Why Mark Penn needs to really truly be fired

Though he was removed from his role as Hillary’s campaign manager, Mark Penn is still very much involved in her campaign. The pollster found himself ousted after lobbying on behalf of Columbia for a free trade pact with America. After he admitted the timing (though not the lobbying itself) was inappropriate he was promptly fired by Columbia and demoted by Clinton.

Today the NY Times reminds us how the government Penn was representing treats its workers. It’s not a pretty picture and it raises serious questions about why Penn is still at all involved in Hillary’s campaign.

Already this year 17 union members have been murdered in Columbia for their pro-labor stands. Since 1985 more than 2,500 union members have been murdered while convictions have been obtained in only 100 of the cases.

Since President Álvaro Uribe’s conservative government took office in 2002, there has been a marked decline in union killings. That has accompanied a broader decline in overall murders and kidnappings as the civil war, between leftist rebels on one side and government forces and right-wing paramilitary groups on the other, has eased somewhat from its peak in the 1990s. Still, 400 union members have been killed since 2002, and dozens of Mr. Uribe’s supporters in Congress and his former intelligence chief are under investigation for ties to paramilitary death squads, which are classified as terrorists by the United States and responsible for some of the union killings.

Unions were often pulled into Colombia’s war when faced with suspicions among paramilitaries that their ranks had been infiltrated with leftist guerrilla sympathizers. Or sometimes union members suffered simply because they opposed the paramilitaries’ brutal assertion of control over large parts of Colombia.

Our own nation fought brutal battles over labor rights. It took decades of hard work and violent oppression for us to gain the right to organize as workers. The rights we gained drastically changed the safety of American workplaces and created jobs that could sustain a family. The American middle class is built on those successes.

A free trade pact with a violently anti-union nation would force American workers to compete in the labor marketplace against workers who are not getting paid nearly the same wages and who have no ability to force their employers to spend money on safety. The creation of new free trade pacts which include no basic labor standards harms American workers. It’s not the sort of position anyone in a Democratic campaign should be fighting for. Penn should be ashamed of himself. Clinton should have shown him the door long ago. It is deeply troubling she has yet to find the good sense to do so.

Updated 11:47 AM:

I suppose it’s easy to fire a consultant. It’s a little harder to fire a spouse. It turns out that it isn’t just Penn who has his fingers in the Columbia Free Trade agreement pie. Bill Clinton has made even more money than Penn shilling for a Columbian free trade agreement.

From the Huffington Post:

Former President Bill Clinton has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars speaking on behalf of a Colombia-based group pushing the trade pact, and representatives of that organization tell The Huffington Post that the former president shared their sentiment.

In June 2005, Clinton was paid $800,000 by the Colombia-based Gold Service International to give four speeches throughout Latin America. The organization is, ostensibly, a development group tasked with bringing investment to the country and educating world leaders about the Colombia’s business opportunities.

Good to know that the Clintons are making hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing for policies that will significantly harm average Americans. What more should we expect from the family that brought us NAFTA and gutted Welfare?