Causes And Rackets

     Eric Hoffer’s oft-misquoted gem:

     What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

     …points to a dynamic propelled by greed. The greedy – i.e., they who seek wealth but shun effort – will strive to exploit any opening that might yield them what they want.

     Noble causes are particularly targeted by the greedy. (In this usage, a noble cause is one whose supporters are motivated by a conception of the greater good.) To gain their ends, they will do their utmost to appear righteous, which is necessary to allow them to hide themselves among the righteous. However, as I’ve written on other occasions, success begets emulation. Over time, exploiters will multiply in accordance with that law. And in the absence of externally applied correctives, they will come to outnumber the sincerely cause-minded.

     Causes particularly attractive to the greedy are those that shelter under the wings of governments.

     In the Sixties, public attention began to focus on a problem that had been growing slowly for several decades: pollution of the air and water, especially in urban zones. Several of the most prominent “environmental defense” organizations rose rapidly at that time. In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address the pollution problem and to satisfy the rising demand for such a body. The EPA has grown in power and funding since that time.

     There’s no question that pollution had become a significant problem in America’s cities. Unrestricted emissions into the air and water were a threat to health and to the quality of urban life. The EPA did address some of those concerns, though the amelioration of air pollution in particular was better served by technological advances and economic influences on ordinary Americans. But exploiters were already at work, gaming out ways to use this new, nebulously chartered agency as a siphon for government funds.

     You may recall the scares about “a new ice age” and “acid rain.” Those were the most prominent sky-is-falling causes in the Seventies and Eighties. Not long afterward we were beset by crisis mongering about “deforestation,” with particular attention to the Amazon basin. Then there was “loss of habitat,” including “wetlands.” By the turn of the millennium, those causes had been found wanting. But the crisis-mongers were still at work. The stick they beat us with today, “global warming,” has been the environmental cause celebre ever since the Naughties.

     What has gone essentially unremarked until quite recently is that a number of “environmental defense” organizations profited substantially from each of those causes. There was plenty of money in the government feed-troughs, and they strove mightily to get their snouts into it. As they fattened, they inspired others of low morals and motives to “get in on the gravy.”

     Matters today are tawdrier than ever:

     When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President’s envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30?
     The task was complicated by the fact most of the money – $20 billion – would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such gargantuan grants.
     In hindsight, it’s easy to suspect that corners were cut, or laws were broken, or, at the very least, extraordinary measures were taken.
     Those possibilities are clearly on the mind of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as he tries to unravel what happened to Inflation Reduction Act spending that the Biden White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the EPA decided to expedite before the November election – an effort that included moving the roughly $20 billion to a private institution, Citibank, away from oversight of the Treasury Department.

     The whole article is worthy of reading and reflection. It’s hard to believe that anyone involved in the “gold bars off the side of the Titanic” scandal was nobly motivated. One of the relevant grants, $2 billion to a “non-profit” headed by Stacey Abrams, has commanded special attention:

     Many outlets have zeroed in on failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who was lead counsel for a group known as Rewiring America. That group, in turn, is one of the main components of a new group known as Power Forward Communities, an outfit with listed assets of $100 that obtained its tax-exempt status last March, just weeks before it was named the winner of a $2 billion grant.

     A number of Democrat Party insiders and supporters were enriched by such schemes. Though the $20 billion of the “gold bars” scandal appears to have been recovered, the stench of the thing has not been quenched. Attention is finally going to the use of environmental “causes” as grafting mechanisms. But there is danger of missing the bigger picture.

     The Constitution’s constraints on the federal government were intended to prevent the use of federal power for illegitimate undertakings. The Founding Fathers recognized very few subjects for Congressional attention. Nowhere in Article I, for example, is Congress empowered to do anything about “the environment.” Yet “the environment” is one of the central “causes” for federal action today. Grafting through the EPA, federal intrusions upon the extractive industries, and restrictions upon what goods can be offered to consumers make plain what such an expansion of federal authority has meant.

     They weren’t always correct – the Founders were men, and therefore fallible – but their vision was remarkable even so. By dismissing that vision and the constraints that flowed from it, we of today have allowed Washington to be used as a pipeline from our pockets to the clever sorts at the heads of “causes,” none of which pass muster under Constitutional scrutiny. They degenerate from “cause” to “racket” with remarkable speed, these days.