The Polycrisis Is Exacerbated by a Long Practice of Wealth Using Public Interest Work – and Fallacious Impact Claims – to Hide Its Ecological, Social and Political Costs.
For example: Peter Singer has for decades made broad claims about creating beneficial impacts for animals and some of the most vulnerable human communities in the world.
His advocacy has – under an “effective altruism” rubric – steered billions into charities that make equally broad impact claims.
Singer and others routinely omit from their valuation and impact reporting countervailing information, including the way inequitable and disenfranchising growth undoes the claimed benefits.
Funders like Jim Greenbaum of the Greenbaum Foundation, as well as direct action advocates like Wayne Hsuing, have backed the omissive approach Singer advocates.
Singer’s approach has been consistent with that of those managing large networks of funders claiming broad beneficial impacts on animals, like Shannon Campion of Senterra Funders, networks which routinely make specific claims about the significant impact they have protecting animals.
The facts:
Extreme Heat Is Rising Faster for Black Americans, and Researchers Say the Gap Is Growing
The largest driver of this outcome is inequitable growth – more emissions, less equitable resources, less political influence to change the outcomes, etc.
At the same time, Trump Has Now Moved to Roll Back Civil Rights and Hide Astronomical Liability for Rising Climate Deaths
How did this happen?
Infant health was never a sufficient metric, masking the inseparability of birth-positioned health and one’s political equity.
And yet…
Prominent public interest advocates like Singer have for decades made completely inaccurate claims of progress that have hidden the growing political, social, and ecological costs of the polycrisis.
The models used assume the legitimacy of a random birth lottery, one that uses growth to disenfranchise.
What’s at play here?
Singer and others have engaged in illegal discounting, assuming children deserve what they are born with rather than what their rights and constitutional equity require, and the related wrong of legitimacywashing, routinely omitting from their valuation and impact reporting countervailing information, including the way inequitable and disenfranchising growth has been undoing the claimed benefits.
Fair Start activists have interacted with each of the claimants named above and witnessed the systematic omissions.
They witnessed, and researched back, decades of out-of-context claims where the system of exploiting future generations causing the climate crisis was simultaneously using public interest claims to hide the unfolding harms, and costs.
Singer and the other advocates were not accounting for costs of children coming into conditions without the resources to deal with the growing threats they face, and with increasingly diluted influence over their political systems, influence they would need to end the threats.
Given massive standing birth disparities, this entails illegally shifting costs by treating children of color as worth fewer resources, more risk, and less political influence than white children. It derives from the historic subversion of decolonial and racial justice movements via “separate but equal” reproductive rights systems that effectively blocked empowerment thresholds of intergenerational justice, ensuring that voting power was never correlated to real world ecological, political, and social thresholds.
When someone makes a value assessment or impact claim we always have to ask, relative to what? Unless the value assessment and impact claims are made first relative to a “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, they are not made as part of a legitimate (or sufficiently inclusive) system.
What are the costs of decades of such out-of-context claims? Look at prospects for black families facing climate change with limited access to air conditioning.
Note those making the animal impact claims do not account for the actual birth-created relations of humans and animals over the last several decades – the key decades in the development of the polycrisis. At that level, they were using the same system of birth positionality described above in which children of color deserve substantially less, the claimants were benefiting from maintaining it during that time through things like growth-based returns, and they also masked the impacts of that system with omissive modeling and claims.
Relative to decades of growth and its impact on animals, the environment and child equity, Singer and the others have had a negligible beneficial impact.
Singer and others are hardly isolated examples. Prominent figures like Bruce Friedrich were instrumental in shifting the focus of animal protection into things like food advocacy, using models that would accept status quo growth systems putting vastly more animals into suffering than dietary reforms would remove. The impacts of that growth on the environment, with children coming into the world without the resources to deal with the impacts, are staggering.
The claims and underlying model also use manufactured numbers to replace political freedom with economic growth, and in a way that skews the baseline for life-saving climate reparations in order for the claimants to benefit at deadly cost to those who need the reparations.
Singer is not free to ignore that benefits in an economy first require empowerment in the political system that regulates that economy, and he is now using the wealth made from a system built on disenfranchising and exploiting animals and vulnerable humans to hide his failures.
Moreover, not accounting for inequitable and disenfranchising growth as a countervailing factor now means some children are very wealthy, other children are dying because that wealth never accounted for its impact on vulnerable children’s environments or on their political equity. And activists who care have seen their ability to change these outcomes further limited, as their political influence was moved into the bank accounts – through the blocking of intergenerational justice thresholds – by those engaged in the illegal discounting,
There is a history of organizations intentionally omitting information from their valuation models and impact claims regarding the largest driver of the outcomes at issue – growing birth-based constitutional inequity – to personally benefit, and in a way that has disenfranchised communities of color.
Organizations like the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF, the same organization where Singer’s modeling largely began) have intentionally attempted to skew the baseline for its public interest work, in one instance withdrawing federal litigation to avoid accurate valuations. Overlapping funders used programming at the University of Denver to create a charade version of animal liberation with wildly inaccurate claims, even shifting dedicated funding away from programming that would have required protective climate reparation standards.
The federal litigation sought to set a ecocentric baseline of climate restoration, including through family reforms, a baseline that would have reversed decades of anthropocentric environmental policy. Climate restoration has been endorsed as the right policy by entities like RAND.
It would have also shown decades of modeling and claims by the organization that had been undone by growth, and the discounting of future lives. It would have shown the same by Julia Olson of the anthropocentric policy-oriented Our Children’s Trust, which consistently pressured ALDF to drop the case given the threat it posed.
Environmentalists and animal protection organizations had consistently set a low bar for environmental rights, which benefitted them at cost to others. They are now not eager to accept that liability, or a high #birthequity standard, mandated as the preemptive part of being in a free and legitimate political system, that would control and enforce that liability.
There has been retaliation in other contexts.
When a Fair Start activist published on the primacy of political relations via birth positioning, leadership at the Humane World of Animals removed the author from media opportunities.
When Heather Gerken, former Dean of Yale Law School, was criticized for the omissions, faculty at the school complained that these issues threatened the “animal law” programming of the school. Fair Start has since called on the Connecticut Attorney General to assess the program’s claims.
When Fair Start activists noted that Wikipedia and the Center for Biological Diversity were undervaluing ecological damage assessments, Wikipedia deleted the Fair Start Wiki page.
In this practice of omission, micro, downstream victories have hidden the way macro, upstream forces were undoing them every day.
Why focus on animal protection as an example of where legitimacywashing is common? The claims, relative to growth, are the most falsifiable, and many Fair Start activists started in animal protection efforts in the United States and witnessed the misconduct there.
Singer’s statements are false under preemptive state and federal unfair/unconstitutional competition, and civil rights, laws because there is no valuation and impact reporting outside of one’s birth positional context, birth-empowerment is inseparable from all other values, and accounting for the costs of children entering the world relative to that threshold (constituting) is what justifies the benefits one gets.
That accounting is the only source of such relations.
There are no legitimate valuation/business models and reporting systems that value others beneath the threshold of their being minimally empowered, because that empowerment is what justifies all of our benefits.
Their discounting the lives of others does more harm than Singer does good, by his own metrics, like safe temperatures, and is skewing the baseline for things like climate reparations and voting rights, putting millions at risk.
How can someone be an animal rights activist and set no minimum threshold for their protection in the actual birth-creation of their relations with humans? In the history of human-animal relations, why not consider the recent decades, as the polycrisis unfolded, and who benefited and who suffered the costs?
Ignoring these issues is more distractivism – using animal rights to hide systems that abuse them, to avoid liability, and for the on-balance benefit of the abusers.
The fix?
This is not philosophy. Singer is part of a legal system, the legitimacy of which, as well as his benefits, are premised on empowering others. Birth-positioned constitutional benefits land at the level of individuals – so do liabilities.
Urge Singer to join other organizations, public and private, that back constitutionally preemptive birth-equity standards in their local, state, and federal jurisdictions.
Governments can’t interpret their constitutions, or any of their derivative authority – including state and federal unfair/unconstitutional competition and civil rights laws – in ways that disenfranchise persons, especially to the point of risking their lives.
One way to start the fix? We can all tell the truth and admit that #illegaldiscounting and# legitimacywashing in our valuation models and impact reporting does more harm to our values than we do good.
Urge Singer to back the Constitutional Campaign.
Fair Start Movement is urging the California Attorney General to take action against #illegaldiscounting and #legitimacywashing.
Contact those offices here and report illegal discounting and legitimacywashing as violations of unfair competition, civil rights and constitutional law.
This work is part of the Fair Start Movement Constitutional Campaign which tests the ultimate political question – are the costs and benefits we experience in life contingent on our being empowered enough to control the outcomes? Documents like constitutions don’t constitute nations. Only people can do that and by accounting for the costs of empowering others.