MARK KLEIMAN ON MARK PENN. I think the good professor from UCLA gets this situation exactly right:
Penn, with the sort of scupulous intellectual honesty you'd expect from a professional flack, says that he has used his firm's "conscience clause" to "recuse himself" from Burson-Marsteller's union-busting business. What the hell is that supposed to mean?As the CEO, Penn gets to decide whether the firm stays in the union-busting business or not. If he has a conscientious objection to that activity — which would be reasonable, since union-busting means scheming with employers to deprive workers of an internationally-recognized human right (see Art. 23) — then he ought to close down the union-busting practice, and tell the Burson-Marsteller board they can fire him if they don't like it.[...] Either Penn and Clinton don't really think that union-busting is wrong, or they don't care enough about the difference between right and wrong to do anything about it. I can't come up with a third alternative. Can you?
--Ezra Klein
