We make sure those claiming to do good are not quietly undoing it, for their own benefit. We simply ask: For any claim of doing good, how is the one making the claim accounting for the most impactful factor: The resources and empowerment with which children enter the world and are measurably empowered to constitute a legitimate nation.
This question identifies constitutive reparations fraud by publicly asking how claimants account for children entering the world on their claims of beneficial public impact, given that there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact. This is not about population. It’s about lies and omissions to gain power.
If the claimant valued 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 claimant doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? Do they start with enabling the powerful over the vulnerable? Did the claimant spend more on undoing their mission than furthering it? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases?
These questions involve looking for an omission, and a belief that children of color deserve less, and should suffer the brunt of a climate crisis they did not create. The question creates a permanent resistance to oppression by testing authority to see if it is fully derived and conditional, and identify frauds that would use authority without that derivation and conditioning.
Why watchdog? The most just and effective form of social change involves accurate and truthful communication, constitutive language, as itself an act of empowerment.
The Quiet Subversion of Civil Rights Using Child Inequity
Concentrations of wealth and power in the Twentieth Century have used child inequity to subvert the civil rights movement, and evade race and other reparations. This was and is reparations fraud, and the hiding of a share equity deficit that is killing children of color. This fraud – like the omissive use of language that assumes black lives are worth less – clouds the language and concepts needed for universal reparative justice, and the fact that by ignoring ecosocial birth equity, most philanthropy ensured the climate crisis and did more harm than good.
“I advocate that Black birth equity, through reparations, should be the primary action taken to resolve consequences such as corporation induced climate change — in particular, because those who are negatively impacted the most are Black communities in California and their future Black children.” — Dr. Breeze Harper
It was the philanthropy of wealthy families not accountable to election or market forces, rather than small business or government, that for decades envisioned and articulated insufficient standards – devoid of child equity – for social justice, environmentalism, animal liberation, etc. The crises we face today were exacerbated by those standards, which had more to do with growing generational wealth than good outcomes.
These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, 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.
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 will dismantle with women’s networks engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.
These are the efforts to repair that inequity by ensuring no child is born outside of a system of debt and reparations accounting, so that no child is born beneath a line of measurable empowerment. Freedom is an objective and measurable concept, linked to historical ecological and social markers that are tied to birth and development but often ignored. What was owed in birth equity, and one’s influential share in democracy, was instead taken and sold back in growth-based economies.
Reparations Fraud
Reparations fraud is subject to legal action, especially in cases where the evaluation of damages will rob victims of what they deserve because the targets of the reparations claims have already received the benefits, often under false pretenses.
Reparations fraud involves literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out the voices of the victims. It usually starts with siloed forms of justice minus the generic, or active, component of constituting just power relations in the birth, development, and emancipation of the most vulnerable. For example, white animal rights advocates might use base assumptions about the nature of animal law that disable its ability to benefit animals.
The omission of information on child entry conditions hides liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids. The fix? As described in detail below, to use measurable standards for true social justice and ecological restoration to ensure accurate climate reparations pegged to the self-determination of each child entering the world.
Because the creation of one’s positionality relative to others and ecologies is legally preemptive, it enables drastic action to recover reparations. Humans need law for the vulnerable amongst us, so there is no law, or obligation to do what others say, in a system that starts with punching down on the most vulnerable. And if our oppression comes in our creation it becomes almost impossible to see and remove without an objective touchstone – like offset, or zero, baselines.
Not backing the reform raises serious questions about whether entities were trying to create value, or free ride at deadly cost to others on their generational, racial, national and other positionality. Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables – like animals rights, which is the most demanding form of social justice and the most current coopted – as well.
How Do You Hide Reparations Liability? Create Decoys of Social Justice Devoid of Equity.
Many funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis, are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.
Wealthy families in polluter nations use low child welfare standards and massive inequity to undo upstream what they are pretending to do downstream – selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children’s needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.
These charades of focusing on symptoms more than cause did more harm than good, clouding the language of liberation. Funding a Fair Start in life with the accurate language and the move towards climate reparations owed is the most just and effective way to free children, animals and the rest of us – exponentially more so than other interventions. It avoids the fraud of dumping costs on future generations, a move that caused a white wealth-driven climate crisis mostly killing persons of color. As discussed below, violence is one of the costs.
For decades FSM members were employed and worked with such entities, and we benefitted at deadly cost to others by omitting information about the fundamental harm we were causing, and in a way that enriched mostly white children and killed mostly children of color. We now work to identify those using the fraudulent standard, especially the most influential.
We identify reparations fraud by publicly asking how they account for children entering the world on their claims of beneficial public impact, given that there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact. Normally the benefits claimed were actually being undone, and in ways that benefited the ones making the claims, at deadly cost to others.
The Way Out: Invert You Obligation from Non-representative Government to the Governed and Most Vulnerable
There is no way to be free without this public process of communicating, this constitutive discourse. There is no racial justice in language that assumes children of color are worth, in terms of birthright, a fraction of the wealth of white children. And there is no justice without subsequent actions that ensure our taking only the equity we all deserve so we can self-determine and make our own choices, rather than determine and choose for others. It is physically impossible to be obligated as a political equal without doing this because there is no more basic system of valuation.
There is no form of autonomy that would not have had to start positioning the person with share equity in their political system.
There is no freedom without share equity in one’s political system, and no system of valuation that would not start with the evaluator’s position in that system. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy, and not skew the criteria needed to assess truth and value by excluding and exploiting others.
Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables as well, and one that continues the performative decoy of social justice, the abstract charade of ignoring creation, that ensured black children are dying in white wealthy driven climate crisis where the death debt carried by wealthy families is only rising. And yet no child’s life is worth the life of another.
Insistence on non-constitutive claims, and benefitting at deadly cost to others, identifies those who choose to free ride on their generational, racial, national and other positionality, and improve their position in an exclusionary and illegitimate system rather than act to legitimate it. To be free is to relate to others as self rather than other determining, and that – as well as representative government or legitimate demand and audiences, is physically impossible without accurate communication of that positioning and obligation, situating oneself as free.
Violence, both from the state and those around us, fundamentally derives from this because it seeds fundamental injustice, making government representatives very non-representative, and breaking any functional form of obligation to follow the law because children are never empowered in the system of making it. Logically, we would owe each other as much as our nation owes children as they enter, defining what we sort of a “we” the nation is. There are the just and unjust, and the latter choose to fall outside of social obligation and protection.
Why? Because there is no inherent authority in government, or inalienable rights, that is not receded with an collective pronoun that implies an obligation. There is no way to constitute justice, and an obligation to follow the law from the top down, enabling the powerful over the vulnerable. Free persons see obligation as deriving from and conditional on being empowered, something fundamentally contingent on the creation at birth of the relations we have with others.
This is not Kantian ethics or intersectionality – both of which hid that which would create the climate crisis. It focused on the primacy of positionality in creation, and obligations to the most vulnerable using zero baseline accounting linked to concrete ecosocial metrics, a zeroing out of debt in the tradition of a businesses practice, rather than the abstract, upside down, and static ethics of old.
For example, when Mbabazi Judith, a three year old in Uganda, died from climate exacerbated malaria, she did so, comprehensively, because she was not positioned to self-determine but rather be determined relative to a unified zero marker that explains many variables from permissible emissions to national representative ratios. The inclusion and empowerment line can be seen as a mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where the most influential who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions by moving kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving them in inequity. In this case getting all children above the line unifies rather than divides, and evades using the same fundamentally illegal system – based on violating children’s rights that caused the crisis
The wealth we see in the world today was made, firstly, by illegally avoiding paying the costs needed to protect children, animals, the environment – and measurable freedom for all of us. Making sure – at grassroots, organizational, and legal levels – that no child is born without climate reparations accounting does protect them. Once one accounts for the common omission of the impact of children entering the world without what they need, we can see Fair Start as exponentially more just and effective than interventions without the qualifier.
