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1 out of 4 Americans employed make less than $10 per hour.

The US has one of the highest number of employees working in low wage jobs of high paying industrialized nations. 1 out of 4 Americans employed work in jobs that pay less than $10 per hour.

• Posted by mybudget360 in average income, economy, government, income, middle class, wall street

Low wage jobs have been a big part of the so-called recovery.  What they also signify is a more troublesome trend that continues to eat away at the middle class in this country.  I’ve noted that the per capita average income for Americans is $25,000 and many seem to be shocked when they hear how low this figure is.  A recent presentation only reinforces this figure by discussing the number of working Americans in low wage fields.  The problem with having such a large portion of our population in low wage work is that as the cost of living goes up many of these people have a harder time providing for necessities like food, education, and also healthcare.  Surprising or not, the nation has been seeing a massive divide between the working class and those at the top.  The low wage employment growth signifies a continuation of this trend.

Number of Americans in low wage jobs
An interesting chart below was presented by economist Tim Taylor.  The chart is illuminating:

Source:  Conversable Economist  
Taking a look at some of the industrialized nations with higher incomes in the world and the US has one of the largest numbers of those employed working in low wage fields.  It is helpful to define what low wage work is; low wage work is employment positions that pay less than $10 an hour.  It is an interesting trend that has continued for well over three decades.  A large portion of Americans are working in lower wage work (assuming they have work).  The $25,000 per capita average of income doesn’t seem so farfetched when one out of four employed Americans find their source of employment to be in the low wage segment of the economy.
An interesting observation is made by Tim Taylor:

“The issue here can be summed up with this question: If someone in the U.S. economy is a law-abiding citizen who works full-time for a period of years, can they earn a level of wages that let them afford a slice of middle-class standard of living? If you are earning $10/hour and working 2,000 hours per year, your annual earnings of $20,000 would put you below the poverty line of $22,891 for a single parent with three children.”

This fact also highlights the large silent numbers that we see with Americans on food stamps.  Some are part of the working poor.  Over 46,000,000 Americans are receiving some form of food assistance today:

  

Source:  Zero Hedge
You can see how quickly things went up from 25 million or so before the recession hit to 46 million today.  Is this really a recovery?  Not if we define a recovery as paving the road to a middle class lifestyle for many Americans.  Much of this path has been paved over even in the last couple of decades.  The 2000s appeared on the surface to usher in prosperity for Americans but in reality, wages were stagnant and all the outward signs of spending came from diving deep into unsustainable levels of debt.  Now that we are dealing with the aftermath of deleveraging people are realizing a growing divide in our country that is becoming more prominent and hard to ignore.
The growing divide
Some parts of the country have done exceptionally well in the last few decades:

Most of the gains have come to the top one and five percent of the nation.  While those in the middle fifth of income saw income rise by 25 percent since the 1970s those in the top 1 percent have seen a stunning 281 percent average jump.  Those on the low income segment have done much worse seeing only a 16 percent rise in income.
These are issues we need to explore since it appears the middle class is disappearing in our country.  The stock market may be up over 100 percent since the low days of 2009 but most Americans have very little invested so it really hasn’t changed their lives:

Most Americans, especially the young have little invested in anything.  Part of this comes from the massive number working in low wage fields.  When examining employment trends we find that some of the top number of jobs for the future will come from lower wage sectors.  How much as a nation do we value having a strong and vibrant middle class?  You can’t call it a middle class when a large portion of employees are at the bottom.

Tension Mounts Over Anahiem Police Shooting

By NBCLosAngeles.com and wire reports

ANAHEIM, California -- Protesters broke the windows of least a half-dozen storefronts in Anaheim on Tuesday resulting in 24 people being arrested and leaving six injured in the second major clash between police and demonstrators since an officer shot dead an apparently unarmed man.

Mayor Tom Tait had called on Monday for a state and federal review of the shooting of the man, a suspected gang member.

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More than 600 demonstrators gathered at City Hall on Tuesday, where officials were holding a regular meeting, police said.

NBCLosAngeles.com reported that crowds converged on the building at around 4 p.m. (7 p.m. ET) to urge council members to investigate a series of recent officer-involved shootings and reform the city's police force, which residents have accused of racial profiling.

Officials say there have been eight officer-involved shootings in the city this year.

The council chamber reached capacity and police in riot gear blocked access to the meeting, according to NBCLosAngeles.com.

Jonathan Gibby / Getty Images

Protesters clash with police during a demonstration at Anaheim City Hall on Tuesday.

Some protesters threw patio chairs through the windows of a Starbucks, a witness told Reuters. No one in the coffee shop was injured, said Anaheim police spokesman Sergeant Bob Dunn.
In the same block-long strip mall, at least five other businesses also had windows smashed, a witness said.
Afterward, officers toting shotguns stood guard in front of the storefronts.

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Dozens of officers wielding night sticks faced off against the demonstrators, who at one point threw water bottles and rocks toward the line.
More photos: Protests in Anaheim
At least one person was transported to the hospital after being shot in the head with a pepperball, Dunn told NBCLosAngeles.com. No officers were injured.

Aerial footage showed several fires near the scene of the protest -- one in a trash bin, another near a bus bench.

The tensions flared after police shot and killed a man on Saturday afternoon.

Alex Gallardo / Reuters

A protester is arrested during a demonstration in Anaheim, Calif., on Tuesday.

Two officers had tried to approach three men in an alley who fled, Dunn said earlier this week. The officers followed on foot and one caught up to one suspect, police said.
The officer shot the man, who police said they later identified as Manuel Diaz, a known gang member. Diaz was not found to have been carrying a gun, police said.
'Transparency is essential'Police fired pepper pellets at angry residents near the scene of the shooting on Saturday.
Late on Sunday Anaheim officers tried to stop a car and killed a man who police said fled and opened fire on them during a foot chase.
He was the fifth person to die in an officer-involved shooting in Anaheim this year.

Tait called for a state and federal probe of the fatal shootings during a news conference Sunday, during which some 70 protesters stormed the lobby.

"Transparency is essential," Tait said Sunday. "The investigation will seek the truth. And whatever the truth is, we will own it."

At least four agencies are involved in or are expected to join the investigation, including the U.S. Attorney's office, the State Attorney General, the Anaheim Police Department's Officer of Internal Affairs and -- as is usual for officer-involved shootings -- the Orange County District Attorney's Office.

Anaheim was among six California cities with a population over 100,000 that saw the biggest spikes in violent crime in 2011, according to an analysis of FBI crime data released last month.

Fresno Ca the poorest county in Cali

California's poorest county: Fresno

• Poverty rate: 26.8%
• Poverty rate of residents under 18: 38.2%
• Median household income: $44,869

The poorest county in the Golden State isn't so sunny. While Fresno's poverty rate is relatively low compared with those of some of the other counties on our list, the county has a large number of people living below the poverty line -- 245,330 to be exact. Only two counties on our list have more residents living in poverty.
to read the full story click here

25 Signs The Collapse Of America Is Speeding Up As Society Rots From The Inside Out

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse
Monday, July 9, 2012
The problems that America is experiencing right now are not just confined to the field of economics.  The truth is that there are signs of deep decay wherever we look, and without question the United States is rotting from the inside out in thousands of different ways.  For a long time our debt-fueled prosperity has masked much of the social decay that has been festering underneath the surface, but now it is becoming increasingly apparent that the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is beginning to disappear.  For many Americans, it is easy to point a finger at a particular group or political party and blame them for all of our problems, but the reality of the matter is that our societal decay cuts across all income levels, all political affiliations and all regions of the country.  We are being destroyed from within, and this decay can be seen on the streets of the most dilapidated sections of major U.S. cities and it can also be seen in the halls of power in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street.  It is undeniable that something has fundamentally changed.  The American people do not seem to possess the same level of character that they once had.  So where do we go from here?
The following are 25 signs the collapse of America is speeding up as society rots from the inside out….
1. Homicides in Chicago are 38 percent ahead of where they were last year at this time.  In fact, the Daily says that “homicide victims in the Windy City outnumber U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year”.  Things are taking a turn for the worse in other major U.S. cities as well.  Just check out the carnage that happened in New York City this past Friday night….

Across barely eight hours, at least seven New Yorkers were murdered and another 21 shot, stabbed or slashed across the city — with only three suspects arrested before the blood stopped flowing

2. Speaking of New York City, a teacher there recently posted the following on her Facebook page….

“Crupi and I survived a shootout today…Thank God we are ok…To all the wanna be gangstas of Staten Island (who say they are from Brooklyn but really aren’t), be grateful you have what you have and stop trying to live a lifestyle you will never understand.”

About a week later, her husband discovered her dead in a pool of her own blood in their apartment.  She had been stabbed numerous times.
3. Reporter James Carlini recently discussed the growing problems that roaming gangs of youths are causing along the Magnificent Mile in Chicago….

There is an increase in problems at night with small gangs roaming around looking for the right prey.
Don’t bother looking for any cops, they are far and few between. Little perfume-size pepper spray canisters may be in vogue, politically correct and fit in a purse, but they are not practical. Forget about pepper spray, you’d need a gallon jug of it to stop five or six assailants.
Do you now need a .357 Magnum to walk down the Mag Mile? Maybe a compact .45 or a high-capacity 9MM “just to be on the safe side” is more what you should have. Even the police are telling each other that they better “carry large caliber” off-duty and not be caught unarmed.

4. Down in Florida, a lifeguard named Tomas Lopez was recently fired for attempting to saving a man that was drowning “outside his patrol zone“….

Lopez, 21, was hired by Jeff Ellis Management to monitor a portion of a public beach in Hallandale Beach, Fla. The company allegedly gave Lopez strict instructions to stay inside his patrol zone, ABC News reports.
But when Lopez spotted a man in distress outside his patrol zone Monday afternoon, he ignored those instructions and leapt into action.
By the time lifeguard Tomas Lopez got to the man, other bystanders had already pulled him to shore, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Lopez stayed with the man until paramedics arrived.
That valiant act was Lopez’s last as a lifeguard, as his employer fired him for straying 1,500 feet outside his patrol zone.

5. Authorities say that thieves are stealing identities and filing fraudulent tax returns on a scale never seen before….

With nothing more than ledgers of stolen identity information — Social Security numbers and their corresponding names and birth dates — criminals have electronically filed thousands of false tax returns with made-up incomes and withholding information and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful refunds, law enforcement officials say.
The criminals, some of them former drug dealers, outwit the Internal Revenue Service by filing a return before the legitimate taxpayer files. Then the criminals receive the refund, sometimes by check but more often though a convenient but hard-to-trace prepaid debit card.

In all, the IRS says that there were approximately 940,000 fake tax returns filed for 2010.
6. U.S. Secret Service agents are supposed to be “the best of the best” and are charged with guarding our top public officials.  But even they have exhibited a consistent pattern of moral decay for many years according to one recent report….

Secret Service agents and officers have been accused of leaking sensitive information, publishing porn, sexual assaults, illegal wiretaps, embezzlement and drunkenness on duty, according to a 229-page log released yesterday.
After a prostitution scandal in April, when agents consorted with hookers while preparing for President Obama’s arrival in Colombia, Service Director Mark Sullivan apologized. But he said it was an isolated case, not a “systemic issue.”
However, the log, which the Service Service released yesterday after news organizations requested it under the Freedom of Information Act, shows a pattern of misdeeds dating back to 2003.

7. These days thieves will steal just about anything that is not bolted down and that they can sell for money.  For example, three thieves recently broke into a Chicago beauty supply store and took off with hair extensions that were worth a total of $230,000.
8. Up in Minnesota, thieves are stealing Bronze Stars from hundreds of military graves, and down in Fresno, California thieves have actually been stealing metal crosses from churches.
9. According to one shocking new report, one out of every 10 Wall Street employees is a “clinical psychopath”.  That is a rate about 10 times higher than the general population.
10. Even many police are going crazy these days.  Over in Seattle, police zapped a pregnant woman with a taser three times just because she refused to sign a ticket.
11. Down in California, one man recently sliced off the ear of another man with a knife over an unpaid debt.
12. These days we are seeing senseless crimes being committed even in small towns in the heartland of America.  Just check out what happened in Helena, Montana about a week ago….

Helena Police are working to identify two young men after what they call a random act of violence over the weekend. Helena Police found a 40-year-old homeless man badly beaten in an alley behind the Gold Bar around 2 a.m. Sunday morning.
Helena Police Detective Sergeant Richard Drysdale states,” The video shows two white males surrounding the victim as he was entering the walkway yelling at him and then knocking him down to the ground where they beat and kicked him until he was unconscious.”

You can find a video report about this incident right here.
13. One town in Connecticut was forced to shut down a beautiful new public fountain because too many people were using it as a toilet.
14. According to one very shocking study, the percentage of U.S. households that contain a married couple with children has fallen from 44.3% in 1960 to 20.2% today.
15. A huge brawl between parents erupted during one recent preschool graduation ceremony down in the Los Angeles area.
16. We continue to see “mob robberies” at retail establishments all over the nation.  During one recent mob robbery in Detroit, thugs beat the living daylights out of one very unfortunate stock clerk.
17. Speaking of Detroit, nobody is immune to the spreading violence in that city.  For example, just check out what happened recently to a 22-year-old pregnant woman….

A 22-year-old pregnant woman survived after being bound, driven to Detroit, set on fire and shot early Saturday morning.
The woman, who was nine-months pregnant, had returned from a movie with her boyfriend and dropped him off at his house in Warren when she was approached from behind, Warren police Sgt. Dave Geffert said.
The woman’s hands, feet and eyes were bound with duct tape. She was then forced into her car and driven to an unknown place in Detroit where she was doused with lighter fluid, set on fire and shot once in the upper back, he said.

18. Many families returned to their homes following the recent wildfires in Colorado only to discover that their houses had been robbed and looted.
19. One 33-year-old art teacher in Arizona was not satisfied with only having sex with one of her students.  In fact, police have charged her with having sex with four of her male students.
20. Down in Florida, one man has actually been charged with biting the lips off of a kitten.
21. Over in Waco, Texas a 22-year-old man recently strangled and ate the family dog while he was high on drugs.
22. Of course most of us have heard of the recent outbreak of “zombie attacks” around the nation where criminals have actually been biting their victims and chewing their flesh.  The following is another example of this phenomenon from a recent case in central New York….

A synthetic drug known as “bath salts” is blamed for some bizarre behavior in central New York.
The Utica Observer-Dispatch reports that police officers were called to Stanley’s Bar Saturday night to check out a woman described as emotionally disturbed. When an officer approached her, she lunged at him and tried to bite his face. Police say she screamed that she wanted to “kill someone and eat them.”
The woman was taken to St. Luke’s Memorial Hospital for a mental health evaluation.

Another very disturbing “zombie incident” took place down in Georgia recently….

Karl Laventure, 21, was believed to be high on bath salts when he tried to attack the officers in Lilburn, Georgia.

And after they had managed to subdue him he began threatening to eat them.
Laventure appeared out of some woods and was seen running naked around a golf range near Atlanta, swinging a club around his head and screaming.

Police said that it took several officers to subdue the man who had ‘super-human strength’.

23. All over America, people seem to be losing their minds.  Just check out what one man in New Jersey did recently when police arrived at his home….

Officers got a call that morning when a witness said Carter was threatening to harm himself with a knife. Two cops responded, kicked in the door and found Carter in the corner, the station reported.
Carter allegedly ignored officers’ orders to put down the knife, and instead began stabbing himself in the abdomen, neck and legs.
An attempt to pepper spray the bleeding man had no effect, the Associated Press reported.
That’s when Carter — disemboweled but responsive — reportedly threw bits of his skin and intestines at the officers.

24. One woman in the St. Louis area was recently caught cooking meth in her purse inside a Wal-Mart store.
25. Anyone that believes that slavery has been abolished in America does not know what they are talking about.  Every single night sex slaves are being horribly abused all over the United States.  The following is from a recent Daily Mail article….

The FBI has rescued 79 teens held against their will and forced into prostitution from hotels, truck stops and stores during a three-day swoop on sex-trafficking rings across the country.
The sex slaves were aged between 13 and 17, although one said she had been involved in prostitution since she was just 11, authorities said.
During the sting operations across 57 U.S. cities – including Atlanta, Sacramento and Toledo, Ohio – 104 alleged pimps were arrested.

It is estimated that “100,000 children are victims of prostitution and trafficking each year” in the United States.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Sadly, there are dozens and dozens more examples like these.  If you want to see more examples of how the collapse of America is speeding up, check out these articles that I recently published….
“70 Reasons To Mourn For America”
“20 Signs That Society Is Breaking Down And That America Has Been Overrun By Psychos”
The frightening thing is that this breakdown of our society is happening at the same time that our economy is completely falling to pieces.
This economic decline that we are experiencing is shredding the middle class and it is plunging millions of Americans into very desperate circumstances.  The following is a brief excerpt from a recent Rolling Stone article….

Every night around nine, Janis Adkins falls asleep in the back of her Toyota Sienna van in a church parking lot at the edge of Santa Barbara, California. On the van’s roof is a black Yakima SpaceBooster, full of previous-life belongings like a snorkel and fins and camping gear. Adkins, who is 56 years old, parks the van at the lot’s remotest corner, aligning its side with a row of dense, shading avocado trees. The trees provide privacy, but they are also useful because she can pick their fallen fruit, and she doesn’t always­ have enough to eat. Despite a continuous, two-year job search, she remains without dependable work. She says she doesn’t need to eat much – if she gets a decent hot meal in the morning, she can get by for the rest of the day on a piece of fruit or bulk-purchased almonds – but food stamps supply only a fraction of her nutritional needs, so foraging opportunities are welcome.
Prior to the Great Recession, Adkins owned and ran a successful plant nursery in Moab, Utah. At its peak, it was grossing $300,000 a year. She had never before been unemployed – she’d worked for 40 years, through three major recessions.

You can read the rest of the article right here.
What would you do if you were in a similar situation?
Sadly, many more Americans will end up just like her.  As I wrote about the other day, the U.S. economy is not going to be able to produce enough jobs for everyone anymore.  In fact, the overall employment picture is going to keep getting worse for working Americans.
Things have gotten so bad that even many very highly educated scientists cannot find jobs in America right now.  Almost everybody is hurting, and we haven’t even gotten to the next wave of the economic collapse yet.
The next time that there is a major spike in the unemployment rate, millions of Americans will lose all hope and will become very desperate.
And desperate people do desperate things.
The rot and decay that we are witnessing right now is just the beginning.
Things are going to get a lot worse.
So let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.

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60 Days In prison & $12k Fine For Home Bible Sudy

60 Days In Prison And A $12,180 Fine For Hosting A Home Bible Study In Arizona

Michael Snyder
The American Dream
Monday, July 9, 2012
The war on home Bible studies and house churches is heating up again.  Down in Phoenix, Arizona a man has been sentenced to 60 days in prison and has been fined $12,180 for hosting a Bible study in his home.  Since 2005, Michael Salman and his wife have been hosting gatherings of about 15 or 20 people where they share food, fellowship and discuss the Bible.  Unfortunately, that kind of thing is against the law in Phoenix, Arizona apparently.  At one point, nearly a dozen armed police officers raided their home and “evidence” of their “crimes” was gathered.  Michael Salman was found guilty of 67 “code violations”, and now he is going to be ripped away from his family and put in prison for two months.  In addition, the assistant city prosecutor is asking the court to “revoke his probation and convert it into a 2 1/2 year jail sentence since he continues to hold worship gatherings on his property despite court orders.”  This kind of case has the potential to have a huge “chilling effect” on home gatherings of all kinds all over the United States.
You may be thinking that you are glad that this man is being put in prison because you aren’t a Christian and you don’t have any sympathy for Christians.
Well, what if you wanted to hold small gatherings in your home to discuss the U.S. Constitution?
Or what if you wanted to hold small gatherings in your home to play cards or watch football?
The U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”, and when the constitutional rights of one person are under attack, it is an attack on all of us.
In America today, we actually do not own our homes and our properties.  Instead, we are only allowed to use them in very, very narrowly-defined ways, and if we “rebel” against those rules the control freaks that run things will smack us hard.
A while back I wrote about how control freak bureaucrats all over the country are using “code violations” to force preppers back on to the grid.  In some cases, they are even using “code violations” to force preppers completely off of their properties.
They want to run our lives, and if we do not live within the very narrow constraints that they define for us then they will send armed men to raid our homes.
So how did Michael Salman’s problems start?
You can probably guess.
His “neighbors” complained about noise and “traffic congestion“.
So that is how city officials got involved.  We have become a nation of informers and tattlers, and this is another perfect example of that.
Michael Salman did have a big cross and a big sign outside his home, and in this situation that was rather foolish.  Perhaps if he had kept a lower profile things would have been different.  But it still does not excuse what authorities in Phoenix are doing to him.
People should be able to have small gatherings of friends and family in their own homes.  If we can’t do that, what do we have left?
And these days, just about everything is illegal in America, so if you want to sick the authorities on your neighbors it is quite easy to do.
What is this nation turning into?
The implications of this story are staggering.
Over the past couple of decades, the number of “house churches” in the United States has absolutely exploded as an increasing number of Americans reject the big, institutional churches for one reason or another.
Now we are seeing a backlash against the home church movement.
Are we going to start to see authorities systematically coming after home Bible studies and house churches all over America?
Sadly, we have already seen quite a few examples of this. The following is one example from California….

A Christian couple from Orange County, Calif., were fined earlier this month for holding Bible studies and for what city officials called “a regular gathering of more than three people” in their homes. They have now been told they face a $500 fine if they continue to hold their home Bible study gatherings.

Fortunately, authorities in that case have backed off at least for now after immense public pressure.
But this is just the beginning.  Bible-believing Christians are now considered to be “outside the mainstream” and are being attacked in unprecedented ways.
For example, the head of Personhood USA (Keith Mason) had his home brutally vandalized after he was featured in a recent Newsweek article.  When that article was posted on the website of The Daily Beast, someone left a comment that contained his home address.  Unfortunately, some very sick individuals decided to “pay a visit” to the home and hurled a boulder that destroyed the glass in his front door.  In addition, they took red spray paint and painted cuss words and red coat hangers on his house and on his sidewalk.
The following is how this attack was described in a recent Newsweek article….

Mason says he was awake at the time of the attack. “I was in the basement, catching a movie and having a beer, to just chill,” Mason says. “I heard a loud noise and thought one of our kids had fallen down the stairs.” Mason says he ran upstairs from the basement, then “ran through a bunch of glass” and “saw red.” He describes the scene as “surreal—I didn’t know if it was blood on the glass or what. It turned out to be spray paint. There was red paint all over the side of our house. They spray-painted coat-hangers all over my sidewalk and door. We called 911. The police were there within three minutes.”

The family has moved from the home and they say that they have no plans to return.
This is what America is turning into.
Hate and anger are rising to unprecedented levels and it seems like psychopaths are running around everywhere.
I truly fear for the future of this nation.

Another Example Of How We Have Went From Capitalism To Criminalism

CEO gets cool $44M severance package for one day of work

12 hrs ago

How much severance would you expect after one day on the job? Not a lot, right? Well, the now ex-CEO of Duke Energy Corp., Bill Johnson, is getting up to a cool $44.4 million for his one day at the helm. Johnson had previously been CEO of another energy company that merged with Duke and signed a contract to be Duke's chief officer when the merger took effect. That was July 2. Suddenly, on July 3, he resigned (though rumors speculate it was more of a firing). Either way, Johnson stands to collect $7.4 million in severance, a $1.4 million bonus and some hefty stock awards to round out the rest. A quick look at the calculator shows that's an hourly rate of $5.5 million. Not bad for a day's work.