Hypocrisy of Michael Moore’s opulent home: op-ed by Detroit News
Millionaire filmmaker Michael Moore’s 10,000-square-foot summer mansion on Torch Lake in northern Michigan is a pad right out of Robin Leach’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” with a sprawling lakefront facade looking out over deep, azure waters that have attracted America’s very rich for decades.
photo Prognosic
And like Moore’s primary address on the gold-lined streets of Park Avenue, Torch Lake is a long way from the grimy turf of Oakland, Calif., City Hall and Zuccotti Park, where 1-percenter Moore poses as a spokesman for the Occupy Wall Street movement.
From Torch Lake to Charlevoix to Bay Harbor on Lake Michigan, northern Michigan’s coastal region is where the successful come to relax. Fellow Moore celebrities like Bruce Willis, Madonna and Tim Allen all have homes here. As do corporate execs that occupy protesters despise: Big Three millionaires such as ex-Chrysler Chairman Bob Eaton, and auto mogul Bill Schuiling and boat-magnate John Winn among them.
But calling Moore’s lake property a “home” would be an understatement. This is a manor. A Kennedy compound. An ostentatious, big-foot show of wealth.
Flint-native Moore bought the original 2,500-square-foot home, local real estate sources say, then gobbled up two surrounding lots to expand his massive estate. Antrim County public records show the property in the name of Moore and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, and lists its taxable value at nearly $1 million. (In Michigan, taxable value is roughly half of market value.)
Local real estate agents estimate the real value of the 7,500- to 12,000-square-foot compound at $2 million.
The filmmaker’s millions have come in part from sweet subsidy deals that occupiers decry as payoffs to the politically connected rich. In 2010 Moore received a $1 million handout from the Michigan government to make his anti-1 percenter movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
But Moore hardly needs to take money from the pockets of this state’s 99 percenters. One of his previous movies, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” has made $222 million.
“I’m saying that we do not have a complete democracy if the economy is not a democracy,” Moore told CNN in 2009 in denouncing the same special interest tax handouts he has taken. “(Corporations) think the richest 1 percent should be calling all the shots, should be buying the politicians, making the decisions.”
Moore’s hypocrisy is a perfect fit for a confused occupy movement that boasts support from Big Labor, millionaire musicians and spoiled Harvard kids. The filmmaker rallied the crowd in front of Oakland City Hall in California by urging them to expand their protests to leafy suburbs like Oakland’s middle-class Walnut Creek. “That’s where all the money is, right?” he said.
Actually, Torch Lake is where the money is. In addition to taxpayer subsidies, Moore’s wealth comes from multinational corporations such as Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment — a subsidiary of Sony — that distributed “Fahrenheit 9/11” on DVD.
As Occupy Detroit and other encampments get curfewed out of America’s inner cities, they should look to squat in the wealthy estates of northern Michigan.
Call it Occupy Michael Moore.
by Henry Payne
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20111115/OPINION01/111150320/Hypocrisy-of-Michael-Moore’s-opulent-home#ixzz1dmJPoeJn
