Want to Solve the Climate Crisis? Avoid Equity and Impact Fraud and Tell the Truth About Who Benefits, and Who Pays Deadly Costs.
- We are all using metrics for success that quietly disenfranchise persons of color. We all use, usually without knowing, an illegal standard meant to enrich some children at deadly cost to others - and which by now has cost millions of lives. How can you see it? Contrast any claim of success with hard metrics of child/political equity as a catch-all for accurate valuation (because can’t accurately assess value if disenfranchised) and reassess the claim. You will find no functional protections for infants as they enter the world, and the animals they will impact.
- Most omit the way this undoes their value and impact claims because including it would show some illegally benefitting at deadly cost to others, and in ways that show a white wealth supremacy.
- When that is factored in, the numbers change drastically, showing a double standard where wealthy children get the benefits and poor children get the costs. Fair Start targets this cause of harm, not the downstream symptoms, and when asking what our claimed success is relative to, measures the claims against our fundamental obligations and not arbitrary criteria meant to benefit the claimant. We require governments to empower their constituents in order to have authority to govern, using the allegations of equity and impact fraud, and the Tell the Truth campaign to account for the full extent of harm “shopping mall democracy” to our true freedom.
- What is the solution if the revolution cannot be funded? Legitimations, which are family planning reparations (legitimations) based on birth equity. Even if we choose to live in a commercialized democracy we cannot limit the right of future generations to a true democracy.
- For example, one of the most cited legal academics in the world wrote a book on climate justice while never accounting for how he and his daughter had the wealth, privilege, and resources they have, while others in his community face catastrophic risk. Now we know how. It’s not just that all are created equal, but that in that in the act of creation we should all should be - relationally - empowered equally.
- Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called growth a Ponzi scheme. One solution? Require governments to show how they are ensuring political capital / birth-based equity in citizens in order to obligate them to follow laws. In other words, we should act to identify and exclude those free riding on a system where we should pay the actual costs of obligation to one another.
- Ensuring that children are born only above a line of resources that makes them measurably self–determining is the true border of human freedom and national authority/legitimacy, not any national border. We assess and measure value from that, from a standard of what ought to be in order to allow others to have a say in what ought to be. Those empowering others as such get priority.
- There is a preemptive legal right, and form of legal action, for these reparations (legitimations), which contrast manufactured numbers versus the reality of climate harm: See https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/. Governments have to measure and remediate harm from zero, the manufactured high numbers that caused the ecocide and decline of democracy we see today.
- Birth equity - self-determining positionality of being truly a “we” - comes before any other obligation because we cannot be legally obligated without being legally empowered to influence outcomes (like climate) that impact us, and much of the violence in the world today comes from this disparity.
- Bottom line - if one uses metrics that discount political equity, they are engaged in fraud, and benefiting some children at illegal and deadly cost to others. There is a sleight of hand in which we assume freedom from power means freedom from government coercion when that power actually originates in the creation of birth and development positionality / power relations.
- Again, how do we see this? Name a target issue/entity/claim-quote - the ask? Just one question - how are they measuring birth and development on infant and maternal freedom/political equity as the fundamental system of valuation? From zero or fake numbers? Show receipts? It’s not necessarily about corporate bad actions - unaccountable philanthropy did more harm by throwing the standards. We represent vulnerable entities for the maximum standard change, but that’s also consistent with self-determination for all. Equity fraud getting benefits of a coercive political/legal system premised on democracy without paying the costs of actually empowering people.
- The claim will begin by assuming an obligatory system, a “we,” which implies certain values, but then in a sleight of hand, move towards some benefiting at deadly cost to others by the time the claim gets to the object-value in the sentence. Interventions become a charade to hide white wealth.
- Are they using a fundamental standard of obligation that does more harm than they are doing good, undoing their own values while treating children of color as deserving of fewer resources, including manufactured numbers in your claim that hide deadly costs like disenfranchisement. Will they admit and join those constituting, through truth, and a better future? We can use AI fact/value checking to show what is owed - the death debt accrued from using a legal system that was premised on fairness and inclusion that was never there, and allowed some the benefits of law and order democracy while paying the low costs of an unsustainable growth economy. We measure the harm from the climate crisis to self-determination because that is what was truly lost - not the lesser standard of a commercialized democracy. This is not about population - it’s relational between persons as they come into the world. This is a fundamental, or constitutional, accounting - who we are and what we are obligated to do, and hitting the bad actors hiding upstream.
- To do this, in a practical way, there is a preemptive legal right to ensure that harm to children’s self-determination be zeroed out.
- Any value or impact claim made today is likely out of context because it ignores children entering the world in vastly inequitable conditions as a key factor impacting the veracity of the claim. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem - equity - equitywashing, or the hiding of illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations that ensure defining standards like “green” in a way that enriches some at deadly cost others, and causes the climate crisis. Equitywashing (disenfranchising to set low standards for “humane” and “green” - a first-order form of fraud the precedes greenwashing and humanewashing) derives from the fundamental subversion of racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century through policies that privatized family planning and thus the fundamental creation of power relations, rather than making the process equitable or empowering.
- This was a sleight of hand and power grab by wealthy families and governments that assumed authorities and entitlements rather than legitimating them, treating the idea of freedom from power as freedom from the coercion of the state rather than the ability to consent to any influence of others, and using unsustainable and inequitable reproductive rights standards designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others. The move ensured most people would assume freedom was the absence of government coercion, when that power actually originated in the creation of birth and development positionality/power relations. This allowed many to use their privileged birth positionality to live lives that were more other-determining than self-determining - degrading freedom for all. Using this standard ensured we did more harm than good- and by own standards - because children entering the world was not some futuristic and economic consideration but the first determinant of political equity and true freedom.
- It led to public interest interventions, for decades, being essentially downstream and abstract - creating a fantasy world of progress and never dealing with the birth-creation of fundamental power relations This abstraction allowed many families to hoard wealth and create artificial demand, cheap labor and large tax bases by converting the possibility of empowered citizens to disenfranchised consumers and workers. Those policies led to systems of subjective valuation that hid impacts on objective values like infant health and equity, and ensured the world overshot key thresholds within less than a few generations leading to the climate and political crises we see today. Overshoot was thus essentially the illegal shifting of power. All rules must be derived from more foundational rules; Fair Start research showed by world leaders stopped at rules meant to control behavior or interpretation, rather than the rules accounting for our creation, thus hiding fundamental causation.
- The standards took the idea of bodily autonomy outside of one’s political equity (accounting for all measures determining that equity and the emancipation in implies), or one’s capacity to influence outcomes that influence them, disenfranchising people. For example, many companies and nonprofit organizations use business models that treat in cost/benefit the infant victims of the climate crisis as equally self-determining as those who benefited the most from it, ignoring those infants’ overriding right to equity resources/reparations as the basis of political obligation and state legitimacy. Those models are deadly, illegal, and can be challenged under unfair competition laws. This is not about population but rather empowerment, and whether one is using a legitimate or illegitimate form of “we,” freedom or self-determination being impossible with the latter. Our freedom becomes their wealth.
- For example: The illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave because she could not afford air conditioning, could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc. The victim would have been taught and likely assumed that she had just been unlucky in her being born without wealth, when in fact she would have had the right to derive her obligation to the political system and condition her compliance with the law, on the state reversing that state of affairs. She was never free because she was never physically empowered, and in that situation, there would have actually been little reason to follow the rules. What went wrong? She was slowly being disenfranchised. Her freedom was taken out of context, and valued incorrectly, as governments began their worth with the injustice of an illegal birth lottery. The move ensured a focus on downstream, siloed, and sensational public interest interventions being undone upstream. Cosmetic and commercial versions of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice reforms that use a false dichotomy between autonomy and equity, rather than more fundamental versions prioritizing things like the autonomy-building value of black birth equity, would have exacerbated this.
- Freedom was defined by one’s role in the economy of a shopping mall, not one’s influential role in a town hall, or democracy. This is not about growth - it’s about qualitative disenfranchisement, and the physical impossibility of being empowered and free without prioritizing intergenerational justice.
- The use of the equity fraud standards has meant treating children of color - for decades - as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk. As such, the standard gutted equity, or each person’s equal capacity to influence one's political system and the outcomes that affect one's life. That policy has led to millions of deaths in the climate and underlying crises, and the undoing of a lot of the value many claimed to create and the beneficial impacts they had. This is equity fraud, ensuring the assumption that our birth relations empower us, and in a sufficiently legitimate way to define things like the “green” in greenwashing laws or concepts like animal liberation, when in fact the standards are hardly green or liberating in the sense of what the most vulnerable children and animals need, but rather designed to enrich some at cost to others. Activists, operating under the baseline error, were comparing themselves to the worst actors rather than what was necessary to achieve their ends on balance, thus ensuring a race to the bottom. While Fair Start originated under the brand Having Kids, the entity pivoted when seeing the rampant fraud in the face of clear equity override.
- This tradition and standard of ignoring children's birthrights did more harm than most public interest interventions did good, and by metrics we all use - like comfortable temperatures. In recent litigation against Coca-Cola for their harmful factory farming practices, the evidence shows the illegal discounting of the future lives of the most vulnerable entities - infants and animals - through manufactured numbers that hid costs, was the largest driver of the harms, by far. And yet the public interest organizations “fighting” factor farming have been using the same standard. quietly choosing upstream policy that exponentially undid claimed impacts in order to personally benefit. They were improving their position in an illegitimate system rather than legitimating it, using a base model that treats increasing amounts of disenfranchised children as a benefit because those children can be exploited in growth economies.
- Illegal demand, ensured by child-rights blocking reproductive rights systems, was the key driver. Many of the interventions public interest organizations used to date against such practices focused on lesser drivers, and hid this fact, exacerbating the situation and skewing how we think about climate reparations, and rights to self-defensive actions in the face of measurably illegitimate state violence defending wealth being made at deadly cost to women and infants, actions like the securing of equity reparation.
- Fair Start activists will testify that, in prior nonprofits, they used fraudulent criteria to create the illusion of value for their funders, often contravening the values they claimed to promote and choosing policies that on-balance harmed the vulnerable entities they were paid to protect. This is consistent with interest convergence theory; at a critical time in the climate crisis when family policies were enriching some at deadly cost to others, many in leadership at animal protection organizations (in what, given the numbers of victims and widespread knowledge of the climate crisis, represents the greatest example of this phenomenon) consistently chose to focus on things like dietary reform over more effective tactics like birth equity because doing so benefited them personally. True activists will want to do this work, relational personhood, to on balance benefit animals and other vulnerable entities. For example, contrary to commercial metrics, the baseline would be whether one benefits from creating human animal relations that are about propertyhood, rather than the mutual liberation version in nesting in the collective pronouns of their claims.
- For decades the concentrations of wealth and power created by that subversion (the “famscam’) have funded academics (whose avoiding the issue of their birth positionality meant they were never truly neutral relative to justifying their benefits in a system of measurable equity), media, nonprofits, companies, and foundations have all used the standard and concealed their funder's liability, their own non-neutrality, and furthering the subversion of racial justice in ways that will kill many. Note how one academic moves from what he and his family deserve, in terms of air-conditioned climates, and what infants in at-risk areas of Uganda deserve, and all in the same sentences. Publications like Vox tout animal liberation as means of expanding vegan markets, but not beyond that in a way that would actually help animals on balance, e.g., when it comes to equity-based family reforms. Based on the experience of many FSM activists with such persons, including retaliation against FSM activists after platforming calls for the primacy of black birth equity, funders were able to exploit the desire of some activists to simply gain goodwill and status even at cost to their stated values, and often because the funders knew those they were paying would choose to privilege their children above most competing interests.
- The solution? There is a preemptive right to equity-reparations, payable to more collective systems of family planning, to compensate for this. Governments have to derive and condition their authority and ability to entitle based on the measurable empowerment, or political equity (equal offsets, relative to zero), of its constituents. This requires not treating children of color as deserving fewer resources and more risk. They do this by funding delayed parenting to ensure that no child is born beneath a line of self-determination and the resources they need to be so - what we might call the legitimacy line. And the key tactic for reform is fact/value checking and getting admissions of the truth, and commitments to change, because that discourse actually created empowering obligations that makes people self-determining, unlike a written constitution. Free people will only follow laws in a system that empowers them, and when one is ignoring how children entering the world either furthers or detracts from their capacity to self-determine one cannot possibly be empowering those subject to the system. This is about unifying obligation, not intersectionality. This is about preemption - governments can’t define what it means to be empowered. That is an objectively measurable thing, and avoids distractivists working downstream and getting something from injustice in the process.
- This process simply asks those making value and impact claims to admit they started their work with a standard of zero functional protections for infants and animals because that would have required minimal equity thresholds for birth and development conditions for all children. Most can't show this because the system - the almost universal standard for assessing and reporting value - was instead blocking obligation-based relations, and exploiting infants for growth that disenfranchised children, denying them equity or an equal share of influence over political system and thus freedom. This process of truth and reconciliation allows us to hold those who benefitted from the illegal and fraudulent standard accountable.
- We should not use the same fundamental system that caused the climate crisis to allow some to avoid their liability for its harm. The best solution entails admitting the equity fraud (soon with the assistance of AI systems that can investigate for the fraud in our value and impact claims), and backing reforms that establish birthright thresholds as the first and overriding human rights, enabled through more collective family planning systems designed to bring all children over the line. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for a child, and treating one child as worth more than another is fundamentally illegal. We owe the powerful and their inheritors only as much protection as they extend to the vulnerable infants entering the world, and the nonhumans they will impact. One is either part of a system of collective obligation or not. That’s what it means to be a “we” capable of being collectively obligated.
- 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? Did you choose policies that on balance helped the vulnerable entities you claimed to represent? 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 in a collective “we,” if infants and animals don’t get their protections? What did particular public interest organizations do to oppose the pronatalism undoing their claimed values? 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?
- Seeing the issue in terms of population rather than the more relational concept of equity - which derives down to measurable political equity or one's influential shares in one's democracy - will become increasingly problematic because the former elides issues that matter, like the birth-based inequality that ensures increasing infant mortality rates in many communities. This continues the process that allows some to centralize wealth and power because they never paid the costs of a legitimate society that empowered all. It is illegal to not treat children born below a rights and equity threshold as an impermissible cost because it’s impossible to get to obligatory and thus empowering relations without this.
- One can’t be free while benefiting from a coercive legal system without paying costs of including others as equals with the capacity to make the rules of that system, and doing so takes one (who is now an equifraud) outside the scope of the system's protection and obligation. Reproductive rights is a universal system where this truth must first be applied because it is where the conception of freedom was warped to hide this truth. There is only one free nation, and to be free we have to derive others' power over us back to our own empowerment through birth equity for all.