[VIDEO] Fault Lines – The Top 1%, US Inequality and the “Second Gilded Age”

Excellent… excellent… excellent video!

Sometimes it takes an outsider to reflect a true mirror upon us. Just like when De Tocqueville described Americans and America over 150 years ago, Al Jazeera English made a poignant video describing where we went wrong and the consequences of these decisions.

The richest 1% of US Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country’s income and control an astonishing 40% of its wealth. Inequality in the United States is more extreme than it’s been in almost a century — and the gap between the super rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.

Fault Lines is a current affairs program that takes you beyond the headlines in the United States, brining you stories from the streets – putting a face to those who are falling through the cracks & holding the powerful to account. On Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera English (AJE) is a 24-hour English-language news and current affairs TV channel headquartered in Doha,Qatar. It is the sister channel of the Arabic-language Al Jazeera.

The budget debate and the economy are the battleground on which the 2012 presidential election race will be fought. And the US has never seemed so divided – both politically and economically.

Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University and one of the most intelligent economists in the US, makes some important points regardless of your political perspective. This is a well worth 24 minutes.