The Dangers of Equity and Impact Fraud
Given the unprecedented numbers of humans and animals suffering as the climate crisis unfolds, there is more rights-deprivation and injustice in the world today than ever before. Governments are legally prohibited from using the same metrics that caused our current ecological and political crises to measure the harms and design the solutions, and thus avoid their own liability for mounting climate deaths.
The crises stem from the use, by governments in the Twentieth Century, of an unsustainable reproductive rights policy and standard designed to evade racial equity and children’s rights through the use of a legal fiction that treated the act of having children as an act of self-determination more personal to the parents than other-determinative of and interpersonal to the children born and the communities they would comprise. The inequitable growth it ensured was sustained for less than a handful of generations before caused catastrophic economic, ecological and political reactions.
The standard is fraudulent because it takes freedom/choice out of one's political context to ensure a double race standard, and manufactured and arbitrary numbers (relative to zero/neutral standard) in value claims that undercut freedom and obligate political subjects without empowering them as constituents. That fiction is the fundamental cause of the deaths we see today, with growth having undone the majority of climate interventions, and its use has constituted an illegal standard that for decades has ensured the violation of children’s birthrights, vast racial and economic inequity, and degrading and largely commercialized democracies.
Fair Start’s research establishing this point, and the danger of taking the value of self-determination out of one’s measurable political equity and measuring harm only after it has occurred, is now nearing ten positive peer-reviews. There is no authority for deviating from children’s self-determination as the standard for legality, because that is the only source from which state sovereignty, authority, and the entitlements it assigns can derive. State’s cannot define birthright harm in a way that allows them to avoid liability, and standards that enable that are illegitimate because they are not part of an obligation-based system of creating, or constituting, power relations. One can't get the benefit of a legal system without paying the costs of rights-based, or legal, relations.
That fiction created an error in the baseline businesses and governments use to measure harm and avoid intergenerational injustice, by hiding illegal costs. This means states are 1) assuming political authority and entitlements rather than legitimating them through preemptive human rights obligations that premise national legitimacy and authority on the measurable empowerment, or political equity and capacity for self-determination, of constituents, 2) ignoring obligations under state law canons and caselaw to interpret legal authority in ways that empower those subject to it, 3) establishing totally arbitrary discount rates for future costs that violate a host of child welfare, environmental and animal protection, conflicts of interest, civil rights, criminal consumer protection / unfair competition, as well as constitutional and others laws meant to ensure democratic empowerment and avoid racial and other forms of disenfranchisement.
For example, recent litigation against Coca-Cola shows use of the standard to assess and report value in claims like “sustainable,” which refer to models designed to enrich the children of leadership at illegal and deadly cost to the most vulnerable children around the world. The company has made animal welfare claims its business models make impossible to fulfill. That standard is the single largest driver of harms by the company, and because it treats children of color as worth substantially fewer resources and more risk than white children, it is illegal. The harm to their freedom or self-determination is much more costly and expensive than to state defined and arbitrary assessments of harm to their welfare, but the former are being hidden and rising, a fundamental driver of much of the violence we see today.
Factory farms, at the most fundamental level, generate illegal demand by treating as a benefit the unsustainable and inequitable growth and impacts that violate (mostly poor, and of color) children's birthrights. So do many nonprofits that line up in a charade version of public interest work, to challenge those factory farms.
The results are mounting climate and related deaths being hidden by widespread and deceptive advertising that discounts the value of the lives lost, minimizes damages and remedies being assessed, and exacerbates the situation by bringing children into conditions without the resources their rights require and they need to respond, and in a process of unsustainable growth that at the same time degrades those conditions - ecologically and otherwise - increasing their needs.
Worse yet, many of the environmental interventions being launched by public interest organizations who are funded by wealthy interests committed to growth models for their returns on investments use the same illegal standard. These charade interventions obscure accurate assessments of the growing level of harm. In many cases businesses and the nonprofits they fund are intending to skew climate reparations assessments in ways that are killing mostly infants of color. Funders intentionally played both sides, investing in growth/inequity based systems while launching “advocacy” efforts that used the illegal standard as the baseline for assessing and reporting success. It was a charade that started with no rights for infants and animals - a sleight of hand regarding what it means to be free from the power of others, an inversion of justice.
In short, the continued use of the standard - which amounts to political equity fraud and criminal concealment - that caused the crises as a tool to address their harms is ensuring corporate impunity and more death.
AI systems adept at assessing racial injustice can detect equity values at the subject-level of value claims, versus the object level of those claims. Consider the need to distinguish between something like equity in hiring decisions versus who is birth-positioned to make those hiring decisions. A goal for permissible climate emissions as the object of a sentence differs greatly from a low emissions standard implicit in the "we" subject of the same claim, with that collective subject implying the ability of all referenced to be free from harmful emissions. Permissible emissions as a goal/object frames the political system as consensual and legitimate, which it would not be without restoration as a condition of the collective subject.
Those systems can use the alternative, preemptive standard and implied cause of action for fraud, as a tool to prevent political disenfranchisement, or some benefitting at illegal and deadly cost to infants and animals. Instead, states are obligated to measure harm from a zero baseline and design remedies that restore the victims to wholeness and freedom to the extent possible. That process of constituting just relations (the first and necessary condition of being free) starts with one question: 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? One can't claim to create real value when one starts by violating rights.