What’s the most just and effective reform possible? Ensuring every child a measurably fair start in life.
Why?
Documents like constitutions and treaties do not constitute legal obligations and nations – only people empowering others can do that, and the first necessary condition of that process is ensuring we account for the costs of ensuring all children enter the word above a “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard of democratic empowerment.
How do we assess if the costs are being covered? Those who wish to pay the costs can never compete against those who refuse, those who would use what one Nobel laureate called a growth Ponzi scheme, exploit infants and animals.
Take anyone’s or any institution’s value assessments and impact claims – these are what situates them in the political system.
Fact: Growing political inequity would have done more to harm their professed values than they have done to further them, and they are likely knowingly omitting the countervailing impacts of that growth in their value assessments and impact claims.
Anyone can use any AI tool to see this clearly, contrasting claimed impact with the impact of that growth.
This is called #illegaldiscounting, a cost/benefit analysis that uses a false premise – legitimate obligation in a legal system that does not empower those subject to it – to enable certain business models.
It is the inherited practice of the illegal conversion of political freedom into market freedom through an almost universal reproductive rights policy / creation ethic that treats having children as more self-determining form the parents than the child created. Welfare gains and market values do not offset the loss of freedom – the loss of objective, measureable self-determination – that the discounting requires.
Illegal discounting entails assuming children deserve what they are born with rather than what their rights and political equity require and discounting costs accordingly. It also involves assuming the legitimacy of a political system in which children of color receive a fraction of what white kids get.
It derives from the privatization of the creation of power relations, an inversion of the meaning of self-determination, by corrupt leaders in the human rights regime decades ago. These leaders subverted racial justice and decolonization efforts by maintaining “separate but equal” ideologies, and the protection of mostly white generational wealth, in the reproductive rights regime over intergenerational justice and a threshold for democratic empowerment of future children.
The standard does not require claimants to actually further the values they claim, and ignores the need for an objective standard – like a “one person, one equal and influential vote” metric – of who we humans should be.This corruption fundamentally created and drove the polycrisis, in part, because public interest became a race to the bottom, with doing good simply meaning doing better than the terrible actors around us. Instead, the objective standard could have ensured anti-legitimacywashing efforts, a much more evolved concept than greenwashing or humanewashing which deal with problems downstream, rather than upstream and preemptively. Those who refuse to discount could never compete against those who do, using wealth made by not paying the costs of child empowerment / legitimate political systems to continue that process.
Climate change solutions that magically enrich some children at deadly cost to others are not solutions at all.
This enriches some illegally, at deadly cost to others.
It skews the baseline for things like climate reparations by as much as five times, minimizing life-saving liability because it does not account for actual, or birth-based power relations. Instead it looks at them abstractly.
This has a disenfranchising and discriminatory impact on future generations, relative to things like democratic representative ratios and ecological carrying capacities.
If lawyers had gotten it right, economists would not have been able to discount future lives because to be legitimate, legal systems have to maintain “one person, one equal and influential vote” entry threshold under standards for intergenerational justice. Lawyers (like Heather Gerken, former Dean of Yale Law School) did not, and do not, get it right because they intentionally use the legal fiction of reproductive autonomy to block the threshold, and free ride on arbitrary birth positionalities, as well as concentrations of power and wealth (the endowments as Yale, and Ford Foundation, for example) made by not ensuring the threshold, in a way that erodes all of our freedoms and right to self-determination.
It would be physically impossible to be free / self-determining if we do not now move that wealth to now elevate the threshold, with markers like democratic representative ratios linked to ecological restoration, racial equity etc.
Those moving the wealth are not being altruistic. They are defending their own political freedom, a reason that has historically, and does today, allow extreme measures.
Here is what we can do to stop it:
Take anti-greenwashing legal frameworks and look for #legitimacywashing instead.
Illegal discounting violates unfair competition and civil rights laws because it disenfranchises future generations relative to a zero / legitimate baseline, and is inherently deceptive and discriminatory.
It is preemptively illegal, under constitutional law, because the authority to govern derives from the need to empower those subject to that authority. Illegal discounting converts the possibility of democratic participation into unsustainable, inequitable and disenfranchising growth by discounting the lives of future children beneath a threshold of democratic empowerment.
That means the same institutions that claim to be fighting climate change have for decades been discounting the damages in things like public interest litigation, in some cases with as much as one fifth the accurate damage assessment.
This is the primary ethical, moral, political, legal question, and because it is existential: Are we valuing others enough to make our benefits and obligations contingent on their empowerment?
What would it take to empower children as they come into the world with a representative ratio pegged to restorative ecological carrying capacities, and racial/political equity?
Then challenge the claims and business models as illegal under unfair competition, civil rights and constitutional law. Only this tests whether political authority and entitlement to wealth is contingent on empowerment. Only this accounts for the inseparability of values from obligation.
The University of Denver recently returned $250k to a funder because of their illegal discounting in regards to their animal law program.
Fair Start Movement is now assisting Truth alliance.global to make its own claims against the school for the harm it suffered.
In circles of funders and advocates dedicated to animal protection the question of whether organizations are illegally discounting (ID), devaluing the future lives of animals in their business modeling, is a real issue.
How it works in animal protection (much like a Ponzi):
Funders create their wealth based on inequitable and unsustainable growth – by not paying the costs of empowering children or evading the climate crisis, by discounting black lives, etc. By using illegal discounting, those taking in the wealth do more harm than good to objective values, like animal protection. Fact: The growth creating the wealth kills more animals than as philanthropy it saves.
The funder then invests in the growth-based food or materials industry to make money, funds nonprofit organizations to create market preference for vegan products through downstream activism (distractivism) – after the harm has occurred, and more animals go into the system with more harm to the environment.
The funder and their wealthy kids walk away with the proceeds, the activists get paid their salary and their egos get fed, and animals and vulnerable communities are worse off.
Trump and those like him (mostly white generational wealth) win, because instead of animal protection blocking the inequitable and disenfranchising growth that created him, the animal protection movement enables the growth by creating a fantasy world of downstream victories to hide it.
This discounting has gone on a long time, but as the climate crisis death count rises, so does the liability of those engaged in this, and we may be reaching a point where key targets/examples start to fall. This will transition the driver or philanthropy not from charity to investment, but from investment to liability for the polycrisis.
Anyone can take similar action against similar targets. Learn more here and join the Constitutional Challenge campaign.
We believe the University of Denver’s traditional modeling approach, as we understand it, risks reproducing a “separate but equal” system of valuing life, one in which the interests of some populations, children, communities, animals, or generations can be assigned greater weight than others. In our view, this approach is incompatible with the principle that every child and every human life must be treated with equal dignity and concern.
Our concern is not simply about one academic model or one institution. It is about the broader consequences of using systems that discount the lives of future generations or treat certain populations as less valuable when calculating public impacts. When a model places a different value on a child’s life because of where that child is born, the wealth of their family, their race, their nationality, or the generation into which they are born, the result can be a deeply unequal distribution of protection, resources, and opportunity.
Truth Alliance believes that no child is worth more than another. That principle must be reflected not only in constitutional law and civil rights but also in the models, policies, economic calculations, and institutional decisions that shape the future.
The Question of Public Impact
We are particularly concerned about the consequences of impact-reporting systems that fail to adequately account for harms imposed on future generations and communities already facing the greatest risks. If a model systematically discounts future life, then the suffering of children who have not yet been born may be treated as less important than the interests of people living today. If the model also fails to account for historic inequalities, the result can be a system that effectively transfers costs from those with greater power to those with less power.
This is especially alarming in the context of the climate crisis.
Africa contributes a relatively small share of historical global greenhouse-gas emissions, inequalities yet African children and other global south communities are among those facing severe consequences from climate change. The impacts include:
Rising temperatures and increasingly dangerous heat.
More frequent and prolonged droughts.
Unpredictable rainfall and changing seasons.
Crop failures and declining agricultural productivity.
Food insecurity and malnutrition.
Water scarcity and competition over limited water resources.
Livestock losses and threats to pastoral livelihoods.
Flooding and destruction of homes and infrastructure.
Soil degradation and desertification.
Loss of forests, biodiversity, and wildlife habitats.
Increased displacement and climate-related migration.
Greater risks of disease and public-health emergencies.
Disruption of children’s education.
Increased poverty and loss of household income.
Greater risks to women and girls, particularly in vulnerable communities.
Increased conflict and competition over natural resources.
Loss of cultural heritage and traditional livelihoods.
Growing pressure on already weak health and social-protection systems.
Greater exposure of children to long-term and intergenerational harm.
These are not abstract statistics. They represent real children, families, and communities whose futures are being shaped by decisions made today.
A Call for a Different Standard
Truth Alliance believes that the solution is not simply to improve one model at the margins. Institutions must reconsider the underlying assumptions that determine whose life counts, whose suffering is measured, and whose future is protected.
We therefore call on the University of Denver and other institutions engaged in public-impact modeling to examine whether their methodologies adequately protect the equal dignity and value of all people including children not yet born. We believe there is an opportunity to move from models that may discount future life toward a Fair Start standard based on the principle that no child is worth more than another.
Such a framework would seek to ensure that:
Every child is treated as having equal inherent value.
Future generations are not systematically discounted simply because they have not yet been born.
Public policies account for long-term and intergenerational harm.
Historical inequalities are not hidden by statistical assumptions.
Communities facing the greatest risks are not treated as acceptable recipients of disproportionate harm.
Public-impact assessments recognize the full human consequences of environmental, economic, and social decisions.
Institutions are transparent about the assumptions built into their models.
Children and affected communities have a meaningful voice in decisions that determine their future.
The Cost of Inaction
Truth Alliance is concerned that failing to reconsider these approaches could contribute to continued and unimaginable harm particularly for children and communities already living at the margins of global protection. When institutions normalize the discounting of future life, the consequences do not remain inside classrooms or academic papers. Models influence policy. Policy influences investment. Investment influences infrastructure. Infrastructure influences communities. And these decisions ultimately shape who is protected and who is left exposed.
The question before us is therefore not merely technical.
It is moral.
It is legal.
It is constitutional.
And it is about the future of humanity.
Truth Alliance and its members believe that a child’s value cannot depend on geography, wealth, race, nationality, generation, or economic status.
We call upon the University of Denver to engage openly with these concerns, review the assumptions underlying its models and public-impact reporting, and explore a new approach that places equal human dignity at the center of institutional decision-making.
We further invite scholars, civil-rights advocates, children’s-rights organizations, climate-justice movements, African communities, and affected families around the world to join this conversation.
The future should not be built on a system that treats some lives as more valuable than others.
No child is worth more than another.
That is the standard we believe the law, civil rights, climate justice, and public policy must ultimately uphold.
There comes a point where we have to stop applauding promises, and start measuring outcomes.
Across the world, we are seeing major institutions, charities, corporations and organisations present themselves as leaders in environmental protection, sustainability, animal welfare and social progress. Many of the people within these organisations genuinely care. Many begin with honourable intentions. But when operations scale, priorities can shift. Profit margins, public image, fundraising targets and institutional KPIs can begin to outweigh the very mission these organisations were created to serve.
That is where accountability matters.
What we are now seeing is a growing dispute over whether certain institutions are using legally and ethically sound baselines when fundraising around animal protection and public-benefit work. In particular, serious concerns have been raised regarding whether publicly promoted animal protection efforts were presented in a way that failed to disclose the wider systems of inequitable growth that continued to undo those same efforts in practice.
This issue sits at the centre of the letters submitted to the University of Denver and to the Attorney General’s Office in Denver.
The purpose of these letters is not outrage for the sake of outrage. It is clarification. Transparency. Accountability. They seek to assess the standards used in public-facing animal law and animal protection programming, particularly where institutions represent outcomes to donors, investors and supporters as meaningful progress, while broader conditions may show worsening realities underneath the surface.
This is not a small issue.
If an institution claims success in protecting animals, but the surrounding systems continue expanding suffering faster than protections reduce it, then the public deserves to understand that reality honestly. If fundraising campaigns present isolated victories while larger structural growth continues driving exploitation, then those baselines must be disclosed clearly and openly.
Because outcomes matter more than narratives.
A quick assessment of broader trends during the relevant period raises difficult questions. Not only were more animals subjected to abuse and suffering than programming efforts were able to prevent, but wider indicators across society also showed increasing levels of human suffering, including rising child neglect, poverty and instability. These baseline failures are not confined to one field. They repeat across environmental policy, social systems, conservation, food reform and public-benefit campaigns whenever outputs are marketed as net success without proper disclosure of the surrounding conditions.
This is why transparency must become standard practice moving forward.
The public should know exactly where money goes. Investors should know whether goals are truly being achieved. Donors should know whether campaigns are producing measurable net improvements, or whether they are merely slowing damage while larger systems continue accelerating harm elsewhere.
Without honest baselines, progress can become an illusion.
This same issue can be seen far beyond universities or legal programs. Around the world, humans and wildlife are increasingly being pushed into conflict over shrinking resources. Forests disappear. Water systems collapse. Species vanish. Communities face hunger, displacement and instability. And as inequality deepens, more people are forced into survival-driven crime, exploitation and desperation.
Everything is connected.
If wildlife disappears, ecosystems collapse. If ecosystems collapse, human survival collapses with them. Nature is not separate from humanity. It is the foundation underneath all human life.
We cannot build a sustainable future while ignoring the systems driving destruction in the background.
That is why this moment matters.
The goal is not to attack good people trying to help. The goal is to create a higher standard — one built on truth, measurable outcomes and transparency. A standard where organisations no longer hide behind carefully crafted narratives while underlying realities worsen year after year.
Because the world does not need better marketing around compassion.
It needs courage.
It needs institutions willing to be honest about what is working, what is failing, and where reform is truly needed. It needs systems where funding reaches the ground effectively, where public trust is earned through measurable integrity, and where protecting animals, people and the planet becomes more than a slogan.
If we truly want a future where humanity and nature survive together, then accountability is not optional.
It is the beginning.
Letter ‘
February 11, 2026
Office of the Dean
University of Denver Sturm College of Law
2255 E. Evans Avenue
Denver, CO 80208
Re: Open Letter to the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, Regarding Animal Law
Programming, Donor-Intent Governance, and Baseline Disclosure in Public “Impact” Claims
Dean Smith
Summary of requests
Within 14 days, provide a written response confirming whether any donor requested
return of funds connected to the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project and/or Animal
Law Programming, identify the gift instrument terms and any restrictions, and identify
the university office handling the request.
Within 30 days, provide an accounting of the relevant funds (amounts, dates received,
restrictions, expenditures to date), the policy basis for any decision to deny return, and
the decision authority.
Within 60 days, conduct and publish an internal review of the Project/Program’s public
impact statements to ensure they do not imply net benefit without disclosing baseline
variables and modeling limits, and adopt a written standard for future impact reporting in
this programming.
This letter is submitted to request institutional process and written clarification regarding the
standards used to assess and publicly represent impact in animal law programming and related
advocacy, based on information Fair Start activists received after terminating their role in the
programming. It is not a critique of intent, nor a dispute over values. It is an inquiry into whether
prevailing impact frameworks omit baseline variables in ways that may misstate net outcomes,
distort competition among advocates, and impede coordinated correction of known harm. This is
not infighting among advocates. It is a governance and public-reliance question about what is
being claimed, what is being measured, and what is being omitted.
Those engaged in upstream reforms cannot compete with actors who benefit from inequitable
growth dynamics while funding downstream advocacy and avoiding the implications of that
growth. This is a collective-action problem: the system rewards omission and penalizes
disclosure. That is why we are asking for institutional review and formal written answers rather
than informal discussion.
Core Issue Under Review: Whether “Impact” Claims are Bounded by Baseline Disclosure
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At the center of this concern is legitimacy. Public claims of value or impact are relative to what?
They either remain accurate once assessed in full context, or they do not. When institutions claim
public benefit while omitting legally relevant baseline variables, particularly those related to
growth, political equity, and the creation of future persons, those claims can become structurally
misleading even when program outputs are real.
The core issue is that the standards being used to assess and report “impact” can conflict with
fundamental human-rights norms and the preemptive basis of legal legitimacy. Institutions
should not imply net outcomes while omitting whether and how baseline variables are treated
and what the modeling limits are.
To evaluate public-benefit claims, Fair Start uses what we refer to as the XYZ test, a minimum
legitimacy check that asks whether public claims of value or impact (X) remain accurate once
assessed against baseline inequity impacts during the value assessment and impact reporting,
relative to children’s rights and political equity standards (Y), and the actual value and impact,
on balance in the key context, accounting for the correct baseline Y (Z). The point is not that any
single program controls all macro drivers. The point is that net-outcome implications should not
be implied without disclosing whether and how these baseline variables are treated, and what the
modeling limits are.
This presents an institutional governance issue. Where a law school supports or hosts
programming that invites public reliance (students, donors, and the broader community), the
standards used to describe “impact” must be stated with clarity, including any modeling limits.
Institutions should be cautious about lending professional credibility to impact narratives that
cannot survive full-context review, because institutional authority can become part of the
mechanism that normalizes and propagates claims that are not actually being substantiated as net
outcomes.
Legal and Compliance Context for Counsel Review (non-exhaustive)
This complaint is submitted to facilitate counsel review and internal escalation, not to litigate in
correspondence. The University can evaluate the issues raised here against existing legal and
compliance frameworks that already govern donor restrictions and public-facing representations,
including:
Donor restrictions and gift-instrument compliance for institutional funds under Colorado’s
Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), C.R.S. § 15-1-1101 et seq.,
including provisions addressing release or modification of restrictions and Attorney General
notice in certain circumstances (see C.R.S. § 15-1-1106).
Standards governing deceptive or misleading public representations in trade or commerce under
the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, C.R.S. § 6-1-101 et seq., including deceptive trade
practices provisions (see C.R.S. § 6-1-105). The relevance here is the governance principle:
public statements that imply net outcomes should be bounded by disclosed assumptions and
limitations to avoid materially misleading reliance.
Baseline non-discrimination and political equity principles reflected in widely accepted
human-rights norms that legal educators routinely reference, including the International
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Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), particularly Article 24 (protection of children
without discrimination including by birth), Article 25 (equal suffrage and participation), and
Article 26 (equal protection and non-discrimination, including on grounds of birth).
Our relationship to the programming
As you know, members of the Fair Start Movement assisted in the co-founding and operation of
the school’s Animal Activist Legal Defense Project and assisted with teaching in the Animal
Law Program in roughly 2022, including participation in a key launch event that was recorded
and framed the intended work of the program as a matter of total liberation, including
environmental restoration.
We are writing now as part of the Fair Start “Tell the Truth” campaign – while we do not
represent the funders in any capacity, given our role in recruiting them for Sturm, we are
communicating information they shared with us.
The intent of our prior work with the school was, consistent with animal liberation and right to
rescue advocacy, to eventually end animal propertyhood at both a micro-level, through criminal
liability and food reforms, and at a macro-level through baseline-corrected family reforms
needed to ensure net outcomes are not reversed by upstream dynamics. A quick assessment
shows that not only were more animals subject to abuse and suffering during the relevant time
period than the programming was able to save, but more children were subject to abuse, neglect
and suffering than animals saved during that time.
The programming at Sturm formed in the wake of controversy around another animal protection
organization hiding historic liability for having used the lower standard for evaluating
animal/environmental policy. The media covered the baseline controversy explicitly. See:
https://www.newsweek.com/secret-war-natural-rights-children-opinion-1771365 and
Our recent research for litigation against Coca-Cola’s factory farming operations showed 5x or
more the damages if we account for illegal baselining/discounting, which makes public interest
interventions that also illegal baseline/discount a deadly charade: See
The macro framework is disfavored by funders because while food law and even criminal law
reforms can ensure good media that support existing entitlements and investments, the family
law and other reforms that the macro entails pose potential preemptive liability for value
assessments and impact reporting around micro, downstream-level interventions undone by
macro, upstream-level forces that illegally enriched some at deadly cost to others.
That macro framework was not speculative or external to the institution. It was developed and
publicly articulated in collaboration with University sustainability leadership, including
co-authored peer-reviewed work involving university staff identified in public materials as
Clinical Professor and Faculty Director, Center of Sustainability. Fair Start further understands
that, after an attempted implementation effort with University stakeholders, the professor
withdrew from participation.
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That was despite extensive peer-reviewed research that shows measurable birth-equity as a
preemptive legal standard, one that makes accounting for and offsetting birth positionality a
necessary part of academic neutrality and accurate research. The deadly costs of “separate but
equal” reproductive rights, versus “no child is worth more than another” will kill millions:
https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-andimplications-for-heat-related-health-risks/
Due to the role of key funders involved, who reject the need for assessing value and reporting
impact in the context of child inequity exacerbated by growth, and who reject macro-level
reforms that would treat measurable birth equity as a fundamental human right, we do not
believe the Project or Program ultimately met the macro goals originally contemplated.
We also understand that funders were aware of the larger context, including prior national
discussion condemning animal protection efforts that failed to account for countervailing impacts
of inequitable growth and birth-based political equity.
During the resulting schism, efforts were made to reframe Fair Start’s work as downstream
population activity rather than the upstream equity override it is. This included the elevation of a
partner organization that subsequently received a substantial grant and removed Fair Start-related
content from its public materials. The effect was to obscure the equity analysis originally
understood by all parties and to avoid confronting the legitimacy implications of the baseline
issue described here.
We are aware that Fair Start’s relationship to a professional funder complicated matters, and we
have since severed ties and are pursuing similar requests for reforms around conflicts of interest
standards before the Association of Fundraising Professionals to address the problem.
Our First Request: donor funds, donor intent, and remedy
We understand that at least one donor who supported the upstream, baseline-disclosure work
originally contemplated for this programming later requested return of funds after the upstream
framework was not implemented, and that the school declined. We request written confirmation
of:
● Whether a return request was made, by whom, and the date received
● The gift instrument terms (restrictions, purpose language, any conditions)
● The office and decision authority that denied or is evaluating return
● The policy and legal basis for denial (including any UPMIFA analysis)
Requested remedy
We request one of the following, in writing, with a dated implementation plan:
Return: full return of the relevant funds to the donor(s), with a closing accounting; or
Restricted reallocation: transfer of the relevant funds into a segregated, restricted
account used only for the upstream work that was originally contemplated and that
resolves the reliance issue at the center of this complaint, including:
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● Adoption of a written impact-reporting template (baseline disclosure + modeling
limits + outputs vs net outcomes)
● Internal review and correction/disclaimer of any public statements implying net
outcomes without disclosure
● Publication of a short standards memo describing the baseline used for any
impact language going forward
Escrow pending review: placement of the funds into escrow pending completion of the
60-day internal review and any required notice/review by appropriate oversight channels.
If the University asserts that return or reallocation is not feasible, we request a written alternative
resolution proposal that is functionally equivalent in integrity terms, including documentation of
constraints, responsible offices, and next steps.
Core disclosure standard requested (for institutional adoption)
We request adoption of a written standard for animal-law programming communications
that:
● States the baseline used for any impact language,
● Discloses modeling limits relevant to any net-outcome implications, and
● Distinguishes outputs (services performed, cases handled, rescues supported)
from net outcomes.
Campaign posture and standards pathway (non-punitive, process-driven)
This request is process-driven and non-punitive. The objective is early alignment on a
baseline (not “purity”), with a voluntary, pass/fail diagnostic standards pathway that
organizations and institutions can use to test whether their metrics and assumptions are
structurally coherent with their stated missions. The goal is documented governance,
donor-intent compliance, and corrective disclosure so that public reliance is not induced
by net-outcome implications the institution is not substantiating.
Illustration of the standard problem: institutional narratives and campaign dynamics
Baseline errors are not confined to any one domain. They recur wherever outputs are
narrated as net outcomes without disclosure. For illustration, we will be addressing these
same modeling issues in the context of Denver’s 2024 slaughterhouse ban effort
(Ordinance 309), where competing public-benefit claims in a high-salience context
illustrate why modeling limits and baseline disclosure matter.
Preemptive standards referenced
A central obstacle to reform is the collective action problem. Because major actors
depend on the same flawed impact standard, any institution that corrects it independently
can incur disproportionate reputational and competitive harm. Our response has been to
turn to state law and to legally preemptive standards that align public-benefit claims with
measurable empowerment and political equity.
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Continued use of prevailing standards for evaluating value and reporting impact out of
context misaligns legal obligations and the coercive power of the state from the objective
empowerment and self-determination of those subject to them.
These standards are outlined here:
● https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-today-moves-to-standardize-climate-dama
ge-evaluations-at-the-un-and-override-any-conflicting-standards/
● https://fairstartmovement.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Fair-Start-MovementACPHR-Petition-3.pdf
● https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fair-start-movement-urges-califo
rnia-attorney-general-to-recognize-full-justice-standard-as-preemptive-of-fraud-cl
aims-1035104323
● https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-and-truth-alliance-file-notice-of-preemptiv
e-standards-with-the-california-attorney-general/
Recent enforcement efforts, including Truth-in-Legitimacy compliance initiatives at the state
level, reflect the beginning of an effort to enjoin business models whose public-benefit claims
rely on these same flawed standards. These efforts operationalize the legitimacy principles
described above and are relevant to how institutions should evaluate and bound public-facing
impact claims.
Public representations at issue
We are specifically concerned with public statements and materials that could reasonably be read
as implying net benefit without disclosing baseline variables or modeling limits. For counsel
review and institutional handling, we request identification and review of the specific items
below:
“Supporting animal activists in their efforts to elevate awareness and understanding of
animal well-being”
“Developing best practices in the counseling and representation of activists,
whistleblowers, and investigators”
“Catalyzing a network of attorneys positioned to advance the welfare of non-human
animals”
“Exploring new and compelling narratives designed to elevate understanding of animal
suffering”
“Partnering with key stakeholders and supporters, including, without limitation,
plant-based and other humane producers, academic institutions, non-profit
organizations, labor activists, reformist professional associations, and environmental
organizations”
“Forging a more inclusive, populist, and activist-centered animal welfare movement.”
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“While the AALDP cannot agree to take cases without screening, we are eager to hear
from activists in need of our assistance. Please contact the AALDP.”
“Interested in working with the AALDP as a volunteer attorney? Please complete the
volunteer attorney sign-up sheet.”
That said, it is less about the claims, and more about the baseline numbers behind the claims, and
deviation from what would be accurate and legitimate accounting for illegal shifting of
costs/harms onto the most vulnerable.
Fair Start states the baseline-disclosure dispute is inseparable from donor intent and institutional
reliance because at least one donor has stated, “When I made my gift to Sturm in 2022, it was my
understanding that it would be used for an ecocentric baseline,” and Fair Start further states that
since January 2023 funders and institutional stakeholders have “doubled down on the
anthropocentric standard,” creating a material mismatch between what was reasonably
understood to be funded and what baseline governed “impact/public benefit/liberation”
representations.
Anthropocentrism is human-centered valuation; ecocentrism recognizes intrinsic ecosystem and
nonhuman value, and Fair Start’s position is that the University must state baseline choice
(including any turn to animal-centric and human-centric systems) with modeling limits because it
determines whether outputs are being narrated as net outcomes and can create downstream harm
when donors, students, and the public rely on implied net benefit. Funding for this effort rests on
a simple premise: the baseline must be explicitly defined, measured, and audited against
collective-action incentives, with specific protection for those most likely to absorb harm when
claims outpace evidence, including protected classes under civil-rights and anti-discrimination
law.
Fair Start states return requests have been made and should be treated as a reliance signal
requiring documented resolution, including Frank (A. F. Rothschild, PhD, Director, Center for
Contemporary Equine Studies) stating the institution should “either return CCES’s grant or
implement our funding for the designated purpose stated in our Agreement with DU Sturm, as
promised,” and requests written baseline clarity (promised vs applied), a full accounting, and a
written remedy of return, restricted reallocation to the designated baseline purpose, escrow
pending review, or a functionally equivalent integrity remedy.
Systems shouldn’t teach, assume, or operationalize legal authority unless there is measurable
empowerment of the people subject to that authority. Otherwise, we’re just automating “separate
but equal” under a technological veneer.
Fair Start’s model in Denver is that we don’t build new institutions, we require existing
institutions to replace non-compliant parts. The same logic would apply to AI governance. If the
language doesn’t invert toward “no child worth more than another,” it fails the baseline.
We propose a standardized reusable legal injunction mechanism triggered by
consumer-protection style action when a public-facing impact/benefit claim materially implies
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net benefit without disclosing the baseline and model limits pushing institutions and government
to either prove benefit under a stated baseline or correct the claim.
Our Second Request: participate in the Tell the Truth campaign and assess value and report
impacts in context.
Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global offer a legitimacy-based framework grounded in
the principle that all facts are relative to values, and that value and impact claims either
constitute or deconstitute legitimate political systems relative to a legally required ideal of
measurable empowerment.
Participation in the Tell the Truth campaign, as it relates to the College of Law, would minimally
include:
● A public clarification distinguishing program outputs from net outcomes
● An updated impact-reporting template that discloses baseline variables and modeling
limits
● A non-punitive, voluntary pass/fail diagnostic standards pathway that can be used
● Internally to test structural coherence of impact language and underlying assumption
● A meeting hosted by the College where competing impact standards are evaluated in a
structured, evidence-based format
The fundamental driver is illegal baselining/discounting, and birth-inequity based growth that
enriches funders, but does more harm than good by the advocates’ and funders’ own professed
values – saving animals. Illegal baselining assumes children deserve what they are born with,
even as growth degrades their prospects, rather than what rights and political legitimacy require.
That said, we recognize that fundamental equity reforms are a collective action problem – so we
ask all as part of the Tell the Truth campaign to back the development and implementation of
model constitutional injunction to block illegal baselining in business models. If it’s illegal to not
hire persons of color, it’s illegal to enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to children of
color.
See:
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fair-start-movement-urges-california-attorney-g
eneral-to-recognize-full-justice-standard-as-preemptive-of-fraud-claims-1035104323
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating
and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all
children equitably as they enter the world—and at a standard where those children could protect
themselves from the climate crisis—the person or company making the claims was using an
illegal Ponzi/equity-fraud standard and benefiting at deadly cost to others, mostly children of
color.
Those willing to account for those costs, to legitimate political systems and engage in the most
just and effective reforms possible, cannot compete with those who do not – but they don’t have
to.
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Given the specific funders at issue, a fair application of the baseline would center on the
on-balance and birth-inequity / growth impacts on animals used in ejiao production, as well as
the vulnerable populations who rely on these animals and experience the related oppressive
impacts of the industry.
Systems shouldn’t teach, assume, or operationalize legal authority unless there is measurable
empowerment of the people subject to that authority. Otherwise, we’re just automating “separate
but equal” under a technological veneer.
Fair Start’s model in Denver is that we don’t build new institutions, we require existing
institutions to replace non-compliant parts. The same logic would apply to AI governance. If the
language doesn’t invert toward “no child worth more than another,” it fails the baseline.
Meeting request
To resolve these issues efficiently, we request a meeting with the appropriate University
representatives (College of Law leadership and the office(s) responsible for donor funds and
public communications for the relevant programming). Proposed agenda:
donor funds status, accounting, restrictions, and decision authority
the specific public impact statements identified above and what corrections/disclaimers are
needed
adoption of an impact-reporting standard for animal-law programming and next steps with dates
Conclusion
We encourage the University of Denver and the Sturm College of Law to address the donor
funds issue, to correct public representations where necessary, and to engage in the Tell the Truth
campaign by adopting an impact standard that does not omit baseline variables and that clearly
distinguishes outputs from net outcomes.
About FairStartMovement.org and TruthAlliance.global
Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global are solution-focused, compliance-oriented
organizations. Our objective is to secure accurate disclosures, lawful handling of donor-restricted
funds, and governance processes that allow institutions to correct public-facing statements where
needed. Where an institution is willing to engage, we can provide structured documentation,
draft disclosure templates, and a defined process for separating outputs from net outcomes in
impact communications, with clear modeling limits suitable for counsel review and institutional
adoption.
Respectfully submitted,
Name: Suriya Khan
Email: suriya@fairstartmovement.org
Phone: 516 – 725 – 3157
Organization: Fair Start Movement / TruthAlliance.global
February 11, 2026
The Honorable Phil Weiser
Office of the Attorney General
State of Colorado
Colorado Department of Law
1300 Broadway, 10th Floor
Denver, Colorado 80203
Re: Request for Attorney General review and investigation concerning University of Denver
Sturm College of Law animal-law programming “impact/public benefit/liberation”
representations and donor-restricted funds governance (Total Liberation Colorado packet)
Dear Attorney General Weiser,
This letter is submitted as part of the Total Liberation Colorado (TLC) packet and requests
counsel review and Attorney General attention to an institutional complaint already submitted to
the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. The complaint concerns animal-law
programming and affiliated advocacy that publicly describes “impact,” “public benefit,” and
“liberation,” and raises governance and public-reliance issues where those public-facing
representations are made without baseline disclosure and where donor-restricted funds
governance is disputed. While we do not represent the funders in any capacity, given our role in
recruiting them for Sturm, we are communicating information they shared with us.
The Attorney General’s role is materially different from the University’s role. The University is
the institution whose public representations, donor-restricted funds governance, and internal
review mechanisms are at issue. The Attorney General is the State’s recognized protector of
charitable interests and charitable assets, with statutory and common-law authority regarding
trusts established for charitable, educational, religious, or benevolent purposes.
Factual Posture – Institutional complaint already filed
FairStartMovement.org and TruthAlliance.global have filed an institutional complaint with the
University of Denver Sturm College of Law requesting a written response and internal review
regarding: (a) how animal-law programming and affiliated advocacy assess and publicly
represent impact; and (b) whether public-facing claims distinguish program outputs from net
outcomes once baseline variables and modeling limits are disclosed.
Core disclosure issue (baseline disclosure and net-outcome implication)
The unifying issue is baseline disclosure: whether public impact language implies net
benefit without stating the baseline, disclosing modeling limits, and separating outputs
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Attorney General Complaint
1
(activities performed) from net outcomes (net effects once baseline variables are
counted).
For TLC purposes, this is operationalized as an “XYZ” minimum disclosure check:
X: the public claim of value and impact
Y: birth inequity impacts during the value assessment and impact reporting,
relative to children’s rights and political equity standards
Z: the actual value and impact, on balance in the key context, accounting for the
correct baseline Y
The point is not that any single program controls macro drivers. The point
is that solicitations should not imply a substantiated net-outcome claim if the
program is not stating its baseline, disclosing modeling limits, and separating
outputs from net outcomes in solicitation-facing materials and incorporated
public-facing materials.
Donor-intent dispute requiring a remedy the Attorney General is positioned to
supervise
Fair Start states that a donor who supported the originally contemplated upstream
baseline-disclosure work requested return of funds after the upstream framework was not
implemented, and that return was declined. The institutional complaint requests written
confirmation of: the request, the gift-instrument terms, the decision authority, and the
policy/legal basis for denial, and requests a remedy in one of these forms:
A) return of funds (with a closing accounting), or
B) restricted reallocation into a segregated account used only for the upstream
baseline-disclosure work originally contemplated (disclosure template adoption;
internal review and correction/disclaimer of public statements implying net
outcomes without disclosure; publication of a short standards memo describing
the baseline used going forward), or
C) escrow pending completion of the internal review and any required
oversight/notice steps.
Fair Start states the baseline-disclosure dispute is inseparable from donor intent,
charitable-asset governance, and reliance because at least one donor has stated, “When I
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2
made my gift to Sturm in 2022, it was my understanding that it would be used for an
ecocentric baseline,” and Fair Start further states that since January 2023 funders and
institutional stakeholders have “doubled down on the anthropocentric standard,” creating
a material mismatch between what was reasonably understood to be funded and what
baseline governed “impact/public benefit/liberation” representations. Anthropocentrism
is human-centered valuation; ecocentrism recognizes intrinsic ecosystem and nonhuman
value, and Fair Start’s position is that baseline choice (including any turn to
animal-centric and human-centric systems) must be stated with modeling limits because
it determines whether outputs are being narrated as net outcomes and can induce
downstream harm when the public relies on implied net benefit.
Funding for this effort rests on a simple premise: the baseline must be explicitly defined,
measured, and audited against collective-action incentives (donors, funders, government
dollars, students, voters, consumers, and future generations), with particular protection
for those most likely to absorb harm when claims outpace evidence, including protected
classes under civil-rights and anti-discrimination law.
Fair Start states return requests have been made and should be treated as a reliance signal,
including Frank (A. F. Rothschild, PhD, Director, Center for Contemporary Equine
Studies) stating the institution should “either return CCES’s grant or implement our
funding for the designated purpose stated in our Agreement with DU Sturm, as
promised,” and requests a written remedy of return, restricted reallocation to the
designated baseline purpose, escrow pending review, or a functionally equivalent
integrity remedy.
Systems shouldn’t teach, assume, or operationalize legal authority unless there is
measurable empowerment of the people subject to that authority. Otherwise, we’re just
automating “separate but equal” under a technological veneer.
Fair Start’s model in Denver is that we don’t build new institutions, we require existing
institutions to replace non-compliant parts. The same logic would apply to AI
governance. If the language doesn’t invert toward “no child worth more than another,” it
fails the baseline.
We propose a standardized reusable legal injunction mechanism triggered by
consumer-protection style action when a public-facing impact/benefit claim materially
implies net benefit without disclosing the baseline and model limits pushing institutions
and government to either prove benefit under a stated baseline or correct the claim.
Reliance and Governance Context (material to review)
Fair Start states that the upstream baseline-disclosure framework at issue was previously
developed and publicly articulated in collaboration with University sustainability leadership,
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including co-authored work involving university staff who were identified in public materials as
Clinical Professor and Faculty Director, Center of Sustainability, and that the staff member later
withdrew after attempted implementation with University stakeholders. Fair Start further states
that the dispute and the requested internal review should be analyzed as a governance and
reliance issue: the public is invited to rely on “impact/public benefit/liberation” narratives, while
the underlying baseline and modeling limits that determine whether outputs plausibly translate
into net outcomes are not disclosed.
Why Attorney General’s Office
Colorado recognizes and reaffirms the Attorney General’s powers regarding
charitable trusts and charitable interests – Colorado law expressly recognizes
and reaffirms that the Attorney General has powers conferred by statute and by
common law regarding trusts established for charitable, educational, religious, or
benevolent purposes. Colorado statutes also preserve the Attorney General’s
rights and powers with respect to any trust. Colorado appellate authority
describes the Attorney General as “the recognized protector of public interests in
charitable trusts,” and explains the enforcement structure that routes these
disputes to the Attorney General.
UPMIFA oversight features (restriction governance; notice to the Attorney
General in modification contexts) – If the disputed funds are governed as
donor-restricted institutional funds, Colorado’s UPMIFA framework provides
specific mechanisms for releasing or modifying restrictions and includes notice to
the Attorney General in court proceedings affecting restrictions, reflecting the
Attorney General’s participation interest where charitable restrictions are being
altered or addressed. The institutional complaint’s requested remedies (return,
restricted reallocation tied to the originally contemplated baseline-disclosure
work, or escrow pending review) are framed to align with orderly
restriction-governance analysis and documented authority, rather than informal
or discretionary handling.
Standing constraints and the enforcement gap the Attorney General fills –
Colorado appellate authority explains the structural point that private parties
commonly face standing barriers in charitable-trust enforcement and that the
Attorney General is positioned to act to protect the charitable interest. This
standing architecture is a principal reason this matter is properly routed to the
Attorney General for review and, where warranted, investigative action.
Consumer protection and public-reliance lens for materially misleading
“impact/public benefit” representations – Colorado’s Consumer Protection Act
includes deceptive trade practices such as false representations about
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Attorney General Complaint
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characteristics, uses, or benefits and failures to disclose material information
known at the time of an advertisement or sale when intended to induce a
transaction. Separately, the Attorney General has statutory authority to
independently initiate actions to enforce state laws including the Colorado
Consumer Protection Act. In this matter, the relevant public-reliance concern is
whether institutional “impact/public benefit/liberation” representations invite
donor/student/public reliance while omitting baseline variables and modeling
limits that determine whether outputs plausibly constitute net outcomes.
Charitable representations and donor-protection context – Colorado’s
charitable solicitations framework reflects a public policy interest in protecting
the public from deceptive or fraudulent charitable solicitations and requires
registration and non-deceptive solicitation practices. While the TLC packet does
not presume a conclusion, it requests Attorney General review because the dispute
concerns donor-intent governance and public-facing representations tied to
charitable/educational programming where the public is asked to rely on
“impact/public benefit/liberation” framing.
Requests to the Colorado Attorney General (time-bound)
Intake and counsel routing (14 days), confirm in writing:
a. the office/division assigned for review; and
b. whether the Attorney General will request documents from the University
relevant to donor-intent governance and public-facing impact representations.
Donor-intent governance review and remedy pathway (30 days), request from the
University (and review for sufficiency):
a. the applicable gift instrument(s) and any written restrictions or purpose
language;
b. the return request(s) (date received; who submitted; what was requested);
c. the decision authority and documented policy/legal basis for denial (including
any UPMIFA analysis, to the extent applicable);
d. an accounting (amounts, dates received, restrictions, expenditures to date);
e. the University’s proposed remedy: return; restricted reallocation tied to the
originally contemplated baseline-disclosure work; escrow pending review; or a
documented alternative that is functionally equivalent in integrity terms.
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Public-reliance and impact-claim review (60 days), request that the University:
a. identify the specific public statements/materials most likely to imply net
outcomes without baseline disclosure;
b. submit those materials for counsel review; and
c. adopt a written disclosure template for future impact language that (i) states the
baseline, (ii) discloses modeling limits, and (iii) separates outputs from net
outcomes.
Enforcement
The TLC packet does not demand punishment for imperfection. It requests documented
governance, donor-intent compliance, and corrective disclosure so that public reliance is not
induced by net-outcome implications the institution is not substantiating. Fair Start states its
standards work is designed so organizations are not punished for imperfection, with an objective
of early alignment on a baseline (not “purity”) and a voluntary, pass/fail diagnostic standards
pathway that organizations can use to test whether their metrics and assumptions are structurally
coherent with their stated missions. This posture aligns with the Attorney General’s role as
protector of charitable interests and with the Attorney General’s authority to investigate and
enforce against materially misleading public representations when the facts warrant.
Attachments / packet materials referenced
Press release announcing TLC and summarizing the institutional complaint, including the
XYZ baseline-disclosure standard, donor-intent remedy request, and the requested
internal review.
Open letter to the University of Denver Sturm College of Law requesting time-bound
written answers, donor funds accounting, internal review, and adoption of an
impact-reporting disclosure template.
Copy of the Colorado Secretary of State complaint submission and supporting exhibits
(as included in the TLC packet).
Respectfully submitted,
Name: Suriya Khan
Email: suriya@fairstartmovement.org
Phone: 516 – 725 – 3157
Organization: Fair Start Movement / TruthAlliance.global
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Attorney General Complaint
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REFERENCES
● Colorado Revised Statutes § 24-31-101 (Powers and duties of attorney general;
subsection recognizing/reaffirming AG powers re
charitable/educational/religious/benevolent trusts) (2024, as amended effective Jan. 1,
2025).
● Colorado Revised Statutes § 15-1-1005 (Rights and powers of courts and attorney general
not impaired).
● Colorado Revised Statutes § 15-1-1106 (Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional
Funds Act; release/modification of restrictions; notice/opportunity for Attorney General).
● Colorado Revised Statutes § 6-1-105 (Colorado Consumer Protection Act; deceptive
trade practices).
● Colorado Revised Statutes § 6-16-101 (Colorado Charitable Solicitations Act; short title).
● Colorado Charitable Solicitations Act, Title 6, Article 16, Colorado Revised Statutes
(compiled statutory PDF).
● Herbst v. University of Colorado Foundation, 2022 COA 38, No. 20CA2067 (Colo. Ct.
App. Mar. 31, 2022)
Summary “When children are missing from the baseline, they are missing from the future we claim to improve.”
In equity-focused work, the language is no longer the problem. Inclusion, participation, and disaggregation are now standard practice across institutions. Yet despite this apparent progress, measurement systems continue to produce results that feel increasingly disconnected from lived reality.
The issue is not a lack of frameworks, it is the overreliance on them.
Too often, measurement has become an exercise in compliance rather than a test of truth. Baselines are constructed to meet requirements, indicators are selected to align with reporting structures, and results are presented in ways that satisfy expectations. On paper, everything is in order. In practice, critical gaps remain unexamined.
This is where the distinction between equality and equity is most often diluted. Equality is easy to standardize; equity is not. Equity requires confronting uneven starting points, structural barriers, and unequal distributions of benefit. Yet many measurement systems, even when disaggregated, continue to rely on frameworks that prioritize comparability over complexity. The result is a form of reporting that appears rigorous while quietly flattening the very differences it is meant to address.
Baselines are particularly vulnerable to this distortion. The question is not simply whether a baseline exists, but whether it is complete. Who is missing? Which conditions were not captured? What forms of exclusion were normalized or overlooked at the outset? When these questions are not explicitly addressed, progress can be reported within a constrained frame that excludes those most affected.
There is also an institutional dimension that cannot be ignored. Measurement is rarely neutral. It is embedded within systems of funding, performance management, and public accountability. Under these conditions, there is a natural tendency to favor stability over disruption to produce results that confirm progress rather than challenge it. This does not require bad intent. It only requires incentives that reward coherence more than accuracy.
For professionals operating within these systems, the real risk is not failure to measure, but failure to question what is being measured and why. When methodologies are accepted without scrutiny, and when baselines are treated as technical formalities rather than political and ethical choices, measurement loses its critical function.
If equity is to mean anything in practice, then measurement systems must be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as the policies they are designed to evaluate. This includes confronting uncomfortable possibilities: that some reported gains are partial, that some populations remain invisible, and that some successes are overstated.
Until this happens, compliance will continue to be mistaken for progress and measurement will continue to reassure more than it reveals.
Professors are influential, and when they make public benefit claims, they should do some from clear baselines, and in a way that does not hide inequitable and disenfranchising growth. Not dealing with baselines is evidence to support the Fair Start thesis: That wealth obtained by violating the rights of future children now drives public interest narratives and outcomes to hide and violate those rights.
*This critique is intentionally done outside of customary back and forth academic discourse. A constitutive discourse is more public, and rather than treating values like animal protection as abstract, it assesses the value and impact claims influential people make that fundamentally benefit them, through a system of illegitimate and disentrancing growth and birth positionality, at deadly cost to others and in contravention of academic neutrality.
The Program’s website states it is: “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system.”
That statement is inaccurate. Stilt and the program use an illegal baselining and equity fraud standard that creates a fantasy world of benefit for animals that is undone, upstream, by inequitable and disenfranchising growth.
Stilt’s work on the illusory concept of “rights of nature,” the benefits of which are undone by growth every day, is exemplary of her approach. Claims of using animals benefiting animals are the worst example of the Winners Take Allphenomenon because animals are the most numerous category of vulnerable entities, and because claiming our current political inequity-based system of growth can benefit them are outlandish.
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than the program ever did good. Use of that valuation and reporting model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
The fundamental unit of moral currency is the influence one has over the outcomes of their political system, or what is loosely understood as political equality / equity though common conceptions are incomplete. Other currencies, like welfare, cannot exist outside of systems of political and legal obligation or “oughtness” and the primacy of how people are positioned relative to others and Earth’s ecologies at birth.
This equity is consistent with an objective “one person, one equal and influential vote” (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) standard, empowering persons to limit the influence others have – including ecologically and socially – over them. This is also consistent with more collective systems of family planning in which no child is treated as worth more than another, an outcome ensured through a threshold or level of empowering birth and development conditions and relations outside of which no child should be born.
This physically disembedded persons from any effective role in their political systems. It also allowed those in power, both with political authority and entitlements to wealth defended by that authority, to avoid having to legitimate their power by actually, and measurably empowering those subject to it. Rather than seeing the creation of actual (relative to the legal baseline) empowering relations as the source of political authority, nations treated symbolic or representative instruments like treaties and constitutions as themselves authoritative.
While civil rights movements made headway in areas like housing, employment, and education, the notion of autonomy without equity amounted to the privatization of the creation of power relations, and the totally arbitrary basis for the concentration of extreme levels of generational white wealth – over the span of decades – that drives many of the outcomes we see today. That wealth never had to pay the costs of legitimacy – and the full impacts are now being revealed.
Within less than a few generations the regime caused unsustainable growth, vast political, social, and ecological inequity, the destruction of world ecologies, and the decline of democracy. This inequitable and disenfranchising growth breached political, ecological and social thresholds for objective values we all share like comfortable temperatures, equality of opportunity,
Public interest work and outcomes during these decades and into today have generally oriented from arbitrary, ever-changing and illegal (both because they disenfranchise and otherwise harm children, relative to a host of accepted legal standards usually only applied to existing rather than future children) baselines that violate the “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard. High levels of climate emissions championed by “environmental” organizations that enrich some at deadly cost to others, still permitted and defended by coercive authority of nations, are an example.
Use of these baselines represents an undemocratic, diluted and commercial form of freedom, rather than values consistent with political freedom, that is more akin to “free market” choice” of a shopping mall more than the political influence of a functional town hall.
Public interest interventions to challenge greenwashing and humanewashing have failed because they themselves did not account for the massively countervailing impacts of growth on the interventions themselves – growth that for instance has created more climate emissions than the interventions removed, while bringing children into the world without the resources or political influence to deal with them.
And yet accounting for growth by itself would not account for the inequity of the relations formed by that growth.cIt would not account for how some benefit at deadly cost to others based simply on their birth and developmental positionality, with benefits defended by nations on the false premise that all are empowered equally at birth. One of the false assumptions at work was that some children were magically born poor and others rich, instead of the reality of a policy choice to elevate family autonomy (and not in the sense of being free of the climate crisis, but free in a “free market” sense) over family equity and political legitimacy.
Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, living in poverty, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. They are subject to top-down abstract rules, not rules derived from the inclusive creation of power relations by those subject to them.
Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth – like Tim Midura – have helped conceal this with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
For example, Fair Start activists were funded by such funders in their work with prior organizations, and prominent activists turned business owners today benefit from having used assessment and reporting models that each year allowed them to claim progress for vulnerable entities – like animals – that was easily being undone on exponential levels by birth-inequity based growth. The hallmark of equity fraud involves the fraudster omitting from evaluation and reporting the largest driver of the relevant outcome – the birth-based creation of power relations – in order to exploit that process.
The solution?
The FalseClaimsChecker.org accounts for this minimum necessary condition of political equity by replacing those assumptions – and the illegal baselining – with a base assumption that political authority and the entitlement to wealth it can generate must be derived from a “one person, one equal and influential vote” / “no child is worth more than another standard,” thus situating those making the value assessments and impact reporting themselves as part of, or outside of, a discourse legitimacy moving towards a just future. This accounts, at a most fundamental level – at a constitutional or basic system of obligation level, for the driver of the polycrisis.
These claims situate them in their political system, and allow us to assess how they arbitrarily benefit from, or suffer the costs, of the “separate but equal” standard.
When someone makes a value assessment and impact claim, we should ask: Relative to what?
You will find rampant use of shifting baseline – moving goalposts – that allow claimants to appear to create value and beneficial impact with no functional protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals, as the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity worsens. That means the impact is being undone relative to the minimum legally required threshold, or an illegal baseline – illegal because it does not account for legitimacy, or the need to measurably empower those subject to the legal system, including ensuring minimum levels of health-as-enfranchisement for all infants.
This is called growthwashing, or more accurately equitywashing. Why the latter? Because to treat humans quantitatively as numbers is less accurate than to see them as living in complex qualitative relations, and because past certain ecological, social, and political thresholds, growth has devastating nonlinear impacts – with climate emissions triggering things like ecological feedback loops.
We can use these claims to demonstrate the problem, that the values and impact they claimed would have been undone relative to the legal / preemptive as opposed to arbitrary baselines, and encourage reforms towards the legal baseline and their becoming part of an empowering system of truly self–determining persons by realigning fundamental authority and entitlements around a system of fair birth positionality, consistent with the values that they are signaling in their claims This is a state of autonomy through political equity by rearranging constitutional entitlements, sufficient to ensure Dasgupta’s optimality, but in the qualitative sense of empowering relations.
Given that few if any use the legal “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, this exercise generally entails their having to admit benefiting from arbitrary birth and developmental positionality (national, racial, intergenerational, etc.) at deadly cost to others, and having disparate influence over others defended by unlegitimated authority, and threat of coercion, of the state.
We admit: Being part of a system of birth inequity that treats children of color as deserving fewer resources and influence, including omitting this as a countervailing factor in our value assessments and impact reporting, by overshooting ecological, political and social thresholds does more harm to our values than we do to further them.
This “Tell the Truth” discourse creates an opportunity for permanent resistance to oppression because it protects, through the use of an intergenerational justice threshold, the most vulnerable, Infants and animals and identifies those who reject that protection, and systems of mutual self-determination with it.
See the fallacious claims by prominent food entrepreneur Paul Shapiro, who ironically started his work as an animal rights activist climbing to a level of national influence on a false advertising campaign against egg producers for humane washing, His claims to have saved animals while explicitly refusing to back equity reforms or qualify his claims, make them inaccurate and out of context because he omits how he chose underlying policies that did vastly more harm to animals than he did good. His omission enables him to exploit financial systems – as lead at a profitable food company with military contracts – that in turn growth exploit animals and elevate his voice above those pursuing on-balance reforms.
Initial attempts, in other scenarios, by Fair Start Movement and Truth Alliance advocates to implement this preemption were met with sabotage by public interest entities hiding liability for decades of inaccurate claims, usually for micro interventions undone – relative to a true system of empowerment – by macro forces that enriched those involved, and their funders, at deadly cost to others.
As a practical matter one can challenge illegal baselining, or political equity and impact fraud, using inexpensive and widely available consumer protection and unfair competition laws to enjoin public and private business valuation, and impact reporting, that don’t comply with the minimum baseline of inclusive legitimacy.
Given that political authority, including to entitle wealth, derives from having to empower those subject to the authority, these cases get to the ultimate question of political freedom: Are we obligated to a political system that does not empower us? And what are the limits of self-defense against such a system?
After 1948 and the inception of universal human rights that limited national authority, nations were obligated to derive their authority and any entitlements protected under it from the equitable empowerment of their subjects. This requirement is widely reflected in the Bill of Human Rights instruments and their references to the right to self-determination – and one person, one equal and influential vote. This requirement should have created an interpretation of the collective pronoun that premises those documents, like the reference to “we the people,” treating a level of influence in one’s political system (“oughtness” or an “influl” that precedes a “util”) as a fundamental currency that precedes utility and welfare.
The textual basis for this interpretive rule is clear – these pronouns are the linguistic premise of the language that follows. Such a currency and universal linguistic rule of interpretation would have entailed a harsh principle: Each person in a system of law and obligation would be owed the level of public protection, or oughtness, they would account to the most vulnerable: Infants, and the animals whom the infants would impact. The value of self, versus other, determination would require it. Again, a racist system of self-determination blocked this change.
Regardless, the principle creates a textual basis to interpret law as requiring the inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, consistent with standards for intergenerational justice, and ensuring equal offsets of influence relative to a zero baseline and the idea that no child is worth more than another. At a policy level this would have required a fundable, minimum threshold of empowerment beneath which no child should be born, with future children holding entitlements sufficient to create collective family planning systems based on readiness, delay, and the equitable distribution of levels of influence among children. The threshold ensures equal offsets relative to zero, or the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from things like a climate crisis, autocracy, deadly inequity, etc.
Put simply:
If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims has been using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
Those willing to pay the costs of a legitimate political system that avoids arbitrary benefits of birth positionality and conditions authority on empowerment could never compete against those willing to exploit others, and they need not given that any authority to govern or assign wealth derives from first empowering those subject to these things. The other solution to inequity-gained wealth backed by state violence – as the oppression it is – is to treat that violence as illegitimate and triggering the right to self-determinative self-defense against “trolley targets” who benefit themselves at deadly cost to others.
It’s this truthful and obligation-creating discourse, a Tell the Truth campaign, that is most preemptive and legally authoritative over all conflicting obligations, including treaties and constitutions.
Did the University of Denver really spend millions of dollars to create charade of animal liberation, saving a few here and there, while embracing an underlying model of animal propertyhood, birth inequity, and unsustainable growth that kills countless more, and harms vulnerable children?
“Today’s animal rights movement is hindered by an unmet need: While relying heavily on activists and insiders to uncover wrongdoing and urge systemic reform, there has historically been a dearth of available legal support. The Animal Activist Legal Defense Project fundamentally alters this state of affairs, with significant and distinctive benefits for the future of the animal rights movement and for the future of animal well-being.”
Relative to what standard does Marceau, or those like Paul Shapiro, benefit animals? Factor in the inequitable growth that put vastly more animals into suffering than they saved, and you find them moving the goalposts away from on-balance protecting animals in order to to appear to win, and appear so for those who use growth-based wealth to fund the efforts. That well-funded charade drowns out the voices of those who engage in fundamental reforms, and it costs lives as the climate crisis intensifies and women and children go without the resources they need to respond to it.
I co-founded the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project with Justin, in the wake of serious misconduct at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, including illegal baselining skewing how courts evaluate harm to the environment, the Board paying a settlement to the former executive director Stephen Wells to hide this, and continued illegal baselining that hides liability for philanthropists’ and nonprofits’ role in exacerbating the climate crisis. Part of the founding of the clinic at Denver, in records now removed from the school’s website, was a commitment to total liberation that accounted for many forms of justice. That quickly changed – consistent with funders’ growing concern about what the commitments would reveal and require.
When I mentioned to Justin the book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” he responded: “This is a story as old as time. I admire the fact that you think you can solve it.” The work we did, if anything, exacerbated this phenomenon.
Justin’s statement above reflects a fantasy world that hides the liability of those who benefited from decades of anthropocentric, inequitable and disenfranchising growth – those who fund his work.
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than we, at the program, ever did good. Use of that valuation and reporting model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Marceau’s work is a facade meant to create the impression of animal rights and law, while maintaining an illegal anthropocentric standard from which he benefits. While originally part of Animal Legal Defense Fund litigation that would have reset the baseline around the unity of interests between nonhumans and vulnerable persons, Marceau dropped out after leadership caved to Julia Olson and Our Children’s Trust – an anthropocentric environmental group – pressured the organization to drop the case. His advocacy since derives from illegal baselining that, like the advocacy of Tim Midura at the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy, does more to protect wealth and white privilege than on balance benefit animals.
How could that happen? For decades reproductive rights systems built on “separate but equal” ideology enabled inequitable growth that – absolved from having to pay the costs of equitizing birthrights – created extreme concentrations of wealth. That wealth now funds downstream, micro, and charade-level interventions that hide the macro process and create a fantasy world of progress that hides liability for the polycrisis.
That wealth, not on-balance values like the full measure of protecting animals, accounts for public interest policy and interventions.
Animal liberation can entail the symbolic rescuing a handful of animals and doing a few show trials, while growth drives the harm of trillions of more animals than activists protect.
To protect animals – to practice animal law actually capable of that – requires accounting for the relations they have with humans, relations that start as humans enter the world. But that entails accounting for things like racist child inequity, the countervailing impact of growth, questions of what we owe future children harmed by the climate crisis and whether that debt overrides competing interests, etc.
We, like the Brooks Institute for Animals Rights Law and Policy that funds the animal law program Justin manages as well as his title, chose greater harm to animals than we as animal lawyers could ever do good with our downstream and micro interventions, a choice made we made in order to evade difficult questions around birth inequity, while benefitting ourselves and those funding us, at cost to animals. It was a deliberate choice of macro (human / nonhuman indivisible) animal propertyhood over macro personhood, and in contravention of the wishes of Brooks McCormick Jr. to protect animals – a fact that Fair Start will show in the years to come.
Following the true intent of Brooks McCormick Jr. to protect animals requires the funding of reforms at the level of the creation of power relations between humans and animals. Based on what I saw at the University of Denver, Tim Midura and his daughters – whom he hired to lead the Institute – will have spent more on lavish events than on developing and implementing a norm that could on-balance protect animals by rearranging entitlements at the most fundamental level, accounting for and reversing overshoot and the inequitable and disenfranchising growth that causes it.
Relative to inequitable and disenfranchising growth, Midura’s use of the money had a negligible beneficial impact on animals – and he made that choice, to not even take the first necessary step of altering his conception of animal law and its basic content.
Marceau, instead of dealing with animal rights in the context of the subject-level relations of reproductive rights, intentionally chose to silo the issue away from birth equity in order to triple-dip: 1) benefit from his arbitrary but very privileged national/racial/class birth positionality, 2) benefit from growth-based wealth unimpeded by the rights of future children, and 3) pretend to be an animal savior while ensuring a comfortable life for him and his children at cost to animals. Pushed to do animal law as reforming the express or implied “we” reference that is the premise of all fundamental legal instruments like constitutions and covenants, their concern for animals fades relative to their desire to preserve their children’s unearned privileges.
Macro animal personhood and rights, the sort that accounts for the actual lived experience of all nonhumans, marked from the birth-creation of their relations with humans, is designed to prevent this sort of charade-level work and distractivism.
The lives animals experience cannot be separated from the creation of the humans with whom they will interact. Justin divides the two issues to get the benefit of appearing to be a hero, while using an underlying system – and its funds – that does much more harm to animals than he does good.
The University of Denver, and its funders, now have an opportunity to change the way it assesses value and report impacts – to eventually be able to substantiate its claims of furthering animal rights and liberation, the highest standard of environmental protection one can imagine and something that cannot be separated from the future prospects and lives of all children.
The University has done the micro version of animal liberation and personhood. Now it can do the macro.
If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
And the just need not be subjected to unfair and unconstitutional competition: Because governments’ authority, including to entitle /incorporate private entities and assign wealth, derives uniquely from the obligation to empower those subject to that authority and those entitlements, governments are under a preemptive obligation to prioritize the elimination, through things like consumer protection actions that can enjoin the underlying business models, of illegal baselining.
“National legitimacy is, and should have always been, contingent on measurable birth equity or
the empowerment of each child to eventually control the outcomes of their political systems. The
Tell the Truth campaign, which is a universal discourse in which all admit wrongly assuming
children legally deserve with the prospects they are born with rather than what racial justice,
their rights, and political equity require, and commit to prioritizing those things, is the best
pathway to that legitimacy. Ensuring this change, especially in post-reconstruction scenarios, is
the first order of business for everyone, and a discourse of our birth-equity obligations – in which
it takes a village to plan for a child – is preemptive.”
What if one could sue to protect one’s effective voice in their democracy, and to be able to meaningfully control the outcomes of their political system. At Fair Start, we think people can do that, and that governments are obligated to ensure that their authority derives from actually empowering those subject to it.
But relative to the fixed standard – birth equity – that was necessary to actually protect animals from deadly growth, the progress was being easily undone daily, and the baseline standard the school used had the effect of enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color.
Those like Trump did not simply win. The progressive systems meant to block him were corrupted.
Fair Start Movement confronts the #illegalbaselining and false claims wealthy funders and those they fund make about their public interest impacts, claims that hide liability for the climate crisis, decline of democracy, vast inequity, and other horrors facing us today. These claims skew the standard for climate policy and life-saving reparations. You cannot help animals on balance without accounting for their relations with humans. Helping them requires the same fundamental change children of color need – reforming fundamental illegitimacy – but that’s the last thing those who made their wealth on illegitimacy want to deal with.
The complaint against the school centers on claims the school made about its impacts, the baseline model for assessing values the school used to model those claims, use donor funds, and refusal to return hundreds of thousands of dollars to one funder in particular.
That donor lives in California, and is now calling on the state Attorney General to take action against the school, given how the funds were solicited, and spent. The state has authority to act to protect its citizens, and the donor backs an animal or eco-centric standard for assessing what constitutes benefits for animals, as standard that Fair Start has advocated for before the California Attorney General.
Why urge the state to act? It’s not on everyday people to legitimate governance by themselves. Governments and the wealthy that control them are first obligated to act, starting with the substantiation of their claims.
Hence this an opportunity for California itself to shift the baseline it uses to assess legitimacy, leaving aside the anthropocentric and “separate but equal” reproductive rights system / baseline that creates commercialized and disenfranchising relations, and choosing to move towards the legitimate, fundamental baseline of “no child is worth more than another / one person, one equal and influential vote” that underlies legitimacy. Again, you cannot help animals on balance without accounting for macro animal rights and personhood, with a focus on their future relations with humans. Helping them requires the same fundamental change children of color need – reforming fundamental illegitimacy – but that’s the last thing those who made their wealth on illegitimacy want to deal with.
Regardless:
If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
The Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.org are now communicating with the California Attorney General regarding the need to protect their citizens from illegal baselining and equity fraud.
We may all feel like we create value and beneficial impacts in the world – but relative to what standard? Few talk about how inequitable birth positionality and the growth it has enabled for decades illegally harms the most vulnerable children, and undoes the good work for the public interest many do. We don’t talk about it because inequity and growth benefit those at the top, often those funding us. This is not about population. It’s about political equity, or having an effective voice in ones’ political system. Not the word “population” in the phrase “we should reduce population to reduce climate emissions” but the word obligation-creating “we” in that phrase. Wealthy entities never had to pay the cost of a legitimate legal system. We should be fundamentally determined by the constituents with whom I share the nation, not their representatives
Facts:
Most public policy and private business models today are based on a twentieth century sleight of hand standard by world leaders, called political equity and impact fraud (or equifraud), that created a massive bubble of mostly white wealth that is today driving most interventions and policies, and is being guarded by widespread equitywashing, a form of fraud that goes beyond greenwashing and ensures a fantasy world of social justice and beneficial public interest impact. The sleight of hand involved defining things like “power” and “freedom” in terms of the coercive power of the state, and outside of the context of having to measurably empower children at birth by accounting for unjust birth positionality – intergenerationally, racially, in terms of class etc. This allowed elites at the time to assume authority and entitlements rather than birth-legitimate them – a problem that continues today. It relies on the mistaking of isolation for empowerment.
The equifraud standard removed children’s rights and measurable political equity for all as a check on universal reproductive rights, allowing unsustainable growth that enriched some at deadly cost to mostly women and children of color. Use of the standard amounted to an arbitrary, inequitable and unsustainable birth lottery rule. By the conditions of our birth and development, we are part of what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme system, one that did more to harm our most basic values than any of us have possibly done to further them. The standard undoes the good we do, by our own metrics, because all objective value is relative to real world thresholds – like comfortable temperatures, participatory democracy, equal opportunities in life, etc. – that the standard ensures we overshoot and alter. Our work and value adds must be measured relative not to what others are doing, but who we should be, and that standard is defined by children’s rights, and the necessarily collective endeavor of political equity those rights seek to achieve. We are not accounting for or explaining something if we do not start from that standard of fundamental causation, and nothing is more fundamental than accounts of how we are created. Not accounting for the benefits of our birth positionality means not being part of a system of justifiable obligation.
Our lives depends on the people around us. And that state of affairs depends on their birth and development. Our primary obligation is to children, not any document, like a treaty or constitution. At the key moment these issues were being considered, between1948 and 1968, world leaders chose to rely on a false premise (there there is national legitimacy without enough individual empowerment for humans to have avoided the crises we now experience) to make what is a collective action problem exponentially worse by isolating decision-making .
The standard treats the average child of color as deserving fewer resources and deserving more risk. This, over the span of decades, has subverted the racial justice movements of the Twentieth Century. The historic use of the standard, which privatizes the creation of power relations by isolating women in systems of family planning and thereby guts environmental and other protections, has led to the deaths of tens of millions, but as described below those who received the benefits it created are now being asked to pay the full costs – measured at an on-balance assessment, or zero baseline, for value – of those benefits. Between 1948 and 1968 human and reproductive rights organizations were supposed to use an objective standard to limit power relations between humans, and between humans and nonhumans. They did the opposite. And if political authority is based on our inclusion of all as equals, the standard used blocked that process. Worsening political inequity was hidden behind the veil of family and reproductive autonomy, a move that undid most of the benefits of the racial justice movements, and today enable value assessments and impact claims that rely on manufactured numbers and a sleight-of-hand that takes freedom out of the context of political equity.
The sleight of hand framed reproductive rights around the autonomy of parents rather than the political equity of parents, children and their communities. It also defined power as the threat of coercion from the state rather than any form of human influence, a move which evaded world leaders having to fundamentally legitimate benefits and entitlements that derive from birth inequity and unjust positionality. It also allowed influential entities at the top of economic systems to divide those subject to that authority and wealth into left versus right, hiding the top down power dynamic. This was the fundamental corruption of social justice – starting with the illegal privatization of power relations.
A necessary condition of being free is being empowered, with measurable political equity for each person, but because of the sleight of hand our political and legal systems block that condition from being fulfilled as we are created. Humans living in democracy are supposed to offset each other’s influence equally (to be self-determining rather than other-determining), but that’s impossible if there’s no threshold of empowerment for children as they enter the world, and there’s no threshold if the act of having a child is treated by the law as more exclusively an act of self determination of the parents than determination of a child’s, and a community’s, future. The standard works by discounting the freedom that future people deserve in order comprise legitimate societies. Use of the standard thus involves wealth made at cost to objective values used to drown out the voices of those who are trying to prevent that very thing.
The basic obligation to follow the law in a political system derives from being empowered. Again, the standard blocks that because birth inequity makes it impossible to empower children, relative to the thresholds required for intergenerational justice. It is physically impossible to constitute obligatory relations – to control who has power over you – without reforming this. Where else would legally empowering relations come from? The rule of law begins by meaningfully including those subject to it through the language we use, not in ancient documents like treaties and constitutions. The value and impact claims we make situate and orient us in our political system and they indicate our choice to omit or to include the correct accounting for how we benefit and cost others relative to our draw in the exclusionary birth lottery.
If it’s taboo to talk about the right to have children, that taboo has a lot more to do with those at the top avoiding political equity as a primary and an overriding value that with protecting the vulnerable. The equifraud that taboo prevents our addressing has slowly, over decades, commercialized democracies. The power disparity that every would-be parent has had over their future children and future generations for decades is now being reflected in macro level inequity, and the continued inversion of justice. Measurable political equity is a necessary condition of being free, but the privatization of reproductive rights in the Twentieth Century made assuring that equity impossible. The fix, as described below, is to require it as preemptive standard today, implemented through fundable birth equity standards.
Much of the violence in the world today can be logically traced to the illegitimate use of violence by the state, illegitimate because without actual or on balance empowerment governments cannot be representative. Those using the standard often do not see their position as furthering violence because that violence is indirect, often used to defend the privileged positions rather than proactively by the state.
There is a preemptive legal claim against use of the standard, for fraud by omission (political equity and impact fraud). Humans constitute nations through the accurate language of obligation. The claim assesses that X said Y, while in fact when factoring in children entering the world relative to their rights and equity, Z is true. Run that test – using ChatGPT for example – on the average public interest impact claim today and you will see a fantasy world where hidden and daily maternal/infant deaths drive wealth to a few.
For years Fair Start activists have seen nonprofits that use the equifraud standard and the wealthy funders driving them take extreme measures to evade liability, including retaliating against whistleblowers in their organizations. For many, if they can get the benefit of their birth positionality, the systems that use that ongoing injustice to make money, and the appearance of doing good, they will do it until forced not to. They will evade fundamental causation to hide liability. But again, because use of the equifraud standard, for decades, has led to the deaths of millions as the climate crisis and decline of democracy accelerates there are strong reasons to use our legal systems to end equifraud. Many have argued that if a social justice challenge to elites arises, they will devise a fake version of it – a decoy. The idea of parents being liberated to harm their future children is exemplary.
The most glaring examples involved the animal law and liberation movement of recent decades, which largely failed because it embraced a macro form of human and animal propertyhood while raising funding on micro examples of liberation, not even trying to account for animals’ lived experience in the birth-creation of their actual relations with humans, micro-successes that were easily being undone by the upstream macro growth. Many who used veganism to monetize animal rights assume the authorities and entitlements that drive – at the most fundamental and effective level – the oppression of animals, and assume and benefit from arcs of population growth and decline that will kill many outside of their immediate circles and echo chambers.
Inequitable growth has put more animals and children in conditions of abuse, neglect and suffering than any organization has been able to save, and that’s before we factor in compounding factors like the climate crisis, and the decline of democracy.
There are those doing better and avoiding equifraud, organizations that account for the way growth undoes social justice, especially because of birth inequity. But they can’t really compete with organizations that ignore or exploit that factor and improve their position in an illegitimate system (by their own values) rather than legitimate that system. Organizations trying to legitimize the system through the fundamental truth and reconciliation of prioritizing birth equity thus have legal claims, often in the area of unfair competition, civil rights and constitutional law, to block the use of the equifraud standard by those organizations that use it to compete unfairly. Preemptively fair competition is how the vulnerable give their kids a chance, rather than using the existing legal system to dilute and disenfranchise.
There is a preemptive right to be measurably empowered, and our laws cannot be interpreted in a way that excludes persons from that process through birth and development. In this case, if we’re interpreting a consumer protection or unfair competition statute for what people have to disclose about their value assessments and impacts, courts can’t interpret those laws in a way that disenfranchises the people that are subject to them because courts’ basic authority relies on empowering those persons. That argument isn’t new, but it was never applied in the context of ” it takes a village to plan for a child” as a preemptive standard, because it was blocked by a colonial and patriarchal system where men (aided by corrupt lawyers) generally see autonomy as disconnected from the social relations that actually enable it. That system is the basis of equity/ legitimacywashing.
Organizations like Truthalliance.global have claims for civil rights violations of the most basic right – the right to be empowered – or the active and deadly disembedding of a person from their political system and efficacy in it. This action is derived from the preemptive meaning of the word “we” in the preamble of the Constitution and any other use of collective references to obligation in legal instruments. Those collective references have to mean “one person, one effective vote: – which means measurable political equity. There is no such thing as freedom out of the context if political equity, and governments can’t hide what it means to empower their subjects to avoid liability for the polycrisis they caused.
Fair Start recently received light finding to bring the first action for this against Coca-Cola for its illegal discounting and concealment with fraudulent omissions related to sale of its products. The equifraud involves measuring a variety of harms, to our ecologies, democracies and legal systems, economic communities premised on equal opportunity, etc. from high and arbitrary numbers rather than the only fair and just measure: from zero. of We all have a choice to be part of a movement ending equifraud, or the system that is continuing it. We all have a choice to be primarily obligated to the most vulnerable, infants and animals, who we protect with the thresholds described above which ensure we all become free or self-determining, or primarily obligated to those at the top who are enriched when we don’t use the thresholds.
This is the most just and effective work one can do, assuming one asks the right questions, based on the facts above. As the death toll from climate/inequity grows, those entities that want to legitimately account for full costs of their benefits cannot compete against those who do not, and governments must enjoin the use of a standard that allows the latter to externalize at the most fundamental level – reproductive rights regimes and systems of intergenerational justice, really as a form of comprehensive civil rights and physical “constitutionalism” that goes well beyond topical, divisive, and downstream DEIJ, ESG, etc. interventions. The first constitutional cause of action is to enjoin the use of a standard that disenfranchises. In that split, one is either part of a system of obligation, or not, and we deserve as much protection as we extend to the most vulnerable.
In the book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the author described a similar phenomenon, but did not account for birth inequity, the physical constitution of nations, or nonhuman liberation, and did not provide a practical test and method for solving the problem.
The core discourse to engage in the solution: “_______’s claimed value add does not account for political inequity, which is caused by our all treating children of color as deserving of less than white children, something that has for decades slowly disenfranchised at risk communities. That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes that are undoing our claimed value add to the world, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent. Use of any standard that ignores political equity means actively harming others, while slowly disenfranchising persons of color. Choose the Equity/Fair Start standard instead. Freedom is universal democratic empowerment, not exploiting arbitrary but massive differences in birth positionality and empowerment.” One is either part of a system of mutual obligation, or not, and asking these questions helps determine where others stand.
Justice means not benefiting at deadly cost to others and not doing so starts by accounting for birth positionality. It would be physically impossible to be self-determining in any literal sense without the reforms above, and the discourse of getting all children over the line that enables them.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) are under mounting pressure to effectively address both Israel’s ongoing conflicts, war crimes by unaccountable authoritarian regimes, and the climate crisis. Their work to date has had little effect on these crises killing millions, and if anything represents that failure of international law.
Fair Start urges both tribunals to admit that as it stands he ICC and ICJ’s claimed value add of justice to the world does not actually account for having to empower the subjects these institutions claim to represent, and for the massive child inequity our collective failure to empower children has caused: Treating children of color as deserving of less and disenfranchising them.
That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent.
Background
Recent filings before the United Nations Human Rights Council, and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, have detailed peer-reviewed research tracing millions of deaths in the unfolding climate and related crises to a very specific failure in the design of human rights, and reproductive rights, systems decades ago. The failure (by elevating autonomy over political equity) privatized the constitutive creation of power relations, gutting the effective impact of all child-rights regimes and setting the stage for a growth-based climate crisis in which only the impoverished face serious threats. The move was – at the most fundamental level – illegal because under it there are no legal protections for / obligations to the most vulnerable: children are brought into conditions that violate their rights, with after-the-fact interventions and applications of rights, after adults have already gotten the benefit of exploiting them. This in turn threatens political legitimacy, inserting a false premise in which citizens have been expected to follow the law without actually being empowered by it.
More specifically, as described below, we invoke your obligations under the best interpretations of preambular collective pronouns (“We . . .”) in things like state and local constitutions, as interpreted under precedent to ensure one-person, one self-determinative vote and other areas of constitutional law, as well as the Article I and other provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to ensure the political and constitutional self-determination of your constituents.
Governments do not have the right to change the meaning of disenfranchisement in order to escape responsibility for that wrong. A government’s authority depends on fair representation and accurate measures of harm. That authority comes from the people’s ability to govern themselves—not only those alive today, but also future generations. When governments create policies about birth and development mainly to boost the economy instead of empowering citizens, they are exploiting people. This not only harms individuals, but also undermines the government’s own right to govern. The damage done by such policies must be measured honestly and compensated fairly.
Your authority derives from and is contingent on accurate assessment and the remediation of threats to the political self-determination of your constituents (roughly eight standards revolving around restorative climate emission levels), rather than your benchmarking to the commercial self-determination of constituents – the system of exploitation over empowerment driving the climate crisis. Many of the standards currently in use to assess and remediate harm (like high permissible levels of climate emissions enabled by diluted levels of democracy / representative ratios that favor the influential) are the same standards that caused the harms and are drastically different from the number set necessary for political legitimacy, allowing many to avoid liability. This amounts to moving the goalposts to allow for harm that was illegal – in violation of children’s rights (under the Children’s Convention and many other instruments) to be measureably empowered, and governments’ (whose authority is fully derivative) first duty to ensure that empowerment.
The meaning of terms like “we,” and the equal protection and political enfranchisement precedent deriving from that meaning, requires equal offsets of one another’s political influence relative to zero or neutral standard, which in turn requires minimal thresholds of wellbeing and empowerment for all children (consistent with state obligations under the Children’s Convention and other instruments), high thresholds that are inconsistent with the low thresholds and standards being used by many nations. Those same standards were used by many of the nonprofits funded by wealthy families (families plagued with an interest convergence problem in the face of the crucial family reforms they ignored) claiming to watchdog such nations.
The Fair Start Movement is urging both tribunals to confront a deeper truth: Their jurisdiction and legitimacy derive only from measurable empowerment of those they claim to represent.
Any value or impact claim made today is likely out of context because it ignores children entering the world in vastly inequitable conditions as a key factor impacting the veracity of the claim. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem – equity – equitywashing, or 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.
Equitywashing (disenfranchising to set low standards for “humane” and “green” – a first-order form of fraud the precedes greenwashing and humanewashing) derives from the fundamental subversion of racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century through policies that privatized family planning and thus the fundamental creation of power relations, rather than making the process equitable or empowering.
This was a sleight of hand and power grab by wealthy families and governments that assumed authorities and entitlements rather than legitimating them, treating the idea of freedom from power as freedom from the coercion of the state rather than the ability to consent to any influence of others, and using unsustainable and inequitable reproductive rights standards designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others. The move ensured most people would assume freedom was the absence of government coercion, when that power actually originated in the creation of birth and development positionality/power relations.
This allowed many to use their privileged birth positionality to live lives that were more other-determining than self-determining – degrading freedom for all. Using this standard ensured we did more harm than good- and by their own standards – because children entering the world was not some futuristic and economic consideration but the first determinant of political equity and true freedom.
Linking Climate, Conflict, and Equity
Fair Start highlights that both the climate crisis and persistent conflicts stem from the same root: governments and wealthy elites securing power through systems that disenfranchise children at birth. This practice of equitywashing—ignoring how children enter the world in inequitable conditions—creates illegitimate standards for “green,” “humane,” and even “just” governance, enriching some at the deadly expense of others.
The Movement us urging the ICC and ICJ to recognize that freedom is degraded when birth inequity allows some to live lives more other-determining than self-determining. True justice requires systems of family planning that empower every child equally, ensuring democratic representation and climate sustainability.
According to Mwesigye Robert, who helps lead a growing coalition called Truth Alliance that demands those making value and impact claims actually account for the preemptive obligation to ensure children entering the world are measurably empowered, “We all have a powerful opportunity to add value through addressing child inequality as a chance to uplift every child, everywhere. When children of color are recognized as equally deserving, Funders and communities can build futures that are more just, resilient and full of possibility.”
Fair Start Movement
Fair Start is distinguished because of its courageous challenge to the foundations of international law. By demanding that tribunals like the ICC and ICJ admit their authority comes exclusively from child empowerment, Fair Start is redefining what justice means in the 21st century. If legitimate governance, including the authority to assign wealth, derives from empowering the people, then we all have preemptive right to ensure institutions like international tribunals treat the violation of children’s birthrights as a horrific cost, and not a benefit to be exploited for growth.
