Sock market indicator.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Income inequality

Having been raised in a small-business family and now running my own small outfit, I always find it heartwarming to see hardworking, enterprising folks get ahead.

So I was really touched when I read that, even in these hard times, one extended family with three generations active in running the business is hanging in there and doing well.

Christy, Jim, Alice, Robbie, Ann, and Nancy are their names, and with good luck and old-fashioned pluck, they have managed to build a fairly sizable family nest egg. In fact, it totals right at $145 billion for the six of them.

That means that these six hold more wealth than the entire bottom 40 percent of American families--a stash of riches greater than the combined wealth of some 127 million Americans.

The "good luck" that they all had is that they were either born into or married into the Walton family, which makes them heirs to the Walmart fortune. And that's where the "pluck" comes in, for the world's biggest retailer plucks its profits from the threadbare pockets of low-wage American workers and impoverished sweatshop workers around the world.

Four of the Walton heirs rank as the sixth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh richest people in our country, possessing a combined net worth of $135 billion. But bear in mind that "net worth" has no relationship to worthiness: These people did nothing to earn their wealth; they just inherited it.

And, as Walmart plucks more from workers, the heirs grow ever luckier. In recent years, while the wealth of the typical family plummeted by 39 percent, the Waltons saw their wealth grow by 22 percent, without having to lift a finger.

How odd, then, that the 1-percenters (or, in this case, the 1/100 of 1-percenters) hail themselves as our country's "makers," while snidely referring to workaday people as "takers." With the Waltons, it's the exact opposite.

You'd think that the Bentonville billionaires would realize that their fortunes are tied to those they disparage. Apparently, they're unaware that our economic recovery cannot truly be measured in the performance of the stock market, but instead should be gauged by the sock market.

Most economists, pundits, and politicos see today's boom in stocks and say: "See, the recovery is going splendidly!"...