And because he is in the business of fossil fuels, the wealth he “owns” was made at cost – through the climate crisis – to those in the future. The cost of much of his family’s wealth could be the death of millions.
John T. Raymond is great example of the climate trolley problem, recently covered in Newsweek. What if you could save millions by engaging one man? You can. John. T Raymond is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, money made by externalizing costs and risks on others.
One could argue that the positive law entitlements described in the first link of this paragraph must control in the absence of agreement otherwise, but unpacked that boils down to doing what the government – the men with guns – says, because it is the government. But that, as a reason, is the opposite of the ideal of American freedom.
This is all beyond liberalism or conservatism. We might equally target the lead at the New York Times – Joseph Kahn – for his role, his use of power, in holding up the family system that created John’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: Contact John here through his agents, and urge him to do the right thing, or find and reason with him lawfully and peacefully in person and we will publicize your bravery. Free persons will limit and decentralize the influence others have over them (including climatological influence) by physically constituting just communities, relative to a neutral baseline like a restored climate and nature, such that we are not interfering with the freedom or relative self-determination of others.
John, using some of his wealth to give back to future generations and reorient what we mean by being free, could lead in this regard.
Want to be effective? Target other choke point high-value targets like Vladimir Putin (who financed western oil companies) or Joseph Kahn, lead editor at the New York Times, who urges women to have kids to in order to further grow the economy that is ensuring the climate crisis.
These efforts urge concentrations of wealth and power to offset the harms they are causing, and their wealth externalized on future generations by paying family planning and birth equity and development reparations that change the location, timing, manner, and with what resources women have children to ensure those children thrive rather than suffer because of the wealth-driven climate crisis.
This is not altruistic. This about liberation. Neither I nor you can be free in world with people who did not get enough what they needed growing up to constitute groups of free and equal persons actually capable of asserting authority and obligating persons to follow laws, especially when that allows the creation of so many people that we lose nature, which is simply the relative absence of the power of other persons. That is the logic of self-determination in a world with more than one person.
Many in positions of power like Peter Singer evade this discussion and refuse to exit a political system that benefits them at deadly cost to others. How they handle this issue – from their position of wealth and entitlement – screams that it’s not their life on the line; that it’s other lives, and other parents’ children’s lives, on the line. Singer’s evasions are unique give his urging policies to liberate animals, the benefit of which were undone by family and growth policies. Also, by siloing off the liberation of nonhumans from social justice more generally, he ensured concentrations of white wealth and privilege, at cost to general justice.
For example, Elon Musk makes money selling electric cars to a growing population that needs them because that growth is destroying our atmosphere. The policies that ensured that growth also ensured birth-based black poverty relative to the massive head-start position in which white South African Musk was born, and a dilution of the average citizens power to use their democracies to reverse things like the climate crisis and birth inequity. Those policies did more harm, especially using a metric like self-determination, than Musk and his car sales did good. This is not about population as much as power relations, and not about growth as much as inequity, understood as an equal and influential role in determining the rules – formal and informal – one has to live under. If every child that could be born in South Africa at the time of Musk’s birth had equity in governance, had a role in making the rules, would they have chosen the outcomes we see today? If exclusion was a violation of human rights, can we take back that amount of wealth that derived from the violation? Who would choose to use the same form of legitimacy that enriched a few at deadly cost to a blameless billion?
Remember that – and that their wealth was created at cost to your freedom and the lives of others – when you engage those in positions of power as co-subjects in a shared democracy and bring them the reality of their position.
Freedom really – or physically – means some relative level of self-determination. You would control your life and what influences you. Influence over you would be limited and highly decentralized.
And if you wanted to maximize freedom, you would have to create a background environment that acts as a buffer between people that minimizes human influence, through things like the climate crisis, we we have over one another. That requires climate and biodiversity restoration.
And assuming you believe people should be political equals, with equal influence under the most basic rules under which they must live, you would ensure their birth and development so that they offset each other’s capacity to influence those rules equally. Freedom always requires some rules – even if just to ensure children are protected from the sort of harm in childhood that limits their freedom in the future – and we should all have equal and influential say over those basic rules.
Freedom – or maximizing relative self-determination – without these conditions would be physically impossible. Our families have to create and develop people for democracies, not economies, because the former precedes and regulates, assign property rights for, etc. the latter. Consider it this way: Much of our lives today is dominated by the need for employment, social positioning relative to others in our economies, titles, etc. That control over our lives is asserted through wealth and other forms of influence. If we are to be free, that influence must be redirected and reprioritized so that would-be parents are incentivized and entitled to first or peremptorily build democracy – town halls where each matter – not economies, or crowded shopping malls.
You and others should be an influential citizen, not just a worker, consumer, and taxpayer. And doing that depends on how you are created and the conditions in which you develop.
Those reparations can get us towards a biodiverse, climate restored, equitable and democratic future and they are first human right and thus override current state-issued property rights because they make us who we should be – free. Many who owe those reparations and owe them because their wealth was made by externalizing costs on future generations, are trying to block this process and send us into a future crowded future with vast inequity, and a dangerous and degraded environment.
Their thinking is fallacious, hypocritical, and oppressive. All have the right to move cost-externalized wealth to young women to evade millions of deaths by all nonviolent means effective because the first legal inevitably obligations deal with creating persons in conditions – fair conditions – where they can comprise self-determining communities.
All of this is evident in reviewing basic conceptions of intergenerational justice. If we substitute the more antecedent value of self-determination for welfare (which legitimate political entity ensures the latter value?), the threshold specified by Meyer leans towards egalitarian, and more importantly, it becomes the first and overriding norm because who we should be always come first in any policy analysis.
Forget figurehead politicians or the fantasy world created constant commercials. Your day-to-day life is and should be determined by the liberty-quality of your relations with your fellow citizens, those with whom you interact every day. And who they are and should be is determined by the conditions in which they are born and raised. How is self-determination possible without such a thing? It’s not, but what we do now can be improved by using children’s rights as the fundament of state legitimacy.That would reform a system where can be coerced or socially cajoled to follow laws that are not theirs at all.
What you thought of as a written constitution or set of rights that ensured your self-determination did not. Freedom is four dimensional. The only possible source of self-determination, the creation, family and child welfare ethics, law and policy of who we should be, slowly undid that value for us in favor of the wealthiest, and certainly for future generations subject to wealth-driven heat waves and social controls.
Most of the academics in these debates contradict in their writings the basic values they exhibited throughout their lives, e.g., seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions, etc. You can identify these academics because they will avoid discussions of how shared values interrelate to the actual creation of power relations. They will avoid discussions of their full positionality. They will avoid explicitly conditioning state authority on empowering each person equally.
Given their privileged intergenerational positionality, and the fact that they sent their lives generally relying on and participated in legal/political systems of coercive obligation premised on the idea of self-determination (evidenced through things like the holding of elections) that benefitted them at deadly cost to others, they should at least begin from a default or provisional position of extending those values to future generations.
They can begin by saying — as a fundamental premise of justice over top-down power — that basic human-rights systems should prioritize the child welfare/equity in instruments like the Children’s Rights Convention over parental subjective choice in the ethics, law, and policy of family planning, population, and procreation so that future generations can also debate these issues from the comfort and security these academics do.
By asking this question you are looking for policy scam that fundamentally created the climate crisis. You are looking for those who are willing to benefit by exploiting those children’s birth positionality for economic growth, thus benefitting at deadly cost to others. You are looking those who choose a fundamental political system/orientation system with no functional protections for children, and thus none for the ecologies those children would consume.
Freedom may best be conceived as the conditions of influence (cash or other incentives, entitlements, coercion, renown, group belonging, the inclination of humans to imitate one another to ensure group safety, etc.), and polarity, where organizations of free and equal persons can form, dissolve, and reform — more like bubbles than an extended organizational chart. What would it take in the creation and development of persons to ensure they acted as free and equal persons and be able to look each other in the eye without fear or deference – in the formation of groups, the state of affairs implied by the “We” in the beginning of the U.S. Constitution. What would it take to ensure that across generations so that we were not imposing our ecological and other costs on future generations? Given that self-determination by definition requires birth and development conditions ensuring all children an open future, that is where we start.
One way to envision the difference would be as between a shopping mall in which business owners try to fill the thing in order to maximize profit, and a rule-making town hall in which citizens fill it while ceding an equal capacity to influence outcomes to all members. Savvy freedom fighters will physically constitute nations, not be constituted by some document or documents to which they have, and can only have, little relation.
This is not capitalism or socialism, but constitutionalism, the creation of duty-based systems that enable member obligation and authority by actually – physically – limiting and decentralizing influence. The unique value of investing in young girls is both evidence of how this can work, and a toehold for major reforms.
Instead of random written constitutions one can imagine modifying GMI systems via a progressive scale of democracy-building payments, inverse to wealth and income and contingent on positionality, that either charged wealthy young women for having a child before their 27th birthday and/or without certain parental readiness benchmarks, or on the other end of the wealth spectrum, covered significant incentives consistently paid out for them to build birth equity and ensure delay.
We owe our first obligation to other members of our nations, as they enter and develop, horizontally, rather than vertically to the powerful – the wealthy or politicians. To think otherwise is to replace the real – authority derived from the people – with the symbolic: documents or representatives.
Free people will target extreme and increasingly vulnerable concentrations of wealth and power to repay the true costs of their wealth to young women, protect millions of innocent lives, and help move the world towards true freedom. This inverts power from deference to coercion from above to exclusive deference to empowering those who are vulnerable – and who we might have been – below. The former cannot create obligation because it undermines self-determination, and hides equity’s demand that privilege be earned, and that all have a right to be heard and matter.
We can’t truly call ourselves civilized if we don’t protect our most vulnerable. The Fair Start Movement gives current and future children the advocates they need to get the life they deserve.
Anne Green, PhD Former Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Executive Director, One Step for Animals
For all of the reasons given above, many reasonable people would consider the young mother taking peaceful action to achieve birth equity for her future child, and setting an example that others might embrace to protect all future children the height of working towards freedom and justice. Free people will follow rules that start by limiting the influence others have over them. The process of her seeking birth equity would be, in that sense, liberating.
She can leave the money with the wealthy family, knowing it was made at cost to others, or move it and save lives.
Those on whom she would make the demands – who would choose preventable deaths – seem tiny and worthy of targeting relative to all of that. Her move to demand is a move towards knowing her and many other children, under a test laid out by one of the leading political philosophers in the world, will live free.
The climate crisis is not just about emissions. It’s about how children, animals, and adults will actually experience the crisis, and that depends long run on the mental and physical resources they have, their location, those people that surround them, etc. And that depends on what they have at birth.
Impact, on many levels. depends on how we have kids.
Consider this fact: People, not documents, constitute nations, and the creation of their power relations through birth and development – by definition and inevitably – determines whether they are relatively self-determining or determined by others. These relations are part of the implied “we” in every statement, the often-unspoken presence of the dominant political/legal system – usually the nation – from which the statement is orienting. How would you ever really account for inclusive power relations to allow a say in what the law should be without starting at creation, and accounting for the move from minor to adult that makes persons full citizens capable of making the rules.
You would not, and the failure to halt the climate crisis is evidence of this. And there is a clear formula to assess reparations. The would-be mother would be truly constituting democracy, speaking the truth and logic of self-determination to power.
So . . . if that young mother were charged with trespassing in making the demand, 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 is fundamentally liberating, and the best explanation of political obligation, because free people will start by limiting and decentralizing the influence others have over them.
This is not theoretical. A complaint reflecting the right to make such demands is now before the United Nations, to benefit the most vulnerable communities impacted by the crisis.
For all of the reasons given above, many reasonable people would consider the young mother taking peaceful action to achieve birth equity for her future child, and setting an example that others might embrace to protect all future children the height of working towards freedom and justice.
She would be ensuring self-determination for many, true freedom, instead of them being determined by others. What is the right way to deal with someone who insists on participating in a system that risks millions of lives in order for that person to make more money?
She can leave the money with the wealthy family, knowing it was made at cost to others, or move it and save lives. She can empower children equally and help solve another problem: Acts of mass violence do not stem from mental illness as much as from a sense of disempowerment, and the need to matter in one final act within what shooters perceive as an unjust world. We were sold sustainable town halls where we matter and can control the world around us to a degree, but got unsustainable, massive shopping malls where most do not matter and have no say. And those that benefitted from this system, at cost to others, want to block media from reporting things like mass shootings to hide the costs of their systems.
Those on whom she would make the demands – who would choose preventable deaths – seem tiny and worthy of targeting relative to all of that. Her move to demand is a move towards knowing her and many other children, under a test laid out by one of the leading political philosophers in the world, will live free.
Do you support an academic institution? Most of the academics in debates about family reforms contradict in their writings the basic values they exhibited throughout their lives, e.g. seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adherence to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, use and enjoyment of an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, etc.
Given their privileged intergenerational positionality, and the fact that they sent their lives generally relying on and participated in legal/political systems of coercive obligation that benefitted them at cost to others, they should at least begin from a default or provisional position of extending those values to future generations by saying – as a fundamental premise of justice over top-down power – that basic human rights systems should prioritize the child welfare/equity in instruments like the Children’s Rights Convention over parental subjective choice in the ethics, law and policy of family planning, population, and procreation so that future generations can also debate these things from the comfort and security these academics do. Urge any academic institution you support to back Fair Start family reforms.
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?
What’s the biggest impact you can have to make the world better for all? It’s probably not what you think.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Food insecurity made worse by climate instability in Uganda.
WHAT’S THE CAUSE?
Wealthy nations disproportionately using resources that exacerbate climate change. There are specific men who benefit from this, and could save millions of lives by leading by example.
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
Distribution of seeds for fruit and vegetables, gardening for self-sufficiency and resiliency.
Opening basic bank accounts/saving plans for children at recognized financial institutions in Uganda.
Sensitizing local populations toward equitable family planning.
Moving wealth from the one percent wealthiest into family planning and ecorestoration entitlements as a form of climate reparations, and the first and overriding human rights. As described in Newsweek, we are unleashing underprivileged women’s and children’s rights with the Seeds for the Future campaign.
Countless media stories today are flooding our brains with stories of an underpopulation crisis, falling fertility rates, and women liberated from being mothers-in-waiting.
You would not see many abortion bans either. These conversations are premised on the idea that we can exploit children as cheap labor and voracious consumers.
But the truth is we do actually have to invest that level in kids, at least the minimum spelled out by the Children’s Rights Convention.
People like Elon Musk may be bemoaning falling population numbers, but the children of his native South Africa – and intending mothers – actually have a claim to his wealth to bend the arc of de-growth even further. He certainly owes it, born a rich white kid who fled South Africa with wealth during apartheid.
How those families take what they deserve, the distraction of effective altruism aside, is another matter.
Wealth was built by externalizing costs on freedom, by being able to consume the nonhuman world, and benefit from the growth not having to invest equally in children allowed.
Older generations of wealthy people often either have trouble understanding this, or simply do not care. Their adult children, who benefitted from more aware systems of education, are different. They have more at stake in the future, understand that large and consumptive families are not sustainable, and can often see their unearned privileges.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Ireland Baldwin online, or find and engage her in person, to publicly admit these truths, and adopt Fair Start family reforms that invest in freedom. She owes us, and the future, the change such a good use of her influence would bring.
