Fair Start reforms offer the most just and effective way to address many of today’s overlapping crises—but only if public-interest claims are evaluated using the right standard. Anyone claiming positive impact should be asked a basic question: How did your cost-benefit model account for children entering the world, and did it meet what those children’s legal rights, political equity, and national legitimacy require? In most cases, the answer is that it did not. Children are typically treated as economic inputs driving growth, while the ecological, political, and human costs of that growth are ignored or illegally discounted. This produces “free” wealth that depends on worsening conditions – especially for children of color – and contradicts the values advocates claim to hold, such as safety, equality, and sustainability. The result is continued overshoot of ecological and social thresholds that both humans and nonhumans need to survive.

How is such contradiction possible? 

Between 1948 and 1968 world leaders effectively subverted the ongoing decolonial and racial justice movements with a human rights regime premised on a fraudulent standard: Autonomy or self-determination without the necessary condition of measurable political equity or empowerment. That fallacy fundamentally operates through an arbitrary and floating baseline present in almost all private and public cost/benefit modeling that illegally discounts future lives, and a universal but illegitimate reproductive rights regime devoid of children’s rights and political equity standards, which avoids applying limiting values to the birth-creation of power relations, and which has mostly protected long generations and growing concentrations of wealth.

The standard treated children, and thus future generations, as means rather than ends, and it ignored that persons not documents constitute nations, and almost inevitably through collective family planning efforts that ensure a minimum threshold of empowerment for all children. That threshold – a real border to replace the fictitious ones nations use today – enables consensual governance, avoiding each person’s loss of self-determination to the billions of others occupying and changing the planet. The real border makes consent possible.

Read more about threshold borders here, and to understand why Trump is a symptom and not the cause of all the harm he has done. 

 

 

That wealth, which enables a form of white supremacy, was built by not having to be legitimated – by not having to pay the costs of child rights and equity, and thus legitimacy, and by ensuring unsustainable economic growth that has enriched a few at deadly and illegal cost to many, mostly children of color. The reproductive rights regime has lasted less than a few decades before causing catastrophic overshoot and degradation of multiple threshold conditions  – ecological, social, and political – vulnerable children and animals need to survive and thrive, and it is impinging on the fundamental right of current and future generations to have children in safe and empowering conditions.

The wealth from that growth now funds a legion of professionals – lawyers, academics (many of whom do not account for birth positionality and thus lose neutrality in their work), reporters/editors, campaigners, and paid fundraisers – who act as decoys creating a fantasy world of social justice undone daily by intergenerational and fundamental injustice, and who protect and expand the wealth by omitting the countervailing impacts of children entering the world in conditions that violate the children’s rights and disenfranchise them, impacts that contradict the value assessments and public interest impacts the professionals claim.

Many benefit from this high-stakes birth lottery system, and then use their privilege to create the misleading appearance of solving it. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in the heat waves caused by the wealth bubble these professionals created.

That omission constitutes legally actionable equity and impact fraud (EIF) – using downstream and micro assessments and reporting to mask upstream and macro forces illegally enriching some at deadly cost to others. There is a preemptive right and cause of action to block EIF because governments authority derives from empowering those subject to it – and governments cannot redefine the object state of what it means to empower subjects just to avoid liability for the climate crisis. Widespread use of the standard – and the discourse that situates (or constitutes) each of us in the intergenerational body politic – makes it physically impossible to limit the power humans have over one another, so that each person can be self-determining. Fair Start activists have witnessed multiple attempts by this professional class to hide collective liability for the deaths of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.

If anyone used in their business or nonprofit work a valuation model premised on valuing as a benefit not hiring persons of color, they would be subject to civil rights injunction by state government. Using a model that generally enriches mostly white children at deadly climatological and other costs to mostly children of color, and doing so in part by disenfranchising them, is worse than a discriminatory hiring model, and is also illegal.

 

Constitutional discourse, about what we owe future generations, can bring change. For example, Fair Start is urging Paul Shapiro – an influential animal rights activist who helped defined policy for decades, now turned industrialist, to Tell the Truth about his impacts and to evade what many movement strategists see as the danger of interest convergence activism. Others are changing the world for the better by embracing the primacy of birth equity.

 

Our work is having an impact. We pointed out that Wikipedia used the EIF standard in reporting the misleading impact claims of one environmental organization. Wikipedia retaliated by deleting the Fair Start Movement page, hiding liability for low editorial standards that have exacerbated the climate crisis, and that hide editors’ individual conflicts of interests.

 

But taking our claimed values seriously, ensuring a future defined by them, requires fundamental change and not lying about one’s impacts while quietly undoing them for personal benefit.

• EIF and those who use it can be challenged by grassroots family reforms and demands for equity reparations via coalitions like TruthAlliance.global; 
• a universal discourse called Tell the Truth that simply urges those making public impact claims to contextualize those claims around children entering the world;
• the standard can be enjoined in a variety of legal fora under the preemptive right all have to legal and political systems where authority, including the right to entitle wealth, is derived from and contingent on the measurable (measured from a zero harm baseline) empowerment of those subject to such systems;
• and the standard can be ended via a corporate certification programming that ensures businesses avoid the horrific costs of the failed reproductive rights standard.

 

Total liberation lies not in top-down power, constitutions that do not empower people, and disconnected leaders drawing fictitious borders on maps, but in decentralizing power through collective reproductive rights systems that are based on love – and proven by ensuring measurable political equity for all children and thus national legitimacy.

Fair Start – which now operates mostly as a limitless network of whistleblowers targeting those above them – is intent on showing EIF as the fundamental driver of the crises we face today, and preempting it at the federal level in the United States by 20028 via specific grassroots, legal and corporate reforms to ensure the United States (which has had a disproportionate impact using the standard to undercut freedom around the world) and other nations begin to fundamentally legitimate. This entails moving illegitimate wealth to save countless innocent lives as a fundamental form of universal resistance to oppression.

TAKE ACTION: Back TruthAlliance.global and this simple truth: No Child is Worth More Than Another.