Stop Hcan from Projecting their Astroturf onto our movement
While the real astroturf refers to a synthetic grass company, the term astroturf apparently refers to grassroots based citizen groups that are primarily created and funded by corporations, public relation firms or political parties with certain interest. Much unlike genuine grassroots activities which usually works more towards the goal of many people much like communism, astroturf campaigns are mostly towards individual goals private to some factions only and is usually heavily funded. These campaigns use sophisticated computer databases, telephone banks and trained group of organized people to net uninformed people to send letters to their elected officials or to do other actions in correlation with their cause to support one faction’s success.
There are many cases of astroturf that had been done successfully in the United States. Some of their most successful campaign was encouraging people to buy Coke, the defeat of the Clinton administration when they proposed health care reform, scare environmentalists by using the Wise Use movement, loosen the standards for automobile fuel efficiencies and some other acts that most of us can see but tends to not believe for some ridiculous factors. To back up their acts, sometimes genuine grassroots organizations can be recruited unknowingly to support their actions.