Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream

I find it interesting that this documentary came out in 2012 and at that time people were bringing attention to the ever widening income gap between the wealthiest Americans and average Americans. Ten years later nothing's changed, in fact it's worse. Who would've thought that a single person would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Two such people exist now.

What we see in "Park Avenue" is what we see in "Inside Job" (2010), "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2005), and "Capitalism: A Love Story" (1997) just to name a few movies about unchecked greed.

"Park Avenue" is eye-opening in that it says a lot about the world's wealthiest and our government, but it says a lot about the average American as well. We live in a democratic republic. That means that the people run the country on the basis of having a vote. Even with the strength of corporations and fat cats having a direct line to lawmakers, if enough people made enough noise, things would change.

But what does the average American think? "That could be me one day." They could be the next Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, David Koch, or John Thain and they wouldn't want the government in their pockets. It's that idea and that dream that is constantly dangled in front of every American that keeps us complicit in the status quo. All we need to see is a handful of rags-to-riches stories and we're sold. If that were not the case, we'd have long ago changed things.