LET'S TALK ABOUT PENN. Ari's article on Mark Penn is making the rounds, and for good reason -- it's a comprehensive and well-done profile of an enormously influential figure. I want to focus on a particular part, though, which was first noticed by our own Mark Schmitt: Burson-Marsteller, the mega-PR firm where Penn serves as Galactic Leader and Imperialist Overlord "Worldwide President and CEO," has a union-busting division. That's right, a union-busting division. Their "labor relations" page, which Mark noticed, was immediately scrubbed of the offensive information, losing such delightful gems as "'Companies cannot be caught unprepared by Organized Labor's coordinated campaigns whether they are in conjunction with organizing or contract negotiating ... That is why we have developed a comprehensive communications approach for clients when they face any type of labor situation." The site also bragged of their close working relationship with Jarold Manheim, a George Washington university professor whose book, Death by a Thousand Cuts, was described to me as "the bible for union busters looking to understand "corporate campaigns." BM's unionbuster-in-chief was a delightful individual by the name of Wade Gates who had, I shit you not, the title, at least at times, of "Corporate Citizenship Director," and served as lead spokesman for Cintas, a particularly nasty company trying to resist a UNITE-HERE organizing campaign. Burson-Marsteller's "labor relations" page is now anodyne and inoffensive, but because I love you guys, I kept a copy of the original page, which you can view here. This stuff isn't made up. But the sheer gall of it is remarkable. Unions are the most powerful progressive constituency in the country and Democrats are dead without them, a fact Penn knew back in the 1982, when he took to the Washington Post to fret that, "In 1980, blue-collar voters swung away from traditional Democratic favorites to put Ronald Reagan in the White House. Now, almost two years later, and despite the recession, the union vote is still pro-Reagan -- and it may well prevent Republicans from losing a significant number of Congressional seats in November." Yet Penn's company has a whole division dedicated to holding down the number of union members in this country. And fine: Penn could have become a conservative, flipped ideologically, exited politics and gone to the corporate world. But none of those things happened. He is the most prominent and public advisor for the most visible and likely Democratic presidential candidate. Even so, he felt absolutely no need to shut down that division of his company, or resign from Burson-Marsteller. It's no surprise that Penn isn't a progressive, but to wage outright war against the labor movement while advising a Democratic candidate for the presidency takes a special gall. Is Labor okay with that? Is Andy Stern? Is UNITE-HERE's Bruce Raynor? The AFL-CIO's John Sweeney? I'm going to start asking, and I'll tell you what they say. --Ezra Klein
