The Advocacy/Grievance Industrial Complex

We recently flogged the Consumer Safety Commission for its suggestion that it was going to ban gas stoves.  At the time, it raised a question in my mind as to who is behind all of this.  These issues do not spring out of the ethosphere without the aid of human intervention.  As it turns out, Kimberly Strassel, in a January 26^th Wall Street Journal article entitled “the Campaign to Ban Gas Stoves”, disclosed some of the groups and how they worked together to move the government to issue regulations in order to impose their will on gas stove aficionados.

Strassel found that the group, the Climate Imperative Foundation, with revenues of $221 million in 2021 had developed an action plan to bring about the ban of gas stoves.  The Climate Imperative Foundation then sent money to the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a Basalt Colorado 501(c)(3) non-profit, to come up with a report detailing the health hazards of gas stoves. Now the Rocky Mountain Institute (itself no piker with $115 million in annual revenues) claims to be an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit organization of experts working to accelerate the clean energy transition.  However, the health “study” was written by two RMI staffers without any type of science degree.

Then another “study” written by two lawyers from the New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity also claimed that gas stoves caused dangerous levels of indoor air pollution, citing…you got it….the RMI study.

Then there was the paid research by Consumer Reports which wrote an article “The Hidden Hazards in your Home” and explained that it found an alarming concern with levels of nitrogen dioxide from gas stoves.  At the end of the article, the editors noted that the project was funded in part by… yep, The Climate Imperative Foundation to the tune of $375,000.

This led me to do some investigatory journalism which for me entails sitting at my computer late at night trolling the internet for hidden gems of information, so you don’t have to.

We have all heard about the military industrial complex which has been portrayed as an industry that wishes war would continue so that it can make money.

What I see now is a similar phenomenon in the non-profit industry, what I call, the advocacy/grievance industrial complex.  Discord and societal problems are good for business and business is good.  If you have previously despaired over the fact that after $200,000 in college expenses your children have only a degree in sociology or gender studies, there are now tremendous employment opportunities in the advocacy/grievance industry.

For example, The Southern Poverty Law Center pulled in $132 million in 2021.  15 employees raked in over $100,000 each in salary with CEO Margaret Huong making $364,000.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which we would ordinarily assume to be a grass roots effort to do good and protect us from drunks, actually brought in $35 million in 2021 paying their CEO, Adam Vanek (who I would dare say is probably not a “mother”), $260,000 for his work.

Indeed, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the national organization that provides health services for women, cleared $324 million, paying 11 employees over $300,000/year and its President, Leana Wen, a cool $1.2 million.  In addition, the 129 affiliated organizations of Planned Parenthood generated an additional $1.5 Billion (with a “B”) in revenues.  That’s a lot of executives and employees who rely on the success and continued viability of Planned Parenthood for their livelihoods and for personal economic success. I could go on and on.

We should begin to look at non-profits as simply business enterprises that that don’t have to pay taxes.  These organizations just like their for profit counterparts exist to perpetrate themselves and grow to support their operations, employees’ salaries, healthcare and pension plans just like any other corporation.

It makes no sense why merely being designated as a non-profit and not paying taxes, makes that entity more virtuous than an enterprise organized for profit.  Is it really more virtuous to work to limit the temperature of the planet to 1.5 C by 2100 rather than to provide food for humanity without which we would quickly starve and die well before the 22^nd century.  Yet climate change non-profits are tax exempt while farmers and grocery stores are not.

To get revenue streams to fund their businesses, non-profits are beginning to look to governments for business or grants.  For example, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates get about ½ of their budget ($750 million) from federal sources.

Seeking income to fund its operations from governmental sources rather than donors isn’t limited to the big non-profits.  In Aurora, Colorado, the City Council recently considered requests from non-profits for $2.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds (federal COVID money) pursuant to a city nonprofit grant program.  Some City Council members actually examined the non-profits and found in one case that the grant was to be used for a bathroom remodel in a home rented from the applicant’s mother.

Another group, the East Colfax Community Collective, is an advocacy organization that purportedly works to prevent displacement in “at-risk communities” by simply telling people where to go to get government money. The organization employs 9 people with its Executive Director making $87,000---not bad.  The organization had planned to use the city money to fund a community organizer or part-time community navigator to help people access resources. Our tax dollars to fund … a community organizer?  Look, I’m all for jobs programs but come on….

The same issues arise as the non-profits gather round the trough to get funding to prevent homelessness. The Common Sense Institute in Colorado estimates that front range communities spent almost $500 million on the homeless who numbered 6,140 in January of 2020 which would come out to about $81,000 each.  Although I cannot say with personal observation, I suspect that the homeless are not receiving over $80K/year. 

One place where homeless money is going (which will do nothing to house anyone) is to expand the “homeless management information system”...I’m not kidding.  More than 100 nonprofits and government agencies from the Denver metro area enter data into this system.  That’s a lot of data entry done by a lot of employees!  Call me a cynic, but sometimes, I get the feeling that the only people who are being housed with money for the homeless are the people hired to help the homeless.

At what point do we begin to consider that maybe the non-profit advocacy/grievance industry may have an independent interest to complicate or create societal ills to keep themselves funded and their employees and officers employed?

What happens if they were successful?  What if there was no racial discrimination anymore?  Would these non-profits dissolve terminating their employees and executives so they could go into productive work, or would they attempt to sell the public that racism still exists, and we just can’t see it because it is “systemic”?  What if new scientific discoveries and mathematical modeling proved conclusively that the planet was no longer at risk of carbon dioxide emissions? Would the climate non-profits cheer or would they be science deniers trying to find some other chemical or molecule that would result in global Armageddon?

Societal success is disastrous for the advocacy/grievance industry and its employees, throwing thousands out of work which will require the search for more injustice or environmental harms that could keep themselves gainfully employed at least until the kids are out of college.

I could go on…and on… but at the risk of further depressing myself and my readership, I must bring this column to a close.

The lesson that we should take away from the above and our peek into the advocacy/grievance industrial complex is that we have to engage in critical thinking when evaluating non-profit and governmental initiatives to do what some may call “doing good”. 

Everyone is selling something including non-profits.  Particularly, governmental officials, who should view the spending of tax dollars as a public trust, need to look a lot harder to see if spending for non-profit social services is producing the desired results and is not just a jobs program for non-profit employees.  It may take a lot of effort, but if we are going to solve society’s problems, we have to do better than just blindly throwing money at them.