Want to understand the most just and effective solution to many of the world’s crises, like climate change, today?
Ask anyone proposing an intervention to tell you how they have been accounting for children as a key factor in their work. Factcheck it with AI. You will be surprised.
Inequitable growth has put more animals and children in conditions of abuse, neglect and suffering than any organization has been able to save, and that’s before we factor in compounding factors like the climate crisis, and the decline of democracy.
Measurable political equity is a necessary condition of being free, but the privatization of reproductive rights in the Twentieth Century made assuring that equity impossible. The fix is to require it as preemptive standard today, implemented through fundable birth equity standards.
No child is worth more than another.
Take Action: Engage those, like Bob Sternfels, who benefitted from a system that has killed millions to tell the truth and change course and move towards Fair Start Certification.
The core discourse to engage in the solution: “_______’s claimed value add does not account for political inequity, which is caused by our all treating children of color as deserving of less than white children, something that has for decades slowly disenfranchised at risk communities. That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes that are undoing our claimed value add to the world, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent. Use of any standard that ignores political equity means actively harming others, while slowly disenfranchising persons of color. Choose the Equity/Fair Start standard instead. Freedom is universal democratic empowerment, not exploiting arbitrary but massive differences in birth positionality and empowerment.” One is either part of a system of mutual obligation, or not, and asking these questions helps determine where others stand.
We may all feel like we create value and beneficial impacts in the world – but relative to what standard? Few talk about how inequitable birth positionality and the growth it has enabled for decades illegally harms the most vulnerable children, and undoes the good work for the public interest many do. We don’t talk about it because inequity and growth benefit those at the top, often those funding us. This is not about population. It’s about political equity, or having an effective voice in ones’ political system. Not the word “population” in the phrase “we should reduce population to reduce climate emissions” but the word obligation-creating “we” in that phrase. Wealthy entities never had to pay the cost of a legitimate legal system. We should be fundamentally determined by the constituents with whom I share the nation, not their representatives
Facts:
Most public policy and private business models today are based on a twentieth century sleight of hand standard by world leaders, called political equity and impact fraud (or equifraud), that created a massive bubble of mostly white wealth that is today driving most interventions and policies, and is being guarded by widespread equitywashing, a form of fraud that goes beyond greenwashing and ensures a fantasy world of social justice and beneficial public interest impact. The sleight of hand involved defining things like “power” and “freedom” in terms of the coercive power of the state, and outside of the context of having to measurably empower children at birth by accounting for unjust birth positionality – intergenerationally, racially, in terms of class etc. This allowed elites at the time to assume authority and entitlements rather than birth-legitimate them – a problem that continues today. It relies on the mistaking of isolation for empowerment.
The equifraud standard removed children’s rights and measurable political equity for all as a check on universal reproductive rights, allowing unsustainable growth that enriched some at deadly cost to mostly women and children of color. Use of the standard amounted to an arbitrary, inequitable and unsustainable birth lottery rule. By the conditions of our birth and development, we are part of what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme system, one that did more to harm our most basic values than any of us have possibly done to further them. The standard undoes the good we do, by our own metrics, because all objective value is relative to real world thresholds – like comfortable temperatures, participatory democracy, equal opportunities in life, etc. – that the standard ensures we overshoot and alter. Our work and value adds must be measured relative not to what others are doing, but who we should be, and that standard is defined by children’s rights, and the necessarily collective endeavor of political equity those rights seek to achieve. We are not accounting for or explaining something if we do not start from that standard of fundamental causation, and nothing is more fundamental than accounts of how we are created. Not accounting for the benefits of our birth positionality means not being part of a system of justifiable obligation.
Our lives depends on the people around us. And that state of affairs depends on their birth and development. Our primary obligation is to children, not any document, like a treaty or constitution. At the key moment these issues were being considered, between1948 and 1968, world leaders chose to rely on a false premise (there there is national legitimacy without enough individual empowerment for humans to have avoided the crises we now experience) to make what is a collective action problem exponentially worse by isolating decision-making .
The standard treats the average child of color as deserving fewer resources and deserving more risk. This, over the span of decades, has subverted the racial justice movements of the Twentieth Century. The historic use of the standard, which privatizes the creation of power relations by isolating women in systems of family planning and thereby guts environmental and other protections, has led to the deaths of tens of millions, but as described below those who received the benefits it created are now being asked to pay the full costs – measured at an on-balance assessment, or zero baseline, for value – of those benefits. Between 1948 and 1968 human and reproductive rights organizations were supposed to use an objective standard to limit power relations between humans, and between humans and nonhumans. They did the opposite. And if political authority is based on our inclusion of all as equals, the standard used blocked that process. Worsening political inequity was hidden behind the veil of family and reproductive autonomy, a move that undid most of the benefits of the racial justice movements, and today enable value assessments and impact claims that rely on manufactured numbers and a sleight-of-hand that takes freedom out of the context of political equity.
The sleight of hand framed reproductive rights around the autonomy of parents rather than the political equity of parents, children and their communities. It also defined power as the threat of coercion from the state rather than any form of human influence, a move which evaded world leaders having to fundamentally legitimate benefits and entitlements that derive from birth inequity and unjust positionality. It also allowed influential entities at the top of economic systems to divide those subject to that authority and wealth into left versus right, hiding the top down power dynamic. This was the fundamental corruption of social justice – starting with the illegal privatization of power relations.
A necessary condition of being free is being empowered, with measurable political equity for each person, but because of the sleight of hand our political and legal systems block that condition from being fulfilled as we are created. Humans living in democracy are supposed to offset each other’s influence equally (to be self-determining rather than other-determining), but that’s impossible if there’s no threshold of empowerment for children as they enter the world, and there’s no threshold if the act of having a child is treated by the law as more exclusively an act of self determination of the parents than determination of a child’s, and a community’s, future. The standard works by discounting the freedom that future people deserve in order comprise legitimate societies. Use of the standard thus involves wealth made at cost to objective values used to drown out the voices of those who are trying to prevent that very thing.
The basic obligation to follow the law in a political system derives from being empowered. Again, the standard blocks that because birth inequity makes it impossible to empower children, relative to the thresholds required for intergenerational justice. It is physically impossible to constitute obligatory relations – to control who has power over you – without reforming this. Where else would legally empowering relations come from? The rule of law begins by meaningfully including those subject to it through the language we use, not in ancient documents like treaties and constitutions. The value and impact claims we make situate and orient us in our political system and they indicate our choice to omit or to include the correct accounting for how we benefit and cost others relative to our draw in the exclusionary birth lottery.
If it’s taboo to talk about the right to have children, that taboo has a lot more to do with those at the top avoiding political equity as a primary and an overriding value that with protecting the vulnerable. The equifraud that taboo prevents our addressing has slowly, over decades, commercialized democracies. The power disparity that every would-be parent has had over their future children and future generations for decades is now being reflected in macro level inequity, and the continued inversion of justice. Measurable political equity is a necessary condition of being free, but the privatization of reproductive rights in the Twentieth Century made assuring that equity impossible. The fix, as described below, is to require it as preemptive standard today, implemented through fundable birth equity standards.
Much of the violence in the world today can be logically traced to the illegitimate use of violence by the state, illegitimate because without actual or on balance empowerment governments cannot be representative. Those using the standard often do not see their position as furthering violence because that violence is indirect, often used to defend the privileged positions rather than proactively by the state.
There is a preemptive legal claim against use of the standard, for fraud by omission (political equity and impact fraud). Humans constitute nations through the accurate language of obligation. The claim assesses that X said Y, while in fact when factoring in children entering the world relative to their rights and equity, Z is true. Run that test – using ChatGPT for example – on the average public interest impact claim today and you will see a fantasy world where hidden and daily maternal/infant deaths drive wealth to a few.
For years Fair Start activists have seen nonprofits that use the equifraud standard and the wealthy funders driving them take extreme measures to evade liability, including retaliating against whistleblowers in their organizations. For many, if they can get the benefit of their birth positionality, the systems that use that ongoing injustice to make money, and the appearance of doing good, they will do it until forced not to. They will evade fundamental causation to hide liability. But again, because use of the equifraud standard, for decades, has led to the deaths of millions as the climate crisis and decline of democracy accelerates there are strong reasons to use our legal systems to end equifraud. Many have argued that if a social justice challenge to elites arises, they will devise a fake version of it – a decoy. The idea of parents being liberated to harm their future children is exemplary.
The most glaring examples involved the animal law and liberation movement of recent decades, which largely failed because it embraced a macro form of human and animal propertyhood while raising funding on micro examples of liberation, not even trying to account for animals’ lived experience in the birth-creation of their actual relations with humans, micro-successes that were easily being undone by the upstream macro growth. Many who used veganism to monetize animal rights assume the authorities and entitlements that drive – at the most fundamental and effective level – the oppression of animals, and assume and benefit from arcs of population growth and decline that will kill many outside of their immediate circles and echo chambers.
Inequitable growth has put more animals and children in conditions of abuse, neglect and suffering than any organization has been able to save, and that’s before we factor in compounding factors like the climate crisis, and the decline of democracy.
There are those doing better and avoiding equifraud, organizations that account for the way growth undoes social justice, especially because of birth inequity. But they can’t really compete with organizations that ignore or exploit that factor and improve their position in an illegitimate system (by their own values) rather than legitimate that system. Organizations trying to legitimize the system through the fundamental truth and reconciliation of prioritizing birth equity thus have legal claims, often in the area of unfair competition, civil rights and constitutional law, to block the use of the equifraud standard by those organizations that use it to compete unfairly. Preemptively fair competition is how the vulnerable give their kids a chance, rather than using the existing legal system to dilute and disenfranchise.
There is a preemptive right to be measurably empowered, and our laws cannot be interpreted in a way that excludes persons from that process through birth and development. In this case, if we’re interpreting a consumer protection or unfair competition statute for what people have to disclose about their value assessments and impacts, courts can’t interpret those laws in a way that disenfranchises the people that are subject to them because courts’ basic authority relies on empowering those persons. That argument isn’t new, but it was never applied in the context of ” it takes a village to plan for a child” as a preemptive standard, because it was blocked by a colonial and patriarchal system where men (aided by corrupt lawyers) generally see autonomy as disconnected from the social relations that actually enable it. That system is the basis of equity/ legitimacywashing.
Organizations like Truthalliance.global have claims for civil rights violations of the most basic right – the right to be empowered – or the active and deadly disembedding of a person from their political system and efficacy in it. This action is derived from the preemptive meaning of the word “we” in the preamble of the Constitution and any other use of collective references to obligation in legal instruments. Those collective references have to mean “one person, one effective vote: – which means measurable political equity. There is no such thing as freedom out of the context if political equity, and governments can’t hide what it means to empower their subjects to avoid liability for the polycrisis they caused.
Fair Start recently received light finding to bring the first action for this against Coca-Cola for its illegal discounting and concealment with fraudulent omissions related to sale of its products. The equifraud involves measuring a variety of harms, to our ecologies, democracies and legal systems, economic communities premised on equal opportunity, etc. from high and arbitrary numbers rather than the only fair and just measure: from zero. of We all have a choice to be part of a movement ending equifraud, or the system that is continuing it. We all have a choice to be primarily obligated to the most vulnerable, infants and animals, who we protect with the thresholds described above which ensure we all become free or self-determining, or primarily obligated to those at the top who are enriched when we don’t use the thresholds.
This is the most just and effective work one can do, assuming one asks the right questions, based on the facts above. As the death toll from climate/inequity grows, those entities that want to legitimately account for full costs of their benefits cannot compete against those who do not, and governments must enjoin the use of a standard that allows the latter to externalize at the most fundamental level – reproductive rights regimes and systems of intergenerational justice, really as a form of comprehensive civil rights and physical “constitutionalism” that goes well beyond topical, divisive, and downstream DEIJ, ESG, etc. interventions. The first constitutional cause of action is to enjoin the use of a standard that disenfranchises. In that split, one is either part of a system of obligation, or not, and we deserve as much protection as we extend to the most vulnerable.
In the book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the author described a similar phenomenon, but did not account for birth inequity, the physical constitution of nations, or nonhuman liberation, and did not provide a practical test and method for solving the problem.
The core discourse to engage in the solution: “_______’s claimed value add does not account for political inequity, which is caused by our all treating children of color as deserving of less than white children, something that has for decades slowly disenfranchised at risk communities. That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes that are undoing our claimed value add to the world, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent. Use of any standard that ignores political equity means actively harming others, while slowly disenfranchising persons of color. Choose the Equity/Fair Start standard instead. Freedom is universal democratic empowerment, not exploiting arbitrary but massive differences in birth positionality and empowerment.” One is either part of a system of mutual obligation, or not, and asking these questions helps determine where others stand.
Justice means not benefiting at deadly cost to others and not doing so starts by accounting for birth positionality. It would be physically impossible to be self-determining in any literal sense without the reforms above, and the discourse of getting all children over the line that enables them.
Before the white man’s footprints darkened our soil, before land was fenced and ownership written on paper, our people lived in a democracy of trust, a circle of life where every hand fed the other and every decision served the whole community.
I come from western Uganda, those days, the women care groups were the beating heart of the homestead. They didn’t hold titles or offices, yet they ruled the rhythm of the seasons.
They knew which seeds would call the rain, which herbs would heal hunger, and which trees would guard the wells. Their wisdom was our wealth.
We never spoke of food insecurity because food was shared, not sold.
We didn’t fear drought because we protected the trees, the springs, and the sacred rhythm between work and rest. We didn’t know inequality because every woman’s hands shaped the home, and every man’s strength served the family. In those days, democracy wasn’t written in books; it lived in our hearts. Elders met under the great local tree not to rule, but to reason. Families decided together about planting, marriage, and birth guided by values that put life before wealth.
The Family before Destruction
Our families were nuclear in structure but extended in spirit.
A man, a woman, their children yet the village raised them all.
A child belonged not just to the womb, but to the clan.
What outsiders now call family planning was once part of our wisdom. The elders taught that a home should grow only as far as the land and love could sustain. Women gathered under banana groves, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters to share herbs, stories, and counsel on how to care for both body and earth.
Then came the colonial shadow.
Foreign rulers broke our granaries, fenced our wells, and called our rivers “property.”
They mocked our ways, dismissed the voices of women, and tore apart the balance that held us together. They brought hunger not of the stomach alone, but of spirit. A hunger for land, power, and things that could never fill the soul.
Reclaiming the Roots
Today, our women care groups are rising again.
They are planting kitchen gardens, restoring indigenous seeds, and teaching young girls their worth. They are rebuilding what was broken the bond between people and land, family and democracy, nature and justice.
We say again:
“Culture is not backward, it is the foundation of freedom.”
True development is not when a few grow rich, but when every family eats, drinks, and decides together.
Our ancestors taught that water, food, and justice breathe as one. Without them, no democracy can survive, no woman can lead, and no child can dream.
If we heal the land, we heal our people.
If we honor our women, we restore the home.
If we return to our culture, we will be free again from food insecurity, drought, inequality, and water scarcity.
The exponential growth enabled by birth and political inequity, the absence of any protective floor for children in reproductive rights regimes, did more to harm animals than any animal protection group has done to help them.
Many animals charities assess the value they add to the world, and report beneficial impact, but relative to what standard?
Most are using the same fraudulent standard of quietly disenchanting persons of color – and undoing value, on balance – that caused the climate and inequity crises today killing millions. This is the 20th century child-inequity standard that caused the climate crisis, and subverted racial justice movements. The standard removes political equity from reproductive rights and replaces it with manufactured numbers, like high pollution thresholds and diluted representative ratios that undermine democracy. This assessment and reporting standard is fundamentally designed to illegally enrich some children at disenfranchising and deadly cost to others – mostly children of color, in violation of a long list of human and animal rights.
This is not theory. Fair Start and Truth Alliance activists have experienced organizations intentionally omitting information that would show their impacts being undone in order to avoid liability – exacerbating the risk to millions.
Under this cost/benefit standard, some get the benefits of a coercive legal system without having to pay the costs of actually empowering those subject to it. Use of this #equifraud standard hides the fact that value and impact claims and micro-level interventions taken of context, were being undone everyday by the more macro forces that have destroyed our ecologies, democracies, and freedoms. Use of that standard shifted the true costs of wealth onto infants and animals did exponentially more harm – resulting in the deaths of millions as the climate crisis accelerates, measured by values we all share – than any of us did good. There is no set of values that doesn’t begin with infant health/equity, and no legal system could actually protects animals without first accounting for the creation of their disparate power relations with humans.
Free people will always need to legitimize the power – ecological, social, and economic – others have over them, power that starts as children enter the world, and avoid a fraudulent and illegal standard that exploits children as they enter the world by removing any minimum threshold of empowerment and protection rather than paying legitimations that offset the costs of wealth.
Take Action: Before you give to any charity claiming to help animals, ask how they account for child inequity and the growth in enables.
Take Action: Join and back charities that are part of the Truth Alliance, and entity designed to block equity and impact fraud.
Take Action: Organize Truth Alliance work in your state, and urge state officials to do their job and recognize measurable political equity as the correct standard for legitimacy, and to derive and condition their authority on empowering their constituents.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) are under mounting pressure to effectively address both Israel’s ongoing conflicts, war crimes by unaccountable authoritarian regimes, and the climate crisis. Their work to date has had little effect on these crises killing millions, and if anything represents that failure of international law.
Fair Start urges both tribunals to admit that as it stands he ICC and ICJ’s claimed value add of justice to the world does not actually account for having to empower the subjects these institutions claim to represent, and for the massive child inequity our collective failure to empower children has caused: Treating children of color as deserving of less and disenfranchising them.
That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent.
Background
Recent filings before the United Nations Human Rights Council, and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, have detailed peer-reviewed research tracing millions of deaths in the unfolding climate and related crises to a very specific failure in the design of human rights, and reproductive rights, systems decades ago. The failure (by elevating autonomy over political equity) privatized the constitutive creation of power relations, gutting the effective impact of all child-rights regimes and setting the stage for a growth-based climate crisis in which only the impoverished face serious threats. The move was – at the most fundamental level – illegal because under it there are no legal protections for / obligations to the most vulnerable: children are brought into conditions that violate their rights, with after-the-fact interventions and applications of rights, after adults have already gotten the benefit of exploiting them. This in turn threatens political legitimacy, inserting a false premise in which citizens have been expected to follow the law without actually being empowered by it.
More specifically, as described below, we invoke your obligations under the best interpretations of preambular collective pronouns (“We . . .”) in things like state and local constitutions, as interpreted under precedent to ensure one-person, one self-determinative vote and other areas of constitutional law, as well as the Article I and other provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to ensure the political and constitutional self-determination of your constituents.
Governments do not have the right to change the meaning of disenfranchisement in order to escape responsibility for that wrong. A government’s authority depends on fair representation and accurate measures of harm. That authority comes from the people’s ability to govern themselves—not only those alive today, but also future generations. When governments create policies about birth and development mainly to boost the economy instead of empowering citizens, they are exploiting people. This not only harms individuals, but also undermines the government’s own right to govern. The damage done by such policies must be measured honestly and compensated fairly.
Your authority derives from and is contingent on accurate assessment and the remediation of threats to the political self-determination of your constituents (roughly eight standards revolving around restorative climate emission levels), rather than your benchmarking to the commercial self-determination of constituents – the system of exploitation over empowerment driving the climate crisis. Many of the standards currently in use to assess and remediate harm (like high permissible levels of climate emissions enabled by diluted levels of democracy / representative ratios that favor the influential) are the same standards that caused the harms and are drastically different from the number set necessary for political legitimacy, allowing many to avoid liability. This amounts to moving the goalposts to allow for harm that was illegal – in violation of children’s rights (under the Children’s Convention and many other instruments) to be measureably empowered, and governments’ (whose authority is fully derivative) first duty to ensure that empowerment.
The meaning of terms like “we,” and the equal protection and political enfranchisement precedent deriving from that meaning, requires equal offsets of one another’s political influence relative to zero or neutral standard, which in turn requires minimal thresholds of wellbeing and empowerment for all children (consistent with state obligations under the Children’s Convention and other instruments), high thresholds that are inconsistent with the low thresholds and standards being used by many nations. Those same standards were used by many of the nonprofits funded by wealthy families (families plagued with an interest convergence problem in the face of the crucial family reforms they ignored) claiming to watchdog such nations.
The Fair Start Movement is urging both tribunals to confront a deeper truth: Their jurisdiction and legitimacy derive only from measurable empowerment of those they claim to represent.
Any value or impact claim made today is likely out of context because it ignores children entering the world in vastly inequitable conditions as a key factor impacting the veracity of the claim. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem – equity – equitywashing, or the hiding of illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations that ensure defining standards like “green” in a way that enriches some at deadly cost others, and causes the climate crisis.
Equitywashing (disenfranchising to set low standards for “humane” and “green” – a first-order form of fraud the precedes greenwashing and humanewashing) derives from the fundamental subversion of racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century through policies that privatized family planning and thus the fundamental creation of power relations, rather than making the process equitable or empowering.
This was a sleight of hand and power grab by wealthy families and governments that assumed authorities and entitlements rather than legitimating them, treating the idea of freedom from power as freedom from the coercion of the state rather than the ability to consent to any influence of others, and using unsustainable and inequitable reproductive rights standards designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others. The move ensured most people would assume freedom was the absence of government coercion, when that power actually originated in the creation of birth and development positionality/power relations.
This allowed many to use their privileged birth positionality to live lives that were more other-determining than self-determining – degrading freedom for all. Using this standard ensured we did more harm than good- and by their own standards – because children entering the world was not some futuristic and economic consideration but the first determinant of political equity and true freedom.
Linking Climate, Conflict, and Equity
Fair Start highlights that both the climate crisis and persistent conflicts stem from the same root: governments and wealthy elites securing power through systems that disenfranchise children at birth. This practice of equitywashing—ignoring how children enter the world in inequitable conditions—creates illegitimate standards for “green,” “humane,” and even “just” governance, enriching some at the deadly expense of others.
The Movement us urging the ICC and ICJ to recognize that freedom is degraded when birth inequity allows some to live lives more other-determining than self-determining. True justice requires systems of family planning that empower every child equally, ensuring democratic representation and climate sustainability.
According to Mwesigye Robert, who helps lead a growing coalition called Truth Alliance that demands those making value and impact claims actually account for the preemptive obligation to ensure children entering the world are measurably empowered, “We all have a powerful opportunity to add value through addressing child inequality as a chance to uplift every child, everywhere. When children of color are recognized as equally deserving, Funders and communities can build futures that are more just, resilient and full of possibility.”
Fair Start Movement
Fair Start is distinguished because of its courageous challenge to the foundations of international law. By demanding that tribunals like the ICC and ICJ admit their authority comes exclusively from child empowerment, Fair Start is redefining what justice means in the 21st century. If legitimate governance, including the authority to assign wealth, derives from empowering the people, then we all have preemptive right to ensure institutions like international tribunals treat the violation of children’s birthrights as a horrific cost, and not a benefit to be exploited for growth.
Today the Fair Start Movement and an emerging coalition called the Truth Alliance filed a notice of preemptive standards with the California Attorney General seeking full justice in matters, like consumer fraud, impacting the futures of the most vulnerable children.
A New Standard for Justice in California
The Fair Start Movementhas called on the California Attorney General to recognize that existing fraud and similar laws are preempted by what the organization describes as the “full justice” standard. This standard is now before the African Union and asserts that true empowerment requires ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of resources necessary for freedom and self-determination.
Why Equitywashing Is the Core Problem
As the Fair Start Movement has argued in its foundational works, including Illegitimate Power, Illegitimate Violence: How Nations Are Built on the Backs of Disenfranchised Children, conventional legal and policy systems ignore the inequities at birth that drive global crises. This omission leads to political equitywashing, where claims of progress in areas such as climate or human rights obscure the fact that children continue to enter the world in conditions of radical injustice.
The use of the equity fraud standards has meant treating children of color – for decades – as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk. As such, the standard gutted equity, or each person’s equal capacity to influence one’s political system and the outcomes that affect one’s life. That policy has led to millions of deaths in the climate and underlying crises, and the undoing of a lot of the value many claimed to create and the beneficial impacts they had.
This is equity fraud, ensuring the assumption that our birth relations empower us, and in a sufficiently legitimate way to define things like the “green” in greenwashing laws or concepts like animal liberation, when in fact the standards are hardly green or liberating in the sense of what the most vulnerable children and animals need, but rather designed to enrich some at cost to others. Activists were comparing themselves to the worst actors rather than what was necessary to achieve their ends on balance, thus ensuring a race to the bottom.
Empowerment as the Basis of Legitimacy
Fair Start’s letter to the California Attorney General emphasizes that governmental and corporate authority cannot be legitimate if it is not conditioned on empowering those it claims to represent. By centering child equity in all claims of value, impact, and legality, the Fair Start Movement argues that freedom and justice must be defined not as an absence of state coercion but as true consent to any external influence—a consent impossible without equitable starts in life.
According to Mwesigye Robert, who helps lead a growing coalition called Truth Alliance that demands those making value and impact claims actually account for the preemptive need to ensure children entering the world are measurably empowered: “Positionality matters, children from the global south deserve to be seen as equal in dignity and opportunity and when global policies reflect that equity, their voice potential can truly be heard in highlighting the need for fairness in family planning and development funding.”
Fair Start Movement
The Fair Start Movement is the only organization connecting the root causes of the climate crisis, inequality, and illegitimate governance to the fundamental issue of inequitable births. Their legal advocacy, including direct appeals to the California Attorney General, marks a groundbreaking step toward transforming systems of law and policy.
If legitimate governance, including the authority to assign wealth, derives from empowering the people, then we all have preemptive right to ensure businesses treat the violation of children’s birthrights as a horrific cost, and not a benefit to be exploited for growth.
Do you believe children deserve a fair start in life? Prioritizing that is the most effective way to ensure a better world.
The idea of an equity override is about putting fairness at the center when the strict letter of the law falls short. At the World Court hearing where climate change was described as an “urgent and existential threat, ”an equity override would allow the Court to look beyond technical legalities and focus on what is right and just, especially for those most affected.
This approach would empower the Court to prioritize justice over rigid legal formalism, reinforcing demands like those of Fair Start: that historical emitters must take the lead in mitigation and support. Equity overrides shifts the conversation from narrow legal obligations to broader moral responsibilities, centering principles like climate finance, loss and damage reparations, and Fair Start development pathways.
(For information on Fair Star’s planned research in the context of vulnerability theory, read more here).
For the Global South, this isn’t just about legal recognition–it’s about survival, dignity, and the right to a future shaped by justice rather than inherited crisis.
The Problem: Equitywashing and the Legacy of Power
Any value or impact claim made today is likely out of context because it ignores the radically unequal conditions children face at birth. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem – equitywashing:the hiding of illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations that ensure defining standards like “green” in a way that enriches some at deadly cost others, and causes the climate crisis.
Those policies led to systems of subjective valuation that hid impacts on objective values like infant health and equity, and ensured the world overshot key thresholds within less than a few generations leading to the climate and political crises we see today. Overshoot was thus essentially the illegal shifting of power.
The standards took the idea of bodily autonomy outside of one’s political equity (accounting for all measures determining that equity and the emancipation it implies), or one’s capacity to influence outcomes that influence them, disenfranchising people. For example, many companies and nonprofit organizations use cost/benefit business models that treat infant victims of the climate crisis as equally self-determining as those who benefited the most from it. These models ignore those infants’ overriding right to equity resources/reparations as the basis of political obligation and state legitimacy. Such frameworks are not just unethical, they are unlawful,, and potentially actionable under unfair competition laws.
This is not about “population control”, but empowerment: is your political “we” legitimate or built under the latter. Our supposed freedom becomes a mechanism for others’ wealth.
Here’s one example: under current legal frameworks, even the most liberal ones—a woman terminating a pregnancy is considered autonomous. Yet if she later dies in a heatwave because she couldn’t influence her government to act, what kind of autonomy is that? She wasn’t free—she was positioned that way by illegitimate standards that valued her life incorrectly–-she was treated as an economic input.
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. She was never free because she was never physically empowered, and in that situation, there would have actually been little reason to follow the rules. What went wrong? She was slowly being disenfranchised. Her freedom was taken out of context, and valued incorrectly, as governments began their worth with the injustice of an illegal birth lottery.
The Consequences: Systemic Disenfranchisement
For decades equity fraud standards have treated children of color as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk. In doing so, these standards gutted the very idea of equity—equal power to shape the political and economic systems that determine our lives
The Solution: A Preemptive Right to Equity-Reparations
NGOs should have always used measurable birth-based political equity as their guidestar, not sustainability – not sustaining the commercialized democracy approach that created Trump.
There is a big difference. Where else does national legitimacy, and the authority to entitle wealth, come from if not birth equity?
Here is one way to pivot to justice and a form of equity that overrides competing values given that the future majority need freedom, and outnumber those alive today:
Many are already taking wealth that externalized its costs onto children and using it to fund (via “legitimations”) collective family planning unions that expect government and the wealthy to treat their authority and entitlements as contingent on actually empowering constituents rather than exploiting them for more growth.
There is a preemptive right to equity-based reparations, payable to more collective systems of family planning that guarantee every child a fair start.. Governments must derive their authority and legitimacy from the measurable empowerment, or political equity (equal offsets, relative to zero), of its constituents. That means no child should be born beneath the “legitimacy line”—the threshold of self-determination and necessary resources.
The only viable reform tactic? Fact-value checking—securing public admissions of truth and formal commitments to change. This kind of discourse doesn’t just inform policy; it creates obligation. It builds the foundation for truly self-determining lives.
This is not about mere intersectionality. It’s about unifying obligation and asserting the preemptive principle: governments cannot unilaterally define empowerment. Empowerment is measurable. And a just society must begin by measuring what truly matters.
Obligation, not intersectionality. This is about preemption – governments can’t define what it means to be empowered. That is an objectively measurable thing.
“Great wealth does not shield you,” French Gates says. “I have an absurd amount of wealth and I’m doing my very best to give it away. … But what I want people to know is that I’m a human being and they may put a label on me, but that label doesn’t really define who I am. … By being my authentic self, I hope they can see, OK, she’s gone through struggles and hardship too, but come out the other side and so maybe I can as well.”
Fair Start, by contacting her foundations this week, is urging her to Tell the Truth.
All of our not accounting, in our value and impact assessments and claims, for how for children enter the world relative to what their rights require has done more harm to our values and goals than we have done to further them. This is especially so because ignoring their birthrights both violated and degraded the ecological, social, and olitical thresholds necessary for justice and national legitimacy, and treated children of color as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk than white children, discounting their lives to enrich others through growth. This single largest driver of the crisies we see today – not paying costs of functional legal rights for the future majority, which ensures growth and demand that undoes social justice imact, an undoing which we hide through omission.
Admitting this failure as part of the process of deriving and conditioning our obligation to follow the law on understanding our self-determination in the context of others – the intergenerational freedom and justice that makes representative and consensual governance possible – is the first step towards righting this wrong and not free-riding on our birth positionality. We admit we were not accounting for children entering the world in conditions consistent with their rights and political equity, the first measures necessary for national legitimacy and the assignment of entitlements to things like wealth. This did more to hide liability than further our missions. It entailed using the same flawed value assessment and reporting model, the most basic criteria for evaluation, that caused the political and ecological crises we see today to conceal liability for them.
This step is part of preempting conflicting standards that interfere with justice, which we cannot get to without starting with intergenerational justice as we constitute future relations. A world with rich infants and dying, impoverished infants, reflects illegal exclusion and a failure to constitute legitimately. Tital liberation starts with elevating the most vulnerable, infants and the animals with whom they will share the world.
We are asking Melinda:
When you make claims of adding value and beneficial impact, how were you accounting for children entering the world relative to what their rights require and reparations for the violations of those rights?
Equitywashing comes before green or humane washing, ensuring incusive criteria to accuratey asses the latter and in ways that avoid things like a climate crisis enriching some and killing others.
There is more suffering than ever in the world today because of that standard, which evades children’s brithrights – and the need to legitimate authority and entitlements via legitimacy thresholds – to instead ensure cheap labor and consumer demand. The rich were playing both sides, funding the industry and those who jumped in to say they were opposed.
This is not population. This is not something different – a different object – from you or anyone else, at all. It’s the orientation of the collective subject-pronoun, the obligated “we,” in our language.
This omissive standard risks millions of lives, will cost businesses trillions of dollars, and its use constitutes the fraudulent withholding of equity reparations. Using this standard makes it impossible to meet our commitments, which imply context, and the protecting of key social, ecological and political thresholds.
Much of the wealth in the world today was made at cost to, and in violation of, children’s birth and development rights, including to political equity (or equal offets relative to zero). This illegal shifting of costs and degrading of the threshold of self-determination continued well after it was clear we’ve been in overshoot of the ecological, social and political metrics/thresholds that frame those rights.
Those who hold wealth did not create value. They benefited from the violation of children’s birthrights to move costs, converting democracy into something more commercial, rather than legitimating their wealth and the state authority protecting it.
Who created Trump and Musk? Use of the illegal standard described here shows liberals caring more about the free money coming from their growth-based investmemnts than values, values ike moderate temperatures, access to water and nature, participatory democracy, equal opportunity etc.
Our first hurdle is to overcome the idea that having kids is just about the freedom of the parents. It’s also about the freedom of the child and the community they form. And that second freedom is unique because all authority to govern and to own wealth first derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons, with one person/one vote or equal self-determination.
But by 1968, governments had used the standard – which omits how children entering the world change our claimed impacts – to take equity out of reproductive rights systems so that inclusion never occurred. Instead, the illegal discounting of infants’ and animals’ rights, economic growth became the standard in a shell/ponzi scheme that took one’s freedom taken out of one’s birth positional context.
They assumed rather than legitimated their authority and entitlements, and by treating reproductive rights as based on parental whim rather than children’s rightr, power relations became subjective/commercial. The fundamental criteria use to evaluate – our rules – failed to evade the climate crisis because people were effectively excluded, bu growth and inequity, from making those rules.
Justice was taken out of where the power differentials, especially in the long run, were being made the greatest. This was equity fraud, avoiding protections inherent in the overriding right to democratic equity by only applying protections after children entered the world, in band-aid fashion, rather than before.
This was a power grab, where governments just assumed authority and entitlements without actually legitimating them through rights.
This meant zero functional protections for infants as they entered the world, and the animals they would impact. That “population” is the closest common concept to this shows how deep the subversion runs. There were two standards: An illegitimate one designed to enrich wealthy white children that assumed governmental authority and entitlements to wealth and the legitimate standard of actually including children of color that was passed over.
This gutted what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black birth equity, which benefited some children at deadly cost to others through unsustainable and inequitable growth. Operating outside of those rights, those parameters, harms others. The standard, using manufactured numbers, treats children of color as deserving exponentially fewer resources and more risk, including the violence inherent in unrepresentative government.
We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
The standard allowed public interest organizations to maintain demand for products and cheaper labor, simultaneously undoing upstream the impacts they claimed to be making downstream through decoy, symbolic or charade-like interventions that used wealth made at cost to rights and objective values, to force attention on the symptoms and not the cause. By creating a fantasy world of change being undone daily by birth inequity, philanthropists were laid the groundwork for the threats our democracies now face.
The omission of daily undoing, through inequitable growth, is the subversion.
There is no such thing as an anthrocentric animal rights activist, and macro animal liberation requires equity reparations for future families that restore nature. Without macro animal personood, at a subject level of our thinking and commuciations, micro acts of animal protection becomes a charade.
It’s not about intent, but rather than consequences of our actions, and the language – using words like “humane” for a system increasingly causing suffering – under which we acted.
The wealth derived from that subversion today via foundations and otherwise funds media, nonprofits, academics (who were never neutral because they never accounted, as a default requirement for benefitting from the system, for their birth positionality), etc. who free ride on the birth lottery and continue to make false claims to protect the wealth. But we can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis and allowed generations of illegal wealth to compound in order to evade liability for it — that’s fraud. And the constitutional language that resolves it will be accessible to all, not owned by some. Would we have to go to court to get a decision as to the overriding nature of birth equity? The court’s authority derives from it.
The subversion took the idea of freedom, or autonomy, outside of one’s equity in one’s democracy and ability to influence political outcomes. But there is a first right to representative or consensual governance through inclusion and empowerment. Government can’t make up their own authority, including to define fraud in the basic allocation of costs and benefits, and entitle wealth to whom they choose. This is not about capitalism or socialism. This is about legitimacy and illegitimacy and the obligation to derive national sovereignty from individual sovereignty.
One way to tell the story involves abortion policy
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.
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. That is what commercialized/privatized/diluted freedom, and consumerism as social justice, 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 hides things.
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.
But it is physically impossible to be free, as in objectively self-determining as opposed to other-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to first ensure that persons are created, developed, and emancipated in ways that equally offset their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position like nature/the nonhuman world. Legitimacy is a physical state of capacity to have consensual representative government derived from how we relate to one another.
Representative governance, and things like entitlement to wealth, derive from a legitimate legal system in which people are first obligated to one another, which is what it means in a constitution to say “we the people.” Our first obligations are to each other, in the creation at birth of the power relations between us. Ensuring our obligations to children are how we fist become politically obligated to one another, unless one gives up the idea of government by the people and consensual governance. We don’t get to maximize welfare through economic growth and massive inequality, at cost of self-determination, because that latter value is what is necessary to legitimate the former and subject it to consensual governance.
The subversion hid this fact.
If we do not agree to invest enough in children’s birth and development conditions, enough to offset their capacity to influence others relative to a neutral or zero position, then constituents are not being empowered equally, and representatives and officials do not represent us at all. Our values are operating at the object-level of our communication, where they can be undone, rather than at a subject level that reflects the creation of power relations. Animal personhood and liberation, in a macrosense, works at the subject level. That can be reversed, as discussed below, by collective family planning systems. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one.
This ensures a preemptive standard to avoid governments hiding their own liability for actual harms associated with the climate crisis, governments whose work is preempted by the need to first legitimize ther authority. A fair start in life for all children is the first law, and no one is above the law.
There’s a counterfactual world, a legal world in which the subversion didn’t happen, in which wealth was not made illegally at cost to children’s and others’ rights. That is measure of reparative justice owed. Things like racial justice and animal liberation align once we abandon the standard that allows us to violate – in creation – the rights of others, exploiting children and animals by bringing the latter in beneath the threshold of things we owe them.
Things like AI governance reforms around better base code that ensures no obligation to follow the law without being empowered to change it, and using crowdsourcing for the enforcement of life-saving and self-defensive equity reparations to empower can change this. For example, those negotiating the Paris Agreement on climate assumed authority and entitlements rather than actually legitimating them – a move that will kill countless innocent victims. Telling the Truth resolves this.
We can’t get to justice from injustice or obligations from others by first violating our obligations to them. Change starts with the most vulnerable, infants and animals, and their rights to be measurably free.
Telling the truth is a constitutive discourse, the only means to a just and legitimate future.
We ask these questions of anyone claiming to add value to the world:
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 back and condition it on ensuring such birthrights? 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 basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
The illegal standard is designed to hide deadly costs and liability.
And the preemptive standard, as both a means of interpreting law and actually creating obligation to future children, requires the disclosure of that information through a truth and reconciliation process meant to ensure the full payment of damages by creating a situation where children are capable of forming self-determining communities.
Changing away from the subversion and its standard, reorienting by Telling the Truth in response to the questions above, could save millions of lives and trillions of dollars while constituting a just future through a discourse that includes all in the ongoing formation of a protective social contract. Children entering the world relative to standard of self-determination or sovereignty is the only source from which governmental sovereignty and authority can derive, including authority to assign property rights to wealth. The Children’s Rights Convention, replaces national sovereignty as the basis for international law because the latter derives from the former. Otherwise, you are using a false premise where one go from adult reproductive rights to protect autonomy, to adult human rights to protect autonomy, with children’s rights thrown in – as abandaid after the fact – rather than as a check on the creation of power relations.
If we want to be in a legitimate political system, we need to first account for our existence, our birth-based positionality, and privilege, or we cannot be truly self-determining, deriving governmental authority, entitlements to wealth, and obligation to follow the law on measurable and equitable empowerment for all as children enter the world. If we can’t fully account for our birth-based position in the social contract, we fall outside its scope of obligation – why would we be collectively obligated to those who cannot account? Tell the Truth devides the free from the unfree.
Elevating infants and animals enables authority, the rule of law, and justice. Anything else is too late.
Take Action
Fair Start, by contacting her foundations this week, is urging her to Tell the Truth.
A Voice From Mwesigye Robert, Zahara Nabakoza , Esther Afolaranmi and Betty Martin-Finneran.
The voices from Africa, and of black communities in the United States, are rising against the fundamentally illegal standards that violate children’s rights in poor regions and recognize the value of using rich children in exploiting poor children.
Children’s Rights Must Not Be Overlooked.
Rejoice Africa Foundation, on behalf of a coalition of organizations, groups, and movements and voiceless from afflicted communities from Africa and India is calling on many United States attorneys generals – under their international law obligations – to reorient the business model in the Coke/Fairlife litigation that treated children of color as deserving exponentially less than white children and hid the harm it was causing them.
That model is costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
This violated human rights laws and is equity fraud – it’s using the same fundamentally fraudulent metrics that caused the climate crisis to evade liability for it. This was the biggest cause of the case’s harm, and using that standard did more harm than good.
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It harmed the work of Rejoice Africa Foundation using the Afrocentric model of decentralizing human power and freedom, treating all children as deserving rights, making wealth and governance condition their entitlements and authority on empowering each person.
We championed call for action and reconsideration of the rights of vulnerable children, not ensuring children’s birthrights and instead exploiting inequitable growth did more harm to all of our values than we did to further them. But we still see a troubling imbalance while animal rights gain global attention, yet millions of children suffer in silence and remain neglected. Through our Tell the Truth Campaign, we urge you to acknowledge this injustice and take action.
Children from marginalized communities face poverty, diseases, exploitation, and climate-driven hardship.
They deserve the same level of compassion and advocacy as animals.
Join us in telling the truth: children’s rights must not be overlooked. Let’s work together to create a world where every child has the dignity, protection, health, climate change , food security, and other basic needs they deserve in life.
In an upcoming Tell the Truth campaign filing before the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, we will allege U.S. companies and charities are using an illegal standard to define words like “sustainable” and “liberty” benchmarked to enrich the white children of wealthy families here, rather than be truly sustainable and liberating for all children, especially those in Amboseli. The standard is illegal because it allows the use of those terms for practices that violate child welfare, environmental, civil rights, and the law of democracy.
Coke/fair was used on manufactured numbers to get to particular targeted results that are illegal, and we have testimony in Affidavit before the African Union it’s done elsewhere and it’s common but it’s not easy to challenge because also government and companies are busy making these numbers to benefit but people and animals are losing this in the system enriched them to an unsustainable which caused inequality, injustices and emotions. The assessment of equality, humane and ecosystem of the harm was based on high numbers and false pledges.
Victims are suffering from a climate crisis that was not caused as a result of wealthy people hiding from the truth that deepens the vulnerability.
Severe climate related issues that disrupt ecosystems, economies and livelihood. These shocks can be caused by extreme weather changes such as droughts, floods and heat waves which often lead to devastating consequences like food insecurity, displacement, diseases, injustices and poverty.
Vulnerable communities like the global south, climate shock worsen food insecurity, malnutrition and poverty. These impacts are often intensified by global factors including emissions and unsustainable practices from the global north that contribute to harsh climatic changes. The hardships are seen through erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts, diseases and poverty. Global north companies continue to concentrate on wealthy accumulation through doing business that pollutes the environment of innocent people and are affected more compared to the wealthy people.
Harsh climate change impacts the global south causing devastating losses of homes, livelihood and cultural heritage. Many victims face relentless disasters with little support and hence resort to self-denial as a coping mechanism. Reducing emotions becomes a survival strategy in the situation of unacknowledged suffering, systemic neglect and overwhelming reality of an uncertain future. This emotional challenge cannot be bearable therefore victims have heard enough silent cry for justice, equality and urgent climate action but voices have been undermined or not heard because of the top line system.
This self-denial has fueled deep anger among global south victims who bear the brunt of the crisis did not create.
Displacement, food insecurity, diseases and poverty intensifies the frustration especially as the global north continues unsustainable practices with minimal accountability. This anger is not personal, it is a collective, directed at systemic injustices, broken/empty pledges and the failure of global leaders / United Nations to act decisively. Therefore it is a powerful selfless force driving climate activism in demanding reparations while pushing for urgent equitable solutions using Fair Start Movement standards.
Faced with harsh realities of climate changes, few victims in the global south are starting negotiations/bargaining. Victims seek global north to invert, accept climate error, policy change and act as obligations. This emotional response based on victims attempting to secure survival in an unjust system without meaning global actions and fear negotiations remain one sided leaving victims continue struggling for the solutions in the crisis not created by victims.
In the western Uganda, Rejoice Africa Foundation used the Afrocentric model to support the community through Women Care groups, Women Care Groups worked tirelessly to grow kitchen gardens. Cabbages, Carrots, tomatoes, Egg plants and spinach thrived under watchful eyes, providing plant based nutritious vegetable food for the families and sources of micro income for the domestic basic needs in the families.
A growing threat loomed based on plastic pollution where used bottles from Coca-Cola poorly disposed of into the environment and acted as vector hiding breeding areas for mosquitoes and children were sick of malaria and some died of malaria. Then garbage was full of plastic bottles and then washed away by rain into the water sources near and ended affecting aquatic animals like fish, also reduced the volume of water sources and contributed to water contamination.
Climate had also grown unpredictable, Rainfall patterns shifted causing prolonged droughts that wilted the once flourishing kitchen gardens and women struggled to water vegetables in the kitchen gardens but the plastic waste bottles reduced the volume of water and leading to the drying up of near water sources then women had to fetch water for irrigation from long distance 1 kilometer and this reduced the yield of vegetables from kitchen gardens.
And also this drought affected animals. Domestic animals that feed on grass and shrubs and also on water animals could go long distances looking for water and grass, and some animals could die of hunger and water scarcity.
Rejoice Africa Foundation is actively testing community driven solutions using Afrocentric modeling to address the emotional impact of harsh climate change on victims in the global south.
Through public health support, resilience building programs and sustainable initiatives like women led kitchen gardens, Agroforestry, sanitation and hygiene and educational services. Rejoice Africa Foundation strives for saving the next generation from Climate harm, injustices and inequality through bringing hope and empowerment to affected communities.
Together, the women care groups launched a clean-up campaign under Rejoice Africa Foundation to educate others about recycling and holding corporations accountable.
Tell the Truth – Admit – Your benefitting from a system that violated children’s birthrights did more harm to your values and cause than you did to further them. Take action.
