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.
- This standard of #equityfraud omits how children entering the world have zero functional protections and how this violation of their birthrights undoes the value we all claim to add to the world. The standard ensures we start by punching down on most vulnerable, infants and animals, and in a way that degrades for billions of impoverished persons things we all value, like moderate temperatures, access to water, the chance to influence one’s democracy, etc.
- The standard derives from the fundamental subversion of civil rights and racial justice many decades ago by governments using the contradiction in terms of reproductive/procreative autonomy to convert - at an existential level - the act of determining the lives of others (children and the communities they comprise) into an act of self-determination (the parents) in order to protect white generational wealth and treat future children as the property of their would-be parents. This was the institution of an illegal birth lottery. It succeeded in existentially subverting racial justice movements, as well as feminist conceptions of relational autonomy. Religion and other screens were used to mask a power grab, an assumption of authority and entitlement that was never meant to happen because the creation of relations at birth should have been framed by objective values enabling self-determination, but instead it was left to the subjective whims of would-be parents and all of the social constructs quietly guiding them. Children’s rights did not apply until after those relations are created, in a performative way that would ensure a growth-based climate crisis. Legitimate systems start with objective values. The subversion ensured power relations were based on subjective values and made it seem that disadvantage at birth, and its exacerbation through growth, was an act of god rather than white policymakers.
- Birth positionality was framed as a magical act of god or fortune, rather than the policy decision that accounts for it, and cosmetic civil rights around employment, housing, and education masked birth inequity now killing millions. This subversion allowed governments and the wealthy and influential families setting the standard to assume their official authority and entitlements to wealth rather than legitimating them with rights-based creation of power relations. Authority and entitlements to wealth have to be based on equal offsets relative to zero (because the base assumption is that humans are free and equal), or those claiming authority or entitlements act as imposters, subject to preemptive or crowdsourceable enforcement for equity reparations described below. Note that we cannot assess our offsets if we ignore creation, or how others are added to our political system. Authority and entitlements to wealth derive first from the fulfillment of the human rights of the constituents of the system in question.
- Systems that ensured reproductive isolation over equity were meant to disenfranchise the average constituent, hiding the slow loss of reproductive equity, which is the basis of our political equity or ability to control the ecological, social, and other influences others have over us. Families like the Rockefellers, who influenced the development of an illegal standard in international law, are wealthy and powerful today. Other families see their infants die from deprivation of even basic needs. The latter have rights of retribution against the former, given the primacy of birth positionality in the order of obligations, that the decisions made cost countless lives and had no basis in law or ethics. That primacy is undeniable, relative to more common views of unity of value or intersectionality. It’s not about quantitative growth as much as about qualitative loss of self-determination because we are operating outside of the thresholds. We ask: What are your value add and impact, relative to the values you have exhibited in your life? What would it mean to be obligated by real empowerment, and not symbolic and empty systems of top down control that only talk about empowerment while benefiting some at deadly cost to others?
- This move, bypassing the primacy of birth positionality, blocked intergenerational justice, the first necessary condition of legitimate nations, and the elevating of vulnerable infants and animals, which is the only way to be free in terms of being empowered, rather than “free” in terms of being isolated and enabled to benefit at cost to others, to be other-determining. The subversion took the way we measure and value oyr freedom out of context, and today many companies, nonprofits, academics, media outlets, etc. use the standard to conceal climate reparations liability. The birth-based creation of power relations is not rights-based or legitimate. Instead, they flow from a subjective or commercial and not legal (objectively obligatory) source: Reproductive autonomy taken outside of the context of one’s political autonomy. The climate crisis closes out any argument that this system maximized welfare. But welfare is not the base currency - self-determination is, because economies and the welfare they produce must be regulated by democracies where each should have control over their own lives in the sense of one-person/one-influential-vote deciding the rules under which they all should live (including climatologically), the rules that regulate economies.
- In other words, the value of subjectivity was assumed to be private. That’s impossible because self-determination is by definition contingent on being created in a way that makes one capable of equally offsetting the influence of others relative to zero. Instead, world leaders colluded to create humans in states of deprivation, in ways that would always ensure scarcity, to control them. We can ask anyone making a value and impact claim how much of the value has been undone, relative to a neutral measure, to see this. The freedom of many was converted to wealth for a few. You will see the historic use of an illegal standard that lets people free ride on the privilege of their birth and developmental positionality as if it were the gift of some deity, rather than bad policy, a power grab by white families, and the largest driver of negative outcomes in the world today.
- The standard treats children of color as worth exponentially less resources in violation of the ecological, social, and political thresholds of intergenerational justice and ensures those using it do more harm than good by their own values, e.g. enjoying moderate temperatures, access to food and water, mattering politically to others, etc. There no accurate valuation outside of those thresholds - there is just the exclusion of those impacted from the process of valuation by treating them - in a system of creation with no rights or minimum thresholds for the vulnerable infants and animals impacted - as means and not as ends.
- One can use easy metrics to show the harm these lies caused and to instead measure harm from zero, not from high manufactured numbers designed to conceal and allow illegal harm costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives. The standard exploits a sense of birth-based white wealth supremacy that has no basis in law or ethics, and discounting future lives is illegal because it violates the rights of those whose lives are discounted. The standard ensures the fundament of white supremacy - massive birthright wealth. The standard hides the illegal creation of relations.
- The omission creates a fantasy world of progress focused on the downstream symptoms and not the upstream cause of political inequity that hides how some are benefiting from the suffering and death of others. The siloing divides us politically by hiding the unity (or more accurately, primacy) of value, the autonomy conservatives value as the equity liberals do. All rules should be fair, most of all the one that creates us and our first power relations with others. The state’s beginning from an unjust place and use of violence, which comes from a fundamentally illegitimate place because it does not empower its constituents in a way that governments are truly representative, in turn creates more violence.
- The standard treats children as economic inputs to ensure growth, rather than measurably empowering them in democracy. For decades many nonprofits used the same illegal standard as their funders, who were also funding the companies that nonprofits claimed to oppose. Years of greenwashing and humanewashing failed to resolve the crises because nonprofits used the standard, which favors wealthy children and investments over rights, taking freedom out of context and deciding in error what was green, sustainable, humane, etc. The standard – which is a matter of equitywashing, and the illegal discounting of future lives, is the largest single factor driving things like animal agriculture. Use of the standard means treating future children and animals as property, and for animal protection organizations it means more was spent on hype media using money made at cost to animals than money being used to save them
- Changing the legal status of something, like rights for nature or animals, without altering the real world power relations is dangerous. It can be illusory, doing little if anything for the vulnerable entity as relations worsen, and is often done for the benefit of the lawyers and the entities who benefit from the illusion. Then a vulnerable entity would much rather have the power relations changed.
- The standard ensures this is who we are relationally - that’s irrefutable. Those who accrued wealth at the cost of political equity or freedom - they owe the difference, having benefited from a system in which the tail (representative governance/entitlement) was wagging the dog (the empowerment of those subject to the governance).
- For example, the illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave because she could not afford air conditioning, could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc.
- She was the victim of the rich using family policy to play both sides: The growth-based investor/social justice funders chose investments in interventions that promoted their products, like vegan food, knowing the benefits for animals were undone by growth. It was funded hype, at the cost to the value of animals’ lives. There is no such thing as an anthropocentric animal rights advocate, and animal rights and law start with reforming the “we” at the base of our legal systems. The standard is illegal because it’s missing the key obligation – liberation, relative to others, in the creation of relations. Animal protection funders and advocates with integrity would start by admitting that the system of unsustainable and inequitable growth through which they profited did more harm to animals than they did to protect them. That conversation, the Tell the Truth campaign discussed below and combined with funding family law and reproductive rights reforms, would actually be a functional form of constitutional animal law, contrary to the wishes of many scammy funders. Fair Start activists have experience with professional fundraisers who were enriched by making sure funders did not make the connection.
- The victim would have been taught and likely assumed that she had just been unlucky in her being born without wealth, when in fact she would have had the right to derive her obligation to the political system and condition her compliance with the law on the state reversing that state of affairs, which derived from a very specific policy decision dating back to the 1960s. She was never free because she was never empowered, and in that situation, there is little reason to follow the rules. The rule of law means obligation because one has been included and empowered in the process of making the rules under which one lives.
- That is what commercialized/privatized/diluted freedom and consumerism as social justice (e.g., vegan food reforms for animals that are easily undone by inequitable growth) and degraded democracy look like. Fundamental causation is existential, and her birth exclusion was the unjust cause of all she experienced. Any lesser account makes assumptions that hide creation, leading to inconarchy.
- The subversion and standard enabled entities through their positionality to define and use terms like “sustainable,” green,” and “humane” around the needs of wealthy white children and their trusts, creating a fantasy world of good being undone daily by deadly inequitable growth at deadly cost to countless children of color. One cannot be positioned to define these terms without first legitimating one’s birth-based positionality, avoiding legitimacy washing and equiytwashing the skews the process of defining terms like “green.”
- This can all be described as a baseline problem, one academics, reporters, activists, philanthropists, etc. have intentionally ignored. The problem involves assessing costs and benefits out of the context of one’s birth positionality, and the need to move from an arbitrary birth lottery to a sustainable and equitable system of intergenerational justice. Entire disciplines, like animal law, have been funded and thus defined by that mistake, at deadly cost to many.
- The illegal standard uses manufactured metrics to conceal actual harm, deny reparations, silo social justice downstream and away from birth equity, and enrich some at deadly cost to others. The manufactured numbers value freedom in a commercialized way, slowly eroding democracy. It treats the act of having children as more determinative of the parents' autonomy than the children's and the communities' autonomy in order to avoid birth equity, and therefore political equity.
- At an academic level Fair Start is implementing a first necessary condition of the theory articulated in the book, The Morality of Freedom by Joseph Raz. It creates an alternative social form challenging corporate social form, a family defensive collective form orienting around entitlements to collectively assess how to ensure future children their equity relative to objective values like infant health.
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:
- Exploit unsustainable growth and levels of consumption that have now reduced the planet’s ability to support infant and animal health, the first and overriding objective measure of value.
- The standard ensures inequitable and unsustainable growth, violation of children’s birthrights, and the denial of the ecological, social, and political thresholds children need to thrive. This has done more harm to our values than any of us have done to further them, and hiding that is fraud, or benefitting at deadly and illegal costs by omitting the daily undoing of the value we claim to create.
- This is especially so because the growth treats children of color as deserving exponentially fewer resources and more risk, including the violence inherent in unrepresentative government. This is the subversion of racial justice by whites who freeride on their illegal birth positionality, using their wealth to control people’s perception of truth and value. All authority to govern and to own wealth derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons in the political system, with one person/one influential vote. But by 1968, governments had taken equity out of reproductive rights systems so that this crucial, physical inclusion never occurred. Rather, the doctrine of separate but equal was maintained at an existential level. The exploitation of children for economic growth became the standard, and freedom was taken out of context.
- The standard ensures each person has less capacity to influence their political system as democracy bloats and is slowly commercialized, in part because it does not derive and condition governmental authority, entitlement to wealth, and the obligation to follow the law on constituents being measurably empowered.
- The standard omits these facts from impact and value claims, hiding conflicts of interest and the preemptive right to equity/legitimacy reparations that ensure a fair and liberating start in life. This allows the use of wealth (which was made at cost to the claimed values ) to drown out the efforts of others through inclusive and constitutive communications that are accurately obligatory, or bottom-up, to further those values.
- Doing so undercuts true obligations to others and ensures violence by making representative governance impossible.