The Hoole Intelligence Report

A Concrete Problem in the Rainier Valley: SESCO and the Principle of Escalation

2011-04-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

Community organizing starts with problems -- a rat infested apartment, the steady drip, drip from the ceiling of an elementary school after a storm, an intersection with no stoplight where a car hits somebody's daughter. By the time the Southeast Seattle Community Organization (SESCO) set up shop in the summer of 1975, many Rainier Valley residents were fed up with all the little problems and had come to the conclusion that they the victims of the city’s neglect or worse, of a deliberate plan to dump Seattle’s problems in the South End.

The complaint was common, but vague; it unhelpfully pointed the finger at the city's entire political establishment and suggested no action. As pioneering community organizer Saul Alinsky put it, "what the organizer does is convert the plight into a problem." Trained in Alinsky’s methods, SESCO’s community organizers sought to overcome feelings of isolation and helplessness by mobilizing people around a modest issue that was concrete, specific, and realizable.

In a pivotal early organizing effort, SESCO hit upon one of those little issues that was symbolic of southeast Seattle's plight and literally concrete. Residents of the Dunlap neighborhood noticed a steadily growing pile of construction rubble behind their houses. The nuisance became intolerable when one day in February of 1976, it rained and the sheer bulk of the mound diverted enough rainwater to flood their basements.

The dumping was originally intended as fill for the site of a future church whose congregation at the time met at a house on the same property. The pile, which stood at 17 feet and was made up of dirt, large slabs of concrete and steel support rods, contained ten times more debris than the city-issued dumping permit allowed.

With the help of the SESCO organizer, the first thing the neighbors did was arrange a meeting with an official from the city Building Department, which had issued the dumping permit. The official told them he would investigate, but that they should really be taking the matter up with the property owner, who was ultimately responsible. Church officials said they had asked their contractor repeatedly to stop the dumping. The residents contacted the contractor, who said he had nothing to do with the landfill and that he was "not about to be the city's fall guy on this deal."

This dizzying circle of deferred responsibility is very often the point where people like the Dunlap residents give up. Alinsky observed in his book Rules for Radicals that "in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck." He directed community activists to pick a specific target as responsible and "freeze" it, relentlessly holding them alone accountable.

The residents of Dunlap chose the superintendent of the city Building Department; unfortunately under the circumstances named Mr. Petty. Twenty-five of them made a trip to his office and presented for his signature a document stating that the debris would be removed within a month. He demurred, stating that "any action on the matter would have to come about through court proceedings." "It looks like someone erred," he told the Southeast District Journal, who had been called there for the occasion, and speculated that his department not intervening to stop the dumping "might have been an honest mistake."

The Building Department's idea of action was to issue a succession of stop work orders, which went ignored since nobody would admit to dumping at the site. Faced with continuing pressure for his department to clean up the site, Petty protested, "We're supposed to go through the proper channels. We'll only take it out if there are no other choices. It's the responsibility of the property owner."

In delivering what was no doubt his department's boilerplate evasion, the superintendent inadvertently spelled out the newly-minted neighborhood activist's end game -- to make it clear that there would be no choice Petty could stomach but to clean up the site.

On Wednesday, April 28, 1976, Residents and organizers loaded a pick-up truck at the dump site and made a trip north to City Hall. They unloading their cargo -- a concrete slab which was estimated to weight three tons and a twisted 20 foot-long steel support rod -- at the entrance to the Building Department’s office and labeled them with the specification of the fill material allowed by the city permit: "8 inch piece of dirt."

Though Petty was still out to lunch when the activists arrived (until 2:15 p.m., the Seattle Times noted), two or his representatives read a statement recounting the city's efforts to address the complaints. One city employee noted down the names of the activists "in case there is some liability for removing the material," he said. Before they left, the Dunlap residents handed out a press release warning that, until city cleaned up the dump, they would return with more of its contents.

The simmering conviction that the City was using their community as a place to hide Seattle's problems, became real in the chunks of concrete, and now with the help of SESCO, the community was rubbing the political establishment's nose in the mess they refused to acknowledge. City Hall had become the dumping ground.

Petty and other officials involved with the dumping issue took comfort that they were following the correct process, regardless of the result. Knowing they had acted correctly, they were able to address the residents from a professional remove. The residents of Dunlap, who lived with the growing landfill in their back yards were only concerned with results, which they intended to get.

As recounted in SESCO's newsletter, "the residents visited Mr. Petty at his home. There he refused to talk with them so they visited his neighbors to tell them how he ran his department." This dry account doesn't do justice to the outrage Petty must have felt -- they violated his private life and, within it, threatened to sully his reputation. What exactly was off limits to people capable of such an affront?

Rodney Herold, who was SESCO's director at the time, described the chain of events that led to the visit to the superintendent's home as the "principle of escalation." "People are reticent to get involved and do things," he said, "So first they write a letter and nothing happens and they get frustrated, so they make a call. If nothing happens then, they go to the person's workplace. And if that doesn't work, we certainly went to people's homes a couple of times." The principle of escalation, fed by intransigence and frustration, is the motor of community organizing. It turns detached authorities into personal targets and anonymous citizens into committed activists.

SESCO organizers built "action groups" around many other issues, which had names like Concerned Residents of Holly Park, Georgetown Community Against the Animal Shelter, and the Bolmor/Jacobus Committee. From these issue-specific groups, SESCO built a coalition of community groups made up of everyday residents who were ready to tackle issues that affected the entire Rainier Valley, like housing segregation and real estate redlining.

Someone must have told the mayor what SESCO was up to because a few days later, one of the the Dunlap residents received a call from the his office conceding that the city would take care of the problem. The next week, Mayor Uhlman, who was making a bid for governor, personally visited Dunlap to assure the residents the debris would be removed at the expense of the city and the contractor.

Dog Loans

2010-09-10T05:29:00.000-07:00

Banks report that there is little investment interest shown in the commercial area of Empire Way and Othello Street. There is a surplus of commercially zoned land indicated by vacancies and non-retail use of land in prime retail locations.

This was written thirty-four years ago in a study of the same area where the Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, a public institution whose business is to stimulate local investment, now operates. A couple of weeks ago, Martina Guilfoil, the executive director of the RVCDF made a spectacle of that organization with her rather less diplomatic gloss on the same theme in a letter to a loan applicant: "We recognize a dog loan when we see it," she wrote. "We are very interested in how our programs are working to help Rainier Valley businesses who actually operate a business and not a hobby."

In the Rainier Valley the distinction between retail and non-retail use, vacancy and occupancy, hobby and business, has long been a fine one. This clearly vexed Guilfoil, who, on behalf of the RVCDF’s board of directors, also informed the business owner that she is “one crazy ass bitch.” Taking the long view, store fronts here, it seems, are always in the process of becoming something else and the commerce inside exists somewhere in the twilight between hobby, social club, side business, and going concern.

The lettering on the corner awning reads “import-export” next to an Asian name, but the sign above the door a few paces down says the shop is a halal grocery. A cut rate brothel becomes a social service agency which in turn becomes nail shop. The tavern next door to the brothel back in the day is now a church and, who knows, may yet be a tavern someday.

Down by the Rose Petal with its “RESTAU ANT” sign, which to workaday world looks abandoned, roars to life on Saturday night. One afternoon this spring, the proprietor of a gyro restaurant was shaken by my request for a gyro -- whatever people came there for, it wasn’t the only product advertised on the sign outside. A tavern is a social club whose exclusivity is maintained by its dilapidated exterior, plywood-covered windows, the lack of a sign that clearly establishes the nature of the business.

A single family home beside Martin Luther King Jr Way S. is the beach head that builds a steady clientele as a Vietnamese bridal shop. From its side has grown a three story apartment complex whose slow-motion construction moves forward in fits and starts as more funds from the paying business become available. Cottage industry grinds modestly onward inside Craftsman bungalows without the pressure of overhead.

Southeast Seattle, with it’s low, haphazardly collected rents is an incubator for business that could not exist in a higher profile location. Down here, businesses that fulfill different purposes than growth and expansion find safety at the periphery of the city, for a moment at least.

As executive director of the Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, Guilfoil knew all this far better than most. I sat down with her almost two years ago to learn more about what the CDF was up to and found her to be engaged with the neighborhood and sensitive to the local business landscape.

In particular, we talked about two Somali immigrants who were extended one of the first business loans the organization made. In a culturally savvy move that a conventional lender wouldn’t even consider, the CDF worked with the imam of the borrowers’ mosque to set terms that were considered compliant with Islam’s prohibition on interest. The loan allowed the borrowers to successfully branch out from their auto sales business into transportation. Evidently they are still making it happen -- I see Universal Translation & Transportation cars all around the south end.

So what happened? How could a local institution that has proved itself in so many ways an asset to the Rainier Valley and particularly to the MLK business corridor sink to the ugliest kind of condescension?

Here, among the strivers and the poor there exists privilege - it’s one of the things that keeps this place interesting. Though content to dip in and out of the Rainier Valley at will, privilege comes to identify with the “vibrancy” of the place. It considers itself hep enough to bring off a brassy lines like “crazy ass bitch” and street-wise enough to know who it should be applied to.

In this spirit a haughty distinction was made in the name of the board of the RVDCF between “real” business and some other kind run by “broke ass crazies” that is beneath consideration. No doubt the loan applicants who come before the board consider their businesses legitimate and “real,” but how can they be sure now that the staff and the board of the RVCDF feel the same way?

More with Less Policing

2009-04-25T18:25:00.001-07:00

Stop me if you've hear this one before:

Higher unemployment will drive more people to seek an illegitimate income, and budget shortfalls will force cities and counties to cut back on police officers, or at least fail to hire enough new ones to cope with their growing populations.

This prediction, from The Economist's "World in 2009" review, suggests that a new policing strategy will necessarily surmount the resource-intensive "zero tolerance" model pioneered in NYC in the early Nineties and adopted in most big city police departments since. The article continues:

The approach that will come to prominence in 2009 is almost the exact opposite of zero tolerance. Rather than cracking down on petty offenders such as turnstile-jumpers and squeegee men, the authorities will focus on those who are most likely to kill or be killed. Some may be drug dealers recently released from prison. Others may be the associates of people recently wounded by gunfire. What makes the approach particularly novel is that it depends on local people. Rather than insisting on zero tolerance from the police, it tries to change what the residents of crime-infested areas will tolerate.

This approach, pioneered in Boston and refined in Chicago, aptly describes Seattle's own Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (YVPI). Seattle's plan focuses government resources on the 800 or so youth identified as likely to commit future acts of violence. The YVPI uses a "case management" model to capture the target population, offer them various kinds of support, and allow opportunities for their behavior to be monitored and measured.

The notion that it "depends on local people" is a debatable feature of Seattle's YVPI. Using community resources and guiding a community's expectations by involving them in crime fighting is supposed to be what makes this strategy cheap compared with "broken windows."

One aspect of the program, the use of "violence interrupters" ties it to Chicago's CeaseFire program and provides at least an shred of community involvement -- the community in this case being ex-con or former gang member (the interrupter) with enough street credibility to diffuse potential violence before it erupts.

The YVPI conspicuously lacks another of piece Chicago's CeaseFire program -- community "responses" at the scenes of all shootings. These aren't built into the Seattle program precisely because the City has not developed the capacity to mobilize the community.

Seattle City Councilman Burgess affirms the need for community involvement in a recent Op Ed without pointing to any institutional framework for community involvement:

Most important, the initiative recognizes that one of the most effective ways to prevent violence is for community members to engage directly with at-risk youth, to challenge norms tolerating violence, and to encourage young people to speak out when violence strikes.

Two points to make here:

1) City officials have gone out of their way to champion their Youth Violence Prevention Initiative as "community-led" and "community-driven," which it is not. It is a smart "technocratic" strategy that leverages existing bureaucracy and expertise. It is led by government administrators, and driven by law enforcement, education, juvenile justice, and social welfare professionals.

2) I doubt the CeaseFire-like aspects of the YVPI signal a titanic shift in Seattle from one model of policing to another, but they do highlight a police force stretched dangerously thin and, owing to a tight budget, apt to see hiring levels reduced sometime in the next year. I have high hopes that case management for 800 kids will result in fewer shootings in our neighborhoods, but I'm skeptical that it will effect residential burglaries in Seward Park or other parts of the city. Budget woes or no, Seattle can't skimp on police hiring.

Thoughts on the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative

2009-04-09T05:39:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday, I attended the meeting of the City Council's Public Safety Committee (available here in its entirety), and what follows are a few observations about the briefing on the City's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (YVPI).

Council members attending were: Tim Burgess, Bruce Harrell, Nick Lacata, and Sally Clark. Other key attendees: Holly Miller (Office for Education), Sid Sidorowicz (Office for Education), Doug Carey (Department of Finance), Jim Diaz (Interim Police Chief), James Kelly (Urban League), Jamila Taylor (Urban League's YVPI administrator), Mark Worsham (County Juvenile Court), Pegi McEvoy (Seattle Public Schools)

The plan as it was initially announced to the public had a 9.2 million dollar budget. According to Doug Carey of the Mayor's office, "because of budget balancing needs and one select program reduction, the Council action resulted in an 8 million dollar initiative over two years."

The intended outcomes of the YVPI are:

A 50% reduction in court referrals for juvenile crimes against persons commited by youth residing in the Central Area, Southeast Area, and Southwest Area Networks
A 50% reduction in the number of suspensions/expulsions due to violence-related incidents at Denny, Aki Kurose, Madrona K-8, Madison, and Washington Middle Schools

Councilman Burgess pointed out that for similar programs across the nation, success often means reductions of 2.5% to 20%, which is far less ambitious than the YVPI's.

The Mayor's office announced that, in addition to the middle school "emphasis officers" the YVPI includes, they intend to apply for Recovery Act (stimulus) funds to provide emphasis officers for high schools as well.

Holly Miller, interim YVPI director, said that the plan is a "community-led and community-driven process." She said that "this is not going to be resolved by the government." Her example of how the YVPI is "leveraging community resources," was that somebody from the Seattle Vocational Institute called her the other day and said they have training slots and pre-apprenticeship programs available for youth in the program.

Pegi McEvoy of Seattle Public Schools affirmed that "it is the mobilization at the community level that we're doing with the Urban League that will allow us to be successful."

A potential weakness of the program is that, where "community involvement" is concerned, the government administrators have a bias toward engaging established institutions like nonprofits and educational institutions. The YVPI administrators are overstating the level of community involvement when they think of "the community" only in terms of citizens who have connections with groups like the Urban League.

Under the plan, payment of 10% of the contracts with providers are contingent on meeting performance targets.

Interim Police Chief John Diaz confirmed that the new 6 person Gang Unit day squad will start work on April 15th. They will patrol "the high schools and corridors."

* * *

Last Tuesday afternoon in Council chambers, there was a reassuring air of confidence and optimism among the assembled notables. They lauded their "tremendous group work" so far and expressed "delight" with the "magnificent effort on the City's part and the Police Department's part." There was laughter and thanks for everybody's contributions and a sense of accomplishment that suggests something powerful is in the offing.

I caution humility to all those involved in this promising initiative: across town at Rainier and Othello, not an hour earlier, in broad daylight, there was an execution-style shooting. Until further notice, further congratulations are not in order.

Choice Words from the City Council Prez on Police Staffing

2009-04-07T05:24:00.000-07:00

Rumor has it that at the last City Neighborhood Council meeting, city council president Richard Conlin volunteered that, due to a tough budget climate, future hiring for the Seattle Police Department may be on the chopping block.

Here is a good place to say that SPD South Precinct staffing is the number one, slam-dunk priority shared by our community and our local patrol officers. There is a lot we can do and have failed to do as a community, and there is room for debate about what the best approach to solving our youth violence problem in the medium to long term, but there is no question that more police resources are immediately needed on our streets -- a beefed up gang unit, foot patrols in select neighborhoods, more total hours for 911 responders.

By way of reassuring a community member that he wasn't proposing a hiring freeze for the SPD, Mr. Conlin wrote the following:

...we may need to consider slowing down filling the new positions that were added in the 2009-2010 budgets. Since new recruits train for almost a year that would have no impact in the near term on crime issues. It would simply be stretching out the five year expansion plan. Might be better to be cautious now than to hire people spend money training them and then have to do layoffs if the budget picture worsens.

In the rarefied world of city politics, there may be some distinction to draw between a hiring freeze and "slowing down filling the new positions," but for us in the Southeast, where crime and violence are an undeniable commonplace, we take the withdrawal of police resources, however temporary, as an insult.

The South Precinct does not have the personnel it needs to do its job. I hear the complaints and the excuses officers feel compelled to make for not providing the level of service the community needs. I wonder why Mr. Conlin hasn't.

I wonder why, when there's not enough police to start with, he thinks it's a consolation that the "slowing down" will only affect us after a year or so when new police don't start work in the South Precinct?

New Information on the Mayor's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative

2009-03-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

For anybody who might care to wade through 38 pages of the mesmerizing prose government bureaucracies churn out, here is the most fleshed out info I've seen yet about the goals, methodology, and implementation of the Mayor's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. Nothing on specific partners the City will be working with though.

Crime & Crime Prevention in the East Precinct

2009-03-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

The Central District News reports that, according to the SPD, crime was down last month in the East Precinct. This is great news, as long as it's true. Past "errors" concerning crime statistics for the South Precinct make it clear that great news about crime in high crime neighborhoods should be met with some skepticism.

In other ambiguously good news, though the City cut the East Precinct's Crime Prevention Coordinator position at exactly the worst time, given the gang wars in the Southeast and Central Districts, the Central District News reports that, between the Mayor's office and the SPD, there is some will to restore it.

SEDC Approves Statement on Youth Violence

2009-03-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

Last night at the Southeast District Council meeting, the group voted to approve the following statement on youth violence:

The youth violence problem in the Southeast Seattle is severe and getting worse. Our South Precinct is understaffed and should quickly be staffed up to the levels promised. The mayor and city council should give the youth violence issue the attention it deserves and sustain that attention until the issues are addressed. The member organizations of the Southeast District Council endorsing this statement pledge to involve themselves directly in whatever way they are able to support SE's youth, schools, and families, and recommend that the city takes neighborhood and business groups into account as the city formulates its youth violence initiative.

All attending groups voted yes except the Othello Neighborhood Association, which abstains on all votes, and the Rainier Othello Safety Association, which considered the statement too weakly worded.

I hope ROSA will make its alternative "statement with teeth" widely available, follow through on whatever action they propose, and lobby other groups in the Southeast and Central Districts to join them. I'm sure other SEDC members will be interested in taking as active a role in confronting our youth violence problem as ROSA clearly intends to.

Fantasy Basketball

2009-03-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

Sometime soon, Mayor Nickels will appoint a new police chief. Whether it ends up being Diaz, Metz, or some dynamic outsider, it would be a mistake to pin too many hopes on his choice because no police chief will care enough about youth violence in the Southeast and Central Districts to solve the problem. It’s our kids that are getting killed and we’re the ones who suffer in this atmosphere of insecurity and violence. Looking to somebody from the outside to come in and solve our problems is a recipe for continued disappointment.

The following excerpt, from a story in the Seattle Times on gangs in local schools, illustrates the point:

Because of those hostilities, Garfield, in the heart of the Central District, and Rainier Beach, a south end school, didn’t schedule a basketball game this year.

“We decided it wouldn’t be appropriate at this time,” said Robert Gary, principal at Rainier Beach. He said the concern wasn’t students but “outside elements” who might make students afraid to go to a game at Garfield or Rainier Beach.

Reading this, it’s hard not to click your tongue and think “so it’s come to this?” With this one act, the City, schools, and police showed that the problem is beyond them. Pity a public school or neighborhood or society whose agenda is set by feuding boys.

Read the Full Article

Elected Officials & SE Seattle Leaders Need to Get Serious About Youth Violence Epidemic

2009-03-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of his annual State of the City address, Mayor Greg Nickels was in our neighborhood spreading election year cheer about crime. A mile from the spot where, a week and a half before, gunmen had shot 19 bullets into the living room of a woman who was home alone watching television, he called the crime rate in Seattle “a cause for optimism.” These past months, the Mayor has rarely missed an opportunity to tout with satisfaction the historic lows in crime he’s presided over.

As euphoric as our public officials are about the low crime rate, when it comes to the youth violence problem in the Central and Southeast Districts, they are unusually circumspect, describing it in terms of “perception”. The gang war in our neighborhoods has been lumped together with issues like public urination under the rubric “perceptions of social disorder.”

Read the Full Article

Proposed Statement on Neighborhood Youth Violence for Consideration by the SEDC

2009-02-25T07:44:00.000-08:00

Here is what I will ask the Southeast District Council tonight:

Last week at a rally held in response to Tyrone Love's murder Mayor Nickels said that "we need to commit that it is the last time we see that happen in this neighborhood, in this community." But we know it probably will happen again in the Central District and in the Southeast District too, because nothing fundamental has changed.

We have to do more. It's going to take the best efforts of government, community groups, parents, and citizens together, offering mutual support and holding each other accountable to solve our youth violence problem

In order to start to come together as leaders around a problem we recognize as severe and escalating, to be watchful over the resources committed to our community, and to hold government accountable for the role it needs to play, I would like the SEDC to consider endorsing the following points:

The youth violence problem in the South Precinct is severe and is getting worse
The South Precinct is understaffed and should be staffed up to the level promised
Mayor Nickels and the City Council should give the youth violence the attention it deserves

While these points, which the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council endorses, are not particularly specific or ambitious, they can serve as the basis for some consensus among community groups in the Southeast District.

The cycle of violence and retaliation is picking up pace, sucking more people into its logic, and inevitably touching citizens who have nothing to do with gangs. Something has to give.

At this moment, confronting gang violence and saving our children from harm should be the priority of southeast Seattle's community leadership, including the Southeast District Council.

I'm asking the SEDC to endorse these points as an organization, and for membership organizations to write letters to the Mayor and the City Council expressing their concern about youth violence in our community.

Some Teens are Not Smart

2009-02-14T15:49:00.000-08:00

On Tuesdays, I tutor Somali refugee kids in Seatac. I do it for selfish reasons - I get to learn a little about the Somali community by osmosis and the students benefit from my help (unless there's high school math in the mix, in which case they're on their own). It's often fun and always interesting.

I've been intending to write about civic participation by the Somali community in South Seattle. After spending a few months interviewing leaders of Seattle's East African community I started to feel like I was getting press-release generalities. I was asking them to tell me, a stranger, about how their lives work. I'm sure my questions weren't particularly insightful. In short, I got the insights I deserved.

I came to recognize that I couldn't expect to know the Somali community unless I was willing to meet them on their own terms. As a tutor, I have the advantage of not needing or expecting to learn anything in particular. The likelihood of gaining the trust necessary for real sharing between people is increased by my willingness to give up a couple of hours a week to help out.

I snatched up my first gem a couple of weeks ago at the orientation class for new tutors. The instructor offered the following example, from an essay on street gangs written by a high school senior, of the difficulties of cross-cultural communication:

Some teens are smart. Some teens are not smart. That is why they need help not to join gang.

"What did this mean?" she asked. Somebody speculated that the student was making a connection between lack of education and crime. Others danced around this idea that it's stupid people who join gangs. Of course, this was all wrong.

What the student meant was that it's perfectly fine for people to join gangs as long as they know how to handle themselves. Imprudent teens who don't know how to keep themselves out of serious trouble are the ones who need to be saved from the gangs. They'll be the ones going to jail and killing each other. In this way of thinking, gangsterism is kind of like skydiving: it looks dangerous to the uninitiated, but with the proper expertise and preparation, it's perfectly safe.

This explanation met with general disapproval. A fellow trainee raised his hand, "As tutors, if we hear something like this, should we tell them that what they're saying is wrong?" I didn't catch the reply, I was off somewhere daydreaming about smart skydivers.

The high school essayist, who no doubt would fit neatly into the "at risk youth" category, was conveying some real, insider wisdom about the calculus of gang membership. But upstanding adults, always ready with our wisdom and righteousness, aren't prepared to hear it. We'd like to edit the faulty reasoning out of a term paper, as if that will make it disappear from the world.

Instead of answering gang violence with repression and violence, Seattle has settled on watching certain kids as much as possible to make sure they're not doing wrong, dissuading them from joining gangs, co-opting them with better alternatives. The idea of hanging out with teens more and reasoning with them informs every part of the the Mayor's $9M "Youth Violence Prevention Initiative". What's missing, I think, is a real understanding of the course of action we're trying to lure them away from.

Short of following the rabid advice of the readers of our local newspapers - encouraging young men to kill each other, shipping them all to Venezuela - solving our gang violence problem is going to require of us adults the humility to sit down with surly, hormonal teens and learn the math that puts them in a gang.

What I've Been Up To

2009-02-06T09:44:00.000-08:00

My most recent piece of writing, published at the Rainier Valley Post blog, is I think, the best writing I've done to date. It's called "The Wrong Side of MLK: A Dispatch from the Nation's Most Diverse Zip Code" and is basically my attempt to answer the question, "What is it like to live in southeast Seatte?"

Like my last writing project, it's also an attempt to shine a light on how grassroots civic participation in southeast Seattle works - who participates, what are the terms of participation, who doesn't participate and why, and what social groups are aligned around particular issues.

I plan to make this the focus of my research and writing for the next couple of years. I'll write about my impressions as I go along here.

A Blight of Dullness at Dearborn Park

2008-06-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

Neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.

-- Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

In all our visits, my three-year-old son and I have never seen more than a couple of other people at Dearborn park. Just four blocks from my house, it's convenient but feels shunned by the neighborhood for no obvious reason. Over time, I've come to discount it as a "bad park," and on sunny days tend to venture further afield to ones we enjoy like Powell Barne tt or Mt. Baker.

When I heard that a week ago a man abducted a women in Renton, and drove her there to sexually assault her, I began to wonder why a rapist might consider Dearborn park a destination worth a half hour drive when so few local residents choose to walk there.

The prominence of the play equipment and soccer field suggest that children accompanied by adults are the primary intended users. When I ask my boy if he wants to go to the park, the answer is always a resounding yes, but Dearborn doesn't really count in his book. The park means open-ended play -- running from one interesting diversion to another, mixing it up with other kids, navigating varied terrain, excitement!

A funny thing I've found about standard children's park equipment -- the swing and Jungle Gym-style play set -- they have little interest in themselves. Kids know that they are for sliding and swinging and monkeying around, but they will use them only as enthusiastically as the surroundings merit. For lack of excitement, our play sessions at Dearborn are halting, and quick to end. If I don't guide each bit of the action, my son might actually request to go home -- something that has happened at no other park.

But enough of my kid, already -- what about me? The park has little to offer adult tag-alongs in the way of views or other areas where a person might pleasurably linger (unless you're the lurking sort, but more on that below). The walking path around the lower soccer field is only good for a five minute circuit and, as visually uninteresting as it is, only bears a single go round. There are no restrooms on site, which can also make lingering unattractive for families.

The path that runs down from the playground is completely secluded in the trees until it pops out into the lower field after some twenty-five yards. It continues on, encircling the play field (which I've only seen used in the fall for soccer) and leads back out to the entrance for a stretch, shaded by more trees. I was bemused when I saw "hiking trails" among the park's features on the city's web listing for Dearborn. I remember seeing what looked like a couple of overgrown deer paths and confirmed by a satellite view that there is a goodly splotch of woods. I never thought of the wooded area as even being part of the park!

Lonely, shaded, and secluded, Dearborn park is ideal for the kind of public activity that is best shielded from the general public view. Come at the right time and you'll see the evidence -- the condoms, the beer bottles, the gang graffiti. It's hard to imagine a better setting for lurking, hooking up, hiding, or indulging in your favorite controlled substance.

Wanting to get to the bottom of this "hiking trails" business, I dug a little deeper and found this enthusiastic review of the park, which declares it a "pleasant pocket of nature in the city." It further explains that the park "was developed by schoolchildren and staff from adjacent Dearborn Elementary School, and Seattle Parks and Recreation, the Trust for Public Land, EarthCorps and other groups."

The private setting that makes the park seem forlorn at best and menacing at worst during off hours, makes perfect sense if you consider it as an adjunct to Dearborn Park Elementary's grounds. Indeed, according to Dearborn Park Elementary's website, their teachers are "specially trained in Project Wild environmental curriculum to use the woods and wetlands as a classroom."

It's designed for school use, with all the built-in supervision and regimentation that implies. Of course there's no restroom -- there are plenty of them inside the school! Private grounds disconnected from the surrounding streets make city schools feel secure. But when the kids and staff go home, so does all the structure and supporting facilities and liveliness that make it a good place to be.

Without the school, the park is an empty shell and the neighborhood treats it accordingly, abandoning it to "users" like the one who made his way there from Renton last Sunday night.

Saul Alinsky and the Low Road to Morality

2008-05-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

Much has been made in this election cycle of the company the presidential candidates have kept. The connection of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to great American rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky has been touted in the media as a potential liability that may yet taint the candidates. Ever the maneuverer, Hillary Clinton, who some forty years ago wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky's work, used her husband's presidential authority to block access to the docume nt. In the mid Eighties, Obama cut his teeth in street-level politics as a community organizer trained in Alinsky's methods.

Alinsky is a bogeyman in some quarters because he had the audacity to encourage the poor to dirty their hands in the process of accumulating power in the same way everybody expects politicians and business to. His sin was viewing the poor as capable of solving their own problems and challenging them to actually confront those in power who have influence over the issues they face (read a fine interview with the man here).

Alinsky's maxim "No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation" wouldn't sound strange coming from some hard hitting executive like say, Jack Welch. But when Alinsky actually expected the poor residents of Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood to "compel negotiation" -- well, that's a different story.

His stated aim of "rubbing raw the sores of discontent" sounds like that great American taboo, "class warfare." We vote, we pray, we humbly accept charity, we may even complain, but we do not confront and we do not demand, especially in groups. It's unreasonable. It upsets our sense of order. It sounds like some commie shit.

In American politics these days, change is on the agenda. The question is who is capable of delivering the change Americans desire. The Hoole Intelligence Report contends that it ain't a new president and, with a little help from Hillary, Barack, and Saul, will explain why.

The Work of Other (Better) People

The other day, I was talking to a friend about philanthropy. His friends tell him that they admire the volunteer work that he does and the contributions he makes but that they themselves aren't the type of people who have the time or disposable income to do likewise. What they are saying is that he has reached that privileged station in life that affords him the wisdom and leisure to give back to the community, but they themselves, lacking his success, are excused from virtue.

They don't realize that he considers himself to be by far the greatest beneficiary of his "charity." He doesn't give because he's a Warren Buffet, he gets to be a little bit the Warren Buffet because he gives. Many people stand up this prerequisite of angelic purity to excuse themselves from stepping outside their immediate circle and contributing to the greater good in their community or the world.

In his book, "Rules for Radicals," Alinsky offers this striking observation about peoples' motivations -- "it is not man's 'better nature' but his self interest that demands that he be his brother's keeper." He continues:

To eat and sleep in safety man must do the right thing, if seemingly for the wrong reasons, and be in practice his brother's keeper... This is the low road to morality. There is no other.

Self Interest and Self Help -- Self, Self, Selfity, Self

Obama has made his hay so far as an agent of change and doubtless his experience as a community organizer will help him deliver on his promises. Naturally, as a man looking to be the big cheese, he's come to see Alinsky's ideas as too narrow a vessel for broad change. He said in an interview "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."

Alinsky would have pointed out that this is a false distinction arising from the shame associated with selfishness. In "Rules for Radicals," he writes in a chapter on the politics of language that "it appears shameful to admit that we operate on the basis of naked self-interest, so we desperately try to reconcile every shift of circumstances that is to our self-interest in terms of a broad moral justification or rationalization."

The problem with dreams and ideals and values that we feel don't advance our own interests is that we are unlikely to do much about them ourselves -- they tend to be the broad, fantastical things we feel are outside our sphere of influence which leads us to cede responsibility for them to God or to... a president!

Alinsky's Iron Rule of Organizing illustrates the difference between Obama’s presidential hopes and dreams and the necessity for grassroots political participation:

Never do for people what they can do for themselves.

The equation is simple -- if your values, hopes, and dreams, are important enough for you to personally do something about them, you will. If they are not, you won't.

In Alinsky's words, "Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services."

People who take on an issue themselves are likely to act with a vigor proportionate to the issue's effect on their lives. If you yourself identify an issue and define the action that will get the result you want, you have motivation to see it through and, for better or worse, own the results. This is what people mean when they talk about "sustainability."

For her part, Hillary Clinton has alternately hidden her connection to Alinsky, damned his work with faint praise, and dismissed his methods. In her 1993 book "Living History," she writes,"He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't.”

In fact, Alinsky explicitly stated that people who want to affect change must work inside the system* -- the thing they really disagree on is the purpose of working inside the system. The Clintons have worked inside the system for a solid three decades building a sweeping national political juggernaut. Alinsky-style community organizing starts "inside the system" for the simple reason that, in order to bring about "concrete, specific, achievable" improvements in their lives, normal people need to depart from a familiar place.

Ultimately, it's the scale of Clinton's and Obama's ambition that led them away from Alinsky's principles of civic participation. Their hustle, however noble, is to make the case that giving them your vote is the best way to see your political hopes and dreams realized.

Shop N' Vote '08!

Confronted with the attacks of 9/11 and the specter of environmental disaster, there are just two forms of civic participation Americans have come together around -- shopping and voting. Shopping for that hybrid sedan, picking up those compact florescent bulbs, or in GW's less discriminate formulation, "your continued participation and confidence in the the American economy."

We attempt to buy our way out of an impending environmental disaster not because that is the correct response or the one that will succeed, but because it is the response that will cause no disruption in our politics, our economy, or our lifestyle. The fruit of our virtue is trifling.

And so it is with voting for a president. Obama can only represent us in the most indirect, symbolic way. We would be fools to expect him to do what only we can do for ourselves. Until we connect those distant, abstract problems menacing our world like global warming or dollar-a-day poverty to our own experience and our own self interest, we will continue to meet them with our trifling virtue at best, or fob them off on better people at worst. Obama's got my vote, but I'm still taking the low road.

* "There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families -- more than seventy million people -- whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971 dollars]. (Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals,"xix.")

Tent City Why Not?

2008-05-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

Driving though "downtown" Mercer Island, I came across this bit of graffiti last week stenciled at the entrance of a new building in neat, black letters. A man stood staring at it in that Rodin's "Thinker" pose people adopt at art galleries. He walked up to it and scratched at it with his fingernail. A week later it hasn't been painted over.

Who did this? The question isn't a simple one. When Tent City 4 moved from Bellevue to Mercer Island last week, it wasn't without controversy. A group of residents who go by the catchy name Mercer Island Citizens for Fair Process tried unsuccessfully to stop the move in court.

Graffiti is pretty scarce in Mercer Island and the classic graffiti kids do tends to go up around construction sites, abandoned property or space otherwise perceived to be unclaimed. The placement of this message at the entrance of a rather swank new building is an explicit thumb in the eye of official Mercer Island.

Perhaps some hardened pro-homeless activist posted this message 95 theses style, for all of affluent Mercer Island to chew on? This is extremely unlikely given how disciplined the activists and residents of Tent City are about abiding by the law and not proving a nuisance to their host communities. They are painfully aware that if crime can be proven to accompany the tent city, the gig is up -- no city would host it.

Could it have been planted there by a NIMBY provocateur, bent on showing just how depraved the homeless and the people who love them are? I picture a be-suited junior executive sliding out of a Range Rover with a can of spay paint and a smirk in the wee hours of the morning.

I guess it might as well be literally "the writing on the wall," placed there by some divine hand. Over the protests of a few residents, churchgoing Mercer Island made the new camp location happen. Way to go, rich people!

The Ghost Verse

2007-11-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

This edition of the Hoole Intelligence Report will bring to your attention the existence of a fake, but immensely popular Bible verse which somebody (nobody knows who) invented to prove a silly point about masturbation (which nobody can agree on). That the holy scriptures offer succor and guidance to untold millions across the globe goes without saying. It is my hope that the tale of the Ghost Verse will make it clear that fake scripture can be a profound source of inspiration in its own right.

It was during a week night session of church some time in the Eighties that I first heard it told. The dude who sat down in the metal folding chair next to mine was a singular fellow, who I'd never met before. A son of one of the church regulars back from somewhere (prison? some low-rent art school?) outfitted in a late-Seventies style typical of a certain kind of twenty-something loaner. His name would have been something like Dan or Jimmy.

His hair, parted in the middle and carefully combed over the ears, framed glasses that made him look more square than studious. He had on a black t-shirt, and in his back pocket was tucked the inevitable comb. I'd seen the costume before and even then, it suggested something definite -- the insistence on an obviously dated style was the outward sign of a simmering refusal to get on with the business of adulthood.
The pastor must have mentioned something that related to masturbation from the podium (itself a strange circumstance), which prompted Jimmy to turn, look me in the eye, and declare with monotone intensity:

The Bible says "It is better to cast thy seed in the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground."

His intention was obvious - to suggest that the Bible was much more complex than the preacherman was letting on, that he was a special authority on the ambiguities of scripture, and that he was personally very much in the belly-of-a-whore camp.
Being a surly misfit myself, I'm sure I nodded my head at the fellow or grunted and returned to the tedious business of sitting through church. I was staggered, nonetheless. It had the ring of authentic scripture, but the theology seemed contradictory to what I'd read myself in the Bible. Paraphrasing it, one hears God as a Marine Corps burn-out father -- "You gotta get yourself laid son, wanking it's for wimps."

The story of Onan, the Bible's famed masturbator, seems to be the inspiration for the verse. It's laid out in Genesis 38 like this -- a guy named Judah sets his son up with a wife, Tamar. God turns on the son and ends up killing him (standard operating procedure in the Old Testament, it turns out). It then falls by tradition to our man Onan to knock up his brother's widow, so that the offspring can carry on their dead father's line. A close reading reveals that though Onan was only too happy to "get down" with Tamar, he wasn't trying to father any kids that weren't his, which led him to withdraw at the vital moment and famously "spill his seed on the ground."

The popular gloss on the story is that Onan settled for "shaking hands with the unemployed" instead of hooking up with Tamar. And thus he was fingered as a wanker by posterity and "Onanism" became a synonym for masturbation. Worse still, poor Onan didn't get a chance to enjoy his new found fame as God killed him shortly afterward.

This misreading of the story is a big semantic leap toward the Ghost Verse, because it presumes that Onan chose masturbation over the chance to sleep with an actual woman (an opportunity sanctioned by God himself, no less). You won't have to ask too many teenage boys to find out why that's absolutely nuts. Nuts enough in fact to rise to the level of Sin. And this is the thrust, if you will, of the Ghost Verse -- male masturbation should be a source of guilt because it is a distraction from the totally awesome business of getting laid.

The beauty of the Ghost Verse is that it has survived and flourished. Search for it on the internet, and you'll find that its status as authentic scripture is refuted time and time again, but such protests only seem to increase its popularity. People continue to quote it because they like it, even if it's not "real."

For some, it confirms Christian hypocrisy and the flawed, anachronistic nature of scripture. For others, like Malachy McCourt (Frank's bro), its presumed Biblical origin is a source of comfort, explaining adolescent sexual anguish as fealty to a strange and cruel god. As for Jimmy, my first and greatest tutor in fake theology, wherever he ended up, I'm sure he continues to do God's work to this day.

Participatory Retail & Transparent Supply Chains

2007-09-17T21:10:00.000-07:00

When a business pitches customers just out of their teens with jargon usually heard in MBA programs, you know something special is going on. American Apparel, a tee-shirt manufacturer that caters to the hip 18-25 year old set is equally renowned for the soft-core porn aesthetic of their ads and for being a "sweatshop free" enterprise. How is this feet accomplished? "Vertically integrated manufacturing," they assure the cool young things who buy their clothes.

Businesses are recognizing that their customers are interested in the chain of events that bring products to the shelf and they've found some ways to assuage their concerns -- various third-party certifications, a section of the annual report devoted to the environment, purchasing carbon offsets, or adding words like "earth friendly" or "sweatshop free" to packaging.

As more companies adopt tokens of transparency, crises like the recent toy and pet food recalls further undermine the trust of consumers, who opt for products they feel are demonstrably safe, healthy, and in line with the values they hold dear. The balance is shifting from disclosure, where corporations mollify their customers with a narrow marketing message, to transparency and participation, where business throws open the door and invites customers in to see for themselves because their trade and manufacturing practices are attractive features of the brand.

Participatory retail and transparent supply chains are two related, often overlapping strategies forward-thinking companies are using to improve their offerings and intensify brand loyalty. The transparent supply chain enables consumers to directly verify a product's claims about health, environmental impact, or social justice. Participatory retail describes products that allow the consumer to engage with and shape some significant aspect of the production process. As you'll see in the account that follows, participation and transparency have novelty and virtue to their credit, but above all they are good business.

Mass Customization - This year at it's annual "investor days" meeting, Nike announced a new global marketing theme -- "the customer decides." CEO Mark Parker described the move this way:
We've spent the last, or in our case, 20 or 30 years trying to bundle things, adding value to a purchase or a relationship. And now, it's almost in reverse, because you have to unbundle everything if it's going to become customizable.

Nike's most avid customers feel themselves to be unique and demand products tailored to their specifications. The strategy is to cater to their needs with a customizable product experience and convert them into champions of the brand rather than plain old customers. The flagship product of the new theme is Nike Plus, shoes with a sensor that transfers performance data to a runner's iPod, allowing the user to track performance, map routes, set goals, and participate in a community of Nike Plus users.

Scion, a youth-oriented division of Toyota launched in 2003, is designed to be a customized experience over the life of the car. Buyers who visit a Toyota dealership go to a separate Scion space inside where they are guided through the process of choosing colors, wheels, stereo, and a host of aftermarket items like a ground effects kit or an illuminated cup holder. Alternately, buyers can build the car and get an accurate price tag online before they set foot in the dealership. Scion car clubs are active across the country and the trade in accessories likely to be installed after the sale is growing precipitously. According to Toyota, about 80 percent of people who buy a Scion are new to the Toyota brand and, when they trade their car in, 8 of the 10 cars they choose next are Scions or Toyotas.

On the production side, Rapid Manufacturing (RM), a new additive manufacturing technique that produces fully functional parts directly from 3D CAD models without the use of any tooling, offers imminent possibilities for product personalization. Prostheses, motorcycle seats, helmets, and backpacks formed to the bodies of individual users are all projects being explored by Custom-Fit, the European consortium developing the technology. The implication for customization is that RM will allow a manufacturer to make a one-off, on-demand product without the costs of retooling.

Paradoxically, mass customization, a response to consumers' desire for a unique product, works best when marketed to a community. The products above have been developed in the context of user communities, online or in the real world, where sharing individuality is a core value, which brings us to the next trend.

Retail Communities - Brands have long catered to consumers' desire to belong, but have done so only in abstract terms -- belonging to a brand community is an increasingly literal proposition.

At Threadless, users participate in the production process by submitting their own tee-shirt designs and/or voting on the best design submitted. Designers upload their T-shirt designs to the website where they are rated by users. On average, around 700 designs will compete to be selected in any given week. The process creates a virtuous circle in which everybody benefits -- ambitious designers become superstars in the Threadless community (and potentially beyond), users get the products they voted into existence, and the folks who run the company sell to an engaged, self-selected community. Nike and Microsoft's Xbox division are both experimenting with developing products on the community model.

Trends toward transparency and participation have the most urgency for business in the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) market segment, which captures consumers who need to know and participate in the supply chain for ethical and even spiritual reasons. For this reason, Zaadz, an online social networking site recently acquired by the biggest player in the LOHAS market, Giaim, is at the vanguard of the new retail communities. Members are what might be called the "lead users" of the LOHAS market segment -- the yoga instructors, the reiki masters, the meditation gurus. Paging through the member profiles, it's clear that the majority have a product or service to sell. In short, they are the tastemakers and the early adopters.

The difference from conventional retail communities like the examples above is that, instead of developing around an existing brand or product, Zaadz has developed around loose set ideals. Given that they are essentially a market segment organized as a community, there are reasons to believe that Giaim will find a more focused audience than others have found at other social networking sites like MySpace. The challenge with this retail community building strategy, as evidenced by rumblings among Zaadz's membership about their relationships being sold, is balancing the goals of the community with those of companies attempting to monetize their investment.

Transparent supply chain - Business has long established the provenance and quality of its product by helping consumers visualize a key part of the production process. Think of the "inspected by" tag included with Fruit of the Loom underwear or commercials featuring mythical Columbian coffee grower Juan Valdez. Among today's wised up consumers, such wan efforts will be seen as little more than marketing hustles.

Consumers from all walks of life and of every political stripe have grown suspicious of traditional guarantors of product safety and quality, like the FDA and the corporations themselves. Consumers increasingly consider themselves the best judge of product health and safety and, instead of taking the company's word for it, will intensify their demands for specific, accurate information.

In 2005, mandatory food chain traceability regulation came into effect across the European Union requiring that "Information on the name, address of producer, nature of products and date of transaction must be systematically registered within each [agricultural business's] traceability system." Though the information is primarily to aid health officials in tracking food-borne illness, the European Union has mandated "farm to fork traceability" for European consumers as well.

In the US, Illinois-based EggFusion etches expiration information and tracking codes on the shells of eggs. You enter the code from your egg on EggFusion's website, and get information including processing plant, product brand, processing date, and retailer.

The increasing prevelance of web-enabled mobile phones is likely to bring the web into conventional brick and mortar retail transactions. Shoppers in Japan already scan items with their phone's camera to access product information on the web. Look for links from products on the shelf to in-depth information on the web in the near future.

Whether or not companies go through the trouble of getting their products Fair Trade certified, more and more are feeling the need to demonstrate that the people who make them are getting what they deserve. In the fashion industry, prime example of supply chain transparency is Made-By, an initiative of Solidaridad, a Dutch development organization. Used by a growing number of luxury garment brands, their "Track&Trace" system allows the purchaser of a garment with the Made-By label to find out where their garment was made and by whom. The back end of the tracing application is Made-By's network of organic cotton farmers and sewing factories that meet ILO labor standards utilized by participating brands. Try out the Track&Trace interface -- it's easy to see how the process of looking up a newly-purchased garment's origins adds value to the product by making it a globe-trotting, educational experience with story value.

Even as the notion of fair trade has gained wide currency, like kissing and telling, keeping mum about costs is considered a retailer's prerogative. The traditional bargain is that the entrepreneur will do what he has to do to get the price right (his business) and if you like the price and features of the product (your business) you will buy. Fair Trade certification and other similar programs simply inform consumers whether or not producers of a given product are getting fair shake -- not how, or to what extent.

The Hoole Intelligence Report predicts that the trend toward more unmediated relationships between consumer and supply chain will move toward it's logical conclusion -- customers will be able to verify the split of the retail price between retailers, distributors, manufacturers, and producers and choose the product they believe represents a fair deal.

Why Bother? The Business Logic of Supply Chain Transparency and Participatory Retail
The Economist, taking Google to task for its intent to do good in the world in a recent article, writes "from the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies to society comes from making profits..." It continues, "Google's 'goodness' stems less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from Adam Smith's invisible hand. It provides a service that others find very useful..."

The bald reality is that "the public" has never held dear old saws of classical economics like the invisible hand, with its naively absolute identification between profit and the common good. On the contrary, today's business environment proves in no uncertain terms that consumers across the political spectrum demand virtue from business and will even reward it by paying a premium.

Transparent supply chains are good marketing and good customer service. Participatory retail, which tends to have more value-neutral applications, works as a business strategy for the same reason -- it makes consumption a vehicle for self improvement and for connecting intimately with the broader world. "Altruism," transparency, participation -- what these notions really describe is a level of customer engagement that goes beyond features and price and investor engagement that compounds the benefit of profit.

Classical economics be damned, the details of sourcing and manufacture are in the headlines every day. The decision for business is whether to proactively leverage a supply chain they're proud of or attempt to stop the bleeding when the next scandal goes down. By abandoning its proprietary stance toward product design, sourcing, and manufacture, business has an unprecedented opportunity to capture a new breed of customer for whom brand loyalty is a matter of principle rather than price.

Do the Hype

2007-08-15T21:19:00.000-07:00

The hype is the name of a classic con game that, for a person with the right mix of audacity and native wit will reliably net $9 for around five minutes of work and $11 of working capital. Falling under a class of cons known as "raising change," the hype been in use for over 100 years with different names and variants. The beauty of this income earning strategy is that it will work as long as cash and cashiers exist.

The ideal setting for the hype is a heavily-trafficked gas station or mini mart -- a busy, distracted clerk will play to this con's strength. The object of the game is to create a change making problem so confusing that the clerk will defer to you for the solution. The apathetic clerk will go along because you’re a pain in the ass. A more conscientious clerk will need to trust or feel sympathy for you.

Here’s are the mechanics of the game, which you’ll need to know inside-out:

Step 1 - make the purchase

You purchase a small ticket item like a pack of gum and pay with a ten dollar bill.
The clerk makes change and gives it to you.

Step 2 - get what's coming to you

You remember you have smaller change to pay with, apologize, and offer to pay with it instead.
You say “give me back the $10 and I'll give you a five and five ones.
The clerk hands over the ten dollar bill.
You give back the nine dollars.
The clerk requests $1 to make it $10.

Step 3 - make your profit

You say "how much do you have there?"
The clerk says $9.
You say “why don't I just give you $11 and you give me back a $20?”
The clerk thinks this sounds perfectly reasonable and takes your $11 in exchange for a $20.

How It Works: the clerk already gave you the $10, which means you come out $9 ahead when you get the twenty. No need to run the game religiously point-by-point as above, but following the 3 steps in sequence is vital -- for the game to work, you've got to get the ten so you can give it back in exchange for a twenty. Just following these steps will do a small percentage of the time, but for the hype to produce consistent results, you'll need to augment it by boosting the two strengths of the game -- complexity and rapport.

Complexity - In essence, you're creating a problem (the complicated transaction) for the clerk and then coming to his aid by solving the problem (telling him how to make change). The more confusion you create surrounding the transaction, the more open the clerk will be to your help. Weaving distracting numbers into your conversation with the clerk can be effective ("See my car out there? It's a '79. My dad bought it for my eighteenth birthday. You got a car? A Subaru? What year? Oh yeah, how much you pay for that?"). Manufacturing a side problem that causes the transaction to start and stop a couple of times can also make the math harder to keep track of (you've got to check on your dog/kid in the car, somebody's nagging at you from the car).

Rapport - The more you bond with the clerk or ellicit his sympathy, the more willing he will be to look to you for help -- you two friends will face this adversity together! If you're the type who makes friends easily, just intersperse your usual chit-chat with the steps above. If the clerk likes you, he will focus on your conversation, and naturally want to help with the change problem.

Clerks need one dollar bills -- they're always running out because they're making change. It's easy to make step 2 and 3 all about thoughtfully letting the clerk keep his change. Another rapport strategy is to tell the story of why you need the ten dollar bill. It has sentimental value because it's the ten dollar bill your dearly departed dad gave you twenty years ago the first time you mowed the lawn. Or you forgot that you wrote an important telephone number on it because you were short a scrap of paper earlier today. Whatever the story, it should make the clerk feel like he's helping you by giving it back.

Your Exit: The clerk will have a knawing feeling that something wasn't right about the transaction. He will be struggling with the math in order to explain the problem to you and correct it before you leave, which means a quick, distracting exit is best. The easiest way is to have a second person with you who, after the deal goes down, demands you hurry in aggressive, personal terms (e.g., "Dammit Jim, I told you I needed to pee ten minutes ago"). The clerk will relent because you obviously have other trouble to deal with.

And there you have it -- a few minutes of work and you've got enough extra folding money to purchase that New Testament Bible you've had your eye on or even a nice little flower arrangement for your mother's birthday!

While I don't advocate cheating gas station clerks, the mechanics of the game are just the kind of esoteric knowledge the Hoole Intelligence Report is here to preserve. The hype first came to my attention a decade ago when I was a victim of it myself. "I think I gave you some extra money," I called after my con man, hoping that he'd agree and correct the mistake. To my surprise, the formerly jovial fellow's body tensed up as if he was preparing for a fight. "You calling me thief? I'm a Christian!," he yelled. I let the strange wisdom of this statement sink in as he drove off into the night with my nine dollars.