Counteracting Equity and Impact Fraud
Recently a U.S. federal class action lawsuit was filed against Fairlife, a Coca-Cola-owned dairy brand, over false sustainability claims and the use of illegal and deceptive standards to assess consumer fraud, deceptive recycling practices, and ecosocial harms in the United States, concealing liability for climate deaths and risking millions more lives. The coalition highlights how such standards conceal liability for climate-related deaths and endanger millions more—especially children of color in the Global South.
“In the world today, there is more suffering and injustice than ever, and fundamentally because of the use by Coke, Fairlife, and others 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 standard conceals liability for climate and other crises-related infant deaths, the violation of children’s birthrights, including treating children of color as worth fewer resources while degrading their chances in life, and all the correlative rights these actions violate. No child is worth more than another,” said Esther Afolaranmi, Legal Director at Fair Start Movement.
If you ask the questions above you will find no functional protections for infants as they enter the world, and the animals they will impact. When that is factored in, the numbers change drastically, showing a double standard where wealthy children get the benefits and poor children get the costs.
Fair Start activism targets this cause of harm, not the downstream symptoms, and when asking what our claimed success is relative to, measures the claims against our fundamental obligations and not arbitrary criteria meant to benefit the claimant.
Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called growth a Ponzi scheme. One solution? Require governments to show how they are ensuring political capital / birth-based equity in citizens in order to obligate them to follow laws. Ensuring that children are born only above a line of resources that makes them measurably self–determining is the true border of human freedom and national authority/legitimacy, not any national border. We assess and measure value from that, from a standard of what ought to be in order to allow others to have a say in what ought to be. Those empowering others as such get priority.
There is a preemptive legal right, and form of legal action, for these reparations (legitimations), which contrast manufactured numbers versus the reality of climate harm: See https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/. Governments have to measure and remediate harm from zero, the manufactured high numbers that caused the ecocide and decline of democracy we see today. We can require governments to empower their constituents in order to have authority to govern, using the allegations of equity and impact fraud, and the Tell the Truth campaign to account for the full extent of harm “shopping mall democracy” to our true freedom.
Birth equity - self-determining positionality of being truly a “we” - comes before any other obligation because we cannot be legally obligated without being legally empowered to influence outcomes (like climate) that impact us, and much of the violence in the world today comes from this disparity.
Bottom line - if one uses metrics that discount political equity, they are engaged in fraud, and benefiting some children at illegal and deadly cost to others. There is a sleight of hand in which we assume freedom from power means freedom from government coercion when that power actually originates in the creation of birth and development positionality / power relations. Again, how do we see this?
Just one question of anyone making a value or impact claim: Ask how are they measuring birth and development on infant and maternal freedom/political equity as the fundamental system of valuation? From zero or fake numbers? Show receipts? It’s not necessarily about corporate bad actions - unaccountable philanthropy did more harm by throwing the standards. We represent vulnerable entities for the maximum standard change, but that’s also consistent with self-determination for all. Equity fraud getting benefits of a coercive political/legal system premised on democracy without paying the costs of actually empowering people.
The claim will begin by assuming an obligatory system, a “we,” which implies certain values, but then in a sleight of hand, move towards some benefiting at deadly cost to others by the time the claim gets to the object-value in the sentence. Interventions become a charade to hide white wealth.
Are they using a fundamental standard of obligation that does more harm than they are doing good, undoing their own values while treating children of color as deserving of fewer resources, including manufactured numbers in your claim that hide deadly costs like disenfranchisement. Will they admit and join those constituting, through truth, and a better future?
One can use AI fact/value checking to show what is owed by those not accounting for birth/political equity: the death debt accrued from using a legal system that was premised on fairness and inclusion that was never there, and allowed some the benefits of law and order democracy while paying the low costs of an unsustainable growth economy.
This measures the harm from the climate crisis to self-determination because that is what was truly lost - not the lesser standard of a commercialized democracy. This is not about population - it’s relational between persons as they come into the world. This is a fundamental, or constitutional, accounting: Assessing who we are and what we are obligated to do.