Mandatory Student University Fees Are Funneled to Left-Wing Lobbyist ‘Public Interest Research Groups’ (PIRG)


Ralph Nader inspired Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) on college campuses to promote left-wing policies concerning the environment, housing, and public utility prices, using lawyers to coerce government agencies.  It was Nader’s idea to fund the PIRGs with mandatory student university fees.  PIRGs lobby state lawmakers and provide new recruits while US-PIRG is the federal lobbying arm of the Public Interest Network. 

Summary: Since the 1970s, left-wing
activists—beginning with failed presidential candidate Ralph Nader—have
struggled to build a lasting base of support for Democrats at the polls.
But one of them, former activist Doug Phelps, took it further,
establishing a permanent empire of professional, paid canvassers
designed to secure money and votes for the radical Left’s agenda. CRC’s
Hayden Ludwig and Michael Watson expose, for the first time, this vast
empire of canvassers known as the Public Interest Network, and the
mysterious puppet master atop the pyramid.

Living the PIRG Life

The oldest and perhaps best-known part of the Public Interest Network
are the Public Interest Research Groups, or “PIRGs.” The PIRGs grew out
of the student activism of the 1960s and early 1970s around a group of
left-wing “consumer activists” known as “Nader’s Raiders” after their
leader and intellectual progenitor, community organizer and four-time
presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
Like the now-defunct ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now), which was created around the same time in the early
1970s by activist Wade Rathke, the PIRGs followed Nader’s vision of a
radical “new populism.”
This new populism largely took the form of community organizing, the
strategy envisioned in the 1960s by veteran Chicago political activist
Saul Alinsky and honed by icons of the New Left like Heather Booth, Harry C. Boyte, and Nader himself.

From the start, Nader intended the PIRGs to be centered on college
campuses across the United States and Canada, beginning in Oregon and
Minnesota. While they were always intended to be run by lawyers able to
coerce government agencies into advancing left-wing policies concerning
the environment, housing, and public utility prices, it was Nader’s idea
to fund the various PIRGs with student university fees. Because they
were aided by mandatory fees enforced by sympathetic university
administrators and approved by liberal-controlled student governments,
many of the early state PIRGs became the best-funded student groups on
their campuses.

As David Seidemann, an environmental science professor at Brooklyn College, wrote
in 2016: “administrators at public universities across the country have
granted [the PIRGs] unique campus privileges and funneled millions of
dollars—in part, from mandatory student fees.” As a result, the New York
chapter of PIRG (NYPIRG) now “raises more money than all other campus
student groups and surreptitiously diverts those funds to its statewide
lobbying operations”—as much as $1 million forcibly raised from the
pockets of college students each year.

In the case of the Oregon State PIRG (OSPIRG), Mark Hemingway wrote for National Review in
2008, students vote on those fees every two years during student
government elections, “in which only 5 to 10 percent of [the University
of Oregon’s] 17,000 students typically vote. So OSPIRG needed only about
800 votes to get a big fat check.” According to Hemingway, the student
fees are then siphoned from the PIRG’s 501(c)(3) clearinghouse to its
501(c)(4) lobbying arm through absurdly high consulting fees, rent on
unused office space, and other supposed “services.”

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