NADER RIPPING OFF STUDENTS ACROSS AMERICA
Bawhahahahaha... Baaaawhaahahaha

Okay, it's not that funny if you attended or are attending one of the 140 campuses that basically forces you to paid a few bucks to Nader's organization, but he's shown to be more hypocritical and narcissistic now. Actually, more like a slimy, evil, cheating bastard... how can you deceive students across the U.S. into contributing towards an organization or person that they probably don't want to give to while railing on politicians for selling out to corporate America? Worse thing about these posts below is that I found out that I unknowing gave to Nader during my years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm so pissed. I could have knowing contributed to corporate America using my $3-$5 bucks by buying a McDonald's extra value meal or played Midway Games' Mortal Kombat for hours instead of unknowingly contributing to Nader's whacked out campaigns.

Definitely read Radley Baklo's article, Public Shakedown Artist, at Tech Centration Station (excerpt below):

The PIRG scam is short for "Public Interest Research Group," and there are well over a hundred chapters of the organization spread out across the country. The scams vary from campus to campus, but it basically works like this:

Each time your kid registers for classes, the local PIRG chapter has arranged with the school to tack a fee on to his/her tuition. On most every campus, the PIRG chapter has made attempts to make this "contribution" as secretive and misleading as possible. Just how secretive and manipulative the method depends on how much resistance each chapter has met in trying to get the scheme implemented. At most schools, they first attempt to make the fee both mandatory and nonrefundable. If that doesn't work, they lobby for as underhanded and sneaky a scheme as the school will allow.

Other articles and my initial read was found at The Volokh Conspiracy:


Nader and PIRGs: 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.