Dear Board Members,
Many charities, funded by wealthy persons more interested in protecting their wealth than doing good, push distracting campaigns that do little in the face of things like massive inequity and a climate crisis set to kill millions. These groups base their planning and work on the assumptions behind the Cairo Consensus on reproductive rights, which – in what might be called the #famscam – was the ultimate source of the exploitation of future generations and the nonhuman world, and only exacerbated inequity and the climate crisis.
That consensus is the fundamental source of most animal suffering and death. This is irrefutable.
A specific example of the scam is when civil society organizations knowingly undo the progress they are claiming in fundraising and other materials with outdated growth-based family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy.
And even when shown the undoing, many groups have continued on course, opting for downstream “distractivism” projects and upstream growth policies that will continue to undo the claimed progress in their campaigns. That makes the messaging in those campaigns misleading, as on balance the work does not help animals or other categories of subjects, human or nonhuman.
These outdated family policies ensure children are tortured to death by their own parents, more and more animals are subjected to suffering and death, other species are wiped out, the gap between rich and poor widens, and each person has less of a say in their political systems. These policies have created the political space for the reemergence of abortion and contraception bans, and enable influencers in media to openly push women to have more children to grow economies.
Many are fighting back against that, and for true freedom. And those who benefitted from unsustainable growth policies that did nothing to level the playing field between rich and poor kids know they are in trouble, now coming up with outlandish claims and a fake “underpopulation” crisis to decoy us away from justice.
That scam also skews the baseline for “loss and damage” climate reparations in favor of wealthy donors and in a way that could harm billions of people, and as such has set the stage for litigation around fraud. The baseline problem also creates a pressing need to ensure climate restoration immediately, via a variety of tactics, including birth equity family planning reparations which enable true ecosocial empowerment by physically constituting just communities, geared around concrete standards for parental readiness, redistribution of wealth for birth equity, and a default of smaller families.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will feel obligated to follow the law, including laws that create property rights, when they are empowered.
They will physically constitute systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others. Such a move ensures we achieve optimal communities by 2100, that are compliant with the Children’s Convention.
Please consider the dozens of ways to adopt Fair Start modeling, rather than the Cairo Consensus, as the base of your work and please take part in the #thewholetruth campaign, which allows groups to publicly explain the impact of family policies on their work.
Thanks for considering,
The Team at the Fair Start Movement
