The American Dream is still very much alive, it appears, but for whom?
According to the Huffington Post, America is tops in “creating really, really rich people.” We’re talking $50 million and then some rich–collectively totaling over $2 trillion–more than the entire bottom half of the country; more than the GDP of Italy, Mexico, Canada; and equal to about two-thirds of all taxes to be collected in the U.S. for 2013.   Forbes claims that makes a spike from last year’s $1.7 trillion–up half a trillion!
In a year’s time the net worth of Forbes 400 members also rose to its highest ever–$5 billion.  Just to make it on the list the game was raised by $1.3 billion. Atop the wealthy list are the usual players–Bill Gates at $72 billion and Warren Buffett at $58.5 billion, etc. But how does America create such wealth in such quantity, and more so than the rest of the world?
According to CNBC’s Robert Frank, “younger Americans are accumulating wealth at a faster clip than their baby boomer counterparts,” and many of those younger wealthy Americans have made their fortune in the tech industry, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Bring, among others.  The pace of the tech field makes for a ripe industry through constant innovations and competition.  Creativity and know-how can rocket one to wealth overnight in such a field, so wealth has the ability to accumulate very quickly, in a manner that would have taken much more time in industrial ventures for obvious reasons.  It’s much easier to spread one’s business across the web than location by location in the physical world.
The demand for such industries as the tech industry, coupled with today’s youth culture and rapid means of growing and advertising one’s business, creates an economic intersection of higher salaries, which leads to an obvious more rapid growth of wealth, as well.  Brian Dombkowski, chief investment officer of Sand Hill Global Advisors, out of Palo Alto, CA, thinks the game has changed. “Young entrepreneurs today made their money by building a better mousetrap, and they have been rewarded by the market for it. We have seen significantly more wealth creation than we did in earlier generations.”  Perhaps, as businesses learn to refine their use of advertising, building, and networking on the web, the world is simply reaching a new norm in production of wealth?
Stocks are also another means and reason for rich Americans’ soaring wealth.
According to another CNBC article by Frank, stocks are primarily what’s driving America’s wealth.  One needs to have a couple nickels to rub together in the first place to begin playing the stock market.  The poor are nearly invisible in the major apparatus forcreating wealth in the country.  While such an apparatus is excessively beneficial for the rich, it is entirely detrimental to average Americans, certainly the poor, and serves to undermine the stability of the country.
This is just one nail in the inequality coffin Nobel Prize in Economics winner Robert Shiller has talked so much about.  Stocks, Frank wrote, “have been on a tear this year in the U.S., which has mainly benefited the top 5 percent, who own 60 percent of all individually held stocks.”
This is why, in America, people say, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”  This is why social unrest and the Occupy Wall St. movement sprang up and resounded with such resonance around not only America, but the rest of the world.  This is why, “Some day, we will have nothing left to eat, but the rich!” as they say.
Why did it spread around the rest of the world?  Because America has its mitts and boot prints all over the globe.  Because we rob, rape, and plunder the rest of the planet for our wealth.  Or, the rich do, anyway.  And they use stocks and various investments, as well as criminal banking practices, war and tax havens to hoard and grow their wealth exponentially while the rest of us live hand to mouth.  As long as there is inequality in America, there will be inequality in the rest of the world.
America contains the most wealthy first and foremost due to its exploitation of the rest of the world, and those wealthy are then able to utilize the current economic free for all across the globe to skyrocket into the financial stratosphere (why would one ever retire?), stashing their bloated fortunes in tax havens wherever they can find them, leaving the rest of the world, poor, hungry, uneducated, without proper medical care, without the means for strong social programs for the elderly, disable, and challenged.  Worst of all they buy up our land and water, destroy them along with the air, and use their arrogance to fence us out of the free and natural world, not to mention a happy, sustainable life.
Perhaps the most frightening of all is that America does not even yet realize that it is not next on the auction block.  It is on the auction block.  Those paying attention fear it has already been sold.
Welcome to the American Dream.