PIRGs

moderation cf below busted Delay scam

see crypto, origin to kill PIRGs cfact

Martha Boneta’s Farming in Fear Documentary: http://www.coasttocoaststrategies.com/index.php/martha-boneta/

omg flag w/ trees "prosperity, liberty, nature) picked up 1 bag litter?!

lame action, girl on phone and capt sweatpants

The University of Connecticut CFACT chapter took to the campus quad on Monday, looking to recruit new students wanting to get involved with the fight for an economically sustainable solution to the growing energy crisis. Equipped with koozies, clipboards, and a sandwich placard, CFACT members met opposition as the campus’ PIRG chapter was out recruiting and spreading misperception on these same issues.

Many students were glad to sign up to get involved with CFACT and the base continued to grow for students wanting to promote a better future. In addition to recruiting students around campus, CFACT members posted REAL Energy literature on bulletin boards, calling on students to visit the website and get involved.

REAL energy is American energy.

https://www.cfactcampus.org/uconn-faces-off-against-pirg/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/ralph-nader-how-corporate-power-is-locking-out-experts-and-civil-leaders-and-winning/

no lnx

Ralph Nader: How corporate power is locking out experts and civil leaders — and winning

Written by Ralph Nader / Common Dreams October 27, 2019

The lawmakers are doing it. The candidates are doing it. The mass media are doing it. All are excluding from their arenas the leading citizen groups as never before, since the early nineteen sixties. The nonprofit national advocacy/research organizations that led the way for social reforms are being shut out of the political process. These groups were pioneers in consumer rights, environmental protections, labor rights, and whistle-blower protections. These groups fought for freedom of information laws and practices and access to justice in ways that have made our country better in so many ways.

Television anchors like Judy Woodruff (The News Hour, PBS) and Chuck Todd (Meet the Press, NBC) prefer to interview reporters, political consultants or tired columnists, instead of knowledgeable civic leaders who use facts and speak truth to power.

One result of this marginalization is that the public discussion of key services and safeguards for the people is often vapid and fact-starved. For starters, the talking heads who are invited on news shows rarely, if ever, speak of the corporate crime wave, the corporate welfare scandals, or many preventable mass casualties that flow from corporate negligence and cover-ups. The few news articles on such subjects are often thin and untimely because reporters are not in regular touch with citizen groups, instead choosing to rely on irregular official leaks and occasional insider information.

Take, for example, the current discussion on Medicare-for-All or single-payer health insurance. The Democratic presidential candidates and other progressive lawmakers who support catching up with dozens of other industrial nations are not making the strongest case for this basic human right. They say that all Americans should have access to health care, referring to the unaffordable price of care.

The corporatists and some of these Democratic presidential hopefuls attack Medicare-for-All, asserting that the program would be prohibitively expensive by citing wild projections from biased think tanks. Bernie Sanders rebuts by proposing overdue restoration of higher taxes on the wealthy and big business. He asserts that whatever increases there are on the middle class would more than be made up by no longer having to pay health insurance premiums and out of pocket costs.

Moreover, most advocates of single payer do not stress the millions of ailments and injuries which persist because people cannot afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in a timely manner. According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly 30 million Americans are uninsured and 86 million Americans are underinsured. And about 40,000 of them die from that same deprivation each year. Such casualties due to lack of insurance do not happen in countries with universal insurance.

Furthermore, little mention is made of Canada’s far more efficient single-payer (public insurance, private delivery of care) that covers every Canadian at half the average per capita cost of that in the U.S. Canada also has free choice of doctor and hospital, in contrast to the cruel, narrow networks in the U.S.

Canada has better outcomes, less billing fraud by far and fewer casualties due to “medical error and negligence.” This is because the U.S. has a serious problem of over-diagnosis and over treatment, due to profit motives built into our chaotic, wasteful, corrupt, and profiteering system.

Single payer means one billing agent in Canada, not inscrutable bills from 1500 insurance companies with manipulated codes and discriminatory fees (for example, many hospitals charge the uninsured more in the U.S.).

In Canada, there is far less anxiety, dread, and fear about medical bills than in the U.S. Imagine what that is worth!

In the U.S. people worry that if they change jobs, they’ll lose their insurance. In Canada, physicians practice medicine, not complex bookkeeping. In the U.S., physicians plead for permission to treat their patients, while slow-paying insurance companies look out for their corporate bottom line.

The sheer administrative costs in the U.S. are, as a percentage of overall costs, more than double the administrative costs in Canada. Health care in Canada is on average less than $5000 average per capita per year; in the U.S. it has just soared over $10,000 per capita per year. Canada spends 10% of its GDP on health care and covers everyone; the U.S. is reaching 18% of GDP while leaving out tens of millions of people.

No one in Canada has to go bankrupt due to medical bills, as is the case half a million times a year in the U.S. Drug prices for the same drugs are lower in Canada than in the U.S. due to the bargaining power of Canadian single-payer system. Just in terms of correlating health care data, single payer detects what works and what doesn’t far better than the secret proprietary data of many U.S. insurance companies (which excessively compensate their executives). For example, in 2017, Aetna paid its CEO, Mark Bertolini, nearly $59 million as compensation (see the Hartford Courant article published on April 7, 2018). These salaries and compensation packages come out of your pockets, as do the co-pays, deductibles. The maddeningly complex fine-print exclusions add insult to injury.

In the U.S. people resort to GoFundMe campaigns to collect money for major operations that cost far more than they would in Canada. After all, to get the same procedures all Canadians have to do is show their Medicare card which is given to them at birth.

At the extreme, people in the U.S. commit minor crimes just to go to jail to get health insurance. Recently, a couple in their seventies in Washington state took their lives due to being so overwhelmed by their soaring medical bills.

These and other examples further illustrate the advantages of a single-payer system. These numerous points were conveyed in a printed pamphlet personally delivered to dozens of members of Congress (see “25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare for the 2020 Elections” and singlepayeraction.org). Some of these deliveries were followed by my personal calls. To date, not one office, other than Congressman Jamie Raskin’s, acknowledged receipt. Nor have any of these lawmakers or the presidential candidates used such obvious arguments in this pamphlet or other available materials to rebut or to explain. Rarely do any media outlets present the overwhelming advantages of a single-payer health care system.

Recently, liberal columnist, Mark Shields appeared on the PBS News Hour and mindlessly characterized single payer as being too expensive.

When Medicare was established in 1965, the elderly had no trouble giving up their private health insurance plans that could at any time have been weakened, dropped, or not renewed. Just as today, workers with private company plans can be forced to accept less coverage or be laid off without any coverage. Mr. Shields seemed to have forgotten the fear that workers have about the unilateral power of companies to change the rules and delay or limit the benefits.

The foregoing case for a single-payer health insurance system is just one example of how corporate power prevails when there is media and political exclusion of the informed and experienced civic community. Speak up, people!

nina e art'l [gang of 5 bk?]

After purging the moderates in the College Republican hierarchy, Abramoff and his team launched a series of events to build public support for Reagan's foreign policy. The first was its ''Poland Will Be Free" campaign to support the democracy movement then under siege by the Polish communist government.

But in the eyes of the College Republicans, the Polish regime wasn't the only Moscow puppet -- so, too, were liberal student groups, the American media, leftist professors, and nuclear-freeze activists. Abramoff distributed on campuses 900 copies of a book called ''Target America," which posited that the Soviets had planted 4,000 journalist-agents in the American media to pursue a ''massive secret propaganda campaign," according to memos.

A training manual from the period, whichReed helped to write, describedRalph Nader's network of Public Interest Research Groups on campus as ''tyrannical" and ''radical." Abramoff's team accused the United States Student Association -- a 350-chapter liberal campus group that in 1982 protested Reagan's student aid cuts -- of being a ''pro-Soviet, pro-terrorist, Marxist-Leninist organization." The manual advised boycotting ''Marxist" professors, and soliciting support from alumni college donors to oust them.

rfk2:

1/95 Tom Delay invites 350 lobbyists to dismantle regs 30 learned from watt disaster PR,

so plant tree foto op and used free mkt rhet to hide; Luntz did PR (wrote Contract for

Am) snuck riders on key bills, "supermandate" regulatory reform, ~ unfunded

mandates etc but PIRG etc caught them, 1 mil signatures, so mod gop opposed; after

gov't shutdown newt lost public support. TD: we lost debate on envir"

the wrecking crew

grace commission p 43

JA win Mass for RR; cr foot soldiers

b to back belly to b, burn their bodies with napalm jelly yaf

got own Dir mkt funding,

then USA Fdn discover an indiv cd make $; hit campus groups amway coors funded, campbell's soup to hit students supporting union workers; oil co, bottlers

then refined get corp $ to hitPIRGs (cheaper to nip in bud) 89 before staged anti-ussr demos b/c old farts liked

CFACT is rothbard spinoff for energy co's WA times

JA and How P help Ollie in congress spitz channell raises $ (much skimmed) iran contra

cozy with freedom fighters b/c validated rebel BS (also anti commie 62

vigurie had DM but also mult platform cross prom) radio, books, mags etc paper col pal terry dolan sold results eg campaign finance limit regs ncpack nickpack: use DM to get $ for local hit ads 76 ads had lies but allowed cand to stay clean

kemp pimped for CR; they tried to get S afr to buy him 400K$ plane

IFF 86-93 S africa made crime to be commie US declared ANC terrorists Rusel Chrystal //JA Jamba woodstock for intil FF; savimbi no use after cold war, so same SA intel pvt army hunted him down Exec Outcomes

IFF trip: bi bob dornan, inhofe, j helms, phil crane, buz lukens, lichenstein D'Souza wrote for mag (later sil vly guru)

craig williamson SA spy infiltrated and became leader, got ppl jailed and killed

hayek award to vaclav klaus

personnel is policy; trotsky fought white army while stalin staffed up

heritage fdn rolodex for RR

Going freelance, as Abramoff did with the USA Foundation, soon became a popular career move among the sons of Reagan. Ralph Reed launched a group called Students for America, a Southern outfit designed to bring evangelicals into the conservative mix. Students for a Better America, which warred on liberal professors, was set up by Steve Baldwin, also a onetime Abramoff lieutenant. The Conservative Youth Federation of America was launched by Amy Moritz, yet another Abramoff associate. And let us not forget the Conservative Action Foundation, the Conservative Student Support Foundation, and the mysterious Young Conservative Foundation, “America’s premier Human Rights organization.”

It was through the USA Foundation that Abramoff seems to have discovered the profitable side of politics. The occasion for this discovery was the College Republicans’ ongoing war withRalph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), student-activist outfits that were set up in the Seventies and funded at most colleges by “activity fees” that all students were required to pay unless they checked a box on a form. This was the point on which the CRs challenged them, insisting on campus after campus that it was “sinful and tyrannical” to compel students to fund an obviously political organization.

Like other Nader groups, the student PIRGs were something of a nuisance for business, and at some point it apparently occurred to Abramoff or Norquist that defunding and thus“killing” campus PIRG chapters was a service for which the targeted businesses ought to be paying. So the young entrepreneurs of the USA Foundation got out there and sold themselves as political hit men. According to one 1986 study, by the journalist Allan Nairn, the group managed to collect tribute from canning and bottling companies, two oil companies, an electric company (PIRGs were then working to set up utility watchdog groups), Amway, Coors, an assortment of San Francisco landlords worried about the possibility of rent control, [ur-prop 13?] and the Campbell Soup Company, which paid the USA Foundation to undermine a campus support group for a migrant farmworkers’ union. It was pugnacity for pay.

The USA Foundation’s motto was “Promoting a free market of ideas on the nation’s campuses,” and here we encounter yet another of the Washington right’s signature lines. Like so many conservative ideas—anticommunism, for example—it sounds fine at first. A “free market of ideas” sounds like “free inquiry” or a “free exchange of ideas,” an environment in which hypotheses are tested and bad ones are weeded out while good ones go on to earn the respect of the community of scholars. But this is not what the phrase means at all. Markets do not determine the objective merit of things, only their price, which is to say, their merit in the eyes of large corporations and the very wealthy.

The point, and the profit, was in getting the people with money to understand which ideas served their common interests, which ones didn’t, and then to act together as a class—supporting the good ideas and crushing the liberal ones.This was a plan with legs: When I spoke to Grover Norquist in 2006, he was still insisting that businesses had to be instructed on big-picture thinking, on the amazing returns to be realized through funding conservatism. By then, of course, Grover Norquist was no longer some campus activist; he was the architect of the most effective defund-the-left program Washington has ever seen. And his old friend Jack Abramoff was on his way to jail.

wiki

In the United States and Canada, Public Interest Research Groups (also known as PIRGs) are non-profit organizations lobbying groups run by college students. For each U.S. state or Canadian Province, its PIRG is a self-governing affiliate. Many of the U.S. state PIRGs are affiliated with the Fund for Public Interest Research ("the Fund").^[1]

Contents

History

The State PIRGs emerged in the early 1970s on college campuses across the country. The PIRG model was proposed in the book Action for a Change by Ralph Nader and Donald Ross. Ross became the director of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in 1973.^[2] ^[3]

MPIRG (Minnesota) was the first state PIRG to incorporate (on February 17, 1971), and today is one of the few to remain independent from USPIRG and the Fund.^[4] Students in Oregon (OSPIRG) and Massachusetts (MASSPIRG) and other states and Canadian provinces then incorporated PIRGs. The PIRGs are responsible for many of the Bottle Bills (container-deposit legislation) in the U.S.

PIRGs now operate in nearly 30 states.

After students organized on college campuses for nearly 10 years, the different State PIRGs established the D.C. arm—U.S. PIRG—to advocate for change on the national level. U.S. PIRG later became the name for the entire federation, not just the federal legislative and policy arm of the organization.

Since 1970, state PIRGs have delivered results-oriented citizen activism, stood up to powerful special interests, and used the time-tested tools of investigative research, media exposés, grassroots organizing, advocacy and litigation to win real results on issues that matter.

Funding

Student PIRG chapters are typically funded through either a waiveable or a mandatory student fee assessed to each student at the college or university. However, this funding system is controversial due to the political nature of PIRG work. Nationally there were several attempts to remove the PIRG chapters from college campuses, with several being removed, several being retained by majority vote of the student bodies, and many student PIRG chapters reinstated on the contingency that they would solicit their funds directly from individual students rather than by addenda to tuition. Student fees are used only to support Students PIRG chapters.

Fund for the Public Interest

Main article: Fund for the Public Interest

State PIRGs are funded through two sources: members and foundations.

The citizen membership of the PIRGs is largely built through fundraising door-to-door, or in high-traffic public areas. The Fund for the Public Interest,^[1] the national canvassing organization created by the State PIRGs, works to build membership for several other national non-profit lobby groups, including: the State PIRGs, the State Environment groups, and the Human Rights Campaign. Canvassers are often college students during the summer when the canvass operation is expanded, while canvassers generally have a more varied background in the few cities where there is a canvass during the non-summer months. Canvass offices vary drastically in size depending on location and time of year with the largest having between 75 and 100 employees during summer months.

The Fund and the telemarketing centers operate on behalf of all of the state PIRG and Environment groups (excepting MPIRG and NYPIRG). There are currently three telemarketing locations (Portland OR, Boston, MA and Sacramento, CA ). These call centers have a fluid workforce similar to the door and street canvass.

Finally, the individual state PIRGs apply for and receive grants from a variety of different non-profit foundations.

Labor disputes

There have been labor issues surrounding street canvassing and tele-fundraising. On Oct 12th the employees of the Telephone Outreach Project's Portland location won an election to have a union and are negotiating the contract. On June 14th the workers of the Telephone Outreach Project's Portland location went on a brief wildcat strike due to what they consider an illegal firing of one of the union negotiators. ^[5] ^[6] ^[7]

State (and other) PIRGs

Some State PIRGs are independent state-based lobby groups, but the vast majority belong to a federal network known as U.S. PIRG. The state PIRGs have also been responsible for creating a number of other public interest non-profits including, but not limited to, Green Corps, the Toxics Action Center, Environmental Action, the National Environmental Law Center, Earth Tones, and the State Environment Groups. These groups remain affiliated with varying degrees of closeness. However, at least two PIRGs remain autonomous operations; MPIRG (Minnesota PIRG) and NYPIRG, the latter supporting activities of U.S. PIRG while maintaing its independence and its governance by its student board.

The organization that encompasses all PIRG, "Environment," and spin-off groups is known as PIN, or the Public Interest Network. This larger, umbrella organization plays a coordinating role.

The highest-profile PIRGs are MPIRG (Minnesota PIRG), CALPIRG (California PIRG), MASSPIRG (Massachusetts PIRG), NYPIRG (New York PIRG), and OSPIRG (Oregon State PIRG). Outside the United States, PIRGs can also be found in Canadian provinces, such as the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, the Alberta Public Interest Research Group (APIRG) and the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group. A more complete list of PIRGs in Canada is located at the website PIRG.CA.^[8] Canadian PIRGs operate on a different model than U.S. PIRGs. Canadian PIRGs are student run and the majority of their funding comes directly from students. Most, if not all, Canadian PIRG's operate on a consensus decision making model. Canadian PIRGs are independent of each other although some efforts have been made towards collaboration.

References

^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Research_Group#cite_ref-The_Fund_0-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Research_Group#cite_ref-The_Fund_0-1) "Fund for the Public Interest". Retrieved April 30, 2012.
^ Nader, Ralph; Donald Ross (1972). Action for a Change: A Student's Manual for Public Interest Organizing. New York: Grossman Publishers. ISBN 670-10319-5.
^ "Public Interest Projects: History". Retrieved 25 May 2012.
^ "About MPIRG". Minnesota Public Interest Research Group. Retrieved 2008-08-19.
^ "Overtime Class Action Suit Against the Fund for Public Interest Research".
^ "Labor Strife at OSPIRG". KBOO. December 15, 2011. Retrieved April 30, 2012.
^ Mirk, Sarah (December 15, 2011). Portland "Workers Picket Progressive Groups OSPIRG, Environment Oregon". The Portland Mercury. Retrieved April 30, 2012.
^ "PIRG.CA". 2012. Retrieved April 30, 2012.