The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and “free trade” that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the “global economy” would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

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.

Giant Sucking Sound

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new “global” labor pool.

What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are “less attractive” than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.

So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.

What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of “chronically unemployed” is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.

Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.

But you can’t raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald’s or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.

The truth is that the middle class in America is dying — and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

The recession killed off 7.9 million jobs. It’s increasingly likely that many will never come back.

The government jobs report issued Friday shows that businesses have slowed their pace of hiring to a relative trickle.

“The job losses during the Great Recession were so off the chart, that even though we’ve gained about 600,000 private sector jobs back, we’ve got nearly 8 million jobs to go,” said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute.

Excluding temporary Census workers, the economy has added fewer than 100,000 jobs a month this year — a much faster and stronger jobs recovery than occurred following the last two recessions in 2001 and 1991.

But even if that pace of hiring were to double immediately, it would take until 2013 to recapture the lost jobs. And the labor market very likely doesn’t have years before it gets hit with the shock of the inevitable next economic downturn.

“It’s virtually certain that the next recession will come before the job market has healed from the last recession,” said Achuthan. (Read ‘Stimulus: The big bang is over’)

More frequent recessions: Despite signs of slowing economic growth, Achuthan is not predicting that the U.S. economy is about to fall into another downturn later this year.

But a combination of a slower growth and greater volatility is a prescription for as many as three recessions over the upcoming decade, he said.

“We’ve entered a era where the United States will see more frequent recessions than anyone is used to,” Achuthan said.

One of the big problems is that many of workers who have lost jobs were in industries that are not likely to recover their former strength.

“We’ve got the wrong people in the wrong place with the wrong skills,” said John Silvia, chief economist with Wells Fargo Securities. He said construction workers in California or Florida and auto workers in Michigan will have to relocate and retrain to find new jobs.

“As many as half the people who lost their jobs will have to find something else to do,” said Silvia.

Home building lost nearly 1 million jobs since the start of 2008, while the auto industry shed 300,000 manufacturing jobs due to plant closings. The finance and real estate sectors lost more than 500,000 jobs.

“Those are the areas with the biggest bubbles, and so it’s not a surprise that those are the areas with some of the biggest job losses,” said Scot Melland, CEO of Dice Holdings, a provider of specialized career web sites. “Many of the jobs we lost are never coming back.”

More new workers: And recapturing the lost jobs fixes only part of the problem.

The nation’s working-age population grows by about 150,000 people a month. So the hole is deeper than it looks.

It would take the creation of 10.6 million jobs immediately for the same percentage of the population to be working as was the case three years ago.

Of course, it will take time to create jobs. If it takes three years, more than 3.5 million additional jobs will be needed because of continued population growth.

The unemployment rate is currently 9.5%. A return to the 4.4% rate it was the summer before the recession started in 2007 is out of reach.

In fact, the Federal Reserve, in its latest forecast, predicts that unemployment will stay around 7% or above through 2012, and in the 5% to 5.3% range in the long-run.

Rich and Poor

Macro economic data suggest the great recession is over. But the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing, thanks, in large part, to a jobless recovery. Wall Street Cheat Sheet’s Damien Hoffman says the growing underclass now accounts for about 10% of the U.S. population.

In this clip, he and his brother Derek, who jointly run the Wall Street Cheat Sheet website, point to several signs America is turning into a two-class society:

• -The foreclosure problem. 2.8 million homes were foreclosed in 2009.  RealyTrac expects that number to increase to 3-3.5 million in 2010.  Damien Hoffman thinks it could be even higher if “strategic foreclosures” become a more accepted practice.
• - Unemployment. The official rate is 9.9% but the wider measure of under employed and those who have given up on their job search is more like 17%.   That’s more than 24 million Americans out of work.
• - Record numbers using food stamps. The Agriculture Department said a record 40 million Americans, or 1 in 8 Americans, may not be able to eat without government assistance.  “This is the ultimate sign of an under class,”  the Hoffman Brothers say.
• - Take a look at Dollar Tree Stores. The discounter’s stock is near an all-time high while revenues are up 12.5% this year.  In other words, more Americans are chasing cheaper goods.

Laurie Kellman, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Illinois firm agreed to pay a $1.25 million settlement for importing and selling Thomas & Friends children’s toys that contained lead levels above legal limits and risked sickening children.

In agreeing to the penalty settlement, RC2 Corp. denied that it knowingly violated federal law as alleged by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency said in a statement Monday evening.

The commission, which provisionally accepted the settlement, charged that RC2 Corp. of Oak Brook, Ill., and one of its subsidiaries, Learning Curve Brands Inc., knowingly imported and sold Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway toys that had “paints or other surface coatings” containing lead levels above .06 percent by weight. The toys were imported from China.

That level violated a 1978 lead paint ban on toys.

“This failure created a risk of lead poisoning and adverse health effects to children,” the commission said in a statement.

From May through September 2007, RC2 reported that more than two dozen styles of vehicles, buildings and other train set components were found to contain lead levels that violated the 1978 ban.

That amounted to some 1.7 million units sold that were later recalled between June and September of that year, according to the CPSC.

The recalls got Congress’ attention.

In 2008, lawmakers passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which lowered the legal lead levels of toys to .0009 percent by weight and took effect on Aug. 14.

RC2 Corp. sells toys through more than 25,000 retail outlets primarily in North America, Europe and Asia, according to its Web site. It is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ:RCRC). Its infant, toddler and preschool products are marketed under its Learning Curve brands, including Lamaze, The First Years and licensed properties such as Thomas & Friends, Bob the Builder and Winnie the Pooh.

RC2 Corp.: http://www.rc2.com/

Consumer Product Safety Commission: http://www.cpsc.gov/

By Rick Newman

Nine months after getting laid off, Catherine Goerz once again became part of the rush-hour commute–in a way she’d never anticipated.

To pick up extra cash, Goerz took a temporary job handing out fliers touting the benefits of public transportation in the San Francisco subway system. Occasionally she’d bump into people she knew from her former job as a creative producer for a Bay Area communications company. “They’re in their corporate clothes,” she recalls, “and I’m in this silly T-shirt and hat. ‘Cathy, is that you?’ they’d ask. ‘What are you doing here?’ Ugh.”

The Great Recession–which is technically over, economists insist–may be morphing into a broader epoch: the Great Humbling. Millions of Americans who felt prosperous just a few years ago are now coping with long-term unemployment, sharp cutbacks in living standards, foreclosure, bankruptcy, and a deep sense of failure. That could persist for years. “This is not like earlier recessions, where things fell, then they bounced back to where they used to be,” says Dennis Jacobe, chief economist for the Gallup polling organization. “We haven’t seen this before. It’s the only time this has happened since the Great Depression.”

[See how to tell if you're saving enough.]

For many disenfranchised workers, the “new normal” is demoralizing. But some have found fresh career paths, clarified their priorities, and discovered that they’re more resourceful than they once thought. After absorbing the initial shock of being laid off, 37-year-old Goerz decided it was the chance to pursue a long-time goal: Filming a documentary. She traveled cross-country with friends and produced a short film called RE:Invention, about creative ways people were toughing out the recession. After a screening at a local film festival, she won a small grant that helped her fund a longer version, which she hopes to finalize soon.

The grant covered only a portion of the production costs, however, with nothing left for living expenses. So Goerz survives on monthly unemployment insurance payments, supplemented by odd jobs and freelance projects. It adds up to just 25 percent of what she earned when employed full time. That has required severe cutbacks but also triggered new discoveries. “My quality of life has not changed at all,” she says. “I think it’s improved because I’m exploring what I want to do. When I see postings for full-time jobs, something inside me says, ‘No, don’t do it.’ I want to make sure I am making the right choice.”

[What have you learned to live without? Tell us: flowchart@usnews.com.]

Goerz may be at the vanguard of a historic shift in American attitudes. Researchers studying long-term trends among American consumers believe that a 20-year spending binge, fueled by easy credit, is over for good. “Smaller things now make the bigger statement,” according to a new report on consumer trends by the Futures Co., a market-research firm. “The infatuation with having it all–and having it all at once–will give way to putting priority only on what’s most important.”

The first step is learning to be comfortable without the customary trappings of middle-class life. Many laid-off workers resist abrupt cutbacks at first, to preserve a sense of normalcy. Goerz did the opposite. She received just two weeks’ severance when she lost her job in December 2008, and her income fell from about $8,000 per month to $1,900. She put $5,000 in a savings account for emergencies and used the rest of her savings to buy a certificate of deposit, so she couldn’t withdraw the money if she wanted to. That meant she’d have to live on no more than what came in every month.

Unnecessary spending on jewelry, clothes, makeup, handbags, movie rentals, music downloads, vacations, taxi rides, and most conveniences stopped. She’d love to buy a new MacBook to help with networking, building a personal website, and promoting her film, but instead she nurses a wheezy old Dell laptop, using programming tricks learned from friends to keep it kicking. When Goerz met a potential client about some freelance work recently, she freshened her outfit with a $10 designer blouse from a consignment shop. Instead of going to a salon for highlights, she squeezes lemon juice into a spray bottle, dilutes it with water, and squirts that onto her hair–a $1 trick she learned as a teenage lifeguard.

[See 7 ways to survive the jobless recovery.]

Food had been a big part of Goerz’s budget, so instead of spending $10 on lunch every day and going out to dinner four nights a week, she’s cut back to two homemade meals per day–a late breakfast and an early dinner. Her diet is more healthful now, and there are other benefits: “I can wear clothes from three years ago, when I was on this huge fitness kick. Suddenly, I have a whole new wardrobe.”

Goerz still goes out with friends once or twice a month, but always economizes: “My strategy for going out is to eat only half of what I order and bring the other half home. Then I turn that into two more meals, since I keep fluffing it up with more rice or something else.” Goerz laughs as she says this, aware of her extreme thriftiness. “I stretch everything,” she chortles.

A close circle of friends helps compensate for the spartan privations. One friend who loves to cook hosts a weekly Monday dinner for Goerz and half a dozen others, who usually show up with a couple of bottles of fine wine–one remaining indulgence. Many of Goerz’s friends are also out of work, and even those with good jobs seem to have caught the thrifty vibe. “Even people who don’t have to cut back are doing it,” she says. “It’s a new kind of consciousness. They seem to be thinking, ‘I don’t need all this.’ ”

Most Americans can live without the proverbial daily latte and a few other niceties, but economic data and anecdotal reports suggest that it’s a much bigger struggle to accept permanent lifestyle diminutions, save considerably more, and break with familiar spending habits. Goerz attributes her transformation to lessons learned from other crises she survived: getting laid off in 2001 amid the dot-com bust, a recent family death, getting robbed while traveling alone in India seven years ago.

[See how to profit from your passion.]

Still, she’s not sure how long she can live on a reduced income. Her health insurance premium recently quadrupled, to almost $400 per month, after a government subsidy expired. She lives with three roommates, which keeps her rent at an affordable $871 per month. But she craves her own place, which would obviously cost more. “I have this niggling fear that I’m screwed,” she says. “Will I ever be able to buy a home or a car? That’s my biggest motivation to succeed financially: to get my own place.”

Goerz fosters an outside hope that the debut of her documentary might lead to paying work in the film industry and a fulfilling new career. But she also knows that she may end up back in corporate America, sacrificing some of her freedom for comfort and stability. So she’s also looking for jobs in her old field, hoping to find a perfect fit. Even if her income goes back up, however, she hopes that her new lifestyle sticks. “I’d want to save money like crazy,” she says. “I’d like to experiment with keeping my frugal ways.” Today, that sounds like a novel idea. Tomorrow, it might be mainstream.

Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer

Economists are in broad agreement that the Great Recession is over. The American public strongly disagrees.

In a poll of more than 1,000 Americans conducted late last week by CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, 84% of those surveyed believe that the economy is still in recession.

That’s a slight improvement from the 87% who believed there was still a recession in the September survey, but it is almost the opposite view of the nation’s economists.

An official declaration of an end to the recession that started in December 2007 won’t be made until next year at the earliest by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But recent economic readings and surveys of economists all point to a U.S. economy that is growing again.

The economy grew at a 2.8% annual rate in the three months ending in September, according to the latest reading on gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation’s economic activity.

While the economy continues to lose jobs, the number of jobs lost in November fell to 11,000, the smallest amount of any month since the start of 2008, while the unemployment rate improved to 10% from 10.2%. And a survey of 43 top economists by the National Association of Business Economists in October found 81% agreed that the recession was over.

The survey was taken ahead of that latest jobs reading. It comes as President Obama announced Tuesday that he wants Congress to redirect a certain portion of leftover Wall Street bailout funds toward new job creation measures, including building roads and bridges, “weatherizing” homes to reduce energy bills and lending to small businesses.

Recovery ‘only an economist can love’

But even economists understand why the general public doesn’t share economists’ view of current conditions. Mark Vitner, senior economist with Wells Fargo Securities, said this has so far been a recovery that only an economist can love, given continued job losses and tight credit conditions.

“I think the end of the recession and beginning of the recovery is very difficult for Main Street America to see,” he said. “The bad news isn’t coming out as frequently, but there really hasn’t been much good news. We’re stuck in some sort of economic purgatory.”

Vitner said part of the disagreement between economists and the public view of the economy is a difference in how recession and recovery are defined. Economists believe a recession is over and a recovery begins when the economy has hit bottom.

“If you fall into a hole, the time that you’re falling is the recession. Once you hit the bottom, the recession is over. But you’re still in the hole,” said Vitner. “Most non-economists think the recovery doesn’t begin until you’re out of the hole.”

In fact the survey backs up that disconnect between economists’ and the public’s views.

It found 46% of those surveyed believe that conditions have stabilized and are not getting any worse. But that plurality also believes that means the economy is still in recession.

Economic conditions of those answering the poll also affect the results.

“The recession has hit blue-collar families the hardest,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “More than half of whites who never attended college say economic conditions are still in a downturn. Most whites who attended college say things have stabilized or are starting to get better.”

Few gains seen, more worries ahead

Vitner said that any improvement in the economy so far has produced very modest gains for the average household, as well as the broader economic measures. So people are likely to feel like there’s a recession for quite some time.

“The hole is a very big hole this time and the recovery is very modest so it might take us a number of years to get out of the hole,” he said.

While economists are typically getting more optimistic, the poll found evidence the public is getting more pessimistic.

The poll found only 15% believe the economy is starting to recover from the problems it faced in the past year or so, down from 17% who saw improvement in the previous poll in September. And it found 39% believe the economy is still in a downturn and conditions are continuing to worsen, up from 36% who believed things were getting worse in September.

And many Americans are still worried things could get a lot worse.

Asked about a risk of another depression, the poll found 43% believing that was somewhat or very likely, a bit worse than the 41% who thought that in a survey in the middle of summer, although well below the 59% who feared another depression when asked in early October of 2008.

The survey described a depression as a period when roughly one out of four workers were unemployed, banks fail across the country and millions of ordinary Americans were temporarily homeless or unable to feed their families.

Asked in general terms how well things are going in the country today, the outlook is more negative than the previous reading for the first time since President Obama took office in January, with 66% saying things are pretty or very bad, up from 63% among those asked that question on Oct. 30 and Nov. 1. Still, that is better than the 79% who believed things were pretty or very bad a year ago.

– CNN Wires and CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – Wal-Mart and two other top retailers said Friday they are suspending business with a large southwestern Michigan blueberry grower after investigators found children as young as 6 working in the grower’s fields.

Wal-Mart, Kroger and Meijer said pending further information, they have stopped buying products from Adkin Blue Ribbon Blueberry Co. near South Haven, about 85 miles northeast of Chicago.

Adkin general manager Tony Marr said the company has a strictly enforced written policy prohibiting young children from working in its fields. All adult employees must sign copies of the policy, and the farm keeps the signed copies on file, he said.

“We certainly don’t condone or promote child labor here in any way,” Marr said.

The company has eight full-time employees and hires about 350 seasonal workers each year to harvest and process the blueberries grown on its 640 acres. About one-third of its berries are processed for sale as fresh produce and the rest are frozen for commercial use.

Adkin is conducting its own investigation to determine what happened, he said. Parents sometimes bring children with them because they don’t have child care, he added.

“Wal-Mart, Kroger and Meijer are very large customers of ours, and certainly we’re cooperating with them in providing information about our internal investigation, trying to figure out what the kids were doing there,” Marr said.

The U.S. Department of Labor announced this week that a check of 35 randomly selected farms in Michigan led to eight being fined about $36,000 in all for violating federal migrant-housing and child-labor laws.

Ten other farms were cited for violations but not fined. Adkin was the lone farm fined for both migrant-housing and child-labor law violations and paid more than $5,500 in penalties, said Scott Allen, a department spokesman based in Chicago.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Caren Epstein said the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer learned of the problem after being contacted by ABC News. Wal-Mart will not buy anything from Adkin “pending the outcome of an investigation by our ethical sourcing team,” Epstein wrote in an e-mail.

Representatives of Cincinnati-based Kroger Co. and Grand Rapids-based Meijer Inc. made similar statements.

Thomas K. Thornburg, co-managing attorney of Farmworker Legal Services, said labor law violations are rampant among farms that use migrant workers.

“This isn’t one abusive employer,” he said.

Federal law does not allow children younger than 12 to work on farms. Children who are 12 or 13 can have nonhazardous farm jobs outside of school hours if they work on the same farm as their parents or with written parental consent.

Labor Department investigators found four children working in Adkin’s fields during an unannounced visit on July 8. At least two of the children were under 12, including the 6-year-old.

Michigan is the nation’s largest blueberry producer, with 110 million pounds harvested in 2008.

During inspections throughout the state, investigators found migrant workers living in unlicensed migrant labor camps with sewage from a faulty septic system seeping up near living units. They also discovered untreated waste water spilling out of broken pipes, no hot water for hand washing and infestations of bugs and rodents.

NEWS— For Immediate Release

Made in USA Certified – Trust but Certify!
The Vision and The People Behind It

Delray Beach, FL—October 19, 2009– Julie and Adam Reiser, husband and wife team, have not only a solid marriage and partnership but a brood of six active boys ranging in age from 4 to 15 years.  That alone could make a great story, or at least a sequel to the movie, “His, Mine, and Ours”.  As if raising six active boys wasn’t enough to keep them busy – they have, together, built a thriving and successful business: Made in USA Certified, Inc., a third party, independent trusted and recognizable certification service that assures the products that make the claim of Made in USA and Product of USA are verifiably made and produced in the United States. (www.usa-c.com)

Adam Reiser was born on the East Coast in Paterson, New Jersey and grew up in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey – 20 miles outside the bright lights and bustle of New York City.  As a young boy growing up in a small working class town, Adam watched our Nation change over the course of the 1970’s, as Japanese car manufacturers altered the US Auto Industry forever. Adam saw his friends’ parents lose their jobs when the Ford Motor Plant closed its doors in Mahwah, NJ, and at an early age learned how a global economy can impact our Country’s prosperity.  As a young man, Adam was educated and trained in the US Navy.

Julie Dennison Reiser was born in Rapid City, South Dakota on Ellsworth Air Force Base near the end of the Vietnam War.  She is also a descendent of a US Patriot who fought for this Country’s freedom during the Revolutionary War.  Julie was raised in the Midwest in an affluent suburb of St. Louis, Missouri and spent much of her childhood at her family’s beloved 90-acre farm in rural Rolla, Missouri.  As a young girl in the 1980’s and 1990’s she saw her parents and their friends prosper while in stark contrast witnessed many American farmers quietly struggling to stay afloat.

Adam and Julie come from distinct American backgrounds and different regions of this vast, beautiful, Country, but they both share a deep love for the USA and the freedoms we all enjoy.  Combining their passions and talents—Made in USA Magazine was born in 2004.  Made in USA Magazine, was a print and on-line magazine that told the inspirational stories, struggles and triumphs of the American manufacturer.

As globalization took hold of the Nation with NAFTA / CAFTA and China, many US manufacturers were forced to succumb to pricing pressures due to cheap labor, currency manipulation and lax environmental laws abroad.  US companies had to either outsource to compete or close their doors.  Many families and even entire towns were decimated by the massive outsourcing of these American jobs.   In the worst situations, American families were left destitute and unable to pay for basic necessities. The writing was on the wall: if US manufacturers shipped everything overseas, what jobs were left for our own people – how would the US Economy survive?

Concurrently, mainstream news reported on the dangers of products the US routinely imports from other countries—dog food, dry wall, toys, vitamins, milk, and lead paint.  Consumers have been terrified by devastating stories of children, animals, and adults that were harmed or killed by unsafe products imported from foreign countries and sold to the unsuspecting US consumer.

This duality created a “perfect storm” bringing American awareness to an all time high while the US experiences the worst recession since the Great Depression, leaving a scorched landscape that will weigh on the labor market and the broader economy for years to come.  The dollar is falling, unemployment is at 25 year highs, and not expected to fall until 2011, and scarcity of job creation continues as companies consolidate in order to survive.  Simultaneously, the US housing market is in ruins and the US deficit has hit an unprecedented $1.4 Trillion.  Adam and Julie look at this situation, however, not as a bleak prediction of our Country’s destitution, but a call to action.  They believe that this gives Americans an opportunity to turn things around, to help one other, to rebuild our beloved Country and to make this Nation great again, together, as Americans.

The Reiser’s vision for keeping consumers safe and companies honest grew out of their experience with the Magazine.  Out of an interest in promoting American jobs, as well as safety of the American consumer, Adam and Julie realized that anyone can make the claim “Made in USA.”  The question is:  how is the consumer assured the product did not come over on a shipper tank from overseas?

The answer is: Made in USA Certified, Inc.  (www.usa-c.com), an independent third party assurance and certification company, verifies that products are indeed made here in the USA and any such claim made by the manufacturing company is true and verifiable.

Made in USA Certified is the leader in independent third party assurance verification. Our seal of certification assures the consumer that the Made in USA or Product of USA claim is true– keeping you and your family safe, giving consumers peace of mind and helping to support and promote products and services Made in USA.  Trust but Certify!

For More Information Contact:
Ellen Ehrenkranz
Phone: 561-279-2855
pr@usa-c.com