Fair Start maintains an open letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations requiring him, under law, to publicly back standardization of climate damages to benefit the inants being harmed. Those who believe every child has a right to a fair start in life – and reject the illegitimacy and entitlement fraud described below that ensures zero protection for the most vulnerable – have signed it.
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 our future and free all of us. We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars.
Many have already begun to engage in this more effective form of constituting a just future – through language and action – by admitting the failure of systems to date, agreeing to change the way be lan families, and exchanging resources.
This transfer of wealth made at deadly costs is also required by law, through things like the Children’s Rights Convention and under the Right to a Healthy Environment. All law must first be interpreted to assure legitimacy, or the measurable inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, so that truly representative governance is possible. In other words, the threshold or border, of empowering development, overrides the authority represented by national borders because it is needed to legitimate such law.
But there are specific barriers blocking this work.
There are wealthy families and other concentrations of power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis who benefitted from unsustainable reproductive rights models. These models used a false premise (that having children is more personal than interpersonal) to avoid the overriding need to ensure measurable empowerment of each citizen, or to first account for our vast generational, racial and other inequitable positionalities in reforming legal systems.
This subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed 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 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.
These unsustainable practices and systems ensured children entering under just thresholds, and thus overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. They allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.
These wealthy 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 – entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. They are obvious because they start by enabling the industries they claim to fight.
Ensuring Justice for All
Fair Start is now urging states attorneys generals and other responsible agencies to 1) track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world in the U.S. and abroad on their and their mothers’ capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations.
What are the metrics and moves, exemplified in action here?
- Funding would-be mothers delay, readiness and safe locating so that no child is born beneath a concrete line of what their rights guarantee them, without abuse or neglect, and what trust-based (democratic) communities require. Read more here.
- Restoring, not mitigating, climate emissions to natural levels. Read more here.
- Taking the exact resources needed to ensure equality of opportunity for children of color, competitive with white kids. Read more here.
- Conditioning political and economic authority on their moving towards truly representative ratios between officials and their constituents, and recognizing the need for those in positions of influence to carry the risk of any violence not doing so creates. Read more here.
- Benchmarking efficiency to equity measures that would not have created a climate crisis killing millions of innocents. Read more here.
We are asking these and other officials to then 2) contrast these impacts with current and historic (ten years back, as a minimum) sustainability and equity claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable and fraudulent family entitlements, used by prominent leaders and organizations within their jurisdictions. This tracking enables preemptive reparations, structured to prevent harm to future generations and to ensure their right to self-determine.
The failed models used a fictitious baseline and false premise that hid the upstream antecedent language that entailed the creation of power relations, often behind downstream subjects like population, environment, animal rights, human rights, etc. To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society. This moves from the bottom upwards – governance contingent on in emancipation of youth – not inherently authorized top down .
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems never really 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 treating children as means rather than ends, ensuring dismal standards for child development, education and critical thinking. This slowly converted democratic relations into commercial ones.
This violated children’s rights by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens, and in systems where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness, while wealthier families benefited from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to – through unsustainable growth – kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a value 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.
Under the fraudulent entitlement scheme there are two standards for justice: The real or what should have been, measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing equity, and self versus other determination. There was also the widely used decoy standard, which centered on assumed legitimacy of white wealth supremacy at birth, and an illusion of bodily autonomy that conflated freedom with the capacity to harm others.
Those who use the latter are choosing that the least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its greatest cost, with no justification, increasing climate deaths by millions and costs by trillions.
The Fundamental Fix
However, 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.
Again, 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. Covering these child development costs as an obligation liberates more than oppresses.
But this true control of who has influence over us requires measuring from zero. And that would be impossible without the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the changing of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. We thus ask all to admit benefit at deadly cost to others, and to back reparations.
Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? As shown above this “truth and reconciliation” process of removing birth apartheid requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if persons are not created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice focuses on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Instead of funding those thresholds, those engaged in equity fraud have continued to assume exponential (and very deadly) wealth and resilience disparities are natural – that their and their children’s birthright privileges are just a given – when calculating things like permissible climate emissions.
Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables liberation from this nonsense. It simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.
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 and that creation was simply art of something humans do rather than a matter of fundamental legitimacy.
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.
