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.
Do you believe children deserve a fair start in life? Prioritizing that is the most effective way to ensure a better world.
The idea of an equity override is about putting fairness at the center when the strict letter of the law falls short. At the World Court hearing where climate change was described as an “urgent and existential threat, ”an equity override would allow the Court to look beyond technical legalities and focus on what is right and just, especially for those most affected.
This approach would empower the Court to prioritize justice over rigid legal formalism, reinforcing demands like those of Fair Start: that historical emitters must take the lead in mitigation and support. Equity overrides shifts the conversation from narrow legal obligations to broader moral responsibilities, centering principles like climate finance, loss and damage reparations, and Fair Start development pathways.
(For information on Fair Star’s planned research in the context of vulnerability theory, read more here).
For the Global South, this isn’t just about legal recognition–it’s about survival, dignity, and the right to a future shaped by justice rather than inherited crisis.
The Problem: Equitywashing and the Legacy of Power
Any value or impact claim made today is likely out of context because it ignores the radically unequal conditions children face at birth. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem – equitywashing:the hiding of illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations that ensure defining standards like “green” in a way that enriches some at deadly cost others, and causes the climate crisis.
Those policies led to systems of subjective valuation that hid impacts on objective values like infant health and equity, and ensured the world overshot key thresholds within less than a few generations leading to the climate and political crises we see today. Overshoot was thus essentially the illegal shifting of power.
The standards took the idea of bodily autonomy outside of one’s political equity (accounting for all measures determining that equity and the emancipation it implies), or one’s capacity to influence outcomes that influence them, disenfranchising people. For example, many companies and nonprofit organizations use cost/benefit business models that treat infant victims of the climate crisis as equally self-determining as those who benefited the most from it. These models ignore those infants’ overriding right to equity resources/reparations as the basis of political obligation and state legitimacy. Such frameworks are not just unethical, they are unlawful,, and potentially actionable under unfair competition laws.
This is not about “population control”, but empowerment: is your political “we” legitimate or built under the latter. Our supposed freedom becomes a mechanism for others’ wealth.
Here’s one example: under current legal frameworks, even the most liberal ones—a woman terminating a pregnancy is considered autonomous. Yet if she later dies in a heatwave because she couldn’t influence her government to act, what kind of autonomy is that? She wasn’t free—she was positioned that way by illegitimate standards that valued her life incorrectly–-she was treated as an economic input.
The victim would have been taught and likely assumed that she had just been unlucky in her being born without wealth, when in fact she would have had the right to derive her obligation to the political system and condition her compliance with the law, on the state reversing that state of affairs. She was never free because she was never physically empowered, and in that situation, there would have actually been little reason to follow the rules. What went wrong? She was slowly being disenfranchised. Her freedom was taken out of context, and valued incorrectly, as governments began their worth with the injustice of an illegal birth lottery.
The Consequences: Systemic Disenfranchisement
For decades equity fraud standards have treated children of color as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk. In doing so, these standards gutted the very idea of equity—equal power to shape the political and economic systems that determine our lives
The Solution: A Preemptive Right to Equity-Reparations
NGOs should have always used measurable birth-based political equity as their guidestar, not sustainability – not sustaining the commercialized democracy approach that created Trump.
There is a big difference. Where else does national legitimacy, and the authority to entitle wealth, come from if not birth equity?
Here is one way to pivot to justice and a form of equity that overrides competing values given that the future majority need freedom, and outnumber those alive today:
Many are already taking wealth that externalized its costs onto children and using it to fund (via “legitimations”) collective family planning unions that expect government and the wealthy to treat their authority and entitlements as contingent on actually empowering constituents rather than exploiting them for more growth.
There is a preemptive right to equity-based reparations, payable to more collective systems of family planning that guarantee every child a fair start.. Governments must derive their authority and legitimacy from the measurable empowerment, or political equity (equal offsets, relative to zero), of its constituents. That means no child should be born beneath the “legitimacy line”—the threshold of self-determination and necessary resources.
The only viable reform tactic? Fact-value checking—securing public admissions of truth and formal commitments to change. This kind of discourse doesn’t just inform policy; it creates obligation. It builds the foundation for truly self-determining lives.
This is not about mere intersectionality. It’s about unifying obligation and asserting the preemptive principle: governments cannot unilaterally define empowerment. Empowerment is measurable. And a just society must begin by measuring what truly matters.
Obligation, not intersectionality. This is about preemption – governments can’t define what it means to be empowered. That is an objectively measurable thing.
In the mid-20th century, world leaders deliberately ignored the interests of future children and political equity when shaping reproductive rights. This likely stemmed from their unwillingness to invest in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions.
Both left- and right-wing leaders defined power narrowly—as the violence of the state rather than any form of human influence. This meant that while people had the right to terminate pregnancies, they now face deadly heat waves without any real influence over climate policy or the means to afford air conditioning.
The failure to invest in equitable beginnings directly fueled catastrophic population growth and extreme inequality. These factors have caused significantly more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts—many of which were motivated by the desire to exploit that growth—have ever managed to repair. Today, projections show that millions will die due to the climate crisis.
These omissions also led to a system that treats children of color as deserving only a fraction of available resources while exposing them to exponentially greater risks. As a result, billions today face extreme climate threats despite contributing little to the crisis.
The Hidden Harm of Inequitable Growth
We know that avoiding children’s interests has done more harm than good. By bringing them into conditions that violate their fundamental rights, we have degraded the very ecosystems they rely on for survival.
This inequitable growth has also weakened democracy, disenfranchising the average voter and obstructing their ability to stop these unfolding crises.
There is no way to assess value in the world without measuring it relative to infant health and life prospects, including self-determination. Infant health and development form the objective basis through which humans experience all value—serving as the foundation for health, equity, democracy, and other unifying ideals. It is the minimum standard for political legitimacy.
Philanthropy’s Role in Concealing the Problem
Many philanthropic efforts today avoid addressing how inequitable growth has reversed progress in infant development. Instead of fixing the problem, they obscure it.
By omitting discussions of birth conditions, these efforts conceal liability—and the right to self-defensive reparations—for the climate crisis’ deadly impact on millions of children of color, who are born into extreme disadvantage compared to the children of wealthy white funders.
The Solution: Measurable Standards for Justice
The most effective solution is to adopt measurable standards for true social justice and ecological restoration. Climate reparations must be directly tied to the self-determination of each child entering the world.
Because our positionality—our standing relative to others and the environment—is legally preemptive, we must take bold action to reclaim reparations and correct these systemic injustices.
A Call to Action
The primary function of law is to protect the most vulnerable. A system that fails to ensure basic welfare at birth is inherently unjust. If oppression begins at creation—through a status quo that denies minimum welfare standards for children—then dismantling that status quo requires an objective foundation, such as offset or zero baselines, to measure and enforce change.
TAKE ACTION: Support efforts at the United Nations to replace dysfunctional reproductive rights systems with Fair Start policies.
Humans are animals. Recognizing this helps shift us away from anthropocentric thinking that drives the climate crisis and leads to mass suffering. Animal law isn’t just about legal protections for nonhumans; it’s about fostering relationships between humans and nonhumans that prevent suffering.
Most acts of animal cruelty go unreported. How do we address that? True animal law starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that foster empathy, empower future generations, and protect animals. Human and nonhuman liberation are interconnected, as the way we shape our relationships drives outcomes for both.
The Hidden Undoing of Animal Law
Many organizations promoting animal law ignore how their efforts are undermined by unchecked human growth and the erosion of political equity. They claim progress without acknowledging that expansion in human populations, wealth concentration, and political inequity counteract their efforts. By ignoring these fundamental drivers of animal suffering, these organizations uphold a version of animal law that ultimately harms animals more than it helps them.
This omission is intentional. The organizations rely on assessment and reporting standards that obscure the real impact of human expansion, protecting the interests of wealthy donors rather than the vulnerable beings they claim to defend. They omit the connection between animal protection and just, sustainable human development because it threatens entrenched power structures.
The Fundamental Truth
We have collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life. We have prioritized economic growth over political equity, allowed unsustainable population expansion, and ignored the needs of marginalized communities. These actions have caused more harm to animals, ecosystems, and human justice than any isolated intervention can remedy.
Animal law isn’t just about legal directives referring to animals; it’s about ensuring legal systems protect nonhumans meaningfully. The best measure of animal law is found in constitutional preambles and the structures that shape human-nonhuman relationships—not just in laws that mention animals.
The Creation Problem
Our birth and development—our creation—is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior. Our creation also dictates how legal systems function, determining whether they genuinely include and empower the vulnerable or serve only the privileged.
Animal law must begin with the ethical considerations of human creation. Without this foundation, no legal system can meaningfully protect nonhumans. Yet, discussions of creation ethics are avoided because they raise uncomfortable questions about racial equity, climate reparations, parental responsibility, degrowth, and liability for misleading charitable work.
The Wealthy Influence on Animal Law
For decades, wealthy families and funders have shaped animal law to serve their own interests. They support narrow definitions of animal law that ignore the role of population growth and political inequity, ensuring that advocacy remains performative rather than transformative. Many advocates embrace this limited scope because it offers well-compensated work with little real impact.
Growth continues to undo the progress claimed by these organizations. It is easier to engage in performative animal law—discussing legal references to animals while ignoring the broader forces that shape their suffering. Large media budgets promote interventions that favor donors more than animals, drowning out solutions that would have a real impact. But there is no such thing as anthropocentric animal law.
Justice cannot emerge from injustice. We cannot create a just society while violating children’s rights at birth, ensuring inequity from the start. Nations cannot be legitimate if they provide no functional protections for children as they enter the world—or for the nonhuman world they will impact.
The HSUS Example: Monetizing Animal Liberation
In 2003, Fair Start advocates working with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) framed farmed animals as the most numerous victims of human cruelty. This framing aligned with corporate interests, such as Whole Foods, which profited from growing public outrage over factory farming. The strategy monetized the concept of animal liberation without actually achieving it.
The most numerous class of animals, however, are future animals. HSUS and others ignored this reality, treating future beings the same way growth economists treat future people—as expendable. Rather than promoting small family ethics and policies that would reduce suffering, HSUS focused on food reforms within a growth-based market.
Many advocates profited from the food sector while using sensational campaigns to overshadow the macro-level drivers of suffering. This growth-driven demand, not food choice alone, remains the largest determinant of climate outcomes and animal suffering.
The Corruption of Animal Law
Animal law, as the most demanding form of social justice, serves as a measure of broader justice. It should assess how we include future generations in legal systems, empowering them to protect animals. However, from 2003 to today, most discussions of animal law focus on food and other downstream interventions. Few address family reforms that could benefit both animals and vulnerable humans.
Many nonprofit funders manipulate the field by using media, academia, and legal framing to obscure real impacts. Harvard University, for example, claims to improve animal treatment through law but does not address the fundamental driver of suffering: anthropocentric growth. Their policies benefit funders more than animals.
A senior funder associated with Harvard’s program has refused to include abortion access in animal law discussions, despite its disproportionate benefit to animals compared to food reforms. Their metric for impact ignores growth and birth-related impacts, ensuring inequity continues. Many organizations dependent on this funding remain silent, allowing resources meant for animals to sustain human privilege instead.
The Demand for Climate Justice
As climate reparations become a global demand, animal lawyers will face scrutiny. What were they doing during the crucial years of the climate crisis? Did they challenge the systems enabling injustice, or did they serve the interests of the powerful?
Recent direct action movements offer hope that animal law can move toward true liberation rather than performative advocacy. However, if these movements ignore macro-level reforms, they, too, fail to serve nonhumans meaningfully.
Fair Start: Exposing False Claims
The Fair Start Movement exists to expose misleading impact claims and hold institutions accountable. Our Tell the Truth campaign asks key questions:
How do organizations account for children’s rights when claiming beneficial impact?
Are their claimed benefits being undone by growth and inequity?
By challenging these false narratives, we push for policies that prioritize birth equity and sustainable relationships, ensuring that animal law becomes a force for real justice—not a tool of wealth and power.
Conclusion: Be Effective
The commercialization of animal rights as food consumerism is a stark example of how a justice movement can be co-opted. Organizations continue making fraudulent impact claims while inequity and growth undo their efforts daily. Many companies that diverted resources from fundamental reforms ultimately failed.
We can change this. Start by asking: “When you claim to benefit animals, how do you account for children’s rights? Is your work being undone by growth?”
Only by telling the truth can we ensure that animal law serves animals not the wealthy individuals who define it for their own gain.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “equity” as the “value of a company, divided into many equal parts owned by the shareholders, or one of the equal parts into which the value of a company is divided.”
But why do companies and shareholders have the authority to own equity at all? There is also – earlier on – the equity one has in one’s democracy, or the share one has in their political system that makes one relatively self-determining or free, as opposed to being determined by others.
Generally, citizens receive their shares at birth, which vest when one becomes emancipated, and can vote.
And because persons are generally considered politically equal, a rule that means each person gets one vote, one’s share of their democracy, first and foremost depends on the number of other individuals in it. That is why many thinkers have been concerned with the way growth dilutes the average person’s share, a fact hidden by formulas like representative ratios that are not based on empowering those subject to the law by treating them as equally empowered, relative to a neutral standard.
But growth does not really account for other key factors that account for the equity, or level of influence, one has over one’s political system. What if that system has created macro changes in the environment so that persons are influenced, say by heat waves, against their will? What if one has a share, but because of structural racism and birth-based economic inequality, it really is not an equal share?
Equity matters because it gives us some control over the systems in which we live, and that equity depends on the number of people with whom we share those systems, the disparities in the resources each of us may have, and things like the way we impact the physical environment around us.
If one does not have equity in the political system, it’s hard to understand how they are free, or relatively self-determining. And there are hard parameters for what the amount of equity each of us deserves.
Establishing a preemptive standard for self-determination, and political obligation
One way to consider birth/political equity, or what might also be called relative self-determination and autonomy, is to contrast it with the concept of population in the field of policy, a concept used by some to disenfranchise many.
Partha Dasgupta is a brilliant theorist who has assessed optimal world population ranges. But, how do these persons actually relate to one another? What is the quality of those relations? How do we decide?
Fair Start’s main value-add to the world is to say that we should only bring kids into certain birth and development conditions, and that if we did that, the future would be better. And when we say “should,” we are the only organization in the world that has shown the “should” overrides all else because who we should be comes before what we do.
Freedom was taken out of context, and the creation of power relations was privatized using an illegal – exclusive from self-determining political processes – standard. Challenging that standard can be controversial. In fact, one former ally organization removed content referring to this approach over traditional considerations of population, through the lens of reproductive autonomy, around the time of their receiving a significant grant.
One way to tell this story involves abortion. The illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave, because she could not afford air conditioning, could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc. She was never free because she was never empowered, and in that situation, there is little reason to follow the rules.
So just as Dasgupta has theorized optimal numbers, we can assess optimal qualitative relations, which we would practically create (whatever we do for equity after the fact) by ensuring no child is born beneath a particular line (or threshold: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/ ). That line, in many ways, represents the border of human freedom, and we could implement it in current policy measures by preempting baby bonds and similar legislation, using AI to set the line around a host of parameters that try to zero out harm, including the harm of taking the value of autonomy out of one’s political equity.
Here are many useful measures to inform how we draw the line:
How were they accounting for the actual experiences and life trajectories of the most vulnerable, infants and the animals they will impact?
When we do that assessing, we see how the ecological and political crises we face today came about, as those who seemed to be making the world a better place – on balance – were not.
In this truth telling process we should all determine, and admit if need be, that we have quietly been using the same fundamental standard causing today’s deadly climate and political crises in order to hide our liability for those crises, and in a way that is costing millions of lives and doing more harm to our values and causes than we are doing good.
Instead, we should all be backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated so that no child is born outside of a system of reparations accounting – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm. We should act so that children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality.
Climate change and inequality are interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it.
Fair Start activists came together because in the nonprofits in which we have previously worked, our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, was doing more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. And in many cases those organizations went out of their way to hide this. Liability for this will be litigated soon in various fora, including climate tribunals in Africa.
Background
For years Fair Start activists in prior employment were paid well for public interest work, and gained goodwill among many, while enriching the families of those funding the work.
And yet the vulnerable entities they claimed to represent – infants, animals, indigenous communities – are now, on many levels, worse off.
The standard ensures our values operate abstractly, disconnected from the creation of power relations as children come into the world, hiding fundamental causation. It siloes social justice efforts into various categories like environmentalism, democracy, animal rights, etc., decoying them away from birth equity, and assessing and reporting impacts out of context.
The standard allows for value and impact claims that are not pegged to an ecosocial baseline that actually protects human and animal health, allowing some to claim their behavior is sustainable, while enriching some children at deadly cost to millions of others. Social justice derives from birth equity, but for decades philanthropists have developed decoy branding around more downstream issues, enriching themselves on growth and inequity that was slowly undoing environmental and other efforts.
The illegal standard allows for a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable – and for many, deadly – economic growth. The standard omits information to ensure false assumptions regarding entitlements and authorities, ensuring audiences assume the legitimacy of entitlements, state authority and traditional political borders rather than actually legitimating them through child rights and political equity. In doing so, it hides vast inequalities derived from birth, and blocks the primacy of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
This is illegal because it violates the rule of law, but also positive laws surrounding child welfare, civil and animal rights laws, as well as the law of democracy. The standard works by weighting autonomy or self-determination outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in their democracy, which makes value assessments (and things like discount rates) wildly inaccurate.
One’s arbitrary birth positionality, one’s draw in the birth lottery in terms of race, intergenerational positioning, nationality, etc., is assumed to be fate or the hand of some magical deity, rather than a product of bad policy now requiring offsets to ensure equity. That skews how we see the world, and in ways that ensured a climate crisis likely to kill those least responsible for it. Seeing things out of the context of our creation, in an abstraction of justice, versus a view from a physically constitutive standard, leads to horrible results.
While racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century made relatively cosmetic advances in terms of voting, education, housing, etc., birth inequity combined with ecocidal growth ensured a caste status that today will mean millions of persons of color will die in the climate crisis, and fundamentally because white wealth was illegally held back from black families.
Anyone could see this standard at work, just by asking a few questions of the organizations making claims. There are now legal actions underway to eliminate the use of the standard. Allowing its continued use enables funders and public interest organizations to exploit unsustainable growth, political inequity, and the subversion of racial justice to profit at deadly cost to infants and animals.
The standard – which we rarely not talk about – has been doing more harm to our causes and stated impacts than we have been doing to further them because it has degraded the capacity of the earth to ensure infant and animal health – the only true measure of value, while disempowering the average person, taking what their birth rights give them in democracy and selling back the rights as goods in an economy.
There is no accurate evaluation of values outside of that truth.
The Tell the Truth campaign asks all:
How are you accounting in your value claims for children entering the world, relative to what their rights require? Do you realize that entitlements to claim ownership of wealth, or any governmental authority, is contingent on not violating those rights, and on empowering citizens so that representative governance is possible? How would one get entitlements to protection, if infants and animals don’t get theirs? If one received the benefits of a system of values, including things like moderate temperatures, access to food and water, and relative security, would we not be eager to ensure those values also limited fundamental systems of entitlements so that others could enjoy them?
More formally, Fair Start is seeking to override the illegal standard at the United Nations, arguing that our collective debt to those dying from climate and political systems from which we benefitted preempts or overrides conflicting policy choices. We begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against rights-based and restorative measures, the deviation from which is leading to things like higher rates of adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth, low birth weight, and infant mortality.
Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated very child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
We don’t get justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring our own. And governments can’t come up with their own definitions of things like legitimacy, and define what things like fraud (which at base means benefitting at cost to others through misinformation), harm, and sustainability mean, in order to hide their liability for using a fundamental system of entitlements that kills millions of innocent people. There are objective measures for such things.
How can new standards be implemented?
Free persons will not follow rules in a legal system that does not give them the control over those rules, and Fair Start is organizing free persons to take action. All theories of political obligation require some measurable level of inclusion and participation by those affected by it.
The replacement standard is simple. Having children in not a matter of personal autonomy or freedom relative to the would-be parents. It’s interpersonal, impacting the children and the communities they comprise more than the parents. It’s capable of being constitutive, or deconstitutive, of a just society. If we assume that everyone should be relatively self-determining in that society, then the fundamental rule or standard by which to assess value and justice would require we offset each other equally, relative to a neutral position. That ensures accurate parental autonomy, balanced against other values, and the best standard for assessing climate policy, including climate reparations.
It allows an accurate measure of the loss of freedom we are seeing as the climate and related crises unfold.
It’s physically impossible for nations to be free, as in relatively self-determining, without elevating measurable birth equity and children’s rights as our first and overriding obligation. Being a free or self-determining nation is impossible if we start by violating children’s rights to self-determination. In doing that we become other, rather than self, determining. Being free means treating future children as means and not ends, and measuring harm from to them a neutral or zero position, rather than the hiding fundamental liability that attaches to generational wealth.
Law and obligation are first about how we are positioned relative to others, not how we act, so our language has to be constitutive, answering these questions – and admitting undoing relative to truly fair and sustainable measures – in order to form actually obligatory relations with future generations that free all. Where else would these obligatory relations come from? If government derives authority from its constituents, there is no other source. Hence we can use the Tell the Truth campaign to see who chooses to be unjust, fall outside the scope of legal – by which we mean inclusive – social protections because they refuse to pay the costs they owe each of us for the loss of our freedoms, and who by so doing saddle their adult children with their death debt.
Our theory of change is that language has to be accurately obligatory and inclusively self, as opposed to other, determining. That’s what it means to constitute a nation, or have supreme obligations – from the bottom up – to others. To do so outside of that process would be physically impossible.
Again, we begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against restorative measures described above. Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated every child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
How else would we account for unreported and unreportable animal cruelty, which comprises that vast majority of such acts? How else would the law account for avoiding that? What logically would precede ensuring relations likely to prevent it?
There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. They are just being stated out of context. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable
The undoing of their claimed beneficial work, and their masking of growth as the fundamental driver of the climate crisis, was enabled by the assessment and reporting standards that caused the climate crisis, standards that ignore illegal violations of vulnerable children’s birthrights. In other words, leaders at these organizations chose a version of animal law that – at base – excluded animal protection as a factor impacting how we invest in children coming into the world, and on balance this emaciated version of animal law did more harm to animals than these organizations did to benefit them.
We can fix this mess by moving what we claim to value – animal protection and liberation – into our fundamental constitutional regimes. How?
It starts with Telling the Truth:
Facts: We have all collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life, by allowing unsustainable growth, trading economic growth for loss of political equity, ensuring the degrading of ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath key thresholds, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk. This has done more to harm our shared values – animal protection and liberation, experiencing moderate temperatures, enjoying access to food and water, etc. – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.
“Animal law” does not mean talking about abstract directives that refer to animals, and relying in good intentions and symbolic acts to achieve animal protection. Yes, advocates may have better intentions than Exxon, but how much do animals care about our intentions, and why not measure justice from an objective standard rather than use bad actors as the standard?
It’s first and foremost about having functionally protective, legal relations with nonhumans, an idea better reflected in the preambles of constitutions than any reference or lack of reference to animals per se.
Background
Humans are animals and our birth and development – our creation – is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior that impacts nonhumans, exponentially. Our creation also determines how – through participatory democracy and representation, or what is really just political equity or our functional shared in democracy – our legal systems function.
Animal law starts with that issue – the creation of humans – the first necessary condition for something to be animal law and capable of protecting them. It starts at the subject level of our grammar, the “we” in our constitutions, or the creation-accounted-for existence of our relations with them.
AI systems adept at assessing racial injustice can detect equity values at the subject-level of value claims (and those values will alter the human-animal relations), versus the object level of those claims. Consider the need to distinguish between something like equity in hiring decisions versus who is birth-positioned to make those hiring decisions. A goal for permissible climate emissions as the object of a sentence differs greatly from a low emissions standard implicit in the “we” subject of the same claim, with that collective subject implying the ability of all referenced to be free from harmful emissions. Permissible emissions as a goal/object frames the political system as consensual and legitimate (especially from the perspective of nonhumans), which it would not be without restoration as a condition of the collective subject.
But instead, these issues are rarely discussed because creation ethics, unlike food, zoning, shelter, etc. policies, involve big questions of racial equity, climate reparations, personal responsibility in parenting, de-growth and liability for charitable fraud that hid the drivers of the climate crisis.
Creation ethics as a subject, threaten the nepotistic families and funders who for decades have used their wealth to define animal law in a narrow way, relying on advocates eager to get the benefits of well compensated but low-impact charade work, contrary to the interests of nonhumans and vulnerable humans. Every day growth undoes the impacts and benefits animal lawyers and others advocates claim to produce. But few will admit that.
Performative Animal Law
It’s easier to engage in performative animal law where we just talk about how legal language refers to animals, while the actual benefits to animals and vulnerable humans are undone via inequity and growth, and we enjoy the benefits of our growth based investments and institutions. It’ s easier to use wealth made at cost to animals to create interventions that are being undone daily, in ways that benefit those creating the interventions more than animals, using large media budgets to drown out possible interventions that would on balance benefit animals. But there is no such thing as anthrocentric animal law.
You don’t get to justice by starting with injustice, by violating children’s rights in the birth-creation of actual relations. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact.
For example, circa 2003 Fair Start advocates previously working with the Humane Society of the United States (“HSUS”) embarked on a policy to frame farmed animals as the most numerous class of animals subject suffering at the hands of humans. We did this while partnering with Whole Foods and other entities intent on commercializing the growing anger HSUS and others would create by publicizing the treatment of farmed animals. We had found a way to monetize the idea of animal liberation, but not actually accomplish it.
But HSUS and others chose to focus on food reforms, all of which assumed growth-based food markets. While the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas, looked at issues of human justice, that turn – to focus on food sales over fundamental justice – is the greatest example of the phenomenon he saw, once we measure by the numbers of victims impacted.
Many of the funders, legal advocates and activists working on these issues at the time would go on to make a lot of money in the food sector, in the years to follow, having used sensational campaigns centered on granular/micro issues of animal suffering that overshadowed the macro forces – like growth-driven demand – undoing the work. That growth driving more and more animals into suffering and acting as the largest diver of climate outcomes.
How does this relate to animal law specifically? Animal law is arguably the most demanding form of social justice, and thus a good measure for how systems fare in being just or unjust. It purports, in referring to a legal system capable of actually protecting nonhumans, to be inclusive of the vulnerable in a measurable way.
Animal law goes beyond impacts, and requires assessments about how we are including future children into legal systems in ways that empower those children and legitimate the systems. Look closely at all of the content being created and framed as “animal law,” from 2003 until today. You will see a lot of focus on food and similar downstream-only interventions. Look then for comparable work on family reforms that would have benefitted nonhumans, and vulnerable humans, alike. You will be surprised to find little if any, and with some of the organizations actually encouraging growth that ignores children’s rights in favor of economic growth.
In many cases the funding of animal nonprofits exemplifies a next-level expansion of the corruption that is well documented in philanthropy: The use of well-funded messaging, media, academia, etc. to limit the ability of audiences to use accurate criteria to judge the truth and value of claims and impact.
In one case, those designing programming at Harvard University define the scope of their work in an inaccurate way that implies a beneficial overall impact on animals that is totally unsupported by their work. When political equity is factored in, the scope privileges those funding the work more than the animals they claim to protect. The site refers to the program as “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system,” and yet nothing in their policies or work addresses the fundamental driver of animal suffering and death because that driver—anthrocentric growth—benefits the school and their funders.
One senior funder, associated with the program, is known for creating digests of animal law developments. That funder has refused requests to cover developments in abortion access precedent as “animal law” because, according to their representative at the time, the idea of “animal law” required legal developments that discussed animals. They ignore legal reforms around abortion access as a benefit to animals, despite the disproportionate benefit abortion access has for animals, relative to food. They define animal law in ways that ignore the largest determinants for animals, things like the notion of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
That standard – which is the same one used by a notorious milk brand – is key for the funder, because their entity is highly nepotistic, spending more on family members compensation than on policies capable of actually benefitting animals. Many of the entities relying on funds from funder avoid talking about this issue for obvious, but unethical, reasons. That silence ensures funds meant to benefit animals don’t – on balance – have that effect, while deadly inequity between humans grows.
In fact, many animal lawyers have continued to double down, explicitly embracing anthropocentric systems that have benefitted their funders more than animals. Why does all of this matter? Demands for climate reparations are growing, and many will be wondering what those attorneys and advocates working under the mantle of protecting the most vulnerable were doing during the most crucial years of us all knowing the climate crisis was unfolding, years when we were able to do something about it.
Animal lawyers, more than most, will have questions to answer for their role.
Were they advocating for performative behavior-changing standards without changing the fundamental relations being created, focusing on micro propertyhood, while hiding a much more lethal form of macro propertyhood? What role did funders making money on the latter, those who did not want to question their or their kids’ birth-based national, intergenerational, racial, etc. positionality, have in that fallacy?
If we have account for way inequity and growth undoes our claimed good work for animals, in which fantasy world were we actually benefitting animals? Some recent direct action efforts give promise that animal law can move towards animal liberation, and not just talking about it while living in ways – fundamental ways – that hypocritically undo it. But unless direct action animal liberation movements also include macro animal liberation reforms, they too are not serving nonhumans on balance.
Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking
The Fair Start Movement was formed to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would use it to avoid liability for the crisis, and for life-saving and legitimating climate reparations.
Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in growth, and the violations of children’s’ birthrights that enabled that growth. In this process we contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero-harm baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent understanding of freedom.
We then urge those key barriers to admit the undoing, and shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today. Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “nonconstitutive” targets blocking that process, often by creating a fantasy world of inaccurate impacts.
The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal assessment and reporting standard to hide climate damage liability, a standard based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard – deriving from Twentieth Century power grab efforts to subvert civil rights movements – siloes justice away from birth equity into downstream issue areas that act as decoys, hiding a growing lack of birth-based political equity.
This power grab effectively skipped children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This was a way to shift costs, evade hard checks on growth, avoid racial equity, and ensure status quo in the direction of power. The illegal; standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.
Any most of the companies that diverted funds away from successful reforms actually failed.
We can all start to change this, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like: “We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis – the one that does not require child-rights based family planning. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact? Were your impacts being undone?”
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Violating children’s right to a fair start in life, or what they are owed under the Children’s Rights Convention, has done more harm to public interest efforts than any organization has done good because 1) it has allowed inequitable growth – the greatest driver degrading the capacity of the earth to ensure the thriving of human and animal life. And 2) we all managed to do that, to exploit growth rather than invest in children, by treating children of color as deserving many fewer resources and much more risk.
We don’t get to justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring your obligations to them. The solution? We have to accurately derive, state and comply with our first obligations: To actually empower children as they come into the world so that we live in a democracy, and not just an economy.
His wealth – made at horrific environmental cost to mostly children of color – allows him not to work, and to elevate his own children’s choices in life even as other children are born into early deaths. That wealth allows him to travel – even enjoying access to private surf locations local surfers could never afford. He was recently able to surf an artificial wave pool while traveling, which is an environmentally damaging system that allows wealthy investors to profit by replacing something natural, and at deadly cost to vulnerable communities.
In essence, he won a birth lottery that ensured him a life of ease fundamentally built on costs to others, and he favors conservative environmental nonprofits that do not interfere with the fundamental process that will allow him to ensure his eco-social privileges to his children.
When he learned about Fair Start he urged me to focus on getting officials to agree to the standards we promote rather than treat them as fundamental, because that immediately assumes their authority and his entitlements. He knows how to decoy from questions of fundamental entitlements, white wealth, and the first drivers of all outcomes towards existing systems of “justice” controlled by the same false assumptions that ensured the climate crisis.
In my public interest work I performed a horrible magic trick:I and others with influence used a fundamental set of assumptions, entitlements, and authorities – standards – in which I received a goodwill increase in my reputation from the work, more money in my accounts, and yet the vulnerable I claimed to represent are now all worse off.
And I mean worse off in terms of the measurably outcomes that underlie things like the laws that deal with children’s rights, animal rights, and civil rights. In all categories, the entities those laws seek to protect are worse off as heat rises, democracy declines, and the distance between the wealthy and impoverished widens.
My friend and I used the same standard that caused the crisis to hide liability for it. He is many things, many of them good. But this is the dilemma of the dysfunctional family system we have all inherited: He benefits at deadly cost to others, and chooses to continue that way in his life. That, in a fundamental way, is who he has chosen to be.
There is an ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and their birth and development itself can alter that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs. That baseline is the objective measure of our value, relative to others. There are no values outside of that system, given climatological impacts on infants, and infant/human health as a basis measure of all value.
Is there a fix?
Fair Start reforms begins simply with our admitting that the wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights because for decades – in what we might call the #famscam – nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into conditions compliant with those rights. Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive.
People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. We all have an overriding or preemptive right and obligation to take the wealth that was stolen by violating children’s rights and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future defined by actual relations, not some abstraction.
That standard – a demand for family planning resources to ensure children’s rights, the right which are the most basic standard for who our species should be – is the key to mutual self-determination, or freedom.
Many entities in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using the same fraudulent impact assessment and reporting standards, ignoring how children entering the world has undone sustainable development impacts, that drove the crisis in order to hide their liability for the death of millions.
The charities my friend supports use those standards.
The Tell the Truth (TTT) Campaign: Justice starts with speaking the truth, and neutral fact checking from a zero harm baseline.
The Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign just asks one question of those like my friend.
If you have claimed to create market value, public interest impact, or to exercise authority as government officials or holders of wealth, please explain how were you accounting for children entering the world relative to their rights and especially to measurable levels of political equity? Just the same way we have equity in a company, we have equity in your democracy. Your share depends on how many others are in it, the varying levels of influence they have, the impact on the environment around the democracy, etc.
We ask this question in the Tell the Truth campaign: How did you account for these things when you made your claims of impact?
We can ask other questions. Would my friend be willing to say that his entailments to his wealth, and the authority of government to use force to protect him and it, derive from and are conditioned on ensuring birth equity for all children? Would my friend change the standards, and elevate birth equity above bodily autonomy and economic growth in reproductive rights regimes, if he could go back in history and do it? Would he choose to sacrifice some of his wealth in exchange for saving lives if he could go back and do it?
The answer is my friend and others were not accounting for such things, because no one ever told them that any measure of value and impact, of governmental authority and entitlement to wealth, starts with empowering people.
The Tell the Truth campaign goes beyond deferring to the will of others, and into the dignity of fundamental rights and obligations, and what we all owe. It allows everyone to relate their experiences to the reality of the most vulnerable: Children entering the world and impacting animals in the actual and first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful.
Fair Start is now pursuing legal action to ensure disclosure requirements – from companies and charities – detailing how growth has compounded children’s rights violations, increasingly degraded ecosystems, and ensured massive political disenfranchisement.
Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of he rights of children and animals. We contrast impact claims that use the illegal standard that ignores harm to some children with actual harm to all children, relative to a zero baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent base value of being free.
We have a right to know what entities are doing to the physical capacity for all to self-determine. We are either included in a system of rights, which must include children’s rights as the base, or we are not. Those of us who are not could never justify why basic obligations are owed, given that they do not extend them to others. . The disclosures discussed above can ensure correctly assessing who chooses to be free or self-determining, and who chooses to exploit their positionality at deadly cost to others and thus fall outside of any logical system of liberating mutual protection.
Take action:
All should admit that our collectively not prioritizing a fair start in life for all kids has more harm to our values and missions than we have done to further them. And we should take action to reverse that mistake, and elevate children’s birthrights as the first and overriding human rights.
There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through, clutching at others and dragging them down as they go. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language – a new standard – to ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.
If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not that at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally. The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations, and freedoms. Without Tell the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in the language that inevitably determines how we relate to others, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
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