If you can't find anyone to support your cause, no problem! Just open the pocket books of your billionaire progenitors and hire someone to support your cause.
Apparently unable to find real activists, the coal industry paid astroturfers $50 to wear pro-coal t-shirts at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing yesterday.
The EPA hearings, held yesterday in Chicago and Washington, D.C., were focused on the agency’s first-ever carbon standards for new power plants. The industry has adamantly opposed these standards, as well as standards on mercury — a pollutant that even Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) admits is harmful. [...]
In a Craigslist ad found by the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago, a coal group promised participants $50 to “wear a t-shirt in support of an energy project.”
How many of those who participated do you suppose even fully understood what it was they were representing?
Very few I would assume, but on the other hand, perhaps we should feel sympathy for them, because only someone who is desperate would protest in favor of Big Coal for the promise of $50 and lunch, and there are a lot of desperate people out there today. And that may be what Big Coal was relying on -- that people would respond because they need the money.
The cynicism involved here is beyond description.