Sunday, April 07, 2019
Constants and variables 125, trailing racket edition
I occasionally receive emails from an academic open-source outfit carrying PDFs of various articles about criminology. Most are pure shit, but today's offering had a bit of useful info that helped to solve half of a puzzle.
Our media formerly helped us to recognize and defend against rackets and scams. Sometime around 1974 this emphasis faded. Now that everything is a racket, we're not supposed to defend ourselves.
Today's article explains how and when the media emphasis started. Around 1940, "social" "science" decided to start examining white-collar crime in the same way as ordinary crime. "Sociologists" were behind the trend, since FDR had already formed the equivalence in real laws and regulations.
From the emailed article:
Sutherland’s approach in White-Collar Crime (1949) helped move the field beyond the legal formalism that Sellin critiqued by arguing that regulatory violations could also constitute a type of unlawful, yet not necessarily criminal, behavior – thus justifying a criminological analysis. Considering these unlawful behaviors to be white-collar crimes was important because of their propensity to produce social harms capable of exceeding traditional crime. Indeed, it is the truly social nature of these harms that make them particularly dangerous. As Sutherland suggested, the financial loss from white-collar crime, great as it is, is less important than the damage to social relations. White-collar crimes violate trust and therefore create distrust, which lowers social morale and produces social disorganization on a large scale.FBI's radio outlet echoed this text in a 1952 episode:
Occasionally it is possible to remove the ill after-effects of a crime. When a criminal is apprehended after a burglary, for instance, and his loot is returned intact to the victim, nobody is penalized except the lawbreaker. Such complete restitution is never possible in the case of one particular criminal: the impostor. He usually works with forged credentials or false letters of introduction from well-known people. Even after the impostor is apprehended, he leaves in his wake a wave of suspicion, a feeling by his victims that never again will they be able to believe anyone.After quoting Sutherland, the author descends into typical modern ratshit about privileging and social constructs, so the rest of the article is useless. The start of media concern about white-collar crime was a trailing variable. FDR clamped down on NYC in the '30s, and the "social" "scientists" picked up the ball in the '40s, followed shortly by the media. Was the end also a response to government shifts? I don't think so. The point of inflection in culture and "science" and media was 1974, marked by the Watergate coup. After 1974, the Maoists (who later became Sorosians) owned everything. The media was at the leading edge of this change. Government enforcement agencies like SEC and FTC partly surrendered in the 80s, then finally in 1999. Now white-collar crime is required, not prohibited. When agencies are given a chance to respond to obvious violations of their own regulations, they put on reasonableness pants instead.
Labels: Constants and Variables, defensible spaces, defensible times
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