Fox News Airs ‘Stossel’ Special on HOLLYWOOD HYPOCRITES

01.10.2015 | News | Daily Surge |

Fox News kicked off 2015 by re-airing a hugely-popular special by John Stossel called “Hollywood Hypocrites.” The featured production, taken from Jason Mattera’s New York Times bestselling book Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers, highlighted a cast of characters in Tinseltown whose sanctimonious lectures bear little resemblance to the way they actually conduct themselves day-to-day.

Stossel had Mattera on to talk about three hypocrites in particular: Harrison Ford, Bruce Springsteen, and Jon Bon Jovi — their duplicities exposed on the pages of Hollywood Hypocrites. As Stossel pointed out, Han Solo got his chest waxed on camera to bring awareness to climate change and the environment. It was a stunt for a conservationist group, which is fine and all. Except for this inconvenient detail — Ford at the time owned seven aircraft, including a helicopter, and has stated on the record that he often flies up the coast just to grab a cheeseburger.

A cheeseburger!

On Springsteen and Bon Jovi, adamant supporters of Barack Obama and the liberal cause of progressive taxation, Stossel and Mattera discussed how both musicians classified themselves as “farmers” in the state of New Jersey in order to exploit an arcane tax law that allows them to write off a jaw-dropping 98 percent of their property taxes on land that they claim is farmed. (Bon Jovi raises “honeybees,” for instance.)

The duo are not down with high taxes on their sprawling estates, apparently.

But it’s okay for your taxes go to up, they say.

Mattera was joined on the Stossel special by Kevin Sorbo, who is famous for his role on the hit television show “Hercules” back in the ’90s. The Stossel segment, which aired on January 1, 2015, is above.

Mattera also takes aim at iconic celebrities in his latest bestseller, Crapitalism: Liberals Who Make Millions Swiping Your Tax Dollars, who have used their political access to score crony-fueled profit.

Enter Steven Spielberg. With a net worth over $3 billion, you’d think the legendary filmmaker could fund his own movies without any taxpayer support. Well, he could. But as it turns out, Spielberg fleeced the taxpayers of Virginia for millions of dollars to shoot his Oscar-nominated film Lincoln. Spielberg made it known that he wanted to film Lincoln in Virginia, but wouldn’t commit until after he was offered a subsidy. Then-Governor Bob McDonnell obliged and signed the state’s first ever movie tax credit into law.

“Spielberg combines his talent for business with a greed for taxpayer-funded government goodies,” writes Mattera. “He may wax patriotic about American heroes, but he gobbles up our tax dollars and other benefits like on of his animatronic sharks at a beach or dinosaurs at a Brontosaurus buffet.”

Virginia, however, is hardly alone in raiding public coffers to subsidize Hollywood productions. As CRAPITALISM details, a whopping 40 states offer some similar type of corporate welfare scheme to movie studios, costing taxpayers nearly $1.5 billion a year. And, as Mattera documents, those subsidies rarely live up to their economic hype.

In CRAPITALISM, Mattera also set his sights on Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is one of the Left’s biggest donors today. Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, received a “return” on those campaign contributions when he got Vice President Joe Biden to orchestrate a backroom deal with Chinese officials to increase the number of foreign films allowed in China. But China’s reputation is so bad that the Securities and Exchange Commission opened up an investigation (ongoing, it appears) into whether Katzenberg and other movie moguls bribed Chinese officials to push the lucrative deal through.

And that’s only the beginning, says Mattera.

“I wrote CRAPITALISM to reveal the infuriating schemes the filthy rich employ to rig government in their favor and leave taxpayers holding the bill.”