocentric systems are inherently legitimate
Humans are animals. What we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species. but because of their unique vulnerability. 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. Effective animal rights in this 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. Guterres and the United Nations will have to eventually move away from anthrocentric systems, towards seeing humans as the animals that they are, and situating them in equity before there is any sense that they can be free.
Concentrations of wealth and power, especially philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, governments, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to continue the entitlement scam, hiding behind a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color.
This fantasy world, created mostly by entities that were operating without accountability or genuine constituents, have cost businesses trillions of dollars long run. A lot of environmental and other social justice agenda-setting over the last several decades came from institutions driven by philanthropy and familial wealth, entities – rife with nepotism – that are unaccountable to market and electorate forces. The climate/inequity crisis is going to cost business and government more than any other factor in the years to come.
Many businesses and governments now have claims against philanthropy and their low impact corporate campaigns that magically enriched some foundations and families at deadly cost to millions. Violence is one of the costs. Much of the violence we see in the world today derives from this failure, with disempowered persons acting out in systems of government incapable of truly representing them. Instead of those who benefit from this process carrying the risk of violence, innocents are usually targeted.
As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few and create the chaos we all see in the world today.
Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.
We have to and can invert that process.
How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? How should we handle those that refuse such fairness, even when it will kill millions as they are born without resources and in the path of danger? Why would anyone have to follow the rules in a system where they are not measurably empowered?
Most claiming to do good work in the world should be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because they compensate for the absence of the values of self-determination in current human reproductive rights regimes and evade harm to those values in the future. This avoids public interest work that is essentially performative, addressed to audiences that then undo the impact.
How can we all move forward?
All can support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world.
Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.
The concentrations of wealth and power you see in the world today have not created value. Instead they first illegally used their wealth to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens whose influence offsets one another. In other words, to properly assess costs and benefits we have to first become groups of people capable of doing so in a way that is actually inclusive and reflective of the group constituents.
You can take legal action.
States attorneys generals and other law enforcement agencies are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.
We can identify – on a binary spectrum – those who believe in linking children to debt/savings accounting to move towards self-determination, and those who do not. The rights of those who stand in the way are contingent on their supporting the rights of others, and their children will inherit their death debt if they do not pay it. Knowing the truth – that the default for what is fundamentally permissible depends on how we include and empower others – lets us overcome the most influential barriers to justice, and ensure a better future for all.
