The human and reproductive rights regimes instituted in 1948 included no minimum and concretely measurable standards of welfare, equity, or freedom for future children, a mistake that ensured vast inequality and growth leading to the climate and other crises we see today. Reproductive autonomy centered on self-determination, but only for parents, not children and the communities they would impact and comprise.
Not ensuring child equity involved assuming a contradictory premise – non-empowerment – for the legitimacy of government. This made social justice interventions largely performative – not tied to the creation at birth of actual power relations. Good evidence of this involves projected death rates in the climate crisis.
This extended a form of historic reparations fraud that undercut the civil rights movement and resulted in the exploiting of positionality and future children for growth rather than including and empowering each child. The mistake – conflating the zeroing out of entitlements to ensure self-determination and equity, instead with some detached notion of bodily autonomy – is now undoing much of the good philanthropy has done to date. This fact is evident if we assess beneficial impact claims against the impacts of children entering the world, relative to children’s rights standards, on the day the claims are made.
Solution:
Fair Start is instituting a preemptive human right to a fair start in life, using children’s rights standards, to supplant the current inequitable and unsustainable human and reproductive rights regimes. We are using those standards, and zero baseline accounting around accepted standards of intergenerational justice, to assess climate reparations as family planning entitlements, inverse to wealth. The entitlements encourage collective family planning, parenting delay, readiness, and equity.
Because the legitimacy and authority of governance derives from its subjects, such a preemptive right is already inherent and practicable, and Fair Start is moving at the linguistic (with truth and reconciliation admissions), legal (e.g., preempting all damage assessment impact child welfare matters), organizational (via certification) and grassroots levels (via women’s defense collectives) to secure reparations for the accounting to assure no child is born beneath a line of minimum standards of welfare, equity, or freedom.
That line is the border between power and freedom that precedes national borders on map. Children deserve the self-determination or freedom that is required for legitimate governance – persons positioned to organize and free and equals, not the reparations scam that cause the crisis. We are all obligated to first constitute, not to any constitution that is merely derivative and conditional.
Years of unrefuted research shows that as early as 1948 any form of authoritative governance would have had to be investing enough in each child to offset their influence equally, relative to a neutral position like Dasgupta’s / Tucker’s biodiverse optimality.
Of course that would have required children’s share equity in democracy be treated as the first human right. To use the concept of a “we” or impliedly invoke any collective authority would require that. Otherwise you would be engaged in third party fraud – identity and capacity theft – because you can’t use the invocation without the equity.
Define power as the violence of the state and conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm (bring beneath a threshold of some value) others, and freedom becomes the resistance of wealth and other existing entitlements to that power of the state, entitlements that can benefit from growth and evade equity.
This created a fraudulent anthropocentric (versus ecocentric) standard for words like “green” “democratic” “sustainable” etc., and the birth inequity and growth we have seen for decades.
Of course that’s not what power is. It’s any form of human influence, from abusive parenting to emitting pollutants. The border of human power is not represented by lines on a globe; it’s the threshold beneath which no child should be born.
To account for that form of influence, we would probably have to assure all family planning occurs in a collective. Mwesigye and Esther developed and are pioneering that model, an Afrocentric model of women’s circle democracy that well predates John Locke.
Moreover, because constituting as free and equal persons is the prerequisite for legitimate (inclusive and empowering) governance, there is a preemptive right to the resources, obtainable by all means effective. This work of overriding allocation would be limited to the most polluting nations, especially the United States.
One way to implement the fix is to ask anyone making any claim of doing good to reassess it, relative to children’s equity needs as they enter the world on the day the claim is made.
For example, we think philosopher Peter Singer consistently omits children entering the world as a factor when he makes claims, and thus uses the anthropocentric standard.
As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote Singer’s food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.
The discourse of dividing all into the fair, and unfair, will identify those who will insist on using the fraudulent standard, and those who will not. The Defiance anti-apartheid movement rose by resisting the most influential drivers of the lie, and that could occur here as well.
If we want to be free, we owe others as much as they give children entering the world. We owe them that level of protection.
In years of doing this, we never found an effective counterargument, but have seen lots of moves to sabotage our work.
Children are the world’s most precious resource. There is no greater cause than championing their rights and wellbeing. I am committed to this cause with all my heart, and I am proud to join the UNICEF family.
Ask Russell – here – how UNICEF accounts for children entering the world without parental delay and readiness entitlements, and how that impacts what UNICEF claims to value, and claims to do? Would she admit children entering the world without the resources they need reverses much of the work UNICEF has claimed do to?
If she can’t say that children have an overriding right to a fair start in life that creates an authoritative demand to the wealth they and their mothers need, she’s hardly being legitimate or inclusive and empowering.
These questions can divide the world into the fair and unfair – create a true border of human freedom and obligation that can reset national borders from the inside out – and allow us to overcome influential and unfair barriers to self-determination.
A body of growing peer-reviewed research showed it was physically impossible to be free, or self-determining, without this reform because there is no system of values, including representative government, outside of relative positioning to the social and ecological state-of affairs that determine infant health, equitable positioning, and opportunity, without this accounting. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.
Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use decoy institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of micro-level social justice impact that hides liability for the macro-level forces undoing the impact.
Wealthy families in polluter nations use these low child welfare standards 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.
One of those costs is violence. Nations using illegal violence to defend entitlements without being positioned to actually represent their constituents begets violence, like mass shootings, which usually target innocents rather than the wealthy families benefiting for the representative system.
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 debt/reparations accounting. Inequity in one’s share in democracy is ineffective.
If you want a better future, find the most influential institutions and individuals engaged in entitlement and impact fraud – those who can be made prominent example of – and ensure they tell the truth and back accounting that legitimates their authority.
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.
Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.
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 and environmental 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.
These organizations show prioritization of growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.
There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.
Why It Matters
How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most key social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?
How is it not racist to back 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.
Take action: Ensure the organizations you work with specifically account for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals and the environment, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.
Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.
Decoy nonprofits do this by making claims that hide key factors, like inequity and growth.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide.
That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
The growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
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.
What Is Fairness at Base? Preemptive Discourses and Reparations That Change Birth and Development Conditions to Ensure Real Freedom, and Not the Freedom to Harm Causing the Climate and Other Crises Killing So Many
Under the International Bill of Human Rights anyone can use any means effective to assist moving wealth at the top to young women in order to plan to save the next generation because constitutive entitlements always come first. Ask anyone or any organization who made a claim of creating some beneficial impact for how they accounted for the impact of children entering the world on the day the claims were made. You will find zero actual or functional protections for infants and animals almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like share equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.
Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals and nonhuman habitat humans would otherwise consume. They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because of an obscure policy mistake by the United Nations between 1948 and 1968.
How could there be a constitutive process enabling the use of collective pronouns in constitutions and covenants if each person could not choose to orient from such a norm, rather than from the directives of those claiming to represent? Had Micah Johnson, or Ashli Babbitt, known this they might have done other than they did. The world today is in crisis because we created many who could not understand what you are reading here.
Regardless, we can fix it.
Member states to the human rights regime have no authority to protect concentrations of wealth and power holding entitlements, when that money is owed to young women who are the only ones who can have and raise kids with share equity, such that governments can actually be sovereign, actually represent the constituents born and raised by the mothers, and have actual/legitimate authority to enforce any entitlements at all. Where else would government get authority?
Through this standard and process we will avoid impact scams that threaten to cut reparations by trillions, and increase the death count by tens of millions. The borders of human power are not lines on a map, but an ecosocial threshold/line of share equity – the only irreducible obligation. To exist is to be in a seamless web of benefit and cost with countless others. Freedom means bending those so that all make choices for themselves, not others.
We all have to work to get all children over the line as they enter the world so they can constitute their own borders, and that line is being seen as the tradition and enforced isolation of would-be parents being broken every day in favor of collective work in care groups around the world, and as activists ready to target the adult children of concentrations of wealth and power who owe the most. How could there be a “We the people ….” obligating us without a collective decision-making process? It would be physically possible. The threshold/line is the true border of human power and freedom. Fair Start is not everything, but it is the first step to all things,
This not about population – this is relational power, on eight levels, that inverts from would-be parents lording over future generations toward measurable and legally entitled empowerment and inclusion of the vulnerable before they arrive. The wealthy can pay, or poor children will die. Those we ask to choose can either say their benefitting at deadly cost to others was correct, or refute the system at based and assist in correcting. Our UN effort inverts the system to help ensure the right result, by all means effective.
History
Critical legal errors made between 1948 and 1968 began a series of events leading to the climate, inequity, and democracy crises killing so many today. The errors involved letting false assumptions about existing entitlements take root, ones that centered in family law and policy.
They included a narrow conception of power that focused on the use of violence by the state and its derivatives, rather than things like the power of parents over their kids, our power over the environment, how wealth lets some control others, etc. This narrowing – of human freedom – was done to protect the entitlements of wealthy families from scrutiny as the human rights regime was being formed, and at base cut the values that comprise self-determination out of the premise of who we should be.
The assumptions bypassed ensuring democratic share equity – where each person has a minimum and measurable level of self-determination, as well as the necessary critical children’s / environmental rights, in reproductive rights systems. Instead, having children was deemed a matter personal to the parents, with no functional obligations to others – a move that allowed the mostly white officials and wealthy families that designed this standard to privilege their children and benefit from investments in unsustainable growth.
Because having kids was wrongly assumed to be more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the kids and community, freedom was – at an existential level – wrongly seen doing what one wished, not actually being positioned relative to others and one’s environment, to be free. The errors created chaos – which accounts for the sense that something unfixable is at work.
This seeded a fundamental form of political illegitimacy. Rather than ensure that national sovereignty derived from the individual sovereignty of each constituent, the entitlements – through ensuring growth, vast inequity, and sub self-determination standards of child development – slowly converted broad political freedom into an attempt at economic freedom, as subjects began to crowd, distrust, disempower, and pollute each other out of town halls and into factories and shopping malls. There is no theory of law or legitimacy that can get around the basic need for share equity.
Key theorists, from Raz, to Dworkin, to Finnis, and even Kelsen – all made the same mistakes, mistaking bodily autonomy for share equity, which is now ensuring the death of millions. To think governments have authority to defend wealth made at deadly cost, when it could be used to save the lives of those it risked, is a fallacy and those engaged in it fall outside the protection of the social contract for obvious reasons.
Thus, demand, market valuation, legality and legitimacy, etc. – the many benchmarking values we use today – all were artificially manufactured to avoid costs that would have evaded the climate crisis, through a process of not investing enough in persons to empower them with real choice. All oughts or values derive from the idea of who – as free persons – we should be, and that begins with children’s birth and development standards pegged to concrete thresholds, like greenhouse gas emissions standards below 280 ppm. There is an objective morality marked by our relation to nature, and through it and our backgrounds, our relations to others.
It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” from which to live our lives until we change these facts because without a change we start by exploiting and thereby harming, rather than empowering in a way that is measurable with clear benchmarks, others. It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” if we start with zero actual protections for infants and animals, and zero actual protections is the case in our legal system today, almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.
They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because if the mistakes described above,
The result of the above is massive white wealth supremacy today and an accepted paradigm of colonizing future generations with our costs, with those least benefiting from the crisis suffering deadly costs. How is it not racist to back 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, male billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? The inequity/unsustainability standard is still in wide use, millions are dying, and this is just the beginning.
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There are identity politics rising because member states sold away the democratic voice of their subjects, and national identity with it. There can’t be a meritocracy if we never included persons in a way that allowed them to assess and determine what merit means, and the climate crisis hints whatever criteria were used were way off.
We have to revise all cost/benefit models now ensuring inaccurate results because they are used an underlying democratic standard to obligate people to follow laws, but never actually included them as democratic constituents, but rather exploited them as economic means for growth. We now owe the difference to avoid children dying in heat waves we created, and then put them in. In other words, leaders defined terms like “sustainable” and “green” based on ensuring growth-based profits for their rich, and normally white, kids. They did not benchmark them based on the actual harm, on eight levels, killing millions of black infants.
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. Leaders today are assuming legitimacy to hide actual harm with low legal standards, the legitimacy of which was based on actually avoiding the harm. Legal institutions can use legal fictions after they have authority – they cannot use them to get authority, and imagine self-determination and inclusion/empowerment when the values are simply not there.
What is equity and self-determination?
Yes a woman needs the autonomy of terminating a fetus that would otherwise come to rule her life, but if she then dies in a heatwave because she has insufficient resources she was never really free, and anything that said or suggested it was “green” without actually having done what was necessary to avoid her death – using at least eight metrics – is greenwashing, and one way the metrics add together is to assess whether she had an equal and influential role in determining the rules that would have limited the power others had over her. Here, it seems, not much.
Everything we think, say, or do, begins with a collective orientation that is hidden behind the illusion of human bodily autonomy that created the climate crisis, and if we are to be free, in that orientation the addition of new constituents must offset the influence of each constituent by one, relative to a restored nonhuman world. That requires a threshold beneath which children should not be born, and above which any may be born with a collective exchange in care model collective planning that ensure offset via the threshold or line. Fair Start will soon be suing to fund accounts that would fund the thresholds
Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the accurate linguistic creation of power relations. The fundamental mistake we all seem to be making is that our obligation is inverted: It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as first obligated to persons who will parent, 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 equitable positioning.
Young women would have more justification to use coercion to get the resources they need, if to constitute, than the unrepresentative officers with guns defending wealth have to use it. This primacy of a discourse and the 1, and process inverting the direction of power, allows us to name high profile individuals that should be engaged. They are treated as members of a democracy, which is only constituted of individuals, and not as members of something that makes them beyond reach. And leaders of media urging racist and genocidal pronatalism in the climate crisis deserve what they get.
Using the old standard and recreating the fantasy world of self-determination – even in the most basic language of impact we see everyday – that caused the climate crisis interferes with measuring actual harm for the crisis who owes what to whom.
The risk of retaliatory violence is growing as temperatures rise and the wealth – the deadly costs of which fell on others – is denied the victims. In fact, much of the violence – including mass shootings – are misreported, with media omitting the political drivers of the acts. In terms of bearing the correct legal (inclusion in one’s democracy in a measurably empowering way) burdens and barriers, it should be more likely that leaders of concentrations of wealth and power die for not saving children, than children die for not being saved. But violence can be evaded.
The solution is clear and many are moving towards it: Measurable share equity, or having an equal and influential role in limiting the climatological, social and other forms of influence others have over you, and that harm your self-determination.
There is precedent for crossing lines to ensure the wealth is moved, like the Defiance work of the African National Congress. The key to this move is disabling current illegitimate entitlements – which drive everything – through the revelation of the fraud they create, and the death debt that encumber them and can be collected any anyone, anywhere.
An Inescapable Binary
The inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard that should have been used by 1968, represents an unavoidable binary distinction. It differentiates along at least eight concrete values/metrics that measure the space between self v. other determining persons, (permissible emissions, political representative ratios, children’s wealth, etc.) and would result in trillions of dollars difference in reparations, and millions of lives saved.
The UN and related domestic legal actions implementing the preemption – dozens – would 1) standardize public benefit claims to avoid deadly and fundamental impact fraud 2) standardize climate and related crises loss and damage evaluations to account for all actual harm relative to real world baselines necessary for legitimate political systems and entitlements, 3) recognize the partial preemption of any conflicting entitlements with this process, and 4) recognize the right to entitle future generations with self-determination and share equity in their democracies as the basis of national legitimacy, and by all means effective.
This standardizes around actual harm (under 280 parts per million), rather than using the same standard – under pressure from the same wealthy families funding greenwashing – that caused the crisis (over 400). That’s the fox guarding the henhouse. Under this standard, every child born beneath the line creates a death debt the children of the wealthy carry. And to make some beg for charity when the thing is owed as a human right violates human dignity, and invites direct justice.
The threshold (which is the first point of political relativity for everything) is operationalized via a debt/savings account and a more collective form of family planning, and uses investments in a wide variety of resources including delay, time, cash, corporate shares, obligations that preempt taxes, time commitments, training and aid internships, etc., as well as parenting delay towards readiness, relocation, education and training, co-investments, etc.
The threshold, through debt and savings, can incentivize both the wealthy and vulnerable to change family planning, covering one’s debt before having kids, or alternatively, adding co-payments to the accounts before having kids. Accounts for particular collectives, care groups, fund kids only over the line, and also determine how actions can unwittingly move the line up, making it harder to get kids over.
The threshold is not a human choice. It is an objective measure of actual harm created by a fragile ecosystem and human needs that determine the impacts of birth, developmental and emancipatory conditions. The threshold is that, from which deviation caused massive harm. It is the antithesis of the fantasy world of “sustainability” created by wealthy persons who seek to now use it to minimize justice.
This process begins and centers on a discourse of intergenerational truth and reconciliation and mirrors the African National Congress Defiance anti-apartheid model of inverting illegitimacy and illegal entitlements. It uses a one question language test referred to as the constitutive discourse which converts the abstract preambles of constitutive legal instruments, which are needed to legitimate our power relations, to functional and inclusive processes.
A discourse to accelerate the change
The old social contract went something like men with money and guns writing rules for all others to follow, and drawing borders around themselves. This version sets a line – or border between freedom and power – beneath which children should not be born, and uses collective family planning discussions to get all kids over the line. Those kids can then write and follow their own rules.
The line or threshold is a full-dimensional border that can be used comparable to other apartheid-dismantling efforts.
There is a concrete discourse that urges target audiences to factor in the impact of children entering the world on any day the members of the audience made inaccurate social benefit claims publicly using the unsustainability standard which inevitably (we start everything we do with a decision, on the binary, about who we should be) contradicts the values of the speaker, and then ensuring the target audiences investing in young women using the fairness metrics as compensation for the fraud, and benefit at cost, that led to the crises.
The test lets anyone know which side of the binary someone falls – the inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard. It lets us know who is punching down on the most vulnerable, in a universal circle of accountability, inclusion, and listening. And it ensures future generations will understand issue like what is covered here – which is not the case for most persons living today.
Many concentrations of wealth are retaliating, and taking extreme measures to hide the errors, avoid climate and other liability, and minimize or scuttle reparations. Defensive litigation is coming. Given the stakes as temperatures rise and inequity grows, there is the serious risk of violence. We need to make sure entitlements minimize that risk, not exacerbate it.
Future actions will test the model:
If a poor family needs access to air conditioning to survive, we will ensure the trespass laws defending the homes of the wealthy who benefited from the climate crisis cost-externalization scheme are preempted, and those in need get access. We will also ensure the death debt of concentrations of wealth attach to the adult children of the debtors, and will eventually be collected.
This is the binary choice, and every day we lose by letting debtors hide and avoid it: We can leave illegitimate wealth where it is or move it and save innocent lives as we invert the political system from top down coercion by non-representatives in what amounts to spamocacy, to bottom up investment and measurable inclusion.
Truth and reconciliation can mitigate the risk and unify around the value of measurable self-determination. Nothing has a more just, beneficial and liberating impact on children, animals, and the environment.
This is not intersectionality. Think of the values below all together as different sides of what it means to be free. Many children die every day because they are born without these entitlements, and all are inseparable and determined when we have children above or below the specific line of ecosocial inclusivity.
The framework standards – moving towards fluid borders, and functional constitutional conventions
Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be. Google terms like “conviction” with terms “child abuse” and “child torture.” Those refusing a threshold benefitted from the suffering your are reading about to make money on things like growth-driven investments.
Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections. Current growth and wealth-based high emissions standards have already dilled millions. How should we treat those willing to choose a standard from which they benefit, but that kills others? How should we treat those that defined “green” to allow wealthy, white families to make money on growth-based investments, rather than a green that would have saved black infants’ lives.
Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections. When some choose to other-determine rather than self-determine, by choosing economic families over democratic ones, it robs you of your freedom. How do free persons deal with such threats, and how have they in the past?
Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above. How could your self-determination not be limited by those entering the world? In this value, It would not seem to be limited if the average person were not really being empowered at birth, but being exploited by others. Intergenerational justice is hard because humans – even the greatest social justice warriors – often want to privilege their children and use it as an excuse to harm others.
Measuring Loss and Damage:
There are efforts underway to measure and award loss and damage for climate change.But all fundamentally recreate the error that drove much of the crisis after 1948: The absence of sufficient environmental protections in family planning regimes, both to limit emissions well below 300 ppm and to ensure minimum levels of welfare and resources for all children to deal with adversity, like rising temperatures.
The current loss and damage evaluations ignore this fundamental error, and would award based on arbitrary baselines that minimize the awards. Moreover, they ignore irrefutable arguments regarding any national legitimacy and political obligation deriving from the measurable self-determination of its constituents, that would treat high-evaluation reparations as preemptive of any conflicting laws and policies. The action before UN seeks to standardize this evaluation, and avoid “the fox guarding the henhouse” with the concentrations of wealth and power, including governments, that caused the crisis dealing with it in a way that benefits them at deadly cost to others.
In Walden we learn that a basket weaver could not expect tosucceed in the “free” markets being created by those colonizing his lands. But even Thoreau missed the fundamental value of nature in constituting power relations towards equity and freedom. To the extent thebeadworkers of Amboseliface the same threat from the likes of Elon Musk and his sort, we can make harsh examples of moving their illegitimate wealth as a fundamental act of liberation. To use god’s standard, nature, to entitle justice is the avenging hand of a higher power. The beadworkers offerings are inherently valuable, as we ensure we treat others as ends, not means.
Why then engage the UN, or member states at all, if there is an authority higher binding them? They become instrumental, and useful, but without the withering lie of having the last word, and as demands for intergenerational justice stretch into decades of action that view will lift those demanding share equity.
TAKE ACTION: Use the discourse and truth and reconciliation above to bifurcate concentrations of wealth and power, whether an individual or institution, into free persons and unfree barriers. Rank the latter by their ability to make the change you know is needed, and scale up influence on the most influential barriers until they break. This work deals with the first border between you, any kids you have or care about, and freedom.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide. That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
They growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
The growth in the chart below – at the most fundamental level – made some rich, some poor, and ensured the climate crisis would fall hardest on those least responsible for it.
I have sat and chatted with wealthy funders backing vegan food companies and nonprofits that made wildly misleading claims about the social and environmental benefits of the products, and who were making money on population -driven growth in markets. They knew what they were doing. I have seen national nonprofits bury research showing the harm growthwashing does, for fear of what their funders – many of whom are moving massive and unearned privilege to their rich white kids – would do if it were revealed. No only were they lying about the impacts of their philanthropy, but they were doing so in a way that harmed poor kids to enrich their own kids through growth-based investments.
TAKE ACTION: One way to address growthwashing is by requiring the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting requirements include family policies and their impacts. Urge the Biden Administration to require this.
For all the good progressives’ think Klein did, by the numbers his pronatalism – urging women to have kids to grow the economy – did more harm. Klein is especially known for his promotion of veganism as a form of social justice, especially beneficial to animals. Like Vox, Klein misleads about the impact of food reforms.
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.
Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets.
They were willing to greenwash to further veganism, even at cost to animals. They were herding the well intentioned towards buying their products, in the middle of a climate catastrophe.
Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be.
Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
