Reply #78: In Your Close, Sir, You Have Put Your Finger On A Real Point

[The Magistrate]

And deserve some commendation for being the first among the 'anti' faction to do so. While it steers us into murky waters all around, it warrants consideration.

It is quite likely, given the circumstances of some of the neighborhoods which A.C.O.R.N. services, that some genuine clients do derive income from illegal activities. In neighborhoods where unemployment ranges towards forty percent, and most of those employed are receiving minimal wages, it would be hard for it to be otherwise. How this should be handled is an interesting question.

My first engagement in this controversy was to point out advice on circumventing tax laws, and means of concealing the source of illegal income in order to make large credit purchases, is readily available to more prosperous criminals, and that what the people in the initial videos were depicted as doing is fairly common in professional suites. It is still illegal there, certainly, but it is part of the ordinary operation of things, and mostly goes unremarked and unpunished. Persons who display great umbrage at such behavior by an A.C.O.R.N. employee without displaying a similar umbrage at corruption of far greater reach and scale nearer the top of the criminal and social order do not deserve to be taken seriously as opponents of corruption and criminality, and persons who claim that action against A.C.O.R.N. strikes a great blow against corruption and criminality in our country are, to put it bluntly, either blind fools or lying allies of grand scale corruption. This would certainly take in the whole of the right wing attack machine promoting and pumping up this trivial occurrence.

If, in advising people on the purchase of homes, A.C.O.R.N. did nothing but what was routinely done by ordinary mortgage brokers over the last half dozen years, they would certainly have been engaged in some practices that were fraudulent by any reasonable standards. Mortgage brokers advised a great many clients to mis-state their incomes on applications, for example. To the best of my knowledge, this wide-spread practice has not resulted in prosecutions for fraud, though one would think it ought to have violated statutes in plenty. Even if one puts the worst possible construction on what these videos seem to show, it is difficult to make the case the behavior shown is something exceptional, and so it is hard to regard it as something worth especial effort at outrage.

When a society so structures its affairs that large numbers of its people are effectively cut off from legal income, illegal activity among those people cannot be regarded strictly as a question of personal moral worth or responsibility. It may still be necessary to police such behavior, as it can indeed do real harm to others, and in so policing it, it will be convenient to pretend the individuals in question are solely responsible for what they choose to do, and moral failures and bad people accordingly, but this is a fiction obscuring the fact that the real harm is done by those who maintain and benefit from unjust structures of economic life, and that the great moral failure is the grasping and covetousness of those at the top of the social pyramid. Without corruption and criminality at the top, there is none at the bottom; the one creates the other, and indeed, enjoins it on many.

What a service organization like A.C.O.R.N. ought to do if approached by a client who does derive income from illegal activities admits, in my view, of several answers. Certainly, on one level, it would be well advised to hew strictly to the law, which will bar advising a person how to launder money and make fraudulent representations. There would certainly exist strong temptation to do as is often done for more prosperous criminals, however, and try to walk up to the line, as professionals do, in imparting information indirectly on the wink and nod. Most anyone working for such an organization, after all, will likely share the view outlined above concerning roots of, and ultimate culpability for, much of criminality in society. In some instances, establishing oneself as a property owner, gaining a respectable face, is an essential step to getting out of the criminal life, and getting a footing in legal society for one's children and family. The old saw that at the root of every great fortune is a great crime is not an idle one. To have something to lose tends to tame a person.