I’ve been critical of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) for its internal financial scandals and for its hard-edged, rather scripted mobilizing strategy which I have often observed to conflict with the kind of diverse, asset-based, skill-building, relational organizing that I admire more.

Still, the current criticisms of ACORN are ridiculously overblown. Because I am a federal grantee, my inbox contains a stern message not to let any of our federal money go to ACORN. That’s because of an act of Congress that specifically names the organization and denies it all funds. I think such legislation is an unconstitutional bill of attainder, because Congress has penalized an individual organization without a trial. It passed the House by 232-178 and the Senate by 67-25.

Meanwhile, you can find daily accusations that ACORN steals elections. For instance, Doug Hoffman, the conservative Republican candidate in New York’s 23 congressional district, claims that ACORN has been “scheming behind closed doors, twisting arms and stealing elections from the voters,” thus allowing Democrat Bill Owens to claim more votes. If you Google the words “acorn steal obama election,” you get 2,510,000 hits.

As far as I can tell, these accusations all stem from the fact that ACORN has submitted false names on voter registration lists–for instance, Mickey Mouse and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. That’s because ACORN pays canvassers, and some of those canvassers try to cheat by filling their sheets with made-up names. ACORN is then required to submit the whole sheet (including the transparently fake names), because if an organization could cross off names, it could disenfranchise real voters. ACORN has flagged the obvious fake entries for special attention by elections officials. In any case, the only victim here is ACORN; Mickey Mouse is not going to vote.

Overall, ACORN does not represent my favorite style of organizing. But it is being relentlessly attacked for different reasons–because it represents poor people, and because it has network ties to Barack Obama and many other national Democrats.

Our system for voter registration is unconscionably complicated and difficult, and that’s just an example of bureaucratic systems that make life hard for all Americans and especially for poor people who have rights to specific services. A lot of ACORN’s work involves signing them up for their legal rights, including their right to vote. We shouldn’t be picking on them for that reason.

[PS: “A new Public Policy Pollling survey finds that 52% of Republican voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.”]

On a frenzied work day, these are sites I should not be visiting–but they are great ideas.

Impact-Inc. is a game (modeled on Mafia Wars) that lets you simulate running a nonprofit organization. This is where to click and play if you have a Facebook account.

Redistricting the Nation opposes gerrymandered electoral districts–one of our most serious political problems–and their site offers an opportunity to draw your own (imaginary) districts.

Our Courts (started by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) provides Do I Have A Right? (a game in which you are a constitutional lawyer), and Supreme Decision (in which you are clerk to a Supreme Court justice).

I haven’t seen polling on corruption, but I suspect that most Americans see some aspects of our society as “corrupted” in an important sense of that word. Institutions’ appropriate, original purposes have been twisted or adulterated until they serve harmful purposes. The great dividing question is, Where do you see the most corruption?

The libertarian/conservative story is that the federal government was created for very limited purposes (the enumerated powers of the Constitution) and has since been corrupted by elites to serve their own illegitimate ends at the expense of individual freedom. One can debate whether the functions of the modern federal government are appropriate and beneficial. Regardless, I disagree with the premise that the federal octopus keeps expanding. As a percentage of GDP, federal revenues have been steady at about 17-20% since the Depression. That means that if increased taxation is a sign of corruption, FDR corrupted us but there has been little change since. What has changed is the nature of federal regulation and activism. Forty years years ago, the national government was involved in welfare (AFDC) and school integration (busing), it drafted many young men to fight in an unpopular and deadly war, and it regulated the financial markets, which were basically public stock and bond exchanges. It has retreated in all those important–and potentially invasive–areas.

I do see other profound forms of corruption:

Financial markets are supposed to allocate resources to the most productive purposes, but the cost of the financial sector has grown from 1.5 percent of the economy in the 1800s to almost 8 percent in 2008–a sure sign (along with Wall Street bonuses and other blatant evidence) that this sector is seizing value for itself and not allocating it productively.

Corporate boards are supposed to oversee companies in the interests of shareholders; and in a competitive market, whatever serves customers best should benefit shareholders as well. But boards seem eager to protect the salaries and job security of senior managers, with whom they interlock.

Medical science is supposed to develop objective understand of diseases, which leads to treatments that will be employed in the maximum interest of patients and with full respect for patients’ dignity. (Health care uses 16% of GDP.) Instead, drug companies ghost-write journal articles advocating for their products and block independent studies designed to compare the efficacy of different treatments. Insurance companies decide how patients are treated.

The courts and criminal justice system are supposed to protect the peace and promote individual liberty and security, but they now absorb massive social resources to incarcerate 2.3 million Americans. Lawyers, companies that build and staff prisons, towns that house prisons, law-enforcement agencies, and organized crime syndicates are some of the institutions that benefit from this diversion of resources.

Legislatures are supposed to deliberate in public about the common good, but Genetech lobbyists were able to write floor statements for 42 Members of Congress (22 Republicans and 20 Democrats). Of course, that is just a window into the pervasive influence of well-funded lobbyists on lawmakers.

Universities (almost 3% of GNP) are supposed to enhance people’s knowledge and wisdom, but they seem as likely to sell research to industry, field professional sports teams using unpaid athletes, and select privileged young people and grant them diplomas after housing them in Club-Med-like arrangements.

I think corruption (writ large) is a major political issue. Perhaps John McCain understood that when he made corruption on Wall Street a signature theme (much to the dismay of Dick Armey). But McCain offered no serious policy response, because he always personalized the problem. Systemic corruption arises because of the rules, incentives, or norms of large institutions. Punishing a few malefactors is rarely more than a small part of the solution.

(On a flight to Atlanta) For my class on social networking, I have put together a series of readings that make the following argument. I believe this argument is important and broadly applicable.

1. Uncoordinated human behavior can produce tragic results

The most famous example is the Tragedy of the Commons. If anyone can take fish from the ocean, we’ll keep harvesting until the there are no more fish. Whoever takes the last fish will understand the dire consequences, but will still do it. If he doesn’t, someone else will.

I wanted to use an example of uncoordinated human behavior that was closer to our class’s focus on the Boston area. So I moved away from environmental issues and “commons” problems and instead looked at demographic changes in neighborhoods. Boston is infamous for “white flight,” although there have been other rapid and painful population shifts here as well–for instance, gentrification. In at least one example (documented in Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope), African Americans rapidly left a South End neighborhood out of fear that it would “tip” into a Hispanic area. So the generic problem is the tendency for individuals to move under pressure, causing others like them to move as well.

There are many explanations for such demographic shifts, including racism, economics, and policy. But my former colleague Tom Schelling famously showed that segregation will occur even if political and economic causes are neutralized. If individuals are free to move, and if they do not want to be a minority in their immediate vicinity, they will self-segregate even if they are equal and actually have a preference for diversity. You can see Schelling’s model play out in a computer simulation.

2. Social capital, institutions, and rules help

I assigned an essay by Robert Putnam to show that when people trust one another and belong to voluntary groups, they are able to overcome such problems of uncoordinated behavior. For instance, Americans support the common good of public education more effectively (not only with tax dollars, but also by participating constructively) when social trust is high. Social trust at the state level is a better predictor of educational outcomes than are student demographics, school spending, or average class size. That would suggest that a neighborhood with strong trust will be less likely to fall apart under demographic pressure.

I then assigned Gerald Gamm’s Urban Exodus to complicate Putnam’s theory. Gamm starts with two communities: an Irish Catholic parish and a Synagogue in South Boston. When African Americans began to move into their neighborhood, the Jews left for the suburbs and their synagogue went with them. The Catholic parish remained in place, along with much of its original congregation, although it gradually became multiracial. Gamm argues that the two communities had the same social capital (and wealth), so social capital cannot be an adequate explanation. Instead, he emphasizes rules and institutions. A synagogue is a voluntary, self-governing membership organization. Schelling’s model predicts what happens when such an organization faces demographic pressure: individual choices determine the collective outcome. In contrast, a Catholic parish answers to a hierarchy that can require the church and clergy to stay in place. If the hierarchy makes a serious commitment to maintaining the parish, individual members can be confident that it will stay and can thereby overcome the Schelling model. Rules either substitute for trust or create trust, or both.

3. We are not prisoners of the past.

Putnam believes that social capital can be created, but his theory has somewhat fatalistic implications. Some communities have social capital, some do not; and often they cannot escape from their history. In his great book on Italy, the high-trust North does well, and the low-trust South fails, because of traditions of membership and trust established as much as 700 years ago.

Likewise, Gamm emphasizes that the institutional structure of parish churches versus synagogues is “exogenous.” Neither Catholics nor Jews choose or create their institutions’ rules; they inherit them. One can understand why Jews would have originally created mobile and flexible congregations, and why Catholics would have preferred stability and hierarchy. But those decisions were made long ago and now determine outcomes even when alternative structures might work better.

To prevent fatalism, I assign Streets of Hope as the story of a deliberate community organizing effort in Boston’s South End. Faced with middle-class flight, urban decay, ethnic divisions, and the threat of gentrification, people come together and created an organization (Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative) that provides direct services, lobbies for better city services and planning, develops new generations of leaders, and builds social capital even across lines of race, religion, and language.

That successful community organizing effort required a lot of resources, including large grants from the Riley Foundation. The question that we are considering is whether the right technological tools could make such organizing easier.