Are you getting scammed by people claiming to do public interest work?

As an animal protection attorney I was paid for decades by wealthy foundations to create a fantasy world of progress for animals and the environment that was being easily undone, every day, by inequitable growth. That growth did more to more harm to animals than we did good, and because it was inequitable, it enriched mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color.

That’s fraud by omission, or illegal baselining. And now some are calling it out. 

I was not alone. Attorneys like Carney Anne Nasser intentionally omitted information, for well over a decade, about the actual impacts of their work.

People like Nasser got paid to play the hero. But it was an illusion. On balance, Nasser did more to privilege her children, at cost to others, than help animals. Even as the climate crisis exacerbated conditions for animals and the most vulnerable, and growth killed off vastly more wildlife than humans could save, Nasser fronted as constantly protecting animals – moving the goalposts each time away from a standard that would have actually protected them in order to falsely claim victory.

Her work was a charade hiding wealth made at cost to the things she claimed to value. It did more to hide climate harm and other liabilities than benefit animals. 

Even after multiple conversations with Fair Start activists Nasser insisted on excluding birth inequity impacts from her work – even though they are the largest driver of animal suffering. Bit it went beyond that – Nasser intentionally ignored obvious evidence legal system she was using was itself becoming increasing illegitimate as the average person was disenfranchised – and she chose to ignore it, currying favor with funders whose wealth was built on that illegitimacy.

Honest lawyers will derive legal systems back to and condition them on the empowerment of those subject to them – not assume entitlements to the wealth that funds them.

That deriving is the macro, upstream form of animal rights that makes micro, downstream interventions actually – or on balance – effective.

 

And the Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global are now pushing back on performative public interest work.

The Tell the Truth campaign allows us to admit that choosing inequitable growth policies that treat children of color as deserving less, and that disenfranchise them, did more harm to our proclaimed values than we did good.

And it let’s us fix that problem by backing a universal injunction against equitywashing, which is fraud by omission about how we assess and report value.

The injunction is based on unfair competition law. Legitimate entities willing to tell the truth about their impacts – to put them in context – and to factor in the costs to ensuring all children are empowered could never compete against funders and advocates who shift their costs to infants and animals – those they claim to protect.

If it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to maintain a business model that enriches white children at deadly cost to children of color. It’s a no-brainer. Whether governments back the injunction raises a key question: Is political authority and the wealth it entitles – it national legitimacy – conditioned on the measurable empowerment of those subject to those things?

Take action: Urge Nasser, at cnasser@law.harvard.edu, to Tell the Truth and admit using an illegal baseline to asses and report her impacts on animals, and to back a legal injunction that would prohibit it. 

Also contact leadership at Dillard University – kvazdeville@dillard.edu. where Nasser is employed, to urge the same. 

 

Background: 

What is Fair Start? Legitimate Public Interest Work Can’t Compete Against Illegitimate Charade–Level Work. And It Does Not Have To.  

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. Those benefiting from particular values must pay the costs, and limit their fundamental entitlements, if we are to ensure governance by the people. 

Recent litigation against Coca-Cola revealed a surprising result: A business model that illegally discounts and disenfranchises  future lives, enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color. How is that possible? 

 

In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders used the prevailing “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity for all. Governments, in the wake of WW2, were supposed to use objective standards to protect the vulnerable. They did the opposite. This blocked the measurable empowerment of each child – the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of being free – and ensured a privatized, commercialized version of freedom, and unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentrations of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment. It allowed those with authority, wealth and other entitlements to assume them, rather than legitimate them though protective limits on the birth-creation of power relations. 

Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and moving goalposts / low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.    

Law and justice were meant to eliminate arbitrary measures and outcomes – and yet with equity fraud, these systems start with a random “parental bodily autonomy” birth lottery ensuring inequitable and unsustainable growth that overshot ecological, political, and social thresholds.

Those using the Ponzi/equity-fraud standard are subject to legal and other action to block the use of the standard because all political authority derives from government having to empower those subject to its authority. Documents like constitutions don’t constitute free nations – communications that form empowering relations, including all birth and development, do. Our value assessments and impact reporting constitute such communications and situate us into a system of protective obligation, or they do not.  

 

Illegal baselining assumes children deserve what they are born with, even as growth degrades their prospects, rather than what rights and political legitimacy require. There’s a false assumption behind most public interest work: That our political obligations are constituted by documents like constitutions instead of being constituted, or not, as children come into the world. Public interest work is performative if it is based on this assumption.

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-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/

And if it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to systematically enrich white children at deadly and disenfranchising costs to children of color. The largest driver of suffering in the world is the discounting of future life, enabled by a lack of a protective threshold/relations beneath which no child should be born, achieved through “legitimations” – funded collective family planning, entitlements to ensure equal opportunity, and parenting delay and assured readiness. 

Will courts go along? Given that their authority derives from the empowerment obligation, they should. 

There is a huge class of professionals – lawyers, academics, fundraisers, politicians, reporters/editors, etc. – funded by the wealth created through birth inequity. That wealth, more than the objective values that underlie public interest work, determine outcomes.

Relative to a zero-baseline in which people are actually empowered to control outcomes in the political system that impacts them, most public interest work after 1948 (when nations were meant to institute human rights universally) amounted to window-dressing to hide Ponzi, growth-based wealth. 

They benefit from this high-stakes birth-lottery system, free-ride triple-dipping on birth positionality and omitting the impacts of inequitable growth from the fantasy world of value and impact they create. 

The triple-dipping involves the:

 – privileges of birth (nationality, race, generational, etc.), 

 – growth income unimpeded for decades by equity and empowerment-based reproductive rights, and

 – charade public-interest heroism that omits countervailing impacts of growth.

Out them with one question: Your value and impact is relative to what? The answer will not be relative to illegitimacy: one person, one equal and influential vote: 

https://fairstartmovement.org/what-is-birth-equity-and-why-cant-we-be-free-without-it/

Those maintaining and benefitting from the illegitimacy – the lack of a protective check on the birth-creation of power relations. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in climate-crisis heat waves caused by the wealth bubble they helped create. They accept a growth arc based on entitlements that contradict their own values, assuming as permissible high levels of harm in a list of variables (this claimant takes credit for “saving animals” for decades), rather than zeroing out the harm – an assumption that quintuple or more discounts the harm caused by birth inequity.

In the context of animal liberation, 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.

Under our lead counsel, Esther Afolaranmi, the TruthAlliance.org and Fair Start Movement will run a Tell the Truth and Commit (TTTC) campaign backed by legal, grassroots and corporate certification efforts that divides binarily between those who admit use of the standard and commit to changing it, and scammers who do not and instead engage in hypocritical babble and value-signaling devoid of legitimating obligations—many of whom have used the standard for decades. The focus is not on the claims, but the numbers behind the claims. 

 

We admit: We were part of a system of unsustainable birth inequity that did more harm to our own values than we did to further them, and we owe the victims compensation. We admit we omitted key facts, and back universally applicable injunctions against doing so as a matter of political legitimacy  

The TTTC campaign leverages the costs of tens of millions of deaths from equity fraud to enjoin the use of the standard as unfair competition inside key public and private institutions in the U.S. and Europe. These institutions are using it to assume entitlements rather than legitimate them, and to pursue growth that slowly dilutes and commercializes the average level of political influence. Some of the institutions actually participated in the creation of the standard and constantly framed their public interest work as charity or investment, rather than the obligation of deriving entitlements from the measurable empowerment of others. 

The injunction would limit entitlements and other benefits by the true or objective costs to others, based on things we all value—like safe temperatures, equality of opportunity, and limits on who has control over what we experience. TTTC is a truth and reconciliation process involving universal admission of our having benefited deadly costs to others based on equity fraud.