What Is Equity and Impact Fraud? It’s Using the Same System That Caused Our Ecological and Political Crises To Avoid Liability For Them
Background
In the world today there is more suffering and injustice than ever, and fundamentally because of the use of a fraudulent and illegal standard for assessing and reporting value used by companies, governments, and organizations meant to exploit children in violation of their birthrights. The Fair Start Movement looks for the use of that standard because it is causing massive harm to the most vulnerable: infants and animals.
If one asks the questions described in detail below, one will find manufactured numbers and a system of creating artificial demand that hides deadly costs, limiting the value of any beneficial impacts being claimed.
But the standard goes beyond for-profit companies.
In many cases, Fair Start activists came from nonprofits that spent more on food and travel than furthering their missions, once inequitable growth was factored in. That’s charitable fraud. That’s starting with injustice undoing the good one claims to do, and replicating the fundament of all power imbalances: Child-makers over children, and the communities they will comprise, contrary to legitimacy.
Funders ensured charities lied about their impacts being undone daily by the charities’ ignoring thresholds of child (and, as a consequence, animal) welfare. They did so because ignoring those thresholds benefitted their wealthy, and mostly white kids at deadly cost to many children of color.
This is the act of not treating violations of rights as costs, but rather illegally benefitting from them, creating artificial demand by slowly commercializing democratic relations and freedom, disenfranchising constituents.
The standard conceals liability for climate and other crises-related infant deaths, the violation of children’s birthrights, including treating children of color as worth less resources while degrading their chances in life, and all the correlative rights these actions violate. This is not about population; it’s about the first way that justice is meant to limit power.
Fair Start activists have previously worked in organizations where leadership engaged in intentional concealment of climate and reparations liability by manufacturing numbers to hide this, illegally discounting the lives of those they claimed to protect, and intentionally minimizing damages. These activists witnessed leadership doing more to benefit their kids and protect generations of mostly white wealth than further their missions.
Public interest organizations should have been reporting a general backsliding on things like sustainable development, a going backwards, rather than granular victories. What assessment system were they using that enabled the decoying - with symptoms, like individualized cases of animal abuse, to hide the existential cause?
There is an effort to reform that using an alternative standard discussed below, targeting what is often considered greenwashing, but using the standard is actually equity and reparations fraud.
The Fair Start Movement is designed to target this fraud, acting as a unique entity: A legitimacy watchdog that protects the most vulnerable entities in the world, infants and animals, by reorienting legal systems and an obligation to follow the law from their empowerment, rather than any other source. Our equity reform would incentivize and entitle would-be parents to ensure no child is born beneath the line or threshold of what their rights require, which is the true border of all of our mutual empowerment. We can't really account for obligations to each other when we start by violating our fundamental obligations to the most vulnerable: infants and the animals with whom they will interact.
Our alternative standard, birth equity, does not treat the life of any child as worth more than another, and instead of dealing with values at the object level of our language, it moves them - things like enjoying moderate temperatures, access to food and water, and being politically empowered—to the subject-level relations (which means taking them seriously) of our language. And it makes elevating child equity, which is political equity, the priority - as the first and overriding human right. Written constitutions, treaties, and other legal documents do not obligate us. The creation of actual relations - as children enter the world - obligates us. People, not documents, constitute nations.
And as our peer-reviewed work shows, it is physically impossible to be free and self-determining and able to limit who has influence over you, without a reform to this alternative standard. Freedom starts with justice, and justice starts with intergenerational justice - the safety system that limits the power of others as we enter the world. We become free by honoring the first term of the social contract, that all should be born free and equal.
Our Tell the Truth campaign, described below, rather than offering Fair Start reforms as an intervention into existing frameworks, uses the contrast between common value and impact claims to invert those frameworks, showing the claims to be false because they omit how the claimants begin by exploiting infants and animals. It simply asks: Do you start by punching down? It asks: How are you accounting for children coming into their world relative to the conditions and political equity, so that power relations and political systems are actually rights-based and legitimate?
Our organization started by seeking charity to fund a reform to fair starts over the current reproductive rights model, but having seen how funders were engaged in equity/legitimacy and reparations fraud, we are moving to Tell the Truth and an overriding demand for birth equity reparations. We begin with a liberating discourse around our first obligations: to children in their creation.
What is Equity/Legitimacy and Reparations Fraud?
The fraudulent standard and illegitimate criteria work by omitting key facts from the assessment and reporting of the impact entities have in the world. At base, the standard privatizes family planning and the resulting birth-based privileges and opportunities to treat the value of one’s bodily autonomy outside of the context of one’s birth-based political equity, or ability to control the influence others have over you through democratic means. This allows avoiding the zeroing out of harm, and hides the role of birth-based positionality behind illegal harm treated as permissible with high emission standards meant to conceal liability and massive unearned privileges that some receive in their birth and development as the largest factor determining outcomes today. This factor is hidden, and freedom is measured out of context so that some may benefit at deadly cost to others. Its use is consistent with things like pronatalism, common on the monied left and right.
The result? The value of work is being undone by inequity, as some free ride on the unearned privilege of their birth positionality. using money made at the cost to their values and missions in a way that exacerbates the cycle. A reproductive rights system that can't sustain itself for less than a few generations without ensuring ecocide and autocracy is generally considered a failure.
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
We can’t use the same illegal standard, built on violating children’s rights, that created the crisis to evade liability for it. All of the horrors we face today stem from the use of the standard - treating infants and the animals as property at a macro-level to commercialize future relations. Those claiming to seek reforms to end the crises quietly continuing use of the illegal standard is evidence of corruption. The Tell the Truth campaign, of overcoming the omissions that physically block true self-determination and political obligation, assesses who is who in this process of turning to the rights-based and self-determination-based creation of power relations.
Many are already admitting that the system through which they made their money did more harm to their own values and missions than they did to further them.
By dealing with these issues, one is either choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others at the most fundamental level of people coming into the world or not. And others can tell who is who by asking the right questions. As described above, it's very hard to understand why people who choose not to harm others have any obligation to those who do. Why even trust those who would sacrifice collective self-determination by not making it derivative and conditioned on empowerment? The latter fall outside of obligation.
There is no functional rule of law that allows the arbitrary outcomes of birth positionality without offsets, based on objective values.
Fairlife LLC., owned by Coca-Cola, was sued recently for using milk supplied by dairy farms that abuse animals and pollute the waterways. Fair Start Movement activists and lawyers are assisting Animal Recovery Mission and others in holding the companies accountable.
The case reveals something new, and surprising: The use of value claims the underlying business model would have made it impossible for the company to meet.
The evidence shows Coke/Fairlife used an illegal standard/business model fundamentally designed to illegally harm children and animals by exploiting their vulnerability and undo the value Coke/Fairlife claimed to create in a way that risks millions of lives and will cost businesses trillions of dollars. The specific standard is designed to assess and report values and impacts out of context. It is the single largest driver of the harms we see in the case, and it begins with zero functional protections for the most vulnerable - infants and animals - and in violation of their rights.
The standard is illegally benchmarked around the needs of the wealthy children of leadership, at deadly cost to vulnerable children using a false assessment and reporting system. This means the companies are making up numbers that hide the damage being done.
Fair Start and others are arguing that Coke/Fairlife should start fixing this by admitting that they benefited from an equitywashing system, that through inequitable growth illegally violated children’s birthright to political equity, and did more harm to their advertised values and impacts than they did to further them. By doing so, by admitting, the companies can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others (and avoid artificial intelligence detectable subject/object misleading value claims, and the use of that binary and a false premise to illegally discount future lives of color).
This illegal, anthrocentric and unsustainable standard is the largest single variable causing the harm, and it hides harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels.
It hides a moral and legal duty to move Coke’s extreme wealth, made at illegal and deadly climatological and other costs to children, or suffer the consequences of continuing to let those kids die.
The case argues that we can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis to evade liability for it — and that doing so, given the omissive nature of the standard, is fraud. The case argues that use of the illegal standard means choosing to benefit a deadly cost to others, a decision to use a legitimate system rather than taking the steps to first legitimate it.
The Coke / Fairlife litigation as a case study in the rich playing both sides by using the illegal standard
Fairlife, owned by Coca-Cola, is using milk supplied by dairy farms that abuse animals and pollute the waterways. Fair Start Movement activists are assisting Animal Recovery Mission and others in holding the companies accountable. How?
Coke/Fairlife used an illegal standard/business model fundamentally designed to illegally harm children and animals by exploiting their vulnerability and undo the value Coke/Fairlife claimed to create in a way that risks millions of lives and will cost businesses trillions of dollars.
The standard is designed to assess and report values and impacts out of context. It is the single largest driver of the harms we see in the case, and it begins with zero functional protections for the most vulnerable. That’s illegal.
The standard is illegally benchmarked around the needs of the wealthy children of leadership, at deadly cost to vulnerable children using a false assessment and reporting system. This means making up numbers that hide the damage being done.
Coke/Fairlife should start fixing this by admitting that they benefitted from an equitywashing system, that through inequitable growth. illegally violated children’s birthright to political equity, and did more harm to their advertised values and impacts than they did to further them. By doing so, the companies can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others.
That anthropocentric and unsustainable standard is the largest single variable causing the harm, and it hides harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels. It hides the fact that we have a moral and legal duty to move Coke’s extreme wealth, made at illegal and deadly climatological and other costs to children, or suffer the consequences of continuing to let those kids die.
We can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis to evade liability for it — that’s fraud.
The standard is the fundamental reason their leadership is being enriched at deadly cost to mostly children of color. This goes beyond greenwashing and humanewashing to a more fundamental system of equitywashing that subverts civil rights and democracy and allows free-riding benefits at costs to others. They are using the same fundamentally false standard derived from the “separate but equal” twentieth-century subversion of racial justice movements and the hiding of liability inherent in generational white wealth that is causing our current ecological and political crises.
The standard has been used by many of the public interest entities claiming to oppose destructive industries like animal agriculture, entities that, like those industries, use performative interventions that do more to protect generational wealth for their biggest funders than to accomplish their missions.
Many start their work by discounting the lives of future animals and infants, in contravention of their stated causes. Many animal rights and law organizations have challenged the idea that animals are property at a micro and mostly performative level, but their acceptance of it at a macro level has done way more harm to animals than they have done good, given the way their out-of-context impact and values claims have for decades hidden this larger issue.
The Coke/Fairlife standard is designed to:
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined
- undefined