Saul Alinsky and the Low Road to Morality

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 document. 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?

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

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

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

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.