Shattered Dreams

            The American Dream is a tall tale phrase that people use when they envision a better tomorrow for themselves. Tommy Hilfiger, a designer, had this quote to say on the American Dream: “The road to success is not easy to navigate, but with hard work, drive and passion, it’s possible to achieve the American Dream”. While it’s true that the road to success is not an easy one to navigate to and from, this is not always true, for some the American Dream is not a reachable status to get to. “Confronting Inequality”, an essay by Paul Krugman, points out why the American Dream is a sugarcoated phrase. And the essay “Up Against Wal-Mart”, by Karen Olson, argues about the hardships that someone goes through in their life just to make ends meet. “Confronting Inequality” and “Up Against Wal-Mart” show the reality of everyday struggle to survive in today’s world. Many people no matter how hard they try to succeed, their hard work may never pay off: why?, because money is what sets communities apart, minimum wage jobs are what the poor working class are suppress to, and money has the power to distort people into greediness.

                       The affluent live and play in a world of their-own, a world close to the regular Joes, and the ones with no funds. In every major city, there will be CEOs lunching in their favorite restaurant while on their phones, lost in a world of their own, and in New York City, there will be crowds of well-off youngsters modeling their credit cards while in their favorite sectors shopping for cloths and cologne; we will see this with our own eyes while walking the cities’ beautiful store-fronts. “Lifestyle of the rich and famous …”, says Krugman (588). The Rich certainly can’t be ignored whenever we go to a major city. They have constructed a self-governing world with their own unique health care program, transportation system, and a separate tax world. “The rich weren’t just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creating their own country within a country”, says Irving Kristole, a neoconservative intellectual (587). And this, definitely, brings a broad income inequality to a community, of which has an adverse effect, not necessarily with jealousy or a slap on the face, but with social inequality that has negative outcomes. For instance, the middle class will spend their hard earned cash on homes that they can’t afford; the reason, they want to enroll their youngsters in a good educational system, which is a costly educational system, and these neighborhoods are becoming increasingly lavish to live and own a home in. The reason they buy in these places is that they want their kids to have a good start, but in the process of doing so, they end up with nothing and are left bankrupt because they have taken on so much debt that they can’t financially sustain; this will set the boundaries of social and income inequality even higher than they are. Whatever happened to the logic of using money wisely; we may want the best for our kids, but we can’t give them the best if we can’t afford to keep a roof above our heads. Think of the children. The Middle class spending habits are not a good way to reach the statue of, the American Dream, wealth.

                         The idea that money is everything has been so entrenched in our minds. Wal-Mart managers to save their income, they will do anything to dissolve the formation of a union. For example, Eric Jackson, a Wal-Mart employee, who had started preaching about joining a Union, called the organization to establish a meeting at the Wal-Mart where he works because of low wages that they were being suppressed by Wal-Mart managers, of who were only paying $5.75 an hour, a hourly pay that doesn’t come close to sustaining the cost of everyday life expenses, arranged a meeting. After the organization had their first meeting, a Wal-Mart manager was spotted outside by one of the employees; they were being watched. “By the time we had our first meeting, they were holding their first anti-union meeting”, says Mc Laughlin, Eric’s girlfriend (Olson 616). One manager had taken up smoking to sit with employees at break for input on a union establishing. Other times hourly employees were counted as managers just so employees could avoid having contact with union staffing. Managers even went as far as firing employees just so they could avoid a union establishment; employees were afraid to speak up. A union formation at a Wal-Mart business is a serious matter. Wal-Mart managers kept the income inequality alive by suppressing employees to a minimum wage and by protecting their high salary. This kept the communities divided by managers living modestly and employees with low wages living a struggle in lower pay communities. For Eric, who has a job at a Wal-Mart and a suppressed wage, it’s going to be impossible for him to see some form of the American dream.

                 Minimum wage jobs are abundant to the poor working class. In 2006, minimum wage jobs were at their lowest they have ever been since 1955, but it’s said that minimum wage went from being $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour in 2009. An hourly pay of $7.25 an hour it’s still very low, one cannot live off this, and ends meet cannot be accomplished by this minimum wage. Minimum wage pay needs to be raised higher. “Meanwhile minimum wage increase can have fairly significant effects on wages at the bottom end of the scale”, explains Krugman (600). Even though a minimum wage raise can have limited impact on the poor working class, it’s still not enough to support a family on this pay. With minimum wage having been increased, “13 million workers” have benefitted from this, but not to a significant amount, yet 5.6 million minimum wage workers are being paid less than todays’ minimum wage (Krugman 600). One reason for minimum wage not being increased to a modest pay is because, it may lead to job losses and an increased in production cost. So, Washington’s only solution to keep unemployment steady is to suppress minimum wage to a low as long as they can. And the poor working communities are the ones that get stuck doing cheap labor for an hourly rate that’s not enough to raise a family.

                        Low-end pay is never enough to live a modest life style. Jennifer McLaughlin, who works at a Wal-Mart Supercenter, has a family to feed and bills to pay. An annual pay of $16,800 is not enough and Wal-Mart recognizes this amount as being high. McLaughlin argues that this is not sufficient, and “the way they pay you, you can not make it by yourself”, you’ll need another job on top of this one, or some type of aid from an organization (Olson 607). McLaughlin has a baby to feed, insurance on her truck, and rent to pay. An amount of $85.00 for health insurance, she avoids because a pay of $550 a week is not enough to cover all her expenses, so she avoids it and her son, Cage, does with out and relies on external outsources. “Forty percent of employees opt not to receive coverage under the company’s medical plan”, writes Olson (608). As a result, thousands of employees and former employees are suing Wal-Mart for breaking the law of wages. This is how the government and the giant retailer Wal-Mart suppress their workers to a minimum wage pay. How can one reach the American Dream with this kind of rules set by the government and the giant retailer, Wal-Mart?

                 So far, we’ve seen how money divides communities into social inequality and how minimum wage suppresses people to a life style of struggles. Now let’s take a look at how the power of money shifts people into selfish human beings, especially politics. For example, because money has the power to eat away politics minds, there’s barely a week that passes by without the effect of money influencing our government’s policy. After all, politic leaders, of who take in more than a billion or more in salary annually, get their payment tax at 15 percent instead of 32 percent through capital gain rate, and the Democrats support this movement, too. Krugman writes that “the hedge fund tax loophole cost the government more than $6 billion a year in lost revenue” and that this amount is enough to cover health insurance “to three million children (593). This is crazy, why would they want so much money, the children would benefit a lot more than the dirty politics would. “If there are men big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it”, says Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States (Krugman 592). This is a perfect example of how the power of money has the ability to distort peoples thinking into oblivion.

              Money hungry individuals are only looking out for themselves and not the well being of others. Wal-Mart founder, Sam Walton, was only looking out for his best interest when he started his own business. Sam Walton, who began his business selling women undergarments, flooded his hometown with low price underwear. “A discounter was born”, writes Olsson (610). As his business grew, his trends did not change: you could’ve still found him driving his old truck, sharing hotel rooms on business trips, and paying his employees as low as he could. “He paid his clerks 50 to 60 cents an hour” well below minimum for that time, says Olsson (611). And every time union contractors approached his business, he had union busters waiting for them and to brainwash workers on the gloomy condition of a union enact. Walton went as far as creating a firm just to fight off a union development. Today Wal-Mart still operates on the same principal that Sam Walton did when he founded the giant retailer. On the whole, Walton did reach the American dream, but he did it by taking advantage of others. To conclude, money is a very powerful substance and in the wrong hands, it can be very evil and destructive.

             Paul Krugman’s and Karen Olson’s research on “Confronting Inequality” and “Up Against Wal-Mart” paints a reality of how hard or nearly impossible is to reach the American Dream. The struggle to reach the American Dream and to bear life’s hard situation and then to rise above poverty, seem like an unreachable goal. There’s no arguing that the middle class plays catch up with the wealthy, and thus, they end up with less than what they had. With minimum wage jobs that lower end communities get stuck doing, their goal of reaching the American Dream is just that, a dream. And chips in the hands of the wrong people, is a destructive material that destroys communities. To conclude, we don’t need a phrases like the American Dream to remind us of what could be better if we work hard, because for many of us the American Dream only exist in fairy tale books.