text: As the years go by, the Sioux Empire’s rapidly growing construction industry continues to keep strong. With the increase in construction projects, our area’s contractors are able to keep up, but the one constant battle continues to be the lack of employees looking for jobs in the industry.
  The Home Builders Association of the Sioux Empire (HBASE) and the Sioux Empire Home Builders Care Foundation (HBCF) are working to find ways to help increase interest in the construction industry. From June 11-14 and 18-21, HBASE and HBCF partnered up with the Career and Technical Education Academy (CTE) to focus on getting twenty-seven 7th and 8th grade middle school students interested in the industry by hosting them at the third annual Summer Construction Camp.
  During the camp, participating students learned basic safety, hand tool operation and a number of other carpentry trade skills as they assisted each other in a variety of construction related projects.
  The Home Builders Association, Care Foundation and the Career and Technical Education Academy hope that the camp will spark an interest in students that will continue with them throughout their college careers and will essentially help to build the future construction industry’s workforce.
  If you have a 7th or 8th grade student that would be interested in participating in the 2019 camp, please contact the Home Builders Association at (605) 361-8322 or email todd@hbasiouxempire.com.
  The economic elite have at least $46 trillion in wealth – but who are they? We look at the people and the industries picking the pockets of the working class.
  The following is an adapted excerpt from David DeGraw’s new report on the financial destruction of the United States. The full report can be read here: Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America.
  If all this isn’t obscene enough, to further demonstrate how the global economy has now been completely rigged, Deloitte’s analysis predicated, based on current trends, that US millionaire households will see a 225 percent increase in wealth to $87.1 trillion by 2020. Accounting for wealth hidden in offshore accounts, they are projected to have over $100 trillion in total within the next decade.
  Now consider, according to the latest IRS data, only 0.076 percent of the population, less than one-tenth of one percent, earned over $1 million in 2009.
  The highest bracket for annual income is $50 million or more. Only 74 Americans are in this elite group. The average income within this category was $91.2 million in 2008. As astonishing as that is, in 2009 they averaged $518.8 million each, or about $10 million per week. This means, in the depths of the recession, the richest 74 Americans increased their income by more than five times within this one year. These 74 people made more money than 19 million workers combined.
  In context, overall, the richest 400 people in the US have as much wealth as 154 million Americans combined, that’s 50 percent of the entire country. The top economic 1 percent of the US population now has a record 40 pecent of all wealth, and have more wealth than 90 percent of the population combined.
  Here is an analysis from an investment manager with mega-wealthy clients breaking down the economic top 0.5 percent of the population, recently published by William Domhoff, sociology professor and author of Who Rules America?: