Summary 

There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to constitute a just nation where subjects are empowered in the creation of actual relations – through birth, development and emancipation. The action focuses on the fallacy of birthright white supremacy, and shows a pathway to move nations from treating its subjects as means towards instead treating them as constituents, and obligated to follow laws only because they have the measurable capacity to control the legal system.

The action simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy. 

The action seeks to escalate climate and other reparations – specifically designed as family planning entitlements – by trillions of dollars, through the concept of equity/reparations fraud, in order to save millions of lives. Many are using illegal tactics to block the high valuation.  

As foundational to the effort and overcoming the barriers, Fair Start is urging states attorneys generals to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for climate damage evaluation and the only standard for national legitimacy, using the eight concrete metrics now being urged as a zero-baseline form of harm-assessment and standardization at the United Nations. This work goes beyond targeting greenwashing towards finding the concealment of liability for the death of millions in the escalating climate crisis. Every entity in the United States should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc.

 

 

But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice was a horrific mistake, one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.

Imagine a home with many floors. A flood is approaching. Will those on the higher floors take the time out to unlock the basement and other doors to allow others to climb to safety? 

As discussed below, because of the connection between communication and legal obligation, we can use fraudulent sustainability claims and racist, ecocidal outcomes contrary to those claims, especially in the animal and environmental protection sectors, to begin the larger move towards constitutive reparations that ensure measurable levels of political equity.

The letters to the attorneys generals will identify dozens of cases of fraud, after forthcoming filings urging damage and remedy standardization before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Court of Justice, Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. For example, in many cases law schools and faculty in the United States routinely made claims of beneficial social impact they knew were being reversed daily by fundamental deadly inequity, typified by the conflict-driving growth and inequity in the Middle East killing tends of thousands of innocent civilians.

 

 

Scholars have noted how national constitutions sweep in those, especially the vulnerable, who never consent to them. The way the United States constitution has done that to future generations, and harmed them, gives us a unique opportunity to physically constitute consensual relations through fairness, and become capable of becoming an inclusive and just nation from the bottom-up because we now have a preemptive, or constitutive, obligation to the most vulnerable. This is not about white men constituting at gunpoint to create a hollow legal system of words rather than empowerment. This is a real opportunity to actually legitimate relations going forward, using measurable benchmarks to ensure children come to exist in the fairly narrow range that makes consent – self-determination – their primary value.

The key? Moving wealth that illegally externalized its costs to now save its victims. Where else would just relations come from?

Introduction 

What is the most just and effective thing you can do to protect your future as the climate, inequity / autocracy, and other crises worsen?

Backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm – so all children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality. This does exponentially more good – for children, animals, our environment, and democracy – than any other intervention because it starts at the beginning and is comprehensive of value by centering on measurable self-determination. 

This need have nothing to do with altruism. We need incoming children to be able to be self-determining because by definition, if they are not, we are not. We think of justice today in various silos – environmental, children’s, identity, animal, etc. because to deal with them all in the intergenerational form, which does unify them all, would have required in the middle of the Twentieth Century the leveling-up of lives for black children and a move towards a concrete range of ecosocial relations. 

Instead of doing that, the wealthy, almost all white families designing the reproductive rights regimes at the time chose the contradiction in terms of procreative autonomy – gutting family law and policy of birth equity to leave black and other children of color with a tiny fraction of the wealth of whites at birth. Many of these families then  siloed social justice into “downstream” issue areas to avoid upstream and effective equity.

This was a power grab to evade black equity by hiding the antecedent/ preambular or overriding right to it, a move that over generations downgraded political freedom to commercial freedom, and enabled the catastrophic growth now killing millions. Nobel laureates have seen this as a growth-based pyramid scheme, but missed the massive birth equity differences which will mean the children of white wealthy families (like the Secretary General of the United Nations) living at deadly cost to countless children of color. 

 

 

That move – to segregate motherhood into castes and pretend one can have autonomy outside of a being  positioned with an influential equity stake in one’s political system  – also allowed enough growth to also degrade the Earth’s atmosphere, which will kill the children least responsible for / benefitting from the regime. It was child inequity that was primarily used to subvert the civil rights movement, and evade race and other reparations. This was and is reparations fraud, and the hiding of a political share equity deficit that is killing children of color. This fraud – like the omissive use of environmental impact language that assumes black lives are worth less – clouds the language and concepts needed for universal reparative justice.

In other words, that move created a false form of constitutionalism that ensured obligations to follow the law with no real equity for constituents to influence the content of law, in fact because they were seen more as economic inputs than political constituents, with family law completely disconnected from measurable political empowerment of children.  To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, from the base not the heights. But it takes admission of the specific harm and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power towards infants and animals

In other words, there is an “ought” premise for all communications. Because political equity was never included in family planning, reproductive-focused human rights and child welfare regimes/law, world leaders never actually had to apply the values, and positivist inclusivity/representability, inherent in legitimacy. That caused horrific harm to legitimacy and not just welfare, which gives rise to steep and measurable reparations.

 

 

It was the philanthropy of wealthy families not accountable to election or market forces, rather than small business or government, that for decades envisioned and articulated insufficient standards – devoid of child equity – for social justice, environmentalism, animal liberation, etc. The crises we face today were exacerbated by those standards, which had more to do with growing generational wealth than good outcomes. 

By isolating women in the family planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families have for decades ensured inherited poverty, or commercially exploitative rather than legitimate and inclusive relations. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” That condition derived fundamentally from the use of illegal family entitlements that undermined all civil rights and created a generational apartheid that Fair Start and others will dismantle with women’s networks engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.  

Future children must be positioned as free and equal persons to be capable of constituting nations (testable through things like the feasibility of functional constitutional conventions). How could would-be parents do that in isolation from one another? Equity trades among would-be parents requires collective family planning rather than isolating women, through things like women’s democratic circles, which may be the best example of the idea of collective self-determination.  

 

 

Of course this process must be funded. And it can be, using the extreme wealth we see in the world today that for decades externalized its costs on future generations by illegally violating children’s rights to certain eco-social standards via family planning entitlements. We can move wealth from those who took it directly to the victims by funding family planning reparations that create a line beneath which no child should be born. This is basic – or intergenerational – justice, widely accepted as encyclopedic. 

The wealthy families and other concentrations of power that owe the costs they never paid to avoid the crisis did not create value in this world. Using a fundamental system of evaluation/cost/benefit that kills millions is generally considered a failure.  Instead, as detailed in this filing before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, they used a sleight of hand (described in detail below) and hidden assumptions to develop a fraudulent entitlement standard (identity or third party fraud) for national legitimacy and sovereignty, one that never derived from the only authoritative source: The measurable sovereignty (where each offsets the influence of others equally, relative to a neutral position) of those subjected to the nation in question. 

This enshrined inequitable family planning and birth / developmental positionality, and allowed mostly white, generational wealth to ensure its own criteria for evaluating truth and value through dismal standards for child development and education. It allowed wealth to create its own audiences, and demand, for example, to assure among a populace unable to read and understand its own constitution the assumption that governments have any authority to ban things like the teaching of critical race theory.

Creation oppression – ensured through birth, development and un-emancipatory relations – is uniquely blinding, like a fish not being able to see water. It may not feel like the constant oppression of Brave New World or 1984, but for those dying in sporadic, climate-driven disasters, or acts of mass violence driven by individual disempowerment, while having had no way to limit this unwelcome influence of others, would certainly feel their position while dying.

This scheme was illegal, violating children’s rights and using people against one another. It was the treating of people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. 

 

 

If you look closely at the progress and beneficial impacts claimed by the public interest organizations this wealth funded, over the last few decades, you will find benefit and progress only if one assumes there is no need to account for children’s needs as they enter the world, and the needs of the nonhumans / nonhuman habitats these children would rely on. Look closely and you will see micro victories being slowly undone at a macro level, and the setting together of a world that would soon be beset by heatwaves and massive political inequity.

Many working for fair starts in life as the basis of legitimacy used wealth, in their prior positions, to create the illusion of progress by just making others look in the wrong direction, away from measurable inclusion and empowerment at birth. This is common with those like effective altruists, who assumed they own the wealth with which they can be altruistic, wealth which is first owed to make freedom – or mutual self-determination – a workable concept. Wealthy families are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to be protecting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable.

There is thus now a binary choice or all to make – and up or down vote: To use the same fundamentally “exclude at birth from power” standard of who we should be that caused the climate and related crises, in terms of creating unsustainable, unjust and top down power relations based on the subjective whims of adults, or to use a measurable equity standard based on the needs of children to preempt all else. Those advocating or silently choosing the former are engaged in reparations fraud.

 

 

The difference in damages between evaluations using equity/eco/self-determination standards, versus anthro/welfare/other-determination standards that are based on a fallaciously narrow definition of bodily autonomy, involves millions of lives, and trillions of dollars. The money demanded was stolen through the fraudulent externalization of costs as detailed in our recent filing before the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Fair Start standardizes and measures the death debt at various intervals between 1948 and 2024, and we allocate responsibility in ways cognizant of things like the unsustainable growth and massive disparity of wealth driving horrors in places like Gaza.

 

 

As noted above, we are now urging states attorneys generals to track the multifaceted impacts of infants entering the world on their capacity for self-determination – the highest standard for evaluation, using the eight concrete metrics urged as the zero-baseline form of harm-assessment standardization at the United Nations. As discussed below, because of the connection between communication and legal obligation, we can use fraudulent sustainability claims, especially in the animal and environmental protection sectors, to begin the larger move towards constitutive reparations that ensure measurable levels of political equity.

• Fundamental impact disclosures that account for infants entering the world relative to concrete freedom standards, can resolve the directional problem of top-down governance not being inclusive and position us as self-determining and legitimate rather than the opposite. Wealth made at cost to the line is now owed to fund it, with a priority on funding the actual standardization in existing infrastructures like public health and reproductive rights communities. No child should be born and emancipated beneath the line because to do so would be more exploitative than inclusive, more illegitimating that legitimating, using measures of political equity. 
• Given the climate harm to future generations, and our obligations to repair the harm, it would be impossible to constitute accurately obligatory relations – legal / obligatory relations – at the most basic level without some sort of truth and reconciliation process of admission and inversion of empowering future generations more than those at the heights of our economic and political hierarchies.
• Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations of persons capable of representative governance, via the measurable self-determination of its constituents. Family planning reparations enable this process, and given that wealth was already  taken and the benefits already consumed, it is owed as share equity (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) for each child.

There is no legitimacy, or inclusion and empowerment based obligation to follow the law, without this. As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.

This is the crucial point. We were in no way accomplishing or missions on balance. Instead we used wealth, growth/inequity, and low-threshold child welfare standards to drown out voices and control the criteria others could use to evaluate truth and values. That was power. 

The letters to the attorneys generals will identify dozens of cases of fraud, after forthcoming filings urging damage and remedy standardization before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Court of Justice, Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

 

 

What’s blocking equity reparations? White wealth is funding the hiding of liability. 

Wealthy families in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are funding a fantasy world to continue this farce, and evade climate reparations they owe for the harm it caused. This is a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. These families fund decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues, to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.

These families, foundations and many of the nonprofits they backed had no constituents, and they were not accountable to either markets or electorate. It was scam philanthropy, by coopting the ideals, rather than the more reactive sectors of business or government that drove the crisis .The children of these families, and their foundations, hold the wealth that is now owed to others. They use the charade of performative social justice – micro campaigns focused on immediate and narrow issues, rather than accounting for the creation of actual power disparities in birth, development and emancipation, as distractivism to avoid dealing with positionality. 

 

 

Members of the Fair Start Movement were formerly paid to engage in work that was simultaneously being undone through inequity, by wealthy white families, using a baseline that assumed illegal entitlements rather than zeroing them out to the legitimate them through democratic processes. Fundraisers attempted to work with Fair Start on condition of not asking funders about the accuracy of their impact claims and how their omissions of inequity deconstituted legitimacy, which effectively would mean reframing fair starts in life for all kids as charity rather than reparations, undermining the dignity of a demand for wealth that obviously did not pay its full costs to those it is now victimizing. It would have also reduced the level of reparations, something none have authority to do,

This, the changing of the standards by sell-out environmental organizations in exchange for short term funding, is what caused the climate crisis. The fraud we committed is obvious if one contrasts the claims of impact with key facts, like growing child inequity, on the days the claims are made.

The solution? Many at Fair Start  are now admitting that we free rode on generational, racial and other unearned positions to benefit at deadly cost to others, and in a way that contradicted our own values. This admission, relative to zero baseline, and the inversion of obligation from government and entitlements to the incoming governed and the threshold of inclusive empowerment they need, enables the discursive constituting of political systems and true obligation. It’s the language of basic duty that makes us a “we.”

This linguistic model, like gender or indigenous land occupation models, is a necessary first condition of any legal system – what we might call preambular preemption. But these admissions use time and space to correct the baseline error of abstraction/arbitrariness to evade positionality, nesting in most legal and political theory, relative to the most demanding ideals, like animal rights. To the extent that most human communication is just an attempt to get into or position oneself within a group, the admission and inversion can truly liberate.

The admission enables those who think the system cannot be changed to realize they simply may not want it to, and struggle with the way justice has been pitted against our promised birthrights.

 

 

White and otherwise privileged public interest attorneys hold forth as saviors. But they usually use, at base, the same fundamentally fraudulent standard of birth inequity to undo any good they claim to be doing, the same move that was used to economically subvert the civil rights movement. The questions discussed below can identify reparations fraud by publicly asking how claimants account for children entering the world on their claims of beneficial public impact, given that there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact.

Factoring in the growth and political inequity that degraded the carrying cavity of the world’s ecologies, many philanthropic funders and the organizations they drove could have done more harm than good, masking that not ensuring children a fair start in life was undoing, each day, their claimed impacts and progress. In fact, when one factors in children entering the world without what they need and their rights should guarantee them, many organizations spent more on union busting, travel and events than on protecting those they claimed to protect.

Targets for reparations funding owed include those philanthropic foundations which used fake standards for environmentalism and child welfare designed to benefit rich, usually white, investors and their kids, rather than actual standards of measurable autonomy and equity. Reparations from these targets can and should be first earmarked for the standardization discussed above. 

 

 

The fix? 

Accurate reparations metrics and universal standardization, in a demand now before the United Nations, fixes the problem of birth inequity, and the unsustainable growth it drives, vastly undoing the good many claimed to have done. Lawyers are key to the fraud, and to the fix. They face the moral hazard of benefitting from having expertise and special knowledge of a system that is crucial to others, but the legitimacy of which is illusory if one derives back to the most fundamental norm: That obligation to follow the law is conditional on being included and empowered, especially if one embraces that idea that the act of constituting legal obligations must be knowable to all subjects.

And most have caved to that hazard, growing wealthy by treating legal systems like window dressing for what was really a systems of exploitative economic growth, and the dilution of legal personhood via the functional exclusion of incluschildren, towards what was instead exploitative, growth-based and unsustainable economies.

 

 

In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), Elizabeth Anderson explores how commercial relations control our lives. But she misses how, at base, those relations came about. The fundamental reason? The absence of equitable and influential shares in democracy as the fundamental of family planning and child welfare. This move cannibalized freedom, taking from us what we are owed in democracy and trying to sell it back in commerce. The difference between self-determination relative to zero baseline markers, and exploitation, is what those who most benefitted owe in reparations.

Their claims of doing good are being undone every day because there are no functional reparative protections for infants entering the world, and the animals and ecologies they will impact. This is not about population. It’s about having an effective share in the equity of democracy, the fact that any authority to claim wealth, property or authority in governance merely derives from constituting self-determining relations.

But law students and lawyers are also key to the fix. They can derive legal obligations, all the way back, to conditioning the legitimacy of systems and entitlements on the inclusion and empowerment of their constituents.

The history 

What the United Nations calls greenwashing begins as a much more deadly form of entitlement fraud. Wealthy families are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to be protecting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable.

 

 

You can identify anyone willing to further the fraud by asking whether they back accurate climate reparations or not.  Those who do not are engaged in political equity or constitutive fraud, or choosing to start with zero actual protections for infants and animals in a way that contradicts stated values, enabling the powerful to punch down on the vulnerable

These families have historically subverted civil rights by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they claim to be doing downstream – a move that masked the drivers of the climate crisis and who it would victimize. If the Three-Fifths Compromise made fractionalized the worth of persons of color, one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth, disparities that violated legally enforceable children’s rights regimes, will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.

To avoid black birth equity, the mostly white families that designed the near-universal reproductive rights regime bypassed equity entirely when defining reproductive autonomy, such that one can only use a thin form of autonomy to terminate their pregnancy, only to then die in a white-wealth driven heat wave months latter because they cannot afford air conditioning.

 

 

This move, of hiding the diminution of equity, relied on a sleight of hand: Defining freedom from power around the authority of the state to use violence, rather than broader definitions that would have captured all entitlements, like those between child and child-maker. The conceptions relied on almost all white and male theorists who abstracted far away from their own birth positionality, leaving us with abstract theories of liberation that would enable a climate crisis deadly to mostly children of color.

• Ronald Dworkin suggested a unity of value, but only downstream, never accounting for constituting just power relations via birth equity. Dworkin may have taken rights seriously, but not freedom.
• Many theories of law and language similarly have avoided equity as a basis for obligation, and the need for accurately constitutive language.
• H.L.A. Hart suggested what might be the most basic norms for a legal system, none of which empower the subjects as they enter.
• John Rawls envisioned basic rights for a just system, but never a basic rule to offset the influence of each subject against a standard that would have evaded the climate crisis.
• Crucially, Robert Nozick’s use of the fallacies described in this letter misdirected liberal political theory
• Hans Kelsen theorized of a norm from which all others derived, but never included ecosocial, birth-based share equity in one’s democracy as the obvious most basic ought behind his positivist vision of law.
• John Finnis envisions a list of natural rights, which does not include birth equity, and certainly not as foundational.
• Joseph Raz may have articulated the closest thing to equity override with his concept of valuable autonomy, but did not deal with the creation of relations at birth.
• Cass Sunstein challenged common views on baselines, but never asks which generational, racial, national etc. position one should be in while assessing the idea of baselines, a question that seems determinative of millions of lives at risk as temperatures soar.
• Contrast with these the work of Dr. Gabirel Bubu Ncha on early democratic women’s circles. While Joel Feinberg certainly envisioned every child’s right to an open future, Ncha’s work on collective planning allows would-be parents to better ensure it.

These theories, minus the last two, are based on the misconception of existence without full positionality, and the abstraction of morality away from the creation of relations at birth. This thinking created decoys, like performative civil rights in employment or voting, masking birth inequity that would allow white wealth built on a lie of unsustainable growth. The theorists generally stopped short of requiring governance by free and equal persons because they did not derive an obligation to follow laws back to the measurable empowerment of subjects as constituents.

 

 

These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead, they first used unsustainable family planning to create their own growing audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was being diluted to uselessness.

 

 

A legal impossibility. 

Law is different from other disciplines because it norms can be coerced, and firstly on the idea that subjects are  included as equals and thus made constituents. Constitutionalism, at bottom, premises obligation to follow the law on actual inclusion and empowerment.

Again, given the climate harm to future generations, and our obligations to repair the harm, it would be physically impossible to constitute accurately obligatory relations – legal / obligatory relations – at the most basic level without some sort of truth and reconciliation process around the admission and inversion of empowering future generations more than those at the heights of our economic and political hierarchies. Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations capable of representative governance, via the measurable self-determination of its constituents.

Where else would the empowering relations come from? If defunding the police makes sense, it’s at least because our legal systems have never included constituents with measurable equity in a way that makes them capable of producing actual representatives, and laws – including property entitlements – that accurately represent the will of those subject to them.

How to see the fraud?

The claims these families make and fund are easily falsifiable, as are the claims of the funders backing decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good one seems to do. Focusing downstream, rather than on things like what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black Birth Equity, avoids civil rights that actually account for the creation of power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation.

What we think of today as procreative or reproductive autonomy was nothing more than cover for not disturbing mostly white birth privilege and positionality. It was the skin of freedom, not the body. Here are some questions one can ask to identify the fraud:

 

 

 

If the claimant valued some outcome, who will cover the child inequity and entry costs to that outcome – growth undoing climate mitigation, for example – and evade more of it? Is the claimant doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? Do they start with enabling the powerful over the vulnerable? Did the claimant spend more on undoing their mission than furthering it? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases? How do they define the term power in the context of being free from power? Who is their intended audience?  

This is a constitutive discourse. Again, this is not about population. It’s about lies and omissions to gain power by exploiting positionality. A concrete goal for a better future might entail functional constitutional conventions, where we can be self-determining rather than determined by others, and in concrete and measurable ways.

Animal rights, law and policy as the most falsifiable examples of reparations fraud on almost a dozen levels, but also the standard for the highest level of clawback payments. 

If one factors in children entering the world in inequity, the claims of success and impact made by most animal protection organizations are being undone daily. And they are false, with more vastly animals suffering and dying through the creation of their relations with humans than these organizations save.

 

 

Those working in animal law, rights, and policy will have made the most falsifiable claims, claims that thus give a toehold for change.

For example, many of the funders behind animal protections have been pushing what is a social justice movement for the most vulnerable, instead towards investments in growth-based vegan food markets that do more harm to animals – by the numbers – than these funders and their leachy children do good. Many lawyers ostensibly working on behalf of animals made impact claims in this area that were easily being undone, every day, by inequity. Some call this the #demandscam, pretending to with one hand create value you undo with the other, and in a way that benefits the scammer at cost to others. In this case not only did growth do more harm to animals that food reforms did good, but that growth was replacing a chance for democratic relations with commercial ones via low investments in children, while concealing the death debt investors already owed for climate deaths.

FSM members were actually told, by a leading animal law professor who was accustomed to not having to link legal institutions to the measurable empowerment of their constituents, that fair start reforms were natural rather than positive law, and that one could work to save animals through food reforms while not altering the underlying retrodictive rights that would – each day – undo any gains from food reforms.

 

 

Given that animal liberation is the highest form of environmentalism (treating ecologies as the homes of entities who have relations, families, and lives of their own rather than a human resource) the cooptation of animal liberation is horrific. The ideal requires equitable human and nonhumans relations. Instead it is funded towards flashy, downstream, low-impact, micro-level campaigns and victories that get easily undone on a macro level.

It is, by the numbers, the greatest example of “winner take all” greenwashing possible. Funders, and the performative advocates who take their money, decoy us all away from seeing animal law, rights and policy as the most demanding standard for who humans should become, ethically, because they would rather use an illegitimate system to improve their positionality and image than do the work of legitimating the system around liberation of humans and nonhumans.

 

 

Humans are animals. Seeing us as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. Animal law is not merely law that refers to animals. Animal law would have to start with a capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals.

So animal rights, law and policy, if we want to protect nonhumans, is just a system of obligation oriented around the most vulnerable, the most demanding form of law and justice. That system has to have the capacity to actually benefit the beneficiaries, not just pretend to. What does pretending to benefit animals look like? Look at most of the micro victories for animal rights and personhood claimed by organizations over the last few decades, and contrast those with the impacts of growth on animals, and the reality, at a macro level, of embedded nonhuman propertyhood in our archaic reproductive rights regimes. Animal rights in the comprehensive sense is not just ecological – it involves the mots demanding levels of empathy in future generations. 

Why then not focus on infants and animals, and – at a macro level of inclusive animal personhood – the creation of fundamental power relations between the two? Those like animal rights theorist Peter Singer, and others, do not do so because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality. 

 

 

The wealthy families funding animal rights, law and policy, for decades, refused to deal with this issue because they wanted to benefit from a system that quietly harmed animals, while seeming to be their saviors. Animal rights and law, in this sense, starts with the actual creation of power relations as children enter the world, represented by the collective pronouns implied or expressed in all statements, including purportedly “constitutive” statements like “We the People.” It is the most demanding standard, eco or animal centric, rather than anthropocentric, or punching down on the most vulnerable. But for Singer it was more important to raise his position as savior in an illegitimate system rather than focus on a better version of a “we” to legitimate it, and that did much more harm to animals than he did good.

Claims many animal protection organizations make, like Mercy for Animals, are objectively false, in the sense that the impacts they claim cannot be squared with the reality of human birth, development. and inequity on nonhumans. But many funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis, are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

Singer’s version of animal rights and law, the abstraction away from the creation of actual relations, is just charade version of animal liberation they need: Value animals in the abstract with one hand, make money on growth and privilege at cost to them with the other.

 

 

Effective animal rights in the best sense is personally expensive, not profitable. It’s easier to ignore all of that and let the macro undo good for animals at the micro level. True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights. True animal rights mean preemptive standards in things like assessing damages to animals (and children). If captivity harms elephants for example, it’s because it deviates from a biodiverse and less crowded world where elephants are free of most human influence, not deviation from a relatively dismal life at a sanctuary.

 

 

Animal law starts with moving away from anthrocentric systems, towards seeing humans as the animals that they are, and situating them in equity, before we should have any sense that they can be free. But, as a close source to Fair Start said: “This is all the organizations will pay you to do. And if you love animals, that’s better than working for nonprofits.” Actually, research in the areas suggests the charade does more harm than good by moving the goalposts of social justice, and that in fact those engaged in it would never do so if they were not otherwise privileged to do so.

Fair Start initiated whistleblowing in this area as the evidence arose that the climate crisis could actually reduce the carrying capacities of ecosystems, rather than just exceed them, and that birth and developmental positionality was the greatest determinant of one’s prospects to to live or suffer/die in the crisis.

Implementing the fix: Being effective means addressing the root cause, not the symptom.

The only way to engage in damage evaluation for reparations, and the fraud hiding them, is to peg them to a functionally inclusive baseline – children entering the world relative to certain counterfactual thresholds – that would not have caused the death of millions of innocent persons.

 

 

Accurate reparations – relative to one’s positioning or membership position in the fundamental system of political obligation – fixes the problem of share inequity in one’s democracy vastly undoing the good many claimed to have done. Without them admitting the harm and fulfilling their obligations it would be impossible for any of us to live in a system of collective self-determination.

You can take legal action against those entities engaged in the fraud, with climate and race reparations benchmarked to concrete metrics of democratic equity, and a preemptive claim to what is owed that means the state has no legitimate authority to defend the barriers to who owe payments. Fair Start is now moving towards such a system evaluating the full spectrum of harms, and accurate damages, in matters like children dying of climate exacerbated malaria in western Uganda.

We only owe others as much as they owe entrants into the world, because any claim of inalienable rights assumes fulfillment of a prior duty to others. One can use the discourse mentioned above, the questions, to force others to derive their thinking back to “might makes right” logic, such that they fall outside of any theory of legitimacy or political obligation that would create a duty ensuring their protection by others. Living such a logic makes those who refuse fundamental fairness – those who embrace missing a crucial step in the logic of their oughtness – fall outside of systems of mutual obligation.

Here are some indicia that an entity is engaged in fundamental, or constitutive reparations fraud: 

• They will silo justice into downstream issues to avoid dealing with the creation of power relations.
• They will conflate the difficultly of inverting power systems with their desire to retain their privilege.
• They will redefine values over time to evade having contradicted themselves when called for payments.

Conclusion 

The legitimacy of legal systems is not just theory. There is a threshold, and a binary choice, the climate crisis is showing us by killing many. We will soon urge the BLSAs to lead with Fair Start on assessing heat and other impacts on infants  – impacts that expose the fraud behind the claims by many, fraud that gives rise to just demands for legitimating reparations.