Last month, Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global filed an institutional complaint with the University of Denver, and complaints with the Colorado state officials regarding illegal baselining and equity fraud at the school, specifically in an animal law program that spent millions claiming to further animal rights while ignoring the largest driver of animal suffering: Inequitable growth.
Instead of using a fixed standard/baseline like birth equity and its inseparable connection to the creation of human relations with animals (like donkeys threatened in the ejiao trade) – relations which will define those animals’ lives, the school uses a system of moving goalposts to constantly assess public interest progress and raise more funding.
But relative to the fixed standard – birth equity – that was necessary to actually protect animals from deadly growth, the progress was being easily undone daily, and the baseline standard the school used had the effect of enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color.
Those like Trump did not simply win. The progressive systems meant to block him were corrupted.
Fair Start Movement confronts the illegalbaselining and false claims wealthy funders and those they fund make about their public interest impacts, claims that hide liability for the climate crisis, decline of democracy, vast inequity, and other horrors facing us today. These claims skew the standard for climate policy and life-saving reparations. You cannot help animals on balance without accounting for their relations with humans. Helping them requires the same fundamental change children of color need – reforming fundamental illegitimacy – but that’s the last thing those who made their wealth on illegitimacy want to deal with.
The complaint against the school centers on claims the school made about its impacts, the baseline model for assessing values the school used to model those claims, use donor funds, and refusal to return hundreds of thousands of dollars to one funder in particular.
That donor lives in California, and is now calling on the state Attorney General to take action against the school, given how the funds were solicited, and spent. The state has authority to act to protect its citizens, and the donor backs an animal or eco-centric standard for assessing what constitutes benefits for animals, as standard that Fair Start has advocated for before the California Attorney General.
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. 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.
That standard has been advocated for at the United Nations, African Union, and in many other contexts.
In the end, the controversy surrounds whether wealth can fund charade versions of public interest work and interventions, charades that use the same fundamental standard that caused the climate crisis, autocracy, massive inequity, etc., or whether we all are to be held accountable using the truly legitimate and protective standard that would have prevented the crises, and can still save countless lives.
Why urge the state to act? It’s not on everyday people to legitimate governance by themselves. Governments and the wealthy that control them are first obligated to act, starting with the substantiation of their claims.
Hence this an opportunity for California itself to shift the baseline it uses to assess legitimacy, leaving aside the anthropocentric and “separate but equal” reproductive rights system / baseline that creates commercialized and disenfranchising relations, and choosing to move towards the legitimate, fundamental baseline of “no child is worth more than another / one person, one equal and influential vote” that underlies legitimacy. Again, you cannot help animals on balance without accounting for macro animal rights and personhood, with a focus on their future relations with humans. Helping them requires the same fundamental change children of color need – reforming fundamental illegitimacy – but that’s the last thing those who made their wealth on illegitimacy want to deal with.
Regardless:
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.
The Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.org are now communicating with the California Attorney General regarding the need to protect their citizens from illegal baselining and equity fraud.