Are you getting scammed by performative public interest work that on balance creates private benefits at public cost? Scammers engaged in illegal baselining / equity fraud disenfranchise children of color, treating them as deserving less than white children, and hiding liability for millions of deaths in the climate crisis while threatening countless more.
The hallmarks of this – those making claims of creating value leave out the largest drivers of the relevant outcomes – inequitable growth – in order to exploit their positionality in the system. They will be getting better off, while those they claim to represent are all increasingly worse off, even as the claimant reports progress. Corrupt lawyering is at the heart of this, often reducing climate and other damage evaluations by as much as 5x to benefit the lawyers and those funding them.
The fix? There is a preemptive process to challenge illegal baselining / equity fraud, with the burden on governments and elites to substantiate their value assessment and impact claims, and legitimate their authority and entitlements. The process is preemptive because authority has to derive from empowerment.
Run claims through: https://falseclaimschecker.org/ and join the Tell the Truth campaign discussed below.
Background
Freedom or self-determination is impossible without first being empowered in one’s political system – a metric called political equity. In law, empowerment is reflected in the rule of “one person, one equal and influential vote,” including at the fundamental level of a constitutional convention. This can also be referred to as zero baseline, or equal offsets relative to zero/neutrality.
Failures in isolationist reproductive rights policy in the Twentieth Century – and the legal fiction that the act of having children was an act of parental bodily autonomy – made ensuring this (and what “on-balance” impacts mean) virtually impossible. It blocked the collective conversation about who we should be in terms of collective family planning – “if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one” – and bypassed the need to empower future generations. The failures (best referred to as political equity and impact fraud, or illegal baselining) allowed governments and elites to assume their authority and entitlements rather than legitimate them though preemptive child-rights and political equity based limits on the birth–creation of power relations. It also seeded a fundamental false dichotomy in political systems – between autonomy and equality – that has led to endless strife, when in fact those values align well in birth-based political equity.
People, not documents, constitute nations – but the failures blocked the processes and cemented false assumptions about authority, and entitlements. If authority and entitlements are fixed and not dynamic, there is little one can do about things like the gargantuan racial income/wealth gap in the United Sates, a vestige of slavery and colonization.
This – which is essentially a false premise, or a legal system with no protective obligations in the creation of power relations – created massive, unsustainable, disenfranchising and deadly growth while bringing children into conditions and matrices of relations that disenfranchised them, diluting their power to prevent the consequences. The system lasted for less than a few decades before prior generations had abused their reproductive rights in ways that today prevent current generations from exercising their own rights. Children of color now face the harshest consequences of the climate crisis – a reality driven by those choosing to maintain the system of equity fraud and illegal baselining. How is that not white supremacy?
Illegal baselining creates a false sense of freedom or self-determination where one does not actually have to be empowered, but magically appears in a free market that is quietly premised on disenfranchising people at a level that would make political/legal systems unrepresentative, and obligated without being empowered.
Nobel laureate Steven Chu deemed growth economics a Ponzi scheme. In fact, it is an illegal Ponzi scheme, built on the iconarchy of elevating symbolic institutions over real relations, subverting racial justice, an violating children’s birthrights.
The legal fiction ensured an anthropocentric and “separate but equal” reproductive rights system / baseline that creates commercialized and disenfranchising relations, instead of the legitimate and fundamental baseline of “no child is worth more than another / one person, one equal and influential vote” (zero baseline) that underlies legitimacy.
It created the illusion of authority and legitimacy, without those claiming such things having to actually birth-empower those subject to them. Freedom is literally impossible without reforming this. Again, documents like constitutions do not create obligations; people being just to one another – including in the act of having children – does. Where else would “constitutive” relations actually come from?
Wealth did not reflect the creation of value, but rather the act of not paying the costs of children’s rights, political equity, and national legitimacy.
For public interest interventions funded by the wealth this was fatal – asked relative to what standard the public good was pursued, organizations would never have been able to show a legitimate or inclusive standard that lets people control the outcomes of their political/legal system. Public interest outcomes became decided by wealth at cost to objective values, like safe temperatures, equity of opportunity, one’s control over who controls them. Public interest advocates and attorneys largely ignored the largest driver of the polycrisis and its outcomes because recognizing it would require systems change they and their funders would not benefit from, including having to admit liability for decades of false claims.
Funders who stood to make money on growth unimpeded by children’s rights, and ability to commercialized relations at birth, had started funding deceptive public interest intervention that hid all of this – creating the illusion of progress that was undone by inequitable growth. The interventions raised funding for nonprofit work that centered in sensational micro victories for animals, the environment, inequality as well as human rights and democracy, victories that were being easily being undone by near invisible macro forces and growth that undid the micro, and enriched their families at deadly cost to others, most families of color.
They chose policies that undid their own work because the first metric for value is infant/animal health, not wealth for a few, and most public interest interventions used shifting baselines to allow inequitable growth.
An example? Well known animal “advocate” Paul Shapiro claims to have spent decades protecting animals. Instead, he abused the women he worked with and benefited from a decades long Ponzi scheme to magically ensure animal protection became all about food reforms in growth-based economies – an effort that now funds the well-financed food company he founded, which includes contracting with the U.S. military.
This was illegal baselining – using the same fundamental system that created the polycrisis to benefit from it at cost to others, and continuing to assume children deserve what they are born with rather than what their rights and political equity – political equity for all – require. At a critical time in the world, those like Paul pushed us away from fair and inclusive optimalities, at deadly cost to many. And yet those like Paul consistently assessed and reported progress, including for animals.
This now entails special, preemptive liability for political equity and impact fraud.
Those failures – at base – caused the current polycrisis of climate change, autocracy, deadly inequity, etc., and enriched mostly white children at deadly cost to countless children of color. Women “liberated” by Twentieth Century reproductive rights are now free to die in heat waves, with little influence over their political system to protect themselves, and wealthy families having masked the threat for decades by funding low impact public interest interventions on a micro, downstream level that masked the threats.
Recent attempts to reverse the failures and fund a threshold of empowerment beneath which no child would be born – the most just and effective public interest work possible – have been met with fraudulent attempts to conceal liability by those funded with wealth generated by the inequitable growth, including for decades of false and illegitimate/commercialized value assessments and impact claims.
The Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy presents a stark example of illegal baselining, with its leads intentionally using an anthropocentric version of animal law that did much more to benefit those in the Institute than animals, and at deadly cost to countless children of color.
The fix? There is a constitutional cause of action against illegal baselining/equity fraud, based on unfair competition theory, to reverse the failures and ensure political equity and the rights-based limitation of power relations. Given that government’s authority derives from the empowerment of those subject to it, legal systems must recognize as preemptive a correct accounting of and reallocation of birth-based or constitutive costs, benefits, and obligations. Nothing is more primary than the birth-creation of one’s positioning relative to others, and moving entitlements to future children can fund life-saving reforms around collective family planning, delay, readiness, baby bonds inverse to wealth in order to level out political influence, and relocation if necessary.
While strategic impact litigation can be brought, the primary burden is on governance and elites to legitimate their authority and entitlements by substantiating their claims.
Those willing to assess and pay the costs of preemptive child-equity could never compete against those willing to exploit future children and animals, while claiming to do public interest work. If one does not use objective values – like safe temperatures, equity of opportunity, one’s control over who controls them) to limit fundamental entitlements and obligations, they are free riding and performative.
This litigation gets to crucial political questions: Do governments have to legitimate their authority, including to entitle wealth, by measurably empowering their subjects? Have we arrived at a place where governments are not representative, but simply using force to protect concentrations of wealth and power? The fundamental unit or currency in ethics, morality, law, politics, etc. all the normatives, is the level of influence over one’s political system, which is determined in one’s birth-creation (given positionalities, vote dilution, environmental feedback, etc.). Again, this was hidden by the legal fiction that creating others is an act of self-determination (a move that allowed welfare to be substituted as the fundamental unit/currency) and ensure disparate power in a few, and the illusions of authority and legitimacy, without the need to to actually legitimate those things through the empowerment of others.
Can we Tell the Truth, and admit that not ensuring all children a fair start in life, that treating children of color as deserving less, did more to harm our values than we did to further them? The focus here is on the model underlying claims, rather than the claims themselves. Those who refuse to tell the truth and back preemptive injunctions – those outside of the fundamental discourse and metric – fall outside of any system of mutual obligation and reasonable assessments of facts and value, and for the most influential, they become key targets.
This is the only form of permanent and indefatigable resistance to fundamental oppression. It’s a primary discourse, before secondary academic discourses designed to project the appearance of truth and authority while usually engaged in illegal baselining.
Why an injunction to start with? If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
Again, illegal baselining is preemptively fraud, and those willing to respect children’s birthrights could never compete against those willing to exploit children rather than empower them, and they need not given that the state’s authority derives from that empowering. Our opponents entire argument relies on government not having to measurably empower those subject to their authority.
The research described above also shows an impossibility that points towards a solution: The assessments of value and claims of impact situate us in the word and relative to others – self-determination is not possible without accuracy. This provides an opportunity for admission and reconciliation – the Tell the Truth campaign – given that self-determination and hence consensual governance is impossible without moving from the legal fiction to birth/political equity metrics, we admit we all illegally started with the assumption that it was permissible for children of color to receive less resources than white children, and that this did more to harm our values than we did to further them. There are no exceptions to the preemptive nature of this discourse because birth positionality and development is the fundamental source of our benefits and costs to others, constitutive at a level more basic than constitutions or even human rights conventions.
Help the Fair Start Movement * end the use of that standard.
For example, we can all urge the University of Denver to end its illegal baselining: Animal liberation is actually the highest environmental standard one can imagine – the school should alter its baselining to substantiate its claims.
* Fair Start Movement is a loose network/discourse of whistleblowers and others committed to political equity/intergenerational justice, and effective tactics – including the Tell the Truth reconciliation campaign of admitting birth injustice/inequity did more harm to our than we did to further them – to get it. When someone claims to add value/impact to the world we ask, relative to what? Unless the answer is a legitimacy metric, the claimant is undercutting political equity and freedom. Try the test at: FalseClaimsChecker.org. It’s a yes or no question: You’re either relying on the threat of violence by the state to protect entitlements, without actually legitimating them by empowering those subject to them, or not.
While some do contract work with Fair Start, most are volunteers. Salaried organizations that scale are a model that helped create the polycrisis. We try to revolve around a principle maximizing birth equity by preempting illegal baselining/equity fraud that blocks political equity and intergenerational justice, rather than around capital or personalities. We originate from animal liberation work – the most demanding standard for justice – and focus on subject-level reforms, the “we” in statements like “we should protect children and the environment,” not the objects in those sentences.