Fairlife, owned by Coca-Cola, is using milk supplied by dairy farms that abuse animals and pollute the waterways.

Fair Start Movement activists are assisting Animal Recovery Mission and others in holding the companies accountable. How?

Coke/Fairlife used an illegal standard/business model fundamentally designed to illegally harm children and animals by exploiting their vulnerability and undo the value Coke/Fairlife claimed to create in a way that risks millions of lives and will cost businesses trillions of dollars.

The standard is designed to assess and report values and impacts out of context. It is the single largest driver of the harms we see in the case, and it begins with zero functional protections for the most vulnerable. That’s illegal.

The standard is illegally benchmarked around the needs of the wealthy children of leadership, at deadly cost to vulnerable children using a false assessment and reporting system. This means making up numbers that hide the damage being done. 

Coke/Fairlife should start fixing this by admitting that they benefitted from an equitywashing system, that through inequitable growth. illegally violated children’s birthright to political equity, and did more harm to their advertised values and impacts than they did to further them. By doing so, the companies can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others.

That anthrocentric and unsustainable standard is the largest single variable causing the harm, and it hides harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels. It hides the fact that we have a moral and legal duty to move Coke’s extreme wealth, made at illegal and deadly climatological and other costs to children, or suffer the consequences of continuing to let those kids die. 

We can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis to evade liability for it — that’s fraud.

The standard is the fundamental reason their leadership is being enriched at deadly cost to mostly children of color. This goes beyond greenwashing and humanewashing to a more fundamental system of equitywashing that subverts civil rights and democracy and allows free-riding benefits at costs to others. They are using the same fundamentally false standard derived from the “separate but equal” twentieth-century subversion of racial justice movements and the hiding of liability inherent in generational white wealth that is causing our current ecological and political crises. 

The standard has been used by many of the public interest entities claiming to oppose destructive industries like animal agriculture, entities that, like those industries, use performative interventions that do more to protect generational wealth for their biggest funders than to accomplish their missions.

Many start their work by discounting the lives of future animals and infants, in contravention of their stated causes. Many animal rights and law organizations have challenged the idea that animals are property at a micro and mostly performative level, but their acceptance of it at a macro level has done way more harm to animals than they have done good, given the way their out-of-context impact and values claims have for decades hidden this larger issue. 

The Coke/Fairlife standard is designed to:

• Exploit unsustainable growth and levels of consumption that have now reduced the planet’s ability to support infant and animal health, the first and overriding objective measure of value.
• The standard ensures inequitable and unsustainable growth, violation of children’s birthrights, and the denial of the ecological, social, and political thresholds children need to thrive. This has done more harm to our values than any of us have done to further them, and hiding that is fraud, or benefitting at deadly and illegal costs by omitting the daily undoing of the value we claim to create.
• This is especially so because the growth treats children of color as deserving exponentially fewer resources and more risk, including the violence inherent in unrepresentative government. This is the subversion of racial justice by whites who freeride on their illegal birth positionality, using their wealth to control people’s perception of truth and value. All authority to govern and to own wealth derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons in the political system, with one person/one influential vote. But by 1968, governments had taken equity out of reproductive rights systems so that this crucial, physical inclusion never occurred. Rather, the doctrine of separate but equal was maintained at an existential level. The exploitation of children for economic growth became the standard, and freedom was taken out of context.
• The standard ensures each person has less capacity to influence their political system as democracy bloats and is slowly commercialized, in part because it does not derive and condition governmental authority, entitlement to wealth, and the obligation to follow the law on constituents being measurably empowered.
• The standard omits these facts from impact and value claims, hiding conflicts of interest and the preemptive right to equity/legitimacy reparations that ensure a fair and liberating start in life. This allows the use of wealth (which was made at cost to the claimed values ) to drown out the efforts of others through inclusive and constitutive communications that are accurately obligatory, or bottom-up, to further those values.
• Doing so undercuts true obligations to others and ensures violence by making representative governance impossible.

We can ask Coke/Fairlife, the charities they back, as well as the charities that engaged for decades in a charade of opposing entities like Coke/Fairlife, the same questions: 

How were you accounting for your work being undone each day by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back and condition it on ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?

Climate reparations owed by those who used the illegal standard are a form of self-defense, and the obligation to pay them should fall on the adult children of the wealthy until justice is done.

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