Pot calling the kettle foreign, eh?
You're Ed Schultz. Sorry about that, but work with me. Your big beef on tonight's show is foreign influence on US elections. What would be the glaring, obvious, overwhelming thing you would want to avoid in your choice of a guest? Having a union boss who is himself a foreigner, you say? Bingo! Yet that's exactly the slip-up Schultz committed.
His guest was steelworker union honcho Leo Gerard, a Canadian, and one who has vociferously advocated Canadian values over foreign ones. Check this jingoistic Canadian claim by Gerard in a north-of-the-border dispute:
"We used to complain that the wealth that was created in the Sudbury Basin with the old Inco was spread across Canada, and not enough of it remained in our region to fix our roads and maintain our public services. Now, that wealth does not even stay in Canada. It goes to Tokyo, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and to other foreign countries . . . The union and Canadian workers in general will never submit to a labour relations culture imported from another country."
Gerard is also is very much a part of the internationalist union movement, promoting "strategic alliances" with unions in countries including Mexico.
Schultz's kvetch was that the US Chamber of Commerce is getting involved in the current electoral campaign, and that under the rules, it doesn't have to account for the sources of its funding. Schultz is concerned that foreign money might be coming into the Chamber's coffers.
View the video and consider the irony of Schultz's patritioc appeal to "red-blooded Americans" . . . just before introducing his maple-leaf blooded friend. Even funnier was Gerard's phony lament that "when I was a young man, I never thought I'd see America come to this." Of course, when Gerard was a young—and not-so-young—man, he was born, growing up and living in and as a Canadian!
This, of all people, is who Schultz chose to lecture us about foreign influence? Tell it to the Mounties, Ed!
