The American Middle Class

The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer

The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer

The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer

Here are the statistics to prove it:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.


Source:  The Business Insider





'Anonymous' Hackers Arrested

16 Suspected 'Anonymous' Hackers Arrested in Nationwide Sweep

By Jana Winter

 FoxNews.com

Sixteen suspected members of "Anonymous" were arrested this morning in states across the country, from California to New York, in a federal raid on the notorious hacking group.

The arrests Tuesday, first reported by FoxNews.com, are part of an ongoing investigation into Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for numerous cyberattacks against a variety of websites, including Visa and Mastercard.

The Department of Justice, in announcing the arrests and more than 35 search warrants in the case, said the case stemmed from an alleged cyberattack on the website PayPal over its action against controversial group WikiLeaks, one of the inspirations for the hacker group Anonymous.

Fourteen of the arrests were identified in the same indictment out of California, while two separate criminal complaints filed out of courts in Newark, N.J., and Tampa, Fla., name the two other alleged hackers. All are believed to have been involved in carrying out nationwide coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on multiple high-profile, billion-dollar companies.

"In retribution for PayPal’s termination of WikiLeaks’ donation account, a group calling itself Anonymous coordinated and executed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal’s computer servers using an open source computer program the group makes available for free download on the Internet," the Justice Department said in a news release.

The department identified the suspects in the California indictment as Christopher Wayne Cooper, 23, aka “Anthrophobic;” Joshua John Covelli, 26, aka “Absolem” and “Toxic;” Keith Wilson Downey, 26; Mercedes Renee Haefer, 20, aka “No” and “MMMM;” Donald Husband, 29, aka “Ananon;” Vincent Charles Kershaw, 27, aka “Trivette,” “Triv” and “Reaper;” Ethan Miles, 33; James C. Murphy, 36; Drew Alan Phillips, 26, aka “Drew010;” Jeffrey Puglisi, 28, aka “Jeffer,” “Jefferp” and “Ji;” Daniel Sullivan, 22; Tracy Ann Valenzuela, 42; and Christopher Quang Vo, 22. One individual’s name has been withheld by the court.

They are charged with various counts of conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Each count of conspiracy carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Also Tuesday, Scott Matthew Arciszewski, 21, was arrested in Florida on charges of intentional damage to a protected computer for allegedly accessing without authorization the Tampa Bay InfraGard website and uploaded three files.

And Lance Moore, 21, of Las Cruces, N.M., was arrested on the New Jersey indictment, which accuses him of stealing confidential business information stored on AT&T’s servers and posting it on a file-sharing site. He is charged with one count of accessing a protected computer without authorization.

U.S. law enforcement officials also told FoxNews.com that the arrest of a 16-year-old hacker in London, who goes by the online user name Tflow, was related to the raids in the U.S.

Some of the arrests were out of the San Francisco field office, sources said. Earlier in the day, the FBI executed search warrants at the New York homes -- two in Long Island, N.Y., and one in Brooklyn, N.Y. -- of three suspected members of Anonymous, FoxNews.com reported.

More than 10 FBI agents arrived at the Baldwin, N.Y., home of Giordani Jordan with a search warrant for computers and computer-related accessories, removing at least one laptop from the premises.

The Anonymous group is a loose collection of cybersavvy activists inspired by WikiLeaks and its flamboyant head Julian Assange to fight for "Internet freedom" -- along the way defacing websites, shutting down servers, and scrawling messages across screens web-wide.

The Anonymous vigilante group recently turned its efforts to the Arizona police department, posting personal information of law officers and hacking and defacing websites in response, the group claims, to the state's controversial SB1070 immigration law.

While Anonymous is largely a politically motivated organization, splinter group LulzSec -- which dominated headlines in the spring for a similar streak of cyberattacks -- was largely in it for the thrills.

The metropolitan police in London arrested the first alleged member of the LulzSec group on June 20, a 19-year-old teen named Ryan Cleary. Subsequent sweeps through Italy and Switzerland in early July led to the arrests of 15 more people -- all between the ages of 15 and 28 years old.

The two groups are responsible for a broad spate of digital break-ins targeting governments and large corporations, including Japanese technology giant Sony, the U.S. Senate, telecommunications giant AT&T, Fox.com, and other government and private entities.

 

Spontaneous Social Media Revolution Erupts

Thousands Say 'F*&% You' Washington

by: Jonathan Benson

(NaturalNews) Users of the popular social media site Twitter know that "trending" topics, or popular topics that are being "tweeted" about often on the site, are typically accompanied by "hash tags" that help better categorize and popularize them. Tweets about natural health, for instance, may contain "#naturalhealth" in their descriptors, in order to help popularize the topic. And over the weekend, an outpouring of tweets against politicians in Washington, DC, erupted, which caused the hash tag "#f*&%youwashington" (except without the special characters, of course) to become a popular trending topic.

Sparked by Jeff Jarvis, a professor of journalism from the City University of New York, a wildfire of online outrage against things like government bailouts, rigged elections, the spiraling economy, universal healthcare, the escalating police state, loss of freedom and liberty, and even the subsidization and open support of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), began suddenly on July 23, and continues to this day



One Twitter user tweeted "[#f*&%youwashington] for giving multinational companies all of the benefits (legal, $) and leaving the citizenry all the costs (enviro, $)," while another tweeted, "[#f*&%youwashington] for allowing media bias and corporate lobbyist [sic] to decide the agenda. Where is transparency?"

Concerning GMOs, one person tweeted "[F*&%youwashington] for unleashing the horrors of #Monsanto into our lives and continuing to do so. Let's go organic, go local, get real!" Another tweeted "[#f*&%youwashington] for allowing the illegal Federal Reserve to steal our wages!", following by a shorthand version of the hash tag "#FYW."

Since the public outcry against Washington first began on Twitter, many users have added Twitter as a target of their retorts as well, citing allegations that the social media site is openly censoring their tweets from the trending topic list. And after reviewing the Twitter feed of posts for ourselves, it is clear that Twitter is actively removing the "#f*&%youwashington" hash tag from its archives, as a message stating "Older Tweet results for [#f*&%youwashington] are unavailable."

Sources for this story include:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/...



‘Pill mill’ clinics spread in ’burbs

“Pill Mills” Illegally Sell Prescription Drugs

By Andria Simmons

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A worrisome new kind of drug dealer is gaining a toehold in Georgia after fleeing crackdowns in surrounding states, setting up in bedroom communities northwest of Atlanta along I-75 to serve customers near and far.

So-called “pill mills” are illegally selling prescription drugs in Georgia. Police say it’s no coincidence that the first bust of a suspected pill mill — the kind of illicit pain clinics that have proliferated in South Florida — occurred last month in Cartersville, the seat of Bartow County. Nor that a Cherokee County house served as a distribution site for a counterfeit prescription drug operation.

The counties are along the superhighway that brings drug seekers in droves from Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Ohio to pill mills in Florida along a route that has come to be known as the “Oxy Express,” after the powerful and highly addictive prescription painkiller oxycodone. Oxycodone and its brand names OxyContin and Roxycodone are sometimes called “hillbilly heroin” because of their popularity in Appalachian states.

Georgia lawmakers have been slower than neighboring states to try to deter prescription drug abuse through means such as a statewide database to track prescriptions or tough regulations for pain clinics. As a result, recent high-profile indictments and arrests illustrate the extent to which prescription forgery rings, counterfeit prescription pushers and illicit pain clinics have sprung up in the Peach State.

● In May, 11 people were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to forge oxycodone prescriptions and trafficking in oxycodone. The alleged ringleader, Kristen Noelle Goduto, 27, of Marietta, and alleged conspirators from Acworth, Canton and Braselton manufactured prescriptions and recruited others to pass them at pharmacies across metro Atlanta. The ring obtained more than 10,000 tablets they intended to sell on the streets, according to the federal indictment.


● Federal, state and local authorities raided Atlanta Medical Group clinic in Cartersville a month ago in the first takedown of a suspected pill mill in Georgia. A few weeks later on June 29, the clinic financiers, who are from Vero Beach, Fla., were arrested on federal drug and money laundering charges. Federal agents removed close to $600,000 in cash from two homes in Florida as part of the raid.


● Cherokee County drug investigators searched a house in Woodstock in January 2010 and seized 100,000 prescription pills including the anti-anxiety drug Xanax, the erectile dysfunction drugs Viagra and Cialis and the diet drug phentermine. Many were counterfeit drugs imported from China. The resident, Robyn Phillip Henderson, 34, has pleaded guilty to charges related drug trafficking in federal court.


Combating prescription drug abuse has become a top priority for the office of Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.


“As shown by last week’s federal indictment charging the owners and staff of a pill mill in Cartersville, our drug prosecutors are bringing larger and more sophisticated cases to focus on the largest sources of abused painkillers, and we’ll continue to bring these cases until the epidemic subsides,” Yates said.


Phillip Price, who heads the Cherokee Multi-Agency Narcotics Squad, shifted two of his 10 detectives to prescription drug investigations last year after observing the uptick in those cases. When one of them, Investigator Nate Luca, began introducing himself to local pharmacies, he was startled at how much prescription forgery was going unreported. Pharmacists handed over folders of information on suspicious customers they had been collecting for months.


“Every pharmacy had a folder that was 2 inches thick,” he said.


There is little to prevent patients who are doctor-shopping or forging prescriptions from going from pharmacy to pharmacy to score drugs. Georgia lawmakers this year passed a law to create a prescription drug monitoring program, an electronic database that would track how prescriptions are dispensed, but no funding was allocated.


Rick Allen, director of the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency, said he has applied for a federal grant to fund the database, which would cost between $400,000 and $1.2 million. Even if the state gets the grant, it will probably be 2013 or later before the database is online.


Prescription medications can be more deadly than heroin, meth and cocaine when abused. Nationally, there has been a tenfold increase in prescription drug-related deaths over the past four decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Georgia, six times more people died from prescription drug overdoses in 2009 than from all other illegal drugs, accounting for 87 percent of drug-related deaths.


Among the people who suffered untimely deaths was Brandi Lynn Kanthak, 24, of Cartersville, who died Feb. 25, 2010, from an overdose of the painkiller Demerol. Unbeknownst to her parents and husband, she would crush the pills to negate the time-release formula and inject them, said her mother, Barbara Pruitt. The once-promising nursing student who worked at a medical clinic went into respiratory failure one day and never revived.


“She had so much ahead of her,” Pruitt said. “And she was so smart, and she could do anything. It’s just a sad thing.”


“Doctor-shopping” and forging prescriptions are prime ways people get their fix. Another avenue is pill mills, such as the one raided in Cartersville last month. Unlike legitimate pain clinics, they prescribe large doses of painkillers with little to no screening of patients.


Allen used to keep a count of how many pain clinics were operating in the state. The tally went from about five last year to about 50 earlier this year. But within the past few months, there have been two to three new ones opening each week.


“They are all over the place,” Allen said. “We can’t even keep up with them anymore. We quit trying.”


There are at least 10 pain clinics currently operating in Cherokee County, according to Price. Five years ago, the county didn’t have any.


Now as many as five to six calls per day come in to Mid-City Pharmacy in Canton from people asking whether it fills oxycodone prescriptions, owner and pharmacist Billy Cagle said. Many of the requests are coming from out-of-state customers and unfamiliar clinics.


“The pain clinics that we are familiar with that are local, we take care of,” Cagle said. “But you’ve got some people coming from Tennessee and from Florida, and from some of the pain clinics we are not familiar with. We turn them down.”


Pill mills are likely to keep moving into Georgia because it has no operational prescription drug monitoring database, unlike its neighbors. And new legislation in Tennessee and Florida that took effect July 1 is aimed at making it more difficult for pain clinics to operate in those states. The new laws state only doctors can own pain clinics. They require the physicians to be board-certified in pain management. And they prohibit convicted felons from ownership.


All of which are “no-brainers” to Rusty Grant, who supervises the Canton Regional Drug Enforcement Office of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. And yet, according to law enforcement officials, no state legislators have proposed similar measures in Georgia.


Grant said pain clinics with Florida owners started moving into his 28-county region in northwest Georgia more than a year ago in anticipation of the crackdown in the Sunshine State.


“They didn’t wait for July 1,” Grant said. “They went ahead and made the move to get up here as quickly as they could.”

Drug Enforcement Administration



Government Considers Ways to Rent Foreclosed Homes

How THEY Kick You When You're Down

BY NICK TIMIRAOS

The Obama administration is examining ways to pull foreclosed properties off the market and rent them to help stabilize the housing market, according to people familiar with the matter.

While the plans may not advance beyond the concept phase, they are under serious consideration by senior administration officials because rents are rising even as home prices in many hard-hit markets continue to fall due to high foreclosure levels.

Trimming the glut of unsold foreclosed homes on the market is "worth looking at," said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in testimony to Congress last week.

Nationally, home prices in May were 7.4% lower than a year earlier, but after excluding distressed sales, prices fell just 0.4%, according to CoreLogic Inc. Foreclosures and other distressed sales now account for about 30% of homes sold each month and sales from government-related entities make up about one third of that number.

"Adding more stock simply increases that overhang. If that can be avoided, it should be," says Jared Bernstein, an economist who left the White House in April and is now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank in Washington. Because rents are firming up, "this idea could have some legs," he said.

More

• Developments: How it Might Work

Renting out homes could cover the costs of holding the properties until they can be resold once markets stabilize, potentially turning a profit for mortgage titans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which handles foreclosures on loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration.

But scattered-site rental programs could require the government to become a national landlord, an area where the mortgage firms have little experience. They also pose accounting challenges that could produce big upfront losses.

One proposal winning support among some federal officials would sell thousands of foreclosed federal properties to private investors who agree to rent them.

Investors would rehab homes, run the leasing process, and contract with national property management firms to handle day-to-day tenant demands.

The government could keep a stake in the venture, modeled on loss-share transactions by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Officials have received interest from around a half-dozen private investors, according to people familiar with the matter.

HUD owned about 69,000 homes at the end of April and sold 11,000 homes in that month. Fannie and Freddie held another 218,000 at the end of March.

Analysts at Credit Suisse estimate that reducing Fannie and Freddie's foreclosed-property sales to around 30,000 each month, from the current rate of 50,000, would cut total distressed sales by one third and avoid a further 3% to 5% decline in home prices.

By flushing foreclosed properties onto markets with few traditional buyers, Fannie and Freddie are "undermining their own recovery," says John Burns, the head of a homebuilding consulting firm in Irvine, Calif., who backs the public-private rental approach.

Bank-owned properties are "concentrated in certain places where lower prices are not going to get more demand," says Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate Research at the University of California at Berkeley. Simply liquidating homes at "auction prices" will drop values for all homes by another 10% to 20%, he says, pushing more homeowners underwater. Fannie and Freddie, which were taken over by the U.S. three years ago, currently rent a few thousand homes to former owners and tenants.

But the Obama administration can't enlist Fannie and Freddie's participation in a wider rental program without the approval of the firms' regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. An FHFA spokeswoman says the agency is "open to considering initiatives that are consistent with the goals of the conservatorship."

Two years ago, investors began scooping up cheap properties at auctions in the hopes of reselling them for a profit. But with home values declining, "flipping is tough to do," says Eric Peterson, a former homebuilder and co-founder of Praxis Capital of Santa Rosa, Calif., which has launched a $10 million fund focused on renting out foreclosures.

Meanwhile, as more Americans go through foreclosure, the number of households opting for single-family rentals over the past five years has grown at about five times the pace of that for overall shelter , according to research firm Zelman & Associates.

"Do you really think a 38-year-old with two kids and two cars who was foreclosed on is really going back to an apartment? It's not going to happen," says Ivy Zelman, the firm's chief executive.

IT'S NOT DEFAULT OF OBAMA

JAIL GOP DEADBEATS FOR DEBT CRISIS

by Greg Palast

Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist gave debtors' prison a bad rap. Too bad. I'd say that locking away GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a penitentiary for deadbeats seems like a darn good idea.

Bush reads from My Pet Budget

Let's talk about how we ended up in this pickle, bucking up against the "debt ceiling." From 2001 to 2008, a Republican President took an annual surplus of $86 billion left for him by Bill Clinton and ran up the budget deficit to over half a trillion in a year ($642 billion in 2008). Altogether, George W. Bush blew up the national debt by over $3 TRILLION--then left the bills to Barack Obama.

For eight years, Bush spent like a drunk monkey. The world was the GOP's Bergdorf's and they had our credit card. If there was a shiny new war on the shelf, they just had to have it: Iraq, Afghanistan, and let's not forget the Fantasy Wars, the half a trillion dollars a year on fancy-ass weapons for a war that won't happen. (Example: the Virginia Class submarine. The V-class was designed to attack Soviet subs. There are no more Soviet subs, but Bush ordered three dozen anyway--at $1.8 billion each.)

And tax cuts? Don't get me started!

The Bush Administration acted just like Sarah Palin when she was set loose in that Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis--grabbing whatever she could carry because Sarah could put it on someone else's account.

The GOP's fattened frat boys feasted--but when the waiter arrived with the bill, the belching rich kids looked around, pointed at some poor schmuck sweeping the floor, Mr. John Q. Veteran, and said, "THAT GUY will pay."

By the way: Congressman Cantor, the guy leading the Republicans' refusal to lift the debt ceiling, voted for the V-class sub as well as Bush's bogus scavenger hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But now Cantor doesn't want to pay the bill.

Y'know, Congressman, maybe you think my parents were fools because they taught me: If you buy it, you pay for it.

Apparently, that's not the rule at Cantor's country club.

The sick assumption of this entire debt ceiling debate, as we hear from talking heads whether on Fox or PBS, is that this is our deficit; as if you and I got a tax break or Amazon delivered that submarine to our door.

And the flapping lips on TV also assume that there must be some kind of "compromise" in which the spending spree by the rich must be paid for by the working class. The Washington elite agree we must pay for tax holidays for hedge funds by closing health clinics.

Of course, the GOP is right abut one thing. President Tiger Wuss will do just that: make the poorest among us pay the debts of the richest. Here we have a bunch of economic terrorists--"Agree to all our demands or the economy gets it!"--and Obama's idea of leadership is to offer the berserkers three-quarters of what they demand.

Thank the Lord and Michele Bachmann that 75% isn't enough for these greedsters.


Solution: Don't pay the banksters

There's another wrong assumption controlling this debate over debt, that the banks, the debt holders, must be paid. When the bankers and the Chinese and the Saudis lent Bush three trillion dollars for his wild-ass buying party, they were betting, like any investor, on the good faith of the borrower to pay it back.

So, let Hu Jintao and King Abdullah stick a collection agency on Cantor and the other Republican shirkers. Repossess their limousines or send The Boys around to remind Cantor what happens when you don't pay what you owe.

The President should say to Hu, the Sheik and Goldman-Sachs:
"I have identified $3 trillion in Treasury notes issued between 2001 and 2008 which were lent to fund President Bush's expenditures. Unfortunately, those who borrowed your money don't want to pay it back. You made a bad investment -- but that's how the free market works. Therefore, I am suspending payments on these Treasury notes until we can round up the deadbeats and make them live up to their commitments.

As President, I have the Constitutional duty to pay the bills of the Veterans Administration, the Social Security fund and other vital services already voted and appropriated by Congress. Military pay before banker pay. Get used to it."

Will the bankers have heart attacks? I hope so. (Maybe if bankers are ill, the GOP will vote for universal health care.) Will China refuse to buy more US debt? Not a chance: The Chinese cannot afford a devaluation of the $2-3 trillion in US Treasury notes they have in their pokey, a devaluation which would surely follow their abandoning the US treasuries.

Note: Argentina defaulted and thrived. We can tango too. But that's all detail for me to argue out with other economists in some effete what-if seminar.

Ultimately, "default" is not the issue. "Default," dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in that age-old battle between Them and Us. They spent the money and now they want Us to pay.

Default lies with the Republican spendthrifts, Mr. President. So I suggest you issue an executive order creating a new wing at Guantanamo: a debtors' prison for trillion-dollar deadbeats.
(Don't you think Eric Cantor would look good in orange?)

***

Greg Palast, a forensic economist, is a Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

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Ron Paul: Bring the Troops Home & Balance the Budget