Dis, old pal, my offer to buy you this book is still open... or would you rather show us something (anything?!) that disproves Schweizer's facts?
Do As I Say (Not As I Do)
by Peter Schweizer
• "I don't own a single share of stock," Michael Moore declares. No, his tax returns show he has owned hundreds of thousands -- profiting from some of the very companies (like Halliburton and Boeing) he viciously denounces. Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn't invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore's IRS forms show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton, Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric and McDonald's.
• The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel: ultra-left class warrior, defender of the inheritance tax -- and trust-fund heiress who fought the IRS all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid paying $2 million in estate taxes
• During the 2004 campaign, John Kerry complained that the "super-rich" don't pay their fair share in taxes. Care to guess what percentage of their income Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry -- who are worth over $700 million -- are paying in taxes?
• Self-described socialist Noam Chomsky opposes private property and calls the Pentagon "the most vile institution on the face of the earth" -- yet he has made millions in contract work for the Pentagon, owns two luxurious homes, and set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. Chomsky has lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich, but Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon over the last 40 years, and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.
• Ted Kennedy favors racial set-asides on federal contracts -- but when it came to his own investment in an entire city block of Washington, DC, he got his political friends to help him waive an affirmative action set-aside. Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters. But he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family's fortune from the IRS.
One Kennedy family trust wasn't even set up in the U.S., but in Fiji.
Another family member, environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr., has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources. But he receives an annual check from the family's large holdings in the oil industry.
• Al Franken habitually calls conservatives "liars" and "mean and nasty" -- yet as a writer for "Saturday Night Live" he penned jokes and skits so mean-spirited they appalled even his colleagues, and he uses brazen lies for his bestselling books all the time. Air America radio host Franken says conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action. But fewer than 1 percent of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-American.
• Hillary Clinton supports the right of thirteen-year-old girls to have abortions without parental consent -- yet she forbade thirteen-year-old Chelsea to pierce her ears and enrolled her in a school that would not distribute condoms to minors.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have spoken in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill vetoed a bill seeking to end it. But the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die.
• Ralph Nader: how he speculates in the stocks of companies that might be influenced by his political activism. How he conceals enormous wealth and a lavish lifestyle behind a façade of pretended frugality. Nader is another liberal who claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights. But when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on the office door.
• Nancy Pelosi has made supporting labor unions a cornerstone of her public career. Yet the vineyards and hotels that comprise her $35 million fortune have one thing in common: they don't use union labor. Staunch union supporter Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union. But the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop.
The hypocrisy doesn't end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of Congress in recent election cycles.
But the Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees - but none of them are in a union.
The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is - that's right, a non-union shop.
• Barbra Streisand: how, on the three causes with which she seems most concerned -- poverty, environmentalism and feminism -- she engages in the very behaviors she says she deplores. Streisand has talked about the necessity of unions to protect a "living wage." But she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada, where she can pay less than American union wages.
• Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates. But he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.