Occupy Wall Street: The Top 1%

The richest one per cent of Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country's income and control an astonishing 40 per cent of its wealth.

Inequality in the US is more extreme than it has 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.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a bitter partisan debate over how to cut deficit spending and reduce the US' $14.3 trillion debt is underway. As low and middle class wages stagnate and unemployment remains above nine per cent, Republicans and Democrats are tussling over whether to slash funding for the medical and retirement programmes that are the backbone of the US' social safety net, and whether to raise taxes - or to cut them further.

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.

In America the ratio is 121 to 1


In Japan it's 12 to 1


Yet, America's Republican so beholden to Wall Street and America's major financial institutions that any policy proposal advanced by the Obama administration is considered dead on arrival.  Because as Senate Minority Mitch McConnell Republican from the state of Kentucky  stated a year ago their main goal isn't to help  America recover from its worse recession since the 1930's is to make sure Barrack Obama is a one term President.