单项选择题

Passage Three
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 show: You and even your Congressman may have been raised to power by manipulative marketers who pay serious money to hire protesters.
It’s a mean 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 take 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.
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 legitimate. 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 upset about. Many had no idea. ’All we do is stand out here and hold the signs," said one.
Some bold organizers have 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 ff 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. From the first paragraph it can be learned that ______.