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Spinning Hillary Centrist
From http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Burson-Marsteller>Sourcewatch
In May, 2007, the Nation magazine ran an insightful article into 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 ."
From http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/berman>Spinning Hillary Centrist, The Nation, Ari Berman...
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 massive human rights violations in Nigeria. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer organizations. 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.
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 former partners with Lee Atwater, the political consultant who crafted the Willie Horton smear campaign used by George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Black regularly disparages the Clintons; he has called Hillary a "martyr figure" and said Bill "tearfully embraced...government preferences for homosexual lifestyle." 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 the summer of 2005 he landed a contract with the Lincoln Group, the disgraced PR firm that covertly placed US military propaganda in Iraqi news outlets. The agreement, according to Intelligence Online, allowed the Lincoln Group to "tap into BKSH's extensive contacts in the Republican administration." When asked by The New Yorker if there was too much cronyism in Iraq, Black responded, "I just wish I could find the cronies."
As expected with such a lineup, B-M has a highly confrontational relationship with organized labor. "Companies cannot be caught unprepared by Organized Labor's coordinated campaigns," read the "Labor Relations" section of its website (until it was scrubbed after Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect quoted the language in March). It consults frequently with George Washington University professor Jarol Manheim, author of The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation and Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation. And it lends help to some of the most controversial union-busting efforts in America.
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Back in 2003 two large unions, UNITE (which later merged with HERE, the hotel and restaurant union) and the Teamsters, launched a major drive to organize 32,000 garment workers and truck drivers at Cintas, the country's largest and most profitable uniform and laundry supply company. Its longtime CEO, Richard Farmer, was a mega-fundraising "pioneer" for George W. Bush. Despite posting $3.4 billion in sales and $327 million in profits last year, the company had a record of overcharging consumers, denying workers overtime pay, keeping unsafe working conditions (an employee in Tulsa died recently when caught in a 300-degree drier) and using any means necessary to block the union drive. Management fired employees under false pretenses, according to worker complaints documented by the unions; vowed to close plants; and screened anti-union videos. A plant manager in Vista, California, threatened to "kick driver-employees with his steel-toed boots," according to a complaint UNITE HERE filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). To put a soft face on its harsh tactics, Cintas hired Wade Gates, a top employee in B-M's Dallas office, as its chief spokesman. Gates coined Cintas's shrewd response to labor: "the right to say yes, the freedom to say no," which has been repeated endlessly in the press. In a speech at the USC Gould School of Law last year, Gates outlined Cintas's strategy, calling for an "aggressive defense against union tactics." Says Ahmer Qadeer, an organizer for UNITE HERE: "It's the Burson influence that's made Cintas much, much slicker than they were." The unions have won two NLRB rulings against Cintas, but for four years the company has continued to resist the organizing campaign.
Link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/berman>Spinning Hillary Centrist, The Nation
Burson-Marsteller
From http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Burson-Marsteller>Sourcewatch...
Burson-Marsteller is the world's fifth largest PR company (Source: Council of PR Firms, 2002) and part of the WPP Group. According to a 2004 profile in The Hill, a Washington, DC newspaper, "This multinational PR behemoth has an active public-affairs practice led by Richard Mintz, who ran the media shop at the Department of Transportation during the Clinton administration. He also served as staff director for Hillary Clinton during the 1992 campaign. B-M has won awards recently for its work for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the "No on Proposition 54" campaign in California. Its public-affairs practice is bolstered by its affiliation with Direct Impact (grassroots marketing) and BKSH & Associates (lobbying)."
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In April 2005, Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter reported that Burson-Marsteller had joined with Quinn Gillespie & Associates to launch 360 Advantage, a public affairs shop filled with "key players in George W. Bush's successful presidential campaigns."
360 Advantage is headed by Russ Schriefer, who did advertising with the Bush/Cheney 2000 and 2004 campaigns and produced the 2004 Republican National Convention, and by Stuart Stevens, a "Bush adman and veteran political strategist." Schriefer and Stevens were also partners in the Stevens & Schriefer Group in Washington, DC, and have worked on presidential campaigns in the Czech Republic, Nigeria, the Philippines and Congo (Jack O'Dwyer's Newletter, Vol. 38, No. 17, April 27, 2005).
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Burson-Marsteller>Burson-Marsteller, Sourcewatch
More from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/berman>Spinning Hillary Centrist, The Nation, Ari Berman...:
Every election cycle Penn discovers a new group of swing voters--"soccer moms," "wired workers," "office park dads"--who happen to be the key to the election and believe the same thing: "Outdated appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy only alienate new consistencies and ring increasingly hollow," Penn has written. Through his longtime association with the Democratic Leadership Council, Penn has been pushing pro-corporate centrism for years. Many of the same companies that underwrite the DLC, such as Eli Lilly, AT&T, Texaco and Microsoft, also happen to be clients of Penn's.
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Yet despite occupying such a divisive place in the Democratic Party and outsized role in the corporate world--and despite his company's close ties to Republican political operatives and the Bush White House--Penn remains a leading figure in Hillary's campaign, pitching the inevitability of her nomination to donors and party bigwigs. According to the New York Times, " Clinton responds to Penn's points with exclamations like, Oh, Mark, what a smart thing to say!" Politically, his presence means that triangulation is alive and well inside the campaign and that despite her populist forays, Hillary won't stray too far from the center. "Penn has a lot of influence on her, no doubt about it," says New York political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked with Penn in '96. "He's not going to let her drift too far left."
More about http://home.intekom.com/tm_info/ge_bm.htm>Burson-Marsteller:
The public relations business is one of the fastest growing industries in the global market economy. In order to face perils like labor unions, organized consumer activists and environmental groups, governments and corporations have come to rely more on slick PR campaigns. The peril to popular democracy posed by PR firms should not be underestimated. Using the latest communications technologies and polling techniques, as well as an array of high-level political connections, PR flacks routinely "manage" issues for government and corporate clients and "package" them for public consumption. The result is a "democracy" in which citizens are turned into passive receptacles of "disinfotainment" and "advertorials" and in which critics of the status quo are defined as ignorant meddlers and/or dangerous outsiders.
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On the human rights front, B-M has represented some of the worst violators of our age. These include:
- The Nigerian government during the Biafran war, to discredit reports of genocide.
- The fascist junta that ruled Argentina during the 70's and early 80's, to attract foreign investment.
- The totalitarian regime of South Korea, to whitewash the human rights situation there during the 1988 Olympics.
- The Indonesian government, which got into power through a CIA- sponsored bloodbath. (It should be pointed out, however, that B-M denies that it is handling the issue of genocide in East Timor)
- Ideological barriers are no object. B-M also represented the late communist Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaucescu.
- Other third world human rights violators that have been represented by B-M include the governments of Singapore and Sri Lanka.
Doesn't this bother the consciences of B-M's executives? Not at all. Commenting on his firm's work for Argentina's fascists, B-M founder Harold Burson said that "We regard ourselves as working in the business sector for clearcut business and economic objectives. So we had nothing to do with a lot of the things that one reads in the paper about Argentina as regards human rights and other activities".
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For years B-M has been involved in major environmental issues all over the world, not hesitating to give polluters a helping hand when confronted by activist groups and/or government regulations. Many transnational corporations have turned to B-M for help in the creation of a pedantic, elitist and corporate-oriented brand of environmentalism. It is the hope of entrepreneurial sectors and neoliberal demagogues that this type of safe and harmless environmental activism will displace the more militant and agressive grassroots groups.
B-M's environmental services have benefited industrial polluters, such as the following:
- Babcock & Wilcox, when its nuclear power plant in Three Mile Island had its famous mishap in 1979.
- Union Carbide, to handle the public relations crisis caused by the Bhopal tragedy in 1984.
- Exxon, to counter the negative press coverage it got in the wake of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in 1989.
- Ontario Hydro, an industrial concern, headed by Earth Summit secretary general Maurice Strong, which is the biggest source of CO2 emissions in Canada. This corporation is currently selling nuclear reactors to Argentina and Chile.
- The Louisiana-Pacific (L-P) logging company, famous for its union- busting, clear cutting of old growth forests and support for anti- environmental front groups. L-P hopes to convince its employees and the public that ruralunemployment in North America is caused by environmental extremists and opressive government regulation and not by unsustainable logging practices or the relocation of s awmills to low-wage countries like Mexico.
- B-M formed the British Columbia Forest Alliance (BCFA), a Canadian front group which has L-P among its founding members. BCFA is campaigning against restrictions on logging and is actively work ing to smear and discredit environmentalists. Other BCFA members include Mitsubishi and Weyerhaueser.
- B-M is a key player in the nuclear industry lobby. According to Canadian journalist Joyce Nelson, B-M has for years "represented top nuclear power/nuclear weapons contractors such as General Electric, AT&T, McDonnell Douglas, Asea Brown Boveri and Du Pont. In fact, Canada's first Candu reactor sale to Argentina in the early 1970's was later renegotiated during the reign of the military junta, for whom Burson-Marsteller did an image-cleanup from 1976-1981". In addition to this, since 1993 B-M subsidiary Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly (see sidebar) has been representing Nordion International, a newly-privatised subsidiary of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Canada's state-owned nuclear power company.
- B-M coordinated the oil industry's campaign to discredit and destroy president Clinton's proposal for a BTU tax.
- A B-M executive sits on the board of Keep America Beautiful, a front for the packaging and waste hauling industries that lobbies against mandatory recycling laws, especially the passage of a national bottle bill in the US.
- B-M's most powerful and influential 'environmental' client is the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD), an eco-capitalist outfit founded by Swiss banker Stephan Schmidheiny. A leading theorist and advocate of neoliberal dogma and corporate environmentalism, Schmidheiny agressively combines entrepreneurship and statesmanship. He is a board member of NestlE9, and a director and shareholder (5% owner) of B-M client Asea Brown Boveri. BCSD's original task was to act behind the scenes at the 1992 Earth Summit, which was chaired by the current head of B-M client Ontario Hydro Maurice Strong, to neutralize and silence any voices critical of the irresponsible behavior of polluting corporations. In the words of Joyce Nelson, "With the able assistance of public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, a very elite group of business people (including B-M itself) was seemingly able to plan the agenda for the Earth Summit with little interference from NGO's or government leader s". Nowadays BCSD is advocating free markets and unfettered corporate activity as the only salvation of the environment. Its members include the CEO's of Asea Brown Boveri, Browning Ferris Industries, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, BCFA member Mitsubishi, Maurice Strong's Ontario Hydro, Royal Dutch-Shell, and companies from Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Spain, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Thailand and Venezuela.
http://home.intekom.com/tm_info/ge_bm.htm>BURSON-MARSTELLER: PR FOR THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Carmelo Ruiz
http://home.intekom.com/tm_info/ge_bm.htm>Destroying Health Care
American and Canadian pharmaceutical and insurance companies that want to crack open the Canadian market are frustrated by the fact that Canadians are very happy with their health care system. Worse yet, more and more Americans, especially in Vermont, are now calling for the introduction of single-payer health insurance in their country--a step in the direction of a Canadian-style system. This presents a grave problem for neoliberal demagogues, since it exposes the basic conflict between capitalism and democracy.
Enter Burson-Marsteller's health care unit, whose staff includes "a medical doctor/physician; former FDA (Food and Drug Administration) commissioner; former hospital administrator; former pharmaceutical communications executives; former non-profit communications chiefs; grassroots specialists, and former reporters" according to the senior editor of O'Dwyer's newsletter, which monitors the PR business.
B-M has plenty of experience in matters of public health. On behalf of client Philip Morris, B-M created the National Smokers' Alliance (NSA) to fight against smoking restrictions. According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, the NSA "is a state-of-the-art campaign that uses full- page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, (toll free) numbers and newsletters to bring thousands of smokers into its ranks each week. By 1995 NSA claimed a membership of 3 million smokers". The NSA is headed by B-M vice-president Thomas Humber and its members include B-M executives Pierre Salinger and Kennetz Rietz, as well as Peter Kelly, senior partner of B-M subsidiary Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly (see sidebar). In addition to this, B-M was hired by the A.H. Robbins company when its Dalkon Shield IUD contraceptive injured thousands of women who used it, and it is now currently promoting the 'virtues' of Eli Lilly's anti-depressant wonder drug Prozac.
Selling NAFTA
In 1990 the Mexican government hired B-M to sell NAFTA to the American public, media and politicians. B-M subcontracted this job to one of its subsidiaries, The Brock Group (TBG), a consulting firm that has done work for American Express, Bell Atlantic, Bacardi, Toyota and the Taiwanese government. TBG is headed by former senator, Republican National Committee chairman, US trade representative and labor secretary William Brock. He was certainly qualified for the job. As US trade representative, Brock engineered the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement, and began the negotiations that would eventually culminate in the signing of the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement.
William Brock co-chairs the Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTN) Coalition, which was founded in 1990 to 'educate' the public-- and lobby for--the now-completed Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The coalition's members include American Express, General Motors, IBM, General Electric, Cargill, Citicorp, Procter & Gamble and other companies and trade associations. According to Malaysian activist Martin Khor Kok Peng, the MTN Coalition had a big influence on the 1990 G-7 Summit meeting held in Houston, USA, in which GATT figured prominently. At the Houston Summit, MTN held a high- profile press conference and released a report by an 'eminent persons group' on world trade.
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