simultaneously empowering them with equitable shares in democracy. When this requirement is not met, the use of violence breeds further violence. Evidence suggests that failing to ensure all children a measurable, fair start in life, along with birth and development conditions consistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment, has caused more harm to social justice goals, including individual freedom, than any efforts to advance them.

Why? Our collective violation of children’s right to a fair start in life, and the assumption that children of color deserve fewer resources, combined with the assumption that children of color face far greater risks, has done more to harm our values and missions than any effort has done to advance them. This is because unchecked growth is degrading the planet’s ecological capacity to ensure infant health, which remains the first and only accurate measure of value.

From Political Empowerment to Commercial Exploitation

After 1948, world leaders began conflating the act of having children and the choice not to have them under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than recognizing that having children requires political equity for the child.

This obscured the true nature of freedom by privatizing the creation of political relationships. It led to the measurement, assessment, and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards designed to detach individuals from their birth and development contexts, ensuring that children of color were treated as less deserving and placing them at increased risk. This was a linguistic cover-up for birthright white supremacy and a massive death debt, enforced through a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation. It concealed the essential need for nations to invest equitably in every child simply to maintain basic authority over citizens to be truly “representative.”

Leaders merged these concepts by defining power solely as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence. In practice, this meant one could be free to terminate a pregnancy without law enforcement interference, yet later die in a heat wave because they had no influence over climate policy and could not afford air conditioning. At its core, family law was used to gradually undermine all other civil rights reforms, training us to see ourselves and our bodies out of context. Ask anyone who claims to be doing good to account for the ongoing entry of children into the world, and the persistent violation of children’s rights becomes clear.

This reality stems from a gradual shift from political empowerment to commercial exploitation. Genuine self-determination requires political influence to be offset equally, relative to zero. But if the creation of children and political relations is private, we never see that happening.

This means the wealth we see in the world today was built at the cost of children’s rights. For decades, nations have illegally evaded their obligation to bring children into conditions consistent with their rights. Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive. People, not documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. We have an overriding, preemptive right to reclaim the wealth stolen by using growth to override children’s rights—and to redirect that wealth to fund family reforms and create a just future.

But we don’t talk about this because it means admitting how civil rights have been subverted through family inequity—treating children of color as deserving only a fraction of what white children receive, and assuming they should bear the worst impacts of the climate crisis. The wealth visible today carries massive debt because we violated children’s rights to create it, bringing children into the world as means and not rights-bearing ends.

Our language conceals this by failing to acknowledge how the birth of children impacts all of our work. It blocks our ability to derive obligations to uphold the law, all the way back to measurably empowering people. It means we value things by taking self-determination out of context. One solution is to legally require disclosures that contrast claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline that children need to experience value, and to reveal how their birth and development alter that baseline beyond the infant’s needs.

How We Hide Illegitimacy 

Many entities in nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using the same fraudulent impact assessment and reporting standards. They ignore how children entering the world without basic needs undo sustainable development impacts, driving the crisis to hide their liability for the death of millions. Language matters, and we cannot be free or contextually self-determining without communication that reflects our most fundamental obligations to others, starting with children who will enter the world. There is no such thing as an inclusive, representative, and legitimate legal system without those communications.

A phenomenon is at work today, an assessment and rerouting system that supports charitable omissions, hiding the impact of growth and political inequity, and thereby exacerbating the climate crisis. In many cases, when one factors in political equity or one’s effective shares in democracy, and the role of this factor in the climate crisis, many public interest organizations have consistently spent more on lavish travel and events than on furthering their missions.

For decades, my colleagues and I have used a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that omitted key facts—facts that would have exposed and undone a separate but equal system of family entitlements that subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements. At the end of those decades, I had more money and prestige when, in fact, we had gone backwards. By using a fraudulent version of freedom that removed the self from the creation context, I had drowned out other voices. Simply put, we were measuring and reporting impacts, including costs and benefits, as well as harm to others, from a completely arbitrary and fallacious baseline.

My funders never created real value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead, they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating children’s rights and treating 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. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons and could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children is generally considered a failure.

The baseline they used has subverted the racial justice rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing the good of things like educational, housing, and employment reforms through upstream inequity, seeding exponential inequality in the creation of birth and development relations, and laying the groundwork for current political and ecological crises that are killing millions. This is a move that has exponentially exacerbated the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for them and most vulnerable to them.

If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, then the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth, which violate 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.

These wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians, and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity. They also use omissive messaging—a form of entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud—that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.

Fraud is the intentional benefitting from the harm of others, often based on misinformation or omissions. If you ask the right questions, those involved become obvious. Their work is inevitably abstract, ignoring the entry into the world of children. It starts by assuming entitlements that contradict the impact they claim and by enabling the industries they claim to fight. This would cement the subversion of civil rights in place.

The Standards Used to Make Impact Claims 

In my work, we routinely choose standards and baselines. This includes animal personhood centered on objectifying nonhumans rather than including them in subject-level relations created through family policy, because the use of a lesser standard benefited us. Our work was inevitably abstract or randomly granular, and by ignoring the entry of children into the world, we assumed entitlements that contradicted the impacts we claimed to combat, while first enabling the industries we sought to challenge.

Impact claims in animal law and protection were among the most falsifiable in the nonprofit sector, due to the unique vulnerability of nonhumans in the face of growth. Because we did not consider the actual creation of legitimate or inclusive power relations that accounted for the vulnerability of children or animals, the work we did never actually had the capacity to benefit animals. Instead, and on balance, the omissive impact claims had the disorienting effect of hiding the privileged positionality of our largest funders and limiting the capacity of various audiences to assess the truth and value of our claims. If ExxonMobil was not sustainable due to its growth, then we were certainly not liberating nonhuman animals.

We routinely ignored this reality by choosing to focus on areas of law like growth-based food reform, as well as to avoid areas like family reforms, because the former allowed us to enrich our funders, even at deadly cost to a child of color and certainly in contravention of our mission. Thus, our work in animal law was especially problematic, as it created a presumption in our audiences that a functional legal system actually protected animals. Nothing about the creation of actual legal relations, through family policy, during the relevant period would have supported that presumption. We began with injustice, at the expense of animals and children.

In many cases, we raised funds showcasing the use of a violent criminal justice system to benefit animals when we knew that system was doing more to entitle the wealthy at the cost of vulnerable humans, nonhuman animals, and the natural environment. And yet, that same research showed that there could be no legitimate system of evaluation outside of the ecosocial conditions that infants deserve, as outlined in standards like the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Accurate accounting requires disclosures that contrast claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alter that baseline.

On balance, it was a deadly charade, and by the numbers, it is the most remarkable example of corruption in philanthropy that is becoming increasingly well-known. During that time, we used wealth made through illegal macro entitlement systems that, by violating children’s and animals’ rights, created a fantasy world of micro impacts that hid the most significant determinant of nonhumans’ life experience. The systems we benefited from while masking are likely to have led to the deaths of millions in the climate crisis and cost trillions of dollars.

Justice starts with speaking the truth and neutral fact-checking from a zero-harm baseline. Given the chance, everyone can relate their experiences to the reality of the most vulnerable: children entering the world and impacting vulnerable animals in the actual first creation of unjust power relations. All legal obligations derived from language, and ours should mutually empower, not disempower, at the base.

The connection between language and violence develops from the fact that all communication is rooted in some fundamental system of obligation, such as a nation’s written constitution. However, if we urge those claiming authority to ground their commitments in the very basics, obligations necessitate the creation of empowering relations through the entry of children into the world. There are really two choices here: self-determination for all or something that is closer to “might makes right.” That is the genesis of violence.

In a world that claims to value liberty, the brutal truth is that many nations are not built on justice, but on carefully veiled exploitation. Behind every national monument and economic success story lies a hidden cost: the lives of children born into systems designed to control, exploit, and silence them. This is not the collateral damage of power—it is the blueprint.

Where Injustice Begins

We like to imagine that injustice is something that happens later in life, something earned or provoked. But in truth, inequality is inherited. A child’s future is often determined before their first breath by factors such as birthplace, race, citizenship, and socioeconomic class. Children born into marginalized communities face a world that polices their bodies before it protects them, that funds their surveillance before it funds their education. And from that first moment, they are positioned not as citizens to be empowered, but as labor, liability, or threat.

Public education is frequently touted as the great equalizer; however, it often functions more as a system of social reproduction. In privileged neighborhoods, students are prepared to lead; in impoverished areas, students are prepared to obey. The school-to-prison pipeline is not a metaphor—it is a map. Children in under-resourced schools are disciplined, criminalized, and tracked into incarceration with chilling efficiency. Their futures are undermined not by chance, but by policy.

Child labor never disappeared—it just went global. In mines, fields, and factories, children fuel the comforts of the modern world. They extract minerals for smartphones, manufacture fast fashion for Western closets, and cultivate food that feeds global markets. We do not see them because the economy depends on our looking the other way. And even within wealthy nations, migrant children work long hours in agriculture, are held in detention centers, or vanish into undocumented underworlds—all under the illusion of legality.

Borders as Violence and Reimagining Legitimacy.

No institution enacts childhood erasure quite like the border. Stateless children, detained minors, and unaccompanied refugees exist in a legal purgatory, denied the fundamental rights of education, healthcare, or safety. The law does not protect these children; they are, in fact, targeted by it. And in labeling them “illegal,” states absolve themselves of responsibility. The violence is sanitized, bureaucratized, and legitimized.

If a society’s power depends on the erasure, control, or dispossession of its children, then that power is not legitimate, no matter how democratic its elections, how progressive its rhetoric, or how orderly its institutions. Justice cannot be something children grow into. It must be something they are born with. This means universal healthcare, equitable education, protection from exploitation, and the right to exist freely, regardless of where or to whom a child is born.

One Example: Coca-Cola and Fairlife Milk

Fairlife, owned by Coca-Cola, was sued in February 2025 for using milk supplied by dairy farms that abuse animals and pollute the waterways. The evidence suggests Coke/Fairlife used an illegal standard/business modelfundamentally 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. One of the lead plaintiffs in the case has presented himself and his family as exemplifying the family reforms needed to address the crises in the world today and fully supports the changes called for in detailed articles, such as one published by Stanford University.

The standard is designed to assess and report values and impacts out of context. It is the single most significant 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 a deadly cost to vulnerable children, using a false assessment and reporting system. This means making up numbers that hide the damage being done. 

That anthropocentric and unsustainable standard is the most significant 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 flawed standard that contributed to the climate crisis to evade liability for it—that would be fraud. The costs of using the standard are horrific.

Central to the economics literature on climate change is the Social Cost of Carbon. This calculation attempts to assign a price to the well-being lost for every ton of Carbon emitted. It has been shown that these estimates are susceptible to the discount rate used to model damages. For example, decreasing the discount rate from 5 to 2.5 percent often increases the estimated damages by a factor of five.

The illegal discount standard is the fundamental reason their leadership is being enriched at a deadly cost to mostly children of color. This goes beyond greenwashing and humanewashing to the more fundamental system of equitywashing that subverts civil rights and democracy and allows free-riding benefits at a cost to others. They are using the same fundamentally false standard derived from the “separate but equal” 20th-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.

Equity is a state of empowerment to allow us to accurately and fairly determine what is “green” and “humane.” Sadly, the standard has been adopted by many public interest entities claiming to oppose destructive industries, such as animal agriculture. These entities, like the industries they oppose, often employ performative interventions that primarily serve to protect the generational wealth of their largest funders rather than achieving their stated 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. Still, their acceptance of it at a macro levelhas done far more harm to animals than good, given the way their out-of-context impact and value claims have, for decades, hidden this larger issue.

We can ask Coke/Fairlife, the charities they back, as well as the charities that engaged for decades in a charade of opposing entities like Coke/Fairlife, the same questions:

How were you accounting for your work being undone each day by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority from such birthrights and condition it on the preservation of these rights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by fundamental inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?

Climate reparations owed by those who used the illegal standard are a form of self-defense, and the obligation to pay them should fall on the adult children of the wealthy until justice is done.

Illegitimacy Breeds Violence

Because of my hidden positionality, I benefited from the system of illegitimate violence likely to kill millions.

If states are not representative and are thus using violence illegitimately, that has implications for understanding criminal violence and revolution in a different light. The beneficiaries of any non-inclusive system should suffer the risk of violence it creates to disincentivize their furthering that system, and because holding health that could save lives when it was made contrary to one’s own values is evil. The disclosures discussed above can help ensure that we correctly assess who chooses to be free or self-determining, and who chooses to exploit their positionality at a deadly cost to others, thus falling outside any logical system of mutual protection.

There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: all work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, in the sense of self-determining, if we cannot ask and then ensure that persons are created and developed in ways that equally offset their capacity to influence political systems relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

If we do not invest enough in children to equally offset their capacity to influence outcomes that affect them, so that they are self-determining, then those who claim to be political representatives and officials are not truly representative, because the constituents they claim to represent are not being empowered equally. If democracy is working correctly, the creation and entry of others into the world should fundamentally alter our obligations and freedoms in a particular way, offsetting our power equally to make room for others’ power.

If this does not happen, if instead we treat children as economic inputs and demand more growth as the antidote for a “baby bust,” even while our environment falls apart, one knows they are not in a democracy because the offset is not happening, but rather the average person is being used for their need to consume, and their ability to provide cheap labor, rather than being enfranchised as a citizen.

Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence, including the degradation of the environment. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s tough to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

Research has shown that the political inequality and growth that occur every day undo the claimed impacts originating from the specific history of the subversion of the civil rights movement discussed above. This history manifested as a quiet continuation (in the complex intergenerational justice) of the racist “separate but equal” doctrine. That process treated children of color as worth substantially less and, given the climate crisis, should, without resources, nonetheless absorb the brunt of the harm.

The standard charities benefited from being used historically to subvert the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing the good these families claimed to be doing downstream. This move exponentially accelerated the climate and related crises while aiming to mitigate the harm of these crises toward the least responsible and most vulnerable.

We told people that they were equals and influencers in a democracy, and that was freedom. Then we slowly used family policy to dilute and degrade their vote into essentially a shopping aisle vote. And then we started to raise the temperature.

One Solution: Requiring Contextualized Impact Claims With Neutral Fact-checking

We ask these four questions of people and organizations claiming to “add value” to the world:

1. How were you accounting for children entering the world when you were adding value?

2. What was happening each day in terms of relative positional relations?

3. How are you ensuring legitimacy and an obligation to follow the law through the use of empowering language that resonates with those around you?

4. How do we value the loss of maternal and infant deaths that are rising in the climate crisis?

We can urge all to admit our work is being undone every day as children enter the world in conditions that violate their rights and block their physical capacity to constitute groups of free and equal people. Violating children’s overriding birthright to political equity has done more harm to our missions than good.

The focus would be on the combined suffering of infants and animals and specific disclosures contrasting impact claims with children entering the world without equitizing rights/beneath the line of their entitlements. How much was undone, how far were the baseline degrades, and how disenfranchised were the actual voices? That is what is owed under equity reparations, and if we take our values seriously, we will use them to form subject relations, not just subject-object relations. This could mean extending debt for climate harm to the children of those who have benefited the most from the system that caused it.

Key to this work is unfair competition litigation, where honest organizations cannot compete with those that omit the due process and cover clawback reparations. To uphold our values with integrity, we must first acknowledge the precise amount owed under established standards of political birth equity, which address fraud and violations of civil and children’s rights. What is owed for fraud, in cases such as omissive impact claims, can be used to initiate the larger reparations owed.

We can preemptively standardize impact claims, climate and environmental damage assessments, and reparations processes to ensure, on balance, the outcomes being claimed are achieved. All climate reparations must be based on measurable and collective self-determination. There are no values outside of that system, given climatological impacts on infants.

This would avoid countless deaths, zeroing out and compensating for harms in ways that accurately account for costs and benefits. These changes begin with mandatory disclosure requirements that account for exactly how much of the claimed impacts were undone. They involve switching to a system of less omissive language that includes specific disclosures. It also means prioritizing family-based climate and other reparations that compensate for our omissions and the benefits, at the cost to others, we accrued.

The disclosures require contrasting claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline that children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alter that baseline valuation outside of the infant’s needs. Omitting this information hides reparations liability and accurate assessments of how we benefited from children born into conditions that violated their rights, in ways that degraded the ecologies they needed to thrive, and in ways that politically disenfranchised them so that they could not alter this reality.

The core of the charitable omissions or false claims involves the use of the same fundamental system of entitlements and disclosures that caused the climate crisis in order to avoid liability for it. Failing to address the fundamental omissions means that, as the crisis intensifies, we are actually doing more harm than good by masking the underlying drivers.

In essence, we are able to “double dip,” ignoring birth positionality—the fundamental system that drives the outcomes and is the primary determinant—while pretending we were saviors. Some sought to change this when it became evident the climate crisis would kill countless innocent people. Let’s consider the values we enjoy every day, such as lower ambient temperatures, relative food security, and opportunities that move us toward self-determination. We will make these disclosures and reparations, rather than hiding the most significant determinant of public interest outcomes for our own benefit.

The Fair Start Movement is now pursuing legal action to ensure the disclosure of formerly undisclosed growth impacts on compounded children’s rights violations relative to an actual baseline of harm, increasingly degraded ecosystems, and massive political disenfranchisement. We have a right to know what entities are doing to the physical capacity for all to self-determine.

Nations and their elites cannot evade the floor, or what it means to ensure the inclusion and development of children as empowered citizens, because if they do not, it results in chaos and violence. Those who benefit from the lack of investment may be the ones to face the risk. That’s doubly so if the violence were to shift resources in a way that could democratize otherwise commercialized nations where wealthy children thrive, wrongly, at a deadly cost to the seas of innocent children who did not win the birth lottery.

Nations must be measured not by their military strength or market size, but by the safety, dignity, and freedom they provide their youngest members. Until we reckon with how deeply our systems depend on the controlled suffering of children, any claim to justice remains hollow.

A just world cannot be built on their backs. It must be built with their full humanity at the center.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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