Politics
Astroturf Update: Coal lobby group parts ways with fraudster PR firm
Published August 23, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Above: Protesting "Naked Fraud" at offices of Bonner & Assoc. in Washington, DC. By DC Climate Action.
The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) announced Friday that it will no longer engage conservative campaign firm Bonner & Associates.
Bonner is the firm responsible for sending fradulent letters to three members of Congress in opposition to carbon cap-and-trade legislation -- letters that were made to look as if they were from legitimate grassroots citizen organizations.
"We will not be working with Mr. Bonner again," Joe Lucas, senior vice president for communications at ACCCE, told NationalJournal.com (which broke the story, as far as I can tell). "ACCCE did nothing wrong. Looking back, there would be many things we would do differently."
Opinion flew around the global warming blogosphere when the move was announced:
At the National Journal's Under the Influence blog, Amy Harder writes that ACCCE has yet to sever ties with PR firm Hawthorn Group, its primary contractor, which had in turn hired Bonner. Thus "the middleman in this scandal is not losing out."
ThinkProgress disagrees with ACCCE's claim of innocence: "In fact, ACCCE covered up the fraud and is now throwing Bonner under the bus. The coal coalition had been informed by the Hawthorn Group...days before the pivotal House vote on the energy legislation. But ACCCE kept silent, failing to notify lawmakers or the defrauded organizations."
ACCCE will continue to work with the Lincoln Strategy Group, a firm with its own troubled history of anti-Democratic voter fraud. "Makes you wonder," writes activist Jesse Jenkins at WattHead, "what else is the dirty energy lobby up to..."
OMB Watch worries that the fraudulent letters could have a chilling effect on grassroots organizing beyond the immediate situation. "Unfortunately, advocacy organizations may now be uneasy about any future letters they send to legislators and question whether they will be considered illegitimate."
In another blog post, OMB Watch makes the point most other blogging and reporting on this issue has missed: Under current law, there are no requirements for grassroots lobbying campaigns to disclose their origins and funding, "including the fake, Astroturf kind, even if specific pending legislation is mentioned and members of the public are encouraged to contact Congress."
Sine these corporate-funded campaigns can generally outspend and outshout public interest organizations and constituents, "the playing field is rendered unequal and the democratic process is hurt," writes OMB Watch.
Opponents of increased disclosure (who often include groups engaged in Astroturf lobbying) argue that requiring the public's access to such information is an unconstitutional regulation of speech and is intended to silence diverse viewpoints. Ethics watchdogs, however, say disclosure of grassroots lobbying is not intended to restrict free speech, but it is intended to bring increased transparency to both government and those who seek to influence government.
In addition, advocates note that nonprofit organizations and labor unions are already required to report on their grassroots lobbying activities via their annual IRS Form 990 reports.
Browsing a few of the more prominent conservative climate blogs, including Climate Audit, Watts Up With That, and Climate Depot, I've so far found no comment on ACCCE's break with Bonner & Associates.
Questions for American Petroleum Institute's @janevanryan #ACES #ec09
Published August 21, 2009 @ 11:33AM PT
UPDATE, Tues., Aug 25: I've posted Jane Van Ryan's answers.
-----
UPDATE, 20:48 ET: Jane Van Ryan has responded, via Twitter, that she'll look over my questions and post answers online. Thank you, Jane. Stay tuned, readers...
-----
August 21, 2009
Jane Van Ryan
New Media Advisor
American Petroleum Institute
Dear Ms. Van Ryan,
I noticed you using Twitter, today, from an energy industry-backed political rally in Lima, Ohio. (I see you're blogging about these rallies, too.)
API's members have such a huge role in the nation's energy and climate policies. The oil and gas industry has already spent $55 million lobbing Congress, According to CNNMoney. It's on track to beat 2008's record-setting $83 million in lobbying expenditures.
Given how much influence this kind of money can buy, I'm encouraged to see you out in the social media scrum, where you can take questions directly from the public and the press.
Since you were tweeting from your mobile phone in Lima, however, it's very possible that you missed my messages. So the salient bits of our not-exchange are reposted below.
I hope you can look them over and get back to me soon with answers.
Best regards,
Emily Gertz
Journalist and Editor
twitter.com/ejgertz
Yes Ryan Sager, There Is Political Astroturf
Published August 19, 2009 @ 08:03PM PT
When is political organizing not a genuine expression of citizen opinion? Not grassroots, but astroturf?
It's about where the funding is coming from, and why.
Author Ryan Sager didn't see it that way on today's opinion page in The New York Times.
His take: If people show up and believe what they're saying, then it's real citizen opinion and activism. "One reason the [health care] town hall protesters are called Astroturf," he writes, "is that they have ties to groups with corporate financing like FreedomWorks, run by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader." But getting people out is "basic politics," no matter who paid for it. In fact, "the Obama administration has been doing its own stage managing," writes Sager,
"At a town hall in Virginia last month, the president took questions from members of organizations with close ties to the administration, including the Service Employees International Union and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. The Web site of another liberal group, Health Care for America Now, instructs counter-protesters to "bring enough people to drown" out the Tea Partiers."
If you try to fault these corporate-funded campaigns on their methods, which are classic community organizing tactics no matter who uses them, then you are indeed taking a weak position.
The inconvenient truth that Sager is dodging here is that large corporations have the monetary and manpower resources to drown out political speech by public interest groups and citizen groups, which are typically much less abundantly funded. But corporate political speech is given equal protection with individual political speech.
If this sounds wrong to you, keep in mind that it cuts both ways on the political spectrum. If it's a cause you agree with, but a corporate-funded entity is paying to generate support for it while hiding its participation, it's astroturf.
Let's compare:
- The US Climate Action Partnership is transparently an alliance between corporations and advocacy groups; the list of members is right at the top of the home page.
- To grasp that the powerful oil industry PR group American Petroleum Institute is behind Energy Citizens, you'd have to recognize the modest acronym "API" on the group's list of participants, Then, you'd have to intuit that an organization that includes many of the world's biggest oil companies as members is likely to be calling more shots than, say, online retailer Gourmet Seed International.
Sagers also makes a category error to equate corporate-funded organizing with political parties and unions turning out people to influence policy. People organize into parties and unions specifically to represent their best interests in the political and economic arenas, where they might otherwise be ignored, and to get more influence over the matters that directly affect their lives.
People found corporations, and corporations pour money into lobbying and PR, to deliver a steady profit to their owners.
Firms like the conservative PR agency FreedomWorks endure for a reason; they're extremely canny operators that know how to tap into two rich veins: one of corporate money, and one of fear of change.
They also know exactly where to hit the traditional news media's reporting blind spot, which (speaking broadly) is that it hates to baldly confront liars with their lies.
I'd wager that they also grasp that the inherent nature of progressives ito suffer sometimes extreme differences of opinion within a single political coalition. This can create a time lag in reacting effectively to reactionary anti-reform campaigns -- whether genuine grassroots or astroturf.
Meanwhile, it's easier to harness the energies of the average reactionary right-winger, who loves to be ordered around, into expressing a disciplined set of messages.
The astroturf effort against health care reform is becoming more and more indistinguishable from real grassroots activism -- or to put it differently, it seems to be converging with non-corporate political efforts.
Time should tell soon if the "Energy Citizen" astroturf effort gains similar ground -- although judging from a report from today's corporate-sponsored rally in Houston, by Sarah McDonald of Texas Public Citizen, they're blowing it.
Kicked out of the rally proper by a security guard because she didn't work for an energy company, McDonald talked with people outside the event:
[S]peaking to other individuals who had been denied access was even more enlightening than listening to Big Oil preach their sermon.
This was such a fake, Astroturf event that they didn't know how to handle legitimate grassroots support. A couple of women who had been to some of the teabagger events and townhalls came down, armed with American flags and excited to protest "crap and tax" -- but even THEY weren't allowed in. Several others who had heard about the rally through Freedom Works, on right wing radio, or in the paper were also locked out.
Video: Rachel Maddow dissects the anatomy of astroturf; You can, too.
Published August 19, 2009 @ 04:48AM PT
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Rachel Maddow dissects the particulars of astroturf campaigns: Public relations campaigns designed to influence public policy. They're funded by corporations, but made to look like the work of "average citizens."
She ends with a look at Energy Citizen, the corporate funded fake grassroots effort to undermine climate change policy, which I've been covering here at Stop Global Warming.
Update, 12:04 pm: As Maddow notes, anyone can do it! When you encounter one of these web sites purporting to be a grassroots campaign against enactment of a reform policy, go to the bottom of the screen and click on the "about us" link (or its nearest equivalent). Then find the names of the entities and/or persons sponsoring the site, and begin digging back until you figure out exactly where the money's coming from and who's created the astroturf.
Some good resources to aid your efforts include:
SourceWatch: A collaborative wiki-based guide to the people, organizations, and companies behind the news, particularly public relations firms and professionals "engaged in managing and manipulating public perception, opinion and policy." A project of the non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy, which also publishes PR Watch.
LittleSis, another collaborative wiki documenting the "key relationships of politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated organizations. (Why "Little Sis"? Because she's a watchful eye on "Big Brother.")
The Long, Lame Tradition of Reactionary Astroturfing
Published August 18, 2009 @ 06:47AM PT
Political reactionaries and some sectors of the health care industry have allied against health care reform. A collaboration with very similar characteristics will, according to reports, soon be turning out crowds at fake grassroots rallies to stop energy policy reform and action on global warming, as well.
For an entertaining preview of what's coming down the pike for climate and energy, consider this flashback to 1961. In this ad, "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine," the Gipper encourages citizens to write their legislators in opposition to the creation of Medicare:
The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally di vided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . .
All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.
... [If Medicare is enacted], one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
"During the 1960s, conservatives regularly claimed that Medicare would destroy the doctor-patient relationship, interject government into every-day decisions and undermine personal freedoms," writes Wonkroom. The media and politics accountability blog created this video to demonstrate how Sarah Palin evoked these simply-not-truths from Reagan during the presidential campaign last fall.
Reactionaries are echoing them now, to try and derail health care reform.
When it came to imagining the future, Ronald Reagan and his conservative allies were zero for zero on accuracy. Medicare was enacted. Free market capitalism survived and flourished (and crashed, and flourished, and crashed, and...). World socialism has near-totally disintegrated, while Western democracy has, with some bruising, continued steadily to this very day.
The predictions, as well as the effort to evoke fear in the public, are not new -- and they're not improved with age.
Astroturf Energy Campaign Plan Fractures Oil Industry
Published August 15, 2009 @ 01:15PM PT
Related posts:
- Join the real grassroots movement to get action on climate change
- Bill McKibben: 'There finally is climate change activism' and anyone can join
- Conservatives Point Astroturf Campaign at Climate-Energy Reform
- Coal Lobby Group Faked Grassroots Opposition to Climate Bill
The leak of an American Petroleum Institute memo that details plans to turn out thousands at supposed "Energy Citizens" rallies in coming weeks -- in reality, energy industry-sponsored rallies designed to derail energy policy reform -- is apparently exposing fissures within the powerful oil lobby group's own membership.
According to Jim Pickard and Kate Mackenzie in the Financial Times, while "core members" of API, like fossil energy giant ExxonMobil, support the plan, it's being rejected by those who are members of the US Climate Action Partnership, a business-environmental group coalition that supports many of President Obama's climate and energy policies.
API member Shell backs USCAP's position and is refusing to join the astroturf effort, reports FT, because the company believes solving global warming is "the pro-growth strategy." Other overlapping USCAP/API members include General Electric, Siemens, BP America and Conoco-Phillips. “The truth is that the API is all over the place on this issue, there is nowhere near a unanimous view,” a source inside the oil industry told FT's reporters.
The smoking gun memo is signed by API president and CEO Jack Gerard. In it, he asks all API members to organize and turn out their employees at least two events during the Congressional recess, aimed at swing vote or vulnerable senators in "11 states with a significant industry presence and 10 other states where we have assets on the ground."
Gerard seems to make clear in the memo that API is underwriting much of the effort, even though it has recruited allies from related industries:
To be clear, API will provide the up-front resources to ensure logistical issues do not become a problem. This includes contracting with a highly experienced events management company that has produced successful rallies for presidential campaigns, corporations and interest groups. It also includes coordination with the other interests who share our views on the issues, providing a field coordinator in each state, conducting a comprehensive communications and advocacy activation plan for each state, and serving as central manager for all events.
(USCAP's stance has also fractured the environmental advocacy sector, to some extent. Check out this January 2009 back and forth between Joe Romm of progressive think tank Center for American Progress, who essentially calls USCAP's position a sellout, and NRDC Climate Center director Dave Hawkins, who says it's a pragmatic position that will result in strong emissions controls and transformation of our energy economy.)
Astroturf Fail? Join the real grassroots climate action movement
Published August 14, 2009 @ 12:52PM PT
It’s more important than ever that we keep the pressure up for strong climate policy. As Emily wrote earlier this week, a fake-grassroots campaign is being unleashed against energy and climate policy reform.
Big Oil is eager to evade regulation of their dirty energy supplies. It's taken a cue from the health care reform protesters, who have managed to seize the media spotlight with intimidation tactics like shouting down members of Congress at their in-district town hall meetings.
Kevin Grandia recently wrote on HuffPo about an email memo, written by American Petroleum Institute (API) president Jack Gerard, that was leaked to colleagues of mine here at Greenpeace. The memo details how API, a lobbying group for Big Oil, "plans to launch a nationwide Astroturf campaign attacking climate legislation at public events scheduled throughout the final weeks of recess before the Senate returns to debate the issue in September."
The best cures for astroturf are real grassroots. So here are ways that you can get involved right now, to help keep the record straight and demand solutions on climate and energy policy:
Green the Block's national day of service on September 11:
This campaign builds off President Obama's call for citizen's to join in national recovery and renewal efforts on September 11th, 2009. Enter your event into Green the Block's online system, so that anyone looking for something to do on 9/11 will be able to find it.
This campaign is organized by green jobs group Green for All and the Hip Hop Caucus “to educate and mobilize communities of color to ensure a voice and stake in the clean-energy economy.”
Above: Green for All has put together a really great video, called "The New Sound," to help get the word out about "Green the Block" day of service on Sept. 11, 2009.
The International Day of Climate Action on October 24th:
Being co-ordinated by 350.org, which has tools online to help you plan and promote an event in your community.
The goal is to unite activists worldwide around getting the greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere down to 350 parts per million (right now we're at around 389 and climbing), and demand that world leaders take action to solve global warming.
As writer and 350.org activist Bill McKibben told us right here on this blog this week, there are over 1,500 or so events already scheduled around the world, from rallies in big cities to "climbers high in the Himalayas, and underwater demonstrations off the coral reefs of the Maldives, and teams of 350 bike riders, and churches ringing their bells 350 times, and an endless variety of other creative and impassioned ways to drive this most important number into the consciousness of the world!"
Maybe you don't want to wait until 9/11 or 10/24:
Well, Greenpeace has organizers around the country who’d be happy to help you plug in to your local activist community. Check out greenpeace.org/volunteer to find an organizer near you, or to sign up to get more information from one of our national organizers if you’re not near one of our field organizers.
I know I’m really stoked about the Mobilization for Climate Justice happening here in the Bay Area this weekend, to protest the expansion of a Chevron refinery in Richmond, CA.
[Other organizing / action efforts and events to consider: 1Sky's "Summer Recess Beach Party" campaign, the Alliance for Energy Education's climate assemblies, and the Energy Action Coalition youth movement. - Ed.]
The important thing is that we all get out there and make sure that corporate-backed astroturfers don’t hijack this debate. Don't let Big Oil drown our voices out! The time for real global warming solutions is now. Let’s make it happen.
-----
Image via Energy Action Coalition.
