By Carter Bundy
The Clinton campaign received an unexpected boost this week when Mark Penn finally got dumped. Penn is widely considered a brilliant political strategist. Further, there’s nothing wrong with having varied opinions within a political campaign or an administration. The current administration is living proof that groupthink can be a major contributing factor to disastrous economic and foreign policies.
But Penn’s beliefs, actions and priorities are far more problematic than simply a normal healthy disagreement over issues. As the current CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a firm that specializes in lobbying for and advising union busters, Penn has long been at odds with some of
His anti-union, anti-worker ways were finally exposed on the national stage last week when he was caught supporting President Bush’s Colombian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA). Penn’s actions and beliefs were beyond the pale considering he was a very highly paid, top-level advisor to the
According to the AFL-CIO, more than 2,500 Colombian trade unionists have been murdered since 1986 – including 39 in 2007 and 17 so far this year – while the government has sat by silently. Fewer than 3 percent of the cases have been successfully prosecuted, a dismal number that can only be explained by lack of desire to prosecute.
With the Colombian government’s de facto complicity in the murder of thousands of workers, there’s no way that any labor protections in the CFTA would ever be enforced.
Yet Penn personally – or at least in his high-powered lobbyist job – supports the CFTA. Not only is that an indefensible position for any Democrat who even pretends to care about workers’ rights, it’s squarely at odds with the Democrat by whom he has been paid millions of dollars in this campaign.
Irreconcilable differences
It was just a matter of time with a mercenary like Penn. Turns out he also supports privatization of our military and the wasteful siphoning of tax dollars to well-connected companies like Blackwater (another Burson-Marsteller client).
It’s one thing to have a disagreement on policy within a campaign. That can be a positive, particularly if the policy disagreements are overwhelmed by general philosophical agreements.
It’s quite another thing to be a millionaire CEO of an outside firm that actively lobbies against his candidate’s policies – especially when Penn clearly has a philosophy more aligned with Dick Cheney’s than any national Democrat’s.
It’s our job as citizens – particularly those of us who are Democrats – to fight back against the likes of Mark Penn. Fortunately, when his views on policy came into conflict with those of real people, Hillary Clinton wisely chose to side with real people.
Good policy, good politics
Turns out, Hillary’s choice was not only right from a policy perspective, but it also makes political sense – even with some independents and Republicans. This week’s New Mexico Business Weekly has a Web poll asking, “Are NAFTA-style trade deals good for the
The weekly has a heavily business-oriented (and in all likelihood strongly Republican) readership, but the totals as of the end of the day on April 8 were 44 percent “No,” 38 percent “Yes,” and 17 percent “Sometimes.” The poll isn’t scientific, but it’s also not the type of site that a bunch of liberals are going to start to stuff the ballot box on, either.
Think about it – even without the gory details of
What kind of spiral?
I agree with those who say globalization is largely inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is that it is destructive. The
The question is whether we use our clout to ensure that developing countries move closer to our current standards of living in win-win trade frameworks, or whether we get bullied by short-sighted, quarterly-profit driven mercenaries like Mark Penn into pushing our standards lower.
The Penn/Bush vision of the world is a negative downward spiral, where multinationals move their operations from country to country, seeking the most permissive pollution standards, most relaxed labor regulations and weakest consumer protections.
The competing, progressive vision is that we can create a positive upward spiral, leveraging the intrinsically good components of trade to increase commerce, drive competition and improve standards of living across the board.
Sounds like a utopian fantasy? Nope – it’s already been done. The
We can replicate that American success across borders, so long as Penn and Bush aren’t calling the shots. No matter how talented a political operative Mark Penn is, unloading him is good for Hillary and the country.
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in