The campaign simply urges anyone claiming to add value to the world to report their impacts in the context of children entering the world each day, relative to the conditions and relations which children’s rights – including their right to political equity – promise them.
How were they accounting for the actual experiences and life trajectories of the most vulnerable, infants and the animals they will impact?
When we do that assessing, we see how the ecological and political crises we face today came about, as those who seemed to be making the world a better place – on balance – were not.
For example:
Factchecking the Weeden Foundation
Basic Fact/Value Checking the organization “Mercy for Animals.” Take Action.
Factchecking Wikipedia and the Center for Biological Diversity. Take Action.
Fair Start Fact Checking Animal Rights Philanthropist Brad Goldberg. Take Action.
In this truth telling process we should all determine, and admit if need be, that we have quietly been using the same fundamental standard causing today’s deadly climate and political crises in order to hide our liability for those crises, and in a way that is costing millions of lives and doing more harm to our values and causes than we are doing good.
Instead, we should all be backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated so that no child is born outside of a system of reparations accounting – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm. We should act so that children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality.
Climate change and inequality are interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it.
Fair Start activists came together because in the nonprofits in which we have previously worked, our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, was doing more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. And in many cases those organizations went out of their way to hide this. Liability for this will be litigated soon in various fora, including climate tribunals in Africa.
Background
For years Fair Start activists in prior employment were paid well for public interest work, and gained goodwill among many, while enriching the families of those funding the work.
And yet the vulnerable entities they claimed to represent – infants, animals, indigenous communities – are now, on many levels, worse off.
How is that possible?
The activists were using an illegal assessment and reporting standard that used manufactured numbers to asses outcomes – a standard that ensures birth inequity – which was derived from the successful subversion through family policy of Twentieth Century racial justice movements. The standard is the single largest variable determining death rates and other outcomes as the climate crisis and political apathy surrounding it intensify.
The standard ensures our values operate abstractly, disconnected from the creation of power relations as children come into the world, hiding fundamental causation. It siloes social justice efforts into various categories like environmentalism, democracy, animal rights, etc., decoying them away from birth equity, and assessing and reporting impacts out of context.
The standard allows for value and impact claims that are not pegged to an ecosocial baseline that actually protects human and animal health, allowing some to claim their behavior is sustainable, while enriching some children at deadly cost to millions of others. Social justice derives from birth equity, but for decades philanthropists have developed decoy branding around more downstream issues, enriching themselves on growth and inequity that was slowly undoing environmental and other efforts.
The activists now working with Fair Start in previous employments used the funders’ wealth and influence to create a perception of value and impact that was never there, and in one case leadership scuttled litigation that would have revealed that fact, and tried to fix the underlying standard.
The illegal standard allows for a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable – and for many, deadly – economic growth. The standard omits information to ensure false assumptions regarding entitlements and authorities, ensuring audiences assume the legitimacy of entitlements, state authority and traditional political borders rather than actually legitimating them through child rights and political equity. In doing so, it hides vast inequalities derived from birth, and blocks the primacy of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
This is illegal because it violates the rule of law, but also positive laws surrounding child welfare, civil and animal rights laws, as well as the law of democracy. The standard works by weighting autonomy or self-determination outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in their democracy, which makes value assessments (and things like discount rates) wildly inaccurate.
One’s arbitrary birth positionality, one’s draw in the birth lottery in terms of race, intergenerational positioning, nationality, etc., is assumed to be fate or the hand of some magical deity, rather than a product of bad policy now requiring offsets to ensure equity. That skews how we see the world, and in ways that ensured a climate crisis likely to kill those least responsible for it. Seeing things out of the context of our creation, in an abstraction of justice, versus a view from a physically constitutive standard, leads to horrible results.
Study: Population growth cancelling out climate change progress
While racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century made relatively cosmetic advances in terms of voting, education, housing, etc., birth inequity combined with ecocidal growth ensured a caste status that today will mean millions of persons of color will die in the climate crisis, and fundamentally because white wealth was illegally held back from black families.
The standard, the one responsible for that outcome, is a form of punch down justice that assesses and reports outcomes as they are being undone by growth, with no functional protections for the most vulnerable. This standard assumes children of color deserve exponentially less resources, and more risk, in a system that is degrading their political equity every day.
Anyone could see this standard at work, just by asking a few questions of the organizations making claims. There are now legal actions underway to eliminate the use of the standard. Allowing its continued use enables funders and public interest organizations to exploit unsustainable growth, political inequity, and the subversion of racial justice to profit at deadly cost to infants and animals.
The standard – which we rarely not talk about – has been doing more harm to our causes and stated impacts than we have been doing to further them because it has degraded the capacity of the earth to ensure infant and animal health – the only true measure of value, while disempowering the average person, taking what their birth rights give them in democracy and selling back the rights as goods in an economy.
There is no accurate evaluation of values outside of that truth.
The Tell the Truth campaign asks all:
How are you accounting in your value claims for children entering the world, relative to what their rights require? Do you realize that entitlements to claim ownership of wealth, or any governmental authority, is contingent on not violating those rights, and on empowering citizens so that representative governance is possible? How would one get entitlements to protection, if infants and animals don’t get theirs? If one received the benefits of a system of values, including things like moderate temperatures, access to food and water, and relative security, would we not be eager to ensure those values also limited fundamental systems of entitlements so that others could enjoy them?
More formally, Fair Start is seeking to override the illegal standard at the United Nations, arguing that our collective debt to those dying from climate and political systems from which we benefitted preempts or overrides conflicting policy choices. We begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against rights-based and restorative measures, the deviation from which is leading to things like higher rates of adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth, low birth weight, and infant mortality.
Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated very child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
We don’t get justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring our own. And governments can’t come up with their own definitions of things like legitimacy, and define what things like fraud (which at base means benefitting at cost to others through misinformation), harm, and sustainability mean, in order to hide their liability for using a fundamental system of entitlements that kills millions of innocent people. There are objective measures for such things.
How can new standards be implemented?
Free persons will not follow rules in a legal system that does not give them the control over those rules, and Fair Start is organizing free persons to take action. All theories of political obligation require some measurable level of inclusion and participation by those affected by it.
Fair Start ensures that level.
The replacement standard is simple. Having children in not a matter of personal autonomy or freedom relative to the would-be parents. It’s interpersonal, impacting the children and the communities they comprise more than the parents. It’s capable of being constitutive, or deconstitutive, of a just society. If we assume that everyone should be relatively self-determining in that society, then the fundamental rule or standard by which to assess value and justice would require we offset each other equally, relative to a neutral position. That ensures accurate parental autonomy, balanced against other values, and the best standard for assessing climate policy, including climate reparations.
It allows an accurate measure of the loss of freedom we are seeing as the climate and related crises unfold.
It’s physically impossible for nations to be free, as in relatively self-determining, without elevating measurable birth equity and children’s rights as our first and overriding obligation. Being a free or self-determining nation is impossible if we start by violating children’s rights to self-determination. In doing that we become other, rather than self, determining. Being free means treating future children as means and not ends, and measuring harm from to them a neutral or zero position, rather than the hiding fundamental liability that attaches to generational wealth.
Law and obligation are first about how we are positioned relative to others, not how we act, so our language has to be constitutive, answering these questions – and admitting undoing relative to truly fair and sustainable measures – in order to form actually obligatory relations with future generations that free all. Where else would these obligatory relations come from? If government derives authority from its constituents, there is no other source. Hence we can use the Tell the Truth campaign to see who chooses to be unjust, fall outside the scope of legal – by which we mean inclusive – social protections because they refuse to pay the costs they owe each of us for the loss of our freedoms, and who by so doing saddle their adult children with their death debt.
Our theory of change is that language has to be accurately obligatory and inclusively self, as opposed to other, determining. That’s what it means to constitute a nation, or have supreme obligations – from the bottom up – to others. To do so outside of that process would be physically impossible.
There are dozens of ways to implement this reform, including reforming the civil rights obligations at one’s workplace .
Again, we begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against restorative measures described above. Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated every child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
The Tell the Truth campaign is the most just and effective reform possible, deriving our fundamental obligations to others from preemptive obligations to communicate in a way – admitting how we were determining the lives of others and not just our own – that frees us. Using an arbitrary birth lottery to determine who is empowered in life, and who is disempowered, is unjust. We can use the Tell the Truth campaign to see who chooses to be unjust, this fall outside the scope of legal – by which we mean inclusive – social protections because they refuse to pay the costs they owe each of us for the loss of our freedoms.