Well, This Explains the Trips to Madison

Ed Schultz, full-time Union Employee.  (H/T News­Busters)

In fis­cal 2011, [MSNBC Host Ed] Schultz received $190,000 from the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers of Amer­ica for what the U.S. Depart­ment of Labor cat­e­go­rized as “rep­re­sen­ta­tional activities.”

For swag like that, you’d think Schultz could at least get it right about the CWA name. Instead, he invari­ably refers to it as the “Com­mu­ni­ca­tion” Work­ers of Amer­ica when its pres­i­dent, Larry Cohen, is a guest on Schultz’s radio show, as Cohen often is.

Schultz also received $9,900 in fis­cal 2011 from the Inter­na­tional Broth­er­hood of Elec­tri­cal Work­ers (IBEW), putting his union haul for the year at almost $200,000.

This rep­re­sented a five­fold increase over the $37,350 Schultz received from unions in fis­cal 2010 — $15,000 from the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of State, County and Munic­i­pal Employ­ees (AFSCME), $14,850 from the Inter­na­tional Broth­er­hood of Elec­tri­cal Work­ers, and $7,500 from the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers of America.

A Labor Depart­ment spokesman con­firmed to News­Busters that Schultz received $190,000 from CWA  in fis­cal 2011, far from than the $7,500 he was paid by the union a year ear­lier. The spokesman said unions are man­dated to report such pay­ments as required by the Labor Man­age­ment Report­ing and Dis­clo­sure Act.

For its fis­cal 2010 pay­ment to Schultz, the union char­ac­ter­ized the pay­ment as per­tain­ing to “union admin­is­tra­tion,” accord­ing to Labor Depart­ment records.

The fis­cal year before that, unions paid Schultz $42,500 — $17,500 from the National Air Traf­fic Con­trollers Asso­ci­a­tion, $10,000 from AFSMCE, and $7,500 each from the Build­ing and Con­struc­tion Trades union and Inter­na­tional Broth­er­hood of Boil­er­mak­ers. All were for “polit­i­cal activ­i­ties,” accord­ing to the Labor Department.

In fis­cal 2008, Schultz was paid $22,304 by unions — $10,000 from United Steel­work­ers (for “union admin­is­tra­tion”), $7,304 from Air Traf­fic Con­trollers (“gen­eral over­head”), and $5,000 from Plumbers and Pip­efit­ters Local 189 in Colum­bus, Ohio. (“gen­eral over­head” again).

Worth not­ing is that Schultz’s cable pro­gram on MSNBC, “The Ed Show,” debuted in April 2009 — and that union pay­ments to Schultz nearly dou­bled from a year earlier.

All par for the course for Ed Schultz.  Was told last year one of the rea­sons for his turn from being a con­ser­v­a­tive radio talker in the early 90s to the flam­ing lib­eral he is today was a truck­load of money by Clin­ton financiers in what was meant to be the left’s first attempt at as lib­eral Rush Lim­baugh on the radio.

That hap­pened all dur­ing his time as a local guy in North Dakota.  (I have some friends in ND Pol­i­tics.  They’re lick­ing their chops to beat up on for­mer Abele and DPW staffer Bran­don Lorenz once he sur­faces after the recent news he left Nebraska.)

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