Grassroots or Astroturf?

The Department of Energy (DOE) recently held a hearing in Pittsburgh to hear testimony from citizens “interested in the safety and environmental performance of hydraulic fracturing.” It gave short notice due to “programmatic issues,” but Energy in Depth (EID), an organization representing the independent oil and gas producers, was quick to respond. Tom Shepstone, campaign manager for EID’s Northeast Marcellus Initiative, sent out an email offering free bus rides or air fare, free hotel accommodations, free meals, and tickets to a Pittsburgh Pirates/Mets game to anyone who would go to Pittsburgh to support the pro-drilling point of view.

It wasn’t long before critics of unconventional gas drilling caught wind of the email and raised an outcry. The offer for free baseball tickets— a perk having nothing to do with helping citizens communicate with their government—was withdrawn. What remained could no longer be viewed as a bribe; it merely made cost-free a trip to the hearing by people who sympathize with the industry point of view. But was it, as Tom Shepstone described it in a quote given to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, “a grassroots” effort?

We’d say it came closer to what is termed “Astroturf:” an initiative funded by private industry to facilitate its profit-making goals, masquerading as a great upwelling of popular sentiment on the part of the common people.

Grassroots movements, by definition, are begun, organized and funded by ordinary people who have no special institutional affiliation but share a common belief or goal. Astroturf initiatives are started and organized from the top down by an industry group, and are funded by that group. Industry money is used to mobilize common people who happen to share that industry’s policy goals, or can be persuaded to do so by professional PR campaigns. That’s how they gain the appearance of being “grassroots,” and it is essential to their mission: to get ordinary folk to write politicians, demonstrate or show up at hearings to give elected officials an inflated impression of how many voters are in favor of industry positions (and if the PR is good enough, to actually inflate that number).

To be fair, we suspect the individuals who actually took up the offer in this case genuinely believe that natural gas drilling is a good thing for Pennsylvania. There are certainly bona fide grassroots organizations in our area that hold this view, like the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance and the Sullivan-Delaware Property Owners Association, which were originally formed by landowners interested in using their pooled resources to gain negotiating muscle with the gas drilling companies—an absolutely legitimate grassroots goal.

But the lines become blurred when groups such as these, or individuals for that matter, are financed in their advocacy by the industry groups that will profit from that advocacy. The problem is not, certainly, that citizen participation in the DOE meeting was facilitated—surely that’s a good thing—but that industry wealth created an uneven playing field between local individuals who received such facilitation and those who did not. That uneven playing field means that the system is no longer a one-person, one-vote system. It is a system in which the people who advocate for positions that profit corporations have multiple votes, and people who oppose corporations have a fraction of one.

In the case of the DOE, the problem has been further exacerbated by the fact that on the DOE panel being created to evaluate the safety of hydro-fracking, according to information assembled by the Environmental Working Group, six out of the seven members of the panel have economic ties to the drilling industry. The House Appropriations Committee recently defeated an amendment suggested by our own Congressman Maurice Hinchey that would have forbidden natural gas industry executives from serving on this supposedly neutral advisory panel. Here again, money has subverted the one-person, one-vote system, with corporations taking almost all the seats at the table.

Unfortunately, we do not see our way clear to any solution of this increasingly systematic problem in the governance of this nation. But one thing we can do, as informed citizens, is to be vigilant when anyone tries to validate the all-American legitimacy of their actions by using the word “grassroots.” Where is the funding and organization coming from? Do the same groups that are doing the funding and organizing stand to make money if the issue in question is decided a certain way? And no matter how sincere the beliefs of the individuals who are mobilized by the organization, if money funneled from for-profit corporations is being used to give those individuals, in effect, more votes than their neighbors, we say it’s not grassroots. It’s Astroturf.