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 ask 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.
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