Mark Penn's Firm Paid $4.3 Mill By Clinton Campaign (Axelrod's More than $1 Mill)

[mod mom]

Mark Penn's Firm Paid $4.3 Million By Clinton Campaign
February 6, 2008 03:47 AM


Even if his candidate fails to secure the Democratic nomination, Mark Penn, the chief strategist for Sen. Hillary Clinton, has profited quite handsomely.

Through the course of the primary, Penn's consulting firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, has been paid more than $4.3 million by the Clinton campaign, according to a review of campaign finance filings.

That total, compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, includes receipts for tasks ranging from polling and consulting to mail expenses and even photography. It does not include the $1.5 million the Clinton campaign is in debt to the firm.

Sen. Barack Obama's chief adviser, David Axelrod, has not done too poorly either. His firm, AKP media (for which Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe also serves) was paid more than $1 million by the Obama campaign, primarily for media activities.

Neither campaign returned requests for comment.

It is not uncommon for candidates to spend their cash on the firms and companies associated with their advisers. And the elongated primary, combined with the historic fundraising totals, have pushed campaign expenditures increasingly higher. Still, the totals taken in by Penn and, to a lesser extent, Axelrod represent significant hauls for a year-plus work

-snip

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/06/mark-penns-firm-paid-4_n_85192.html


SO CLINTON UNWISELY PAYS PENN'S FIRM OVER 4 TIMES AS MUCH TO LOSE HER TOP LEAD STATUS? THIS SOUNDS AS IF THE OBAMA CAMP IS MUCH MORE FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE IN THEIR CHOICE OF AXELROD. WHY WOULD CLINTON HANG ON TO SUCH A REPUGNANT MAN WHOSE UNION BUSTING, AND DEFENSE OF SUCH CORPORATIONS AS BLACKWATER, PHILIP MORRIS, UNION CARBIDE AFTER THE BHOPAL DISASTER, GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS FOR MONSANTO AMONG OTHERS, IS PUBLICLY KNOWN? WHY CHOSE A FIRM THAT GAVE OVER 57% OF CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE GOP IN 2006. IN 2006! WHEN EVERYONE WHO HAD EVEN A LITTLE SENSE KNEW WHAT THEY WERE UP TO?

WHY PROMOTE A FIRM WHO PROTECTS THE POWERFUL OVER THE PEOPLE TO REPRESENT YOU?

[SoFlaJet]

1. that's good money

for doing such a crappy job there Mark

[mod mom]

2. "In '06, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57% of Campaign Contrib to GOP"

I like to back up what I write with facts:

"In '06, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57% of Campaign Contrib to GOP"



Polling Czar



After the 1994 election, Democrats had just lost both houses of Congress, and President Clinton was floundering in the polls. At the urging of his wife, he turned to Dick Morris, a friend from their time in Arkansas. Morris brought in two pollsters from New York, Doug Schoen and his partner, Mark Penn, a portly, combative workaholic. Morris decided what to poll and Penn polled it. They immediately pushed Clinton to the right, enacting the now-infamous strategy of "triangulation," which co-opted Republican policies like welfare reform and tax cuts and emphasized small-bore issues that supposedly cut across the ideological divide. "They were the ones who said, 'Make the '96 election about nothing except V-chips and school uniforms,'" says a former adviser to Bill. When Morris got caught with a call girl, Penn became the most important adviser in Clinton's second term. "In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high priest."

Penn, who had previously worked in the business world for companies like Texaco and Eli Lilly, brought his corporate ideology to the White House. After moving to Washington he aggressively expanded his polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland (PSB). It was said that Penn was the only person who could get Bill Clinton and Bill Gates on the same line. Penn's largest client was Microsoft, and he saw no contradiction between working for both the plaintiff and the defense in what was at the time the country's largest antitrust case. A variety of controversial clients enlisted PSB. The firm defended Procter & Gamble's Olestra from charges that the food additive caused anal leakage, blamed Texaco's bankruptcy on greedy jurors and market-tested genetically modified foods for Monsanto. PSB introduced to consulting the concept of "inoculation": shielding corporations from scandal through clever advertising and marketing.

In 2000 Penn became the chief architect of Hillary's Senate victory in New York, persuading her, in a rerun of '96, to eschew big themes and relentlessly focus on poll-tested pothole politics, such as suburban transit lines and dairy farming upstate. Following that election, Penn became a very rich man--and an even more valued commodity in the business world (Hillary paid him $1 million for her re-election campaign in '06 and $277,000 in the first quarter of this year). The massive PR empire WPP Group acquired Penn's polling firm for an undisclosed sum in 2001 and four years later named him worldwide CEO of one of its most prized properties, the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M). A key player in the decision to hire Penn was Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP. "Clients of stature come to Mark constantly for counsel," says Paster, who informally advises Hillary, explaining the hire. The press release announcing Penn's promotion noted his work "developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector." The release blithely ignored how utility deregulation contributed to the California electricity crisis manipulated by Enron and the blackout of 2003, which darkened much of the Northeast and upper Midwest.

Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat. The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which thousands were killed when toxic fumes were released by one of its plants, to Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of colluding with the Nigerian government in committing major human rights violations. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer groups. It set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s. Its current clients include major players in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries. In 2006, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.

-snip
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070604/berman

[mod mom]

3. Penn heads a firm that has represented everyone from union busters to big tobacco, & Blackwater:

Isn't it Time for Mark Penn to Leave Burson-Marsteller?
Posted November 12, 2007 | 11:18 AM (EST)


My colleague at The Nation, Ari Berman, has done more than any journalist to shine some light on how pollster-strategist Mark Penn, head honcho at PR giant Burson-Marsteller, and perhaps the most important figure in Hillary Clinton's campaign, poses a real dilemma for the candidate. Penn heads a firm that has represented everyone from union busters to big tobacco, and more recently Blackwater. (According to a Marsteller spokesperson, it was a subsidiary, BKSH & Associates, run by GOP operative Charlie Black, which helped Erik Prince prepare for congressional hearings after his employees killed civilians in Iraq).It would seem difficult to find a more controversial client than Blackwater but Penn's firm has just been retained by Spin Master.

Who is Spin Master? It turns out that Spin Master distributes Aqua Dots, a toy that was recalled last week because it contains a glue ingredient that when ingested is broken down by the body to make GHB, the "date rape" drug, which can cause unconsciousness and even death. (The Consumer Product Safety Commission says the number of children sickened by Aqua Dots has risen from two to nine in the past week.)

Penn has repeatedly stated that he has no direct contact with controversial clients like Blackwater or unionbusters. But what about the good old-fashioned American principles of responsibility and accountability -- principles which his candidate likes to invoke on the campaign trail? As Ari Berman has pointed out, the dilemma for Clinton is that Penn's firm represents many of the interests whose influence she has vowed to curtail. But as kids get sick from poisonous toys, how can Clinton keep in her corner, as her chief strategist, a man who has even limited involvement with a firm like Burson-Marsteller? Isn't it time that Clinton ask Penn to choose: my campaign to make this a safer country or a PR firm which has too many clients undermining that agenda?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katrina-vanden-heuvel/isnt-it-time-for-mark-pe_b_72206.html

[mod mom]

4. WP: A Few Degrees of Separation From Hillary Clinton's Top Adviser

A Few Degrees of Separation From Hillary Clinton's Top Adviser

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Tuesday, February 20, 2007; Page A11



Mark J. Penn is a man who wears many hats: high-paid political and corporate pollster, chief executive of an international communications and lobbying company, and chief strategist to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Enough connections for you?


Well, there are more. Penn's firm, Burson-Marsteller Worldwide -- with 2,000 employees and $300 million a year in revenue -- owns BKSH & Associates, the major lobbying firm chaired by Charles R. Black Jr. That's right, Black, counselor to Republican presidents, reports to Clinton's top strategist.

The connections get even more entangled. Burson-Marsteller is a subsidiary of WPP Group, a London-based advertising and PR giant that owns many of the biggest names on K Street. These include Quinn Gillespie & Associates, Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, Timmons & Co., Ogilvy Government Relations Worldwide (formerly the Federalist Group), Public Strategies Inc., Dewey Square Group and Hill & Knowlton.

To be more precise, Penn's parent company employs as lobbyists and advisers an ex-chairman of the Republican National Committee (Edward W. Gillespie), a former House GOP leader (Robert S. Walker), a top GOP fundraiser (Wayne L. Berman), and the former media adviser to President Bush (Mark McKinnon).





http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/19/AR2007021900972.html

[mod mom]

6. Pollsters Penn, Schoen & Berland's work in Venezuela:

In August, exit polling figured in a bitter fight in Venezuela over what amounted to competing landslides for and against a recall of the sitting president, Hugo Chávez, a socialist with ties to Fidel Castro.

The recall's proponents sponsored an exit poll, supervised by Penn, Schoen & Berland, an American firm whose clients have included Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Sometime before the polls closed on Aug. 15, Penn, Schoen reported that 59 percent of Venezuelan voters had said yes to throwing the president out of office.

A few hours later, the official count, by an election commission under Mr. Chávez's control, declared him the winner, with 58 percent of the total. Both the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, the Atlanta-based human rights organization founded by Jimmy Carter, said that their observers had seen no irregularities at the polls. In response to the exit poll, they called for a random audit at selected polling stations and again found nothing suspicious.

Mr. Schoen acknowledged in an interview that the poll's field workers were recruited by a group that helped organize the recall, but he said the volunteers had been trained to conduct the poll professionally, and that his firm would have no reason to put its reputation at risk by participating in a fraudulent poll. The recall's supporters continue to believe the election was stolen.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/weekinreview/17plis.html?_r=1&fta=y&oref=slogin

[TexasObserver]

9. Mark Penn will work for dictators, big tobacco, and others

He doesn't care about the politics involved, only finding themes that will SELL. They don't need to be true, and often aren't.

[mod mom]

12. He reminds me of one of the victims in the movie Seven. His race baiting comments

on Hardball (called out by Chris Matthews) shows how low he'd go.

[TexasObserver]

5. It Takes a Villiage Idiot

... to run the campaign.

Mark Penn is that man.

There is no telling how much of that money is being illegally filtered to campaign "helpers."

"Walking around money" they call it.

[UALRBSofL]

7. The thing is I don't like Penn, he's not real bright

And I never understand why she relied on him. He is just bad. He sounds so stupid talking on tv. My rant is over.

[Adelante]

8. Rumor of a staff shakeup

Maybe Penn's getting the ax?

http://thepage.time.com/halperins-take-the-obama-clinton-questions/

[TexasObserver]

11. the time is right to dump him over board

at the risk of dangerously raising the level of the oceans

[mod mom]

13. Her selection of him says a lot in my estimation.

[maddezmom]

10. reminds me of Trippi and the Dean campaign

Trippi said he had no control over funds, nor did he draw a salary as campaign manager. The only money he made came from the profits his firm made producing ads and buying airtime for Dean. When he resigned, Trippi, McMahon & Squier had charged the campaign $7 million; of that, Trippi and his partners each got $165,000.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2519/is_7_25/ai_n6240735