Meatless Mondays, the brainchild of Sid Lerner, have been a big hit:
“Inspired by the meat reduction campaigns of World War I and II, Sid conceived of and launched Meatless Monday with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2003. The simple concept of “cutting out meat one day per week” was clear, memorable, and easy to understand and encouraged participants to take small steps towards lifestyle changes. Meatless Monday materials, resources, and programming were made free to the public and could be easily customized for any organization, community or individual.”
Those involved in the Fair Start Movement assisted charities funded by Lerner and his family to promote dietary change as a way to benefit animals, the environment, and human health.
The problem: Upstream inequitable family policies, which are used to enable unsustainable growth, have done more harm to human health and animal rights than downstream efforts like dietary reforms have done good.
Matless Mondays are great, but if we want a better future, they have to be combined with Fairness Fridays.
What’s that? Fairness Fridays is a commitment to give an hour, one day a week, to backing Fair Start universal equity reforms that move wealth made from unsustainable and inequitable growth into the hands of would-be parents to maximize equity in future generations:
There are dozens of ways to take action on your Fairness Friday.
Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect and free all of us. It is also required by law, in things like the Children’s Rights Convention and under the Right to a Healthy Environment.
But there are specific barriers blocking this work. Wealthy families and other concentrations of wealth and power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging that hides macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
The disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. But this requires, and would be impossible without, the admission of the specific harm we have caused and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power towards infants and animals. Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
Fair Start is now urging states attorneys generals and other responsible agencies to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using the eight concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations. We are asking these and other officials to contrast these impacts on the most vulnerable and numerous entities, with current historic sustainability and equity claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable standards, used by prominent leaders and organizations.
Background: Hidden and deadly racism
The climate and related crises we face today were largely driven by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in near-universal reproductive and human rights regimes dating back to 1948.
The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity as the overriding value behind political legitimacy, and evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority.
These families have historically subverted civil rights by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they claim to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed 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 made fractionalized the worth of persons of color, one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth, disparities that violated 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.
By isolating women in the family planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families have for decades ensured inherited poverty, or commercially exploitative rather than legitimate and inclusive relations. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” That condition derived fundamentally from the use of illegal family entitlements that undermined all civil rights and created a generational apartheid that Fair Start and others is now dismantling with women’s networks in the United States and Europe engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.
Fundamental illegitimacy
This created a fake, top-down version of social justice based on hollow legal institutions and laws that never derived from any legitimating authority, but rather hid the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and emancipation. It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families. Under this scheme there were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others.
If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation. Not doing so cannibalized freedom, taking from us what we are owed in democracy and trying to sell it back in commerce. The difference between self-determination relative to zero baseline markers, and exploitation, is what these families owe in reparations. Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations of persons capable of representative governance, via the measurable self-determination of its constituents. Family planning reparations enable this process, and given that wealth was already taken and the benefits already consumed, it is owed as share equity (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) for each child.
Wealthy families and other concentrations of wealth and power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding a fantasy world of charities, media, academics, etc. who use omissive messaging to evade the liability they and their children carry from inequitable growth. They frame what is obligatory as charity. They use decoy versions of public interest work – by organizations, academics, media, etc. – the impacts of which are being exponentially undone, each day, by family policies that enrich mostly white families at deadly cost to countless children of color. This involves literally using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable, who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.
There is no legitimacy authority or entitlements without the measurable political equity, or entitling children enough so they offset each other’s influence relative to a neutral position – testable through things like the feasibility of a constitutional convention. Instead, the model urged by these families assures zero functional protections for infants and animals, and uses a sleight of hand that conceives of freedom in terms of an arbitrary form of autonomy from the state, rather than as political equity to choose who has influence over you, ecologically and socially.
Here are questions for anyone claiming to do good in the world today: How can we assure justice without improving the conditions in which children are born and develop, given the intergenerational justice requirements of minimum thresholds for all children? How do we become free without honoring the rights of others, especially the future majority? If you value some outcome, who will cover the child inequity and entry costs to that outcome – growth undoing climate mitigation, for example – and evade more of it? Is the entity doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases? How do they define the term power in the context of being free from power? Who is their intended audience?
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems have never created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating children’s rights and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens 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 is generally considered a failure.
Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. These families routinely funded decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.
Taking action
As discussed above, Fair Start is now urging states attorneys generals and other responsible agencies to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using the eight concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations. We are asking these and other officials to contrast these impacts on the most vulnerable and numerous entities, with fraudulent sustainability and equity claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable standards, used by prominent leaders and organizations.
The disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. But this requires, and would be impossible without, the admission of the specific harm we have caused and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power towards infants and animals. Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
National legitimacy derives from and is contingent upon including in a measurable way subjects as free and equal constituents, so that they have the capacity to choose who has influence over them, and legal institutions have the capacity to represent its constituents. Reorienting from being obligated top-down to empowering from the bottom-up also holds promise to reduce violence by rejecting any legitimate representative authority of the state to use it to block reparations, or to otherwise role model illegitimate violence those around us.
There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to constitute a just nation where subjects are empowered enough in the creation of actual relations, through birth, development and emancipation, to move from being treated as subjects to being included as constituents, and obligated to follow laws only because they have the measurable capacity to control the legal system. Those who do not back ensuring all children a fair start in life logically fall outside of any system of collective obligation, and protection.
The action before the UN seeks to escalate climate and other reparations – specifically designed as family planning entitlements – by trillions of dollars, through the concept of equity fraud, in order to save millions of lives. Many are using illegal tactics to block the high valuation because this work goes beyond targeting greenwashing towards finding the concealment of liability for the death – through a sustainability scam involving both false and omissive claims (with the most falsifiable claims made in the animal rights sector) – of millions in the escalating climate crisis.
Every entity in the United States should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc. But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine there – was a horrific mistake. It seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of illegitimate policy. But it is one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.
