During my working years, I had the unfortunate experience of going through recurring layoffs at my place of employment. Fortunately my salaried position spared me, but it was frightening to me nonetheless. Eventually I tried to take a positive view of them: when the papers would say the workforce was going to be reduced 20%, for example, I’d say to myself, well look at it this way, 80% are still working. This particular ruling by PolitiFact (PF) along with a blog post critical of it, reminds me, in a way, of that “80% positive.”
Michael Moore, self-avowed liberal activist and champion of the working class, recently went to Madison, Wisconsin to cheer on the Wisconsin public union members and teachers who protested their governor’s approach to solving a budget crisis by essentially taking away their collective bargaining rights (along with some other cuts), perhaps a move not so much to alleviate the budget but to eviscerate the unions.
PolitiFact Wisconsin pronounced as "True" the claim of Michael Moore, who stated quite plainly “Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined.” My conservative counter part’s criticism is that Moore was not specific by saying “Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined who are at the bottom of wealth distribution.” Somehow PolitiFact Wisconsin’s writers were at fault for not paying close enough attention to the specific wording of the claim. Not only that, they failed to consider the underlying message of how our country is “awash in wealth”…which, as he supposedly points out, appears to contradict Bill Adair’s claimed method for evaluating statements subject to PolitiFact’s Truth-o-meter.
Let’s first look at the chain of events in relation to this statement. Moore made the statement in Madison on March 5; he published his statement March 7 on his website. PolitiFact Wisconsin did not publish its ruling until March 10.
On March 5, the day of his speech in Madison, we get this description of it from a publication called the Daily Page:
On March 5, the day of his speech in Madison, we get this description of it from a publication called the Daily Page:
…Moore talked about the nation's growing economic disparities, saying the total amount of wealth held by the nation's 400 richest individuals is equal to the assets of 155 million Americans on the other end of the spectrum.
Apparently this writer knew that Moore meant “the other end of the spectrum” economically when he talked about the 155 million people.
