Fair Start Movement

Author: Fair Start Movement

How did the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity we see today fundamentally come about? Ask Tim Midura and the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy.

Those claiming to prevent such threats – especially lawyers – used a deceptive system of moving goalposts to constantly assess progress and raise funding. But relative to the fixed standard – child/political equity – that was necessary to actually prevent the threats, the progress was being undone daily by inequitable growth – growth that benefited those lawyers and the funders backing them. In the case of those tasked with and claiming to protect animals, their work is the most easily falsifiable – dealing with the most vulnerable class of entities and the legitimacy of the system they use.

A close examination shows a cadre of lawyers creating the illusion of legitimacy for their own benefit at deadly cost to the animals they claimed to benefit, and many vulnerable humans as well.

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 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, enriching white children at deadly cost to children of color.

The Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy – and those they fund – are an example of the problem.

I know, having worked in entities they funded for many years, and they are aware of the criticism of prior funders in the animal law space whose funding framed the discipline in ways that benefitted them and their children at cost to animals.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were left by Brooks McCormick for the protection of animals.

Instead of using the funds to actually protect animals, the lead Tim Midura hired his own daughters and used an anthropocentric growth standard for assessing and reporting value – an illegal baseline that moves the goalposts to allow Midura to claim beneficial impact for animals easily undone by inequitable growth – that did more to benefit himself and those he funded than animals.

What Midura does is not animal law, or obligatory systems determining the actual lives and experiences of animals. It’s human law that refers to animals, a conception that does more to benefit Midura than animals.

Every benefit the Institute claims to have created for animals was easily undone by a birth inequity-based system that assumes political authority and entitlements to wealth rather than legitimating them through child rights-based limitation of power relations.

Midura and the Institute talk about animals in the current anthrocentric legal system – they do not reform that system to on-balance protect animals, which was the intent of Brooks McCormick. Midura’s omissions, and his misconception of animal law, were deadly. They are the fundamental reason we have billionaire kids like Barron Trump on one hand, and infants dying of dehydration in wealth-driven heat waves on the other.

In fact Midura was advised by Fair Start Activists in 2018, based on peer-reviewed research, that he was using an illegal baseline, and later in different widely circulated articles that described the use of the baseline at the Animal Legal Defense Fund which Midura had funded (one of which pointed out that when the correct equity measure was used, the Fund has spent more on union busting than on developing and implementing principles of animal law actually benefitting animals).

Midura, instead of dealing with animal rights in the context of the subject-level relations of reproductive rights, chose to silo the issue away from birth equity in order to triple-dip: 1) benefit from his arbitrary but vey privileged national/racial/class birth positionality, 2) benefit from growth-based wealth unimpeded by the rights of future children, and 3) pretend to be an animal savior while living a lavish life at cost to animals.

Why is that so bad? If we are to be free we have to be measurably self-determining, rather than determining of others – through things like wealth-based ecocide killing infants in the Sahel. And that first gets determined in reproductive rights policies that determine who we should be.

Who knew that benefits in a political system should be geared to paying the costs of others being empowered to participate in that system!? This is nutty stuff for those like Midura.

Midura thus intentionally did more to maintain the largest driver of animal suffering and ecocide than reform it. He’s intentionally choosing models that push us closer to Donald Trump’s vision for a future defined by an inequitable population, rather than Partha Dasgupta’s vision of a biodiverse future.

And Midura’s doing it spending money meant to save animals.

One can easily see this by assessing his quotes on impact in the context of growth, growth that is based on the anthropocentric and “separate but equal” reproductive rights system / baseline that creates commercialized and disenfranchising relations, rather than the legitimate fundamental baseline of “no child is worth more than another / one person, one equal and influential vote” that underlies legitimacy.

Even simple AI systems can detect this, and it manifests as manufactured numbers in his claims, where the on-balance benefit to animals is easily undone by assumptions and policies – like high permissible levels of climate emissions and a commercialized and disenfranchising conception of human freedom where Midura’s family benefits at the constitutional level of who we should be, and at deadly cost to others – that undo the benefit claimed.

More specifically, Midura used the funds to further cement the nonsensical concept of anthropocentric animal law: Animal law as the current legal system’s reference to animals, with no need to fundamentally change how we form human/animal relations to actually / on balance protect animals. But 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.

Why? Inverting preemptive power from documents like constitutions to collective family planning discourses – to account for the actual creation of power relations and the lives animals will experience – nullifies all of the assumed and unlegitimated authorities and entitlements Midura’s family relies on to live well while others suffer.

Midura funded his misconception in premier law schools to brand it with their mystique – much the way philanthroscammer Brad Goldberg did. Those schools all make false claims about their impacts on animals, and have been named in actions before the United Nations.

This shows a horrible thing: In the middle of the polycrisis, wealth could buy and further false ideologies at top schools – like the idea that freedom is about “free markets” that harm animals rather than measurable political empowerment for humans which helps animals, or the idea that performative public interest work – in which the performer quietly chooses policies that undo the work on balance, and benefit them – are acceptable.

Seeing this does not require inside knowledge – just ask Midura to report impacts in the context of inequitable growth or run the zer-baseline tests with AI described above. The problem is hidden in plain sight. He won’t see the problem because he assumes it’s acceptable that some children benefit at deadly cost to others through inequitable birth positionality, capital growth unimpeded by the rights of future children, and omissive reporting.

The academics he funds do not speak out because they want the money he controls.

The fix? Anyone can challenge illegal baselining – through things like complaints to states attorneys generals under consumer protection law – because it hurts everyone.

More at:

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fair-start-movement-urges-california-attorney-general-to-recognize-full-justice-standard-as-preemptive-of-fraud-claims-1035104323

and

http://einpresswire.com/article/880223770/africa-led-petition-challenges-global-climate-and-corporate-harm-standards

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, inequity, etc. – he person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline.

Those willing to account for those costs, to legitimate political systems and engage in the most just and effective reforms possible, cannot compete with those who do not, and can simply use money made at inequitable growth-cost to infants and animals to fund omissive modeling and claims that violate a variety of state and federal laws.

Governments are obligated to block illegal baselining, and equity fraud, because their authority derives from having to measurably empower those subject to it.

Some are now taking legal action against the entities Midura funds.

Take Action: Contact Midura – https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-midura-4845a214/ – and ask him to join the Tell the Truth campaign and admit a simple truth and act on it. Inequitable growth and illegal baselining did more to harm animals than he did to protect them, and that he is obligated to change standards.

Background:

What is Fair Start? Legitimate Public Interest Work Can’t Compete Against Illegitimate Charade–Level Work. And It Does Not Have To.

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—the person or company making the claims was using an illegal Ponzi/equity-fraud standard and benefiting at deadly cost to others, mostly children of color.

Those willing to account for those costs, to legitimate political systems and engage in the most just and effective reforms possible, cannot compete with those who do not – but they don’t have to. Those benefiting from particular values must pay the costs, and limit their fundamental entitlements, if we are to ensure governance by the people.

Recent litigation against Coca-Cola revealed a surprising result: A business model that illegally discounts and disenfranchises future lives, enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color. How is that possible?

In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders used the prevailing “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity for all. Governments, in the wake of WW2, were supposed to use objective standards to protect the vulnerable. They did the opposite. This blocked the measurable empowerment of each child – the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of being free – and ensured a privatized, commercialized version of freedom, and unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentrations of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment. It allowed those with authority, wealth and other entitlements to assume them, rather than legitimate them though protective limits on the birth-creation of power relations.

Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and moving goalposts / low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.

Law and justice were meant to eliminate arbitrary measures and outcomes – and yet with equity fraud, these systems start with a random “parental bodily autonomy” birth lottery ensuring inequitable and unsustainable growth that overshot ecological, political, and social thresholds.

Those using the Ponzi/equity-fraud standard are subject to legal and other action to block the use of the standard because all political authority derives from government having to empower those subject to its authority. Documents like constitutions don’t constitute free nations – communications that form empowering relations, including all birth and development, do. Our value assessments and impact reporting constitute such communications and situate us into a system of protective obligation, or they do not.

Illegal baselining assumes children deserve what they are born with, even as growth degrades their prospects, rather than what rights and political legitimacy require. There’s a false assumption behind most public interest work: That our political obligations are constituted by documents like constitutions instead of being constituted, or not, as children come into the world. Public interest work is performative if it is based on this assumption.

The deadly costs of “separate but equal” reproductive rights, versus “no child is worth more than another” will kill millions: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/

And if it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to systematically enrich white children at deadly and disenfranchising costs to children of color. The largest driver of suffering in the world is the discounting of future life, enabled by a lack of a protective threshold/relations beneath which no child should be born, achieved through “legitimations” – funded collective family planning, entitlements to ensure equal opportunity, and parenting delay and assured readiness.

Will courts go along? Given that their authority derives from the empowerment obligation, they should.

There is a huge class of professionals – lawyers, academics, fundraisers, politicians, reporters/editors, etc. – funded by the wealth created through birth inequity. That wealth, more than the objective values that underlie public interest work, determine outcomes.

Relative to a zero-baseline in which people are actually empowered to control outcomes in the political system that impacts them, most public interest work after 1948 (when nations were meant to institute human rights universally) amounted to window-dressing to hide Ponzi, growth-based wealth.

They benefit from this high-stakes birth-lottery system, free-ride triple-dipping on birth positionality and omitting the impacts of inequitable growth from the fantasy world of value and impact they create.

The triple-dipping involves the:

– privileges of birth (nationality, race, generational, etc.),

– growth income unimpeded for decades by equity and empowerment-based reproductive rights, and

– charade public-interest heroism that omits countervailing impacts of growth.

Out them with one question: Your value and impact is relative to what? The answer will not be relative to illegitimacy: one person, one equal and influential vote:

https://fairstartmovement.org/what-is-birth-equity-and-why-cant-we-be-free-without-it/

Those maintaining and benefitting from the illegitimacy – the lack of a protective check on the birth-creation of power relations. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in climate-crisis heat waves caused by the wealth bubble they helped create. They accept a growth arc based on entitlements that contradict their own values, assuming as permissible high levels of harm in a list of variables (this claimant takes credit for “saving animals” for decades), rather than zeroing out the harm – an assumption that quintuple or more discounts the harm caused by birth inequity.

In the context of animal liberation, the macro framework is disfavored by funders because while food law and even criminal law reforms can ensure good media that support existing entitlements and investments, the family law and other reforms that the macro entails pose potential preemptive liability for value assessments and impact reporting around micro, downstream-level interventions undone by macro, upstream-level forces that illegally enriched some at deadly cost to others.

Under our lead counsel, Esther Afolaranmi, the TruthAlliance.org and Fair Start Movement will run a Tell the Truth and Commit (TTTC) campaign backed by legal, grassroots and corporate certification efforts that divides binarily between those who admit use of the standard and commit to changing it, and scammers who do not and instead engage in hypocritical babble and value-signaling devoid of legitimating obligations—many of whom have used the standard for decades. The focus is not on the claims, but the numbers behind the claims.

We admit: We were part of a system of unsustainable birth inequity that did more harm to our own values than we did to further them, and we owe the victims compensation. We admit we omitted key facts, and back universally applicable injunctions against doing so as a matter of ensuring political legitimacy.

The TTTC campaign leverages the costs of tens of millions of deaths from equity fraud to enjoin the use of the standard as unfair competition inside key public and private institutions in the U.S. and Europe. These institutions are using it to assume entitlements rather than legitimate them, and to pursue growth that slowly dilutes and commercializes the average level of political influence. Some of the institutions actually participated in the creation of the standard and constantly framed their public interest work as charity or investment, rather than the obligation of deriving entitlements from the measurable empowerment of others.

The injunction would limit entitlements and other benefits by the true or objective costs to others, based on things we all value—like safe temperatures, equality of opportunity, and limits on who has control over what we experience. TTTC is a truth and reconciliation process involving universal admission of our having benefited deadly costs to others based on equity fraud.

March 9, 2026
The Ecocide We See in the World Today Was Ensured Through Decades of Public Interest Fraud: The Case of Carney Anne Nasser

Those claiming to prevent such threats – especially lawyers – used a deceptive system of moving goalposts to constantly assess progress and raise funding. But relative to the fixed standard – child/political equity – that was necessary to actually prevent the threats, the progress was being undone daily by inequitable growth – growth that benefited those lawyers and the funders backing them. In the case of those tasked with and claiming to protect animals, their work is the most easily falsifiable – dealing with the most vulnerable class of entities and the legitimacy of the system they use.

A close examination shows a cadre of lawyers creating the illusion of legitimacy for their own benefit at deadly cost to the animals they claimed to benefit, and many vulnerable humans as well.

Are you getting scammed by people claiming to do public interest work?

As an animal protection attorney I was paid for decades by wealthy foundations to create a fantasy world of progress for animals and the environment that was being easily undone, every day, by inequitable growth. That growth did more to more harm to animals than we did good, and because it was inequitable, it enriched mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color.

That’s fraud by omission, or illegal baselining. And now some are calling it out.

I was not alone.

Attorneys like Carney Anne Nasser intentionally omitted information, for well over a decade, about the actual impacts of her work – especially in her role defining what “animal law” means as a Fellow at Harvard.

People like Nasser got paid to play the hero. But it was an illusion. On balance, Nasser did more to privilege her children, at cost to others, than help animals. Even as the climate crisis exacerbated conditions for animals and the most vulnerable, and growth killed off vastly more wildlife than humans could save, Nasser fronted as constantly protecting animals – moving the goalposts each time away from a standard that would have actually protected them in order to falsely claim victory.

Nasser, instead of dealing with animal rights in the context of the subject-level relations of reproductive rights, chose to silo the issue away from birth equity in order to triple-dip: 1) benefit from her arbitrary but very privileged national/racial/class birth positionality, 2) benefit from growth-based wealth unimpeded by the rights of future children, and 3) pretend to be an animal savior while ensuring a comfortable life for her and her children at cost to animals.

Why is that so bad? If we are to be free we have to be measurably self-determining, rather than determining of others – through things like wealth-based ecocide killing infants in the Sahel. And that first gets determined in reproductive rights policies that determine who we should be.

One can easily see this by assessing her quotes on impact in the context of growth, growth that is based on the anthropocentric and “separate but equal” reproductive rights system / baseline that creates commercialized and disenfranchising relations, rather than the legitimate fundamental baseline of “no child is worth more than another / one person, one equal and influential vote” that underlies legitimacy. Even simple AI systems can detect this, and it manifests as manufactured numbers in her claims, where the on-balance benefit to animals is easily undone by assumptions and policies – like high permissible levels of climate emissions and a commercialized and disenfranchising conception of human freedom – that undo the benefit claimed.

More specifically, Nasser helped cement the nonsensical concept of anthropocentric animal law: Animal law as the current legal system’s reference to animals, with no need to fundamentally change how we form human/animal relations to actually / on balance protect animals. But 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.

Why? Inverting preemptive power from documents like constitutions to collective family planning discourses – to account for the actual creation of power relations and the lives animals will experience – nullifies all of the assumed and unlegitimated authorities and entitlements Nasser relies on to live well while others suffer.

Her work was a charade hiding wealth made at cost to the things she claimed to value. It did more to hide climate harm and other liabilities than benefit animals.

Even after multiple conversations with Fair Start activists Nasser insisted on excluding birth inequity impacts from her work – even though they are the largest driver of animal suffering. But it went beyond that – Nasser intentionally ignored obvious evidence legal system she was using was itself becoming increasing illegitimate as the average person was disenfranchised – and she chose to ignore it, currying favor with funders whose wealth was built on that illegitimacy.

Honest lawyers will derive legal systems back to and condition them on the empowerment of those subject to them – not assume entitlements to the wealth that funds them.

That deriving is the macro, upstream form of animal rights that makes micro, downstream interventions actually – or on balance – effective.

And the Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global are now pushing back on performative public interest work.

The Tell the Truth campaign allows us to admit that choosing inequitable growth policies that treat children of color as deserving less, and that disenfranchise them, did more harm to our proclaimed values than we did good.

And it let’s us fix that problem by backing a universal injunction against equitywashing, which is fraud by omission about how we assess and report value.

The injunction is based on unfair competition law. Legitimate entities willing to tell the truth about their impacts – to put them in context – and to factor in the costs to ensuring all children are empowered could never compete against funders and advocates who shift their costs to infants and animals – those they claim to protect.

If it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to maintain a business model that enriches white children at deadly cost to children of color. It’s a no-brainer. Whether governments back the injunction raises a key question: Is political authority and the wealth it entitles – it national legitimacy – conditioned on the measurable empowerment of those subject to those things?

Who knew that benefits in a political system should be geared to paying the costs of others being empowered to participate in that system!? This is nutty stuff for those like Nasser.

This shows a horrible thing: In the middle of the polycrisis, wealth could buy and further false ideologies at top schools – like the idea that freedom is about “free markets” that harm animals rather than measurable political empowerment for humans which helps animals, or the idea that performative public interest work – in which the performer quietly chooses policies that undo the work on balance, and benefit them – are acceptable.

Take action: Urge Nasser, at cnasser@law.harvard.edu, to Tell the Truth and admit using an illegal baseline to asses and report her impacts on animals, and to back a legal injunction that would prohibit it.

Also contact leadership at Dillard University – kvazdeville@dillard.edu. where Nasser is employed, to urge the same.

Background:

What is Fair Start? Legitimate Public Interest Work Can’t Compete Against Illegitimate Charade–Level Work. And It Does Not Have To.

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—the person or company making the claims was using an illegal Ponzi/equity-fraud standard and benefiting at deadly cost to others, mostly children of color.

Those willing to account for those costs, to legitimate political systems and engage in the most just and effective reforms possible, cannot compete with those who do not – but they don’t have to. Those benefiting from particular values must pay the costs, and limit their fundamental entitlements, if we are to ensure governance by the people.

Recent litigation against Coca-Cola revealed a surprising result: A business model that illegally discounts and disenfranchises future lives, enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color. How is that possible?

In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders used the prevailing “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity for all. Governments, in the wake of WW2, were supposed to use objective standards to protect the vulnerable. They did the opposite. This blocked the measurable empowerment of each child – the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of being free – and ensured a privatized, commercialized version of freedom, and unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentrations of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment. It allowed those with authority, wealth and other entitlements to assume them, rather than legitimate them though protective limits on the birth-creation of power relations.

Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and moving goalposts / low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.

Law and justice were meant to eliminate arbitrary measures and outcomes – and yet with equity fraud, these systems start with a random “parental bodily autonomy” birth lottery ensuring inequitable and unsustainable growth that overshot ecological, political, and social thresholds.

Those using the Ponzi/equity-fraud standard are subject to legal and other action to block the use of the standard because all political authority derives from government having to empower those subject to its authority. Documents like constitutions don’t constitute free nations – communications that form empowering relations, including all birth and development, do. Our value assessments and impact reporting constitute such communications and situate us into a system of protective obligation, or they do not.

Illegal baselining assumes children deserve what they are born with, even as growth degrades their prospects, rather than what rights and political legitimacy require. There’s a false assumption behind most public interest work: That our political obligations are constituted by documents like constitutions instead of being constituted, or not, as children come into the world. Public interest work is performative if it is based on this assumption.

The deadly costs of “separate but equal” reproductive rights, versus “no child is worth more than another” will kill millions: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/

And if it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to systematically enrich white children at deadly and disenfranchising costs to children of color. The largest driver of suffering in the world is the discounting of future life, enabled by a lack of a protective threshold/relations beneath which no child should be born, achieved through “legitimations” – funded collective family planning, entitlements to ensure equal opportunity, and parenting delay and assured readiness.

Will courts go along? Given that their authority derives from the empowerment obligation, they should.

There is a huge class of professionals – lawyers, academics, fundraisers, politicians, reporters/editors, etc. – funded by the wealth created through birth inequity. That wealth, more than the objective values that underlie public interest work, determine outcomes.

Relative to a zero-baseline in which people are actually empowered to control outcomes in the political system that impacts them, most public interest work after 1948 (when nations were meant to institute human rights universally) amounted to window-dressing to hide Ponzi, growth-based wealth.

They benefit from this high-stakes birth-lottery system, free-ride triple-dipping on birth positionality and omitting the impacts of inequitable growth from the fantasy world of value and impact they create.

The triple-dipping involves the:

– privileges of birth (nationality, race, generational, etc.),

– growth income unimpeded for decades by equity and empowerment-based reproductive rights, and

– charade public-interest heroism that omits countervailing impacts of growth.

Out them with one question: Your value and impact is relative to what? The answer will not be relative to illegitimacy: one person, one equal and influential vote:

https://fairstartmovement.org/what-is-birth-equity-and-why-cant-we-be-free-without-it/

Those maintaining and benefitting from the illegitimacy – the lack of a protective check on the birth-creation of power relations. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in climate-crisis heat waves caused by the wealth bubble they helped create. They accept a growth arc based on entitlements that contradict their own values, assuming as permissible high levels of harm in a list of variables (this claimant takes credit for “saving animals” for decades), rather than zeroing out the harm – an assumption that quintuple or more discounts the harm caused by birth inequity.

In the context of animal liberation, the macro framework is disfavored by funders because while food law and even criminal law reforms can ensure good media that support existing entitlements and investments, the family law and other reforms that the macro entails pose potential preemptive liability for value assessments and impact reporting around micro, downstream-level interventions undone by macro, upstream-level forces that illegally enriched some at deadly cost to others.

Under our lead counsel, Esther Afolaranmi, the TruthAlliance.org and Fair Start Movement will run a Tell the Truth and Commit (TTTC) campaign backed by legal, grassroots and corporate certification efforts that divides binarily between those who admit use of the standard and commit to changing it, and scammers who do not and instead engage in hypocritical babble and value-signaling devoid of legitimating obligations—many of whom have used the standard for decades. The focus is not on the claims, but the numbers behind the claims.

We admit: We were part of a system of unsustainable birth inequity that did more harm to our own values than we did to further them, and we owe the victims compensation. We admit we omitted key facts, and back universally applicable injunctions against doing so as a matter of political legitimacy

The TTTC campaign leverages the costs of tens of millions of deaths from equity fraud to enjoin the use of the standard as unfair competition inside key public and private institutions in the U.S. and Europe. These institutions are using it to assume entitlements rather than legitimate them, and to pursue growth that slowly dilutes and commercializes the average level of political influence. Some of the institutions actually participated in the creation of the standard and constantly framed their public interest work as charity or investment, rather than the obligation of deriving entitlements from the measurable empowerment of others.

The injunction would limit entitlements and other benefits by the true or objective costs to others, based on things we all value—like safe temperatures, equality of opportunity, and limits on who has control over what we experience. TTTC is a truth and reconciliation process involving universal admission of our having benefited deadly costs to others based on equity fraud.

March 8, 2026
What is Fair Start? Legitimate Public Interest Work Can’t Compete Against Illegitimate Charade–Level Work. And It Does Not Have To.

What is Fair Start? Legitimate Public Interest Work Can’t Compete Against Illegitimate Charade–Level Work. And It Does Not Have To.

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—the person or company making the claims was using an illegal Ponzi/equity-fraud standard and benefiting at deadly cost to others, mostly children of color.

Those willing to account for those costs, to legitimate political systems and engage in the most just and effective reforms possible, cannot compete with those who do not – but they don’t have to. Those benefiting from particular values must pay the costs, and limit their fundamental entitlements, if we are to ensure governance by the people.

Recent litigation against Coca-Cola revealed a surprising result: A business model that illegally discounts and disenfranchises future lives, enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color. How is that possible?

In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders used the prevailing “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity for all. Governments, in the wake of WW2, were supposed to use objective standards to protect the vulnerable. They did the opposite. This blocked the measurable empowerment of each child – the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of being free – and ensured a privatized, commercialized version of freedom, and unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentrations of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment. It allowed those with authority, wealth and other entitlements to assume them, rather than legitimate them though protective limits on the birth-creation of power relations.

Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and moving goalposts / low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.

Law and justice were meant to eliminate arbitrary measures and outcomes – and yet with equity fraud, these systems start with a random “parental bodily autonomy” birth lottery ensuring inequitable and unsustainable growth that overshot ecological, political, and social thresholds.

Those using the Ponzi/equity-fraud standard are subject to legal and other action to block the use of the standard because all political authority derives from government having to empower those subject to its authority. Documents like constitutions don’t constitute free nations – communications that form empowering relations, including all birth and development, do. Our value assessments and impact reporting constitute such communications and situate us into a system of protective obligation, or they do not.

Illegal baselining assumes children deserve what they are born with, even as growth degrades their prospects, rather than what rights and political legitimacy require. There’s a false assumption behind most public interest work: That our political obligations are constituted by documents like constitutions instead of being constituted, or not, as children come into the world. Public interest work is performative if it is based on this assumption.

The deadly costs of “separate but equal” reproductive rights, versus “no child is worth more than another” will kill millions: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/

And if it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to systematically enrich white children at deadly and disenfranchising costs to children of color. The largest driver of suffering in the world is the discounting of future life, enabled by a lack of a protective threshold/relations beneath which no child should be born, achieved through “legitimations” – funded collective family planning, entitlements to ensure equal opportunity, and parenting delay and assured readiness.

Will courts go along? Given that their authority derives from the empowerment obligation, they should.

There is a huge class of professionals – lawyers, academics, fundraisers, politicians, reporters/editors, etc. – funded by the wealth created through birth inequity. That wealth, more than the objective values that underlie public interest work, determine outcomes.

Relative to a zero-baseline in which people are actually empowered to control outcomes in the political system that impacts them, most public interest work after 1948 (when nations were meant to institute human rights universally) amounted to window-dressing to hide Ponzi, growth-based wealth.

They benefit from this high-stakes birth-lottery system, free-ride triple-dipping on birth positionality and omitting the impacts of inequitable growth from the fantasy world of value and impact they create.

The triple-dipping involves the:

– privileges of birth (nationality, race, generational, etc.),

– growth income unimpeded for decades by equity and empowerment-based reproductive rights, and

– charade public-interest heroism that omits countervailing impacts of growth.

Out them with one question: Your value and impact is relative to what? The answer will not be relative to illegitimacy: one person, one equal and influential vote:

https://fairstartmovement.org/what-is-birth-equity-and-why-cant-we-be-free-without-it/

Those maintaining and benefitting from the illegitimacy – the lack of a protective check on the birth-creation of power relations. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in climate-crisis heat waves caused by the wealth bubble they helped create. They accept a growth arc based on entitlements that contradict their own values, assuming as permissible high levels of harm in a list of variables (this claimant takes credit for “saving animals” for decades), rather than zeroing out the harm – an assumption that quintuple or more discounts the harm caused by birth inequity.

In the context of animal liberation, the macro framework is disfavored by funders because while food law and even criminal law reforms can ensure good media that support existing entitlements and investments, the family law and other reforms that the macro entails pose potential preemptive liability for value assessments and impact reporting around micro, downstream-level interventions undone by macro, upstream-level forces that illegally enriched some at deadly cost to others.

Under our lead counsel, Esther Afolaranmi, the TruthAlliance.org and Fair Start Movement will run a Tell the Truth and Commit (TTTC) campaign backed by legal, grassroots and corporate certification efforts that divides binarily between those who admit use of the standard and commit to changing it, and scammers who do not and instead engage in hypocritical babble and value-signaling devoid of legitimating obligations—many of whom have used the standard for decades. The focus is not on the claims, but the numbers behind the claims.

We admit: We were part of a system of unsustainable birth inequity that did more harm to our own values than we did to further them, and we owe the victims compensation. We admit we omitted key facts, and back universally applicable injunctions against doing so as a matter of political legitimacy

The TTTC campaign leverages the costs of tens of millions of deaths from equity fraud to enjoin the use of the standard as unfair competition inside key public and private institutions in the U.S. and Europe. These institutions are using it to assume entitlements rather than legitimate them, and to pursue growth that slowly dilutes and commercializes the average level of political influence. Some of the institutions actually participated in the creation of the standard and constantly framed their public interest work as charity or investment, rather than the obligation of deriving entitlements from the measurable empowerment of others.

The injunction would limit entitlements and other benefits by the true or objective costs to others, based on things we all value—like safe temperatures, equality of opportunity, and limits on who has control over what we experience. TTTC is a truth and reconciliation process involving universal admission of our having benefited deadly costs to others based on equity fraud.

February 11, 2026
Zahara Nabakooza Speaks Up: Truth, Power, and Justice

White supremacy is built on a false belief: that some people are naturally superior to others because of race. Throughout history, this belief has shaped how “truth” is told. Facts have been distorted, voices silenced, and stories rewritten to justify inequality. Understanding this is not about blame; it is about honesty, healing, and building a more just and human world.

How Truth Has Been Distorted

Silenced Voices

For generations, the stories, achievements, and lived experiences of Black people and other marginalized communities were ignored, erased, or rewritten. When only one version of history is told, truth becomes incomplete. Real truth includes everyone.

When Lies Disguised Themselves as Science

False ideas about race were once presented as “science” to justify slavery, colonialism, and segregation. These ideas were never truth; they were tools of control. Yet they shaped laws, institutions, and attitudes that harmed generations.

Controlled Information

Education, media, and political systems shape how people understand the world. When these systems carry bias, they can normalize inequality and hide injustice. Over time, repeated narratives can feel like truth, even when they are not.

Blaming the Oppressed

Inequality is often explained as personal failure rather than the result of historical and structural barriers. Poverty, exclusion, and limited opportunity are blamed on individuals instead of systems that created unfair conditions. This shifts responsibility away from injustice and delays real change.

The Human Cost

Distorted truth has lasting consequences:
Inequality in education, health, wealth, and justice
Loss of dignity, identity, and recognition
Division, mistrust, and social tension
Generations growing up with limited opportunity
Injustice does not only harm those directly affected; it weakens society as a whole.

A Path Toward Justice and Liberation

Liberation is not about replacing one form of dominance with another. It is about building a world where every human being has equal dignity, voice, and opportunity.

Telling the Truth

Healing begins when societies confront history honestly, acknowledge harm, and listen to voices long ignored.

Learning and Critical Thinking

Education that includes diverse histories and challenges stereotypes helps people see beyond myths and recognize our shared humanity.

Building Fair Systems

Justice requires institutions and laws that protect everyone equally and actively resist discrimination.

Creating Real Opportunity

Equity grows when people have fair access to resources and opportunity, so history no longer determines a person’s future.
Letting People Speak for Themselves
Communities must have space to tell their own stories and participate in decisions that shape their lives.

Choosing Solidarity Over Division

Progress happens when people stand together against injustice, recognizing that humanity is shared not divided.

Zahara Nabakooza
Leader Truth Alliance

February 8, 2026
To Those Who Care, and to Those Who Decide: Words of Truth from Hugo Valdes-Vera

To those who care, and to those who decide,

Like many working in environmental and human rights spaces, I long assumed that population, environment, and equity were being addressed through separate but adequate channels. I did not understand until much later that birth equity itself had been systematically excluded from impact frameworks, despite its direct implications for children, ecosystems, & animals.

But…..

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with being an environmentalist without money, without power, and without institutional support. It is the exhaustion of seeing, clearly and constantly, how much could be done—and how little is allowed to happen. It is knowing that solutions exist, that communities are willing, that the science is sound, and yet watching progress stall because it is deemed unprofitable, inconvenient, or misaligned with short-term interests.

Environmentalism, in this context, becomes an act of persistence rather than progress. It is built on unpaid labor, emotional resilience, and the quiet hope that speaking up still matters. Many who care deeply about the planet are left to volunteer their time, fund their own initiatives, and absorb disappointment as a routine cost of conscience. Passion is expected to replace funding. Moral urgency is expected to substitute for real support. And still, we are told to do more.

At the same time, we must confront a deeper injustice that shapes not only environmental outcomes, but the future of humanity itself: the radical inequality of life possibilities for children.

A child’s chances of contributing to a better world are not distributed equally. They are shaped by the neighborhood they are born into, the color of their skin, the social circles that surround them, the quality of their education, and the financial security of their family. Some children grow up with access to mentors, resources, and platforms that amplify their ideas. Others grow up fighting simply to survive—forced to trade curiosity for caution, and long-term dreams for immediate needs.

When children from privileged backgrounds are raised in systems that normalize profit over people, growth over balance, and comfort over responsibility, they absorb these values as facts of life. If they learn—explicitly or implicitly—that wealth requires exploitation, that environmental damage is an acceptable side effect, and that the suffering of other children is simply part of how the world works, then this worldview hardens into normality.

These children will grow up to be the decision-makers of tomorrow: lawmakers, executives, investors, and leaders of multinational corporations. They will direct the systems that shape our planet’s future. And if they have been taught that inequality is natural, that environmental sacrifice zones are unavoidable, and that entire communities can be left behind without consequence, how can we reasonably expect them to imagine a world that works for everyone?

How can we expect them to design policies for a planet they were never taught to share?

Meanwhile, children from underprivileged backgrounds—often the ones most affected by environmental destruction—are systematically excluded from the very spaces where solutions are created. Their insights, born from lived experience, are dismissed. Their potential contributions are lost to cycles of poverty, discrimination, and underinvestment that repeat generation after generation.

This is not just an environmental failure. It is a moral one.

A sustainable future cannot be built by a narrow segment of society making decisions in isolation from those who bear the greatest consequences. A livable planet requires not only clean energy and conservation, but equity, imagination, and empathy—qualities that must be cultivated early, across all backgrounds.

If we want a better world, we must stop treating environmentalism as a luxury hobby and start treating it as a collective responsibility. We must fund it. We must protect it. And we must ensure that children—regardless of race, class, or geography—are given the tools to participate meaningfully in shaping the future.

Because a planet designed only by the privileged will never be a planet that works for everyone.

And because hope, without justice, is not a strategy—it is a delay.

Sincerely,

Someone who knows how much more we could do

February 6, 2026
Six Reasons to Only Support Fundamentally Legitimate Organizations, and How to Tell Who Is Legitimate

Micro, downstream interventions in public interest crises are being undone by macro, upstream growth and birth-based political inequity that involves illegally discounting future lives and hiding liability for the deaths of millions. Illegal baselining enriches some children at the illegal and deadly cost of others. The Tell the Truth Campaign can end it.

1.

Fair Start was established by advocates who identified a fraudulent Ponzi standard embedded in their prior public-interest work. This standard stems from a twentieth-century power grab by wealthy families who privatized family planning to safeguard entitlements and maintain power within a coercive political system that never empowered its subjects. These families, along with political leaders, were legally bound to adhere to a child-rights and equity standard asserting that no child is worth more than another, as outlined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The fundamental measure of value is infant health, wellness, and self-determination—ensuring equal political influence for each individual. Instead, they relied on a prevailing “separate but equal” standard to define reproductive rights and disenfranchise others, leading to the exclusion of birth equity from valuation and reporting systems.

Equity fraud—and the illegal baselining it entails—was embedded decades ago as a “separate but equal” standard in reproductive-rights systems, ensuring inequitable and unsustainable growth. This has resulted in the deaths of millions and is a fundamental cause of the polycrisis. The legitimate standard, which should have been used as early as 1948, treats no child as worth more than another and centers on collective family planning that ensures no child is born beneath a threshold of empowerment.

After World War II, governments and wealthy families were obliged by human-rights regimes to use an objective and protective standard to limit the power humans have over one another. Instead, they chose a subjective and illegitimate standard that allowed exploitation of birth positionality, with no functional protection for the most vulnerable: infants and animals.

Today, women “liberated” by this reproductive-rights regime—and their children—are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse still, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with downstream charade interventions and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable,” designed to enrich their own children at the deadly expense of others.

This was existentially subversive to racial-justice and decolonization efforts, because it constituted wealth and power segregation at the very creation of power relations. What appears to be simple growth is, relative to the correct baseline, qualitative disenfranchisement.

Equity fraud involves using a discounted version of freedom: Measuring levels of harm to vulnerable infants and animals as permissible (as opposed to impermissible, or requiring a zero baseline) because the user wrongly redefines self-determination so that economic growth (benefitting some at illegal and deadly cost to others) offsets the requisite political disenfranchisement to achieve that growth, skewing the baseline for climate damage and other life-saving evaluations in the process.

2.

If an entity claims beneficial public impact, it must be able to account for how it factors in the variable of children entering the world relative to what children’s rights and equity require. If it cannot, its assessment of value and reported impacts may do more harm than good. If one cannot show—after accounting for the costs of ensuring future children are empowered enough to use their political systems to protect themselves from threats like the climate crisis (equal offsets relative to zero, or one person, one equal and influential vote)—then the equity-fraud standard is being used.

The illegal standard relies on manufactured numbers through an XYZ analysis, in which out-of-context claims about value and impact (X) are assessed against the variable of children entering the world during the relevant timeframe (Y) in a way that overshoots and degrades children’s birthright conditions, producing an outcome (Z) different from what is claimed. This standard encourages inaccurate claims of micro-level progress that benefit the claimant while hiding larger macro-level losses driven by growth.

One cannot benefit from a system that brings children into conditions and relations that violate a host of accepted legal standards, including the obligation to treat infants of color as persons deserving political equity. Use of this standard means many public interventions have done more to subjugate people of color than to advance their stated missions.

3.

Fair Start activists have encountered many actors intentionally concealing information that would reveal this fraud—literally skewing the baseline that protects infants and animals—to improve their position within an illegitimate system rather than to legitimate it. These actors engage in value signaling and performative babble, doing many seemingly useful things while “triple-dipping”: benefiting from inequitable birth positionality, growth-based wealth, and charade micro- and downstream public-interest work that hides the upstream macro-level harms from which they benefit at deadly cost to others.

The Tell the Truth (TTT) Campaign is a yes-or-no, fact-checking effort that requires admission of the use of the illegal standard and a commitment to replacing it with the equity standard necessary to legitimate national governance. The campaign operates with full transparency, including querying those who once worked with Fair Start but later chose to use the equity-fraud standard to benefit at deadly cost to others.

One can either tell the truth and participate in a discourse of true constitutional—or empowering—obligation, or fall outside its scope and face legal action for subverting racial-justice movements to enrich white children at the deadly expense of children of color.

4.

A legion of professionals refusing to Tell the Truth ensure the white wealth bubble:

Lawyers, who refuse to derive authority from empowerment because they benefit from not doing so.

Academics, many of whom do not account for birth positionality and thus lose neutrality in their work.

Reporters/editors who omit the countervailing impacts of child inequity on the facts/values they report, and cave to incentives to write ad-worthy sensationalism that omits relevant facts around birth equity.

Campaigners, who focus on micro interventions undone by the macro.

Paid fundraisers, who take a cut from working downstream on a problem, rather than solving it.

They create a fantasy world of legitimacy and social justice progress with performative, micro-level and downstream interventions easily undone by inequitable, disenfranchising, and upstream growth.

5.

Our thesis is that:

A. Admitting use of a system in which wealth created through decades of violating children’s birthrights determines public-interest outcomes instead of objective values, and

B. Through the admissive language itself

C. Inverts obligations away from those in governance and toward future generations.

6.

TTT is supported by legal, certification, and grassroots efforts within Fair Start and Truth Alliance. Legitimacy is about obligation, and all work either reflects or fails to reflect that basic value.

Entities that address birth inequity and truly—on balance—benefit animals cannot compete with entities that use a birth-inequity-based growth standard to quietly convert the values they claim to promote (such as wildlife protection) into wealth—wealth that elevates their voices above others. But because this practice is illegal, it can be blocked.

Anyone can require governments to block use of the equity-fraud standard—often through an unfair-competition-law and legitimacy injunction—because governmental authority, including the power to entitle wealth and property, derives from a preemptive obligation to measurably empower those subject to that authority. It is illegal to refuse to hire people based on race. Yet it has been treated as legal to use a standard that enriches some—mostly white children—at deadly climatological and birth-inequity costs to millions of children of color.

January 30, 2026
Urge Peter Singer to Tell the Truth. His Work for Animals Failed Because It Was Based on the Equity Fraud Standard.

Urge Peter Singer to Tell the Truth

Fair Start is Working to End the Corrupt Public Interest Charade That Created Trump With a Yes-or-No Campaign on How We Measure Impact.

Micro, Downstream Interventions Are Being Undone by Macro, Upstream Growth and Birth-Based Political Inequity, Illegally Discounting Future Lives and Creating Liability for the Deaths of Millions.

Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global offer the most just and effective social justice reforms possible today—but only if we ask the right question to understand why. When someone makes a value assessment or impact claim, we must ask: relative to what? What is the baseline?

If someone claims a beneficial public impact, they should be able to account for how they factor in the variable of children entering the world, relative to what children’s rights and equity require. If they cannot, their value assessments and impact reporting may do more harm than good.

Fair Start was established by advocates who recognized a fraudulent Ponzi standard embedded in prior public-interest work.

Animal law provides a key starting point. It is both aspirational and a stark example of winner-take-all philanthropy. In the 1970s, Peter Singer advanced an illegal and fraudulent standard at the Animal Legal Defense Fund that narrowly defined animal liberation. Over five decades, that standard facilitated wealth concentration that now underwrites his Effective Altruism movement.

Singer continues today with a charade version of animal liberation, working with groups like Direct Action Everywhere while obscuring the political-equity and impact fraud that produced the current polycrisis. Claimed impacts collapse when assessed against an objective, preemptive standard.

This standard stems from a twentieth-century power grab by wealthy families who privatized family planning to safeguard entitlements and maintain power within a coercive political system that never empowered its subjects.

These families, along with political leaders, were legally bound to adhere to a child-rights and equity standard asserting that no child is worth more than another, as outlined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The fundamental measure of value is infant health, wellness, and self-determination—ensuring equal political influence for each individual.

Instead, they relied on a prevailing “separate but equal” standard to disenfranchise others, excluding birth equity from valuation and reporting systems.

This twentieth-century power grab treated the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy rather than political equity. In doing so, it blocked the empowerment of each child—the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of freedom—and ensured unsustainable, inequitable growth. The result has been extreme concentration of wealth, mass disenfranchisement, and irreparable environmental harm.

Growth is not neutral.

Growth produces political inequity and ultimately illegitimacy. World leaders pushed public interest and social justice into the object position of the sentence, enabling triple extraction—through birth positionality, growth-based profits, and charade-level philanthropy—from a system built on birth inequity.

This has forced us into a position where we benefit at deadly cost to others through increasingly diluted and commercialized versions of our values, making those values inaccessible to future generations. There is no way to prevent this harm other than preventing children from being brought into the world without sufficient resources and political equity. The system ensures children arrive without what they need, and in numbers and power relations that degrade the very conditions required for their survival and freedom.

Today, women “liberated” by this reproductive-rights regime—and their children—are dying in growth-driven heat waves, with no meaningful political influence to protect themselves. Meanwhile, wealthy funders who benefit from inequitable growth masked these harms for decades through downstream, performative interventions and weak standards for terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable,” enriching their own children at deadly cost to others.

This is about equity as empowerment—one’s influential share in one’s democracy. It is the political analogue of equity in a firm. What we have instead is a diluted, growth-and-inequity-commercialized version of freedom: a vote in a shopping mall rather than a town hall. The principle of one person, one equal and influential vote is the basis of national legitimacy. Today, legitimacy would require enough empowerment for future generations to block the climate and political harms we now face—and to reverse their root causes.

The most fundamental obligation is to position future generations, and ourselves with them, in this way. The only means is a constitutional discourse that accounts for these obligations and brings every child into the world above a measurable threshold of empowerment—within conditions and relations that make that empowerment real. Our words situate us in constitutional discourse. There is no such thing as a “private” equity entitlement outside it.

A broad professional class sustains the white-wealth bubble: lawyers who refuse to derive authority from empowerment because they benefit from not doing so; academics who ignore birth positionality and thereby forfeit neutrality; reporters and editors incentivized to produce ad-friendly sensationalism that omits birth-equity facts; campaigners and fundraisers who profit from downstream work rather than structural solutions. Together, they manufacture a fantasy of legitimacy and progress built on micro-level interventions that are easily undone by upstream growth and disenfranchisement.

They profit by blocking the threshold that would protect infants and animals, while pretending their downstream additions are meaningful. In doing so, they convert freedom into wealth through child abuse, disenfranchisement, ecocide, and deadly inequity. They take objective values meant for all and hoard them for themselves.

Fair Start activists watched these groups take extreme measures to hide liability, including reframing the issue as “population” in order to evade equity-based overrides.

The remedy is to confront those using this fraud—beginning with the Tell the Truth campaign—and to pursue state attorneys general complaints to prohibit the hidden, illegal, and highly harmful practices treated as permissible despite violating objective human-rights and democratic limits on power. Legal instruments alone do not constitute obligations. Bringing children into the world in a way that genuinely empowers them does.

There is also a preemptive cause of action for fraud, because governments can redefine what it means to omit information necessary for legitimate political obligation.

The Fair Start Tell the Truth (TTT) campaign is one way to do this.

Long-time animal-liberation advocate Zane McNeill recently highlighted the urgency of resisting current administration efforts to coerce higher birth rates—moves that would undo the benefits of nearly all contemporary social-justice efforts:

Funders Must Support Advocates Fighting Back Against Pronatalism

While opposing pronatalism is essential, it does not by itself address the power imbalance that enables such coercion. Fair Start reforms—including the Tell the Truth campaign, which prioritizes measurable #birthequity as a basis for national legitimacy—are the most just and effective path forward. This includes actions such as suing Coke/Fairlife to enjoin equity fraud.

To understand why, we must ask one question of anyone making public-interest impact claims: How are you accounting for children entering the world? What level of democratic empowerment do you require? Are children and animals being discounted and exploited at birth?

The campaign demands a simple admission: we all relied on a system with an embedded baseline error—one that dilutes votes, commercializes democratic relations, and overshoots political, social, and ecological thresholds, rather than enforcing a resourcing threshold beneath which no child should be born. Freedom and self-determination—and national legitimacy—are physically impossible without a shared language that creates measurable empowerment through equitable power relations.

The illegal standard relies on manufactured numbers, often via an XYZ analysis: out-of-context impact claims (X) are assessed against the variable of children entering the world (Y) in ways that degrade birthright conditions, producing outcomes (Z) that contradict the claims. This standard rewards micro-level “progress” that benefits the claimant while concealing macro-level losses driven by growth. Interventions conducted under such a system often did more to subjugate people of color than to advance their stated missions.

Our work uses the Tell the Truth campaign to preemptively establish legitimate obligations and to examine why some actors refuse to participate.

Leaders such as Suriya Khan, Gabby Mora, and Breeze Harper are telling the truth. Others, including Paul Shapiro, are not.

This all begins by challenging value and impact claims rooted in an illegal UN-developed standard (1948–1968) that caused the deaths of tens of millions through a colonial system of privatized reproductive rights designed to protect entitlements rather than measurably empower women and children.

This was political-equity fraud. It triggered multi-threshold overshoot and self-reinforcing feedback loops.

Our thesis is that admitting use of this system—and changing course through language itself—reorients obligation from governance toward future generations. The TTT campaign is supported by legal, certification, and grassroots efforts within Fair Start and Truth Alliance. Legitimacy is about obligation, and all our work reflects that value.

TTT is a constitutive discourse, not a document. It rests on individual choices about which models to use within institutions, recognizing that we all benefit at others’ expense. The campaign identifies non-constitutive language and impact reporting that ignores harm to infants and animals, demonstrating the need for systemic change.

To tell the truth is to admit participation in a system of unsustainable growth and inequitable birth positionality—one that has harmed our professed values more than it has advanced them.

There is no conception of freedom that does not require measurable political equity—enough influence to protect oneself from the climate crisis. At this stage of overshoot, liability outweighs charity or investment.

The TTT “legitimacy lever,” as our lead Suriya Khan describes it, redirects responsibility for the global death debt created by the “separate but equal” standard toward concrete demands—beginning in Africa and India—and leverages them through failed UN mechanisms into coordinated legal, corporate, and grassroots action in the U.S. and Europe. The goal is not merely to remove Trump by 2028, but to remove the conditions that produced him: a disembedded, isolated conception of freedom.

Omitting information required for zero-baseline legitimacy in public-impact reporting constitutes illegal unfair competition. Using illegitimate entitlements to oppress infants and animals—backed by state violence—is morally equivalent to violence itself.

Peter Singer and the Obligation to Tell the Truth

Animal law provides a key starting point. It is both aspirational and a stark example of winner-take-all philanthropy. In the 1970s, Peter Singer advanced an illegal and fraudulent standard at the Animal Legal Defense Fund that narrowly defined animal liberation. Over five decades, that standard facilitated wealth concentration that now underwrites Effective Altruism.

Singer continues today with a charade version of animal liberation, working with groups like Direct Action Everywhere while obscuring the political-equity and impact fraud that produced the current polycrisis. Claimed impacts collapse when assessed against an objective, preemptive standard.

True animal protection—subject-level reform—requires accounting for the human-animal relations formed at birth. Instead, animal advocacy focused for decades on downstream spectacle after macro-level property relations were already entrenched. Ending exploitation requires ending those relations, but doing so demands confronting racist birth inequity—the same power imbalance imposed on animals at birth.

Fair Start’s core conclusion is simple: facts are relative to values, and value claims either constitute or deconstitute legitimate political systems. Freedom is impossible without a collective, preemptive discourse that ensures every child is born above an empowerment threshold. The Tell the Truth campaign comes closest to such a discourse. Misrepresentation is equity fraud and subject to preemptive injunction because authority derives from constituting—from telling the truth.

Behavior is driven by fear of ostracism and coercion. The wealthy rely on diluted representation and state power to preserve growth economies. Leaders act as if votes are equal when they are not. In that context, preemptive self-defense—and defense of others—is justified.

Fair Start represents a permanent form of resistance to fundamental oppression, using language to define obligation, legitimacy, and protection. The first laws are those that account for our creation relative to one another and the environment. No one is above the law.

All Fair Start is, is the research conclusion that all facts are relative to values, and value and impact claims either constitute or deconstitute legitimate political systems relative to a legally required ideal of measurable empowerment. It is physically impossible to be free without a preemptive, obligatory, collective discourse of family planning ensuring all children are born above a threshold of empowerment. The Tell the Truth campaign is the closest thing to that discourse. Deconstituting legitimacy through inaccurate statements is equity fraud and subject to preemptive equity injunctions, because authority derives from constituting—from telling the truth.

What really drives behavior? Fear of ostracism and coercion. The wealthy use state violence and the threat of prosecution to control people, but few know the state operates on diluted representation necessary for growth economies that benefit the top. Leaders act as if votes are equal. We have a right to preemptive self-defense, and defense of others, in that context.

Fair Start represents a permanent, ubiquitous, and indefatigable form of resistance to fundamental oppression, using language to identify perpetrators and obligations. It clarifies who belongs in the legitimate linguistic community of obligation,entitlements-to-ensure actual or on-balance values, and protection, and who does not. All laws should be fair.The first laws are laws that account for our creation relative to others and our environment. And no one is above the law

January 24, 2026
Freedom Cannot Be Granted to Equity Fraud
We cannot keep calling something “progress” when it leaves children unsafe, families struggling, and the land exhausted. Freedom and legitimacy should never be given to wealthy individuals or organizations that operate under fake equity standards—standards that ignore how children are born into the world, how families survive day to day, and how the environment that sustains life is treated. Equity is not just about how much money is made. It starts much earlier with safe births, strong families, clean water, healthy land, education, and the protection of children’s lives. When these basics are ignored, the wealth that follows is not neutral. It is built by taking more than is given back.

Today, many powerful actors hide behind numbers that look impressive but tell only part of the story. These numbers leave out family reform, birth equity, and climate impact. This is not accidental. It is a choice. And that choice has consequences especially for children and communities living on the frontlines of environmental and economic harm.

Two Lives, One Broken System

Dickson’s frustration comes from what he sees every day. Children dropping out of school. Families stretched thin. Communities facing drought, pollution, and land pressure. Mothers giving birth in conditions that no one should accept. His concern is not theoretical, it is personal, urgent, and deeply human.

At the same time, Paul Shapiro’s Company is thriving within this same system.

As communities struggle, Shapiro Paul’s meat company has grown. He is now a millionaire. But this success has come at a real cost to families and children in places like Amboseli, where environmental damage, land stress, and the absence of family-centered reforms are rarely counted in profit reports. When wealth grows while children suffer and land is depleted, something is wrong. That is not development. That is equity fraud.

See here more information on Paul Shapiro as an example

What Fake Standards Leave Out

Fake standards make harm invisible. They allow wealth to grow while erasing:
- The conditions children are born into.
- The damage to land, water, and climate that families depend on.
- The absence of family and birth reforms.
- The long-term impact on education, health, and community survival.
When environmental destruction and family breakdown are excluded from “impact,” success becomes a performance. Injustice becomes normal.

Climate justice and family reform cannot be separated. When land is polluted or overused, families lose food, health, and stability. When families are unsupported, children become vulnerable to illness, exploitation, and early death. Ignoring this connection is not neutrality—it is participation in harm.

A Silence That Speaks Loudly

Years ago, we sent a concept note to Paul Shapiro. It focused on seeds for the future, family reform, community equity, environmental responsibility, and protecting children. There was no response. No engagement. No support. Years later, his company is flourishing. Meanwhile, Truth Alliance continues to struggle to raise funds, not because the work lacks value, but because it refuses to lie, inflate numbers, or separate profit from responsibility. Truth is harder to fund than comfort.

A Simple, Necessary Demand

Truth Alliance is not asking for charity. It is boldly asking for honesty and accountability.

We are calling on those who have benefited from broken systems to:
- Acknowledge harm to families, children, and the environment
- Stop hiding behind incomplete or fake standards
- Measure success through climate responsibility, family reform, and child well-being
- Take responsibility for wealth built on silence and extraction
Freedom without accountability is not freedom.
It is exploitation. If equity does not protect children at birth, support families, and care for the land they depend on, then it is not equity at all. And we can no longer pretend otherwise.
January 7, 2026
Fair Start Reforms Protect Children Before It’s Too Late

Fair Start reforms offer the most just and effective way to address many of today’s overlapping crises—but only if public-interest claims are evaluated using the right standard. Anyone claiming positive impact should be asked a basic question: How did your cost-benefit model account for children entering the world, and did it meet what those children’s legal rights, political equity, and national legitimacy require? In most cases, the answer is that it did not. Children are typically treated as economic inputs driving growth, while the ecological, political, and human costs of that growth are ignored or illegally discounted. This produces “free” wealth that depends on worsening conditions – especially for children of color – and contradicts the values advocates claim to hold, such as safety, equality, and sustainability. The result is continued overshoot of ecological and social thresholds that both humans and nonhumans need to survive.

How is such contradiction possible?

Between 1948 and 1968 world leaders effectively subverted the ongoing decolonial and racial justice movements with a human rights regime premised on a fraudulent standard: Autonomy or self-determination without the necessary condition of measurable political equity or empowerment. That fallacy fundamentally operates through an arbitrary and floating baseline present in almost all private and public cost/benefit modeling that illegally discounts future lives, and a universal but illegitimate reproductive rights regime devoid of children’s rights and political equity standards, which avoids applying limiting values to the birth-creation of power relations, and which has mostly protected long generations and growing concentrations of wealth.

The standard treated children, and thus future generations, as means rather than ends, and it ignored that persons not documents constitute nations, and almost inevitably through collective family planning efforts that ensure a minimum threshold of empowerment for all children. That threshold – a real border to replace the fictitious ones nations use today – enables consensual governance, avoiding each person’s loss of self-determination to the billions of others occupying and changing the planet. The real border makes consent possible.

The following is a complete restatement of the official press release by Gregg D. Shore, First Assistant District Attorney, Bucks County, PA.

In what the judge called “one of the most horrific examples of child abuse that I’ve ever seen,” a Tullytown couple were sentenced this afternoon to 10 to 21 years in state prison for violently abusing their twin, infant daughters. Melissa Shales, 26, inflicted multiple broken bones on both infants by the time they were 2 months old. Now 17 months, the girls only recently began to walk, and still need physical therapy. Michael Shales, 31, failed to seek medical care for those injuries and badly tore the throat of one girl with a pair of pliers when he was high on heroin. That girl remains on a feeding tube. “Their two months of life with their parents was torture,” Deputy District Attorney Chelsey D. Jackman said. “Nothing short of torture.” Bucks County Common Pleas Court Judge Raymond F. McHugh concurred with that assessment. “I believe that both of these parents tortured their children,” McHugh said. “I don’t know which is worse: to injure a child, or to fail to get a child treatment.” Both defendants pleaded guilty on May 22 to charges of aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children.

McHugh sentenced each to serve seven to 14 years for the assault charges, plus a consecutive three to seven years for child endangerment. Police were called to the Shales’ squalid, trash-strewn apartment on March 21, 2016, where officers found the infants malnourished and injured. Melissa Shales told police that one of the twins was having trouble breathing. The child had a throat injury inflicted earlier in the day when Michael Shales had used pliers to retrieve a piece of gauze lodged there. Police found the baby pale and gurgling, her breathing shallow. The apartment, meanwhile, was strewn with dirty clothes, toys, sharp tools, soiled diapers and dirty dishes, along with drug paraphernalia and unspent bullets left within the reach of the babies and their 2-year-old brother. Michael Shales had begun the day by purchasing $120 worth of heroin in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. When he returned, Melissa Shales became so enraged that she threw the baby she had been bottle-feeding into the aluminum rails of a nearby daybed and stormed out. Michael Shales then injected the heroin he had bought before trying to wipe the inside of the injured baby’s mouth with a piece of gauze. When the gauze became lodged in her throat, he tried to retrieve it with his fingers before using a pair of pliers, puncturing the back of her throat and esophagus in the process. Police were not summoned to help the infant until after 10 o’clock that night. The baby’s injuries required her to be intubated to breathe and for a feeding tube to be inserted for nourishment. The child also was found to have a fractured femur, rib and tibia, neck injuries consistent with shaken-baby syndrome, and cuts and bruises to her vagina.

The couple admitted having left her in soiled diapers for hours at a time. About one week before police intervened, Melissa Shales had grabbed the same baby’s leg while bathing her and heard a pop. Over several days, both parents tried repeatedly to pop and twist the leg back into place, possibly worsening the injury, Jackman said. Neither parent called or visited a doctor, and by the time police were summoned the child’s leg had swollen to the size of a 1-year-old’s leg. Melissa Shales also admitted to having thrown the same baby forcefully into her swing after becoming angry with her husband on March 20, 2016. The baby landed hard on her left side, and appeared to be favoring that side afterward. Michael Shales witnessed the assault but, again, neither parent sought medical attention. The baby’s twin sister also was found to have two fractures to her leg, and was hospitalized on March 22, 2016. Experts at St. Christopher’s Hospital attributed the breaks to non-accidental trauma, likely caused by pulling, shaking or twisting the child. Melissa Shales admitted to police that she had picked up the infant by her onesie and placed her down hard in the past. Both children were malnourished, having gained only two pounds each in their first two months of life, Jackman said. In a statement to police, Melissa Shales said she had injured the babies “to get back at Michael, to show him how mad he makes her.”

In court today, Melissa Shales said had she worked 40 hours per week for minimum wage while her husband stayed home and spent their money on guns and drugs. She accused him of abusive, threatening behavior toward her. Melissa Shales also blamed her behavior on her use of methamphetamine. She said she began using the drug after the twins were born at the behest of her husband, who “told me that sex would be better” on meth. She said she “was too afraid of him” to challenge Michael Shales’ own drug abuse. “What I did to my kids was and is unacceptable,” she said. “From here on out, I wouldn’t blame my kids if they never wanted to see or hear from me again.” Michael Shales told a much different story. Addicted to opioids since 17, when he suffered severe spleen and back injuries in a criminal assault, he said the injuries and his addiction limited his ability to work. His attorney, Paul Lang, told McHugh that Melissa Shales had been physically abusive to her husband, and was trying to “deflect” blame for her violence onto him. “Words cannot express the pain and sorrow that I have built up in my heart,” Michael Shales said. “I regret my actions, and long for the opportunity to rectify my actions.” The girl who suffered the most broken bones and the punctured throat “was treated as a rag doll by the two people who are supposed to protect her against any kind of harm,” Jackman argued.

Michael Shales, she said, “sat there and watched” his wife abuse the child, failing to intervene each time the baby cried out in pain. “Those cries went unanswered,” she told McHugh. “I’m asking Your Honor to answer those cries today, and to see that justice is served.” Family members of both defendants testified that both were brought up in good homes, a fact that McHugh said made their crimes even worse. The judge added that heroin addiction may explain theft and other property crimes, but not violence inflicted on one’s own children. “It’s horrific,” the judge said. “It shakes my faith in human beings.” The case was investigated by Tullytown Police Sgt. Phillip D. Kulan and Bucks County Detective Jack Slattery, and prosecuted by Deputy District Attorneys Chelsey D. Jackman and Monica W. Furber. Contact: Chelsey D. Jackman, 215.348.6016, cdjackman@buckscounty.org Approved for release by Gregg D. Shore, First Assistant District Attorney.

Sourced via CRIMEWATCH®: https://bucks.crimewatchpa.com/da/29567/post/couple-get-10-21-years-torture-twin-infant-daughters

December 30, 2025