This story originally ran on my Channel Surfing blog.
The nation’s largest and most well-established consumer groups have all consistently praised the federal Consumer Financial Protection Board as an agency that is transparent and effective.
The Consumers Union, which has been around 80 years and publishes Consumer Reports, has called the CFPB “the best thing to happen to Americans since” Jennifer Lawrence and “one of the few good things to come out of the (economic) crash” of 2008–09.
And it has praised the CFPB consistently for its work on payday lending, college loans, mortgage robocalls and other financial matters.
U.S.PIRG, another consumer and good government group, says the CFPB “gets results” and has called it a “child prodigy” because of the speed with which it has acted in its relatively short existence.
So what is this email all about?
It’s what’s called “astroturfing.” I received this email last week, an all-but-anonymous call to “reform” an agency that, though it has hit some minor potholes, is considered by many to be an exemplar of good government. I say all-but-anonymous because there is little on this group’s website to indicate who it is and what it’s real aims might be. The apparent goal is to convince unsuspecting email recipients to become the citizen face of this faux reform movement, to create the impression that this effort — most likely the work of the financial industry — really comes from the grassroots.
The address on its Virginia incorporation record matches the law firm Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky, which specializes in untraceable pressure groups for conservative causes and whose clients include Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign and the National Republican Congressional Committee. The use of an expensive law firm to set up an anonymous entity suggests this is no small effort.
The only person who has been identified with the group, spokesman Steve Gates, worked for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity while it was caught feigning a grass-roots campaign, including sending forged letters to congressional offices. Gates didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Politico pointed out in the same piece that the PAC website offers “quotations” from several prominent progressive Democfats that lead the reader to think they were critical of the CFPB. But these Democrats — Maxine Waters of California, Keith Ellison of Minnesota — are staunch supporters of the agency. Both told Politico that, at best, their statements were taken out of context and were highly misleading. Brett Morrow, Ellison’s spokesman, called it “blatantly out of context.”
“This is the work of an ‘astroturf’ group — a fake grass-roots group-that is trying deceive the American people into abandoning the protections of the CFPB from predatory products and unscrupulous actors.”
This has been standard political practice for years — Williams Greider wrote about it in Who Will Tell the People — and can be effective, for corporate interests. But it also is destructive of democracy, using money to manipulate the system in a way that may be more pernicious than Citizens United.
Originally published at channel-surfing.blogspot.com on March 14, 2016.