When Michael Moore told Piers Morgan that he was not among the hated 1 percent, he wasn't lying. That's because with a net worth upwards of $50 million he's among the top 0.1 percent.
He made a big deal about paying a third of his first $3 million in taxes to this "great country," as I noted previously. But what has he been doing since then? Collecting subsidies from Michigan taxpayers to make millions more, as it turns out, completely unlike the bailout money that evil Wall Street fat-cats received from federal taxpayers.
Henry Payne, my former colleague at The Detroit News reports that Moore took $1 million in film subsidies to make "Capitalism: A Love Story" from a state that has a mega-billion dollar fiscal hole.
What's more, he made $222 million at the box office whose DVD distribution was handled by Sony, an evil corporation. What did he do with the money? Give it all away in charity, buying turkeys for Michigan's poor on Thanksgiving? Errr….Not exactly: He bought a $5 million mansion in tony Torch Lake, Michigan.
But that doesn't mean he can't rally a crowd in front of Oakland City Hall urging it to expand its protests to leafy suburbs like Oakland's middle-class Walnut Creek because that's, you know, "where the money is," as he put it.
Actually, as Payne notes, Torch Lake is where the money is. So maybe after he is done with Oakland he can lead an Occupy Torch Lake protest. Yes, Michael?
Full disclosure: I live in Oakland County that, I believe, could really use a protest to liven things up.
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