Like many of us here at DU, I'm looking for a way to make my basic on-line posting Jones pay the bills. So, it was with some interest that I first spotted this Help Wanted ad at Craig's List:
Advocacy Coordinators
Exciting start-up, grassroots firm currently has openings for Advocacy Coordinators working in house or from home. In this position you will be working with a team of dedicated professionals doing issue-based advocacy work; educating, organizing and mobilizing grassroots advocates by phone and e-mail. Ideal candidates will be highly motivated, politically minded individuals with outstanding communication skills, both written and verbal, who thrive in a campaign style work environment. A strong interest in and working knowledge of politics and public affairs are essential. Campaign experience strongly preferred.
This is an outstanding opportunity to work on high profile issues and gain valuable grassroots experience! Not only did this seem right up my alley, the company is located in Alexandria, VA, right outside of Washington, DC, which for me is local. I started to warm up to the prospect of dusting off my resume.
Before I submitted my C.V., however, I looked at the website for the company, OnPointAdvocacy.com. It should have been a tip-off, but I could find no links to "Our Clients", "Case Studies", "Success Stories" or anything else that might indicate what type of clients hire this company. I didn't want to waste my time if they cater only to Republicans, Fundamentalists, and corporate shills.
The answer to that nagging question didn't become clear until I Googled OnPoint Advocacy. This article from The Washington Post came up:
For Activist Constituents, Click Herehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/18/AR2005091801118.htmlBy Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Monday, September 19, 2005; Page D01
It's hard to imagine two issues of less interest to most voters than free trade with Central America and a cut in the tax on dividends paid to the owners of stock. Yet the latest in lobbyists' wiles -- a grand elaboration on Internet advertising -- managed to rope hundreds of thousands of average Americans into the congressional debate on both matters and was instrumental in passing the measures into law.
The until-now unheralded trick-of-trade was bankrolled by the Business Roundtable -- an organization of chief executives from 160 large companies -- and was executed by
Alexandria-based Democracy Data & Communications LLC and its OnPoint Advocacy affiliate . It worked so well that the Roundtable is experimenting with it as a way to revive President Bush's foundering effort to make private accounts part of Social Security.
"It's the future of lobbying," said John J. Castellani, president of the Roundtable.
Why? Because the gimmick turns the greatest-ever tool of the masses -- the Internet -- into a gold mine for factions that seek lots of people to contact members of Congress on their behalf. When legislators hear from a bloc of constituents on a subject, they tend to believe that support for it is widespread, even when the communication is actually prompted (read: manufactured) by a well-fina
nced and narrowly focused lobby. The technique works this way: An interest group that wants to gather home-grown advocates takes out a banner advertisement on a widely used Web site. By clicking on the ad, people acknowledge that they agree with the group's opinion and are then asked what further steps they'd be willing to take to help the cause. These include writing letters to the editor and calling, writing or meeting with lawmakers in the capital or back in the district.
The interactive ads, in other words, create instant, ad hoc lobbying organizations that can be mobilized on every front that modern influencers utilize. In several respects, this is a significant advancement over older methods of "grass-roots" lobbying. First, the would-be advocates are self-selected; they are already eager to press the case. In the past, Washington-based lobbyists had to hunt for grass-roots helpers by using expensive telemarketing and postal mailings. They often had to persuade people to adopt their arguments and train them how to talk to their elected representatives. Second, the cost of collecting followers is much reduced. The Roundtable had to pay only about $1.50 per advocate for its dividend fight, compared $9 to $13 per advocate for patch-through calls to the offices of members of Congress gathered via telephone banks. Third, the grass-rooters found through the Web can be used and reused as a lobbying base. "You can keep going back to them on similar issues for years to come," said Thomas M. Herrity, president of OnPoint.
SNIP
Well,I don't think Mr. Herrity and I would have been very happy together. This is what I found when I cross-referenced Democracy Data & Communications. This was posted on June 16, 2005 by "BEN" at a blog called Rational Grounds, for which we really have have to thank him and Google's cache feature:
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:0zwlRK06hG4J:www.rationalgrounds.com/mt-archives/2005/06/democracy_data.html+Democracy+Data+%26+Communications+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=13&ie=UTF-8 They're an astroturf retailer. And they've been busy.
Democracy Data & Communcations is a big player in the astroturf community. They host the website for the Grass Roots Roundtable, and they co-chair it with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The board of directors is a regular Who's Who of American industry. They're a big player at the Public Affairs Council, and they've earned a reputation as the place to go for astroturf campaigns.
I came across DDC in October of last year, when they were putting pop-up ads against John Edwards in AOL Instant Messenger. This was for their The Truth About Trial Lawyers site for the November Fund (warning: slow to load). The November Fund was a tort-reform astroturf campaign bought and paid for by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (Yes, the government was running ads against the Democrats. For more on this episode, see dKospedia. Is the Chamber of Commerce allowed to do that?) A quick google on their name brought up their site, and a May 2004 post by Mark Kleiman on a very similar campaign on behalf of No Child Left Behind.
However, it wasn't until I started noodling around their DNS that things really got interesting. Punching in the domain name at DNSStuff.com
gave me the IP address 151.200.70.81 for http://supportnclb.com (defunct now, try the Way Back Machine). A WHOIS lookup on this showed me it was indeed owned by DDC, and that they owned the whole 151.200.70.* netblock. Hmm. Finally, I did a reverse-DNS lookup on the IP . . . SNIP:Ben, indeed, came up with an amazing list that is People's Exhibit No. 1 that proves the incestuous inbreeding between Big Corporations, Lobbyists and the GOP. He came up with hundreds of business lobbying front groups, political action committees, and "grassroots" organizations run off the same servers in Old Town Alexandria. I'll give just a sampling that mixes huge corporations Duke Energy, GE, Verizon, BankOne, MasterCard, HomeDepot, FoodLion, FannieMae, PhilipMorris with astroturfs such as absestosreformnow.org, cleanerair4u.org, and moreconsumerchoices.com and my personal favorite, grassrootsvotes.com.
Here's a particularly telling series
unearthered by Ben:
151.200.70.81 voteforcontracting.com
151.200.70.81 voteforcontracting.org
151.200.70.81 voteforflorida.com
151.200.70.81 voteforflorida.org
151.200.70.81 voteforfranchising.com
151.200.70.81
voteforgeorgewbush.com 151.200.70.81 voteforphilanthropy.com
151.200.70.81 voteforsmallbusiness.com
151.200.70.81 voteforsmallbusiness.net
151.200.70.81 voteforsmallbusiness.org
151.200.70.81 voteforthemeritshop.com
151.200.70.81 voteforworkingwomen.com
151.200.70.81 votehardwood.com
151.200.70.81 votein2004.com
151.200.70.81 votein2004.org
151.200.70.81 wisconsinbusinessvotes.com
151.200.70.81 www.voteforbusiness.com
To this we have to ask, is it even legal for the US Chamber of Commerce and Democracy Data & Communications to even be hosting voteforgeorgewbush.com? One has to wonder whether this service was counted toward the FEC campaign contribution limits? Well, it turns out someone was interested. B.R. McConnon, President of Democracy Data & Communcations was subpoenaed to testify before a Senate Committee probing his company's relationship with Jack Abramoff's convicted protege, Michael Scanlon.
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/110105/news3.htmlFinally, a word of caution. Watch where you send your resume. Chances are these days in post-K Street Project Washington, that interesting Help-Wanted application may end up on the desk of Jack Abramoff.
Mark G. Levey, 2006
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