And you thought the town hall meetings on health care reform were bad…

We’re used to railing against the use of corporate cash as a determinant of Congressional behavior, but we think the use of faux-grassroots groups (now being known, appropriately enough, as ‘astroturf’ groups) to sway politicians may be equally disruptive to the democratic process.

This somewhat cynical* phenomenon is being enthusiastically copied by the oil & gas industry from the playbook of Big Health, as an American Petroleum Institute (API) memo recently leaked to Greenpeace USA showed.  According to Greenpeace, the memo asks member companies to round up current and former employees, among others, to attend ‘Energy Citizen’ rallies across the country posing as unaffiliated citizens.  Companies will, in many cases, provide transportation and food for attendees from their labor force, who, we anticipate, are expected to speak out against the Congressional energy bill.

And why, exactly, do we find this trend so offensive?  Aren’t corporations entitled to express the concerns and opinions of management to members of Congress, just as citizens and voters are?

Certainly they are, although we would hope that corporations’ greater access to legislators would be a function of their importance to the economy rather than their ability to transfer bits of the economy to re-election campaigns. A CEO expressing his concern to his Congressperson over the effect of pending legislation on his industry’s profitability is perfectly above board and within bounds.  A sensible Congressperson will weight his comments accordingly;  conversely, he will weight the comments of voters he hears from at town hall meetings not as a measure of an industry’s importance but as a representation of large numbers of like-thinking voters.

It’s in this respect that the astroturf trend is troubling, because the elected official standing in the community hall with the roving mike is treating his questioners as members of the latter group — as average citizens just looking for answers — and will extrapolate the general feeling of the meeting to his whole constituency.  If, due to the dissimulation practiced by the API scheme, that general feeling is biased toward the interests of an industry — or even a single company — then representative democracy has been hijacked by corporate interests. 

*We’d have liked to say ‘new and cynical’, but for the power business this is actually old news.  When the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 proposed that utilities be regulated, the industry launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to fight it.  The campaign included paying Western Union messengers to persuade citizens in their areas to send telegrams opposing the bill, citing fabricated arguments and outright lies.  One Congressman supportive of the bill, who received many hundreds of such telegrams in a matter of days, noticed that they all used the same language and that most of their senders had names beginning with the first few letters of the alphabet.  Most of the telegrams were, of course, fake, and had used names taken from telephone directories.