Hypocrisy Triumphant: Forget the Alamo; Remember the Heinz 57!
by Ken Bell

A cynic might well be forgiven the indelicate observation that the two most salient, pervasive and persistent characteristics of American politics are hypocrisy and irony. Both, as usual, are prominently on display in the presidential campaign of 2004.

Perhaps the most savory of all examples is the “controversy” over “outsourcing” broached in a deliciously “outraged” denunciation by the single wealthiest member of the United States Senate, plutocrat John Kerry, aristocratic “defender of the common man,” of “Benedict Arnold CEOs” who callously export jobs abroad while earning “obscene” salaries substantially less than the Senator’s annual dividend checks—the facts be damned. [For the facts, see “The Mythology of Outsourcing” and “Insourcing Free Markets” on page five of this edition.]

Kerry and his wife, you see, are the single largest individual investors in H.J. Heinz & Co. This global corporation has 79 factories worldwide, of which 57—yes, wryly, 57, neither more nor less—are located abroad.

Has the Senator indignantly returned his dividend checks?

Nor does it all stop at that simple irony. According to The Hill, Benedict Arnolds and their upper echelon henchmen at such outsourcers and their collaborators and facilitators as Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Kerry campaign coffers.

Will these contributions righteously be returned?

Personal trusts held by Kerry himself have an estimated half a million dollars (give or take a couple hundred thousand) invested in outsourcing companies such as IBM and General Electric. Will he divest?

The estimated seven or eight million American workers whose jobs depend upon Toyota, BMW, Honda and dozens of other foreign corporations must be growing quite nervous—along with all those West Virginia coal mine workers whose jobs are targeted by Tides Foundation-funded radical environmental groups, funded by Teresa Heinz Kerry’s “philanthropic” grants. (In a future issue will take a look at the incestuous links between these “philanthropic” grants and a number of organizations endorsing or otherwise supporting the Kerry campaign.)

It really hasn’t been quite this good since 1884, when the supporters of James G. Blaine derided bachelor Grover Cleveland’s alleged fathering of an illegitimate child with the rousing refrain of “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”, only to be rebuked with Blaine’s own words “Burn, burn, Oh burn this letter!” and then further insulted with the coda to their own war cry “. . . gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

Forget the Alamo. Remember the Heinz 57.

–From the April 2004 Austin Review