MANSFIELD: Snake Oil

If you’ve ever gotten even a whiff of snake oil it’s a smell you never forget. It’s like dirty old gym socks, dry popcorn farts and toe jam all rolled together and left out in the blazing sun for a week or so until it reaches its height of funky ripeness. It’s an odor you want to avoid at all costs.

That’s why when the announcement was made that a snake oil salesman named Ty Williams was going to bring 650 jobs to Collinwood where workers would process hemp into “biodegradable hempcrete” bricks that were stronger than concrete at his company, North Coast Natural Solutions, my first thought was, why would anyone want to use biodegradable bricks? Aren’t buildings supposed to last forever, or at least hundreds and hundreds of years? Another red flag was no cost comparison was ever made that I have been able to find. If hempcrete bricks can be made (and I don’t have any reason to doubt that they could be), what would be the cost in comparison to what a regular old brick costs? If it’s cheaper, then Williams is on to something, but if it cost more (or a lot more) then it’s snake oil.

The rule of thumb is, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Williams was offering a starting pay of $17 per hour, child care and transportation to work. What more could someone ask for? Uh, maybe checks that don’t bounce.

While I won’t ascribe evil intent to Williams, who runs the Washington, D.C.-based consulting and financial company Level 5 Global Corp, by all appearances, he is in the smoke-and-mirrors business of selling dreams. Did any of the group of clergymen that he got to bat for him do a background check, or did they simply accept what he was saying at face value? Did they engage in at least rudimentary due diligence or did they simply start giving out promises of jobs like Oprah used to give out new cars?

And that’s my beef with this shitshow. People who are mired in poverty are once again getting the short end of the stick. They got their hopes up sky high for a better life based off of what some preachers and a con man told them (indeed, some even quit the jobs they had) and now they have nothing, while those who held out the promises will simply walk away as if nothing happened.

But, just maybe, not so fast. A couple of the employees who haven’t been paid have hired a very good attorney to file a lawsuit on their behalf in federal court. While the purpose of the legal action is to get the monies they are rightfully owed, a byproduct will be that a federal prosecutor will be going over the facts of this fiasco with a fine tooth comb to assure that no federal labor laws were broken.

If anyone has to do the perp walk over this when they get to federal prison the first thing they will smell is … snake oil.

From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.

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