I am by no means comparing myself to the great names listed above, but I do believe the Consumer Equity movement is of equal importance to everyday citizens as any of the movements backed by those great names.

In any case, I’ve got a helluva story to tell.

My Irish Catholic mother - in love with John F. ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you Kennedy - raised her children to be public servants. I was born in 1965 – a year and a half after JFK was assassinated. I was an Eagle Scout.  I went to West Point and served in the Army. My younger brother was an Eagle Scout and a pilot in the Navy. My older brother was a physicist and had an Oppenheimer type role in the Navy. Had my mother lived longer, my baby sister would have found herself in uniform.

I married my high school sweetheart, Heidi, and Army life was not for her. So, I eventually had to find new ways to satisfy my calling to serve. Over the years, I have found an eclectic variety of public and private sector engagements to serve the public. I’ve worked for the UN, USAID and even the CIA. In hindsight, my private sector engagements serving the public have definitely had the greatest impact, but I never found it as satisfying at the time because it lacked a formal, government chain-of-command pat-on-the-back to validate my public service identity. I longed for those pats-on-the-back – “probably a mommy issue,” says my wife, a licensed therapist.

With my brothers and a younger sister and my father, I helped found a technology firm in 1997. Through ups and downs and existential threats that accompany the small business, start-up experience, we eventually became a micro-cap, publicly traded company with operations in China, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa. Our annual revenue eventually exceeded $100 million. In 2005, I was recruited by the CIA to use the family business as cover for various operations.

One CIA operation was so large, it pushed our annual revenue up by approximately 30%. In late 2010, I was awarded the Earl Warren Outstanding Public Service Award for my work on the project. I was so moved by the chain-of-command pat-on-the back, embarrassingly, I shed a few tears when I received the award at Langley.

A few months later, the Regional SEC Division of Enforcement came to visit my office. I was actually in a meeting with my CIA handler when they arrived. The SEC wanted me to immediately take them to a warehouse where my company was specifically and solely engaged in work for the CIA – the work that increased our revenue by 30% in one year and which the SEC found suspicious.

The SEC converted the inquiry into a formal investigation based on the allegation that I lied about national security. Once the CIA raised their hand and took credit for the warehouse, the SEC used the investigative authority to look at every other aspect of my life. The investigation ran for five years. My family’s company was bankrupted. I was personally bankrupted, and I lost my home to foreclosure. My brothers, sister and father quit speaking to me. I was never charged with anything, but now my name was on a list with the SEC. My wife was thinking maybe we should have stayed in the Army.

It took me some time to reinvent myself. I suffered a major identity crisis. Heidi and I had five young children and one of them is severely handicapped. I had to put aside my public service identity crisis – at least for the time being - and prioritize just figuring out how to make money. Making money was not easy with the stink of an SEC investigation on me.

After several trials and errors over the course of about three years, I finally established traction as a consultant to start-up and early-stage businesses drawing on the experience I gained building my own family business. My compensation was usually tied to my client’s success in the form of a stock based agreement. I had learned how to raise funds for my family’s business in the micro-cap, public market and I was using those skills for many of my new clients by assisting them with strategies to list public on the OTC market.

(Side Note - The micro-cap, public OTC market is a chaotic, unforgiving capital formation environment, largely misunderstood by both its participants and regulators, with over 10,000 listed companies that cumulatively have less buying and selling of shares—measured in dollars traded—than Apple trades all on its own in any given year, but hold that thought for later.)

Overtime, I even found my way back to enjoying public service again. The lion’s share of my work gravitated toward early-stage and start-up companies in global developing economic regions. My favorite projects were in Kenya and Cuba. I learned to enjoy public service without a government chain-of-command pat-on-the-back.

One of my client’s was an electric vehicle (EV) company operating in Kenya and like most electric vehicle companies, their share price followed Tesla’s meteoric performance in 2020 and 2021. Long story short, the Kenyan EV company share price performance won them a look-at by the SEC and my name as a consultant set off alarms. The SEC filed charges against me in September of 2023 alleging I had orchestrated a pump and dump. On December 11, 2025, after President Trump was elected, but before he took office, I was indicted.

Even though I feel I have been treated harshly and unfairly by the U.S. Government, I can’t help but take a hard look at myself. What part did I play in getting myself into this predicament? I’ve been self-reflecting now for years in search of what part of the mess I find myself in is of my own doing – lots of therapy, prayers, long talks with my wife, her parents and a few close friends. Here’s what I’ve identified as a common thread: 

My approach to public service has always been from a pedestal reaching down to offer my help. As if my sense of superiority is not arrogant enough, I got more validation for my reaching-down public service endeavors from my government chain-of-command pats-on-the-back than I did from simply knowing I did something good for someone else.

To get it through my thick skull, I had to learn the perils and failures of reaching down to provide public service the hard way. I have suffered, but worst of all, my family has suffered.

(Remember Side Note Above) When I attended the SEC Forums on Small Business Capital Formation in 2008, 2009, and 2010 to reach down and share my first-hand experience with the fulltime SEC employees on how to improve the small business capital formation regulatory environment, no wonder I came under investigation in 2011. My intentions were good – arrogant, but good. In hindsight, as a 60-year old, my 40 something year-old know-it-all self must have been really irritating.

I am more committed to public service than ever before, and I no longer feel any need for a pat-on-the-back validation of my public service identity. 

I’ve written a book titled Finding We — The CIA, an FBI Investigation, and Criminal Charges Send a West Point Grad Turned Entrepreneur on a Retrospective Journey Exploring the Ideas That Divide America in Search of What Might Still Unite America.

Long title! I know, right?  I’ve signed with a publisher and I’m sure there will be some editing and a shorter title in the end.

Nevertheless, I’m going to do what I can to use my helluva, lemon of a story to make Consumer Equity lemonade.

Find We ends with an introduction of the Consumer Equity plan to reverse the wealth divide.

Through an on-the-job-school-of-hard-knocks education, I have in depth, first-hand, experience in the world of start-up and small business finance. Connected with that experience, I have also learned the harsh inequities faced by small, independent investors – many of those inequities being imposed by antiquated, out-of-touch government regulation. You see, the vast majority of the micro-cap, OTC market participants are start-ups, small businesses, and small independent investors. At best, the harsh inequities leave small, independent investors with only a fraction of the opportunity available to the wealthiest 10%. At worst, and is often the case, the harsh inequities completely deprive would-be small investors of any opportunity at all.

Consumer Equity is the cornerstone of a movement to level the playing field for start-ups, small businesses, small, independent investors and would-be, small independent investors – all of this to reverse the wealth divide.

I have followed the stories of many civil servants forced out, terminated and lately, even indicted as a result of actions taken by the current administration. The stories highlight a shameful disrespect demonstrated against the civil servants disregarding their noble dedication to an oath sworn to defend the Constitution. I started my public service identity crisis journey there too. How dare the SEC and the DOJ disregard my oath to defend the Constitution, my years of service in the Army and the CIA, not to mention my membership in the West Point Long Grey Line?

Looking deeper and more critically at myself and facing the discomfort of possibly recognizing my own culpability for the mess I’m in, has been hard. It has also been the most important step in reimaging my future public service identity.

I think We the People and all public servants (including civil servants) must ask ourselves, did one man cause the democratic, capitalist system to falter or did one man exploit a faltering system? If the latter is true, then we all must recognize and admit our role in the fault that has been exploited.

If dedicated public servants that currently feel the rug has been pulled out from under them are going to play a role in recovering the sustainability of the American Dream dependent on a sound democratic, capitalist system, they have to reconcile with their own past failures, update their perspective, build a new plan and find the energy to recommit to the battle to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

There are more exploiters in the wings. If repairs are not made to our democratic, capitalist system, it is at risk of being exploited again and again.

Next year is America’s Semiquincentennial. I like to think our nation has 250 years of reflection upon which we can draw to update our democratic, capitalist system to be more in line with prevailing social values and priorities. After two centuries of agency, department, regulation, and law proliferation, a spring cleaning of thousands of government organizations and hundreds of thousands of statues and policies is long overdue. The inevitable redundancy, conflict and outdated status of organizations and legal code is a source of weakness in and of itself.

America is a popular sovereignty. We the People are the source of the solution to the democratic, capitalist disarray. I believe public servants can make a meaningful contribution by inspiring We the People to see the democratic, capitalist disarray not as a problem with loyalty to one party, or politician, but otherwise a problem with an outdated, ill-tended, 250 year old democratic, capitalist system.

America’s founding principles are sound and with 250 years of enlightenment, we better realize the all-inclusive reach of those principles. The experience and hindsight of all long-term, dedicated public servants can be compelling. They can encourage We the People to stop listening to any politician that lay’s blame or instigates fear and start listening to and voting for politicians with proposals and plans to refresh and update our underlying democratic system. They can share their insight and experience with those politicians - help to connect the will of We the People with a renewed democratic, capitalist system that can sustain the American Dream for future generations. Don’t reach down to help American citizens, reach across to them on a level playing field, peer to peer. Public servants aren’t going to fix this problem. The best a passionate, dedicated public servant can do is help We the People fix this problem.

Introducing and inspiring a movement behind Consumer Equity is the part I’ve decided to play in the spring cleaning and update of outdated, out-of-touch, counterproductive policies, rules and regulations. All citizens deserve access to ownership in the U.S. economy – it is the citizens, through both labor and consumption, that make the U.S. economy the strongest economy in the world paying for much good being done the world round. Including all citizens in the benefits of corporate ownership will only make the U.S. economy stronger.