Fair Start Movement

Category: Climate, Environment & Animal Protection

Joseph Chamie, More Than Most, Helped Ensure the Climate Crisis and Deadly Inequity. Hold Him Accountable?

World leaders, not everyday people, created a climate and inequity crisis that is killing millions. And they did it by valuing some children over others, and in ways that were illegal.

Joseph Chamie is a prolific writer in the area of population and development, and recently wrote that: “Inequalities in human mortality are evident worldwide. Premature death is particularly prevalent in low-income regions due to limited access to healthcare, poverty, and conflict.”

He should know, having served as Director of the United Nations Population Division and the deputy secretary-general for the 1994 UN International Conference for Population and Development.

He is directly responsible for use of the United Nations fraudulent reproductive rights system, and illegal baselining, that acts as the fundamental driver of the “limited access to healthcare, poverty, and conflict” he now decries.

And he did so in violation of human rights law.

By ensuring no threshold for intergenerational justice, the system created extreme concentrations of wealth and power at cost to democracy, nature, and child welfare. To avoid that all Chamie had to do was take the logical step of extending child welfare entitlements, including to political equity, to future children. Instead he chose to maintain a privatized process that exploited children for growth, even as the climate crisis became known.

That meant he did not even try to legitimate the political authority he claimed, and exercised over others, by measureably empowering those subject to it. He knowingly used a system that enriched white children at deadly cost to mostly children of color, and that commercialized political freedom.

That’s a serious example of public corruption. Understand this: Chamie embraces and helped build a system that allows wealth and political authority to use the state’s threat of, and application of, official violence to defend themselves without empowering those everyday people subject to these things. It’s obscure, but tyranny nonetheless, and on a scale that dwarfs others.

Chamie is, in some ways, a trolley target because of this.

While human rights activists are accustomed to targeting for retribution acute and palpable abusers like war criminals, on volume of suffering Chamie has done more harm than most, albeit in a subtle way that is hard for humans to perceive. That does not make him any less culpable.

And Chamie has declined to admit fault, or support a clear and easy change that would reset the reproductive rights and family planning regimes.

Today the costs of his mistakes are becoming clear as the climate crisis claims millions of lives. Why should Chamie live well why so many die?

Chamie declined to debate Fair Start activists regarding his role, and what he owes the victims. And he continues to promote the fraudulent model.

Take action:

As a first step contact him at chamiej@gmail.com and urge him to admit the truth:

He oversaw a reproductive rights and family planning regime – from which he and others benefitted – that did more to exploit future generations than protect them from the ecological, political, and inequity crises that are now unfolding. And he did so in violation of human rights laws, including the simple rule that wealth and political authority must be derived from the measurable empowerment of those subject to such things.

If people really constitute their own political systems through truthful discourses about what we owe future generations, then it’s up to everyone to engage those at the top who are responsible to admit their failures, and their obligations to fix them. This act literally decentralizes influence – the first step to a future that is more just and free.

April 7, 2026
Factchecking Professor Justin Marceau. His Animal Advocacy Does Not On Balance Liberate Animals. It’s a Facade That Hides Liability for the Climate and Inequity-Driven Deaths of Millions.

Did the University of Denver really spend millions of dollars to create charade of animal liberation, saving a few here and there, while embracing an underlying model of animal propertyhood, birth inequity, and unsustainable growth that kills countless more, and harms vulnerable children?

“Today’s animal rights movement is hindered by an unmet need: While relying heavily on activists and insiders to uncover wrongdoing and urge systemic reform, there has historically been a dearth of available legal support. The Animal Activist Legal Defense Project fundamentally alters this state of affairs, with significant and distinctive benefits for the future of the animal rights movement and for the future of animal well-being.”

—Professor Justin Marceau, Director, Animal Activist Legal Defense Project

That statement is not accurate.

Relative to what standard does Marceau, or those like Paul Shapiro, benefit animals? Factor in the inequitable growth that put vastly more animals into suffering than they saved, and you find them moving the goalposts away from on-balance protecting animals in order to to appear to win, and appear so for those who use growth-based wealth to fund the efforts. That well-funded charade drowns out the voices of those who engage in fundamental reforms, and it costs lives as the climate crisis intensifies and women and children go without the resources they need to respond to it.

I co-founded the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project with Justin, in the wake of serious misconduct at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, including illegal baselining skewing how courts evaluate harm to the environment, the Board paying a settlement to the former executive director Stephen Wells to hide this, and continued illegal baselining that hides liability for philanthropists’ and nonprofits’ role in exacerbating the climate crisis. Part of the founding of the clinic at Denver, in records now removed from the school’s website, was a commitment to total liberation that accounted for many forms of justice. That quickly changed – consistent with funders’ growing concern about what the commitments would reveal and require.

When I mentioned to Justin the book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” he responded: “This is a story as old as time. I admire the fact that you think you can solve it.” The work we did, if anything, exacerbated this phenomenon.

In the years that I served with the program we never implemented that standard, but used the same illegal, racist (it starts with the assumption children of color deserve less than white children) and anthropocentric standard for evaluating the value and impact of our work that fundamentally caused the climate crisis, the standard the Animal Legal Defense Fund has used and still uses.

In fact, leadership at the school removed me from a grant project involving a funder I had brought in to the process, one willing to address the macro issues (or what he calls the “necro”), and then repurposed the grant towards low-impact, charade-level work, keeping part of the grant even after the funder broke from the school and asked that it be returned.

Justin’s statement above reflects a fantasy world that hides the liability of those who benefited from decades of anthropocentric, inequitable and disenfranchising growth – those who fund his work.

Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than we, at the program, ever did good. Use of that valuation and reporting model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.

Relative to that harm, on many levels, our work was insignificant and thus performative – and in terms of the underlying business model – mimics Coca-Cola’s model of discounting future lives, especially lives of color, at exponential levels.

Marceau’s work is a facade meant to create the impression of animal rights and law, while maintaining an illegal anthropocentric standard from which he benefits. While originally part of Animal Legal Defense Fund litigation that would have reset the baseline around the unity of interests between nonhumans and vulnerable persons, Marceau dropped out after leadership caved to Julia Olson and Our Children’s Trust – an anthropocentric environmental group – pressured the organization to drop the case. His advocacy since derives from illegal baselining that, like the advocacy of Tim Midura at the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy, does more to protect wealth and white privilege than on balance benefit animals.

How could that happen? For decades reproductive rights systems built on “separate but equal” ideology enabled inequitable growth that – absolved from having to pay the costs of equitizing birthrights – created extreme concentrations of wealth. That wealth now funds downstream, micro, and charade-level interventions that hide the macro process and create a fantasy world of progress that hides liability for the polycrisis.

That wealth, not on-balance values like the full measure of protecting animals, accounts for public interest policy and interventions.

Animal liberation can entail the symbolic rescuing a handful of animals and doing a few show trials, while growth drives the harm of trillions of more animals than activists protect.

To protect animals – to practice animal law actually capable of that – requires accounting for the relations they have with humans, relations that start as humans enter the world. But that entails accounting for things like racist child inequity, the countervailing impact of growth, questions of what we owe future children harmed by the climate crisis and whether that debt overrides competing interests, etc.

We, like the Brooks Institute for Animals Rights Law and Policy that funds the animal law program Justin manages as well as his title, chose greater harm to animals than we as animal lawyers could ever do good with our downstream and micro interventions, a choice made we made in order to evade difficult questions around birth inequity, while benefitting ourselves and those funding us, at cost to animals. It was a deliberate choice of macro (human / nonhuman indivisible) animal propertyhood over macro personhood, and in contravention of the wishes of Brooks McCormick Jr. to protect animals – a fact that Fair Start will show in the years to come.

Following the true intent of Brooks McCormick Jr. to protect animals requires the funding of reforms at the level of the creation of power relations between humans and animals. Based on what I saw at the University of Denver, Tim Midura and his daughters – whom he hired to lead the Institute – will have spent more on lavish events than on developing and implementing a norm that could on-balance protect animals by rearranging entitlements at the most fundamental level, accounting for and reversing overshoot and the inequitable and disenfranchising growth that causes it.

Relative to inequitable and disenfranchising growth, Midura’s use of the money had a negligible beneficial impact on animals – and he made that choice, to not even take the first necessary step of altering his conception of animal law and its basic content.

Trump did not simply win. The public interest sector became corrupt, and they and those they fund are betting they can use their wealth to suppress these truths, and that audiences will simply not hear them nor act upon them. The programming is further evidence that public interest interventions often do more to protect the growth-based wealth that funds low-impact charades, made at cost to children’s and animals’ rights, than to actually further those rights.

The baseline for progress in the programming, and the school in general, was set closer to growth economics based on treating children of color as deserving less that white kids, a standard that has nothing to do with animal welfare, exacerbating situations like the ejiao trade in equines and it’s projected growth. Original intent in the founding of the programming aside, that standard used is illegal because it violates a host of laws, including the fundamental rule that persons obligated to a legal system should first be empowered by it.

Marceau, instead of dealing with animal rights in the context of the subject-level relations of reproductive rights, intentionally chose to silo the issue away from birth equity in order to triple-dip: 1) benefit from his arbitrary but very privileged national/racial/class birth positionality, 2) benefit from growth-based wealth unimpeded by the rights of future children, and 3) pretend to be an animal savior while ensuring a comfortable life for him and his children at cost to animals. Pushed to do animal law as reforming the express or implied “we” reference that is the premise of all fundamental legal instruments like constitutions and covenants, their concern for animals fades relative to their desire to preserve their children’s unearned privileges.

Macro animal personhood and rights, the sort that accounts for the actual lived experience of all nonhumans, marked from the birth-creation of their relations with humans, is designed to prevent this sort of charade-level work and distractivism.

The lives animals experience cannot be separated from the creation of the humans with whom they will interact. Justin divides the two issues to get the benefit of appearing to be a hero, while using an underlying system – and its funds – that does much more harm to animals than he does good.

That’s a charade. And it’s illegal.

What Marceau did – part of a larger example of public interest advocates selling out, cost macro reforms that on-balance benefit animals substantial funding and time. And that cost the lives of mostly persons of color.

The University of Denver, and its funders, now have an opportunity to change the way it assesses value and report impacts – to eventually be able to substantiate its claims of furthering animal rights and liberation, the highest standard of environmental protection one can imagine and something that cannot be separated from the future prospects and lives of all children.

Fair Start and Truth Alliance activists have called upon the University to join the Tell the Truth campaign, and back preemptive standards for human rights and constitutional reforms that would truly liberate all animals.

The University has done the micro version of animal liberation and personhood. Now it can do the macro.

If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.

Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.

What do we do about it?

Use of that illegal baseline constitutes unfair and illegal (actually uniquely unconstitutional) competition. Entities willing to pay the costs of legitimacy by refusing valuation and reporting models that don’t actually empower children as they enter the world at a measurable level of “one person, one equal and influential constitutional vote” could never compete against those who refuse to do that, those who triple dip on their arbitrary birth positionality in an unsustainable system of growth to benefit from a system that quietly does more harm to their professed cause than they do to further it.

And the just need not be subjected to unfair and unconstitutional competition: Because governments’ authority, including to entitle /incorporate private entities and assign wealth, derives uniquely from the obligation to empower those subject to that authority and those entitlements, governments are under a preemptive obligation to prioritize the elimination, through things like consumer protection actions that can enjoin the underlying business models, of illegal baselining.

“National legitimacy is, and should have always been, contingent on measurable birth equity or
the empowerment of each child to eventually control the outcomes of their political systems. The
Tell the Truth campaign, which is a universal discourse in which all admit wrongly assuming
children legally deserve with the prospects they are born with rather than what racial justice,
their rights, and political equity require, and commit to prioritizing those things, is the best
pathway to that legitimacy. Ensuring this change, especially in post-reconstruction scenarios, is
the first order of business for everyone, and a discourse of our birth-equity obligations – in which
it takes a village to plan for a child – is preemptive.”

– Pierrette Kengela

March 17, 2026
How did the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity we see today fundamentally come about? Ask Tim Midura and the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy.

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

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

Those like Trump did not simply win. The progressive systems meant to block him were corrupted.

Fair Start Movement confronts the illegalbaselining and false claims wealthy funders make about their public interest impacts, claims that hide liability for the climate crisis, decline of democracy, vast inequity, and other horrors facing us today. These claims skew the standard for climate policy and life-saving reparations, enriching white children at deadly cost to children of color.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More specifically, Midura used the funds to further cement the nonsensical concept of anthropocentric animal law: Animal law as the current legal system’s reference to animals, with no need to fundamentally change how we form human/animal relations to actually / on balance protect animals. But you cannot help animals on balance without accounting for their relations with humans. Helping them requires the same fundamental change children of color need – reforming fundamental illegitimacy – but that’s the last thing those who made their wealth on illegitimacy want to deal with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More at:

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

and

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

Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy, inequity, etc. – he person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline.

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

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

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

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

Background:

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

Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world—and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis—the person or company making the claims was using an illegal Ponzi/equity-fraud standard and benefiting at deadly cost to others, mostly children of color.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The triple-dipping involves the:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was not alone.

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

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

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

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

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

More specifically, Nasser helped cement the nonsensical concept of anthropocentric animal law: Animal law as the current legal system’s reference to animals, with no need to fundamentally change how we form human/animal relations to actually / on balance protect animals. But you cannot help animals on balance without accounting for their relations with humans. Helping them requires the same fundamental change children of color need – reforming fundamental illegitimacy – but that’s the last thing those who made their wealth on illegitimacy want to deal with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background:

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

Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world—and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis—the person or company making the claims was using an illegal Ponzi/equity-fraud standard and benefiting at deadly cost to others, mostly children of color.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The triple-dipping involves the:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 8, 2026
Dr. Michael Greger Helped Turn Animal Protection Into a Ponzi Scheme for Food Investors. Urge Him to Tell the Truth.

Dr. Michael Greger is a prominent physician promoting plant-based nutrition as a means of health.

He was also paid a significant amount of money by the Humane Society of the United States, years ago, to further their mission of protecting animals.

Instead, over the span of decades he used the equity fraud standard described below and key positions he held in the animal protection movement to focus investors on food choice in growth-based markets as an effective reform, monetizing animal protection into a form of consumption, benefitting himself and investors in the process.

The growth in those markets did exponentially more harm to animals, and to vulnerable populations, than Greger did to help them.

In the past decade, the number of animals on U.S. factory farms has increased significantly, outpacing any reduction from veganism. Factory farm animal numbers rose by 6% (roughly 97 million more animals) between 2017 and 2022, reaching 1.7 billion, while veganism remains low (under 3% of the population) and has not significantly reduced overall consumption.

The Tell the Truth campaign simply asks him to admit that truth and factor in the negative impact of inequitable growth on humans and animals in order to dispel the illusion of his having made the world a better place.

Greger’s version of human health as a matter of food choice – on funded platforms in which he drowns out the voices of the vulnerable – has for decades masked deadly inequity that is now killing tens of millions of persons, and mostly persons of color.

Animal protection requires radical social change – with numbers that track total liberation. Those who have shifted it towards other ends, in the decades that proceeded Trump and the unfolding of the climate crisis, bear some responsibility for the crises we see today.

Contact Greger here, and urge him to Tell the Truth by describing his impacts in context, and to change standards for how he assesses and reports value.

Background:

Why Equity Fraud? Why Tell the Truth?

Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global offer the most just and effective social justice reforms possible today, but one has to ask the right question to understand why. You have to ask, when someone makes a value assessment and/or impact claim, what it’s relative to, or the fundamental baseline the claimant is using. They may be using the same illegal baseline that caused the climate crisis, one that undoes the value they claim by illegally discounting future lives, treating children of color as worth a fraction of the benefits white children enjoy.

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

Anyone can identify what’s called illegal baselining, or equity fraud: how is anyone claiming to create public value and impact accounting for children entering the world during the contemporaneous period of time? How were they accounting for a system of empowering children enough so they have a “one person, one influential vote,” enough to stop the harms of the climate crisis? If there was no such accounting or reporting to this standard, the claimant will have benefited at illegal and deadly cost to others and undone their claimed value. The Tell the Truth campaign identifies such people.

History

Fair Start was established by advocates who saw the corrupt use of a fraudulent Ponzi standard in their prior public-interest work. This standard stems from a twentieth-century power grab by wealthy families privatizing family planning to safeguard entitlements and maintain power, in a coercive political system never empowering its subjects. These families, along with political leaders, were legally bound to adhere to an objective, child-rights and equity standard, which asserts that no child is worth more than another, as outlined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The fundamental measure of value? Infant health and wellness as self-determination, or the ensuring of equal political influence for each individual.

Instead, they used the prevailing “separate but equal” standard to base reproductive rights on a subjective framework with no functional protection for future generations—a move that disenfranchised others, leading to the exclusion of birth equity from valuation and reporting systems and a commercialized version of freedom missing the necessary condition of empowerment.

The twentieth-century power grab used the “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity. This assumed existing entitlements and blocked the empowerment of each child—the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of freedom—and ensured unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentration of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment.

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

The power grab also created a false premise in our legal systems, because there is no protective obligation limiting the birth-creation of power relations. Why should we be obligated to protect the lives of those with great influence if they show no obligation to protect and empower those with the least influence so that political systems are legitimate?

Performative Babble Signaling Value While Benefiting From a System That Undoes It

The illegal standard uses manufactured numbers (using an XYZ analysis, where out-of-context statements about value and impact (X) are assessed against the variable of children entering the world during the relevant timeframe (Y) in a way that overshot and degraded children’s birthright conditions, showing a different outcome (Z) than claimed). The standard encouraged inaccurate claims of micro-level progress that benefited the claimant in order to hide larger losses based on macro-level factors like growth. One can’t benefit from a system that brings children into conditions and relations that violate a host of accepted legal standards, including treating infants of color as entities deserving political equity. Use of the standard means many public interventions did more to subjugate persons of color than further their missions.

These actors engage in hypocritical value signaling and performative babble, doing many seemingly useful things while “triple-dipping”: benefiting from inequitable birth positionality, growth-based wealth, and charade micro- and downstream public-interest work that hides the upstream macro-level harms from which they benefit at deadly cost to others.

Communications without the underlying obligation are hypocritical babble, with the communicator signaling values to others in the hope of improving their position in an illegitimate system, while refusing to legitimate the system by elevating a protective obligation to infants and animals in the formation of power relations above any other obligation, including deference to the state that purports to represent those infants.

For example, Paul Shapiro—a well-known animal-protection advocate—used the equity-fraud standard and a constant flow of inaccurate claims over the span of decades to help shift the movement from on-balance animal protection toward a system of vegan Ponzi-scheme food investments, and then founded his own company in order to cash in.

The power grab thus ensured a public-interest industry built on equity fraud, one that did more to enrich some children (like Barron Trump) at deadly cost to others (infants in the Sahel) than it did to long-run protect animals, the environment, children, and political systems. In this system, the wealth bubble created over decades of never having to pay the cost of children’s birthrights—not values—controls public-interest outcomes. Philanthropists assume entitlements unencumbered by both their professed and object values, when in reality they owe more than they could give as charity or invest.

The Solution: Tell the Truth and Be Part of a System of Protective Obligation—or Not

All Fair Start is is the research conclusion that all facts are relative to values, and value and impact claims either constitute or deconstitute legitimate political systems relative to a legally required ideal of measurable empowerment. It is physically impossible to be free without a preemptive, obligatory, collective discourse that ensures a system of family planning aligning measurable birth and political equity as the preemptive obligation with the coercive authority of the state, bringing all children above a threshold of empowerment.

The Tell the Truth campaign is the closest thing to that discourse because it requires admitting the use of an illegally commissive standard and communicatively reorienting the person in the political system to a preemptive obligation to future children. Like efforts to use non-binary pronouns or land-occupation declarations to change mindsets fixed around binary genders or colonial control of Indigenous land, the Tell the Truth campaign uses admission of benefiting at deadly cost to future generations—especially persons of color—to change how we think about obligation.

The campaign demands admission that we all used a system with an embedded baseline error that dilutes votes and commercializes democratic relations by overshooting and degrading political, social, and ecological thresholds, rather than applying an empowerment and resourcing threshold beneath which no child should be born.

The campaign acts as a “legitimacy lever,” taking the death debt from the use of the “separate but equal” reproductive-rights standard rather than the “no child is worth more than another” standard, and using it to leverage a legal, corporate, and grassroots effort in the United States and Europe to identify and preemptively enjoin key targets using equity fraud. This would, by 2028, not just remove Trump, but the fundamental cause of Trump: the power grab that assumed entitlements rather than legitimating them, and disembedded freedom from empowerment and isolated humans from one another, rather than having them measurably empowered and embedded via birth equity as the overriding human right.

How? Anyone can require their governments to block the use of the equity-fraud standard (usually through an illegal or unfair-competition-law injunction) because governments’ authority—including the authority to entitle wealth and property—derives from a preemptive obligation to measurably empower those subject to that authority. It’s illegal not to hire persons because of their color. It’s also illegal to use a standard in one’s work that enriches some—mostly white children—at deadly climatological and birth-inequity costs to millions of children of color.

Legitimate organizations that empower others cannot compete against those who exploit them. They can’t compete with those who omit facts that would show more harm done through a system that quietly turned claimed values into wealth. They can’t compete with those who want to improve their position in an illegitimate system rather than legitimate it. The Tell the Truth campaign is backed by grassroots, corporate-certification, and legal efforts to block equity fraud through state attorneys general who are obligated to legitimate their governance by actually empowering those subject to it.

Conclusion

To avoid equity fraud—which is an essentially racist Ponzi scheme with moving goalposts for what constitutes social justice in order to allow economic growth that enriches some and kills others—we all must assess value and report impact by accounting for the requirement on all of us to pay the costs of empowering children as they enter the world. The standard for doing so is sufficient entitlements and incentives to bring every child into the world in conditions, and with relations, that ensure one person, one equal and influential vote relative to political-equity metrics.

If one cannot show that—accounting for the costs of future children being empowered enough to use their political system to protect themselves from things like the climate crisis (equal offsets relative to zero, or one person, one equal and influential vote)—those assessing and reporting were using the equity-fraud standard. The Tell the Truth campaign divides the just—who back legal injunctions blocking equity fraud—from the unjust, who exploit birth inequity to triple-dip on their arbitrary benefits at deadly cost to others. The unjust hold wealth and entitlements that they refuse to legitimate with children’s rights, using violence to defend it while women and infants—unaware of their rights, including their rights to self-defense—die.

February 2, 2026
Urge Peter Singer to Tell the Truth. His Work for Animals Failed Because It Was Based on the Equity Fraud Standard.

Urge Peter Singer to Tell the Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growth is not neutral.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funders Must Support Advocates Fighting Back Against Pronatalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Singer and the Obligation to Tell the Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 24, 2026
An Open Letter to Mercy for Animals: Ensuring On Balance Public Interest Assessment and Reporting
A PDF version of the following letter is attached here.

December 30, 2025

Board of Directors, Mercy For Animals, 8033 Sunset Boulevard #864, Los Angeles, CA 90046

Dear Ms. Colizzi, Mr. Pellman Rowland, Ms. Akinci, and Ms. Mindrum,

I write on behalf of Fair Start Movement, which is a charitable organization that analyzes the systemic harms and threats to the sustainability and viability of our planet, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable populations globally, including children and future generations, animals, and the environment. It seeks solutions through law, policy, and education.

I’m also writing in my personal capacity as an attorney and leader in the animal protection movement and the human rights movement, including in various roles protecting the interests of humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment throughout my career. I started as a human rights attorney with the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to remove human rights abusers and then spent over twenty years in our movement building and leading legal and strategic animal protection initiatives and creating scholarship on how our work can truly advance the rights and protections of all of us – human and nonhuman – and fight exploitative systems to build a sustainable world.

Admittedly in this process I have developed critiques of what I see as counterproductive work in the animal protection movement and crucial errors and omissions in the way we evaluate and approach the work we do. In a nutshell, I believe we have to take into account the impact of growth and inequities in the human population as we fight against exploitative systems, understanding the plight of vulnerable populations and future generations, as well as the dire ecological crisis we are facing, and the role of factory farming in that. I think by incorporating these concepts and a more accurate calculus of present and future harm, the potential impact of our work will be immeasurably improved. Likewise, I have been outspoken in critiquing particular players in the animal protection movement because I believe the implication of not including appropriate growth and equity considerations into our work is catastrophic and undermines our objective of protecting animals in factory farms. I now have shifted to the process of building and guiding the grassroots Fair Start Movement, largely in the U.S. and Sub-Saharan Africa. As part of this, I have honed and refined our campaigns and asks in a way I think will be beneficial for all of us, and ultimately for the animals. It’s in this spirit of building a better movement that I come to you with this ask to begin to incorporate and account for these growth and equity issues in your work.

This is a moment of opportunity for Mercy For Animals. MFA has a history of innovation and thought leadership in this movement, and has weathered internal and external changes before. On the occasion of looking back over the organization’s accomplishments under Leah and what the next stage of MFA should be, I invite you to recognize and begin to incorporate the central tenets of the Fair Start Movement into the formulas and metrics by which you design and measure the impact of your work, and into your campaigns. We believe it’s exactly this thinking that can enhance the goals you set forth in your FAST post of “clarity, collaboration, and meaningful change for farmed animals.”

The Fair Start Movement is on the brink of launching its largest campaign yet, which is tailored primarily to organizations, funders, and leaders in the animal protection movement, and which will form the intersectional movement-building basis of incorporating growth and equity considerations within the animal protection movement and across other movements around the world. This campaign is called the Tell the Truth Campaign (TTT). It has a 4 point ask:
- Assess all public interest work from an accurate baseline, like assessing how climate and political crises impact the health and freedom of women and infants disproportionately around the world. Take into account inequitable growth. Ask: how does the value and impact of your work change once you factor in children entering the world relative to what their rights and equity require?
- Work toward the universal human right to birth and political equity as the most basic norm which means a minimum or floor of empowering and equitable resources beneath which no child should be born. Ask: are we and/or others claiming to do good while treating children of color and/or poor people as worth fewer resources and more risk than the average white or wealthy child?
- Address – and require government and the industry to address – the fundamental authority any government has, including to protect the legitimacy of economic rights and capital, is contingent on measurably empowering those people subject to it, in the creation of power relations and in birth and development. Defrauding people about inequity disenfranchises people. It’s not about population, it’s measurable political equity. In other words, ending equity fraud is about being free to choose who has power over you.
- Use discourse and a standard to assess impact that accounts for the full impact of the system that inequitable birth and development, and one’s position within it. In other words, set goals that account for and are ambitious enough to cover the full nature and scope of the harms industry causes.
We invite you to join the TTT campaign by beginning to incorporate its asks within your campaign design and metrics.

Mercy For Animals is a particular fit for this work given its core identity in two distinct respects. First, MFA is an organization that truly engages intersectionally across movements, supports the fight for racial justice, and elevates the factory farming issue in multiple spaces. Second, MFA has been dedicated to quantifiable impact-based metrics, particularly in its corporate and outreach campaigning. The TTT campaign and the Fair Start Movement’s core principles are central to improving upon both of these areas. Properly accounting for the harm to vulnerable populations, people of color – especially children and future generations – is the crux of true intersectionality and a bridge for more and better work across movements. The TTT campaign also offers a more complete accounting for harm and the impact of campaigns because it takes into account not just the number of animals affected today, but what impact on growth will mean for future suffering saved over a multigenerational timeline.

What we are offering here is an opportunity to incorporate a better and more complete formula for calculating harm and impact. As we know, factory farms operate on an illegal business model, externalizing the harms to animals, the environment, workers, consumers, and communities. Our campaigns and advocacy – outreach, corporate, legal, and otherwise — have been weak relative to the level of harm inflicted by these factory farms. Calculation of harm has been based on an incomplete and ineffective use of existing legal tools and inaccurate economic modeling which has actually further enabled such harm rather than curtailing it. Animal advocates must change our legal and economic systems to require them to catch up to recognition and remediation of the true scope of harm, across systems and even for future generations in order to address the existential threat that mega-corporations present to the rule of law and even to life on this planet.

The Problem: Improper Prioritization of Short-Term Profits and Growth Due to Future Discounting and Errors in Calculating Baseline Harms

Core to all of the harms of factory farming is the improper prioritization of short-term profits and growth without accounting for the negative externalities. Two closely related economic principles compound the harms. First, future discounting (i.e. valuation of short-term profits and growth over preservation for future health, animal life, animal welfare, and sustainability) and measuring things like amount of suffering and number of animals killed from the starting point of current production levels and demand, rather than from a baseline that reflects an ethical and sustainable amount of suffering and animal killing (which I think we’d all agree is zero or at least a negligible amount that is unavoidable through the use of sustainable plant based agriculture). This applies also to greenhouse gas emissions. That is, we must look at what the healthy and sustainable CO2 levels would be and hold factory farming polluters accountable to meet that goal. The end result is that short-term profits and growth are valued and enabled by the law and its enforcement, and the negative externalities are borne by the animals and the public. Vulnerable populations are hardest hit, including people of color, people in poverty and developing countries, children, and future generations. Mass species extinction, exploitation, and killing of trillions of animals each year, public health crises, and the risk of total ecosystem collapse are the result. If we remain on this trajectory, things will only get worse in the coming decades.

Second, omission of the disparate impact of harm to vulnerable populations – including animals and the natural environment, children, and the effect of this trend on future generations as population grows – has caused significant under-assessment of harm. This omission has led to the application of a standard for assessing such harm that is so inadequate it threatens the efficacy of all sorts of campaigns and other advocacy in the movement, and even the legitimacy of the law that continues to justify the existence and growth of factory farming. This inadequate assessment has been employed by stakeholders across all categories, including governments, corporations, and even nonprofit organizations working on these issues.

This has resulted in widespread discounting of lives and rights, and systematic political disenfranchisement. Without correction, significant portions of the population will become functionally incapable of getting their basic human rights met and will be irredeemably politically disenfranchised. The advocates for those who don’t have those voices – including animals and the environment – are weakened in their political power and efficacy as well, which will only continue to get worse over time.

Mercy For Animals’ Work is Hindered by this Problem and Uniquely Positioned to Incorporate Accurate and Impactful Metrics

MFA has a long history of leadership and impact in the animal protection movement, and has been at the forefront of a holistic and intersectional view of the factory farming problem and of its work. Its mission is “to construct a compassionate food system that is not just kind to animals but essential for the future of our planet and all who share it. Our vision of a world where animals are respected, protected, and free drives the work we do every day.” This globalistic and future-focused view of MFA’s mission makes it crucial to account for the problem accurately, and to apply its innovative skill set to its work incorporating an understanding of growth and sustainability.

Programmatically, according to its 2024 990, MFA’s impact and focus is on “expos[ing] factory farming… [and] educating millions through social media on the benefits of plant-based eating… helping to raise awareness and inspire action for animal welfare globally.” It also “supported significant corporate and legislative wins, ensuring ongoing progress for farmed animals. Our corporate engagement team helped advance campaigns to improve protections for farmed animals and promote plant-based eating.”

MFA’s Transfarmation program’s “mission is to build collective power sufficient to realize a just and sustainable food system… by helping farmers transition from industrial animal agriculture operations to raising crops for human consumption. By creating models of alternative economic opportunities, building solidarity with other movements, and shifting societal narratives to chang culture, we will realize a just and sustainable food system.” This is another future-focused and systemic strategy.

“Investigations show the harsh realities of the treatment of farmed animals… and can help lead to major changes in the animal agricultural system and public perception to further action for animal welfare and protection of farmed animals.”

Each of these programs presents an opportunity and an imperative to incorporate an accurate assessment of harm and evaluation of impact into MFA’s strategy and work. A throughline of each of these programs is the commitment to changing things now for a cumulative and lasting effect on the future plight of animals, people, and the environment. All of these programs also rely essentially upon the agency and effectiveness of activists and political power. These are the central principles of TTT and the Fair Start Movement’s solutions for effecting real change.

Taking a few of the specific programs, corporate and legislative campaigning has a significant blind spot here that causes it to be potentially weak to the point of counterproductivity. If we do not take into account the growth – in profits, in demand, in market share, and in total production of animal products – that welfare-based corporate and legislative campaigns may be contributing to, these campaigns may have the effect of actually increasing suffering over the course of time in a significant way. An additive component here is the halo effect these campaigns may bring to these companies, further promoting consumerism and growth as a virtue rather than the root of the problem.

Educational and exposure-based campaigns including investigations could and should be incorporating an accurate calculus of harm, accounting for growth and the impact of the harms of industrial animal agriculture on vulnerable populations and future sustainability, as well as emphasizing the importance of reducing the overall demand and production of animal products. Vegan campaigning has heretofore not taken into account the projected growth of demand in animal products. Movement leaders have privately conceded for years that even the most optimistic projections on the success of vegan campaigning can only hope to slow the growth of demand for animal products over time, rather than reducing existing levels or reversing the trend to reducing the overall number of animals in the system or overall suffering. This issue needs to be reckoned with and inform strategy and assessment.

Perhaps the easiest program to upgrade under the Fair Start Movement’s principles is Transfarmation. With its objective to create a holistically just and sustainable food system, any impact it can have on shifting the paradigm and transforming the system now will have an amplified effect in the future, shifting away from the highly consolidated corporate animal-based model that is centered on and slated to grow dramatically over time. If Transfarmation succeeds today, its effects will be much greater than if it were to try to correct the problem in 10, 20, or 50 years’ time.

The Solution; Incorporate Growth-Based Standards for Calculating Harms into Your Campaigns and Metrics

As MFA and other organizations that work with the TTT campaign design their strategies, you can correct the basis for which you are calculating harms and impact by taking into account the impact on animals, vulnerable populations, and future generations using an objective measure. This objective measure accurately assesses damages and should be used in evaluating what kinds of interventions and campaigns can be used in your strategy against factory farming, how effective your campaigns are as they progress, and incorporated into your outreach and education and bridge-building between social justice movements. Two types of actions can and should underly a variety of campaigns and strategies:
1. Reduce or eliminate future discounting in cases where there is harm that will continue. Instead, take into account the projected growth of the exploitation and growth of harm over time. The most important situations to apply this principle to are cases where animals and ecosystem health and survivability, young people, vulnerable populations, and future generations face disproportionate harm.
2. Use a zero-baseline calculus of harm. Fair Start Movement advocates for the recognition of harms to all, including animals and the environment, young people, and future generations. By considering the welfare of life holistically, and on a longer timeline, we can account more accurately for the level and type of harm factory farming is inflicting and upon whom.
Impacts on farmed animals, poor people, people of color, children, and future generations, are disproportionately high now and those divides will continue to grow. The current campaign, educational, and legal approach also does not take into account the acceleration of production of animal products, suffering, demand, and ecological devastation and system collapse corporate bad actors are creating for short-term gains. In particular, any legitimate advocacy work must include an understanding of future animals, children’s welfare, and future generations in light of the existential threats to our environment and geopolitical future.

Harms to young, the vulnerable – including people, animals, and the environment, and future generations – and the likelihood of acceleration of those harms if current trends are allowed to continue – should be taken into account in any campaigning against factory farming. In addition, in the case of factory farming, where the underlying harm is a driver of growth of the corporation or sector – by competitive advantage, simple externalizing of costs to increase profits, and/or by false representations to consumers, investors, or regulators – campaign objectives that account for this should be incorporated to take into account the disparate, ongoing, and growing harms caused by factory farming. Breaking away from the pack by reliance on illegal and damaging practices now sets into motion growth and acceleration which increases damage as a whole.

Factory Farming’s current and projected harms also pose a fundamental threat to the legitimacy of law and our power as political citizens in a representative democracy. Factory farming corporations have been allowed unfettered – and in fact highly assisted – growth, which has put children and future generations in a position of inheriting a world that is both ecologically worse off than ever and where they have no functional opportunity to reverse course due to the relative political disempowerment that the exploitative industries have created.

The scope of this problem is so large that it poses a fundamental threat to our democratic system of government. Ecological collapse due to climate change, deforestation, and a litany of similar existential harms have robbed massive numbers of people the meaningful right to participate in the political process, let alone enjoy the exercise of their legal rights. Their ability to advocate for animals and other politically disenfranchised groups is further weakened. Corporate growth and profitability does not necessarily support even baseline human rights. In fact, at some point enabling such corporate growth and profitability to the exclusion of other things reduces humans to mere instruments of corporate objectives. For some populations now – and certainly for many future generations – that balance has tipped, such that corporate profits have subsumed even the basic ability for people to participate in and consent to their own governance. Their access to basic needs such as clean water and a livable environment has been or will be denied. Corporate bad actors – especially factory farm corporations – are undoubtedly the major cause of such existential harms.

The representation of the governed is the basis of the authority to govern, and is the preemptive standard from which all other legal authority derives. The situation we are facing as a result of corporate harms poses such an existential threat that it has either passed now or will soon pass the threshold of disenfranchisement if these kinds of harms persist unabated. At some point, the threat becomes so dire, the very basis of law is threatened. Large swaths of people have no meaningful representative rights and access, and it will only continue to get worse. This threat to equity and political representation necessitates the accurate and objective harm standards set forth in this letter.

All legal systems, political entities, constitutions, courts, precedents, statutes, and the like are predicated on the simple premise of citizen representation. All legal authority derives from such representation. The cornerstone of political representation is the “one person, one vote” standard for equal protection. The environmental harms caused largely by multinational factory farming and other corporations impact the population in such a disparate way, and that disparate impact is set to accelerate in our children’s lifetime and for future generations, that the very concept of political legitimacy through representation is undermined. We stand to leave our children and future generations with an irredeemable ecological, legal, and geopolitical mess. It is only through the objectivity and accuracy of the preemptive standard we propose here that we may find remedies to reverse course. Any remedies applied after-the-fact in an attempt to right this will fall far short of the mark unless a standard is used that takes children and future generations’ right to a sustainable environment and functional democracy into account.

Failing this, vulnerable populations, children, and future generations must live in a society where they are in ecological crisis, have no meaningful political power to shape reforms, and are required to follow the law without actually being empowered by it. The preemptive standard takes these interests into account, incorporating constitutive political equity and self-determination into its metric. As compared with the current standard which was derived from commercialized standards of welfare that prioritized profit and growth, there are massive differences in terms of things like permissible emissions, levels of democratic representation, minimal birth and development conditions for children, and many others. The current commercially based standards are not based on legitimate legal principles, are killing millions, will continue to do so, and pose and existential risk to life on earth over time.

Fair Start’s full justice standard to preserve freedom and self-determination

The Fair Start Movement seeks what we call a full justice standard, which requires no child is born beneath a threshold of resources necessary for freedom and self-determination. In other words, we do not want to see any life brought into a planet that is irredeemable. That may already be happening to some in this generation, and with the trajectory we are currently on, it is only a matter of time before the next generation or the one after that is handed a planet and political system that they have no power to fix. We face an unsolvable ecological and geopolitical crisis with no meaningful access to the tools – political, economic, educational, and otherwise – to give any hope of redemption. Corporate harms and the disparate impacts of these corporate harms directly cause this powerlessness. Factory farming corporations are at the center of this problem.
- Measurement of harms accurately, from zero baseline standards and without future discounting, is necessary to preserve democracy and the government’s own right to govern
- Protecting political legitimacy requires prioritization and inclusion of children and future generations
In order to have any meaningful attempt at a “one person, one vote” democratic institution, from which all legal authority derives, a certain baseline requirement must be met: children need minimum thresholds of well-being and empowerment, or they simply do not have access to political representation of any kind. Infants possess a constitutionally protected right to life, bodily integrity, and health.

As explored by Nobel Laureate Steven Chu in Forbes, “The World Economy Is a Pyramid Scheme,” this systemic exploitation continues to enrich the few at the expense of millions, perpetuating cycles of inequity and environmental degradation. The omission of children’s rights not only weakens the chain of legitimacy but also allows performative fraud to undo the “object in the subject,” thus undermining justice. No valuation system outside of zero remains for the omitted, who are those left without recognition or investment in their future. The inequitable growth this ensured was sustained for less than a handful of generations before it caused catastrophic economic, ecological and political outcomes, creating unsustainable demand, cheap labor, and diluted political equity – all enabled by discounting future children’s rights – and in fact the rights of all future life. The standard has allowed benchmarking of terms like green, humane, eco, sustainable, net-zero, equitable, etc. that in ways that have no connection to the actual birth and development conditions children need to survive, and benchmarking process that has been driven by a first-order lack of equity standards in value assessments and claims.

The preemptive standard argued for here has a number of campaign, legal, and policy implications and potential applications, including incentivized parenting delay, equity reparations, and a resource measure below which no child should be born.

MFA is a leader and a pathbreaker in the animal protection movement. This is a moment of unique opportunity to level up the impact of its work and its leadership across our movement and others. I invite you to reach out to me and to the Fair Start Movement to engage in a dialogue around how to improve the course of progress for today and generations to come.

Sincerely,

Carter Dillard, and The Team at Fair Start Movement
December 30, 2025
An Open Letter to United States Black Liberation Organizations. Take Action.
Fair Start reforms offer the most just and effective way to address many of today’s overlapping crises—but only if public-interest claims are evaluated using the right standard. Anyone claiming positive impact should be asked a basic question: How did your cost-benefit model account for children entering the world, and did it meet what those children’s legal rights, political equity, and national legitimacy require? In most cases, the answer is that it did not.

Children are typically treated as economic inputs driving growth, while the ecological, political, and human costs of that growth are ignored or illegally discounted. This produces “free” wealth that depends on worsening conditions – especially for children of color – and contradicts the values advocates claim to hold, such as safety, equality, and sustainability. The result is continued overshoot of ecological and social thresholds that both humans and nonhumans need to survive.

How is such a contradiction possible?

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

Even a basic review of history will show women “liberated” by the United Nations “separate but equal” standard of treating having and not having children as a matter of personal autonomy (with parents taught to treat their children as means and not ends, generation after generation) now face dying in heat waves fundamentally driven by inequitable growth. Their predicament was worsened by low-impact social justice interventions, like attempts to eliminate greenwashing, that themselves used a definition of “green” and high permissible emissions geared to paltry early childhood development investments all meant to exploit growth and enrich the mostly white children of the funders backing the U.S environmental organizations, at deadly cost to millions of Africans.

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

Read more about threshold borders here, and to understand why Trump is a symptom and not the cause of all the harm he has done.

That wealth, which enables a form of white supremacy, was built by not having to be legitimated – by not having to pay the costs of child rights and equity, and thus legitimacy, and by ensuring unsustainable economic growth that has enriched a few at deadly and illegal cost to many, mostly children of color. The reproductive rights regime has lasted less than a few decades before causing catastrophic overshoot and degradation of multiple threshold conditions – ecological, social, and political – vulnerable children and animals need to survive and thrive, and it is impinging on the fundamental right of current and future generations to have children in safe and empowering conditions.

The Illegal Wealth Bubble Driving Outcomes

Today there is a massive wealth bubble at the top of our political and economic systems that derives from the use of a racist and fraudulent family policy, dating back to the standards that were set in human and reproductive rights regimes circa 948-1968. By privatizing reproductive rights, existing concentrations of wealth and power could maintain their entitlements, and could externalize their costs on the most vulnerable, at an existential level instead of legitimating political systems through child rights and equity-based creation of power relations. Instead of using bodily autonomy as the ethical basis of a right not to have children, and child equity as the basis of a right to have children, they used bodily autonomy for both. That eliminated all functional protections in the most influential stage of power relations.

This gutted racial justice and human rights / legitimation efforts – taking the key step out of the process. The move was – at the most fundamental level – illegal because under it there are no legal protections for / obligations to the most vulnerable: children are brought into conditions that violate their rights, with after-the-fact interventions and applications of rights, after adults have already gotten the benefit of exploiting them. This in turn threatens political legitimacy, inserting a false premise in which citizens have been expected to follow the law without actually being empowered by it.

The wealth from that growth now funds a legion of professionals – lawyers, academics (many of whom do not account for birth positionality and thus lose neutrality in their work), reporters/editors, campaigners, and paid fundraisers – who act as decoys creating a fantasy world of social justice undone daily by intergenerational and fundamental injustice

Many of these have tried to sabotage Fair Start reforms, in order to hide liability, and will be outed in the year to come.

These professionals protect and expand the wealth by omitting the countervailing impacts of children entering the world in conditions that violate the children’s rights and disenfranchise them, impacts that contradict the value assessments and public interest impacts the professionals claim.

Many benefit from this high-stakes birth lottery system, and then use their privilege to create the misleading appearance of solving it. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in the heat waves caused by the wealth bubble these professionals created.

Taking Action

That omission constitutes legally actionable equity and impact fraud (EIF) – using downstream and micro assessments and reporting to mask upstream and macro forces illegally enriching some at deadly cost to others. There is a preemptive right and cause of action to block EIF because governments authority derives from empowering those subject to it – and governments cannot redefine the object state of what it means to empower subjects just to avoid liability for the climate crisis.

Widespread use of the standard – and the discourse that situates (or constitutes) each of us in the intergenerational body politic – makes it physically impossible to limit the power humans have over one another, so that each person can be self-determining. Fair Start activists have witnessed multiple attempts by this professional class to hide collective liability for the deaths of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.

This is intentional reparations fraud, the attempt to skew the metrics for avoiding, and compensating for, untold climate-related and other deaths caused by illegal birth inequity and the growth it causes.

Use of the fraudulent standard – which derives from the maintenance of the racist “separate but equal” standard of the Twentieth Century, tucked away in reproductive rights regimes as a form of autonomy designed to gut political equity, is preempted by a variety of laws, and can be targeted as unfair competition under state law.

How? Because vulnerable entities and those who represent them, like TruthAlliance.Global – can’t compete with those who use the equity fraud model. Use of that standard constitutes the ongoing subversion of racial justice and other decolonial movements, and the hiding of collective liability for the deaths of millions as the democratic disenfranchisement and climate crisis.

Anyone can spot the standard of private benefit and public costs and its manufactured numbers using an AI-based XYZ analysis where claim X is assessed for how the cost/benefit modeling accounted for what children were owed as they entered the world (high levels of permissible harm v. self-determination, or zero), the largest factor altering the X claim to in fact be Z).

When confronted with these truths by TruthAlliance.global, many have just continued, hiding collective liability for the deaths of millions, and intentionally omitting the impacts of the largest driver.

If anyone used in their business or nonprofit work a valuation model premised on valuing as a benefit not hiring persons of color, they would be subject to civil rights injunction by state government. Using a model that generally enriches mostly white children at deadly climatological and other costs to mostly children of color, and doing so in part by disenfranchising them, is worse than a discriminatory hiring model, and is also illegal.

Constitutional discourse, about what we owe future generations, can bring change. For example, Fair Start is urging Paul Shapiro – an influential animal rights activist who helped defined policy for decades, now turned industrialist, to Tell the Truth about his impacts and to evade what many movement strategists see as the danger of interest convergence activism. Others are changing the world for the better by embracing the primacy of black birth equity.

Our work is having an impact. We pointed out that Wikipedia used the EIF standard in reporting the misleading impact claims of one environmental organization. Wikipedia retaliated by deleting the Fair Start Movement page, hiding liability for low editorial standards that have exacerbated the climate crisis, and that hide editors’ individual conflicts of interests.

But taking our claimed values seriously, ensuring a future defined by them, requires fundamental change and not lying about one’s impacts while quietly undoing them for personal benefit.
- EIF and those who use it can be challenged by grassroots family reforms and demands for equity reparations via coalitions like TruthAlliance.global;
- a universal discourse called Tell the Truth that simply urges those making public impact claims to contextualize those claims around children entering the world;
- the standard can be enjoined in a variety of legal fora under the preemptive right all have to legal and political systems where authority, including the right to entitle wealth, is derived from and contingent on the measurable (measured from a zero harm baseline) empowerment of those subject to such systems;
- and the standard can be ended via a corporate certification programming that ensures businesses avoid the horrific costs of the failed reproductive rights standard.
Total liberation lies not in top-down power, constitutions that do not empower people, and disconnected leaders drawing fictitious borders on maps, but in decentralizing power through collective reproductive rights systems that are based on love – and proven by ensuring measurable political equity for all children and thus national legitimacy.

Fair Start – which now operates mostly as a limitless network of whistleblowers targeting those above them – is intent on showing EIF as the fundamental driver of the crises we face today, and preempting it at the federal level in the United States by 2028 via specific grassroots, legal and corporate reforms to ensure the United States (which has had a disproportionate impact using the standard to undercut freedom around the world) and other nations begin to fundamentally legitimate. This entails moving illegitimate wealth to save countless innocent lives as a fundamental form of universal resistance to oppression.

TAKE ACTION: Back TruthAlliance.global and this simple truth: No Child is Worth More Than Another. For our supporters we urge specific avenues – Take action: 1) Become a whistleblower and grassroots organizer with Truth Alliance, 2) demand truth and reconciliation with our Tell the Truth campaign, 3) urge your attorney general or other law enforcement to seek a “legitimacy injunction” blocking use of the standard, and 4) back legitimacy certification for those who come forward and are willing to change accelerates.

One solution? Ensure a preemptive, legal cause of action for constitutional equity, starting with preempting the state law standard for basic consumer fraud cases, and moving into civil rights and constitutional litigation to elevate the primacy of black birth equity:

We will style the first suit as unfair competition on behalf of the Truth Alliance (TA) coalition. At base that coalition means admitting in truth and reconciliation that not prioritizing political equity as a fundamental norm has done more harm to our world and values than downstream public interest interventions have done good.

While the litigation and policy work will cite positive law and authority, our position is that the fundamental legal authority is a grundnorm that measurably and equitably empowers the constituents of any legal system. Documents, like constitutions, do not constitute political entities. People do. And the authority for courts to set precedent around the “one person, one vote” standard for equal protection derives from and is conditioned in a primary rule of constitutional equity and empowerment, a requirement logically inherent in the phrase “We the people” and similar conditions premising constitutions, treaties, and other legal instruments.

Will you join the TA coalition?

It starts by simply bifurcating those into admit the above, and want change, and those who do not:

A sample engagement question:

_________’s claimed value add does not account for child inequity, and treating children of color as deserving of less, and disenfranchising them. That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes that are undoing _______’s claimed value add, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent.

For example______________
December 29, 2025
A Quiet Driver of Climate Death? A Wealthy Professional Class Creating a Fantasy World of Social Justice Impact.
Fair Start reforms offer the most just and effective way to address many of today’s overlapping crises—but only if public-interest claims are evaluated using the right standard. Anyone claiming positive impact should be asked a basic question: How did your cost-benefit model account for children entering the world, and did it meet what those children’s legal rights, political equity, and national legitimacy require? In most cases, the answer is that it did not. Children are typically treated as economic inputs driving growth, while the ecological, political, and human costs of that growth are ignored or illegally discounted. This produces “free” wealth that depends on worsening conditions – especially for children of color – and contradicts the values advocates claim to hold, such as safety, equality, and sustainability. The result is continued overshoot of ecological and social thresholds that both humans and nonhumans need to survive.

How is such contradiction possible?

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

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

Read more about threshold borders here, and to understand why Trump is a symptom and not the cause of all the harm he has done.

That wealth, which enables a form of white supremacy, was built by not having to be legitimated – by not having to pay the costs of child rights and equity, and thus legitimacy, and by ensuring unsustainable economic growth that has enriched a few at deadly and illegal cost to many, mostly children of color. The reproductive rights regime has lasted less than a few decades before causing catastrophic overshoot and degradation of multiple threshold conditions – ecological, social, and political – vulnerable children and animals need to survive and thrive, and it is impinging on the fundamental right of current and future generations to have children in safe and empowering conditions.

The wealth from that growth now funds a legion of professionals – lawyers, academics (many of whom do not account for birth positionality and thus lose neutrality in their work), reporters/editors, campaigners, and paid fundraisers – who act as decoys creating a fantasy world of social justice undone daily by intergenerational and fundamental injustice, and who protect and expand the wealth by omitting the countervailing impacts of children entering the world in conditions that violate the children’s rights and disenfranchise them, impacts that contradict the value assessments and public interest impacts the professionals claim.

Many benefit from this high-stakes birth lottery system, and then use their privilege to create the misleading appearance of solving it. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in the heat waves caused by the wealth bubble these professionals created.

That omission constitutes legally actionable equity and impact fraud (EIF) – using downstream and micro assessments and reporting to mask upstream and macro forces illegally enriching some at deadly cost to others. There is a preemptive right and cause of action to block EIF because governments authority derives from empowering those subject to it – and governments cannot redefine the object state of what it means to empower subjects just to avoid liability for the climate crisis. Widespread use of the standard – and the discourse that situates (or constitutes) each of us in the intergenerational body politic – makes it physically impossible to limit the power humans have over one another, so that each person can be self-determining. Fair Start activists have witnessed multiple attempts by this professional class to hide collective liability for the deaths of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.

If anyone used in their business or nonprofit work a valuation model premised on valuing as a benefit not hiring persons of color, they would be subject to civil rights injunction by state government. Using a model that generally enriches mostly white children at deadly climatological and other costs to mostly children of color, and doing so in part by disenfranchising them, is worse than a discriminatory hiring model, and is also illegal.

Constitutional discourse, about what we owe future generations, can bring change. For example, Fair Start is urging Paul Shapiro – an influential animal rights activist who helped defined policy for decades, now turned industrialist, to Tell the Truth about his impacts and to evade what many movement strategists see as the danger of interest convergence activism. Others are changing the world for the better by embracing the primacy of birth equity.

Our work is having an impact. We pointed out that Wikipedia used the EIF standard in reporting the misleading impact claims of one environmental organization. Wikipedia retaliated by deleting the Fair Start Movement page, hiding liability for low editorial standards that have exacerbated the climate crisis, and that hide editors’ individual conflicts of interests.

But taking our claimed values seriously, ensuring a future defined by them, requires fundamental change and not lying about one’s impacts while quietly undoing them for personal benefit.
- EIF and those who use it can be challenged by grassroots family reforms and demands for equity reparations via coalitions like TruthAlliance.global;
- a universal discourse called Tell the Truth that simply urges those making public impact claims to contextualize those claims around children entering the world;
- the standard can be enjoined in a variety of legal fora under the preemptive right all have to legal and political systems where authority, including the right to entitle wealth, is derived from and contingent on the measurable (measured from a zero harm baseline) empowerment of those subject to such systems;
- and the standard can be ended via a corporate certification programming that ensures businesses avoid the horrific costs of the failed reproductive rights standard.
Total liberation lies not in top-down power, constitutions that do not empower people, and disconnected leaders drawing fictitious borders on maps, but in decentralizing power through collective reproductive rights systems that are based on love – and proven by ensuring measurable political equity for all children and thus national legitimacy.

Fair Start – which now operates mostly as a limitless network of whistleblowers targeting those above them – is intent on showing EIF as the fundamental driver of the crises we face today, and preempting it at the federal level in the United States by 20028 via specific grassroots, legal and corporate reforms to ensure the United States (which has had a disproportionate impact using the standard to undercut freedom around the world) and other nations begin to fundamentally legitimate. This entails moving illegitimate wealth to save countless innocent lives as a fundamental form of universal resistance to oppression.

TAKE ACTION: Back TruthAlliance.global and this simple truth: No Child is Worth More Than Another.
December 24, 2025