Essay Example on the Documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream

The main reason as to why this film was produced was meant to investigate the fact that the 400 richest Americans are the ones who control more wealth as compared to the 150 million people who are in the bottom 50 percent of the population.

The main claim in this documentary is that both the rich and the poor players both got an equal opportunity its up to one to decide the play, but the rich players believe that they deserve to win and show no concern for the misfortune of the poor despite them not standing for a chance to win. For example in the case of playing of a dice between a rich player and a poor player the rich player is always in a greater chance to win he got more money and hence allowed to make more moves on the board more quick as compared to the rich one. The primary reason of this essay is to discuss how the rich have scoped all the wealth leaving behind very little for the poor which has killed the American dream.

There is evidence to support this claim because we find that the rich controlled more wealth hence creating the gap between the wealthiest in the society and everyone else. That gap in America was used as the grand channel since the income of the less wealthy became stagnated and the rest accrued to the wealthy unlike the time after the world war two where the income was shared equally among the people. We get enough evidence to support the main claim, we see that the children from the unwealthy families have to live in unsafe neighborhood, overcrowded apartments lack good nutrition, medical issues, and lack of food on the table which is also as a result of unemployment which has reached 19 percent in parts of South Bronx and lack of opportunity. We get to see pastrol and his wife run a food poetry which feeds about 200 struggling families every week yet its never enough. There are more evidence in the documentary that shows there is a big gap between the wealthy and the poor the wealthy will leave in lavish homes with several rooms and not care about the poor if they have somewhere to live or not.

To pull out of extreme poverty in the United States tends to be very hard which is an opposing statement to the dream of that the rich and the poor got an equal opportunity this is true because the game is already unfair, the opportunity is not there all the rules have been decided, the property brought up and the money in the hands of the rich, there is the game of monopoly. This so convincing and true because the income was no more shared equally as it was the case before world war two, in 2010 we find out that only 400 of the richest Americans were able to control more wealth than the bottom half of the Americans which consist of 150 million people.

This documentary successfully presents its claim they clearly demonstrate this well and clearly using diagrams, the pie charts, and graphs. The pie chart represents the 90% who are those people at the bottom and the wealthiest took a 1% of the income. This was between the year 1947-1977 which later changed from 1978-2008 where now the income distribution changed this is presented very well using the graph whereby income of those at the bottom remained constant with a 0% increase and that of the wealth increase continuously.

The documentary shows the gap between the rich and the poor we get to see that 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan is the place where more billionaires live compared to any other building in the United States. Lack of opportunity for the poor people is seen now that these billionaires are the C.E.Os. Of the biggest corporates. They will do everything in favor of the ultra-rich for example Stephen showmans who is one of the prominent CEOS who is featured in the document as well known when it comes to the robbing of taxes in favor of the rich. They are opportunists and wealthy interests they have invested in policies that favor them and use that money for political purpose.

Works Cited

Park Avenue: money, power, and the American dream. Directed by Alex Gibney, Perf. Alex Gibney,Jack Abramoff, Michele Bachmann. 2013. 2013.