Grist is a nonprofit media organization that makes this claim:
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices.
Facts:
On any given day Grist made claims about someone or some action creating benefits in terms of ecological protection, those claims were being undone as children entered the world under without entitlements to minimum levels of welfare, share equity in their democracies (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) or entitlements to the legitimate political systems that derive from the share equity of their members.
To further values like ecological protection, entities like Grist would need to include those values in the first premise of who humans should be and become in terms of the creation of basic power relations, and entities undo the values if they do not include them. While including those values in the premise is not popular with funders or seemingly progressive media whose wealth derives from inequity, that does not change the reality of the impacts – including suffering and death – and the justice owed for those impacts.
An entity either starts with a measurably inclusive and thus liberating system that accounts for the birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality of its members, and relative costs and benefits, or they do not.
There is no evidence Grist factors in equity in its coverage, and much evidence that they omit the impacts of inequity.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
Not orienting from equity risks millions of lives as well as trillions of dollars in climate reparations, and illegitimates political systems by treating subjects as means bound in inequity, rather than empowered ends from whom governance derives. If one wanted to decolonize wealth and the future, one would have to start from a position of not punching down on children and animals – and that requires a constitutive threshold.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal rights projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: URGE THE LEAD AT GRIST TO COVER ISSUES AND STORIES IN A WAY THAT INCLUDES EQUITY AND ITS ROLE IN DETERMINING OUTCOMES.
The New York Times Co. is an American mass-media company that publishes The New York Times, its associated publications, and other media properties. Its headquarters are in Manhattan, New York City.
Claim: “The Times publishes hundreds of pieces of journalism every day. We apply ethical standards and rigorous reporting to every article, video, podcast, newsletter and interactive we produce.”
Facts:
For years the Times published articles and essays omitting crucial facts, facts that would have shown that the beneficial impacts of the environmental, antiracist, human rights, child welfare, and many other policies and processes being covered were being undone by inequity and growth. Those omissions benefitted Times leadership, at deadly cost to others.
And saying that is not controversial, or controvertible. Google “New York Times” and things like “children’s rights” or “child welfare.” On any given day an essay or article was published lauding such things, the Times omitted that more children that day were being born into conditions that violate their rights than were being protected. Look for actual, functional protections in terms of limits on the conditions in which children could be born, and hence their environment protected.
You won’t find them. Why? Because of the need for growth, growth – having already exceed atmospheric carrying capacities – that would ensure the violation of countless children’s rights in the future. This went well beyond the Ponzi scheme Nobel laureate Steven Chu saw, and into a multi-faceted and deadly thing.
The Times routinely uses and has used terms like sustainable, green, eco, humane, democratic, inclusive or similar value terms to describe policies, states of affairs, and /or objective values/measures which rigorous research and reporting would have shown were being vastly undone by unsustainable and inherently racist policies (like inherited economic inequity) accelerating the climate crisis and deadly inequity. The Times routinely framed environmental issues as liberal, and under an ethos of top down protection, which according to research has divided audiences over the issue, instead of correctly covering the more antecedent, unifying and accurate issue of democratic share equity as a driver of environmental outcomes.
The Times routinely covered issues of animal rights without ever including the driver of animal oppression, the creation – in the birth and development of humans – of our relations with them. The reporting, around things like veganism, treated animal rights as consistent with growth-based consumerism, and dietary change as an on-balance benefit for animals. That is inaccurate, hid the main drivers of climate change and the extraction of wealth ensuring inequitable outcomes, and in many cases was accompanied by stealth advertising.
The Times also routinely covered political institutions and those claiming to represent constituents, while omitting how easily measurable growth and inequity were undermining any possibility of any accurate representation. Times editors and reporters benefited from these omissions, forestalling things like expensive liability in the United States for birth equity reparations that would have moved towards representability. While the Times is critical of symptoms of growth and inequity, like the rise of Donald Trump, its reporting has stymied attempts to change the cause, the fundamental allotment of entitlements that created him. In similar form, the Times routinely covered affirmative action and other more cosmetic fixes to racism, even though that framing is divisive of the vulnerable on both sides of the political spectrum.
A assessment of recent coverage shows more reporting by the Times that would qualify as advertising, including advertising to children, than of violence around the nation and world that is at least partially driven by correctable incentive structures and entitlements that also benefit the Times and its leadership. When it does report, the coverage avoids drivers like economic and other caste-class based motivation, or political disempowerment, in favor other more topical explanations.
While the Times may feel it has been reducing the likelihood of violence of a political nature by not covering that side of violent events, it may be doing the opposite, concealing a backgrounded but fundamentally relevant system driving violence. This driver will become more salient as temperatures rise and growth-based inequity disempowers the average person, crowding them out of town halls where they can self-determine and into shopping malls where they are determined by others.
The coverage above ignored the overriding nature of child development entitlements in favor of downstream concentrations of wealth and power that were exploiting those children. This is not about freedom of speech, or journalistic autonomy, but a powerful entity misreporting facts and values to benefit itself at deadly cost to the vulnerable.
How inaccurate was the reporting, given the omissions?
All facts and values are relative to the thresholds and baselines discussed above, and any reasonable editor would reorient assessments of any story when it became clear that basic assumptions about relative positioning were likely to kill a billion innocent persons.
Failure to account for these crucial facts makes the reporting and essays inaccurate.
Are these omissions racist?
How is it not racist omit as a driver (and also omit research showing the right to override racist entitlements by all means effective) of many stories 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?
We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
The omissions hid – as many in the Fair Start Movement did in former work – a process that would lead to largely white and wealthy children being enriched from growth-based investments, at deadly cost to mostly black children. Instead, they reported from arbitrary baselines – the same thing that conservative Exxon, and liberal Cass Sunstein for that matter, did.
An analogy: The Times reporting on all of these matters of basic justice and political legitimacy/obligation, which impact the future majority in a way that will kill millions, would be like reporting on events in historic South Africa while omitting mention of the apartheid policy in place, and that policy benefitted those controlling the reporting. But in this case, the intergenerational and racial apartheid of assuming birth, developmental, and emancipatory benefits will kill countless more people.
Concentrations of wealth and power like the Times – like those in white South Africa – did not create value. They helped ensure rules for the game, and most importantly the first rule of who we should be in terms of the creation of power relations, to move the key costs on to others, and to create deadly criteria for truth (academic hierarchies based on birth inequity, for example) and value (like market demand created by not investing in birth and development conditions for all children, but rather exploiting their needs) by ensuring the average person could not patriciate in the rulemaking and was born more as a worker and consumer, than an empowered constituent. Their wealth is owed back, and the demand overrides any government’s right to block the taking of the wealth because the process of investing in equitable birth and development positionality is what makes governance inclusive, capable of representation, and hence legitimate.
TAKE ACTION
The New York Times leadership, including Joseph Kahn, is personally liable (as many in leadership elsewhere are) for the costs and benefits of a deadly but fixable systems of birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality. We are all liable for the costs and benefits of our birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality, and can choose to offset them and be obligated to legitimate systems, coming under their protection, or not.
He and others are liable for making choices and living lives that contradicted their own demonstrated values, like enjoying the absence of heat waves, while ensuring others could not do the same. He and others made choices for the vulnerable, robbing them of their freedom.
Right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. But it’s unclear why those created as economic means would ever have to follow the law, including the entitlements driving the loss of freedom.
If we are in quantity and civic quality created as workers for factories, and consumers for shopping malls, and not created as empowered and influential citizens in town halls where we make the rules, what democratically made laws protect the entitlement of the mall owners? This is not socialism or capitalism but basic constitutionality.
Nonviolence in engagement is crucial, but what seems clear is that the state also cannot use violence to halt constituting an equitable future – via things like care modeling reforms – because it would have no authority to do so.
Background reading:
Between 1948 and 1968, when the United Nations and member states should have been shifting their power from the top down systems of coercion protecting existing entitlements to bottom up systems of inclusion and empowerment. They should have begun the process of inversion. They did the opposite.
Controlled by a handful of mostly white and wealthy men whose criteria for evaluating truth and value came from the castes in which they were born and saw the world, through various mechanisms they avoided the shift from to down power to button up inclusion by conflating the act of having children and not having children under a veil of personal autonomy or privacy, failing to include share equity and children’s rights. They used a mangled version of freedom – freedom from taxes, from governance and regulations, from obligation to animals and the environment, freedom from duties to others, etc. to benefit at cost to others, causing the current state of world affairs. It was an immediate, narrow version of freedom, with one’s true freedom – based on our personal histories and positionality relative to others, veiled behind privacy.
What good is the right to terminate a pregnancy if you die in heat waves driven by others, because you could not afford air conditioning.
More specifically, they treated having children as an act of autonomy, bundled up with the act of not having kids, 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 conception of power that makes democracy work – it was used to make listeners assume the status quo for certain entitlements, like generational wealth, that should have been examined.
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 operated mostly by taking the element of time out of the equation, and assuming certain relations rather than requiring birth and developmental self-determination. But families are not just in the social contract; they are constitutive of it.
Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future, using metrics that combine to create a threshold above which children may be born, but beneath which no child should be born.
Kahn fails this binary, threshold test, because his editing decisions omitted it – for their own benefit and at cost to others.
Why does the baseline matter?
Without this it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us – not who actually has – day to day – influence and power over us. Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.
Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function.
The United States prides itself on being a free nation, but it uses a conception of freedom that starts by exploiting the most vulnerable, at the nexus of our creation. Look for a minimum threshold of wellbeing for future children and animals, and you won’t find one because they are both already earmarked for use in growth.
Had Micah Johnson, instead of filling five police officers, turned his attention to fossil fuel executives in demanding reparations for would-be black mothers harmed by the crisis and inequitable positioning in responding to it, the state would have not been able to legitimately block any nonviolent efforts by Micah to get the funds.
It should be the beneficiaries of a set of rules premised on inclusion for their legitimacy, but which instead fundamentally exploit and exclude, should carry the risk of violence in any confrontation over entitlements (which will mostly be reactionary) it creates. Justice, at base, will mean their not being allowed to benefit from an illusion of including and empowering others.
Many over the years had said that Fair Start Movement was true in its assessment, but that the goals were unrealistic. In a world where a few like Kahn have massive influence, targeting them to admit liability and transfer wealth in a way that would save countless lives – so that we may orient from truly self-determining baselines and die free or self rather than other-determining – is totally realistic, and underway. Who else will be held accountable for the deaths?
Wikipediais a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. There is evidence that many of the articles contain claims that do not account for a key factor that alters their veracity. For example, this article leads with the claim:
The Center for Biological Diversity is a nonprofit membership organization known for its work protecting endangered species through legal action, scientific petitions, creative media and grassroots activism.
It is now widely accepted that individualized attempts to protect endangered species were undone, and are being undone, by insufficient neonatal and child welfare policies designed to enable growth and which drive climate and other macro changes in our ecologies. The Center accepted and benefitted from these policies, as does the Wikimedia Foundation.
To further values like biological diversity, or mercy for individual animals, entities would need to include those values in the first premise of who humans should be and become in terms of the creation of basic power relations, and entities undo the values if they do not include them. While including those values in the premise is not popular with funders or seemingly progressive media whose wealth derives from inequity, that does not change the reality of the impacts – including suffering and death – and the justice owed for those impacts.
An entity either starts with a measurably inclusive and thus liberating system that accounts for the birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality of its members, and relative costs and benefits, or they do not. There is no evidence the Center or Wikimedia Foundation do.
Not doing so risks millions of lives as well as trillions of dollars in climate reparations, and illegitimates political systems by treating subjects as means bound in inequity, rather than empowered ends from whom governance derives. If one wanted to decolonize wealth and the future, one would have to start from a position of not punching down on children and animals – and that requires a constitutive threshold.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
The Center and Wikimedia are hardly alone. Media, like the New York Times Co., routinely misreported the climate crisis in a way that exacerbated it, urging along with many animal protection organizations the sale of vegan products in growth-based economies that were doing more harm than the dietary change was doing good. They are accountable, and if reparations are not paid, the children of their leadership will inherit the debt for the deaths they enabled, when those children become adults.
Many supporters of the Fair Start Movement were urged by funders in their work with other nonprofits to ignore equity as a base value, and to focus downstream, creating false silos like environmentalism, animal protection, human rights and democracy, racial justice, etc. They left out crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit they knew was being undone by inequity in creation under a system liberals, conservatives and almost all shades of political affiliation use. This helped illegally enrich mostly white kids, the children of funders. at deadly cost to millions of black children. There is a way to mitigate the harm – prioritizing the self-determination of all future children, by all means effective.
UNFPA is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency. Our mission is to deliver a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.
We promote gender equality and empower women, girls and young people to take control of their bodies and their futures. We work with partners in more than 150 countries to provide access to a wide range of sexual and reproductive health services. Our goal is ending unmet need for family planning, preventable maternal death, and gender-based violence and harmful practices including child marriage and female genital mutilation by 2030.
Given the United Nations own predictions of hundreds of millions of climate deaths, the UNFPA’s refusal to limit procreative autonomy with children’s rights did more harm to their claimed values than they did good.
Test the UNFPA and their lead Dr. Natalia Kanem’s commitment to their claim. Will she and other leaders there admit the extreme wealth in the world today was made by not having to pay the costs of protecting the environment, and investing in the equity of each child? Do they back moving that wealth as entitled reparations to young women to plan their families in a way that does not lace such costs on others?
Share equity: Nothing has a greater impact, addressing not just lowering emissions to self-determination standard – lower emissions than the failed welfare standards that were based on the economic growth models that caused the crisis, but ensuring women and children the resources they need to be resilient in the crisis, including a greater voice in governance through models that avoid growth-based democratic vote dilution, or share inequity.
This change is the main subject of a recent filing before the United Nations Human Rights Council, following in the line of the Council’s recent recognition of a right to a healthy environment, and arguing that the right to have children (Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), should have always been interpreted around the value of share equity rather than the contradiction-in-terms of procreative autonomy.
What’s better than the UNFPA?
The Rejoice Africa Foundation care group modeling ensures a move towards share equity thinking by bringing family planning out of a paradigm in which would-be parents are left in atomizing isolation, and into a collective setting where all can collectively assess the impact of having children on the future. Share equity – as the anchor value – requires each subject in a political system to have an equal and influential role (share) in deciding the rules under which they live, thus maintaining the capacity to limit the influence others have over them.
The climate crisis, in which the same growth that degraded our atmosphere also diluted our vote in the democracies that should have prevented it, is exemplary of shared inequity. Having children, unlike terminating a pregnancy, is more other-determining for the children born and the communities they comprise than self-determining for the parents. The Rejoice Africa Foundation care group modeling captures this reality, and uses collective planning (including more effective demands for climate reparations) to protect future generations.
TAKE ACTION: Contact Kanem and urge her to embrace equity over isolation.
What are you doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work you discuss?
In asking these question you are looking for the #Impactscam: A growing body of peer-reviewed research had shown the basis of deadly climate greenwashing – which is killing millions – originates with child welfare policies that illegitimate political systems because they ensure no minimum threshold of self-determination or freedom. These policies literally set inequitable standards killing millions of those least responsible for the crisis. And those backing them are choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others, when there are clear alternatives – like moving wealth through externalizing deadly costs into the hands of young women able to save many lives.
These policies illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get 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. At the very least young women demanding birth equity reparations would have greater right to use coercion to protect their children than the state would have to defend existing property rights that harm their children. That said, nonviolence is more effective in achieving justice
Instead of changing the policies many organizations are hiding them – aware that they face liability for greenwashing, where the growth they embraced historically did more harm to their causes than their efforts did good. Many of them are going out of their way to evade liability, and thereby – at least inadvertently – reduce the reparations victims would be awarded.
The most just and effective solution? There are legal actions pending before the United Nations and other agencies urging more inclusive legitimacy. Self-determination derives by definition from conditions of development that ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over us – to be free. According to a growing body of research, there would be no legitimate political entity to assign wealth or incentives that precedes this obligation. Who we should be, the “ought” of Children’s Rights and the hard metrics of being a legal person as opposed to an economic person, logically always comes first – before what we should do, and the allocation of other entitlements.
But there are ways to move towards fulfilling this obligation, upstream, and we work downstream on more traditional projects.
Take Action: Work with the Fair Start movement to factcheck claims by nonprofits. Read more here.
Forget the easy categories of the New York Times being liberal or conservative.
Look at how the New York Times has for around the last decade, covered in their reporting and the opinions they chose to promote, family policy both in the United States and abroad.
Their reporting on family planning policy – what it was and what it should be – almost uniformly falls into the left side of this divide in the image below, rather than the right. They routinely backed Trump’s family policy – one based on economic growth rather that birth and developmental equity one that undercuts human rights and democracy based on a handful of clear metrics. They backed systems that fundamentally created consumers and workers for shopping malls, not influential citizens for town halls.
This now means they – the disenfranchised – will suffer the brunt of a crisis for which they were least responsible, including violations of their right to have even one child in healthy and safe conditions. And because of basic vote dilution, voter suppression, and other factors, they will be unable to use democratic processes to protect themselves, and may rationally choose other measures. And in the face of all of this, many governments driven by industry are paying women to have more children with no easy safeguards like “survive and thrive” baby bonds in place, while wealthy families and foundations reliant on growth fund charities engaged in distractivism.
The New York Times has never seriously covered the simple fact that all children deserve a fair start in life, understood as the capacity to control the influence others have over them.
The New York Times recently reported on China leaning on women to have more kids, in the middle of the climate crisis, with no way to assure they will thrive in the future. The reporting does not cover how the United States does the same, through media – including the New York Times – and things like the child tax credit system.
How can we change this? Getting the resources needed to give all kids an ecosocial Fair Start in life is the first human right. The lead editor at the Times can be approached in person to admit the Times reporting had undercut this right by – like China – urging women to have kids with no assurances of a fair start in life.
He can now publicly change course.
TAKE ACTION: Find and urge Joe Khan to do the right thing, and ensure Times reporting includes all relevant family policies, and the impacts of not giving kids a Fair Start in life on our world.
Are the charities you fund undoing their own good? Find out before you give, and if organizations do not promote climate restoration via birth equity, and admit mistakes that led to the climate crisis, find out why. Where do your organizations fit in the timeline below?
Many other organizations are implicated in this scam.
But there is a fix.The Tell the Truth campaign.
Be effective.
Just ask the right questions of any person or group claiming to do good: Ask anyone claiming to do any form of good, whether they are conservative, liberal or otherwise inclined, how they have accounted for children being born into the world, and whether they are investing in those children to give them a fair start, or exploiting them for growth. Do they support family planning entitlements that ensure parental delay and readiness, relocation, leveling the playing field for all kids, and smaller or more ecocentric families? Or are they putting millions of innocent lives at risk to make money?
Find out where the organizations – from foundations, to companies, to media, to political parties etc. – you support fit into the FamScam timeline below. Some will claim this is not their issue. How can we do anything that does not involve other persons, and the relationships created through family policy? We can’t. What those insisting on ignoring family reforms really mean is that they are choosing status-quo policies from which they benefit at deadly cost to others. They are choosing injustice, often to benefit their rich kids at cost to others.
2018: The Animal Legal Defense Fund files a federal suit to reverse this process, using an animal liberation or ecocentric standard for climate reforms. The claim is simple – to constitute a free and just society first requires climate restoration via a right to ecosocial birth equity, and this is consistent with guarantees of a right to autonomy in the U.S. Constitution. The suit calls for ppm reductions a third or more greater than the Paris Agreement.
2018-2021: The anthropocentric-based Paris Agreement on climate reform is seen to be a failure, as average temperatures as expected to well exceed 1.5C. At the same time the Fund comes under sustained pressure from Our Children’s Trust and many funders, both of whom embrace an anthropocentric over ecocentric policies for climate reform and climate reparations, to drop the litigation.
Spring2022: The Fund and other organizations quietly withdraw the litigation, choosing status quo policies that minimize climate reparations, and hide their priority over property entitlements, putting millions at risk while many in leadership at the organizations personally benefit. That same year WHO reports rising deaths from an accelerating climate crisis.
June 2023: Additional allegations about the Fund come to light in a long-form article, including an investigation into the Executive Director who withdrew the litigation and was subsequently replaced. The article affirms racism and other issues consistent with the organization’s refusal to promote racial equity in family and environmental policies.
July 2023: Fair Start Movement, in conjunction with the California’s Green Initial Public Offering (IPO), announces a pilot Fair Start Certification standard, and green/growth-washing filings targeting nonprofits, companies, foundations, etc. engaged in the FamScam for deadly harm caused to at-risk victims in nations around the world. The standard 1) uses international human rights law, not purely domestic standards, which is required for the climate crisis – but in a way that includes domestic remedies, 2) sets the highest standard for climate reparations rather than undercutting victims’ claims, 3) mandates direct family-based reparations, which have the greatest impact, and 4) corrects the baseline error or fallacy discussed above, including climate migration and pro-labor/equity employment policy changes.
The Fair Start certification program is a fundamentally a human rights certification. It’s standards track capital itself, and forthcoming state attorney-general complaints, Lanham and other tort litigation – tied to climate loss and damage cases – will target relevant green/growth-washing claim, in many contexts. Because green/growth-washing comes from business, charities, media, politicians, academics, etc., all of whom are responding to capital which is predisposed to green/growth-wash. Our lives and freedom are determined by obligation, and the dominant one is law. The fundamental creation of power/obligation relations – our birth and development – should have been determined over the last several decades by incentivizing resources that would have ensured birth equity for all children, and equal influence over the laws under which we must live. That never happened, but climate reparations are a chance to change.
TAKE ACTION: Ask anyone claiming to do any form of good, whether they are conservative, liberal or otherwise inclined, how they have accounted for children being born into the world, and whether they are investing in those children to give them a fair start, or exploiting them for growth. Do they support family planning entitlements that ensure parental delay and readiness, relocation, leveling the playing field for all kids, and smaller or more ecocentric families? Or are they putting millions of innocent lives at risk to make money?
As the climate crisis manifests because we overran the nonhuman world how silly is it to talk about the success of animal rights?
Nicholas Kristof’s take on animal rights shows a total disconnection from the fundamental reality of human and nonhuman relations. While it’s easy to focus on popular icons like Singer and marketable and consumerist issues like diet change, the truth is that fundamental growth-based family policies that Singer, Kristof and others ignored not only caused much more animal suffering and death than their efforts prevented, those policies ensured a climate crisis that will cause untold misery for all.
I’ve worked at major animal rights organizations for years and, and often under pressure from funders who benefit from growth-based market we intentionally evade the growth issue. Singer and others likewise looked past the obvious source of animal oppression – our proliferation over the nonhuman world, and at a time leaders like him could have made a difference. if Kristof cared about animals he would embraced crucial family reforms that actually liberate animals, not treat a failure as a success.
