Summary – “Across Africa, groups of women are coming together in their communities to tackle poverty, hunger, and inequality in simple but powerful ways—supporting families, sharing knowledge, caring for the land, and standing by the belief that every child matters equally”
Across Africa, some of the most powerful solutions to poverty, hunger, and inequality are not coming from large institutions or global conferences. They are coming from women gathered in small circles in villages, under trees, in homes, and in community meeting spaces.
These women care groups are made up of mothers, grandmothers, farmers, caregivers, and community organizers. They work quietly, often without recognition, yet their impact is profound. At the most basic level of society the household and the village they are strengthening families, protecting children, and rebuilding community resilience. In many ways, their work reflects the core values of Truth Alliance and the Tell the Truth Campaign: the belief that real justice begins with honesty about inequality, and with the simple but powerful principle that no child is worth more than another.
Birth Equity Begins at Home
Birth equity means that every child no matter where they are born—should enter the world with equal dignity and a fair chance to live a healthy life. In many African communities, women care groups are the first line of protection for that principle. They share knowledge about maternal health, safe pregnancy, breastfeeding, and child nutrition. They support pregnant mothers, check on newborns, and help families understand how to keep children healthy during their earliest and most vulnerable stages of life.
But their work goes beyond health education. Women care groups challenge the quiet assumption that some lives matter less than others simply because of where they are born. Through their care and solidarity, they affirm a truth reflected in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that every human life has equal worth.
Starting from a Zero Baseline
A powerful idea sits at the center of this grassroots work: every child should start from the same moral baseline.
This “zero baseline” does not mean every family begins with the same resources. Rather, it means that no child should be considered less valuable or less deserving of opportunity.
Women care groups put this idea into practice every day. They create shared food gardens, savings circles, and community support networks so that families facing hardship are not left alone. When crops fail or a child becomes sick, neighbors step in to help.
This spirit of collective care helps prevent the deep inequalities that often grow when families are isolated. It strengthens communities and protects children who might otherwise fall through the cracks.
Climate Repair through Local Action
Africa contributes only a small share of global emissions, yet African communities often suffer some of the harshest impacts of climate change drought, flooding, crop failure, and rising food insecurity.
Women care groups are responding in practical ways. Many organize kitchen gardens, plant trees, conserve water, and teach climate-resilient farming methods. These small actions improve soil health, increase food production, and protect local ecosystems.
Organizations such as Rejoice Africa Foundation have shown how these community-led efforts can tackle both environmental and social challenges at once. When women grow food locally and restore the land, they reduce hunger while strengthening resilience against climate shocks.
In this sense, their work represents a form of climate repair not only through funding or policy, but through restoring the conditions that allow communities to survive and thrive.
Addressing the Root Causes of Poverty
Too often, development programs focus only on immediate problems distributing food, treating illness, or responding to emergencies. While these efforts are important, they do not always address the deeper causes of poverty and inequality.
Women care groups take a more holistic approach. They work to tackle underlying challenges such as:
Poor household nutrition
Limited health knowledge
Environmental degradation
Economic vulnerability
Social pressures that contribute to large family sizes
Through open conversation, shared learning, and mutual support, women encourage healthier birth spacing, improved nutrition. They also strengthen women’s voices in household decisions.
Through focusing on causes rather than symptoms, these groups help communities move toward long-term stability.
Reducing Hunger and Preventable Disease
One of the clearest impacts of women care groups is improved nutrition and health.
Community gardens provide vegetables and fruits that enrich family diets. Nutrition education helps mothers prepare balanced meals for children. Hygiene and sanitation practices are shared through trusted relationships, allowing life-saving knowledge to spread quickly from one household to another.
These simple steps help reduce malnutrition and prevent diseases that continue to affect millions of children worldwide.
The result is powerful: healthier mothers, stronger children, and more resilient communities.
A Movement Rooted in Truth
The experience of women care groups teaches an important lesson: lasting change rarely begins in distant offices or international meetings. It begins where life itself begins—in families, neighborhoods, and villages.
By caring for one another and protecting the next generation, these women are already practicing the vision promoted by Truth Alliance and the Tell the Truth Campaign.
Their work quietly exposes a global contradiction. Many systems speak about equality while allowing deep inequalities at birth to persist.
Women at the grassroots are showing that a different path is possible.
No Child Is Worth More than Another
The principle is simple: every child has equal worth.
But if that truth is taken seriously, it has profound implications for how the world organizes its resources, policies, and priorities.
Climate policy, health systems, development funding, and economic opportunity must all reflect that same commitment to human equality. African women working through care groups are already living this truth through everyday acts of cooperation, compassion, and resilience. Their leadership offers a powerful blueprint for a more just world.
The responsibility now is not to replace their efforts but to recognize, support, and learn from them.
When communities begin with the understanding that no child is worth more than another, justice stops being a distant idea. It becomes something real grown in gardens, shared across households, and protected by women determined to secure a better future for the next generation.
NY JBS “Net Zero” Settlement Risk: FairStartMovement.org and TruthAlliance.global Ask New York Attorney General to Require Baseline Disclosures So Enforcement Does Not Become Implied Climate-Claim Certification
The request asks New York to close a disclosure gap that can survive enforcement itself: absent plain-language baseline disclosure, settlement messaging in a greenwashing matter can operate as an implied credibility signal for the very class of “net” climate representations whose ambiguity gave rise to the enforcement action.
We simple ask: relative to what was any of the progress made?
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to climate than the state or JBS ever did good. Use of an inaccurate valuation and reporting 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 absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
The fundamental unit of moral currency is the influence one has over the outcomes of their political system, or what is loosely understood as political equality / equity though common conceptions are incomplete. Other currencies, like welfare, cannot exist outside of systems of political and legal obligation or “oughtness” and the primacy of how people are positioned relative to others and Earth’s ecologies at birth.
This equity is consistent with an objective “one person, one equal and influential vote” (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) standard, empowering persons to limit the influence others have – including ecologically and socially – over them. This is also consistent with more collective systems of family planning in which no child is treated as worth more than another, an outcome ensured through a threshold or level of empowering birth and development conditions and relations outside of which no child should be born.
This physically disembedded persons from any effective role in their political systems. It also allowed those in power, both with political authority and entitlements to wealth defended by that authority, to avoid having to legitimate their power by actually, and measurably empowering those subject to it. Rather than seeing the creation of actual (relative to the legal baseline) empowering relations as the source of political authority, nations treated symbolic or representative instruments like treaties and constitutions as themselves authoritative.
While civil rights movements made headway in areas like housing, employment, and education, the notion of autonomy without equity amounted to the privatization of the creation of power relations, and the totally arbitrary basis for the concentration of extreme levels of generational white wealth – over the span of decades – that drives many of the outcomes we see today. That wealth never had to pay the costs of legitimacy – and the full impacts are now being revealed.
Within less than a few generations the regime caused unsustainable growth, vast political, social, and ecological inequity, the destruction of world ecologies, and the decline of democracy. This inequitable and disenfranchising growth breached political, ecological and social thresholds for objective values we all share like comfortable temperatures, equality of opportunity,
Public interest work and outcomes during these decades and into today have generally oriented from arbitrary, ever-changing and illegal (both because they disenfranchise and otherwise harm children, relative to a host of accepted legal standards usually only applied to existing rather than future children) baselines that violate the “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard. High levels of climate emissions championed by “environmental” organizations that enrich some at deadly cost to others, still permitted and defended by coercive authority of nations, are an example.
Use of these baselines represents an undemocratic, diluted and commercial form of freedom, rather than values consistent with political freedom, that is more akin to “free market” choice” of a shopping mall more than the political influence of a functional town hall.
Public interest interventions to challenge greenwashing and humanewashing have failed because they themselves did not account for the massively countervailing impacts of growth on the interventions themselves – growth that for instance has created more climate emissions than the interventions removed, while bringing children into the world without the resources or political influence to deal with them.
And yet accounting for growth by itself would not account for the inequity of the relations formed by that growth.cIt would not account for how some benefit at deadly cost to others based simply on their birth and developmental positionality, with benefits defended by nations on the false premise that all are empowered equally at birth. One of the false assumptions at work was that some children were magically born poor and others rich, instead of the reality of a policy choice to elevate family autonomy (and not in the sense of being free of the climate crisis, but free in a “free market” sense) over family equity and political legitimacy.
Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, living in poverty, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. They are subject to top-down abstract rules, not rules derived from the inclusive creation of power relations by those subject to them.
Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth – like Tim Midura – have helped conceal this with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
For example, Fair Start activists were funded by such funders in their work with prior organizations, and prominent activists turned business owners today benefit from having used assessment and reporting models that each year allowed them to claim progress for vulnerable entities – like animals – that was easily being undone on exponential levels by birth-inequity based growth. The hallmark of equity fraud involves the fraudster omitting from evaluation and reporting the largest driver of the relevant outcome – the birth-based creation of power relations – in order to exploit that process.
The solution?
The FalseClaimsChecker.org accounts for this minimum necessary condition of political equity by replacing those assumptions – and the illegal baselining – with a base assumption that political authority and the entitlement to wealth it can generate must be derived from a “one person, one equal and influential vote” / “no child is worth more than another standard,” thus situating those making the value assessments and impact reporting themselves as part of, or outside of, a discourse legitimacy moving towards a just future. This accounts, at a most fundamental level – at a constitutional or basic system of obligation level, for the driver of the polycrisis.
These claims situate them in their political system, and allow us to assess how they arbitrarily benefit from, or suffer the costs, of the “separate but equal” standard.
When someone makes a value assessment and impact claim, we should ask: Relative to what?
You will find rampant use of shifting baseline – moving goalposts – that allow claimants to appear to create value and beneficial impact with no functional protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals, as the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity worsens. That means the impact is being undone relative to the minimum legally required threshold, or an illegal baseline – illegal because it does not account for legitimacy, or the need to measurably empower those subject to the legal system, including ensuring minimum levels of health-as-enfranchisement for all infants.
This is called growthwashing, or more accurately equitywashing. Why the latter? Because to treat humans quantitatively as numbers is less accurate than to see them as living in complex qualitative relations, and because past certain ecological, social, and political thresholds, growth has devastating nonlinear impacts – with climate emissions triggering things like ecological feedback loops.
We can use these claims to demonstrate the problem, that the values and impact they claimed would have been undone relative to the legal / preemptive as opposed to arbitrary baselines, and encourage reforms towards the legal baseline and their becoming part of an empowering system of truly self–determining persons by realigning fundamental authority and entitlements around a system of fair birth positionality, consistent with the values that they are signaling in their claims This is a state of autonomy through political equity by rearranging constitutional entitlements, sufficient to ensure Dasgupta’s optimality, but in the qualitative sense of empowering relations.
Given that few if any use the legal “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, this exercise generally entails their having to admit benefiting from arbitrary birth and developmental positionality (national, racial, intergenerational, etc.) at deadly cost to others, and having disparate influence over others defended by unlegitimated authority, and threat of coercion, of the state.
We admit: Being part of a system of birth inequity that treats children of color as deserving fewer resources and influence, including omitting this as a countervailing factor in our value assessments and impact reporting, by overshooting ecological, political and social thresholds does more harm to our values than we do to further them.
This “Tell the Truth” discourse creates an opportunity for permanent resistance to oppression because it protects, through the use of an intergenerational justice threshold, the most vulnerable, Infants and animals and identifies those who reject that protection, and systems of mutual self-determination with it.
See the fallacious claims by prominent food entrepreneur Paul Shapiro, who ironically started his work as an animal rights activist climbing to a level of national influence on a false advertising campaign against egg producers for humane washing, His claims to have saved animals while explicitly refusing to back equity reforms or qualify his claims, make them inaccurate and out of context because he omits how he chose underlying policies that did vastly more harm to animals than he did good. His omission enables him to exploit financial systems – as lead at a profitable food company with military contracts – that in turn growth exploit animals and elevate his voice above those pursuing on-balance reforms.
Initial attempts, in other scenarios, by Fair Start Movement and Truth Alliance advocates to implement this preemption were met with sabotage by public interest entities hiding liability for decades of inaccurate claims, usually for micro interventions undone – relative to a true system of empowerment – by macro forces that enriched those involved, and their funders, at deadly cost to others.
As a practical matter one can challenge illegal baselining, or political equity and impact fraud, using inexpensive and widely available consumer protection and unfair competition laws to enjoin public and private business valuation, and impact reporting, that don’t comply with the minimum baseline of inclusive legitimacy.
Given that political authority, including to entitle wealth, derives from having to empower those subject to the authority, these cases get to the ultimate question of political freedom: Are we obligated to a political system that does not empower us? And what are the limits of self-defense against such a system?
After 1948 and the inception of universal human rights that limited national authority, nations were obligated to derive their authority and any entitlements protected under it from the equitable empowerment of their subjects. This requirement is widely reflected in the Bill of Human Rights instruments and their references to the right to self-determination – and one person, one equal and influential vote. This requirement should have created an interpretation of the collective pronoun that premises those documents, like the reference to “we the people,” treating a level of influence in one’s political system (“oughtness” or an “influl” that precedes a “util”) as a fundamental currency that precedes utility and welfare.
The textual basis for this interpretive rule is clear – these pronouns are the linguistic premise of the language that follows. Such a currency and universal linguistic rule of interpretation would have entailed a harsh principle: Each person in a system of law and obligation would be owed the level of public protection, or oughtness, they would account to the most vulnerable: Infants, and the animals whom the infants would impact. The value of self, versus other, determination would require it. Again, a racist system of self-determination blocked this change.
Regardless, the principle creates a textual basis to interpret law as requiring the inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, consistent with standards for intergenerational justice, and ensuring equal offsets of influence relative to a zero baseline and the idea that no child is worth more than another. At a policy level this would have required a fundable, minimum threshold of empowerment beneath which no child should be born, with future children holding entitlements sufficient to create collective family planning systems based on readiness, delay, and the equitable distribution of levels of influence among children. The threshold ensures equal offsets relative to zero, or 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 things like a climate crisis, autocracy, deadly inequity, etc.
Put simply:
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 has been using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
Those willing to pay the costs of a legitimate political system that avoids arbitrary benefits of birth positionality and conditions authority on empowerment could never compete against those willing to exploit others, and they need not given that any authority to govern or assign wealth derives from first empowering those subject to these things. The other solution to inequity-gained wealth backed by state violence – as the oppression it is – is to treat that violence as illegitimate and triggering the right to self-determinative self-defense against “trolley targets” who benefit themselves at deadly cost to others.
It’s this truthful and obligation-creating discourse, a Tell the Truth campaign, that is most preemptive and legally authoritative over all conflicting obligations, including treaties and constitutions.
Looking at Yale’s website on animal protection one would think great progress is being made for the most vulnerable.
But relative to what was any of the progress made?
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than the program ever did good. Use of an inaccurate valuation and reporting 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 absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
The fundamental unit of moral currency is the influence one has over the outcomes of their political system, or what is loosely understood as political equality / equity though common conceptions are incomplete. Other currencies, like welfare, cannot exist outside of systems of political and legal obligation or “oughtness” and the primacy of how people are positioned relative to others and Earth’s ecologies at birth.
This equity is consistent with an objective “one person, one equal and influential vote” (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) standard, empowering persons to limit the influence others have – including ecologically and socially – over them. This is also consistent with more collective systems of family planning in which no child is treated as worth more than another, an outcome ensured through a threshold or level of empowering birth and development conditions and relations outside of which no child should be born.
This physically disembedded persons from any effective role in their political systems. It also allowed those in power, both with political authority and entitlements to wealth defended by that authority, to avoid having to legitimate their power by actually, and measurably empowering those subject to it. Rather than seeing the creation of actual (relative to the legal baseline) empowering relations as the source of political authority, nations treated symbolic or representative instruments like treaties and constitutions as themselves authoritative.
While civil rights movements made headway in areas like housing, employment, and education, the notion of autonomy without equity amounted to the privatization of the creation of power relations, and the totally arbitrary basis for the concentration of extreme levels of generational white wealth – over the span of decades – that drives many of the outcomes we see today. That wealth never had to pay the costs of legitimacy – and the full impacts are now being revealed.
Within less than a few generations the regime caused unsustainable growth, vast political, social, and ecological inequity, the destruction of world ecologies, and the decline of democracy. This inequitable and disenfranchising growth breached political, ecological and social thresholds for objective values we all share like comfortable temperatures, equality of opportunity,
Public interest work and outcomes during these decades and into today have generally oriented from arbitrary, ever-changing and illegal (both because they disenfranchise and otherwise harm children, relative to a host of accepted legal standards usually only applied to existing rather than future children) baselines that violate the “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard. High levels of climate emissions championed by “environmental” organizations that enrich some at deadly cost to others, still permitted and defended by coercive authority of nations, are an example.
Use of these baselines represents an undemocratic, diluted and commercial form of freedom, rather than values consistent with political freedom, that is more akin to “free market” choice” of a shopping mall more than the political influence of a functional town hall.
Public interest interventions to challenge greenwashing and humanewashing have failed because they themselves did not account for the massively countervailing impacts of growth on the interventions themselves – growth that for instance has created more climate emissions than the interventions removed, while bringing children into the world without the resources or political influence to deal with them.
And yet accounting for growth by itself would not account for the inequity of the relations formed by that growth.cIt would not account for how some benefit at deadly cost to others based simply on their birth and developmental positionality, with benefits defended by nations on the false premise that all are empowered equally at birth. One of the false assumptions at work was that some children were magically born poor and others rich, instead of the reality of a policy choice to elevate family autonomy (and not in the sense of being free of the climate crisis, but free in a “free market” sense) over family equity and political legitimacy.
Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, living in poverty, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. They are subject to top-down abstract rules, not rules derived from the inclusive creation of power relations by those subject to them.
Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth – like Tim Midura – have helped conceal this with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
For example, Fair Start activists were funded by such funders in their work with prior organizations, and prominent activists turned business owners today benefit from having used assessment and reporting models that each year allowed them to claim progress for vulnerable entities – like animals – that was easily being undone on exponential levels by birth-inequity based growth. The hallmark of equity fraud involves the fraudster omitting from evaluation and reporting the largest driver of the relevant outcome – the birth-based creation of power relations – in order to exploit that process.
The solution?
The FalseClaimsChecker.org accounts for this minimum necessary condition of political equity by replacing those assumptions – and the illegal baselining – with a base assumption that political authority and the entitlement to wealth it can generate must be derived from a “one person, one equal and influential vote” / “no child is worth more than another standard,” thus situating those making the value assessments and impact reporting themselves as part of, or outside of, a discourse legitimacy moving towards a just future. This accounts, at a most fundamental level – at a constitutional or basic system of obligation level, for the driver of the polycrisis.
These claims situate them in their political system, and allow us to assess how they arbitrarily benefit from, or suffer the costs, of the “separate but equal” standard.
When someone makes a value assessment and impact claim, we should ask: Relative to what?
You will find rampant use of shifting baseline – moving goalposts – that allow claimants to appear to create value and beneficial impact with no functional protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals, as the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity worsens. That means the impact is being undone relative to the minimum legally required threshold, or an illegal baseline – illegal because it does not account for legitimacy, or the need to measurably empower those subject to the legal system, including ensuring minimum levels of health-as-enfranchisement for all infants.
This is called growthwashing, or more accurately equitywashing. Why the latter? Because to treat humans quantitatively as numbers is less accurate than to see them as living in complex qualitative relations, and because past certain ecological, social, and political thresholds, growth has devastating nonlinear impacts – with climate emissions triggering things like ecological feedback loops.
We can use these claims to demonstrate the problem, that the values and impact they claimed would have been undone relative to the legal / preemptive as opposed to arbitrary baselines, and encourage reforms towards the legal baseline and their becoming part of an empowering system of truly self–determining persons by realigning fundamental authority and entitlements around a system of fair birth positionality, consistent with the values that they are signaling in their claims This is a state of autonomy through political equity by rearranging constitutional entitlements, sufficient to ensure Dasgupta’s optimality, but in the qualitative sense of empowering relations.
Given that few if any use the legal “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, this exercise generally entails their having to admit benefiting from arbitrary birth and developmental positionality (national, racial, intergenerational, etc.) at deadly cost to others, and having disparate influence over others defended by unlegitimated authority, and threat of coercion, of the state.
We admit: Being part of a system of birth inequity that treats children of color as deserving fewer resources and influence, including omitting this as a countervailing factor in our value assessments and impact reporting, by overshooting ecological, political and social thresholds does more harm to our values than we do to further them.
This “Tell the Truth” discourse creates an opportunity for permanent resistance to oppression because it protects, through the use of an intergenerational justice threshold, the most vulnerable, Infants and animals and identifies those who reject that protection, and systems of mutual self-determination with it.
See the fallacious claims by prominent food entrepreneur Paul Shapiro, who ironically started his work as an animal rights activist climbing to a level of national influence on a false advertising campaign against egg producers for humane washing, His claims to have saved animals while explicitly refusing to back equity reforms or qualify his claims, make them inaccurate and out of context because he omits how he chose underlying policies that did vastly more harm to animals than he did good. His omission enables him to exploit financial systems – as lead at a profitable food company with military contracts – that in turn growth exploit animals and elevate his voice above those pursuing on-balance reforms.
Initial attempts, in other scenarios, by Fair Start Movement and Truth Alliance advocates to implement this preemption were met with sabotage by public interest entities hiding liability for decades of inaccurate claims, usually for micro interventions undone – relative to a true system of empowerment – by macro forces that enriched those involved, and their funders, at deadly cost to others.
As a practical matter one can challenge illegal baselining, or political equity and impact fraud, using inexpensive and widely available consumer protection and unfair competition laws to enjoin public and private business valuation, and impact reporting, that don’t comply with the minimum baseline of inclusive legitimacy.
Given that political authority, including to entitle wealth, derives from having to empower those subject to the authority, these cases get to the ultimate question of political freedom: Are we obligated to a political system that does not empower us? And what are the limits of self-defense against such a system?
After 1948 and the inception of universal human rights that limited national authority, nations were obligated to derive their authority and any entitlements protected under it from the equitable empowerment of their subjects. This requirement is widely reflected in the Bill of Human Rights instruments and their references to the right to self-determination – and one person, one equal and influential vote. This requirement should have created an interpretation of the collective pronoun that premises those documents, like the reference to “we the people,” treating a level of influence in one’s political system (“oughtness” or an “influl” that precedes a “util”) as a fundamental currency that precedes utility and welfare.
The textual basis for this interpretive rule is clear – these pronouns are the linguistic premise of the language that follows. Such a currency and universal linguistic rule of interpretation would have entailed a harsh principle: Each person in a system of law and obligation would be owed the level of public protection, or oughtness, they would account to the most vulnerable: Infants, and the animals whom the infants would impact. The value of self, versus other, determination would require it. Again, a racist system of self-determination blocked this change.
Regardless, the principle creates a textual basis to interpret law as requiring the inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, consistent with standards for intergenerational justice, and ensuring equal offsets of influence relative to a zero baseline and the idea that no child is worth more than another. At a policy level this would have required a fundable, minimum threshold of empowerment beneath which no child should be born, with future children holding entitlements sufficient to create collective family planning systems based on readiness, delay, and the equitable distribution of levels of influence among children. The threshold ensures equal offsets relative to zero, or 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 things like a climate crisis, autocracy, deadly inequity, etc.
Put simply:
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 has been using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
Those willing to pay the costs of a legitimate political system that avoids arbitrary benefits of birth positionality and conditions authority on empowerment could never compete against those willing to exploit others, and they need not given that any authority to govern or assign wealth derives from first empowering those subject to these things. The other solution to inequity-gained wealth backed by state violence – as the oppression it is – is to treat that violence as illegitimate and triggering the right to self-determinative self-defense against “trolley targets” who benefit themselves at deadly cost to others.
It’s this truthful and obligation-creating discourse, a Tell the Truth campaign, that is most preemptive and legally authoritative over all conflicting obligations, including treaties and constitutions.
But relative to what was any of the progress made?
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than the program ever did good. Use of an inaccurate valuation and reporting 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 absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
The fundamental unit of moral currency is the influence one has over the outcomes of their political system, or what is loosely understood as political equality / equity though common conceptions are incomplete. Other currencies, like welfare, cannot exist outside of systems of political and legal obligation or “oughtness” and the primacy of how people are positioned relative to others and Earth’s ecologies at birth.
This equity is consistent with an objective “one person, one equal and influential vote” (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) standard, empowering persons to limit the influence others have – including ecologically and socially – over them. This is also consistent with more collective systems of family planning in which no child is treated as worth more than another, an outcome ensured through a threshold or level of empowering birth and development conditions and relations outside of which no child should be born.
This physically disembedded persons from any effective role in their political systems. It also allowed those in power, both with political authority and entitlements to wealth defended by that authority, to avoid having to legitimate their power by actually, and measurably empowering those subject to it. Rather than seeing the creation of actual (relative to the legal baseline) empowering relations as the source of political authority, nations treated symbolic or representative instruments like treaties and constitutions as themselves authoritative.
While civil rights movements made headway in areas like housing, employment, and education, the notion of autonomy without equity amounted to the privatization of the creation of power relations, and the totally arbitrary basis for the concentration of extreme levels of generational white wealth – over the span of decades – that drives many of the outcomes we see today. That wealth never had to pay the costs of legitimacy – and the full impacts are now being revealed.
Within less than a few generations the regime caused unsustainable growth, vast political, social, and ecological inequity, the destruction of world ecologies, and the decline of democracy. This inequitable and disenfranchising growth breached political, ecological and social thresholds for objective values we all share like comfortable temperatures, equality of opportunity,
Public interest work and outcomes during these decades and into today have generally oriented from arbitrary, ever-changing and illegal (both because they disenfranchise and otherwise harm children, relative to a host of accepted legal standards usually only applied to existing rather than future children) baselines that violate the “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard. High levels of climate emissions championed by “environmental” organizations that enrich some at deadly cost to others, still permitted and defended by coercive authority of nations, are an example.
Use of these baselines represents an undemocratic, diluted and commercial form of freedom, rather than values consistent with political freedom, that is more akin to “free market” choice” of a shopping mall more than the political influence of a functional town hall.
Public interest interventions to challenge greenwashing and humanewashing have failed because they themselves did not account for the massively countervailing impacts of growth on the interventions themselves – growth that for instance has created more climate emissions than the interventions removed, while bringing children into the world without the resources or political influence to deal with them.
And yet accounting for growth by itself would not account for the inequity of the relations formed by that growth.cIt would not account for how some benefit at deadly cost to others based simply on their birth and developmental positionality, with benefits defended by nations on the false premise that all are empowered equally at birth. One of the false assumptions at work was that some children were magically born poor and others rich, instead of the reality of a policy choice to elevate family autonomy (and not in the sense of being free of the climate crisis, but free in a “free market” sense) over family equity and political legitimacy.
Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, living in poverty, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. They are subject to top-down abstract rules, not rules derived from the inclusive creation of power relations by those subject to them.
Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth – like Tim Midura – have helped conceal this with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
For example, Fair Start activists were funded by such funders in their work with prior organizations, and prominent activists turned business owners today benefit from having used assessment and reporting models that each year allowed them to claim progress for vulnerable entities – like animals – that was easily being undone on exponential levels by birth-inequity based growth. The hallmark of equity fraud involves the fraudster omitting from evaluation and reporting the largest driver of the relevant outcome – the birth-based creation of power relations – in order to exploit that process.
The solution?
The FalseClaimsChecker.org accounts for this minimum necessary condition of political equity by replacing those assumptions – and the illegal baselining – with a base assumption that political authority and the entitlement to wealth it can generate must be derived from a “one person, one equal and influential vote” / “no child is worth more than another standard,” thus situating those making the value assessments and impact reporting themselves as part of, or outside of, a discourse legitimacy moving towards a just future. This accounts, at a most fundamental level – at a constitutional or basic system of obligation level, for the driver of the polycrisis.
These claims situate them in their political system, and allow us to assess how they arbitrarily benefit from, or suffer the costs, of the “separate but equal” standard.
When someone makes a value assessment and impact claim, we should ask: Relative to what?
You will find rampant use of shifting baseline – moving goalposts – that allow claimants to appear to create value and beneficial impact with no functional protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals, as the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity worsens. That means the impact is being undone relative to the minimum legally required threshold, or an illegal baseline – illegal because it does not account for legitimacy, or the need to measurably empower those subject to the legal system, including ensuring minimum levels of health-as-enfranchisement for all infants.
This is called growthwashing, or more accurately equitywashing. Why the latter? Because to treat humans quantitatively as numbers is less accurate than to see them as living in complex qualitative relations, and because past certain ecological, social, and political thresholds, growth has devastating nonlinear impacts – with climate emissions triggering things like ecological feedback loops.
We can use these claims to demonstrate the problem, that the values and impact they claimed would have been undone relative to the legal / preemptive as opposed to arbitrary baselines, and encourage reforms towards the legal baseline and their becoming part of an empowering system of truly self–determining persons by realigning fundamental authority and entitlements around a system of fair birth positionality, consistent with the values that they are signaling in their claims This is a state of autonomy through political equity by rearranging constitutional entitlements, sufficient to ensure Dasgupta’s optimality, but in the qualitative sense of empowering relations.
Given that few if any use the legal “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, this exercise generally entails their having to admit benefiting from arbitrary birth and developmental positionality (national, racial, intergenerational, etc.) at deadly cost to others, and having disparate influence over others defended by unlegitimated authority, and threat of coercion, of the state.
We admit: Being part of a system of birth inequity that treats children of color as deserving fewer resources and influence, including omitting this as a countervailing factor in our value assessments and impact reporting, by overshooting ecological, political and social thresholds does more harm to our values than we do to further them.
This “Tell the Truth” discourse creates an opportunity for permanent resistance to oppression because it protects, through the use of an intergenerational justice threshold, the most vulnerable, Infants and animals and identifies those who reject that protection, and systems of mutual self-determination with it.
See the fallacious claims by prominent food entrepreneur Paul Shapiro, who ironically started his work as an animal rights activist climbing to a level of national influence on a false advertising campaign against egg producers for humane washing, His claims to have saved animals while explicitly refusing to back equity reforms or qualify his claims, make them inaccurate and out of context because he omits how he chose underlying policies that did vastly more harm to animals than he did good. His omission enables him to exploit financial systems – as lead at a profitable food company with military contracts – that in turn growth exploit animals and elevate his voice above those pursuing on-balance reforms.
Initial attempts, in other scenarios, by Fair Start Movement and Truth Alliance advocates to implement this preemption were met with sabotage by public interest entities hiding liability for decades of inaccurate claims, usually for micro interventions undone – relative to a true system of empowerment – by macro forces that enriched those involved, and their funders, at deadly cost to others.
As a practical matter one can challenge illegal baselining, or political equity and impact fraud, using inexpensive and widely available consumer protection and unfair competition laws to enjoin public and private business valuation, and impact reporting, that don’t comply with the minimum baseline of inclusive legitimacy.
Given that political authority, including to entitle wealth, derives from having to empower those subject to the authority, these cases get to the ultimate question of political freedom: Are we obligated to a political system that does not empower us? And what are the limits of self-defense against such a system?
After 1948 and the inception of universal human rights that limited national authority, nations were obligated to derive their authority and any entitlements protected under it from the equitable empowerment of their subjects. This requirement is widely reflected in the Bill of Human Rights instruments and their references to the right to self-determination – and one person, one equal and influential vote. This requirement should have created an interpretation of the collective pronoun that premises those documents, like the reference to “we the people,” treating a level of influence in one’s political system (“oughtness” or an “influl” that precedes a “util”) as a fundamental currency that precedes utility and welfare.
The textual basis for this interpretive rule is clear – these pronouns are the linguistic premise of the language that follows. Such a currency and universal linguistic rule of interpretation would have entailed a harsh principle: Each person in a system of law and obligation would be owed the level of public protection, or oughtness, they would account to the most vulnerable: Infants, and the animals whom the infants would impact. The value of self, versus other, determination would require it. Again, a racist system of self-determination blocked this change.
Regardless, the principle creates a textual basis to interpret law as requiring the inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, consistent with standards for intergenerational justice, and ensuring equal offsets of influence relative to a zero baseline and the idea that no child is worth more than another. At a policy level this would have required a fundable, minimum threshold of empowerment beneath which no child should be born, with future children holding entitlements sufficient to create collective family planning systems based on readiness, delay, and the equitable distribution of levels of influence among children. The threshold ensures equal offsets relative to zero, or 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 things like a climate crisis, autocracy, deadly inequity, etc.
Put simply:
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 has been using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
Those willing to pay the costs of a legitimate political system that avoids arbitrary benefits of birth positionality and conditions authority on empowerment could never compete against those willing to exploit others, and they need not given that any authority to govern or assign wealth derives from first empowering those subject to these things. The other solution to inequity-gained wealth backed by state violence – as the oppression it is – is to treat that violence as illegitimate and triggering the right to self-determinative self-defense against “trolley targets” who benefit themselves at deadly cost to others.
It’s this truthful and obligation-creating discourse, a Tell the Truth campaign, that is most preemptive and legally authoritative over all conflicting obligations, including treaties and constitutions.
Take action: Urge the lead at Harvard’s animal law program here to tell the truth.
Professors are influential, and when they make public benefit claims, they should do some from clear baselines, and in a way that does not hide inequitable and disenfranchising growth. Not dealing with baselines is evidence to support the Fair Start thesis: That wealth obtained by violating the rights of future children now drives public interest narratives and outcomes to hide and violate those rights.
*This critique is intentionally done outside of customary back and forth academic discourse. A constitutive discourse is more public, and rather than treating values like animal protection as abstract, it assesses the value and impact claims influential people make that fundamentally benefit them, through a system of illegitimate and disentrancing growth and birth positionality, at deadly cost to others and in contravention of academic neutrality.
The Program’s website states it is: “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system.”
That statement is inaccurate. Stilt and the program use an illegal baselining and equity fraud standard that creates a fantasy world of benefit for animals that is undone, upstream, by inequitable and disenfranchising growth.
Stilt’s work on the illusory concept of “rights of nature,” the benefits of which are undone by growth every day, is exemplary of her approach. Claims of using animals benefiting animals are the worst example of the Winners Take Allphenomenon because animals are the most numerous category of vulnerable entities, and because claiming our current political inequity-based system of growth can benefit them are outlandish.
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than the program ever did good. Use of that valuation and reporting 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 absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
The fundamental unit of moral currency is the influence one has over the outcomes of their political system, or what is loosely understood as political equality / equity though common conceptions are incomplete. Other currencies, like welfare, cannot exist outside of systems of political and legal obligation or “oughtness” and the primacy of how people are positioned relative to others and Earth’s ecologies at birth.
This equity is consistent with an objective “one person, one equal and influential vote” (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) standard, empowering persons to limit the influence others have – including ecologically and socially – over them. This is also consistent with more collective systems of family planning in which no child is treated as worth more than another, an outcome ensured through a threshold or level of empowering birth and development conditions and relations outside of which no child should be born.
This physically disembedded persons from any effective role in their political systems. It also allowed those in power, both with political authority and entitlements to wealth defended by that authority, to avoid having to legitimate their power by actually, and measurably empowering those subject to it. Rather than seeing the creation of actual (relative to the legal baseline) empowering relations as the source of political authority, nations treated symbolic or representative instruments like treaties and constitutions as themselves authoritative.
While civil rights movements made headway in areas like housing, employment, and education, the notion of autonomy without equity amounted to the privatization of the creation of power relations, and the totally arbitrary basis for the concentration of extreme levels of generational white wealth – over the span of decades – that drives many of the outcomes we see today. That wealth never had to pay the costs of legitimacy – and the full impacts are now being revealed.
Within less than a few generations the regime caused unsustainable growth, vast political, social, and ecological inequity, the destruction of world ecologies, and the decline of democracy. This inequitable and disenfranchising growth breached political, ecological and social thresholds for objective values we all share like comfortable temperatures, equality of opportunity,
Public interest work and outcomes during these decades and into today have generally oriented from arbitrary, ever-changing and illegal (both because they disenfranchise and otherwise harm children, relative to a host of accepted legal standards usually only applied to existing rather than future children) baselines that violate the “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard. High levels of climate emissions championed by “environmental” organizations that enrich some at deadly cost to others, still permitted and defended by coercive authority of nations, are an example.
Use of these baselines represents an undemocratic, diluted and commercial form of freedom, rather than values consistent with political freedom, that is more akin to “free market” choice” of a shopping mall more than the political influence of a functional town hall.
Public interest interventions to challenge greenwashing and humanewashing have failed because they themselves did not account for the massively countervailing impacts of growth on the interventions themselves – growth that for instance has created more climate emissions than the interventions removed, while bringing children into the world without the resources or political influence to deal with them.
And yet accounting for growth by itself would not account for the inequity of the relations formed by that growth.cIt would not account for how some benefit at deadly cost to others based simply on their birth and developmental positionality, with benefits defended by nations on the false premise that all are empowered equally at birth. One of the false assumptions at work was that some children were magically born poor and others rich, instead of the reality of a policy choice to elevate family autonomy (and not in the sense of being free of the climate crisis, but free in a “free market” sense) over family equity and political legitimacy.
Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, living in poverty, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. They are subject to top-down abstract rules, not rules derived from the inclusive creation of power relations by those subject to them.
Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth – like Tim Midura – have helped conceal this with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
For example, Fair Start activists were funded by such funders in their work with prior organizations, and prominent activists turned business owners today benefit from having used assessment and reporting models that each year allowed them to claim progress for vulnerable entities – like animals – that was easily being undone on exponential levels by birth-inequity based growth. The hallmark of equity fraud involves the fraudster omitting from evaluation and reporting the largest driver of the relevant outcome – the birth-based creation of power relations – in order to exploit that process.
The solution?
The FalseClaimsChecker.org accounts for this minimum necessary condition of political equity by replacing those assumptions – and the illegal baselining – with a base assumption that political authority and the entitlement to wealth it can generate must be derived from a “one person, one equal and influential vote” / “no child is worth more than another standard,” thus situating those making the value assessments and impact reporting themselves as part of, or outside of, a discourse legitimacy moving towards a just future. This accounts, at a most fundamental level – at a constitutional or basic system of obligation level, for the driver of the polycrisis.
These claims situate them in their political system, and allow us to assess how they arbitrarily benefit from, or suffer the costs, of the “separate but equal” standard.
When someone makes a value assessment and impact claim, we should ask: Relative to what?
You will find rampant use of shifting baseline – moving goalposts – that allow claimants to appear to create value and beneficial impact with no functional protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals, as the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity worsens. That means the impact is being undone relative to the minimum legally required threshold, or an illegal baseline – illegal because it does not account for legitimacy, or the need to measurably empower those subject to the legal system, including ensuring minimum levels of health-as-enfranchisement for all infants.
This is called growthwashing, or more accurately equitywashing. Why the latter? Because to treat humans quantitatively as numbers is less accurate than to see them as living in complex qualitative relations, and because past certain ecological, social, and political thresholds, growth has devastating nonlinear impacts – with climate emissions triggering things like ecological feedback loops.
We can use these claims to demonstrate the problem, that the values and impact they claimed would have been undone relative to the legal / preemptive as opposed to arbitrary baselines, and encourage reforms towards the legal baseline and their becoming part of an empowering system of truly self–determining persons by realigning fundamental authority and entitlements around a system of fair birth positionality, consistent with the values that they are signaling in their claims This is a state of autonomy through political equity by rearranging constitutional entitlements, sufficient to ensure Dasgupta’s optimality, but in the qualitative sense of empowering relations.
Given that few if any use the legal “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, this exercise generally entails their having to admit benefiting from arbitrary birth and developmental positionality (national, racial, intergenerational, etc.) at deadly cost to others, and having disparate influence over others defended by unlegitimated authority, and threat of coercion, of the state.
We admit: Being part of a system of birth inequity that treats children of color as deserving fewer resources and influence, including omitting this as a countervailing factor in our value assessments and impact reporting, by overshooting ecological, political and social thresholds does more harm to our values than we do to further them.
This “Tell the Truth” discourse creates an opportunity for permanent resistance to oppression because it protects, through the use of an intergenerational justice threshold, the most vulnerable, Infants and animals and identifies those who reject that protection, and systems of mutual self-determination with it.
See the fallacious claims by prominent food entrepreneur Paul Shapiro, who ironically started his work as an animal rights activist climbing to a level of national influence on a false advertising campaign against egg producers for humane washing, His claims to have saved animals while explicitly refusing to back equity reforms or qualify his claims, make them inaccurate and out of context because he omits how he chose underlying policies that did vastly more harm to animals than he did good. His omission enables him to exploit financial systems – as lead at a profitable food company with military contracts – that in turn growth exploit animals and elevate his voice above those pursuing on-balance reforms.
Initial attempts, in other scenarios, by Fair Start Movement and Truth Alliance advocates to implement this preemption were met with sabotage by public interest entities hiding liability for decades of inaccurate claims, usually for micro interventions undone – relative to a true system of empowerment – by macro forces that enriched those involved, and their funders, at deadly cost to others.
As a practical matter one can challenge illegal baselining, or political equity and impact fraud, using inexpensive and widely available consumer protection and unfair competition laws to enjoin public and private business valuation, and impact reporting, that don’t comply with the minimum baseline of inclusive legitimacy.
Given that political authority, including to entitle wealth, derives from having to empower those subject to the authority, these cases get to the ultimate question of political freedom: Are we obligated to a political system that does not empower us? And what are the limits of self-defense against such a system?
After 1948 and the inception of universal human rights that limited national authority, nations were obligated to derive their authority and any entitlements protected under it from the equitable empowerment of their subjects. This requirement is widely reflected in the Bill of Human Rights instruments and their references to the right to self-determination – and one person, one equal and influential vote. This requirement should have created an interpretation of the collective pronoun that premises those documents, like the reference to “we the people,” treating a level of influence in one’s political system (“oughtness” or an “influl” that precedes a “util”) as a fundamental currency that precedes utility and welfare.
The textual basis for this interpretive rule is clear – these pronouns are the linguistic premise of the language that follows. Such a currency and universal linguistic rule of interpretation would have entailed a harsh principle: Each person in a system of law and obligation would be owed the level of public protection, or oughtness, they would account to the most vulnerable: Infants, and the animals whom the infants would impact. The value of self, versus other, determination would require it. Again, a racist system of self-determination blocked this change.
Regardless, the principle creates a textual basis to interpret law as requiring the inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, consistent with standards for intergenerational justice, and ensuring equal offsets of influence relative to a zero baseline and the idea that no child is worth more than another. At a policy level this would have required a fundable, minimum threshold of empowerment beneath which no child should be born, with future children holding entitlements sufficient to create collective family planning systems based on readiness, delay, and the equitable distribution of levels of influence among children. The threshold ensures equal offsets relative to zero, or 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 things like a climate crisis, autocracy, deadly inequity, etc.
Put simply:
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 has been using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
Those willing to pay the costs of a legitimate political system that avoids arbitrary benefits of birth positionality and conditions authority on empowerment could never compete against those willing to exploit others, and they need not given that any authority to govern or assign wealth derives from first empowering those subject to these things. The other solution to inequity-gained wealth backed by state violence – as the oppression it is – is to treat that violence as illegitimate and triggering the right to self-determinative self-defense against “trolley targets” who benefit themselves at deadly cost to others.
It’s this truthful and obligation-creating discourse, a Tell the Truth campaign, that is most preemptive and legally authoritative over all conflicting obligations, including treaties and constitutions.
World leaders, not everyday people, created a climate and inequity crisis that is killing millions. And they did it by valuing some children over others, and in ways that were illegal.
Joseph Chamie is a prolific writer in the area of population and development, and recently wrote that: “Inequalities in human mortality are evident worldwide. Premature death is particularly prevalent in low-income regions due to limited access to healthcare, poverty, and conflict.”
He should know, having served as Director of the United Nations Population Division and the deputy secretary-general for the 1994 UN International Conference for Population and Development.
By ensuring no threshold for intergenerational justice, the system created extreme concentrations of wealth and power at cost to democracy, nature, and child welfare. To avoid that all Chamie had to do was take the logical step of extending child welfare entitlements, including to political equity, to future children. Instead he chose to maintain a privatized process that exploited children for growth, even as the climate crisis became known.
That meant he did not even try to legitimate the political authority he claimed, and exercised over others, by measureably empowering those subject to it. He knowingly used a system that enriched white children at deadly cost to mostly children of color, and that commercialized political freedom.
That’s a serious example of public corruption. Understand this: Chamie embraces and helped build a system that allows wealth and political authority to use the state’s threat of, and application of, official violence to defend themselves without empowering those everyday people subject to these things. It’s obscure, but tyranny nonetheless, and on a scale that dwarfs others.
While human rights activists are accustomed to targeting for retribution acute and palpable abusers like war criminals, on volume of suffering Chamie has done more harm than most, albeit in a subtle way that is hard for humans to perceive. That does not make him any less culpable.
If people really constitute their own political systems through truthful discourses about what we owe future generations, then it’s up to everyone to engage those at the top who are responsible to admit their failures, and their obligations to fix them. This act literally decentralizes influence – the first step to a future that is more just and free.
University of Denver Sturm College of Law is facing increased scrutiny in Colorado and California following written inquiries and regulatory referrals concerning donor-fund governance and undisclosed baseline assumptions underlying the law school’s public-facing claims of impact, public benefit, protection, and well-being.
The matter arose after a complaint submitted in early 2026 through www.FalseClaimsChecker.org led to written inquiries concerning donor-fund governance and the omission of baseline assumptions in public-facing “impact,” “public benefit,” “protection,” and “well-being” claims connected to the Animal Law Program and Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.
According to The Fair Start Movement, written responses from University of Denver Sturm College of Law did not resolve those concerns and instead expanded questions about donor intent, fund use, and whether public-facing institutional representations were supported by sufficiently disclosed standards. The Fair Start Movement states that it is now formally investigating the matter and has asked the Federal Trade Commission, as well as government bodies in Colorado and California to investigate as well.
The donor-fund issue became concrete when A. F. Rothschild, PhD, Director of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, sought accounting from University of Denver Sturm College of Law regarding the use of funds connected to the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies for two years without an on-point response.
Watch this video to learn more.
Then only after University of Denver Sturm College of Law Dean Bruce P. Smith was contacted by The Fair Start Movement, Smith wrote to Rothschild in February 2026 that over $90k in “charges to the Fund were made during 2023-24 to support the salary, benefits, and travel” related to the engagements regarding proposed equine-related initiatives. Smith further wrote: “Ultimately, SCOL and CCES could not reach alignment regarding programmatic priorities. Thus, additional equine-related work conducted pursuant to the commitment has been paused. No charges have been made to the Fund since August 2024, and a balance of $158,403.24 remains.”
According to donor materials provided by University of Denver Sturm College of Law and other documentation, the total award amount from The Center for Contemporary Equine Studies was $250,000. The obvious question is why has the “paused” $150k not been returned or otherwise formally resolved for two years?
Those disclosures transformed the matter from a general concern into a concrete donor-intent and fund-governance dispute involving a named donor, a designated equine fund and unresolved questions about whether University of Denver Sturm College of Law’s public-facing institutional representations matched the actual status and direction of the funded work.
Since the matter began, University of Denver Sturm College of Law has received at least two direct written inquiries: one concerning donor-fund use and donor intent in connection with equine-designated funding raised by A. F. Rothschild, PhD, Director of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, and another from The Fair Start Movement seeking baseline clarity for public-facing benefit claims connected to the Animal Law Program and Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.
Both inquiries have received written responses from University of Denver Sturm College of Law, but the issues expanded rather than narrowed, and the matter has since reached the Colorado Attorney General, the Colorado Secretary of State, and the California Attorney General.
On February 25, 2026, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Dean Bruce P. Smith wrote that “the Animal Law Program supports a robust slate of activities, including, without limitation, scholarly research, affiliated faculty, a public event series, a certificate program, courses and externships, and the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.”
The Fair Start Movement argues that this response did not address the narrower question it had raised: what evaluative baseline governs University of Denver Sturm College of Law’s public-facing benefit claims.
That question matters because the Program’s own Annual Report uses language such as “enhance animal protection in the United States” and “around the world for generations to come,” describes itself as “well-known in Colorado as a hub for education, advocacy, and compassion,” refers to “elevating the voices of all beyond human animals,” and claims it will “expand our impact throughout Colorado and across the nation.”
The Fair Start Movement says the underlying issue is not whether a program undertakes activity, but whether public-facing claims of impact or benefit disclose the evaluative baseline needed to interpret them. In its view, that includes what counts as benefit, what harms or costs are excluded, what populations are counted, the time horizon used for evaluation, and how uncertainty and tradeoffs are treated.
“This inquiry process has now become a formal case for Fair Start Movement and False Claims Checker,” said Suriya Khan of Fair Start Movement. “We asked a narrow question. The University replied. But the reply did not identify the baseline used for public-benefit language or the disclosure limits attached to those claims. In general, it matters when institutions seek trust, donations, and public reliance.”
Zahara Nabakooza, lead at TruthAlliance.global, decried the charade and misdirection of funding from a macro-level benefit to infants and animals together: “This is not a request for awareness campaigns or symbolic gestures. It is a demand for accountability. Governments, institutions, and global leaders must confront inequality honestly, commit resources where harm has been greatest, and measure progress transparently. Good intentions are not enough. Outcomes matter.” That would entail the school using a zero-baseline to assess value and report impact, something like the inseparable link between future human and nonhuman outcomes.
The Fair Start Movement reports that University of Denver Sturm College of Law is no longer merely in an advocacy dispute and that this matter now presents a policy-level and institutional investigative issue under familiar omission, donor-reliance, and misleading-net-impression theories reflected in Federal Trade Commission deception standards and California unfair-competition law.
The theory is grounded in established federal and California law. The FTC states that a deceptive practice can involve a material representation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead a reasonable person in the circumstances, and the agency’s deception policy expressly focuses on the net impression created by what is said and what is left out.
California’s Unfair Competition Law defines unfair competition to include unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business acts or practices as well as deceptive, untrue, or misleading advertising, and Business and Professions Code section 17200/17500 separately prohibits untrue or misleading statements made to induce the public to enter into obligations.
California courts have long recognized that advertising can mislead through implication and omission, including in Committee on Children’s Television, Inc. v. General Foods Corp., 35 Cal.3d 197, and that materially misleading representations tied to reliance and economic loss are actionable under California’s UCL and false-advertising framework, including in Kwikset Corp. v. Superior Court, 51 Cal.4th 310.
The Fair Start Movement says those principles are directly relevant here. In its view, University of Denver Sturm College of Law cannot seek trust, money, credibility, or public reliance through claims of “impact,” “public benefit,” “well-being,” “compassion,” or “protection” while leaving unstated the evaluative assumptions that determine what those terms mean.
“The issue in Denver is just the first of many,” said Suriya Khan, “and The Fair Start Movement is asking regulators across the country to consider baseline-disclosure guidance clarifying that public-facing net-benefit claims should disclose the baseline assumptions that determine what the claim means. The proposed disclosure structure would require statements describing what is counted as benefit, what harms or costs are excluded, the time horizon and uncertainty treatment, how outputs are expected to translate into outcomes, and what verification procedures and correction triggers apply.”
The dispute also has relevance beyond one school or one donor. The Fair Start Movement says the issues raised here may have implications for how universities, nonprofits, and advocacy programs describe public impact, outcomes, and benefit claims.
To help identify similar patterns, Fair Start is directing journalists, donors, advocates, and institutions to www.FalseClaimsChecker.org.
The tool is intended to screen public-impact claims, force baseline clarity before such claims induce reliance, and catalyze identification of similar false or omission-based claims across sectors and across the world.
About Fair Start Movement
Fair Start Movement is a public-interest initiative focused on compliance, disclosure, and governance issues in public-benefit claims. Through research, complaints, and policy advocacy, it examines whether institutions adequately disclose the assumptions and standards underlying claims of impact, benefit, protection, and related outcome-oriented representations. FalseClaimsChecker.org is one of its public-facing projects.
Media Contact Suriya Khan Fair Start Movement suriya@fairstartmovement.org 516-725-3157
What if one could sue to protect one’s effective voice in their democracy, and to be able to meaningfully control the outcomes of their political system. At Fair Start, we think people can do that, and that governments are obligated to ensure that their authority derives from actually empowering those subject to it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
