The Weekly Standard's William Kristol finds it "creepy" that the CEO of Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, would write to President Obama saying, "You can count on me and the entire Citi organization to support" Mr. Obama's financial "reform."
Says Mr. Kristol, "the U.S. government owns 27% of Citi." More: "A CEO seeking political favor commits his 'entire organization' to work for a particular policy outcome. And if individual Citi employees disagree? No stifling of freedom of speech or freedom of political activity there, I'm sure....:"
This is a little more complicated than Mr. Kristol has it. The First Amendment guarantee of free speech is a prohibition on Congress, not on employers. If some Weekly Standard employee started running around saying Mr. Kristol has lost it and that President Obama's expansion of government is really terrific, Mr. Kristol would be well within his rights to fire the employee, as long as there's no free speech guarantee in the employee's employment contract, if there is such a contract.
Still, he's right about the fact that it's creepy.
