Micro, downstream interventions in public interest crises are being undone by macro, upstream growth and birth-based political inequity that involves illegally discounting future lives and hiding liability for the deaths of millions. Illegal baselining enriches some children at the illegal and deadly cost of others. The Tell the Truth Campaign can end it.

1.

Fair Start was established by advocates who identified a fraudulent Ponzi standard embedded in their prior public-interest work. 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 define reproductive rights and disenfranchise others, leading to the exclusion of birth equity from valuation and reporting systems.

Equity fraud—and the illegal baselining it entails—was embedded decades ago as a “separate but equal” standard in reproductive-rights systems, ensuring inequitable and unsustainable growth. This has resulted in the deaths of millions and is a fundamental cause of the polycrisis. The legitimate standard, which should have been used as early as 1948, treats no child as worth more than another and centers on collective family planning that ensures no child is born beneath a threshold of empowerment.

After World War II, governments and wealthy families were obliged by human-rights regimes to use an objective and protective standard to limit the power humans have over one another. Instead, they chose a subjective and illegitimate standard that allowed exploitation of birth positionality, with no functional protection for the most vulnerable: infants and animals.

Today, women “liberated” by this reproductive-rights regime—and their children—are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse still, 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 the deadly expense of others.

This was existentially subversive to racial-justice and decolonization efforts, because it constituted wealth and power segregation at the very creation of power relations. What appears to be simple growth is, relative to the correct baseline, qualitative disenfranchisement.

Equity fraud involves using a discounted version of freedom: Measuring levels of harm to vulnerable infants and animals as permissible (as opposed to impermissible, or requiring a zero baseline) because the user wrongly redefines self-determination so that economic growth (benefitting some at illegal and deadly cost to others) offsets the requisite political disenfranchisement to achieve that growth, skewing the baseline for climate damage and other life-saving evaluations in the process.

2.

If an entity claims beneficial public impact, it must be able to account for how it factors in the variable of children entering the world relative to what children’s rights and equity require. If it cannot, its assessment of value and reported impacts may do more harm than good. If one cannot show—after accounting for the costs of ensuring future children are empowered enough to use their political systems to protect themselves from threats like the climate crisis (equal offsets relative to zero, or one person, one equal and influential vote)—then the equity-fraud standard is being used.

The illegal standard relies on manufactured numbers through an XYZ analysis, in which out-of-context claims about value and impact (X) are assessed against the variable of children entering the world during the relevant timeframe (Y) in a way that overshoots and degrades children’s birthright conditions, producing an outcome (Z) different from what is claimed. This standard encourages inaccurate claims of micro-level progress that benefit the claimant while hiding larger macro-level losses driven by growth.

One cannot benefit from a system that brings children into conditions and relations that violate a host of accepted legal standards, including the obligation to treat infants of color as persons deserving political equity. Use of this standard means many public interventions have done more to subjugate people of color than to advance their stated missions.

 

3.

Fair Start activists have encountered many actors intentionally concealing information that would reveal this fraud—literally skewing the baseline that protects infants and animals—to improve their position within an illegitimate system rather than to legitimate it. These actors engage in 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.

The Tell the Truth (TTT) Campaign is a yes-or-no, fact-checking effort that requires admission of the use of the illegal standard and a commitment to replacing it with the equity standard necessary to legitimate national governance. The campaign operates with full transparency, including querying those who once worked with Fair Start but later chose to use the equity-fraud standard to benefit at deadly cost to others.

One can either tell the truth and participate in a discourse of true constitutional—or empowering—obligation, or fall outside its scope and face legal action for subverting racial-justice movements to enrich white children at the deadly expense of children of color.

 

4.

A legion of professionals refusing to Tell the Truth ensure the white wealth bubble:

Lawyers – who refuse to derive authority from empowerment because they benefit from not doing so.

Academics, many of whom do not account for birth positionality and thus lose neutrality in their work.

Reporters/editors who omit the countervailing impacts of child inequity on the facts/values they report, and cave to incentives to write ad-worthy sensationalism that omits relevant facts around birth equity.

Campaigners, who focus on micro interventions undone by the macro.

Paid fundraisers, who take a cut from working downstream on a problem, rather than solving it.

They create a fantasy world of legitimacy and social justice progress with performative, micro-level and downstream interventions easily undone by inequitable, disenfranchising, and upstream growth.

 

5.

Our thesis is that:

A. Admitting use of a system in which wealth created through decades of violating children’s birthrights determines public-interest outcomes instead of objective values, and

B.  Through the admissive language itself

C. Inverts obligations away from those in governance and toward future generations.

 

6.

TTT is supported by legal, certification, and grassroots efforts within Fair Start and Truth Alliance. Legitimacy is about obligation, and all work either reflects or fails to reflect that basic value.

Entities that address birth inequity and truly—on balance—benefit animals cannot compete with entities that use a birth-inequity-based growth standard to quietly convert the values they claim to promote (such as wildlife protection) into wealth—wealth that elevates their voices above others. But because this practice is illegal, it can be blocked.

Anyone can require governments to block use of the equity-fraud standard—often through an unfair-competition-law and legitimacy injunction—because governmental authority, including the power to entitle wealth and property, derives from a preemptive obligation to measurably empower those subject to that authority. It is illegal to refuse to hire people based on race. Yet it has been treated as legal to use a standard that enriches some—mostly white children—at deadly climatological and birth-inequity costs to millions of children of color.