--------------------------From Readers Digest---------------------------------
It's hard to know who to trust these days. When we see people staging protests we think, Wow! These folks are passionate about their cause -- otherwise, why would they stand in the rain for hours? But sometimes it's a sham: You and even your Congressman may have been set up by manipulative marketers who pay serious money to hire protesters.

It's a sneaky trick. Let's say you want to stage a political rally, but you just can't find enough people for a good turnout. What you need are folks with lots of time on their hands, who can be persuaded to make a fuss over almost anything. Solution: Head down to a homeless shelter and dole out cash.

No joke -- hiring the homeless is catching on. Last October, a Georgia activist pushing a state law to crack down on illegal immigrants paid 14 homeless men $10 each to hold signs and march around. It worked. People thought the rally was genuine -- a local radio station even broadcast it live. But listeners had no idea this was just a crowd for hire. Near Washington, D.C., a local carpenters union has hired around 100 homeless men, according to union official George Eisner. The men, paid $8 per hour, are "another source" of manpower for rallies and protests. The scheme is so effective that unions across the country are getting in on the act too.

Pay for rage works -- the homeless get a little income and the lobbying group gets a crowd. The only losers are citizens and the media, who think the whole show is legit. After a Phoenix TV station recently noticed rallies featuring the homeless, they asked some of the protesters, who were holding signs about a local labor dispute, what they were so upset about. Many had no idea. "All we do is stand out here and hold the signs," said one.

These are small examples of what's happening at every level of society. In business, "stealth marketers" are paying people to casually talk up their products to friends and co-workers and get word-of-mouth buzz going. And in politics, the biggest special-interest racket is so-called "Astroturf" lobbying.

If you want to create the illusion of grass-roots support to help sway Congress, you might have to pay. "Contrived and organized, it's known as Astroturf lobbying," says Jeffrey Birnbaum, a Washington Post reporter and lobbying expert. Special interests spend millions on Astroturf campaigns in which they set up front groups, gather signatures, and hire telemarketers without disclosing their real agendas.

And you could become an unwitting tool of these special interests. Say you get a call from someone who says he's with a citizens' group that's fighting a bill to raise taxes. He may offer to connect you directly to your Congressman's office so you can express your outrage. You may never know you've been duped -- a pawn of a tobacco industry front group battling a cigarette-tax hike.

Astroturf lobbyists have even been known to "borrow" people's names. In one case a few years ago, members of Congress were swamped with telegrams about a telecom bill. But some constituents were confused when they got phone calls from their concerned Congressmen -- because they'd never written in to begin with. It turned out that thousands of the telegrams were faked by a telecom-industry PR firm. And guess what? No aspect of this campaign appears to have violated Postal Service regulations. That means your name could be used next in support of a corporate cause you've never heard of.

All of this amounts to a corruption of our democratic system: You can't trust someone who's calling you about a political issue, and if you write to your Congressman, he might not trust that you haven't been manipulated.

Maybe the solution starts with unmasking all those protest rallies that are just outrage-for-hire purchased down at the local shelter.

Outraged? Write to Michael Crowley at outrageous@rd.com.

Astroturf lobbying- didn't know there was something like that!! Good to know!!! :) :)
Thanks for the info SHIV.

That was an informative piece.
Good job SHiva ji !

I am glad you guys liked it.
Here is another one from our own "oohi Ashu" which is in the same line as the above article.
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- http://www.nepalitimes.com/issue/286/StrictlyBusiness/10735

Crowd control: What if such a show of large crowds is actually a wrong indicator of one’s democratic strength?

by ASHUTOSH TIWARI

For almost four years now, private-sector Nepali newspapers have been headlining photos that show large groups of people attending anti-government rallies in Kathmandu and elsewhere. From the other side of the fence, state-funded media too have been displaying images of large crowds of people turning up to greet the king wherever he goes. In either case, the accompanying reports point to the same conclusion: so many people cannot be wrong. In today’s uncertain times in Nepal, showing off the size of one’s crowd has become a convenient indicator that’s supposed to validate the public strength of one’s political position.

But what if such a show of large crowds is actually a wrong indicator of one’s democratic strength?

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki writes about four criteria that make a crowd’s decisions accurate. First, such a crowd has to have a diversity of opinion. ‘Each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of known facts.’ Surowiecki adds that ‘diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think.’

The second criterion is independence. This means that ‘people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.’ Obviously, a crowd that lets in a variety of opinions, including dissenting ones, is more tolerant of independent voices than one where there’s pressure to conform to a groupthink with everyone seeking tepid consensus that ‘offends no one rather than excite everyone.’

The third criterion is decentralisation, which allows for individuals to bring in their specialisation and inject local knowledge into the crowd’s deliberations. Aggregation is the fourth criterion. It’s a process of adding up all the individual private judgments and then turning them into a collective decision. If a crowd includes these four criteria, Surowiecki says, its judgment is likely to be accurate.

But what do these criteria mean for our crowd-dependent political processes? It’s arguable that of our two groups the one aligned with the political parties is more diverse in terms of opinion. On one level, it is more likely to represent disparate sections of our societies. But the difference ends there. Given that political parties remain rigidly hierarchical entities that do not allow for any independence of thought, it’s hard to see how they actually get to derive the benefits of diversity, independence and decentralisation in their ranks.

As a result, for the longest time their protests appeared to have been afternoon programs devised by a few netas to keep themselves busy, not something that really bubbled up to the surface because of the demands placed by diverse sections of the crowd. One danger about such narrow leadership is that by not adequately bringing dissenting views, independent opinions and local knowledge into its decision-making apparatus, it is more likely to reach an extreme but wrong conclusion about the strength of support it actually enjoys in public.

It’s time for those who claim that their legitimacy—either on the street or in the corridors of power—comes from the crowd behind them to take another look at that crowd. That way, they’d see for themselves how limited their crowd’s composition really is. Maybe then, they’d stop mouthing off the usual platitudes about democracy and start looking for ways to tap into the extant wisdom of the crowd.