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A little about B-M From SOURCEWATCH: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Burson-Marsteller#Blackwater_USAIn May, 2007, the Nation magazine ran an article about the relationship between Burson-Marsteller's top executive world-wide, Mark Penn, and Hillary Clinton. "As Hillary Clinton charges toward the Democratic nomination for President, her campaign has a coterie of influential advisers. ... But perhaps the most important figure in the campaign is her pollster and chief strategist, Mark Penn, a combative workaholic. ... Yet Penn is no ordinary pollster. Beyond his connections to the Clintons, he not only polls for America's biggest companies but also runs one of the world's premier PR agencies ."
The Wall Street Journal first reported on April 4, 2008, that Penn "met with Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. on Monday to discuss a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact the presidential candidate (Clinton) opposes." Burson-Marsteller "has a contract with the South American nation to promote congressional approval of the trade deal." The New York Times later noted that Penn apologized for his conflict of loyalty saying "the meeting was an error in judgment."
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From Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/29/mark-penn-ties-drag-clint_n_89243.html
Mark Penn Ties Drag Clinton Down
As the Clinton campaign struggles to pull out of a potentially terminal nosedive just four days before the decisive Ohio and Texas primaries, much of the blame for the former First Lady's difficulties is falling on the shoulders of her controversial chief strategist, Mark Penn.
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Strategic and tactical fault-finding, however, miss the key point. Clinton's Mark Penn problem does not lie in the strategist's advice and counsel -- it lies in Penn himself.
As the CEO of powerhouse PR giant Burson-Marsteller, Penn heads a bipartisan corporate conglomerate specializing in influence peddling, lobbying, phony front groups, and manufactured hype. Penn, the network of companies that he oversees, and the corporations to which he answers, represent precisely what voters have come to dislike most violently about Washington: the relentless cultivation and manipulation of political connections to generate wealth for a handful of operatives, all at taxpayer expense and in blatant defiance of the public will.
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The problem Penn poses for the Clinton campaign is reflected in the numerous stories in the media about Penn's conflicts as CEO of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, on the one hand, and as chief strategist for Hillary Clinton, on the other.
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Similarly, after Blackwater USA security guards killed 8 Iraqi civilians, the company turned to BKSH, a subsidiary of Penn's Burson-Marsteller, for strategic advice on how to minimize the negative impact of dealing with Congressional inquires.
Such conflicts only touch the surface. For the media, Burson-Marsteller and its affiliated companies could easily become a full-time beat pumping out a cascade of additional stories:
* The creation of such seemingly innocuous organizations as the National Smokers Alliance, European Women for HPV Testing, and the Coalition for Clean and Renewable Energy - organizations which are in fact the creation of corporations seeking to win lucrative support for contentious fights over smoking in public places, the promotion of highly-remunerative testing for a sexually transmitted human papilloma virus, and the expansion of nuclear power facilities.
* The laundry list of controversial Burson-Marsteller -- and its subsidiary BKSH -- clients includes US Smokeless (i.e., chewing) Tobacco, Johnnie Walker (distilled spirits), Morongo Casino Resort & Spa (gambling), Lockheed Martin (weapons), and Chevron Texaco (oil/gas) and Bristol Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, and Wyeth/Amgen (pharmaceutical).
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From the point of view of any news organization, Mark Penn, who has evolved from a relatively obscure Bill Clinton pollster into the helmsman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, is a walking, talking target -- an over-the-top example of the seductions of Washington, a lethal combination of political opportunism and corporate profiteering.
http://www.americablog.com/2008/02/mark-penns-tangled-corporate-web.html
Mark Penn's tangled corporate web: Clinton is a client; McCain is a client.
As has been widely reported, Hillary Clinton's top guru, Mark Penn, is leading the charge within the Clinton campaign to go aggressively negative against Obama. Besides the fact that Penn is the architect responsible for Hillary's presidential aspirations going from "inevitable" to being on life support, he is reportedly obsessed with destroying Obama. While it is understandable that Clinton's top adviser wants his client to win at all costs, going massively negative against Obama (or Hillary for that matter) risks damaging our candidate in the fall election against McCain. Unfortunately, this is something another "client" would welcome. That client is named John McCain.
Penn is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a DC public relations (PR) firm. Burson-Marsteller owns a subsidiary, BKSH. BKSH is run by Charlie Black. Black is a longtime Republican politico, and a top adviser for John McCain for President. And, as Think Progress notes, while Black is a volunteer on the McCain campaign, he views Mcain as his client and continues to take a paycheck from BKSH. JedReport dissected these relationships in a diary on DailyKos last night.
Much more after the jump...
And, Ari Berman wrote about this last spring:
A host of prominent Republicans fall under Penn's purview. B-M's Washington lobbying arm, BKSH & Associates, is run by Charlie Black, a leading GOP operative who maintains close ties to the White House, including Karl Rove, and was a partner with Lee Atwater, the consultant who crafted the Willie Horton smear campaign for George H.W. Bush in 1988. In recent years Black's clients have included the likes of Iraq's Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the neocon right in the run-up to the war; Lockheed Martin; and Occidental Petroleum. In 2005 he landed a contract with the Lincoln Group, the disgraced PR firm that covertly placed US military propaganda in Iraqi news outlets.
Black is only one cannon in B-M's Republican arsenal.
Penn works for Clinton.
Black works for McCain.
And Black works for Penn.
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