The Hightower Report

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A THUD OF A 'BOOM'

Despite George W.'s recent cheerleading effort to convince us that – sis-boom-bah! – the economy is surging and the Boom Is Back, most Americans are shaking their heads and saying, a boom for whom?

With the mass offshoring of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs, and with the Wal-Martization of wages and benefits here at home, it's no longer just the unskilled, down-and-out, abject poor who are left out by our "boom boom" economy, but also skilled, formerly middle-class workers.

There's a quiet crisis spreading in the America that Washington and Wall Street either never visit or ignore. I'm not talking about the inner cities, but the middle-class suburbs, where even hunger is a growing problem. "Food insecurity," as the jargonists label it, is up by 15% in the last four years. That's 1.5 million new people now struggling to put food on their tables. One soup kitchen serving 11 Connecticut suburbs says 80% of its clients have jobs – mostly low-wage, no-benefit, Wal-Martized jobs.

Likewise, affordable-housing needs have long been ignored by both government and commercial developers, so 94 million of our people now have "significant" housing problems. That's one-third of the population of the richest country on Earth. Worse, 40 million of us now have housing problems ranked as "severe," meaning their housing is either severely substandard, severely unaffordable, or both. Housing prices go up, while most people's incomes stay flat or go down ... and the affordable housing crisis mushrooms.

Meanwhile, the richest among us get the bulk of federal housing subsidies. Not only do multimillionaires enjoy full mortgage deductibility on their main mansions, but also on their Park Avenue condo, their Aspen getaway home, and the summer place at the beach.

If the elites continue to ignore the hard realities faced by a growing majority of us, they'll need to build mighty high fences around their own compounds.

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GOVERNMENT-SCRIPTED 'NEWS'

If you saw a news report on your local television station, then later you learned the report had actually been written by the federal government and that the "reporter" actually was hired by the government to read the government-written script – might that affect the report's credibility in your mind? And might it affect the credibility of your local TV station, as well?

Nonsense, you say, this isn't the Soviet Union, this is the Land of the Free, we don't allow government-scripted news in America!

No? Well, maybe you've seen some recent news reports touting the benefits of George W.'s new prescription-drug law for Medicare patients. Some of the segments show Bush signing the law and getting a standing ovation from those watching. One shows a pharmacist explaining the program to an elderly customer. "It sounds like a good idea," says the customer. "A very good idea," responds the pharmacist. Talk about puff pieces!

In none of these is it mentioned that Bush's law is an exorbitantly expensive program that will benefit the drug-company gougers more than senior citizens or that the Bushites lied about the price tag in order to get Congress to OK the program. That's because this news bite was produced and distributed to TV stations nationwide by Bush's own Department of Health and Human Services.

Your tax dollars at work! Lots of dollars. The agency will spend some $50 million this year on its advertising campaign to glorify the program.

These "news packages" are called VNRs – video news releases – and they've been used for some time by corporations. Our government is simply following the corporate lead, spoon-feeding "news" to TV stations, which don't bother identifying the source of these packaged stories.

What we have here is the dangerous combo of government propaganda and journalistic fraud. To help stop this, call the Committee for Concerned Journalists: 202/293-7394.