If you comb through coverage on the Vox news site regarding a variety of issues – including the environment, population, democracy, animal rights, etc. – you will see something odd.
They never trace all of these problems back to the source: Unsustainable and inequitable family models that exploit future children for economic growth. Each day those models make the problems being covered worse. Like most concentrations of wealth and power the news outlet’s values do not outweigh their desire to exploit growth and their own birth positionality, even when that exploitation drives a deadly climate crisis. And even when doing so makes their coverage hypocritical.
Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserve fewer resources and more risk, has done more to harm our values and missions than we have done to further them.
Wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights, in what some call the #famscam. In the scheme, nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into birth and development conditions compliant with children’s rights and the political equity from which legitimate governance derives.
They chose a form of unsustainable reproductive autonomy that was akin to the racist separate but equal scams, but one which will kill far more persons. Governments said we were equal and then ensured some children had nothing and others everything under the lie that parental autonomy could exist outside of political equity.
Because of the crisis we owe children and future children reparations based on zeroing out our harming them, using at least eight metrics to assess what we owe.
Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive. People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. What we think of as growth is actually political inequity. We have an overriding or preemptive right to take the wealth that was stolen and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future.
Those who subverted the civil rights movements decades ago, by ignoring children’s rights in the idea of reproductive autonomy, were avoiding the override – the fact that political equity always comes first and would allow the needy to take the correct resources by all means. National borders, rules and entitlements derive from the sovereignty or self-determination of constituents, and that derives from relations developed in birth, development and emancipation.
The many funders that framed and defined social justice over the last several decades never created real value in their vast wealth, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used inequitable family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating their own professed values (like animal protection and children’s rights) and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens.
They did this while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons, and which could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children, is generally considered a failure.
The baseline those like Vox uses has subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they seem to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzes the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it, and most vulnerable to it.
If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.
Wealthy, mostly white, families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud – that hides their liability and the illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions.
Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.
Take Action:
Contact Swati, a key lead at Vox, and urge her to report in a way that covers the real driver of the problems we face. Ask her if she thinks all kids deserve a fair start in life.