He Who has the Big Stick may Speak with a Soft Voice

First, What Are The Questions?

Do we all agree the the Elephant should be public and available to all Pickens' Plan Participants? Do we further agree that the inventions, innovation products, and services should be prefaced with a protective document? Something like an admonition to those intellectual property holder w\regard to thier rights and a mandatory mutual non-disclosure agreement form that establishes the rules for engagement between the supplying and the receiving parties.

Do we all recognize the fact that T. Boone Pickens has provided us the opportunity to support the creation of a national energy policy at the expense of our support of his economic initiative? The Pickens Initiative involves a private effort to prioritize the conversion of commercial transport to natural gas; build and attach wind power converters for electricity generatoin to the national electricity grid; accelerated solar power conversion; and commercialization of water resources, mostly in Texas.

Do we further agree that the above initiative is the price we individually and jointly pay to gain national and global access to Pickens Plan sympathizers and proponents?

Finally, is it agreed that the investment club shall be a totally independent non-profit organization that is designed to further the goal of establishing a bipartisan national energy policy?

Next, What are the Facts?

If we can agree to the above ideas and observations, we can agree to the concept that we should and can extract a price from T. Boone for our support of his efforts. We can rationalize that fact as politics, business or expediency. As a political effort we had, prior to Boone's facillitation, little more that a hope and a prayer's chance of communicating ideas and opinions to each other in such a focused manner. We were forced to rail at the wealthy PACs and to silently fume at the major Political Parties idiotic mudslinging and confusing messages.

For most of us busines is a matter of employment. As employees, we have no voice in the coming or the going nor the freight carried by the train. Our principle responsiblities are to keep the thing on the tracks, put it back on the tracks when the owners run it off , load and unload the freight. We do not control the start or stop buttons nor how far or how fast the train shall go. But just let that train come off those tracks and see who catches ALL the "you know what."

Terms of Engagement

This brings us to the issue of expediency. It is neccessary and opportune that we take advantage of the opportunities we encounter in a manner that we can retain the integrity of our self-respect. That Boone a wealthy person, is an undisputable fact. Is he malicious or decietful? Doubtless, you can find some persons with emenity towards Mr. Pickens out there, but what are they doing for you? Did they provide you with this forum? Are they going to help or just teardown any efforts to create the necessary national policies? By its very definition expedientcy implies that there is a utilitarian nature to the act or idea being comptemplated. It makes one aware that the idea isn't a matter of what's right or wrong in the sence of sin, rightousness, good or bad. We are engaged in a question of what is opportune in the matter of advantages that determine if there will be a tangible benefit that is sustainable in terms of better pay for current employment or better employment at higher pay. Nothing elese matters in the dialogue. Not religion, nor partisanship or class distinctions based on wealthy, power and the lack thereof.

My Humble Request

Your agreement is necessary because there can be no unity where there is no agreement. Your zombie devotion isn't desired nor required because this effort requires you to think and disagree with explicit pronunciation. You don't have a right if you can't refuse to exercise it. Freedom of speech only works when somebody speaks up. So it is with the rest of the Bill of Rights attached to our national Constitution. Let us build on our legacy and show the world that we are worthy of our forefathers' blessings. The fact's are historic that many of the wrongs that we as a nation have previously engaged in were ignoblely expedient and peculiar to the times that the actions occured in. What has happened isn't nearly as important to me as what will happen unless we establish policies that govern the rules of how we will interact with the rest of the planet.

How Can We Effect the Change that WE Desire?

Occassionally, but with regularity we should recognize the limits of the human condition as well as its political components that determine how we will interact with each other. The advances of technology have in all likelyhood mandated that we do this more frequently as the ability to convey messages more quickly to more people has become so swift that it has no prescedant in the history of human exisitence. Expedientcy gets mixed in with good and bad with dexterious commercial intent which results in things like a Pickens Plan. You can use the plan to be heard by uniting with your neighbors to reform your communities one neighborhood at a time and across the nation simultaneouosly. Speakup for yourself and your right to be heard. Create a situation that can't be undone by legislatures, join an investment club and learn for yourself how to control YOUR assets to your benefit. Vote with your pocket book!

The resulting situation is that voting is an expedientcy that you must exercise to retain the right to have a voice. Business, in this modern age, is a privilege that individual national bestow on individuals and employment is the national benefit. How you participate in business will determine your personal benefit. In a capitalistic society, you can be a customer, an investor, an employee, or a regulator. Ethical expedientcy mandates that you pick any three of the four and the system will work. The message that a Pickens may be publishing can be confusing and freightening, but can you afford to ignore it?

What we have to ask ourselves is if this is propaganda or some other form of maliciousness with selfish intent that doesn't serve our personal interest, expediently. There are so many messages that it is easier to ignore them all, but will that serve your purpose or is it the purpose of some of the messengers to nuetralize you and your voice so that the abscense of dissent gives the illusion of concurrency or authorization by abdication?

A Soft Voice Behind a Big Stick

Do you feel like your voice doesn't count? That you can't hear your own voice coming out your mouth because of the din of 'professionally' crafted noice all about you? Do feel that you are alone. The options are not limited to not listening and screaming as hard as you can for as long as your strength hold up. You joined the Pickens' Plan to become part of an Army. Every army has specialized divsions to handle all of the logistics of acheiving the objective of whatever it is musterd to accomplish. An Investment Club is just a division that is designed to put common people like you and I into the position of investors\owners in addition to customers, and employees.

This affiliation with Pickens creates a voice that can't be quited and is too loud to be ignored. As it stands, it is Pickens' voice and we are his stick. To acquire our own unified voice, we need to take a page from T. Boone's playbook and adapt his plan for a sustainable movement. Once Boone has what he wants, why would he continue to sponsor our voice? This is a question worth more than comptemplation. It is worthy of your action. An investment club would allow us to build our own unified voice like a national choir for good governance through widely distributed educational and financially valuable information.

We must speak in unison like a choir. Like a choir we must choose our audience and speak directly at them. If we wish to amplify our voices, we can't expect someone else to provide us with our sound equipment without some expense of one kind or another. Pickens' wants our political commitment to push a national energy policy. What do those other guys want?

These are the questions. The answers must be reach very soon or we run the risks of loosing our benefactor's support and the associated "sound equipment" of this Internet facillitation. Either we take up the burden or it will die. It it dies without our having acheived any of the goals of the benefactor or our own, it will be a long winter. This I can assure you, the next wealthy person with an idea that has possibilities for you to do something for yourself inspite of and in addition to doing something for your country; will be a lot more forthcoimg if this effort is successful.

Thank you for your patience and may God Bless you and those you love.

M.L. "Mickey" Hayes
Pickens' Plan Ambassador

Tags: business, choir, club, elephant, investment, participation

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Comment by ML Hayes on January 18, 2009 at 1:57pm: The criteria for the public awareness that will be required to move a credit union or an investment club to the point of effectiveness is disproportionate between the two objectives, if you consider them alternatives. A climb to any peak requires a trip through the foothills. On this MLK Day eve, I can reminisce on many difficult days and sorrowful events in history. Given the fact that the inauguration of Obama and the celebration of Dr. Kings birth just happen to coincide this year, I am also elated to contemplate our national arrival on the path of the less taken road of human advancement.

I've studied history sufficiently to know that the progress of our species has been stalled in nationalisms based on ethnic and religious affinities underpinned by commercial interest for far too many centuries. There is no doubt in my mind; or any one reading this essay, that the advancement of transcultural concepts like non-violence are not born of a single brain or cultivated in any one culture. Greece got its' ideology from India and they from Egypt. Geography and politics melded these ideas across our globe. An infantile America rose out of a primitive Europe to prominence in the consciousness of people who abandoned mothers' and fathers' lands. They sacrificed all to immigrate to a land where they could court the dream of freedom, to exercise those liberties of speaking truth, to engage in public prayer and self-satisfying commerce.

The children of those pioneers and pilgrims inherited a legacy and a responsibility in the opportunity take the human race in a direction that hasn't been visited since the birth of Christ and the visions of Mohammed. This ideology that gets its stirring from the smaller realizations of our universally individual imperfections by ordinary persons living under extraordinarily grand circumstances. The fact that it manifests itself in proclamations about credit unions and investment clubs is merely proof by symptomatic evidence. What makes this phenomenal idea relevant is a will to act. We can sense that change is occurring, even though our preceptive senses bare acknowledge the fact.

Now we, you and I, come to the juncture where the road again divides into two paths. The less traveled route leads us in a direction where we form institutions (including government) that value the individual over assets and accumulations of things. This is a new way not overgrown but virgin and totally unpaved. Simple mortality says that for lack of a vision, we perished and yet we are all mortal beings. Still, we all can dream, but in order to truly live we must create an existence that bridges the ethereal and realization. This isn't the stuff of computers, papers and plans but that of rolled-up sleeves, sweat, tears and all too often blood. It isn't the stuff of large congregations and committees of academics or masters of commerce. It is the work of plumbers, carpenters, electricians, technicians and service workers. If this kind of thing is going to get done, it will those people who will do it.

There isn't anything new or different on this path. The obstacles are the familiar ones typically encountered. They are still the same as they are on previous mountainous terrains we have traversed. Chasms void of solid footing and filled with fear. Walls of sheer ignorance with few toeholds that are far spaced and treacherously loose; but we are competent climbers with lifetimes of experience. Let us begin the new journey.

M.L. "Mickey" Hayes
Pickens Plan Ambassador

Comment by Mark J Warren on January 18, 2009 at 11:15am: Well Said ! Very Well Said !!!

Mark

Comment by ML Hayes on November 10, 2008 at 7:03pm: Chris,
Investors & owners are basically the same animal except the owner has the greate imagination :-). Term wise, lest call them founders and people who buy in early on and stay for the payday.

Some people are more sensitive to exposing themselves to inspection than others. During the ten year run up to the sub-prime melt-down, the mortgage industry intentionally targeted people who have been systematically denied participation in the financial system. Most were minorities and recent immigrants. The more they lowered the reporting standards and credit scoring barriers, the more people they were able to ensnare in the foolhardy game. Now, those people are saddled with massive debts and hugh mortagages on properties that have lost two-thirds of thier value in less than twelve (12) months. Everyone knew what was going on, where were the regulators?

Unless you have been subjected to socio-economic segregation and barred from have any dignity in your business aspirations, you can't make an assumption that someone is blaming someone else for their position in life. This isn't the first time that I have seen such a con-game pulled off. In the fifties & sixties it was insurance (term vs life) that was sold door to door. In the seventies it was savings accounts in Savings & Loans that wouldn't lend money to people who lived in VA backed mortgaged (GI) homes in certain neighborhoods. In the Eighties the failure of the S&Ls followed straight on the heels of the legislation to remove the lending biases.

There are some forty-one (41) volumes in two series w\two supplements of personal accounts of people who survived slavery in The United States. This compilation is titled 'The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography,' Greewood Press, Wesport, Connecticut 1979 ISBN 0-313-21423-9. For the most part, it is a sanitized reading of interviews of people who were either born into slavery or the first generation of emancipated Americans of African decent. These interviews were conducted as a WPA work project during the Great Depression era, so the interviewees were all very aged and most were afraid to speak truthfully in an era where people were still being lynched for disrespectful 'attitudes.' A few choice accounts slipped through the censors. Some of the interviewers' unedited drafts have been discovered. It should suffice to say, that people can train humans just as they would dogs, to see to their benefit before first taking care of their own.

I personally can remember being discriminated against for consideration of educational opportunities because, my hair was too long. Most of my generation doesn't blame anyone for how we are treated. We acknowledge that there are those people among us who are not going to treat anyone with any measure of fairness. We also realize that those persons have a specially deadly contempt for Americans of African decent. We can see how they do not respond to kindnesses, courtesies, and community-minded overtures. We can further acknowledge the fact that they have fled the cities and the suburbs and now they have no place left to retreat to, (without leaving the nation) as more minorities of all persuassions find alternative ways of acheiving their own ideas of progress and affluence.

Pickens' Plan is a tool, but like all tools it must be operated in a manner that allows one to acheive the desired results. Pickens, the man is a person of incredible resources. We need to regard him with respect, but not awe.

My argument is that if Pickens breaks the social norms in the persuit of his ambitions, pleasures or dreams he needs to be confronted and reprimanded. If he uses his wealth to silence contrary, cynical or criticizing voices, he should be censor through ostracization.That ability to publicize the sentence is the obstacle that we have to technically overcome.

Regulators are needed to make certain that people don't get lynched. The problem, lately in the USA is that the wealthy buy the regulators then proclaim it law in the public media. The regulators, who are supposed to be trustees debate these proposals in a vacume without truely publicizing alternative propositions inclusive of the opposing perspective. So no one knows whats happening and the opposition can and has publish lies to support altrusic agendas that only serve a different kind of non-profit but non-the-less special interests.

The only real solution is to take matters into your own hands, but in this regard I am preaching to the choir. Wearing all those hats is tricky in and of its own right, but doing so and making it work for some higher purpose is the one and only objective. Some of the hats can't be worn at the same time, that is the point that we must insist on. A regulator can't be the owner under any circumstance as this is the very definition of conflict of interests. On the other hand, an employee owned company is the same as an investor who is an employee. The employee could be the person charged with employment of other employees, therefore the employer as in sub-contractors and consultantants.

Simple solutions to complex problems are generally bad solutions; unless there are many complementing simplicities that address most if not all of the complexities individually. Our higher purpose is an inhabitable planet with a sustainable ecology and a modern economic system that produces enough creature comforts and substanance to keep usfrom killing each other covertly inadvertantly, or intentionally.

M.L. "Mickey" Hayes
Pickens Plan Ambassador

Comment by Lou De Frog on November 8, 2008 at 5:40pm: I see five hats investor/employee/employer/investor/regulator. With a transparent structure we should be able to wear four simultaneously, and stop blaming others for the way we are treated, what we earn, what things cost, and why we have to work so hard just to get screwed.

That's four. - Don't need a regulator when everyone knows whats happening.