“Climate change doesn’t affect everyone equally, it hits the poorest children and communities hardest, deepening the inequalities they already face.”
The exponential growth enabled by birth and political inequity, the absence of any protective floor for children in reproductive rights regimes, did more to harm animals than any animal protection group has done to help them.
Many animals charities assess the value they add to the world, and report beneficial impact, but relative to what standard?
Most are using the same fraudulent standard of quietly disenchanting persons of color – and undoing value, on balance – that caused the climate and inequity crises today killing millions. This is the 20th century child-inequity standard that caused the climate crisis, and subverted racial justice movements. The standard removes political equity from reproductive rights and replaces it with manufactured numbers, like high pollution thresholds and diluted representative ratios that undermine democracy. This assessment and reporting standard is fundamentally designed to illegally enrich some children at disenfranchising and deadly cost to others – mostly children of color, in violation of a long list of human and animal rights.
This is not theory. Fair Start and Truth Alliance activists have experienced organizations intentionally omitting information that would show their impacts being undone in order to avoid liability – exacerbating the risk to millions.
Under this cost/benefit standard, some get the benefits of a coercive legal system without having to pay the costs of actually empowering those subject to it. Use of this #equifraud standard hides the fact that value and impact claims and micro-level interventions taken of context, were being undone everyday by the more macro forces that have destroyed our ecologies, democracies, and freedoms. Use of that standard shifted the true costs of wealth onto infants and animals did exponentially more harm – resulting in the deaths of millions as the climate crisis accelerates, measured by values we all share – than any of us did good. There is no set of values that doesn’t begin with infant health/equity, and no legal system could actually protects animals without first accounting for the creation of their disparate power relations with humans.
The solution to the equifraud?
No one should start their work with injustice – start with empowerment-based obligation. The solution involves treating political equity and empowerment of all as the preemptive standard for legal systems including corporate civil rights obligations, and use fact-checking, whistleblower platforms, and legal injunctions to prohibit use of the political inequity standard. There are many other tactics as well.
Free people will always need to legitimize the power – ecological, social, and economic – others have over them, power that starts as children enter the world, and avoid a fraudulent and illegal standard that exploits children as they enter the world by removing any minimum threshold of empowerment and protection rather than paying legitimations that offset the costs of wealth.
Take Action: Before you give to any charity claiming to help animals, ask how they account for child inequity and the growth in enables.
Take Action: Join and back charities that are part of the Truth Alliance, and entity designed to block equity and impact fraud.
Take Action: Organize Truth Alliance work in your state, and urge state officials to do their job and recognize measurable political equity as the correct standard for legitimacy, and to derive and condition their authority on empowering their constituents.