100 Million Poor People In America And 39 Other Facts About Poverty That Will Blow Your Mind

Land of the free - home of the brave! farts the national anthem of America! At least the British public have an inkling that they are just chattel to their Queen. The Americans are so duped that they believe they could become rich on the American Dream! That Americanisation is what has messed up Britain from Thatcher onwards...

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse
July 25, 2012

Every single day more Americans fall into poverty.  This should deeply alarm you no matter what political party you belong to and no matter what your personal economic philosophy is.  Right now, approximately 100 million Americans are either “poor” or “near poor”. 

For a lot of people “poverty” can be a nebulous concept, so let’s define it.  The poverty level as defined by the federal government in 2010 was $11,139 for an individual and $22,314 for a family of four.  Could you take care of a family of four on less than $2000 a month?  Millions upon millions of families are experiencing a tremendous amount of pain in this economy, and no matter what “solutions” we think are correct, the reality is that we all should have compassion on them.  Sadly, things are about to get even worse.  The next major economic downturn is rapidly approaching, and when it hits the statistics posted below are going to look even more horrendous.

When it comes to poverty, most Americans immediately want to get into debates about tax rates and wealth redistribution and things like that.

But the truth is that they are missing the main point.

The way we slice up the pie is not going to solve our problems, because the pie is constantly getting smaller.

Our economic infrastructure is being absolutely gutted, the U.S. dollar is slowly losing its status as the reserve currency of the world and we are steadily getting poorer as a nation.

Don’t be fooled by the government statistics that show a very small amount of “economic growth”.  Those figures do not account for inflation.

After accounting for inflation, our economic growth has actually been negative all the way back into the middle of the last decade.

According to numbers compiled by John Williams of shadowstats.com, our “real GDP” has continually been negative since 2005.

So that means we are getting poorer as a nation.

Meanwhile, we have been piling up astounding amounts of debt.

40 years ago the total amount of debt in the United States (government, business and consumer) was less than 2 trillion dollars.

Today it is nearly 55 trillion dollars.

So we have a massive problem.

Our economic pie is shrinking and millions of Americans have been falling out of the middle class.  Meanwhile, we have been piling up staggering amounts of debt in order to maintain our vastly inflated standard of living.  As our economic problems get even worse, those trends are going to accelerate even more.

So don’t look down on the poor.  You might be joining them a lot sooner than you might think.

The following are 40 facts about poverty in America that will blow your mind….

#1 In the United States today, somewhere around 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or “near poor”.

#2 It is being projected that when the final numbers come out later this year that the U.S. poverty rate will be the highest that it has been in almost 50 years.

#3 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

#4 Today, one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the poverty level.

#5 According to the Wall Street Journal, 49.1 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial benefits from the government.  Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#6 It is projected that about half of all American adults will spend at least some time living below the poverty line before they turn 65.

#7 Today, there are approximately 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing.  That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

#8 During 2010, 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty.  That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

#9 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of “very poor” rose in 300 out of the 360 largest metropolitan areas during 2010.

#10 Since Barack Obama became president, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by 6 million and the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by 14 million.

#11 Right now, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#12 It is projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.

#13 The poverty rate for children living in the United States is 22 percent, although when the new numbers are released in the fall that number is expected to go even higher.

#14 One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars a year.

#15 Households that are led by a single mother have a 31.6% poverty rate.

#16 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

#17 According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4 percent of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1 percent of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6 percent of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6 percent of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.

#18 Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.

#19 Child homelessness in the United States has risen by 33 percent since 2007.

#20 There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity.

#21 More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.

#22 A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7 percent) than has ever been measured before.

#23 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.

#24 A lot of younger Americans have found that they cannot make it on their own in this economy.  Today, approximately25 million American adults are living with their parents.

#25 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

#26 Amazingly, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.

#27 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.

#28 At this point, the poorest 50% of all Americans now control just 2.5% of all of the wealth in this country.

#29 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.  Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

#30 Right now, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

#31 Half of all American workers earn $505 or less per week.

#32 In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”.  By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”.

#33 Federal housing assistance outlays increased by a whopping 42 percent between 2006 and 2010.

#34 Approximately 50 million Americans do not have any health insurance at all right now.

#35 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.  Today, approximately one out of every 6Americans is on Medicaid.

#36 It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

#37 Back in 1990, the federal government accounted for 32 percent of all health care spending in America.  Today, that figure is up to 45 percent and it is projected to surpass 50 percent very shortly.

#38 Overall, the amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has risen by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.

#39 It was recently reported that 1.5 million American families live on less than two dollars a day (before counting government benefits).

#40 The unemployment rate in the U.S. has been above 8 percent for 40 months in a row, and 42 percent of all unemployed Americans have been out of work for at least half a year.

Recently, I wrote a long article about why there will never be enough jobs in the United States ever again.

That means that a whole lot of Americans are not going to be able to take care of themselves.

As our economy gets even worse, there is going to be a tremendous need for more love, compassion and generosity all over the country.

Don’t be afraid to lend a helping hand, because someday you may need one yourself.

Tags: Financial, money

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Bill Gates dumps another $10 million into researching new GM crops for agricultural takeover of Africa

Ethan A. Huff
Natural News
July 24, 2012

(NaturalNews) The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is once again busy funding efforts to promote the spread of the agricultural cancer that are genetically-modified (GM) crops, this time in the form of a $10 million grant it recently issued to a group of British scientists working on new GM crops that require no fertilizer. According to the U.K.’s BBC, the justification behind the need for such research is that the GM crops will supposedly benefit African farmers that are unable to afford fertilizer.

Researchers from the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich will specifically use the grant, which happens to be the largest single investment into GM crops ever made in that country by a private organization, to create novel varieties of corn, wheat, and rice that pull nitrogen out of the air rather than from material fertilizers. Certain crops, including beans already do this naturally, which is what led scientists to begin a process of trying to artificially splice nitrogen-pulling genes into various other crops.

“We believe if we can get nitron fixing cereals we can deliver much higher yields to farmers in Africa and allow them to grow enough food for themselves,” said professor Giles Oldroyd from JIC, lead author of the new study.

Sounds great, right? Except that the genetic alterations will plunge even more African farmers into a vicious cycle of having to purchase licenses every year from corporate giants like Monsanto, which prohibit the saving and reusing of their proprietary seeds. And if the new crops fail to deliver as promised, which has happened time and time again with GM crops in the past, the farmers that adopt the patented technology will be in worse shape than if they simply continued on with their traditional crop systems.

“If you look in America, yields haven’t increased by any significant amount and often go down,” said Pete Riley, Campaign Director at GM Freeze, an alliance of organizations that is raising awareness about the deception of GM technologies, about the overall failure of GM crop systems to produce more food than conventional and organic crop systems. “Now we’re seeing real, major problems for farmers in terms of weeds that are resistant to the herbicides which GM crops have been modified to tolerate,” added Riley.

Numerous studies have also shown that GM crop systems do not perform better than traditional crop systems, and oftentimes perform worse. A groundbreaking study recently published by the respected Rodale Institute; for instance, found that traditional, organic growing methods produce higher crop yields, and are far more sustainable, than any of the “Frankencrops” that have ever emerged from Monsanto’s research laboratories. (http://www.naturalnews.com/033925_organic_farming_crop_yields.html)

Africa’s best bet; in other words, is to stick with trying to implement more organic polyculture crop systems that utilize what the natural environment has to offer rather than what Monsanto’s marketing department claims to offer. Organic crops are still the safest, most nutritious crops available to mankind, and they come with none of the many health and environmental problems caused by GM crops. (http://www.naturalnews.com/026426_GMO_food_GMOs.html)

Sources for this article include:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18845282

Tags: Eugenics, GMO, Government Corruption, technology

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U.S. Pledges $20 Million, and Counting, for African “Clean Energy” Projects

Michael Tennant
The New American
Sunday, July 8, 2012

The federal government has done such a bang-up job of picking winners in the “clean energy” field here at home (see, e.g., Solyndra) that it is now planning to spend $20 million of taxpayers’ money on similar projects in Africa — with “hundreds of millions of dollars” to follow, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, speaking at the United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, announced the U.S.-Africa Clean Energy Finance Initiative, whose purpose, she said, is to “help clean energy projects in Africa get started.” The initiative involves three federal agencies: the State Department, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. “We plan to use an initial $20 million grant fund to leverage much larger investment flows from OPIC,” Clinton explained. “That will open the door then for hundreds of millions of dollars of OPIC financing, plus hundreds of millions of more dollars from the private sector for projects that otherwise would never get off the drawing board.”

“Clean energy,” she averred, “will bring new jobs, create new livelihoods, support education, new businesses, healthier and more productive lives, as well as reducing the emissions that contribute to climate change.”

But if clean energy is such a wonderful thing, why would these projects “otherwise … never get off the drawing board”? It’s not a matter of resources or technology, Clinton maintained, but of “obstacles and risks” that frighten off investors. “So if we can remove some of the risk and cover some of the costs of preparing a project,” she said, “we believe we can spur significant new private investments in clean energy.”

This is, of course, the same rationale that was applied to funding clean energy in the United States. The projects, so the government said, had great potential but were unable to get off the ground because of skittish private-sector investors. Thus, the government (i.e., taxpayers) had to step in and assume the risk. And what have taxpayers gotten in return for their “investments”? “At least 12 green energy firms that received about $6.5 billion from the [Obama] administration now face financial troubles, … with at least 5 companies declaring bankruptcy,” CNSNews.com reports.

It was also the rationale behind the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the purpose of financing mortgages that the private sector wouldn’t touch — and we all know how well that turned out.

The $20 million that the administration is so generously shelling out for African energy projects is just the beginning, as Clinton noted. OPIC is expected to kick in “hundreds of millions of dollars” in financing; and while OPIC is at present self-funding, should too many of the projects it backs go belly up, taxpayers will undoubtedly have to bail it out, too. Beyond that, said Clinton, the U.S. government is committed to spending “tens of billions of dollars a year over the next 20 years to extend our energy infrastructure” as part of its “commitment to the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All Initiative, which seeks to give all people everywhere access to clean energy.”

Therein lies another problem: In addition to being both unconstitutional and unwise, the aid disbursed under the U.S.-Africa Clean Energy Finance Initiative “is being handled by the famously corrupt United Nations as part of [a] costly plan to conquer global warming,” as Judicial Watch put it in a blog post criticizing the program.

Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton told CNSNews.com that this latest $20-million plan “is part of billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid that’s gone for naught in Africa. Africa is worse off after receiving decades of foreign aid than it would have been if it hadn’t.” Moreover, he observed, the whole program is “based on dubious science and ideology. It has nothing to do with the needs of the people of Africa, whose needs often get short shrift to social planning and environmental extremism.”

Social planners, naturally, are in favor of such programs. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization that has the best interests of neither Americans nor Africans at heart, has praised the U.S.-Africa Clean Energy Finance Initiative as one of “Rio+20’s unheralded achievements.”

Clean energy, whether in America, Africa, or elsewhere, may or may not be a good investment. The only way to find out is to see whether private investors are willing to risk their own money on it without a taxpayer backstop. If so, they don’t need taxpayer funding in the first place. If not, taxpayers shouldn’t be put at risk. The last thing Americans need in a time of persistent high unemployment and low economic growth is to have their hard-earned dollars confiscated for investment in boondoggles on the other side of the world.

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