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While he was in China in the past summer to meet with
potential clients, he allegedly met with individuals from the Turkish
government. The meeting was about an upcoming bill in the U.S. House that
would have called on President Bush to declare that the killing of up to
1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks after World War I constituted
genocide. The Turkish government was adamantly against the bill and had
already hired multiple American lobbying groups to lobby the Congress
against the bill. Following the meeting, he called his firm back in
Washington DC to asked them to begin writing a preliminary proposal to
pitch an offer to the Turkish government to lobby the Congress to kill the
genocide bill. The name of his company was Burson-Marsteller - the 5th largest
PR and lobbying firm on earth - and he was its worldwide president and CEO.
His name is Mark Penn, and he is now serving as Hillary Clinton's top
political strategist.
Senator Clinton is the only top tier candidate on the democratic side
who openly receives money from lobbyists for her campaign. While many seem
outraged about this fact, most people are not aware of the extent of
influence and history of relationships and dealings between the Clintons
and lobbyists, and the inevitability of their continued influence in
policymaking should Hillary become president.
It is important to briefly review how Penn rose to his current position.
After the democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994, Hillary asked Bill
to bring in Dick Morris, a controversial friend from their time in
Arkansas, to help repair Bill's image. Morris knew Mark Penn from when he
was a pollster in New York and brought him to the White House to help with
the effort. They pushed the Clintons to the right and caused the
origination of the term "triangulation," the idea of
strategically adopting certain aspects of your opponent's position on
issues, not necessarily because of the merits of those policies but in
order to immune oneself from criticism on that particular issue. But
Morris's career was cut short after he let a prostitute, Sherry Rowlands,
listen in on a conversation with the President. That left Penn as "the
high priest," as the Washington Post called him, in a White
House where triangulation and polling had become a religion. Following the
Clinton presidency, Penn also became the architect of Hillary Clinton's
victories in 2000 and 2006, receiving $1 million from Hillary for the
latter service.
But Penn's involvement in Hillary's campaign is inconsistent with the
party's stated mission. He has been intimately involved in running or
lobbying for big corporations on issues that are directly contrary to the
interest of consumers and average Americans throughout his life. Before he
came to the White House in the 90s, he worked for Texaco - a major oil
company - and Eli Lilly, which is a major pharmaceutical firm.
After moving to DC, he worked both at the White House and also continued
to expand his own polling firm, Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB), which
served Microsoft as its biggest client. During his time at PSB, Mark Penn
has tuned out any sense of integrity and care for the wellbeing of the
general public from the process of deciding whose interests to serve.
Public welfare is naturally irrelevant to what he does and why he does it.
His firm defended Proctor and Gamble when the latter's fat substitute
product, Olestra, was criticized for having disturbing side-effects and put
the blame for Texaco's bankruptcy on the greed of jurors.
Throughout the past seven years, Mark Penn has continued to keep one
foot in his corporate lobbying firm and another foot in Hillary Clinton's
campaigns. Under his leadership, Burson-Marsteller has followed the same
corporate mentality of not including the public's wellbeing as a factor in
deciding what projects to undertake. B-M boasts in its website that the
company recognizes its "obligations to all who have a stake in our
success, including shareowners, clients, employees, and suppliers."
(Notice that even the firm admits by implication that the "public,"
"consumers" or "national interests" don't have a stake
in the firm's success.)
Burson recently lobbied the Texas legislature for TXU energy - a widely
despised energy company in Texas - in support of an initiative that would
secure the company's ability to build three more coal plants at a time when
we are trying to put the usage of fossil fuels behind us. This is hardly
the first time that Burson has put the company's bottom-line ahead of the
environment. The firm has served TXU for almost a decade now on multiple
projects, all aimed at multi-level lobbying to push for company's plans to
continue to build coal plants. In 1993, Burson led a $1.8 million campaign
to successfully defeat President Clinton's proposed BTU tax on fossil
fuels. Burson is also behind a group called "Foundation for Clean Air
Progress," which has been deceptively named as it was specifically
formed to hinder - not help as the name implies - measures to control air
pollution and designed to pressure the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
not to adopt tougher pollution controls. The Washington Post
reported on June 17, 1997 that the group had participated in a
"multimillion-dollar campaign to turn back EPA regulations for smog
and soot."
Burson was also hired by Blackwater USA to help Erik Prince with his
testimony to Congress two months ago about his employees' killing of 17
Iraqi civilians.
One of the lobbying methods that Penn's Burson employs is phone
campaigns to constituents of legislators who are the "targets."
Constituents receive a phone call, sometimes from a group artificially
created with an innocent-sounding name. Caller explains the reason for the
call and the issue in debate, tries to convince the constituent why he or
she should support a certain position and asks whether he or she would be
willing to write a letter to the target in support of that position. If the
constituent agrees to the one-sided argument, the caller then asked for
some personal information to compose a personalized letter on the constituent's
behalf. The unique letter is then written and sent to the constituent along
with a pre-stamped envelope and pre-addressed to the legislator. All the
constituent has to do is to sign the letter, put it in the envelope and
throw it in outgoing mail.
Burson also seeks to influence policy through its political action
committee. According to SourceWatch and the Center for Responsive Politics,
Burson's federal PAC raised more than $69,000 for the 2004 election cycle.
Of that amount, 37% went to democrats while 58% went to republicans. Notice
the firm's role in helping to secure a larger republican majority in
Congress in 2004.
Lobbying and PACs have been a part of a long tradition of participatory
democracy in this country. But the involvement of Mark Penn as the top
strategist for the Clinton campaign is inapt for several reasons:
1) Burson-Marsteller - both through its lobbying efforts as well as its
PAC - pushes for policies that are often significantly detrimental to
progressive values and directly designed to serve the interest of
multinational corporations to the detriment of the American consumers and
workers. These policies are also contrary to many of Hillary Clinton's
stated position on issues.
2) There was a great deal of criticism of the Armenian genocide bill,
the strongest of which was that it wasn't the right time for the bill
because of our geopolitical interests. But the fact is that the Congress
has been intending to formally recognize this historically unchallenged
event for two decades. But every time the bill reaches the floor, the
lobbyists help to kill it. The inability of congress to pass this important
legislation contributes to hurting our image. This is because each failure
sends a message to the world that we are willing to keep quiet on a human
rights matter and pander to a foreign government that refuses to accept
responsibility for its history because we need them as an "ally."
Burson's interest to lobby the U.S. Congress on behalf of foreign
governments and companies with little or no transparency or accountability
with regard to the impact of their lobbying efforts on distorting our
foreign policies is extremely inconsistent with who we believe should or
should not have influence on our international relations.
3) Penn's method of running his firm in the most secretive manner and
his position as a major strategist for Hillary Clinton is likely to lead to
a secretive presidential administration as well.
4) Mark Penn used his position in the White House to expand his own
wealth and business interests and strike a close friendship with the
Clintons in the 1990s. If Hillary is elected, Penn will have even better
access to the inner White House circle and be in the unique position of
lobbying the president personally from within the Oval Office on behalf of
his clients, which most often include multinational corporations,
labor-union busters, foreign governments, and more republicans than
democrats.
There has not been enough discussion about whether a politician can be
considered progressive if she has closely associated herself with someone
who has a consistent record of serving the interests of oil, pharmaceutical
and other major corporations as well as foreign interests, often at the
expense of Americans' interests. In a recent interview with Charlie Rose,
President Clinton agreed that voting for Obama - who doesn't get money from
lobbyists and whose campaign lobbyists are not running - would be like
"rolling the dice." But Mark Penn's life-long commitment to
special interests, his intimate involvement with the Hillary Clinton
campaign and the influence he will have to push his corporate agenda from
within a Clinton White House should be yet another factor to lead any
sensible voter to realize that supporting Hillary would be equivalent to
raising the bet in the middle of the game knowing you are holding the
losing set of cards.
Link to the article on The Huffington Post.
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