This appears to be the moment to finally establish in everyone’s mind the deep fraudulence and corruptness of Ralph Nader’s various enterprises. Nobody has an interest in covering up for him now.
See: Mark Kleiman, Jane Galt, Zach Wendling, Radley Balko.
Jane’s post in particular sounds like the stories of many, many collegiate idealists I’ve known who went off for PIRG work and canvassing for a summer and returned with really bitter disgust at the enterprise. It’s also noteworthy that the PIRGs are the only major example of mandatory student activity dues getting systematically channeled off-campus into political causes. It’s more common for off-campus political organizations to subsidize undergrad activities, so that they can publish newspapers, invite speakers, or work on campaigns that they’d be unable to afford just from their cut of the student activities fee. PIRGs, by contrast, extract money from campusesin order to fund their ongoing operations– which consist of a little bit of ‘organizing’ and a lot of further fund-raising.
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