This former super-soldier, now a senior U. S. Army Veteran nearing retirement, stood tall and accepted the betrayal as a call to duty. With the skills to make a difference forged through a 33-year tech career and decades of advocacy, a new mission emerged from the ashes of corporate callousness.

A Lifetime of Standing for Others

My journey has always been about serving those who needed a voice. From standing up for troops and their families in times of need, to advocating for taxi drivers who couldn’t speak for themselves, to organizing solar workers without representation—the mission has remained constant: protect those who cannot defend themselves.

This commitment to service extended beyond grassroots organizing into the political arena, with a run for Congress and, most recently, leading the Kennedy for President campaign in Nevada. Each experience reinforced a fundamental truth: systems change when people unite with the right tools and knowledge.

The Birth of Build Up Cooperative and Pay-Maker

When my team of seasoned professionals was discarded and our positions shipped overseas, I recognized this wasn’t just my battle—it was happening everywhere. The tactics had changed, but the war on workers’ dignity remained the same.

Drawing on military strategic thinking and decades of technical expertise, I began reshaping Build Up Cooperative into a 21st-century on-demand union. The centerpiece of this mission: Pay-Maker, a digital platform that equips any worker advocate with the tools and education to lead Section 7 Collective Actions for living wages.

A Tactical Approach to Worker Empowerment

The strategy is precise and targeted:

• Rapid deployment: Provide immediate resources for workers facing urgent situations
• Clear objectives: Focus on achievable goals like living wage adjustments
• Sustainable operations: Dues are paid only until the action is completed
• Force multiplication: Enable a single advocate to organize an entire workplace effectively

This approach applies battlefield wisdom to labor organizing—identify the objective, gather intelligence, equip your team, execute with precision, and secure the position.

The Next Deployment

As this mission moves forward, the goal remains clear: create a system where workers can rapidly organize, effectively advocate, and successfully secure the dignity and compensation they deserve—without waiting for traditional structures to catch up to urgent needs.

For this veteran, the battlefield may have changed, but the mission continues: stand up for those who need a voice, equip them with the tools to succeed, and never retreat when justice is on the line.

Build Up Cooperative and Pay-Maker represent not just applications or organizations, but a continuation of service—a duty that doesn’t end with retirement, but evolves to meet the challenges of a new era.

The Problem That Stopped Me Cold

I couldn’t in good conscience teach workers how to organize around their grievances if organizing itself was a firing offense.

And it is. In America, right now, an employer can terminate you for discussing your wages. Can blacklist you for circulating a petition. Can make your name radioactive for so much as asking whether your overtime was calculated correctly. The retaliation isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the system’s primary feature. It’s how 170 million people are kept silent by a few thousand executives who have never once feared the consequences of their own actions.

The right to petition is meaningless when the government is owned by the entity you’re petitioning against.

The right to assemble is theater when the laws are written by the people you’re assembling against. The right to free speech is a cruel joke when the platforms are controlled by the corporations you’re speaking about — and when speaking up at all means losing your livelihood, your healthcare, and your family’s security in a single afternoon.

I drafted a legislative response to this. The Comprehensive Labor and Worker Safeguards Act — the CLAWS Act — starts from the premise that workers already have rights. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act already guarantees every American worker the right to engage in concerted activity for mutual aid and protection. What workers lack is not the right. What they lack is any realistic means of enforcing it. The CLAWS Act is an enforcement statute. It imposes immediate financial penalties on employers who retaliate — not three years later, not after an administrative backlog clears, but immediately. It gives workers a direct right to sue in federal court. It requires 72-hour reinstatement pending resolution. It covers every worker regardless of classification — gig, domestic, agricultural, undocumented — every one of the 170 million workers the current system has abandoned. It is not a union bill. It does not require anyone to organize or join anything. It simply makes the law mean what it says.

The CLAWS Act has not been introduced in Congress. It is a policy framework — a model bill, drafted here to show exactly what the legislation would look like and what it would require. Its full framework is laid out in Chapter 21. Its draft statutory text is available at AddClaws.com. It is the standard we demand every member of the 119th, 120th, and 121st Congress be willing to introduce, co-sponsor, and vote for while we organize for something larger. The campaign to introduce and pass the CLAWS Act in the 120th Congress is organized at AddClaws.com.

Because the problem that stopped me cold is not just an enforcement problem. Enforcement can be dismantled. A law can be repealed. A regulation can be reversed by the next administration. The CLAWS Act is a floor. But a floor on a foundation of sand can still be ripped up.

So I wrote this book instead.

Not a how-to guide for playing a rigged game. A blueprint for tearing the rigging out of the walls.

The US Majority Amendment doesn’t ask workers to organize better within a broken system. It breaks the system’s ability to be broken in the first place. It removes the corporate money from politics so that when a worker speaks, a politician has to listen — not because the worker organized well, but because the politician has no other master.

That is the deployment. That is the mission. And unlike every order I ever received in uniform, this one comes with a guarantee: if 170 million workers simply decide it’s done, it’s done.

No permission required. No waiting list. No three-year backlog.

Just the Constitution. Just the people. Just the will to see it through.