The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has a lot of influence on family and health policy. They make decisions that impact our futures.
We are urging their lead, at the end of this message, to act.
The Fair Start Movement arose from a growing body of undisputed research that traces the climate and political crises we all face to a very specific mistake, made decades ago, in reproductive rights policy making.
Because we collectively used a false assessment and reporting standard disconnected from accurate measures of ecological and social harm, we never assured children birth and development conditions consistent with their rights. This allowed enough inequitable growth to degrade our ecologies and disenfranchise the average voter, leading to environmental catastrophe and the concentration of power in a few.
Those involved in Fair Start worked previously at nonprofits where leadership were knowingly undoing their claimed impacts, while enriching mostly white kids at deadly cost to countless children of color.
Fact: As we show in this work re-published Stanford University, violating children’s rights, and assuming children of color deserved a fraction of the resources and exponentially more risk did more harm to all of our values – like moderate temperatures, food security, and representative government – than any of our philanthropic efforts did good.
Did KFF value their growth-based investments and endowment more than kids? How did they not do that?
The fix? All must admit that truth, and now back a universally preemptive and restorative standard that treats the old standard as illegal, and reallocates resources into equity-based family reforms that encourage parenting delay, readiness, and child entitlements inverse to their parents wealth.
More specifically, we are bringing legal actions before state attorneys generals in the United States urging key target organizations making claims of beneficial impact to disclose how they were accounting for children entering the world in their claims for the last three years.
We believe that contrasting claims with the facts of declining infant and maternal health will show continued use of the illegal standard, which in many cases will give rise to legal liability for inaccurate claims leading to the deaths of millions. There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable.
Act Now
Drew Altman leads the KFF. Contact him on Twitter, or find and engage him in person, to admit fundamental system failure and to back this reform: https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-today-moves-to-standardize-climate-damage-evaluations-at-the-un-and-override-any-conflicting-standards/
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation.
She remains so until she takes account of the primacy of her positionality, and acts on it.
We can’t get to justice, legitimacy and an obligation to follow the law from the injustice of violating children’s birthrights and assuming children of color deserve exponentially less resources and more risk. Doing that has done more harm than we did good. How? Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.
At the end of this post we ask her to prioritize intergenerational justice, not as an issue siloed from her animal work, but as the correct basis for it.
Introduction
The climate crisis is intensifying, and killing millions who had little role in causing or exacerbating it. At the same time a small percentage of persons have become obscenely wealthy. Many are asking if there has been a fundamental failure of justice – in the actual creation, at birth, of power relations – that we should all address. Many entities in those nations most responsible for the crisis are using the same fraudulent political systems, and impact / reporting standards, that caused the crisis in order to hide liability.
Fact: The failure of world leaders for decades to ensure a measurable fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, for all children has done more to harm the practice of justice than Nussbaum and other luminaries have done to further it. There is no form of justice, and certainly not animal justice, that ignores the actual creation of human and nonhuman relations. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so true justice first focuses on thresholds beneath which children should not be born. Most thinking about that threshold seems focused on welfare. But if we use a metric or value like self-determination, the idea of intergenerational justice actually becomes a the first necessary condition for political obligation, the first rule, or what is required to owe others our allegiance to a legal system. Nothing is more primary than our birth-determined relations to others.
When the reproductive rights regime was developed and put into law, the architects conflated the acts of having kids and not having kids equally as a matter of parental bodily isolation. But creating a child is the least isolating thing one can do – it’s interpersonal in nature, not personal, and it is in fact the basis of our relations – it’s constitutive: https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/family-planning-offers-the-best-means-for-combating-climate-change-an-interview-with-carter-dillard-fair-start-movement/.
Autonomy as isolation, out of context, was effectively an extension of the racist “separate but equal” thinking at work at the time.
Nussbaum’s work ignores this primary issue – the largest determinant of animals lives.
This is a failure many funding the fields of animal law and justice are eager to ignore because they made their wealth on the growth and inequity that together are killing many as temperatures rise. Climate change and inequality are 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.
There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable
Fair Start is writing Nussbaum openly for a reason
That backchannel and time consuming discourse is what one might call distracademia. In light of the immediate horrors of things like growth-exacerbated heat waves, much in the modern animal protection movement – like the academy and its questionable impact – seems more like a self-aggrandizing garden club that has been funded by the clear cutting of local forests than drivers of a true social justice movement.
At a meta level, beyond the façade, is Nussbaum assuming entitlements she should not?
Liberalism, and freedom, mean being empowered. How could that possibly happen outside of the context creation, development and emancipation? Are academics exempt from this relative positioning? Those who reject fair creation obligations limit themselves to a version of freedom that is leading to the death of others. Why not change the entitlements default while engaged in the discourse to avoid that? Would Martha have focused on this change, decades ago, if she had known how the climate crisis would unfold?
It’s very possible we should define fundamental political group membership, and the deserving of collective protection, based on the level of protection members would extend to infants and animals. Those rejecting self-determining protections for these vulnerables through things like parental delay and readiness incentives would themselves fall outside the scope of being owed protection because there would never be a way to explain why they have shown the reciprocity necessary for membership. They are not included in any collective “we.” Deserving that, being included in a legitimate system, is not onerous and could just require backing high level birth protections for infants. For those who do not, it’s unclear why they deserve basic protection in political systems which are, at base, premised on inclusion.
That is all we are asking Nussbaum to do – to consider resetting the default for obligation, and protection, while she engages in discourse.
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. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.
Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including their degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy.
All evidence suggests that not ensuring all children a measurable fair start in life, and birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment, has done more to harm all social justice goals, including individual freedom, than any other efforts have done to further them. In many cases when one factors in loss of political equity, or one’s effective shares in democracy to control the influence of others, many public interest organizations have spent more on lavish travel and events than furthering their missions.
But we don’t talk about this because it means admitting the historic subversion of civil rights through family inequity, and the treating of children of color as deserving a fraction of what white kids deserve, while assuming those children of color should suffer the brunt of the climate crisis. The wealth we see in the world today carries massive debt because we all benefitted from the violation of children’s rights to make it, bringing children into the world as means and not rights-bearing ends.
Whatever Nussbaum said, she lived a life of benefiting from not having to assure her own values in the birth-creation of others’ power relations, for example, in the funding that would have backed her work. All of that wealth would have been made in disregard of the lives of animals and the most vulnerable children because their interests are absent in the fundamental family creation norms that entitle wealth.
Nussbaum clearly avails herself of the benefits of our legal system, to protect herself for example, without deriving that system back to, and conditioning its legitimacy upon, measurably empowering those subject to it. That is the problem – one the impacts the freedom of others in a way that calls for a reaction.
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 relative to colonized nations – nesting in the human-rights regime.
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.
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 on empowering each person equally.
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.
These academics often assist funders in coaptating the values, imitating and redefining things like animal rights and mutual self-determination of humans and nonhumans, creating something that looks like the value but more aligned with their interests.
Fair Start has shown that a necessary condition for something to constitute “animal law” would be that it can actually benefit nonhumans, including accounting for the creation – through our birth and development – of their relations with humans. There are influential funders in this space however that define the field to specifically avoid that issue, going so far as to selectively report developments in the field to hide the way macro forces like growth undo the value of granular “victories” at a macro level. This benefits the funders, and wealthy their kids, as deadly cost to nonhumans and mostly vulnerable children of color. Both Nussbaum and the funders have affirmed their views of animal law and justice in this regard, with Fair Start activists in communications the activists can provide.
Our language, by not including the impact children entering the world has on our values, work, and missions, hides costs we foist on others and blocks our ability to derive obligations to follow the law back to a condition of its actually measurably empowering those subject to it. The hiding means we value the things in our lives by taking the idea of self-determination out of context, ignoring how our lives very much determine others – climatologically for example. At a subject-subject level of animal liberation, it would not mean that we have social contract obligations with nonhumans as voters or contractors. It would means that their presence influences who the human persons we share our democracy with are and should be. That’s what matters to nonhumans.
As discussed below, one solution is to legally require disclosures contrasting claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alters that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs.
We have all benefitted at deadly cost to future generations, a fact quickly manifesting now as the climate crisis intensifies.
None can be allowed to ignore creation ethics / positionality. Where, when and with which resources we are born is the largest determinant of outcomes in things like the climate crisis. And in terms of justice, and political obligation, there is no more basic a choice than how to deal with and offset our creation positionality, and the benefits and costs it conveys, intergenerationally for example.
Our collective failure to deal with the unjust and unsustainable system of growth that created our own birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionalities is leading to the death of millions. Academics are not immune from this systems of benefits and costs. In fact leaders in the academy are some of the most responsible given their decoy effects.
We should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring all children the fair start in life justice required. Doing so now, and changing policies to internalize the costs we foist on others, can save lives. Doing so would allow us to require fundamental social coordination around a norm which is infinitely easier to use than a written constitution of the sort we have in the U.S., a thing unknowable to most – and more backed by guns than collective reason and understanding.
Nussbaum’s work and claims contain the same self-serving baseline error as the work of Cass Sunstein. Instead of self-determination in the accurate sense, law and policy forced our thinking into an immediate focus on other humans that veiled our creation. How? Again, our legal and political systems treated having children as an act of autonomy, bundled up with the act of not having children, because that form of autonomy would define the concept of power in a way that avoided questioning certain entitlements.
The dangerous and powerful were the men with guns in government, and the castle of the home was an autonomous zone to be protected from it. That’s not the definition of the conception of power that makes democracy work. Power is any form of human influence, the mass aggregate of human activities that is killing millions in the climate crisis, and it begins as we—and our relations to others—are created fundamentally through birth and development. Watch for others entering the world, not the leaders with money and guns they will become.
This was power over others, not self-determination for all, and the misconception mainly operated by taking the element of time out of the equation and assuming certain relations rather than requiring birth and developmental self-determination. However, families are not just part of the social contract but constitutive of it.
Instead of racing others to the bottom for how bad we can act or be, the natural and temporalized threshold for being is based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much easier to see and achieve in a collective setting, like care modeling, than a nuclear family. This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
But as the climate and relate crises worsen, there are fewer reasons to continue to make that mistake. In essence, if we do not change the standard, we are inclined to “double dip,” to ignore birth positionality – the fundamental system most driving the outcomes, the main determinant, while pretending we are saviors ensuring justice. The Fair Start, “Tell the Truth,” theory of change takes claims each of us have made that assumed state authority and wealth entitlements not conditioned on the actual empowerment of constituents, has us admit those claims were fallacious, and urged us to now commit to elevating the empowerment threshold as an obligation above state authority.
This mimics some of the truth and reconciliation work in other contexts, but with future children.
Nussbaum is a luminary. She is also a person who simply benefitted at deadly cost to others, as many of us have. She can be a leader in fixing the fundamental cause of that. Martha will have air conditioning this summer. Some infants near her in Chicago will not.
For example, we could ask whether she would consider who – between wealthy families uniquely responsible for the climate crisis seeking to defend their wealth, and impoverished would-be mothers needing resources to defend their future children’s choices in life, would have a superior claim to use state violence?
But as the climate crisis intensifies and kills millions who had little role in causing or exacerbating it, and at a time where a small percentage of persons have become obscenely wealthy, many are asking if there has been a fundamental failure of justice that we should all address.
Fact: The failure of world leaders for decades to ensure a measurable fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, for all children has done more to harm the practice of justice than Sandel and other luminaries have done to further it.
We have all benefitted at deadly cost to future generations, a fact quickly manifesting now as as the climate crisis intensifies.
None can be allowed to ignore creation ethics / positionality. Where, when and with which resources we are born is the largest determinant of outcomes in things like the climate crisis. And in terms of justice, and political obligation, there is no more basic a choice than how to deal with and offset our creation positionality, and the benefits and costs it conveys, intergenerationally for example.
Our collective failure to deal with the unjust and unsustainable system of growth that created our own birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionalities is leading to the death of millions. Academics are not immune from this systems of benefits and costs. In fact leaders in the academy are some of the most responsible, and we should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring children the fair start in life justice required.
Ask anyone claiming to good work in the world to account for children being born without what the Children’s Rights Convention promises those kids in resources and rights. Then ask the person claiming to do good to reassess their claims. You will see a lot of good that many claimed to do actually fall away, by metrics we all believe in, with harm escalating as temperatures rise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
Those same black children will die by the millions in the climate crisis, while many white children get richer and richer. We can change that by taking birth equity seriously.
The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity as the overriding value behind political legitimacy. They were evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority.
There were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others. If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority and wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation.
Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.
Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we.” Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.
Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.
Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.
Finding: The organization perpetuates inequities by failing to address the climate and social costs of inequitable births.
Their Claim:
“We Don’t Have Time is a movement and a tech startup that leverages the power of social media to hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change.”
“Its principal purpose is to contribute to a reduced climate impact and an ecologically sustainable environment.”
The entity is literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claim to be protecting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable. They do not prioritize zeroing out the harm we are causing, using freedom as the base metric, nor do they admit there are climate reparations liens on the wealth they are using based on that standard.
Key Idea
To “constitute” in the context of governance means to be obligated. Our societal obligation to children offers an opportunity to build a just society from the ground up, focusing on infants and animals instead of serving those in power. Achieving this requires acknowledging the specific harm caused and shifting resources to empower would-be mothers. This ensures no child is born into circumstances that deny them measurable self-determination. This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
Backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm – so all children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality.
There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to constitute a just nation where subjects are empowered enough in the creation of actual relations, through birth, development and emancipation, to move from being treated as subjects to being included as constituents, and obligated to follow laws only because they have the measurable capacity to control the legal system. The action seeks to escalate climate and other reparations – specifically designed as family planning entitlements – by trillions of dollars, through the concept of equity fraud, in order to save millions of lives. Many are using illegal tactics to block the high valuation.
These reforms could save millions of lives by addressing the root causes of inequality, but powerful interests are working to block these efforts. Without action, wealthy interests will continue to fund programs that appear helpful on the surface but ultimately deepen inequality by prioritizing their own children’s success at the expense of others. By adopting universal equity standards, we can ensure that no child is left behind, and that future generations inherit a world built on fairness and opportunity.
Wealthy nations and families have exploited these systems to concentrate power and wealth, often at the expense of Black families and marginalized communities. They promote superficial solutions—such as charity or public programs—that distract from the deeper issues of systemic inequality. This approach benefits their children while leaving countless children of color in poverty and vulnerable to climate and social crises.
It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families. There were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others. If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation.
There is no legitimacy authority or entitlements without the measurable political equity, or entitling children enough so they offset each other’s influence relative to a neutral position – testable through things like the feasibility of a constitutional convention. Instead, the model urged by these families assured zero functional protections for infants and animals, and used a sleight of hand that conceived of freedom in terms of an arbitrary form of autonomy from the state, rather than as political equity to choose who has influence over you, ecologically and socially. How did we assure justice without improving the conditions in which children are born and develop, given the intergenerational justice requirements of minimum thresholds for all children? How did we become free without honoring the rights of others, especially the future majority?
These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating children’s rights and treating 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. This 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 they owe in reparations.
But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice was a horrific mistake, one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. 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.
The vision of the Cato Institute is a free and open society in which liberty allows every individual to pursue a life of prosperity and meaning in peace.
There is no way to be free without this public and universal truth and repair process of communicating, and our taking only the equity we all deserve so we can self-determine and make our own choices, rather than determine and choose for others. It is physically impossible to be obligated as a political equal without doing this because there is no more basic system of valuation. Where else would self-determining or constitutive relations come from?
The nature of our environment, and of human reproduction, makes freedom a very specific praxis.
Not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe those outside of it as much protection as they extend to children entering the world. Is that harsh to say? What sort of person would let millions die in an ecological crisis they did not cause because we did not take the measures needed to move the wealth those millions need to live?
Photo by Wavebreak Media Ltd/BigStock
Take Action. Urge Cato’s lead to answer these questions:
How does Cato account for children entering on the values they claim to further? If they did not account, does that mean they spent more on events and travel than furthering their mission? Instead of accounting, could they be free riding on generational, racial, national, and other positionalities and privileges? Do they assume the legitimacy of enabling the powerful over the vulnerable?
If These Organizations Do Not Account for Children Entering the World on Their Claimed Impacts They Are Part of a System Doing More Harm to Their Cause Than They Do Good. Regardless, They Remain Key to Changing It – Moving from the Most Falsifiable Claims Towards the Highest Ideals of Social Justice.
Not backing the reform raises serious questions about whether entities were trying to create value, or free ride at deadly cost to others on their generational, racial, national and other positionality. Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables as well.
Take action: Contact you state attorney general to ask what standard they are using for climate damage assessment and reparations, for example, in greenwash / impact fraud, environmental justice and other cases. Are they making the fundamental mistake that caused the crisis of not deriving back and making conditional any obligation to follow the law to the measurable empowerment of each child entering the world (and thereby our own empowerment)?
Family defense collectives can link, virtually, between polluter nations to those nations most harmed to ensure the primacy of value (which is not intersectionality,). Without this reform, many organizations will have spent more money on lavish travel and events than on legitimate policies that actually derive back to the creation of actual relations – between humans and nonhumans, for example.
Fact: It would be impossible to live in legitimate nations without accurate statements and inclusive communications relative to the full picture of costs, benefits and obligations we are all subject to. Such a constitutive discourse situates us and our influence on others, moving from a world where some influence many without consent, towards measurable and true self-determination. Why give to an organization that starts its work with zero protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals? The most just and effective solution, exponentially more effective than other social justice interventions, is for each of us to admit the fundamental mistakes that created the climate and other crises and move to fulfill our reparations obligations as the first human right. The need for this is just hidden by omission, but if fixed will save countless lives and avoid trillions in costs to businesses.
Ignoring minimum thresholds for children as they enter the world goes beyond inaccurate claims. The wealth we see in the world today was made, firstly, by illegally avoiding paying the costs needed to protect children, animals, the environment – and measurable freedom for all of us. Concentrations of wealth and power in the mid-Twentieth Century fraudulently assumed the authority and entitlements they had at the time, and used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring illegal standards for child development and education that violated children’s rights regimes. This treated people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.
Those rejecting fair starts in life as the first obligation on all of us – who we might call noncons – continue simply elevate their unearned positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it and liberating others. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. Without fair starts in life 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.
Thus not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe them as much protection as they extend to children entering the world.
The most just and effective solution to the crises we face today, exponentially more effective than other interventions, is to engage in the public and constitutive discourse of admitting the mistakes above, the ones that mean we were all benefitting at deadly cost to others. And, to then fulfil our reparations obligations to future children as their first human right.
