Farm out the dirty work. That seems to be the order of the day in heavyweight corporate America: HP hires identity thieves to spy on its own board members … and now Google turns to a notorious Washington, D.C. dirty-tricks outfit called the DCI Group to help boost its standing in the hallways of a GOP-dominated Congress.
“Talking Points Memo” blogger Josh Marshall knows the back alleyways of Washington better than most journalists, and he says Google has jumped into bed with a doozy of a floozy.
“If you’re a dirty tricks and slimy opps aficionado a chill most certainly just went down your spine,” Marshall writes. “DCI, if you’re not familiar with them, is an interlocking group of companies which is the phony seed bed for most noxious astroturf organizing and general bamboozlement in contemporary politics.”
Astroturf organizing entails creating the illusion of grassroots support for your client’s legislative interests and has risen to a dark art form in recent years. When you receive mail from “Americans for Mom and Apple Pie” or see a political commercial featuring “just folk” talking about an issue “just folk” never talk about, you can be fairly certain that an astroturf outfit is pushing the buttons. The goal is to fool the public into voting against their better judgment or simply pressuring their lawmakers to lean one way or the other.
Companies such as DCI make a good living doing this stuff because the corporations that hire them lack the necessary expertise and crave plausible deniability should something go wrong. It should go without saying that they lack genuine grassroots support, lest they wouldn’t be spending the money to gin some up.
HP executives have sworn up and down that they were unaware of the fact that the leak investigation they ordered would entail the apparently illegal “pretexting” that produced private phone records of its board members.
When DCI goes overboard and causes some kind of public stink — and it will — Google’s going to have a much harder time blaming the subcontractor.
