Sufficient funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention (“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.
We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today to fund reparative justice, wealth that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars. However there are entities now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive and fraudulent messaging that hides their liability and the entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
This is, in essence, the fraudulent withholding of reparationsusing a historically racist and unsustainable model – not benchmarked to actual harm – that illegally bypasses children’s rights as the basis for reproductive intergenerational justice. This is an arbitrary model that simply assumes children of color are worth less in terms of the birth and development conditions they deserve. That assumption will now condemn millions of children, mostly of color, to death as the climate crisis intensifies. Fair Start outs those using the fraudulent standard, which is inherently omissive, by simply asking targets to account for the entry of children into the world relative to things like the Convention when making impact claims and to adjust their claims accordingly.
The results are often shocking, with many public interest organizations having spent more on lavish travel, events and other performative things than on furthering their mission. Fair Start assists communities impacted by the fraud to seek claw-back reparations.
It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated 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 the degradation of the environment around us.
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And yet governments and big business are working together to try to push more women to have kids in order to create cheap labor, more consumers, and dumbed-down taxpayers. Fair Start is fighting back, and taking the money they stole to make sure families work for families, not governments and business.
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” that comes before the things we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.
Today most children born will end up relatively poor, working for wealthy families who made their money ruining our environment and never having to invest in an equal opportunity for all kids.
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.
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.
As foundational to the effort and overcoming barriers, Fair Start is urging state attorneys general to track themultifaceted 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, wecan 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.
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 createa 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 orgrundnorm – 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 towarda 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 thehiding 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.
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.
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 equitystandard 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, wecan 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 disclosuresthat account for infants entering the worldrelative 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 governancevia 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.
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 tothe 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 includephilanthropic 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.
We make sure those claiming to do good are not quietly undoing it, for their own benefit. We simply ask: For any claim of doing good, how is the one making the claim accounting for the most impactful factor: The resources and empowerment with which children enter the world and are measurably empowered to constitute a legitimate nation.
This question identifies constitutive reparations fraud by publicly asking how claimants account for children entering the world on their claims of beneficial public impact, given that there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact. This is not about population. It’s about lies and omissions to gain power.
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?
These questions involve looking for an omission, and a belief that children of color deserve less, and should suffer the brunt of a climate crisis they did not create. The question creates a permanent resistance to oppression by testing authority to see if it is fully derived and conditional, and identify frauds that would use authority without that derivation and conditioning.
The Quiet Subversion of Civil Rights Using Child Inequity
Concentrations of wealth and power in the Twentieth Century have used child inequity to subvert the civil rights movement, and evade race and other reparations. This was and is reparations fraud, and the hiding of a share equity deficit that is killing children of color. This fraud – like the omissive use of language that assumes black lives are worth less – clouds the language and concepts needed for universal reparative justice, and the fact that by ignoring ecosocial birth equity, most philanthropy ensured the climate crisis and did more harm than good.
“I advocate that Black birth equity, through reparations, should be the primary action taken to resolve consequences such as corporation induced climate change — in particular, because those who are negatively impacted the most are Black communities in California and their future Black children.” — Dr. Breeze Harper
By isolating women in the family planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families have for decades 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.
These are the efforts to repair that inequity by ensuring no child is born outside of a system of debt and reparations accounting,so that no child is born beneath a line of measurable empowerment. Freedom is an objective and measurable concept, linked to historical ecological and social markers that are tied to birth and development but often ignored. What was owed in birth equity, and one’s influential share in democracy, was instead taken and sold back in growth-based economies.
Reparations Fraud
Reparations fraud is subject to legal action, especially in cases where the evaluation of damages will rob victims of what they deserve because the targets of the reparations claims have already received the benefits, often under false pretenses.
Reparations fraud involves 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 the voices of the victims. It usually starts with siloed forms of justice minus the generic, or active, component of constituting just power relations in the birth, development, and emancipation of the most vulnerable. For example, white animal rights advocates might use base assumptions about the nature of animal law that disable its ability to benefit animals.
Because the creation of one’s positionality relative to others and ecologies is legally preemptive, it enables drastic action to recover reparations. Humans need law for the vulnerable amongst us, so there is no law, or obligation to do what others say, in a system that starts with punching down on the most vulnerable. And if our oppression comes in our creation it becomes almost impossible to see and remove without an objective touchstone – like offset, or zero, baselines.
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 – like animals rights, which is the most demanding form of social justice and the most current coopted – as well.
How Do You Hide Reparations Liability? Create Decoys of Social Justice Devoid of Equity.
Wealthy families in polluter nations use low child welfare standards and massive inequity to undo upstream what they are pretending to do downstream – selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children’s needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.
For decades FSM members were employed and worked with such entities, and we benefitted at deadly cost to others by omitting information about the fundamental harm we were causing, and in a way that enriched mostly white children and killed mostly children of color. We now work to identify those using the fraudulent standard, especially the most influential.
The Way Out: Invert You Obligation from Non-representative Government to the Governed and Most Vulnerable
There is no way to be free without this public process of communicating, this constitutive discourse. There is no racial justice in language that assumes children of color are worth, in terms of birthright, a fraction of the wealth of white children. And there is no justice without subsequent actions that ensure 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.
There is no form of autonomy that would not have had to start positioning the person with share equity in their political system.
There is no freedom without share equity in one’s political system, and no system of valuation that would not start with the evaluator’s position in that system. 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, and not skew the criteria needed to assess truth and value by excluding and exploiting others.
Violence, both from the state and those around us, fundamentally derives from this because it seeds fundamental injustice, making government representatives very non-representative, and breaking any functional form of obligation to follow the law because children are never empowered in the system of making it. Logically, we would owe each other as much as our nation owes children as they enter, defining what we sort of a “we” the nation is. There are the just and unjust, and the latter choose to fall outside of social obligation and protection.
Why? Because there is no inherent authority in government, or inalienable rights, that is not receded with an collective pronoun that implies an obligation. There is no way to constitute justice, and an obligation to follow the law from the top down, enabling the powerful over the vulnerable. Free persons see obligation as deriving from and conditional on being empowered, something fundamentally contingent on the creation at birth of the relations we have with others.
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. Making sure – at grassroots, organizational, and legal levels – that no child is born without climate reparations accounting does protect them. Once one accounts for the common omission of the impact of children entering the world without what they need, we can see Fair Start as exponentially more just and effective than interventions without the qualifier.
In Winners Take All, The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas explores corruption in nonprofits. But he and the New York Times missed the biggest charade of all, the one most driving the suffering and death unfolding as the climate degrades and temperatures increase.
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. The solution to this problem is to recognize that governments have no inherent authority, but only what is derived from and conditional upon them empowering their constituents, and that includes any authority to entitle wealth made at deadly cost to others that is partially owed in climate reparations.
In this sustainability scam there are always at least two standards for values like sustainable, green, humane, democratic, eco-friendly, etc. There is one standard for the rich investors and their kids, who are often funding the organizations promoting the terms and any impact their work is having in furthering them.
These standards are artificial, arbitrary, and designed to allow a particular form of economic growth that benefits some – mostly whites – at deadly cost to others. This first standard – anthropocentric and adopted circa 1968 by UN agencies bowing to wealthy families – does not require birth equity. It uses an unsustainable form of welfare as the basic currency or value.
The wealthy in polluter nations use this standard to undo upstream, what we are pretending to do downstream – selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children’s needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.
This first standard allows significant deviation from the ecosocial baselines, the ecocentric standards, that would have actually prevented the climate crisis. These latter are the real standards – which can be measured along at least eight metrics like restorative levels of greenhouse gas emissions and inclusive-level representative ratios that ensure actual representative democracy. Deviation from these standards – which are based on self-determination or freedom, and the equitable shares in democracy that comes with it – covers the full experience of the climate crisis that is killing millions.
Funders in the polluter nations facing significant climate liability fund institutions – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of impact to support the first standard, and the birthright of wealthy whites to benefit and deadly cost to mostly persons of color.
This allows wealthy families to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, while they use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where they – the Trump family, for example – can use the wealth they made through the scam to attack the democratic process itself and try to step outside of it.
There is an effort underway at the United Nations to require assessments of climate damages be 1) set around the ecocentric standards in order to account for the actual harm, and to avoid using the same standards that created the crisis to enrich a few at deadly cost to many. And 2), to treat that standard and the recovery of climate reparations as the first and overriding human rights, a right that preempts government’s authority to assign wealth contrary to it, and allows citizens to engage in preemptive acts of self-defense to protect themselves and their children.
The concentrations of wealth in the polluter nations face a challenge – having created vulnerable classes in their own countries who have common interest with those in the vulnerable countries most suffering from the crisis. To identify which standard any person or organization supports, they can simply be asked to account for how we should protect children entering the world, and whether they deserve to be protected, ensured equity and enabled to be self-determining, as their birthright. Those who refuse that higher standard, or cannot explain how they are helping to ensure it and offset their benefitting at deadly cost to others, are choosing to exacerbate the crisis and undermines the freedom of all.
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.
An ecosocial fair start in life is also the standard for evaluating legal damages for the many crises unfolding today, including the rampant impact fraud hiding climate liability, and it is the preemptive standard for all law and policy to resolve the damages.
Free persons will make their obligation to follow the laws of their nation contingent on a universal system of empowerment that tends to unite our values. But the chance to do so – and save millions of lives – is not something we ever talk about. Below are two moves you can make to change that.
We formed Fair Start because many of our members, in prior public statements about our work and successes, omitted facts that would have revealed that our claims were inaccurate, with the progress being undone by other factors. These were factors from which we were fundamentally benefiting at deadly cost to others, and our omissions hid life-saving entitlements. I personally omitted these facts – enriching myself, and other white families, at deadly cost to many black children.
These omissions hid the full impact of our positionality, climatologically and otherwise, in contradiction of the values we all live (like evading deadly heat waves, being counted as an influential equal in politics, wanting at least the choice to have children in safe conditions, etc.) – including the value of self-determination. They also delayed and minimized climate reparations, skewing the baseline used to determine them. At base, the omissions hid that we were benefiting from coercive and obligatory legal systems the protected current entitlements without paying the correlative costs: Ensuring, at birth, children’s rights to political equity.
These omissions hid an obvious error in our thinking about what it means to be free, for nations to be sovereign and legitimate, and the role that laws around the world governing families play in this. The error combined with the climate crisis will mean the death of millions, many of whom could be saved if we admit and reverse the mistake.
Freedom or autonomy to do what you want always follows and flows from the freedom or autonomy of being physically included as an equal in your democracy. Simply as a matter of logic, who we should be comes first, and it derives – and should derive – from our creation and development, relative to others and our environment. Adults with human rights – our first and inescapable obligations to others – would first have had rights as children, rights which would have also defined the reproductive rights that should have guide our creation, so that we are not born into conditions and with power relations that functionally disabled the rights. This is not altruism, but a commitment to being truly free by first limiting who has influence over you, and the amount of influence they have, through family reforms that ensure children enter the world and are raised in conditions consistent with their joining communities of free persons.
Those who accumulated wealth because of a misplaced sense of freedom – freedom from environmental regulations, from being a responsible parent, from the requirement to not take what you did not earn – were just harming others, benefiting by placing the true costs on others. They were acting in a way that determined the lives of others using birth positionality and ecological impacts, not in a free, or relatively self-determining, way. They owe those costs to the future children they harmed.
Equity, or a share of control, as the first move towards freedom
Fair Start means children being born and raised with real equity – where each person eventually can offset the influence of others in a measurable way, and control through rulemaking who has influence or power over them. The first entitlements in any political system belong to would-be parents, not government or the wealthy. They belong to those plan families around child equity using seven concrete metrics based on values we all live day to day. The rules of creation are unique because the values become inextricable in the act, including the value of subjective choice.
The entitlements – structured around antiracism and decolonization – enable parents delaying having kids until they are truly ready, as well as having and raising those kids at a time, in a place, and with resources where those children can truly self-determine and thus legitimate the nations they form. As such we all have more of a right and responsibility to enforce those primary entitlements than the government, or any group, has to deny them.
Obligation to follow the law is conditional on being empowered through birth and developmental positionality. Dare anyone to logically explain to you how we get to a fair system with an unfair start – without the equity of an equal and influential role in making the fundamental rules that limit the influence we have over each other. We get to true reproductive autonomy – in the fullest sense where women who can terminate pregnancies don’t later die in anthropogenic heat waves – via birth equity for future children, without which autonomy becomes impossible.
Starting in 2004 I helped raise millions for animal charities by claiming to use the U.S. legal system to save the lives of animals. The statements I made carried deadly omissions, making them inaccurate. The focus on low impact micro victories hid that progress was being undone – and in deadly ways – on a macro level that was taking infinitely more animals than I was saving. Often we siloed off the issue of nonhuman rights because it was easier to raise money, avoid complexity, and evade additional controversy. Often we avoided the issue of birth equity because leaders did not want to examine their own children’s unearned privileges, or because they had quietly given up on their professed causes while retaining their positions and salaries. The combined impact of those silos, across the spectrum of public interest work, led us to the word in which we live today.
In truth that legal system – like almost all around the world – offered no real protection to nonhumans or the future children that will determine animals’ lives, because it did not financially entitle would-be parents to plan well, in an equitable way that will not harm both the children and the nonhumans. The system, like many others, was on balance – at a macro level – eradicating animals and exacerbating the climate crisis for the most vulnerable humans in what is accurately described as racist ecocide. Through my omissions I hid the error described above and the claims many have to reparations.
I benefited from hiding the true nature of what I was doing: Fundamentally placing deadly costs on children that undid what I was claiming to do for animals, both socially and ecologically, children like Anthony Avalos who was tortured to death by his caregivers, and Mbabazi Judith, who died in eastern Uganda of the malaria the climate crisis is making more deadly. The system from which I benefitted systematically disenfranchised and treated them as economic inputs – as means, rather than as empowered ends comprising democracies.
Theirs and millions of children’s deaths derived – fundamentally – from a system that benefits me and others by protecting current entitlements, allowing us to determine the lives of others, rather than ensuring the primary parental entitlements that help constitute free nations. It could have been any of us that died in this way, and justice starts with being empathetic enough to avoid these situations by exploiting others as means as they enter the world. Equity does not conflict with autonomy if we ensure it precedes it between birth and emancipation, but the human brain struggles with time frames this large, and many have taken advantage of this fact.
Take Action:
Some are beginning to fix this deadly problem with two simple moves: 1) Making the same admission we make here and urging others to do likewise, moving towards the truth and the language of dynamic and conditional political obligation. Find specific and public statements they have made, and engage them.
Freedom, or self-determination, by definition first flows from the restoration of nature (a baseline defined by the relative absence of human influence) achieved via delayed parenting, which is entitled through birth and developmental equity funding pegged inverse to wealth. This is owed as the first and overriding human right, and it allows each to be relatively free at the most fundamental level from the ecological and social influence of others – and thus capable of constituting a system of legitimate governance.
This process does not need violence because unlike our current system it is politically inclusive, or constitutive. All rules should be fair, and that which determines our creation is the first rule. That rule contains an inescapable logic: That if government truly derives from the governed, young women would have justification to obtain funds for life-saving equitable family planning entitlements – to give all kids a fair start in life – and actually constitute legitimate nations and become a “we,” more than the state would have to use violence to keep that wealth where it is.
All of this is not a matter of academics or research. It’s just a factual history and a action commitment to not being obligated to follow the laws of nations that do not empower all members in an equitable and measurable way.
Join the Fair Start Tell the Truth and Act Campaign with the two moves above and bend the arc of our species towards a better future.
Free people feel obligated to follow the law because their legal system first empowered them – through birth and development conditions, with with a role in making the law and and thus ensuring the capacity for each to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over them. That is the core of legitimacy, or the creation of fundamental power relations that look more like a town hall of citizens than a shopping mall of workers and consumers controlled by owners. By definition, freedom among equals first means birth and development against ecocentric or natural ecologies in conditions that ensure equity of opportunity and an influential voice in deciding – and thus legitimating – the rules under which one must live.
Such a change would ensure that we do not benefit from a system at deadly cost to others, a fact that have driven some to desperate acts.
And because being free in this sense is constitutive, or comes first, those women would have a claim to such resources that overrides the existing property rights to extreme wealth that was made at cost to future generations. The policies that would keep this wealth in place are illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get the benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to violently target us for reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them – starting with children’s rights. Expecting to benefit from others without paying the costs of freedom – truly investing in kids – is proceeding from a false premise.
If a young mother were charged with trespassing in making the demand for birth equity reparations, could she challenge it – and expect a jury to side with her – because the state cannot limit access to property without first empowering (actually or physically constituting) its people to be involved in the making of such property rules, i.e. empowering them through just the sort of constitutive discourse in which she seeks to engage? How do we every get to governance by the people without elevating her pre-political right above the process-based rule of trespass? Do we really choose to constitute our relations via top-down force in a system run by men, versus a system of bottom-up empowerment run by women, via the act of care? Her act would be fundamentally liberating, and the best explanation of political obligation, because free people will start by limiting and decentralizing the influence others have over them.
I recently had one wealthy, white funder tell me that “fair start” sounded like ensuring their grandchild would be born in hospital conditions like those in Kampala, rather than in Palo Alto, and they wanted to avoid that. They felt this way, even though they had made their wealth through a system that externalized its costs, and relied on family policies that fundamentally allowed that externalizing, with deadly impacts on Uganda and the children living there. This was the same cost-externalized wealth, and policy control, that had also ensured this funder’s daughter would be the executive director of their foundation.
The funder urged me to do “make work” and low impact window dressing, as other funders in nonprofits urge their employees to do, rather than see the fundamental issue. They insisted on framing the issue as “population” to avoid discussions of equity as equal and influential shares in a democracy – equal control, through law, to limit and thereby free us from those who would have influence – including climatologically or through irresponsible parenting – over us. They did this all while using that same money to decoy audiences away from equity with that same focus on overpopulation, and towards geoengineering solutions that would make them a savior in the climate crisis driven by policies that benefitted the funder at deadly cost to others.
This is an existential question. Who should we be? Persons that leave extreme wealth where it is, made at cost to future lives because the wealthy got the benefit of seemingly legitimate governance without actually paying the costs of children’s rights, or freedom fighters who move it and save countless lives? Many are already giving voluntarily in this way, leading the way for others.
What are we doing to ensure the conditions in which children are born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work we are promoting? What minimum protections for children and animals do we require for political systems to be legitimate? Can we admit that our failure to ensure such minimums through a correct system of entitlements, historically, is now killing millions of those least responsible for the climate catastrophe?
Here are two legal moves we can all make for truth and justice:
Back new Tell the Truth ESG reporting requirements geared around the actual harm the climate catastrophe is doing to the most vulnerable. Current ESG reporting requirements are designed to benefit rich white kids at cost to the global majority and nonhumans, and to minimize climate reparations – including by hiding the overriding right to ensure resources are prioritized for ecosocial birth equity. It’s called the ImpactScam: Many organizations raised money while making policy choices that benefitted their leadership at deadly cost to others, choices that – given the climate crisis – did more harm to the causes they promoted than they were doing good.
