740 Park Ave Reflection

In the United States, public policy is shaped by multiple factors, from average citizens voices in elections to interest groups and organizations. In their study, “Testing theories of American politics”, scholars Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens explore the impact of average citizens, the economic elite and interest groups have on the passage of public policy. Additionally through their, Page and Gilens(2014) have found “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence” (Pg 535). This means that when it comes to the creation of public policies, rich people and groups

I really enjoyed this documentary because it made me realize just how lucky I am for the life I was given. It changed my perception of happiness in so many ways. It made me realize that I have more than I need to live a happy life. Other people around the world don’t have as nice of a house or even a house at all to live in and are so much happier than I am and that is something that sparked my attention. For example, the man who lives in India, Manoj Singh, he lives in what looks like poverty to me, but to him, he lives well. There are times where his family are only able to eat rice and he has no air conditioning in his home, but he still remains a very happy man. When he mentioned that there are times where his family only eats rice, it instantly made me feel awful because I have all the food in the world around me and I still take it for granted some days. I also take my family for granted at times. For instance, the man from Louisiana, his family and friends are what make him happy the most. He is simply grateful for them while

Last semester, one of my sociology professors showed us a documentary called The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream. It 's a Canadian documentary that was released in 2004 and it even won a few awards.

It is time that the voters are the only one’s deciding elections. Candidates should be running on issues, not money. They should not be allowed to get money from wealthy investors, who keep the playing field unlevel. Any person who wants to run for office, and is qualified to run for office, should be able to regardless if they have a lot of money to set up a campaign or not. It is time for Campaign Finance Reform.

According Forbes Magazine, in the year 2010, a year that was not even a presidential election, the Koch brothers contributed over $45,000,000 to campaigns through a group they deemed “Americans for Prosperity” (Poole). With this money going towards the men in congress almost any legislation proposed by President Obama has been stalled, resulting in what is known as a policy gridlock. Whatever the case, seeing the huge money being contributed by individuals or their businesses, makes the campaigns run by people such as Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders more admirable for not being bought out by big money.

4. Give your review of this documentary. What did or didn’t you like? Are there issues, opinions, or voices that are left

I thought the ethnographic work done by Dr. Myerhoff was done very well. She went into great detail about the rituals and parties that these elders had at their senior center. She did an amazing job of asking for descriptive feedback from the Jewish elders. This gave me a deeper understanding of their culture and how it affects them as individuals. This documentary is more mindful of the culture than the last film on Sara Baartman. I also liked how the film addressed the problem of valuing looks in our society. When we should be valuing what’s on the inside and not what’s on the

Candidates such as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are surrounded by money. This will allow for easy unlimited funding from the citizens who agree with their views and will benefit from them winning. Presidents would obviously reward these organizations once elected in one way or another. This will allow wealthy individuals to make a much more significant impact on elections. While old PACs had a cap on how much could be donated by individuals, while prohibiting organizations and companies from donating, these new “isolates” super PACs can receive unlimited donations. A major company may decide to spend a few million dollars to support a specific candidate if it could return profit on the investment from taxation policies the winning candidate puts in place. This puts a large importance on money in the election, and less on debates and views. This is shown in the current election, with two of the candidates being some of the biggest financial influencers in the United States. Donald Trump is one of the faces of the business world and has huge influences in the business world. Hillary Clinton was a former first lady and has many large backings. This election has two of the biggest iconic faces in this country, most likely due to this new

I can’t say that I honestly enjoyed watching it, but then again that is not the point of a documentary such as this. This documentary, although not the most exciting to watch, forces you to constantly evaluate and consider the information being presented to you. There were times I would have to rewind just to give my thoughts a second to catch up, and in that sense, the film fully accomplished its goal. In discussing complicated ideas such as education, employment, and obedience it showed me just how narrow my scope of the world is, and I think I can better understand what the narrator meant and how he felt when he said: “almost everything I was brought up to believe turns out to be

The film Inequality for All really opened my eyes to a huge and growing problem in the United States, and that is inequality. Our country functions best when it has a healthy and growing middle class. That hasn't been the case for the middle class in over 20 years. The problem that we have is that the rich keep getting richer and the middle class wages stay the same, and sometimes even get lower, causing the inequality percentage to rise. The movie stated that in 1978 the average male worker made $48,302 and the average top 1% made $393,682, and in 2010 that same male worker makes $33,751 and top 1% now makes more than 1 million dollars on average. The richest 400 people in the united states have more money than over half the population combined.

The thing I liked most about this documentary was the fact that it focused on the guys at the top, the self-proclaimed "smartest men in the room", the so-called geniuses who knew the energy business so much better than the rest of the industry. And what a piece of work these men were.

Over the past four year, while attending Central Dauphin East High, I have gotten involved in many different activities and clubs. I first got involved in the sports at East High, such as field hockey, swimming, and lacrosse. Starting from my freshman year, I helped make East a better school, to compete against. In 2012, the field hockey team won just about half of the games they played, the swimming team was offly small but was competition for others and we sure gave it our all that year; especially because half of our team were beginners! Later in the spring of 2013, the lacrosse team made it to districts for the first time in years, maybe even a decade or two; Mr. Wagner was a fantastic coach, so the players cannot take all of the credit.

This means that, in total, a marriage couple can give $10,800. Briffault specifies that $10,800 is over 12$ of median household’s income, meaning that this is a lot of money. Briffault also points out that individuals can give up to $33,000 to nation party committees each year. Additionally, Briffault states that in 2014 less than 0.5% of donations from individuals were more than $200, and 80% of those donations were under $2,500. However, this small percentage of donations actually accounted for 77% of total dollars donated by individuals. Therefore, the cap on individual donations only really effects a small minority of donors, who already account for over ¾ of the total donations. Briffault additionally argues to that large individual donations turn into political favors from elected officials. For example, both Donald Trump (before he got into politics) and Charles Koch are big political donors, who have been quoted saying they expect favors in return for their large donations. Finally, proponents of keeping the individual donation limit assert that most large donations come from non-constituents. For example, in 2014 Briffault states that 64% of donations that were $200 or more in House elections came from non-constituents; similarly, 19 out of 28 Senate incumbents seeking reelection received more than half of $200 or more contributions from non-constituents.

Personally, the key strength of this documentary was when the carbon tax was mentioned. The carbon tax is a tax on any kind of activity that puts carbon into the atmosphere. The goal here is to tax bad activities that have negative effects on other people in society. This will eventually "nudge" people towards doing the right thing. An example would be the increase in taxes for cigarettes; and when you tax something, you raise the price, therefore, people tend to consume less of

What I really liked about this documentary is that some of the points brought up are things that most people never talk about. For example, it mentioned that the most prescribed medication in the world is Lipitor, which is a diabetes medication. However, since the introduction of Lipitor to the public, the incidence of diabetes has not decreased, in fact the amount of people who suffer from diabetes has actually increased. This just shows that the way we are trying to solve the problem is not working. It seemed so strange to me that we spend so much money on the development of medications, yet the most used form of treatment doesn’t really help those who need it. Treating the symptoms is not a cure it is only a short term fix for a long term problem. Not are the people being cured, they are now going to be spending the rest of their lives dependent on medication, and we are yet to understand the long term effects of long term medication use. This also raises the question, if the medication is not helping what can? The documentary proposed that a complete change in diet was the answer. The documentary used a study that was done with people who had diabetes their whole lives and switched them to a whole foods plant based diet, and their health improved drastically. It was mind blowing