(Astro)Turf Wars: How corporate America is faking a grassroots revolution in the name of freedom
Tea party activists get training in ‘guerrilla online campaigning’.
(Astro)Turf Wars is an investigative documentary examining the murky world behind the ‘grassroots’ groups that have previously sprung up to oppose things like environmental legislation and healthcare reform, and how they tie into the ‘Tea Party’ movement which is making its bid for wider political power.
An ‘astroturf’ campaign is a fake grassroots movement founded, funded and organised by lobbying firms, PR companies, or interest groups. The term came to prominence following an upsurge of citizens groups opposing climate legislation in the USA that turned out to be funded and in some cases organised by industry lobby groups.
In one notorious case, the American Petroleum Institute was actually paying to organise rallies against climate legislation and then filling them up with oil company employees.
Director Taki Oldham went undercover to examine some of the groups campaigning against the Obama administration’s legislation. Oldham spend a month investigating grassroots groups campaigning on healthcare and climate change across the USA.
He found that some apparently citizen-led campaigns with appropriately populist names like ‘Hands off my Healthcare’ or ‘Hot Air Tour’ were actually PR tools organised by libertarian and conservative think tanks or lobby groups – in particular two organisations called ‘Americans for Prosperity (AFP)’ and ‘FreedomWorks’.
Across the USA, their activists and ‘independent experts’ give speeches, run trainings sessions on “guerrilla internet tactics”, collect signatures against the cap-and-trade bill, and mobilize their supporters in the name of freedom and the fight against communism – a cause which blurs into a fight for corporate freedom.
AFP is in turn funded by Koch Industries, the second biggest private company in the USA, who also fund the Cato Institute, the Reason Institute, the Mercatus Centre and the Heritage Foundation – all of whom have, incidentally, played a role in promoting climate change scepticism and denial.
There clearly is a link between these big funders, lobby groups and the Tea Party itself. AFP have provided funding and support to the movement, and although the Koch’s have distanced themselves, with David Koch stating: “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me” the film shows footage of David Koch listening to members of different AFP chapters reporting how many ‘tea parties’ they have organised.
Oldham also traces the historical background to astroturfing. A forerunner of AFP and FreedomWorks was Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which in 1994 was at the forefront of opposing attempts to reform healthcare in the USA. In 1998 CSE received more than $9million from tobacco, oil and gas companies, including Koch Industries.
As has also been meticulously documented in Naomi Oreskes’ excellent book Merchants of Doubt, although the issues for which astroturfing is deployed for have changed over the years, the organizations, tactics and in some cases people involved has remained remarkably consistent.