The following is an AI simplification of a longer draft, in progress, below it regarding one example of Fair Start’s Tell the Truth campaign, which urges constitutional discourse to target the fundamental driver of the political, ecological, and social crises we see in the world today: Birth-based political equity.
All facts, and the claims that use them, are relative to values. Ensuring the right set of values when assessing the accuracy of claims, and contrasting what we find when we use the wrong set of values, let’s us see problems in the world today at a deeper level, as well as how to fix them.
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.
If a business or nonprofit used a valuation model that counted racial exclusion as a benefit, it would be subject to civil-rights enforcement. A model that enriches mostly white children while imposing deadly climate, political, and ecological costs on mostly children of color—often through disenfranchisement—is worse, not better, and is also illegal. Yet this model is widespread.
The model uses a sliding baseline that gives future children fewer resources and less political power as conditions worsen. This is the same growth-based Ponzi scheme—identified by a Nobel laureate—that shifts costs onto those least responsible while violating children’s legal rights. Impact claims made under this model are therefore inaccurate because they omit a decisive factor: the harms caused by inequitable and unsustainable growth itself.
The remedy is straightforward: call such claims in, and require advocates to change how they assess and report impact.
Paul Shapiro as an Example
Paul Shapiro, founder of a major alternative-protein company, recently claimed in a Medium essay that he has helped animals over more than two decades. That claim is misleading.
Since the early 2000s, factory farming has expanded dramatically, with hundreds of billions more animals suffering today than when Paul began his work—far exceeding any animals “saved” through food reforms. This outcome was driven by a factor Paul and many others relied on and benefited from: unsustainable, birth-inequitable growth paired with valuation models that illegally discount future human and nonhuman lives. Instead of focusing on fundamental justice, Paul and other activists used a focus on farmed animals as a vector to focus on food, monetizing animal rights in a way that benefited Paul and alternative protein food investors more than animals, and at cost to our ecologies, democracies, and the most vulnerable humans. Had they actually moved to liberate animals, they would have had to account for the fundamental creation of power relations between humans and animals – a costly move that would require dealing with racial justice, political equity, and other issues that cannot be reduced to an investment strategy masquerading as charity.
Activists working alongside Paul at Compassion Over Killing and later at the Humane Society consistently used this same flawed standard. It created the appearance of progress through narrow, downstream interventions while upstream growth quietly overwhelmed those gains. The model violated legal protections for children and animals, undermined racial justice, and entrenched political inequity by ignoring the impact of children entering the world without guaranteed birth or political rights.
The question is not whether Paul did better than worse actors. The question is relative to what standard he claims to have helped animals. Using a floating baseline—rather than a legally required threshold of empowerment—allows one to claim success even as conditions worsen overall. That is how animal suffering could increase dramatically while advocates claim victory.
Much of the funding for these efforts came from wealth produced by the same inequitable growth system—wealth that carries a “death debt” as climate harms accelerate. Charity distributed from this system does not outweigh the damage it causes.
The Core Failure
The standard Paul and others used treats harm as relative and adjustable rather than absolute. As ecological and political conditions degrade, the baseline simply shifts downward, normalizing injustice. This allows advocates to appear to help animals while benefiting from a system that does far more harm than good.
True animal protection cannot be separated from human political equity. Humans are animals, and any serious attempt to reduce nonhuman suffering must account for how children enter the world, how power is distributed at birth, and whether governance is legitimate. Ignoring these relationships turns animal protection into a charade.
Laws protecting animals have negligible impact compared to the effects of unchecked, inequitable human growth over generations. Food reforms and similar interventions are minor and often self-serving when measured against these macro forces—and they frequently obscure growing political illegitimacy.
The Alternative: Fair Start
A legitimate model begins with birth and political equity. Government authority—and the wealth it entitles—must be derived from the measurable empowerment of those subject to it. This is a yes-or-no condition, not a matter of ideology.
Fair Start treats caring for children as the foundation of freedom and democracy, not as a private matter divorced from political legitimacy. It replaces growth-based exploitation with a standard that ensures no child is born below a threshold of empowerment and preparation. This approach aligns with ecological limits, racial justice, democratic self-determination, and genuine animal protection.
Call to Action
Paul should tell the full truth about the context of his impact, including how growth undermined it. He should abandon models that exploit infants and animals and instead support a Fair Start standard that prioritizes birth and political equity as prerequisites for legitimate impact.
Specifically, he should support efforts—such as forthcoming FTC action—to prohibit the use of deceptive “equity fraud” valuation models in public-interest claims. This is a collective action problem, but it will not be solved unless those with influence lead.
This is not a personal attack. The personal is political, and Paul has the opportunity to help correct a systemic failure. Telling the truth about how we failed future generations—and committing to a just standard going forward—is the first step toward real accountability and real change.
Paul Shapiro Can Do More to Help Animals, at an Exponential Level
Fair Start reforms are the most just and effective way to end many of the crises we see in the world today, but you have to ask the right question of anyone making a public interest impact claim to understand why. Ask the person making the claim to explain how their value assessment (cost/benefit) model, and impact reporting, accounted for the factor of children entering the world, and entering in conditions that satisfy what those kids’ legal rights, right to political equity, and right to national legitimacy, require? Most likely they were not accurately accounting for those rights, but were instead treating children as economic inputs who are simply driving growth, and the “free” money that magically comes from unsustainable growth. Most likely the person making the claim was using a standard that contradicts their own values (like being made safe rather than put into a vulnerable position), and ensures the ongoing overshoot and degradation of multiple ecological/social thresholds that infants and animals need to survive.
Lots of inputs go into the outcome of more animals suffering despite the efforts critiqued below, but everyone has to choose the lens through which they weigh values and report impacts, and everyone can choose a model that requires a threshold of empowerment for all children. We are all responsible for that choice, because we benefit from the system that impacts them.
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, as described below. Using a model that generally enriches mostly white children at deadly climatological and other costs to mostly children of color, doing so in part by disenfranchising them, is worse than a discriminatory hiring model, and is also illegal.
If the person making the claim was using this model/standard, they were mostly likely doing so in order to personally benefit, and using a sliding scale baseline that gives children (and mostly children of color) less and less as things worsen ecologically and politically in the world, heaping costs on those least responsible. This is the same scale that ensures the ongoing and illegal Ponzi scheme (as noted by one Nobel laureate) that fundamentally drives outcomes in the world today, and is designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others, all in violations of children’s legal rights. And that means the claims the person is making are inaccurate – usually because they are omissive of a key factor, e.g. an animal advocate omitting the largest driver of animal suffering, as discussed below. The fix? Call the claimant in, and ask them to change how they assess and claim impact.
I have done this. Paul can too.
Paul Shapiro is an influential person and can use that influence to make a massive shift that does not disproportionally elevate his own prospects, and by embracing a macro or total liberation of not just nonhumans but humans as well.
Paul Shapiro and his recent claims to have helped animals over the span of more than two decades
Recently Paul Shapiro, founder of a highly valued alternative protein company, wrote a piece for Medium about his work at the animal protection organization Compassion Over Killing (now Animal Outlook) going back to the early 2000s. Paul is well respected and liked by many, including at Fair Start, but the subject below involves a system that causes unimaginable suffering. And while his work has inspired some to take up animal protection and leave lucrative careers, their goal was always to help animals on balance and as Paul pushed for in the early days, to liberate them.
Paul is better off than when he and other activists there started their work. Animals, and the most vulnerable humans, are much worse off, with horrific prospects for the future.
What went wrong? In his Medium piece Paul refers to helping animals in various ways over his career. For example, Paul says:
I’m grateful to the numerous animal advocates who helped build COK during my decade there. I’m also grateful to the animal advocates around the world who came both before and after us and are still today working to effectuate a better world for animals.
Those statements are inaccurate, and out of context.
Paul is trying to rewrite history. Factors of growth, impact, and damage to equity – and the cumulative and accelerating effect of all of these – should be and should have been taken into account by anyone doing public interest work when designing strategy and tactics.
There are hundreds of billions of more animals suffering in factory farming since 2001, exponentially more than Paul saved, and all from a factor Paul spent decades benefitting from while shuffling the costs of onto others: Unsustainable, and birth inequity-based growth, and the use of manufactured numbers in value assessments and impact reporting that illegally discount future human and nonhuman lives, rather than measuring harm from a zero baseline, as described below.
Activists today working with Fair Start also worked with Paul and others at the Compassion Over Killing, since roughly 2001, and after that at the Humane Society of the United States. During their entire experience, the activists and Paul all consistently used a fraudulent equity and impact standard – #equityfraud – that created a fantasy world of impacts on a micro and downstream level that were quietly being undone on a macro, and upstream level by a Ponzi scheme of inequitable growth.
Using the wrong standard – clouding the world with misinformation and skewing the baseline – threatens ongoing efforts to ensure accurate and life-saving climate reparations.
The model the activists used was based on a decades old and illegal growth arc that violated a variety of legal protections for infants and animals, and effectively subverted racial justice movements of the Twentieth Century by ensuring unsustainable and inequitable growth and massive political inequity. Ask Paul how he was factoring in children entering the world relative to what their rights require, 2001 to date, and you will find him assuming and benefiting the current reproductive rights system – the system most responsible for factory farming itself. He started his work, and starts today, with a growth model that contradicts his own claims. The lives of animals lost to growth are of no less value than the lives Paul saved in his food reform work.
The standard Paul and many others used treats the baseline for harm as floating rather than fixed, and as things get worse in the world ecologically and politically, it does more harm. Why talk about Paul, and not big companies like Coke, for example? Fair Start does talk about Coke, but Coke never claimed to be saving animals. By doing so, Paul sets a standard.
This is the question truly just people will ask: If Paul helped animals, he did so relative to what standard? Yes, he did better than Donald Trump, but using a floating scale, rather than the legally required threshold, leads to the situation we all face today: How could he be helping animals, while things have gotten worse for them on balance?
The animal protection efforts of Paul and the activists were funded by the wealth illegally produced by that growth. That wealth (much of it intergenerational and derived from the arbitrary birth lottery – where and with what you are born determining your benefits and burdens – we see in the world today) drives much of the public interest work one sees today, and the death debt it owes as the climate crisis accelerates outweighs the charity it doles out.
That growth arc has caused the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates, and it is driving wealth – made at growth-driven cost to objective values like safe temperatures, participatory democracy, and equal opportunities in life – into the hands of a few.
Use of that standard means Paul was and is part of a well-documented and illegitimate system of disenfranchising growth that did much more harm to animals, to say nothing of children, political equity, and legitimate and inclusive democracy, than he did good. But he benefited from that system, and does today. That standard uses manufactured numbers in assessing and reporting value – and fundamental justice means not using it. Yes, this constitutes fraud – benefitting at deadly cost to others based on the omission of material information – in terms of the most fundamental or constitutive sources of law: the norms that empower those subject to legal systems.
Paul values those norms too – things like safe temperatures, being heard and valued, a future with exponentially less animal suffering, having some control over the governments that have control over him, etc. That’s the nature of objectivity. But as things get worse with greater emissions, each person having less of an effective voice in their democracy, wealthy white children living at deadly cost to children of color, Paul’s business model accepts that degraded conditions as the new normal, as an acceptable baseline. If Paul were part of a system of mutual obligation and value, he would assess and report in a way that entitled all to the good things he values, and move towards Dasgupta’s optimality as discussed below.
Paul continues to use that standard of illegally discounting future lives, with his public interest work having acted ass a decoy to enable his private success. He does so despite several written conversations with Fair Start activists urging him to change course, and join the Tell the Truth process of legitimating macro systems by elevating in his for-profit and non-profit modeling birth/political equity as the measure of political legitimacy, and accurate cost/benefit analysis. His position reflects a phenomenon we see time and time again. Persons, like Paul, back the idea of Fair Start in the abstract because they get something from that, but pushed to apply the standard in their lives and they will refuse, or in some cases go out of there way to hide liability.
But the truth is, there is no such thing as an anthropocentric animal protectionist. If one care about nonhumans, they will choose a future and limitations on the powerful to minimize animal suffering. Using a growth arc is the opposite. It would be physically impossible to protect animals without accounting for the relations they will form with humans, which means one has to invert the entire power structure to actually protect them.
Part of the failure involved the organizational structures Paul and the other activists used – salary-based organizations designed to scale, but which simultaneously became reliant on the problems they claimed to want to solve.
Run an AI query on how inequitable growth, on many levels, impacted animals relative to vegan and other food-based interventions over the last few decades. It will show the latter are relatively insignificant. Then run the query on how inequitable growth impacts political equity. Not only were food interventions ineffective and usually self-serving for those promoting them – they hid growing political illegitimacy. Self-determination has as a requirement each person being an influential part of a political system, holding political equity, a necessary condition blocked by the legal fiction of reproductive autonomy, which functionally reduced autonomy to the body – now disconnected – not needing to be part of an effective system of self-governance.
There is a difference between using one’s privileged birth positionality in an illegitimate birth lottery to appear to make the world a better place, and actually making it a better place by legitimating the system itself through birthright empowering those subject to it. In particular, a key funder of the activists’ work at Compassion Over Killing used that same fraudulent standard to simultaneously limit the scope of animal law’s development through selective funding at key leading law schools, and in a way that exploited inequitable growth, benefitting him and others at deadly cost to animals, and vulnerable persons.
Laws meant to protect animals have a negligible effect on their lives relative to the effect of humans having children, children that grow and interact with those animals, generation after generation, creating broader ecological and other outcomes. The former, by comparison, are charade version of impact.
Paul used his influential positioning in the animal protection movement to focus efforts on farmed animals as a vector to engage in relatively low-impact food reforms, premised on and omissive in reporting of, growth and an absence of children’s birthrights, and then positioned himself to benefit from that move at deadly cost to others absorbing the ecological, social and political costs of that growth. Farmed animals are not the most numerous category of existing animals exploited by humans, and future animals outnumber existing animals by far, but a farmed animal focus allows animal rights to be monetized around food reforms, and it was.
In many ways this move is the greatest example of the Winners Take All phenomena, because that original assessment of how social justice becomes a charade did not account for animal-inclusive liberation, the highest form of social justice.
The children of the funders Paul aided over decades are rich, and made so through a system of growth and birth inequity that is killing millions of other children. Many of those same funders pushed Fair Start activists to treat this injustice as a matter of downstream “population” framing, rather than upstream preemptive political equity, and to go to other funders for charity-based resources rather than birth equity entitlements and reparations. It’s more about disempowerment, given the overshoot of multiple thresholds including reasonable levels of representatives to voters and other measures of political equity, than overpopulation.
They did so knowing that Fair Start and the vulnerable entities we represent would not be able to compete against the fraudulent modeling, and the wealth it creates.
Facts:
- Paul’s model exploits growth that treats children of color as worth significantly fewer resources and more risk. No child is worth more than another, but the model Paul and other activists used was premised on the opposite, and illegitimate, assumption. Humans are animals, and any attempt to protect nonhumans starts by accounting for the actual relations that form between them and children as they enter the world. Paul’s model skips this step and assumes total animal propertyhood, (and future person propertyhood as well) dividing nonhumans off into the object rather than subject and relational phase of the sentence, which allows him to appear to benefit them while benefitting from a system that fundamentally exploits them. Paul is then able to appear to benefit animals – selling vegan products – but not pay the costs of a growth-based system that does more harm than he does good.
- The model ignores the fact that government’s authority, including to entitle wealth, has to be derived from the measurable empowerment or birth/political equity of those subject to it. Measurable birth equity as the overriding basis of legitimate governance is a yes or no proposition. This is not about liberals versus conservatives, vegans versus meat eaters, or pro-Palestinians versus Israelis. It’s about those who believe governance requires empowering those subject to it, and those who do not believe it. One of the costs of the model Paul uses is violence, with illegitimate state violence driving violence in general in societies, a situation in which the innocent – rather than the beneficiaries of injustice – are targeted.
- Use of the model is preempted by a variety of laws, and can be targeted as unfair competition under state law because vulnerable entities and those who represent them, like TruthAlliance.Global – most who operate without access to the capital Paul has access to almost entirely through the current system of birth positionality- can’t compete with those who use the equity fraud model, appearing to help animals while converting the harm caused to them – through growth – into a benefit for themselves. Like many with influence, it’s likely that Paul will resist this preemption, and instead rely on a system of coercive governance built on exploiting infants and animals to protect his wealth, influence, and false legacy, rather than choose to on balance protect animals. But we hope we are wrong. State Attorneys General (AGs) can enjoin illegal business models by targeting deceptive practices, unfair competition violations, misleading marketing, and fraud, often using state UDAP laws and working with federal agencies, leading to settlements or injunctions against the entire business model. All political obligation is premised on the express or implicit “we” in the legal instruments that purport to organize nations, the constitutions, but it would be physically impossible to create such self-determining relations without an empowering threshold.
- The alternative model treats caring for children as the genesis of human freedom – not resistance to the state, but inclusion in it. Instead of using the idea of reproductive autonomy to undermine freedom and then sell back to people in a “free market” economy what they are owed in a legitimate democracy – nonhuman liberation, equality of opportunity, an influential voice, etc. – it makes allegiance to a political system contingent on such things shaping the power relations formed in birth and development.
But how does the model actually work?
After World War Two, nations were legally obligated to derive and condition their authority on objective limitations – called human rights – of the power humans have over one another. Instead leaders used a subjective reproductive rights system devoid of child equity standards in order to privatize the creation – at birth – of power relations, a move initiated by wealthy and white concentrations of power at the United Nations. This is the fundamental injustice and driver of all the suffering we see today, as upstream growth that benefits a few undoes downstream interventions that should be benefitting many.
These men started reproductive rights as a system that ensured they need not share power.
One way to think of it:
Women are told in the 1960s that terminating a pregnancy and having kids are both forms of bodily autonomy – a standard devoid of child equity, and child rights-based reproductive rights. By today many of those women, their kids and certainly grandkids will die in growth-based heat waves enabled by the absence of children’s birthrights, with their voices having been drowned out by population growth and political inequity. In short, they were robbed of enough influence over their political systems to stop the horrible outcomes. Worse yet? Environmentalists and animal rights activists would have hidden the problem for decades with downstream micro interventions undone by macro growth benefitting them and their funders, and with greenwashing/humanewashing interventions that looked good, but that defined “green” and “humane” with ridiculously low standards designed to benefit the investors/philanthropists funding the environmental and animal organizations at deadly cost to women and children.
Today the massive bubble of money made in those decades hides what happened, drowning out vulnerable voices with wealth. What happened? World leaders used a fundamental system that defined power and freedom around visions of the coercive power of the state and escape/safety from it, rather than empowering citizens through measurable birth/political equity so that one is part of a legitimate state and need not fear and run from it. Had world leaders done the latter we would have gotten Dasgupta’s optimality – but with equity. They did not, and today when Paul and others go to assess value and report impact, they do so from a completely arbitrary baseline (the same one baselining the arbitrary birth lottery / privatized creation of power relations reproductive rights system driving the Anthropocene) that has nothing to do with the real world – nothing to do with the conditions that infants and women of color need to be free. His version of saving animals and the growth arc it assumes – the money he spends on elevating his voice – these things block a reform that would allow humans to actually limit the power others have over us, and save countless lives in the process.
Instead humans vastly overshot ecological carrying capacities, legitimate political representative ratios, levels of equality of opportunity, minimal standards of birth-based child welfare, etc., with power relations that have little to do with the actual and measurable self-determination of peoples. And when Fair Start activists showed this research to wealthy U.S. funders in 2019 along with evidence their philanthropy was doing more to enrich their kids than further their stated missions, their reaction was to retaliate and hide liability. We are now in the process of telling this story, and bringing legal actions against these funders – who would rather ensure inaccurate legacies than actually do what they claim by factoring in birth/political equity as the key driver impacting the work.
Take Action:
Urge Paul to Tell the Truth about the full context of his impact on animals, including use of a model that exploits macro forces like growth. Urge him to replace a growth-based model that exploits infants and animals and has no minimum threshold of empowerment for those infants as they enter the world, with a model that preemptively prioritizes a threshold of empowering/enfranchising resources, and equitable preparation, beneath which no child should be born. A fair start standard would ensure measurable self-determination for all, and specifically through a collective discourse that encourages parental delay, smaller families, parental readiness, and a collective process of birth-equity distribution inverse to wealth.
Specifically, and especially given Paul’s work on false advertising, he should speak out in favor or a better future and embrace brith equity override, as others have done. He can also back forthcoming efforts at the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit use of the equity fraud model by both private and public entities.
In Paul’s defense, this is a collective action problem and those first changing the model face a lot of resistance – but it will not be changed unless some come forward and animal advocates have a lot of failure to make up for. What passed as “victories” for animal protection advocates in the United States over the last several decades shows a standard that fully explains the political and ecological state of affairs we see today.
This is not a personal attack on Paul – the personal is political, and Paul has the ability to make a great change.
Telling the Truth about how we failed future generations, what we owe them now, and what we intend to do, is a discourse – and unlike top-down and abstract national constitutions and even international human rights instruments – it actually obligates us in an empowering and self-determining way, situating us justly relative to others and at the most fundamental level.
