Astroturf campaign targeted Walmart Black Friday protests

Last week, an organization calling itself "Worker Center Watch" launched a campaign to discredit the Walmart workers who staged protests across the United States to target Black Friday sales. Among the thousands of Walmart employees, the protests included labor union organizers and members there to push for living wages and more full-time positions.



According the The Nation, Worker Center Watch was registered by the former head lobbyist for Walmart, Parquet Public Affairs. They call themselves "an Issue Management, Communications, Government Relations and Reputation Assurance firm."

So yeah, astroturfing. The idea of "professional protestors," who are simply mercenary layabouts, is a populist tactic used to discredit all kinds of demonstrations.

The Walmart protests were, in fact, organized by "outside agitators." The union-backed Organization for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) calls itself "an independent, not-for-profit organization for hourly Associates." In other words, it's pushing for unionization.

Between Walmart and "union bosses," I side with the labour organizers. Their demands are simply a $15/hour wage and full-time hours. A corporation that pays its hourly employees so poorly that they need to do an internal food drive just to make sure everyone can feed their families will never be a hero in my mind.

(Thanks to John Hardy for the tip)

"Walmart" astroturf campaign against labour rights

The abysmal writing and low production quality of this ad are insulting enough to viewers. But watch it, and prepare to be appalled.



According to The Nation:

TheNation.com has discovered that Worker Center Watch was registered by the former head lobbyist for Walmart. Parquet Public Affairs, a Florida-based government relations and crisis management firm for retailers and fast food companies, registered the Worker Center Watch website. 

The firm is led by Joseph Kefauver, formerly the president of public affairs for Walmart and government relations director for Darden Restaurants.

This is what we call "astroturfing" — fake grassroots movements as corporate reactions to real activism.

Of course, you could also say that the exposé has a point of view; The Upworthy post I saw this on was sponsored by AFL-CIO. But the characterization of all those who stand up to Black Friday labour abuses as lazy, paid, union stooges is pretty dishonest no matter where you stand politically.

Walking Dead viewers threatened with losing AMC on major Canadian cable service

I'm not much of an Oscars fan, so instead I spent last night catching up with The Walking Dead. If you did too (or if you recorded it for later), and you are a Canadian Rogers Cable customer, you will have noticed the frequent distraction of a text crawl in which the cable company apparently threatens to drop AMC from its cable package.

The text crawl and Facebook ads (above) target fans of AMC's best series, such as The Walking Dead,  Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. They lead to a web site called keepamccanada.com that asks viewers to fill in a form to let Rogers know they don't want to lose the service.

Just what the hell are is going on? On Rogers Community Forums, one poster explains:

Every once in a while, cable networks renegotiate contracts with the providers. When the negotiations do not go thier way, they try to rile up the customers as leverage to get more out of the cable company. if the cable company pays more than is comfortable, the price of our service goes up. To be fair to everyone, we should also write AMC that they would be losing customers as well if they try to drive our prices up. I believe that a solid performer like AMC deserves more money for the quality original programming they produce, but not if it will hit the customers pocketbook. So, Rogers is not dropping the channel, it is more likely that they refused the first demand put on the table. 

In other words, it's AMC's tactic to get Rogers subscribers to get up-in-arms to keep the network no matter how much it costs. And it worked:

All over social media, Rogers subscribers are threatening to drop the service if it loses AMC. Considering that these shows are eventually available on Netflix and various (and often unofficial) online channels, this is a very dangerous place for Rogers to be. But although they have broadcast their case, Rogers social media managers seem to be failing to respond one-on-one to these customer concerns, which is somewhat of a fail.

Network Vs. Carrier, with customer anxiety used as a weapon. This won't reflect well on either side, in the end.

Ad features actual women who like Todd Akin

UPDATE: They pulled it. Also, this.

Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin may have lost support of his own party over his comments that women rarely get pregnant from "legitimate rape" and therefore rape survivors don't need access to legal abortion.

Now, in a pretty crappy piece of astroturfing organized by daughter Hannah, "Women for Akin"are trying to bring him the conservative woman vote. Titled "we think for ourselves," the video features a survivor of rape and addiction, women of faith, and women of various ethnicities shilling for the candidate. (And while they may think for themselves, some of them are clearly reading cue cards.)



The strangest aspect of the ad is the woman in silhouette. What is that supposed to mean?

There is also a brochure, archived by Talking Points Memo from a press sheet. It's pretty much the same, but without the mystery woman.

The campaign apparently launches tonight. The URL in the ad and the brochure's QR akin.org/campaign/women, leads to Akin's official site but yields an "access denied" code.)

Kids for making more kids (within marriage)

Jezebel shared the news about a pro-abstinence/anti-birth-control group called 1flesh. Styling itself as a grassroots organization, it uses youth-friendly graphics and messaging to celebrate the joys of procreative marital sex:

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At the same time, it preaches some potentially misleading arguments about the efficacy of contraceptives in preventing unplanned pregnancy and disease:

What is going on here? It's almost like they're trying to run a white, christian, breeding program. Which is a pretty smart strategy from a political point of view. Get those horny kids to keep their pants on until marriage, then turn the young woman's reproductive parts into a baby factory — a clown car, if you will — of Duggar proportions.

"But what about overpopulation?", you might ask.

The whole “Save the World: Don’t Have Kids” idea is, in retrospect, just plain silly. The worldwide fertility rate fell throughout the same period... Even if we were to pretend that the world was in a desperate state of looming overpopulation, artificial contraception on its own wouldn’t be of much use. It does not reduce the rate of unintended pregnancies. We’ve been duped into demanding a bad solution to a non-existent problem. It’s time to move on.

Move on. Get married. Have babies.

But a full reading of the site does show that it promotes one method of family planning: the Creighton Model Fertiltycare™ System. It's an initiative of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction. And it's basically a modern version of the rhythm method (with cervical mucus observation instead of guesswork).

According to Wikipedia:

The effectiveness of the CrMS, as of most forms of birth control, can be assessed two ways. Perfect use or method effectiveness rates only include people who follow all observational rules, correctly identify the fertile phase, and refrain from unprotected intercourse on days identified as fertile. Actual use, or typical use effectiveness rates are of all women intending to avoid pregnancy by using CrMS, including those who fail to meet the "perfect use" criteria. 

The Pope Paul VI Institute reports a perfect-use effectiveness rate of 99.5% in the first year.In clinical studies of the CrMS conducted at the Pope Paul VI Institute, researchers excluded most pregnancies from the typical-use rate calculation, on the grounds that they believed the affected couples had used the method to deliberately attempt pregnancy. The Institute reports a typical-use effectiveness of 96.8% in the first year. Most studies of similar systems do not exclude such pregnancies from the typical-use failure rate.

Remember how 1flesh said that condoms don't work?

The condom’s use-effectiveness rate is 85%.  This means that, under real-world conditions, a woman whose sexual partners use condoms for every act of sexual intercourse has a 15% chance of becoming pregnant in a year. And while oral contraceptives are more effective, studies have shown that after three years of use, the failure rates of oral contraceptives was 4.7% for 24-day regimen pills and 6.7% for 21-day regimen pills. The FDA’s conclusion is that the use-effectiveness of oral contraceptives is 95%. A 2011 study, Contraceptive failure in the United States, found the Pill’s actual failure rate to be 9%. 

Though the numbers shift in various studies, in every case, natural methods of family planning — specifically the Creighton Model FertilityCare System — are more effective at preventing unintended pregnancies, with a use-effectiveness of 96.8-98%. The idea that the widespread use of artificial contraception will help end the stressful incidence of unintended pregnancy — while hopeful — has been debunked. The answer is not pill or a rubber. It’s having a true understanding of a woman’s body and cooperating with it. 

This is from the source they cited at About.comhttp://contraception.about.com/od/overthecounterchoices/p/OTC.htm:

Condom (Male)Typical use: 85% effectivePerfect use: 98% effectiveOf every 100 women whose partners use condoms, 15 will become pregnant (with typical use) and 2 will become pregnant with perfect use

The PillTypical use: 92% effectivePerfect use: 99.7% effectiveOf every 100 women who use The Pill, 8 will become pregnant (with typical use) within the first year and less than one will become pregnant with perfect use

Waitaminute. Did they just compare perfect use of their "natural" birth control with "typical use" of condoms and the pill? Yes, yes they did.

When you get to the bottom of it, 1flesh's "grassroots" movement is anything but. It's a highly organized campaign of reproductive misinformation designed to recruit a new generation of social conservative, anti-reproductive choice, voters, using generational mouthpieces like Patheos blogger Marc Barnes to make being quiverfull more palatable to Millennials.