Click here to access article by Jason Hickel from the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt.
This article is loaded with little known or understood facts about the extreme distribution of wealth throughout not only the US, but even a much worse distribution throughout the world. And, this extreme picture is continuing to grow worse at an accelerating rate under neoliberal policies.
In my opinion, it is a result of a natural process inherent in the system of capitalism which provides individuals with extraordinary rights of property, and thus wealth, and with wealth comes power. People who function best in this system are sociopaths, people who are weak in their allegiance to communal or social values. Then when such people combine their wealth and power in the form of corporations, they direct this powerful engine against the very societies that sustained them and permitted their institutions. They even have the temerity to justify this by declaring, as one hero of their system stated, that "there is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and their families."
Unfortunately, like most liberals the author can only imagine a solution which evolves tinkering with the rules of the system. This would be like treating an advanced stage of cancer with aspirin.