Video from surveillance cameras that monitored the large closet where the boys were kept naked and starving in horrific conditions did not tell the entire story of their suffering, the judge said.
That means more animal suffering and dying in factory farms, and more companion animals suffering than ever before.
TAKE ACTION: The fundamental driver of all child and animal abuse is an outdated system of family laws that prevent parents from being ready before they have kids, and encourages large families even in the face of environmental disaster.
The basic rule for having kids should be to be ready, and not have too many.
Will you assist us in taking action to demand the Secretary General of the United Nations admit that his authority derives from empowering those he claims to represent, and that without prioritizing Fair Start as the first human right, he has no authority? Fairness comes first. The Secretary General is the highest symbol of representative government, and if he makes clear the need for Fair Start reforms, change will follow.
The Secretary General should start by admitting that he benefited from an equitywashing system that illegally violated children’s birthrights and did more harm to the UN’s values, goals, and impacts than he did to further them. By doing so, he can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others, hiding harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels.
The standard has been used by many of the public interest entities claiming to oppose destructive industries, entities that like those industries can show no capacity to actually constitute a just future through empowering relations.
We can ask the Secretary Genral: How were you accounting for your work being undone, each day, by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back, and condition it on, ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems, decades ago, to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation.
More here: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fair-start-movement-urges-california-attorney-general-to-recognize-full-justice-standard-as-preemptive-of-fraud-claims-1035104323
We are now submitting this with a request to the California Attorney General to intervene in the litigation, using the standard we have identified.
The standard is designed to assess and report values and impacts out of context. It is the single largest driver of the harms we see in the case, and it begins with zero functional protections for the most vulnerable. That’s illegal.
Coke/Fairlife should start fixing this by admitting that they benefitted from an equitywashing system, that through inequitable growth, illegally violated children’s birthright to political equity, and did more harm to their advertised values and impacts than they did to further them. By doing so, the companies can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others.
That anthrocentric and unsustainable standard is the largest single variable causing the harm, and it hides harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels. It hides the fact that we have a moral and legal duty to move Coke’s extreme wealth, made at illegal and deadly climatological and other costs to children, or suffer the consequences of continuing to let those kids die.
We can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis to evade liability for it — that’s fraud.
Equity is a state of empowerment to allow us to accurately and fairly determine what is “green” and “humane.
The standard has been used by many of the public interest entities claiming to oppose destructive industries like animal agriculture, entities that, like those industries, use performative interventions that do more to protect generational wealth for their biggest funders than to accomplish their missions.
Many start their work by discounting the lives of future animals and infants, in contravention of their stated causes. Many animal rights and law organizations have challenged the idea that animals are property at a micro and mostly performative level, but their acceptance of it at a macro level has done way more harm to animals than they have done good, given the way their out-of-context impact and values claims have for decades hidden this larger issue.
The standard ensures inequitable and unsustainable growth, violation of children’s birthrights, and the denial of the ecological, social, and political thresholds children need to thrive. This has done more harm to our values than any of us have done to further them, and hiding that is fraud, or benefitting at deadly and illegal costs by omitting the daily undoing of the value we claim to create.
This is especially so because the growth treats children of color as deserving exponentially fewer resources and more risk, including the violence inherent in unrepresentative government. This is the subversion of racial justice by whites who freeride on their illegal birth positionality, using their wealth to control people’s perception of truth and value. All authority to govern and to own wealth derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons in the political system, with one person/one influential vote. But by 1968, governments had taken equity out of reproductive rights systems so that this crucial, physical inclusion never occurred. Rather, the doctrine of separate but equal was maintained at an existential level. The exploitation of children for economic growth became the standard, and freedom was taken out of context.
Doing so undercuts true obligations to others and ensures violence by making representative governance impossible.
We can ask Coke/Fairlife, the charities they back, as well as the charities that engaged for decades in a charade of opposing entities like Coke/Fairlife, the same questions:
How were you accounting for your work being undone each day by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back and condition it on ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
Climate reparations owed by those who used the illegal standard are a form of self-defense, and the obligation to pay them should fall on the adult children of the wealthy until justice is done.
Central to the economics literature on climate change is the Social Cost of Carbon. This is a calculation that attempts to assign a price to the wellbeing lost for every ton of Carbon emitted. It has been shown that these estimates are highly sensitive to the discount rate used to model damages. For example, decreasing the discount rate from 5% to 2.5% often increases the estimated damages by a factor of 5.
Please consider making a contribution here to further the work of Fair Start: Donate.
Together, we can create lasting change to save the next generations.
If you are worried about Trump and Musk as threats to democracy, ask yourself what your company has been doing – at the most basic level of measurably empowering and freeing children as they entered the world – to actually protect democracy.
What in your company’s cost/benefit analysis covered the costs of children only being born into conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, the basis for human rights and democracy? Or did your company, like Trump and Musk, assume those kids were valuable economic inputs in your growth model?
Were you quietly enjoying growth-based investments that exponentially undid climate and animal protection reforms, and enriched those you criticize? Did your company make money on veganfood investments relying on growth, and massive wealth differentials for black and white kids, that did more harm than good?
We don’t get to justice through injustice, and punching down on infants and animals with zero actual birth equity protections.
Hypocritical companies, fake charities and nepotistic foundations that did nothing to ensure fair starts in life for all kids, which means measurable equity or effective shares in one’s democracy, created Trump and Musk at the most basic level.
Take action: If you knew your company, foundation, or charity was making fake impact claims where benefits were being undone by growth that enriched some families at deadly cost to those in vulnerable hot spots around the world, please contact: info@fairstartmovement.org
If we want to protect democracy our companies have to build it through the creation of actual power relations by starting at birth and, in the name of intergenrational justice, targeting key bad actors who lied about impacts while making their money at cost to children and animals. They owe that money because they used fraud and unfair competition, omitting deadly costs in their public impact statements, in order to make it.
We have an obligation to take that wealth back and ensure – through delayed parenting and collective family planning incentives inverse to wealth – that no child is born beneath a line of being empowered.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
Free riding on what one Nobel laureate called the shell game/ponzi scheme of our birth positionality is not climate justice, and doing so does more to protect white wealth than actually save lives.
Cass Sunstein is a highly regarded legal scholar.
But his most recent book on climate justice is based on a critical baseline error, in which he does not account for the harms of one’s arbitrary birth positioning, that he was warned of years ago.
The error results in illegally accrued wealth because it never has to pay the cost of ensuring children’s and animals’ rights in the creation, at birth, of relations. But rights are first step in legitimating a system. The error thus disconnects the system from those values in the physical world – like low greenhouse gas emission levels -the deviation from which through the creation of children cause the harms we see today. This error harms progress towards the ideal of freedom, or self-determination, as one’s capacity to influence the political, economic, and social systems in which one lives, equal to others, relative to a neutral background.
In other words, his call to action is great, but must be oriented from a different base in order to be just.
An initial question: Default obligations while academics debate
Yes, academics can debate this, but why should Cass have the benefit of systems of state violence backing his rights, systems that are also based on that error, while the debates ensue? Why should those least empowered and liberated by birth-positioning respect the rights and the benefits he received from the unsustainable economic growth that was also degrading democracy, or what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme, in such a system, especially if ignoring children’s rights was used as a way to ensure economic growth?
Harvard may platform what are arguable violations of the law to liberate animals on an abstract/micro level, but would it go too far to do so on a macro level, holding Sunstein and his family responsible for their birth positioning in a deadly birth lottery / system of reproductive rights in which animals and future children had no rights and Sunstein and his family won, relative to heat, flood, and malaria-stricken infants in Uganda today, to say nothing of decades from now?
If Sunstein’s argument is based on the fallacy that governments and wealthy entities don’t need to derive and condition their authority and entitlements on measurably empowering children as they enter the world so that governance is consensual, what more would one have to do than defeat that fallacy to change the default for legitimate preemptive action against institutions like Harvard?
And if we assumed each person should have equal capacity to influence their political system, we would arrive at an ideal of how to constitute the future with more collective family planning systems focused on birth equity overriding conflicting norms. That can slowly replace the power relations of the current world—a spectrum where some, like Sunstein, have massive influence and others on the other side of the spectrum—like these families—have little or no influence and await whatever those like Sunstein have planned for them.
We can use the primacy of becoming who we should be to replace a spectrum where some are other-determining of many, towards a future where all are relatively self-determining.
Children have a preemptive right to birth and development conditions that ensure political equity and self-determination, a right necessary to legitimate governance. There is no obligation, on any of us, that precedes this existential right, the one that determines who we are. Complex documents and bodies of impenetrable law do not constitute nations and obligations, even though law professors, whose rarefied positions hinge on that being the case, want us to think so. People constitute nations.
Sunstein ignores that right, choosing to assume governmental authority and the entitlements of many to control extreme wealth without actually deriving it from, and conditioning it on, the measurable empowerment of those from whom authority and entitlements derive: The people.
By ignoring the primcy of the right, Cass engages in nonconstitutive discourse, using omissive language that constitutes free riding the birth positionality of his having won an illegal birth lottery.
If he and his family want justice, will they give access to their air-conditioned homes this summer to those who need it? Their property lines may be better examples of the border between self and other determinaton, or freedom, than national borders. Shall we test justice, in the real world?
Who is more fitting to suffer the costs of the climate crisis—a influential man responsible for the policies over the last several decades, or Black infants who had nothing to do with benefiting from or making the policies that brought us to today?
If Sunstein does not owe infants their birthright to freedom, why do we owe him and his family any obligations? How would he be included in a “we” group among whom obligations are owed? Would such language, relations, and obligations magically flow from a document like a national constitution? Why orient from a default system of public protection where Sunstein gets the benefits of status quo entitlements and authorities without having to legitimate them through radical birth equity reforms?
We can ask Cass, in our Tell the Truth campaign:
Tell us what was going on in terms of children entering the world without what their rights promise them, on each day you said you were engaged in doing justice, keeping in mind the increasing decline of children’s ecologies, in conditions of increasing political disenfranchisement, and as many of those children were without any of the necessary resources to deal with the consequences?
He will have been undoing his claimed work and ignoring the fact that it would be physically impossible to constitute obligation without a shared conception of a value. The campaign is now urging attorneys generals to measure harm to infants, and the growing debt that falls on the wealth Sunstein helped to avoid its true cost, from a zero baseline that captures the full measure of harm and priority for reparative justice.
This is not complex.
Intergenerational justice requires, as a first priority, minimum thresholds beneath which children should not be born, and there are irrefutable reasons a self-determination threshold would override conflicting interests, like the entitlement some claim to the wealth that is needed to fund those threshold. Funding the thresholds – through fertility delay, readiness, and equity – moves us towards relational optimality, who we should be, which comes before what we can then choose to do.
The greatest form of justice in the world today is finding those who benefitted from that and ensuring they suffer the costs of moving their wealth to the victims.
Until he changes to a threshold of empowering children to be self-determining, Sunstein will be using collective pronouns in his sentences that reflect relations which undo his claimed impacts. In the real world of actual relations, Sunstein and Singer are both and have been for decades as exploitative of their birth positionality – racial, generational, national, etc. – as the worst polluters.
Instead, Sunstein should be protecting the most vulnerable from the unsustainable and exploitative growth policies he ignored for decades, costing countless lives. Sunstein’s work in government allowed for what one Nobel laureate saw as a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable—and for many, increasingly deadly—economic growth premised on the illegal discounting of the lives of infants (especially of color), and nonhumans. Sunstein used a left v. right charade to hide the reality of the powerful from above dominating the vulnerable below.
The policies and standard Sunstein uses are illegal because they require violating child welfare, civil rights, environmental, and animal protection laws, including the law of democracy / rule of law, that instead have to be preemptively interpreted to fundamentally derive their legitimacy and content from the measurable empowerment of those subject to those laws.
Instead the policies and standard use arbitrary baselines and metrics to “equitywash,” which blocks accurate damage assessments and reporting, ensuring the daily undoing of value claims and impacts and costing countless lives as a result. There is no universe in which most of the beneficial impacts claimed occurred—they were simply taken out of context, acting more as a charade enabled by the daily birth-violating of children’s rights than change.
The deadly lie: World leaders privatized freedom in the birth-creation of political relations after 1948 by conflating the act of having and not having children under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than treating the former as requiring political equity for the child. This hid the nature of freedom by privatizing the creation of political relations. And it led to the measuring, assessing, and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards meant to take oneself out of one’s birth and development context, ensuring children of color were treated as deserving less and placing them at increased risk.
This was the hiding, linguistically, of birthright white supremacy and massive death debt with a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation, hiding the need for nations to invest equitably in each child just to have basic authority over citizens—to be “representative.” Leaders conflated the two by defining power narrowly as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence, so one would be free to terminate pregnancies without law enforcement blocking you, only to now die in a heat wave because one had no influence over climate policy, and could not afford air conditioning. See https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/
Our benefitting from a system of growth that illegally robs children of birth and development conditions consistent with political equity and their rights has degraded our ecologies and political systems, doing more harm than we are doing good. Sunstein assumes a fundamental system of language, and entitlements, in which children of color receive a fraction of the resources as white children, and exponentially more risk.
Fact: Not deriving and conditioning our obligation to follow the law on its first measurably empowering all through high investments in the birth and development of each child, has done more to harm our freedom, than we have done to further it.
We can’t get to justice, legitimate legal systems and public protection from injustice by others, through the violation of children’s rights—by exploiting others. We can’t constitute a nation without actually obligatory, or constitutional, language that begins with admissions of what we owe children.
Legitimacy and obligation begin with rights, and the birthright of a line of resources, beneath which no child should be born.
The default for political obligation—for following any rules in a society—is measurable inclusion in the political process. If academics are using growth economics to instead commercialize democracy, it’s on them to now offset that by accounting for birth positionality and the benefits and costs of intergenerational, racial, national, and other birth-lottery positions.
Not doing so is tantamount to using violence to defend the owners of a shopping mall, who inherited it, against the impoverished persons squatting and shoplifting there by making the latter think they are really in a democratic town hall and were part of the process of choosing all of the entitlements and rules to which they are now subject.
Take Action
Urge Sunstein’s daughter, who takes her commitment to justice to the extremes of wanting to protect nonhumans, to admit these truths and make clear her birth positionality relative to children who will die this summer from a system that without Fair Start reforms remains unjust. Urge her to Tell the Truth, as animal abusers are being urge to do.
Those children should have had at least some what she has, and maybe this summer as heat rises and wealth affords air conditioning, some of them still can.
Humans have a blind spot when it comes to privileging their kids. But that’s no excuse for creating bad policy fundamentally leading to autocracies and the deaths of millions.
There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through, clutching at others and dragging them down as they go. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to ask and then assure that persons are created, developed, and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.
If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not that at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally. The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations, and freedoms. Without Telling the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in our language, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence—including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
How were they accounting for the actual experiences and life trajectories of the most vulnerable, infants and the animals they will impact?
When we do that assessing, we see how the ecological and political crises we face today came about, as those who seemed to be making the world a better place – on balance – were not.
In this truth telling process we should all determine, and admit if need be, that we have quietly been using the same fundamental standard causing today’s deadly climate and political crises in order to hide our liability for those crises, and in a way that is costing millions of lives and doing more harm to our values and causes than we are doing good.
Instead, we should all be backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated so that no child is born outside of a system of reparations accounting – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm. We should act so that children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality.
Climate change and inequality are interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it.
Fair Start activists came together because in the nonprofits in which we have previously worked, our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, was doing more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. And in many cases those organizations went out of their way to hide this. Liability for this will be litigated soon in various fora, including climate tribunals in Africa.
Background
For years Fair Start activists in prior employment were paid well for public interest work, and gained goodwill among many, while enriching the families of those funding the work.
And yet the vulnerable entities they claimed to represent – infants, animals, indigenous communities – are now, on many levels, worse off.
The standard ensures our values operate abstractly, disconnected from the creation of power relations as children come into the world, hiding fundamental causation. It siloes social justice efforts into various categories like environmentalism, democracy, animal rights, etc., decoying them away from birth equity, and assessing and reporting impacts out of context.
The standard allows for value and impact claims that are not pegged to an ecosocial baseline that actually protects human and animal health, allowing some to claim their behavior is sustainable, while enriching some children at deadly cost to millions of others. Social justice derives from birth equity, but for decades philanthropists have developed decoy branding around more downstream issues, enriching themselves on growth and inequity that was slowly undoing environmental and other efforts.
The illegal standard allows for a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable – and for many, deadly – economic growth. The standard omits information to ensure false assumptions regarding entitlements and authorities, ensuring audiences assume the legitimacy of entitlements, state authority and traditional political borders rather than actually legitimating them through child rights and political equity. In doing so, it hides vast inequalities derived from birth, and blocks the primacy of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
This is illegal because it violates the rule of law, but also positive laws surrounding child welfare, civil and animal rights laws, as well as the law of democracy. The standard works by weighting autonomy or self-determination outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in their democracy, which makes value assessments (and things like discount rates) wildly inaccurate.
One’s arbitrary birth positionality, one’s draw in the birth lottery in terms of race, intergenerational positioning, nationality, etc., is assumed to be fate or the hand of some magical deity, rather than a product of bad policy now requiring offsets to ensure equity. That skews how we see the world, and in ways that ensured a climate crisis likely to kill those least responsible for it. Seeing things out of the context of our creation, in an abstraction of justice, versus a view from a physically constitutive standard, leads to horrible results.
While racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century made relatively cosmetic advances in terms of voting, education, housing, etc., birth inequity combined with ecocidal growth ensured a caste status that today will mean millions of persons of color will die in the climate crisis, and fundamentally because white wealth was illegally held back from black families.
Anyone could see this standard at work, just by asking a few questions of the organizations making claims. There are now legal actions underway to eliminate the use of the standard. Allowing its continued use enables funders and public interest organizations to exploit unsustainable growth, political inequity, and the subversion of racial justice to profit at deadly cost to infants and animals.
The standard – which we rarely not talk about – has been doing more harm to our causes and stated impacts than we have been doing to further them because it has degraded the capacity of the earth to ensure infant and animal health – the only true measure of value, while disempowering the average person, taking what their birth rights give them in democracy and selling back the rights as goods in an economy.
There is no accurate evaluation of values outside of that truth.
The Tell the Truth campaign asks all:
How are you accounting in your value claims for children entering the world, relative to what their rights require? Do you realize that entitlements to claim ownership of wealth, or any governmental authority, is contingent on not violating those rights, and on empowering citizens so that representative governance is possible? How would one get entitlements to protection, if infants and animals don’t get theirs? If one received the benefits of a system of values, including things like moderate temperatures, access to food and water, and relative security, would we not be eager to ensure those values also limited fundamental systems of entitlements so that others could enjoy them?
More formally, Fair Start is seeking to override the illegal standard at the United Nations, arguing that our collective debt to those dying from climate and political systems from which we benefitted preempts or overrides conflicting policy choices. We begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against rights-based and restorative measures, the deviation from which is leading to things like higher rates of adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth, low birth weight, and infant mortality.
Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated very child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
We don’t get justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring our own. And governments can’t come up with their own definitions of things like legitimacy, and define what things like fraud (which at base means benefitting at cost to others through misinformation), harm, and sustainability mean, in order to hide their liability for using a fundamental system of entitlements that kills millions of innocent people. There are objective measures for such things.
How can new standards be implemented?
Free persons will not follow rules in a legal system that does not give them the control over those rules, and Fair Start is organizing free persons to take action. All theories of political obligation require some measurable level of inclusion and participation by those affected by it.
The replacement standard is simple. Having children in not a matter of personal autonomy or freedom relative to the would-be parents. It’s interpersonal, impacting the children and the communities they comprise more than the parents. It’s capable of being constitutive, or deconstitutive, of a just society. If we assume that everyone should be relatively self-determining in that society, then the fundamental rule or standard by which to assess value and justice would require we offset each other equally, relative to a neutral position. That ensures accurate parental autonomy, balanced against other values, and the best standard for assessing climate policy, including climate reparations.
It allows an accurate measure of the loss of freedom we are seeing as the climate and related crises unfold.
It’s physically impossible for nations to be free, as in relatively self-determining, without elevating measurable birth equity and children’s rights as our first and overriding obligation. Being a free or self-determining nation is impossible if we start by violating children’s rights to self-determination. In doing that we become other, rather than self, determining. Being free means treating future children as means and not ends, and measuring harm from to them a neutral or zero position, rather than the hiding fundamental liability that attaches to generational wealth.
Law and obligation are first about how we are positioned relative to others, not how we act, so our language has to be constitutive, answering these questions – and admitting undoing relative to truly fair and sustainable measures – in order to form actually obligatory relations with future generations that free all. Where else would these obligatory relations come from? If government derives authority from its constituents, there is no other source. Hence we can use the Tell the Truth campaign to see who chooses to be unjust, fall outside the scope of legal – by which we mean inclusive – social protections because they refuse to pay the costs they owe each of us for the loss of our freedoms, and who by so doing saddle their adult children with their death debt.
Our theory of change is that language has to be accurately obligatory and inclusively self, as opposed to other, determining. That’s what it means to constitute a nation, or have supreme obligations – from the bottom up – to others. To do so outside of that process would be physically impossible.
Again, we begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against restorative measures described above. Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated every child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, by using unsustainable growth and loss of political equity and effective shares in democracy to degrade ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath a key threshold, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk, has done more to harm our shared values – like experiencing moderate temperatures and enjoying access to food and water – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.
Why? The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health. This is exacerbated by vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our current trajectory, and all of this loss of freedom and welfare is measurable by widely accepted metrics used for assessing sustainable development.
And yet legal systems, and legitimacy, require the measurable inclusion of constituents in order to be representative, and to legitimately claim exclusive use of violence to ensure compliance with the law. Illegitimate use of violence, of course, breeds violence.
How could we account for fundamental obligations without first ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions, the fundament of empowering relations?
And yet several organizations in high-emission nations have been running animal protection and environmental campaigns – our most demanding ideals – by fundraising on claims of reduced emissions, while total emissions and negative infant outcomes are rising, the claimed reductions in emissions having been vastly undone by growth, an enabled by political inequity. More and more children and animals have been brought into conditions with no resources with which to deal with the impact of the growing emissions, lack of political influence, and degrading eco-social safety systems.
Human birth and development is the largest determinant of all outcomes we experience. It is thus the fundamental driver of the climate crisis – not just emissions, but political influence to control them, and resilience to deal with them. And yet even now, wealthy funders driving social justice reforms are hiding their liability for the violations and undoing – and undoing that moved wealth into their hands, and undoing that is costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barrierswho should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of he rights of children and animals. We contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent base value of being free.
How then could we account for fundamental obligations without ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions?
If they are willing to tell the truth, we urge key barriers to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today.
Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “non-constituitive ” barriers – those who refuse to derive authority and entitlement back to demonstrably empowering the constituents from whose sovereignty these things flow and are conditioned upon. While nonviolence is key these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.
Children Healers is a transformative initiative dedicated to addressing the profound mental and emotional toll experienced by children affected by trauma. By breaking down barriers to mental health care, we empower children to heal, rebuild, and thrive. In partnership with the Fair Start Movement, we advocate for a more equitable world, where children regardless of their background—have access to the resources they need to succeed.
Together, we are focused on ensuring that the most vulnerable children, especially those impacted by the climate crisis, are not left behind. Supporting Children Healers means joining a global effort to provide essential therapeutic services, education, and hope to those who need it most. As we work to create lasting change, we invite you to stand with Children Healers, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to heal and grow in a world that offers them a fair chance at a brighter future.
Every child has a right to come into the world with their needs met. But due to the actions of major contributors to climate change, like Coca-Cola and Exxon, for the last several decades those rights have been diminished to a point where basic rights are treated like a privilege, especially for black and brown people in the U.S. and around the world.
In the West it’s become disgustingly clear, as we’ve watched Helene ravage the southeast United States, watched fires ravage Altadena, and as we’ve watched the unhoused struggle and suffer just to survive in a country that can consume all while outsourcing its labor needs. The people of the globe, and of the United States, are owed.
Regina Stone Grover,Rei Stone-Grover MA – Co-Executive Director, Fair Start Movement, Poet, Writer, and Trauma educator; Commit To Healing Vol. 1 https://www.amazon.com/Commit-Healing-Vol-Poetic-Experience/dp/0578900327
For many years, There has been an error in addressing climate injustices and birth inequality until the world is at threshold and soon bursting. Very many charities and foundations emerged in addressing climate injustices and birth inequalities but the method used by these charities is insufficient in that it lacks the measurable accountability to the death of vulnerable children from harm hidden in Their charity because they didn’t address the root cause of the crisis. Whereas indigenous emerged from the grassroots from Affected communities with Afrocentric model to address climate injustices and birth inequalities but have limited access to funds to execute this model in saving the next generation.
The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal, and fundamentally racist, assessment and reporting standard that hides climate damage liability. This standard is based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard –deriving from power grab efforts by wealthy families in the Twentieth Century that subverted the civil rights movements – used the contradiction in terms of procreative autonomy, and by hiding measures of the loss of political equity, started to silo justice into downstream issue areas that acted as decoys with the work being undone daily by growth.
Reproductive rights regimes based on isolated decision making, which ensured long run inequity, have become the base driver of a white wealthy supremacy that will kill countless children of color.
This move effectively skipped ensuring children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This shifted costs onto mostly children of color, evading hard checks on growth, avoiding racial equity, and ensuring status quo in the direction of power. This racial subversion standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.
If you ask the right questions, those engaged in it become obvious: Their work is inevitably abstract, ignoring the entry into the world of children, and starts by assuming entitlements that contradict the values and impacts they claim, entitlements that enable the industries they claim to fight.
This further cements in place the subversion of civil rights.
In the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign we ask all how they are first accounting for children entering the world relative to what their rights require, because social justice reforms should address this – the largest determinants of outcomes – first.
We can all start to change that, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like:
“We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact?”
You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact.In essence the proponents are using a shell/ponzi scheme, identified as such by Nobel laureates, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocent persons around the world.
Forget left versus right politics and focus on the top-downs: Government over citizens, owners over managers, employers over employees, parents over children and future children, and humans over nonhumans. It’s about a choice of power, a directional binary choice between entitling the powerful or the vulnerable, with the former choice illegally violating infant and animal rights, rather than creating an inclusive system where the powerful can represent the vulnerable.
How could we invert that system, in practice?
See more below, but in essence one can invert by talking about the vulnerable when assessing and reporting impacts – by talking in a dynamic way about constituting relations, rather than focusing on a static national constitution that has nothing to do with deriving and conditioning authority on the empowerment of subjects. Just the way binary gender language erases nonbinary identities, or nationalistic language erases rightful indigenous land owners, static language erases future children as the priority class of most numerous and vulnerable entities.
What’s justice? It starts with existence and birth, or developmental and emancipatory positionality – or what we understand to be the commonly accepted idea ofintergenerational justice as minimum thresholds for children entering the world, though these thresholds must now be modified to account for the fundamental driver of the climate crisis.
Fair Start’s research shows that – given the millions of deaths being caused by the climate crisis – ignoring this factor meant that many charities on balance did more to enrich the families of wealthy investors/funders than accomplish their missions.
More vulnerable entities will suffer and die, because of the subversive standard and the protection of generational wealth, than most prominent charities will have saved.
By not accounting for the fair or equitable creation of actual power relations at birth, our social justice and public interest work became performative, abstracted from reality in a way that ensured the current crises. As described above, our research also shows that all legal obligations derive from language that accurately captures our first obligations to others, and given our harming future children in the climate crisis, the corrective admissions we call for here are needed to move our language towards mutually empowering all using measurable self-determination as the base value.
Dignity – and the human rights that derive from it and equity – require orienting from truth, not failed forms of justice derived from injustice.
Change can start with interim disclaimers like “our work does not account for inequity,” as well as making disclosures under the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign contrasting omissive claims that used the status quo standards with new measures of actual harm to vulnerable infants and animals.
After World War Two, aspirational standards for social justice, like environmentalism and animal protection, were largely left by governments and businesses to a third sector, civil society.
But there was an inherent conflict of interest. Large, wealthy families like the Rockefellers largely controlled the sector through their philanthropy, and they had a history of conveying generational wealth rather than ensuring equity. They, and the church, played a crucial role in privatizing reproductive rights regimes, and focusing them on the quantitative issue of population, over the qualitative issue of one’s effective share in one’s democracy – one’s political equity. It was not conservatives or the government that set low standards ensuring the crises we see today.
Without political equity, reproductive rights regimes became fundamentally unjust and unsustainable, skewing what it means to be self versus other-determining by wrongly treating the act of having children as more personal to the parents than other-determining for the child. The regimes enabled prior = generations to abuse an unlimited right to have children at cost to the rights of current and future generations, creating massive inequity and ecocidal growth.
To the extent wealthy and mostly white families owed reparative justice, this was reparations fraud, the evasion of the heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions child rights required.
The lack of investment, the lack of necessitating rights-compliant early childhood development conditions, directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth and enabling some kids much further ahead than others, did more harm than good because it blocked life-saving funds in favor of concentrating and growing generational wealth.
It was not conservatives that fundamentally caused modern ecocide, inequity, and autocratic nationalism. It was the hypocritical liberals behind philanthropy who refused at base to reconcile their generational wealth and unearned privilege with justice, and they thereby set horrifically insufficient goals for social justice movements, siloing justice away from birth equity and into decoy versions of the ideals that through inequitable growth ensured the climate and related crises.
Those concentrations are so extreme today that they can ensuresustained propaganda of an underpopulation “crisis” in the middle of a growth-driven climate crisis killing millions.They use an illegal standard for cost/benefit assessment and reporting that was designed to benefit the children of wealthy investor-philanthropists by arbitrarily scoring their worth higher than other children, in violation of the rights of all children.
Continued use of that standard gives rise to justifiable retaliation by those tricked into being obligated to follow the law without being fairly empowered to change it (what we might call the #equiscam).
The impact claims this philanthropy funded were wildly off base, being undone daily by the growth / political inequity. There is no universe in which those positive impacts occurred – they were simply reported out of context, omitting the largest determinant of outcomes undoing the benefits every day, making social justice a top-down and performative charade, a cosmetic version that started by mis-entitling the powerful and ignoring universally enforceable obligations.
Activists now with Fair Start will admit being paid by funders of other nonprofits to create a fantasy world that made it look like there was progress and a better future, when in reality both were just moving money towards themselves as the situation deteriorated for the most vulnerable. The activists used wealth to create a fantasy world that ensured audiences would assume entitlements that were contrary to the organizational missions, while they were shifting benefits away from the vulnerable and to ourselves.
It was like a magic trick. At the end of almost two decades of activism with other organizations, many of our activists could demonstrate how despite their organizations’ claims, they had quietly chosen policies that placed more vulnerable entities in harm’s way, while simultaneously enriching themselves and their funders. We had benefited from a system of racist entitlements, exacerbated them through growth and the creation of a fantasy world of social progress that hid the reality of the crisis, and that enabled us to now enjoy comforts like air conditioning while those least responsible for the crisis died in heat waves.
We were leeches free-riding on the inequity and injustice of the birth lottery, benefiting at deadly cost to others while creating a fantasy world of impact that did not exist.
There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc. It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy. It’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born into economic use, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. In fact,funders have blocked some efforts to reform the standards, thereby minimizing climate damage evaluations, including amounts, the weight or priority of claims, universal enforceability, and priority uses of funds.
The many public interest organizations Fair Start activists are aware of have used concrete illegal practices, often employing a “social justice decoy” — a weaker version of the effective interventions needed, but instead one that would do more to transfer wealth to certain families than ensure mission objectives. One funder in particular, influential in reproductive rights and animal welfare, told me he chose a reproductive rights standard without equity because he benefited from the outcomes.
But continuing that tradition and policy of ignoring political equity in reproductive rights goes beyond bad acting, like racism. By hiding from policy the actual creation – at birth – of power relations, it skews how we see the world, treating the most interpersonal thing – having kids – as personal. This moves values, like nature, equity and democracy, from defining a subject-level “we” towards being objects in our sentences, which enabled things like discount rates and other top-down inaccuracies that exacerbate the climate crisis. Under this misdirection, the focus will be on emissions, ignoring how growth undoes reductions while bringing children into the world without the resources to deal with the impacts. The crisis is about power relations; emissions are only a tiny aspect of that.
Against all of this, Fair Start, or an equity-based focus, is the preemptive standard to assess reparations fraud because governments cannot create their own definitions of legitimacyin lieu of the objective measurefor that value.
There are a few tactics we can use to change the standard:
1) We can ask key leading social justice organizations:
What were you doing to ensure children’s birth rights to development and equity over unsustainable demand for the products you criticize? We can urge key influencers who might act as barriers to fair starts, and whose role modeling and inversion of political system would have a large impact whether they would have chosen to institute such a system decades ago had they known the climate crisis would unfold as it did.
This assesses the level of commitment to one’s actual values. This discourse can lead into the process of elevating reparations to a measurable level of self-determination, and treat those reparations as owed and payable to would-be parents to bend down the arc of growth and consumption towards child-rights compliant families that are smaller, equitable and democratic.
Why? Bringing future children into the world is the largest determinant of outcomes in the long run, and because who we should be – fundamentally relating to one another based on rights and not growth commerce – comes before what we do, we can take radical action to move the incentivizing funds. Would we really think it racist not to hire someone because of their race, but to ignore climate risks to millions because of race-based differences in generational wealth?
Climate change and inequality are birth-interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action.
This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it. If we care about a particular value, like animal liberation, biodiversity, children’s rights, or democracy wouldn’t we be eager to account for a fundamental cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the harm wealth has done to those values, and what it owes going forward?
2) We can identify and make examples of high profile barriers (“noncons,” or those who block constituting a just future), many of whom would have funded social justice “decoy” philanthropy:
Failure to resolve this injustice takes the debtors outside of deserving public (legal/inclusive) protection because by their bypassing child-rights compliant positionality and formation of relations, it would be impossible to account for their being included in a comprehensive system of obligation/rights that actually accounts for the costs and benefits of birth positionality. While nonviolence is key, these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.
They are fundamentally illegal, and not based on an assessment using fictitious borders like lines on a globe, but the true border to self v. other determination controlled by who – via creation – we actually share the world with. In such an assessment and the horrors of the climate crisis, those seen as leaders become targets.
They deserve as much as they necessitate for the most vulnerable.No rights for infants in creation, rights that act as cost limits on our behavior, means no rights for the cost evaders. It was this override, the primacy of creation positionality and its impact on political equity, that those behind the racial subversion standard described above were likely terrified of, and hiding.
But their wealth was fundamentally made at cost to our freedom, and the freedom of others, and there is no reason we should not take it back in order to fundamentally liberate. Their behavior, each day, is evidence of whether they ensure legitimacy, or collective freedom from power, or assume illegal entitlements to benefit at deadly cost to others while masquerading as free.
This tactic can begin by asking government officials, wealthy individuals and families, and key leaders across all sectors whether they think kids deserve a fair start on life; how they are accounting for entitlements that ensure children only being born into conditions that comply with their rights under the Children’s Convention so that we can all share a legitimate, or a rights-based, political system; and to admit their entitlements derive from and are conditioned upon an obligation to measurably empower the constituents in a way that actually justifies governance.
This can include focusing on the adult children of key targets, who under the preemptive standards above would inherit the death debt of their parents.
Academia should be objective and that doesn’t mean ignoring one’s positionality. It actually means first accounting for it, especially to avoid contradictory exploitation and entitlements that conflict with one’s values.
There is no accurate evaluation, no assessment of values, without inclusive positioning.
If the micro-liberation of nonhumans looks like open rescues at factory farms, the macro would look like “real new deal” social contract demands for reparations in exchange for child-centric planning that would ensure a truly climate-restored and bio-diverse future in which humans areempathetic enough to be inclined to treat nonhumans well. But many academics, whose interests do not align with macro reforms, ignore the latter.
Regardless, there is no room for continued debate under the status quo entitlements, as the death rate climbs. Illegal power derives from the illusion of representative authority, which is used to to justify the exclusive right to use of violence.
That illegitimacy, that abuse, is what breeds all violence. How do we react well?
Free persons will only follow rules that are fair, and the first rule accounts for our creation or positioning into the system of rules, so that we are more self-determining than determined by others. The most basic legal rule of all – after World War Two and objective limits (human rights) on subjective individual and national sovereignty – requires representatives and property-rights claimants to derive their authority from those they claim to represent, from an objective system of empowerment.
Because of the racial subversion standard, that never occurred. Leaders exploited the arbitrary nature of the birth lottery, rather than ending it. That subversion is so internalized today that major figures in justice advocacy, like Martha Nussbaum and Michael Sandel, never even touch on the main driver of the climate crisis. God did not create them into relative positions of safety and benefit, bad policy did.
Telling the truth allows us to see who is sufficiently other-regarding to be included in the “we,” or those who support capacity for self determination, versus those who were engaged in a performative version of justice without covering the actual costs.
Telling the truth allows everyone to relate their experiences to the dynamic reality of the most vulnerable, children entering the world and impacting animals – in the actual first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful.
All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base. Language that accurately reflects and forms obligations has to be accessible to the people who are engaged in the discourse – meaning it definitely is not a traditional national constitution.
There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down with them. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all.
Above all, this is the most important thing to remember:
Law must be interpreted to legitimate itself, and the areas of positive law necessary to carry the Fair Start reform forward, including constitutional, fraud, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental, nationality, democracy, civil rights, and others, must be preemptively interpreted to ensure inclusion and representation. As such, treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as others must be enforced by the ultimate source of authority, the people, through things like the Tell the Truth campaign, and demand for reparations payments from key concentrations of wealth and power to class representatives of collective family defense systems.
This is not altruism.
Again: It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy, whose authority and entitlements derive from and are conditioned on the creation of liberating relations. Those that think and act otherwise – nonconstitutives – logically fall outside of the scope of protection free, or measurably self-determining persons, must give each other.
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How else would we account for unreported and unreportable animal cruelty, which comprises that vast majority of such acts? How else would the law account for avoiding that? What logically would precede ensuring relations likely to prevent it?
There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. They are just being stated out of context. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable
The undoing of their claimed beneficial work, and their masking of growth as the fundamental driver of the climate crisis, was enabled by the assessment and reporting standards that caused the climate crisis, standards that ignore illegal violations of vulnerable children’s birthrights. In other words, leaders at these organizations chose a version of animal law that – at base – excluded animal protection as a factor impacting how we invest in children coming into the world, and on balance this emaciated version of animal law did more harm to animals than these organizations did to benefit them.
We can fix this mess by moving what we claim to value – animal protection and liberation – into our fundamental constitutional regimes. How?
It starts with Telling the Truth:
Facts: We have all collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life, by allowing unsustainable growth, trading economic growth for loss of political equity, ensuring the degrading of ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath key thresholds, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk. This has done more to harm our shared values – animal protection and liberation, experiencing moderate temperatures, enjoying access to food and water, etc. – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.
“Animal law” does not mean talking about abstract directives that refer to animals, and relying in good intentions and symbolic acts to achieve animal protection. Yes, advocates may have better intentions than Exxon, but how much do animals care about our intentions, and why not measure justice from an objective standard rather than use bad actors as the standard?
It’s first and foremost about having functionally protective, legal relations with nonhumans, an idea better reflected in the preambles of constitutions than any reference or lack of reference to animals per se.
Background
Humans are animals and our birth and development – our creation – is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior that impacts nonhumans, exponentially. Our creation also determines how – through participatory democracy and representation, or what is really just political equity or our functional shared in democracy – our legal systems function.
Animal law starts with that issue – the creation of humans – the first necessary condition for something to be animal law and capable of protecting them. It starts at the subject level of our grammar, the “we” in our constitutions, or the creation-accounted-for existence of our relations with them.
AI systems adept at assessing racial injustice can detect equity values at the subject-level of value claims (and those values will alter the human-animal relations), versus the object level of those claims. Consider the need to distinguish between something like equity in hiring decisions versus who is birth-positioned to make those hiring decisions. A goal for permissible climate emissions as the object of a sentence differs greatly from a low emissions standard implicit in the “we” subject of the same claim, with that collective subject implying the ability of all referenced to be free from harmful emissions. Permissible emissions as a goal/object frames the political system as consensual and legitimate (especially from the perspective of nonhumans), which it would not be without restoration as a condition of the collective subject.
But instead, these issues are rarely discussed because creation ethics, unlike food, zoning, shelter, etc. policies, involve big questions of racial equity, climate reparations, personal responsibility in parenting, de-growth and liability for charitable fraud that hid the drivers of the climate crisis.
Creation ethics as a subject, threaten the nepotistic families and funders who for decades have used their wealth to define animal law in a narrow way, relying on advocates eager to get the benefits of well compensated but low-impact charade work, contrary to the interests of nonhumans and vulnerable humans. Every day growth undoes the impacts and benefits animal lawyers and others advocates claim to produce. But few will admit that.
Performative Animal Law
It’s easier to engage in performative animal law where we just talk about how legal language refers to animals, while the actual benefits to animals and vulnerable humans are undone via inequity and growth, and we enjoy the benefits of our growth based investments and institutions. It’ s easier to use wealth made at cost to animals to create interventions that are being undone daily, in ways that benefit those creating the interventions more than animals, using large media budgets to drown out possible interventions that would on balance benefit animals. But there is no such thing as anthrocentric animal law.
You don’t get to justice by starting with injustice, by violating children’s rights in the birth-creation of actual relations. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact.
For example, circa 2003 Fair Start advocates previously working with the Humane Society of the United States (“HSUS”) embarked on a policy to frame farmed animals as the most numerous class of animals subject suffering at the hands of humans. We did this while partnering with Whole Foods and other entities intent on commercializing the growing anger HSUS and others would create by publicizing the treatment of farmed animals. We had found a way to monetize the idea of animal liberation, but not actually accomplish it.
But HSUS and others chose to focus on food reforms, all of which assumed growth-based food markets. While the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas, looked at issues of human justice, that turn – to focus on food sales over fundamental justice – is the greatest example of the phenomenon he saw, once we measure by the numbers of victims impacted.
Many of the funders, legal advocates and activists working on these issues at the time would go on to make a lot of money in the food sector, in the years to follow, having used sensational campaigns centered on granular/micro issues of animal suffering that overshadowed the macro forces – like growth-driven demand – undoing the work. That growth driving more and more animals into suffering and acting as the largest diver of climate outcomes.
How does this relate to animal law specifically? Animal law is arguably the most demanding form of social justice, and thus a good measure for how systems fare in being just or unjust. It purports, in referring to a legal system capable of actually protecting nonhumans, to be inclusive of the vulnerable in a measurable way.
Animal law goes beyond impacts, and requires assessments about how we are including future children into legal systems in ways that empower those children and legitimate the systems. Look closely at all of the content being created and framed as “animal law,” from 2003 until today. You will see a lot of focus on food and similar downstream-only interventions. Look then for comparable work on family reforms that would have benefitted nonhumans, and vulnerable humans, alike. You will be surprised to find little if any, and with some of the organizations actually encouraging growth that ignores children’s rights in favor of economic growth.
In many cases the funding of animal nonprofits exemplifies a next-level expansion of the corruption that is well documented in philanthropy: The use of well-funded messaging, media, academia, etc. to limit the ability of audiences to use accurate criteria to judge the truth and value of claims and impact.
In one case, those designing programming at Harvard University define the scope of their work in an inaccurate way that implies a beneficial overall impact on animals that is totally unsupported by their work. When political equity is factored in, the scope privileges those funding the work more than the animals they claim to protect. The site refers to the program as “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system,” and yet nothing in their policies or work addresses the fundamental driver of animal suffering and death because that driver—anthrocentric growth—benefits the school and their funders.
One senior funder, associated with the program, is known for creating digests of animal law developments. That funder has refused requests to cover developments in abortion access precedent as “animal law” because, according to their representative at the time, the idea of “animal law” required legal developments that discussed animals. They ignore legal reforms around abortion access as a benefit to animals, despite the disproportionate benefit abortion access has for animals, relative to food. They define animal law in ways that ignore the largest determinants for animals, things like the notion of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
That standard – which is the same one used by a notorious milk brand – is key for the funder, because their entity is highly nepotistic, spending more on family members compensation than on policies capable of actually benefitting animals. Many of the entities relying on funds from funder avoid talking about this issue for obvious, but unethical, reasons. That silence ensures funds meant to benefit animals don’t – on balance – have that effect, while deadly inequity between humans grows.
In fact, many animal lawyers have continued to double down, explicitly embracing anthropocentric systems that have benefitted their funders more than animals. Why does all of this matter? Demands for climate reparations are growing, and many will be wondering what those attorneys and advocates working under the mantle of protecting the most vulnerable were doing during the most crucial years of us all knowing the climate crisis was unfolding, years when we were able to do something about it.
Animal lawyers, more than most, will have questions to answer for their role.
Were they advocating for performative behavior-changing standards without changing the fundamental relations being created, focusing on micro propertyhood, while hiding a much more lethal form of macro propertyhood? What role did funders making money on the latter, those who did not want to question their or their kids’ birth-based national, intergenerational, racial, etc. positionality, have in that fallacy?
If we have account for way inequity and growth undoes our claimed good work for animals, in which fantasy world were we actually benefitting animals? Some recent direct action efforts give promise that animal law can move towards animal liberation, and not just talking about it while living in ways – fundamental ways – that hypocritically undo it. But unless direct action animal liberation movements also include macro animal liberation reforms, they too are not serving nonhumans on balance.
Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking
The Fair Start Movement was formed to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would use it to avoid liability for the crisis, and for life-saving and legitimating climate reparations.
Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in growth, and the violations of children’s’ birthrights that enabled that growth. In this process we contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero-harm baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent understanding of freedom.
We then urge those key barriers to admit the undoing, and shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today. Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “nonconstitutive” targets blocking that process, often by creating a fantasy world of inaccurate impacts.
The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal assessment and reporting standard to hide climate damage liability, a standard based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard – deriving from Twentieth Century power grab efforts to subvert civil rights movements – siloes justice away from birth equity into downstream issue areas that act as decoys, hiding a growing lack of birth-based political equity.
This power grab effectively skipped children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This was a way to shift costs, evade hard checks on growth, avoid racial equity, and ensure status quo in the direction of power. The illegal; standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.
Any most of the companies that diverted funds away from successful reforms actually failed.
We can all start to change this, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like: “We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis – the one that does not require child-rights based family planning. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact? Were your impacts being undone?”
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Those working in public interest often make claims, and choose definitions of things like “humane,” “green,” “child welfare,” “democratic,” “inclusive,” “legitimate” and “sustainable,” that give enough wiggle room for influential officials and funders to make money on inequity and growth driven investments, at cost to the freedom and lives of many.
They benchmark claims for the wealthy, not the vulnerable, and many are dying as a result.Like me, their statements #leftout that they begin from a system of entitlements that do not actually protect the most vulnerable, and likely undo the good they claim to be doing. These moves hid expensive liability that could move resources and save lives.
This back and fourth dialogue will show many starting from a self-serving position that risks millions of human lives and countless animals.
Between 2000 and roughly 2021, as a federal attorney, as someone teaching law, as a public interest litigator, and as someone creating content for media like the New York Times and other outlets, I avoided subjects that impact United Nations assessed climate “loss and damage” liability, and in ways that protect extreme wealth made at deadly cost to others. This illegally benefited some at deadly cost to many, in violation of things like the human right to a healthy environment.
I used wealth made at deadly cost to black children to promote low impact public interest work that wrongly implied the legitimacy of basic entitlements, further exacerbating risks to millions of other children. Often we focused on food law to benefit animals, because diet does not implicate positionality relative to discussions of share equity. This created an illusion of truth and value. I claimed a role in effective immigration and national security work, and victories in legal cases for animals and the environment, the impacts of which I and others knew were being undone by inequitable growth policies that violated human rights – policies from which we benefitted. Even when advised of the inaccurate nature of their claims, many organizations and their funders have simply persisted.
Animal rights and law is an area of public interest that shows the greatest disparity between what was said, and the actual policies chosen. In many universities I taught content, like cases, statutes, and treaties, as authoritative and justly enforceable through violence, knowing such claims were based on a fallacy that served me while deriving others of their entitlements. Whatever those cases, statutes, and treaties seemed to do in terms of ensuring beneficial change, they were being undone by insufficient neonatal and child welfare systems used to grow economies, a policy many animal rights lawyers ignore because it benefits them. I had one prominent environmental / animal rights professor urge me to avoid discussions of the need for ecocentric over anthrocentric family reforms, knowing that this would mean his children benefitting – through growth-based investments and otherwise – at deadly cost to others.
For the animal rights work I did, the omission hid that we did not help animals on balance, once growth and share inequity was taken into account. This created an illusion of truth and value by letting listeners assume certain entitlements, including ones antithetical to our mission. We also did this by ignoring conflicts of interests, including my own. To ensure legal systems actually protect animals would take massive reforms we never seriously attempted because we could raise funds – in what some have called off-ramp distractivism – without taking on such a massive thing. We knew donors often wear #blinders. It also let us silo off our work from unifying forms of social justice, at cost to those advocates and immediate benefit to us, and it let us ignore the way inequity-driven noncompliance with the law undoes the value of legal victories.
As social justice and animal rights lawyers we inevitably decried violence, but never backed the idea of defunding the police or military because that was a form of violence that benefited us – including the way growth-based birth inequity enriches white kids at cost to children of color. We wanted the benefit of a legal system in terms of coercively obligating others to do things in a system where we held prestige and rank, but not to cover the high costs of actually empowering others with influence over that system. When it came to others’ children, we could benefit again, exploiting them for growth even at disastrous cost to animals.
This account is from a leader on climate reforms in Africa:
An anonymous funder from the United Kingdom pledged to support Rejoice Africa Foundation with $300,000USD to do water project as charity, but not as obligations to cover the harm caused by the true costs of wealth. The wealthy funder, seeing our demands for reparation, then declined the pledge to support the water project in Uganda, as I was struggling to look for funders to pay such obligations because they allow us the dignity of living in the spirit of human rights, as equals who should not be harmed without restorative justice.
It was around this time that a child in a nearby village – Judith – died of Malaria – as the disease worsened, driven by the costs of wealth and with those costs – the climate crisis, the greater breeding of mosquitoes, no prevention measures in place.
Immediately after a while , another wealthy funder from the USA funded a conference with $50000USD, continuing to ignore obligations. The conference did nothing for children like Judith, and very little even for the animals the funder wanted to protect. What could they show? Many wealthy funders from global north have avoided funding Rejoice Africa Foundation because they want to pay as charity not as obligation hence causing conflict of results in climate reality in avoiding climate liability. Rejoice Africa Foundation would double work a $50k grant as an obligation. But most funders are busy not accepting to fund this initiative. Rejoice Africa Foundation would like to call funders to reconsider funding this initiative and invest $50k in women and children as the primary obligation to stop climate genocide.
[Note: Mwesigye Robert suffered from Malaria while fundraising for $3k in February/2024. Malaria in Uganda: 100% of total children go to health facilities every day. 40% are diagnosed with Malaria and 20 % of these children would get fully treated with anti-malarial and 15 % of these would go to buy treatment from private health facilities. 5% die from complicated Malaria due to lack of adequate treatment for Malaria. Yet in global north Countries, children don’t suffer from Malaria unless they are traveling back from Africa. Wealth imbalance is the cause of this and now leading to climate genocide.]
I omitted information because it benefitted me, and those that employed or funded me, or that published my work. My claims and work became a decoy, sensational minutiae, benefitting wealthy funders by evading costly investments in future generations, ones that would impede growth. Wealth made at deadly cost to others was literally used to drown out mostly black voices, voices that could have saved human and nonhuman lives. In some cases I urged others to avoid discussions of white supremacy, when the evidence is clear that gargantuan race-wealth disparities drive daily power relations all around us.
For example, one animal law funder who helped build programming at several leading laws schools made claims about benefitting animals. His underlying policy choices instead:
Created more demand for animal products, and thus suffering, death, and extinction, than the policies he promoted saved.
Did so while ensuring black children entered the world with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children, which meant they would die in greater numbers from the ecological impacts the increased demand would create.
Elizabeth is the Founder and Executive Director of For All Animals (FAA) and for decades has overseen communications for nonprofits: She said:
“To truly measure the impact of our efforts to protect animals and the environment, we cannot review metrics in a vacuum. It is far too easy to manipulate impact by hyper-focusing on one positive outcome or extrapolating beyond acceptable mathematical standards. This not only presents a false narrative of success, but typically ignores the negative reactive implications. Fair Start’s approach requires us to examine individual crises as part of a whole, and highlights the global impact the recognition of a basic legal right to equity could bring.
We can’t fill shopping malls by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. The money that had been made by cutting many off is owed to first change the system, by elevating birth equity as the basis of all sovereignty. Self-determination, by any conception, means laws that protect the lives of beneficiaries of any political system only derive their legitimacy from the prior act of including and empowering – in a measurable way – future generations, rather than exploiting them and thereby disenfranchising and harming all of us.
We would all rightly ostracize anyone refusing to hire persons of color, and yet we embrace those defending their wealth made at cost to millions of black lives, when it could still save countless others. Many funders are changing their views on entitlements to avoid these deaths, and mounting #deathdebt if they do not.
Had I been asked the questions above, regarding children simultaneously entering the world as I made claims, I would have had to reveal failings in my and others’ assumptions. That would have prompted the beginnings of beneficial change.
The longer we wait, the more innocents will die. All justice starts with human rights and the dignity of expecting, in equity, the power you and your children are owed. Humans can only constitute the future through and accurate language of obligation and the creation of just power relations. It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as, and act under an obligation of, being ruled by persons who will parent and the children they will have, rather than by those at the top, officials, wealthy families, celebrities, etc., who hide the mistake above, and who should only have influence to the extent the creation of others ensures measurable equity and the equal offset of their power.
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Why? Scammy nonprofits ignored every child’s right to a fair start in life, and the need to incentivize better birth and development conditions that would have reversed growth, and reduced suffering. Many lied for the growth-based funders they served.
That means more children and animals are worse off, and that’s not even considering deadly climate crisis as shown the graphs below.
Fact: As we show in this work re-published Stanford University, violating children’s rights, and assuming children of color deserved a fraction of the resources and exponentially more risk did more harm to all of our values – like moderate temperatures, food security, and representative government – than any of our philanthropic efforts did good.