Opening Paragraph
“I grew up in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment. My older brother, Larry, and I spent years sleeping on couches in the living room…Fifty-six years after I left, I had a chance to visit the apartment where I spent my first eighteen years. Somehow, it had shrunk. God, it was small. The kitchen/dining room was tiny. It was hard to imagine our family of four having dinner there every night together. And the whole building looked dingier than I remembered. And so many apartments on one floor.”
The Brooklyn Dodgers
Sanders waxes nostalgic about his love for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the heartbreak experienced when the team was moved to Los Angeles, but his point is not mere nostalgia. He paints a portrait of himself as a metaphor for the community at large in order in order to point out that while the decision to move the team was made by one man for financial reasons mostly benefitting himself, it was a decision that devastated the community which had been responsible for enriching him in the first place. The imagery speaks to the fact that ownership of a company is more complicated than a name on a form.
Iraq
The word “Iraq” is infused with a metonymic quality of imagery across the breadth of the entire book. Sanders uses it to draw attention to the fact that foreign policy is not just about how many foreign leaders one has met with, it is also about casting the right vote on disastrous decision to invade other countries. Iraq is imagery that speaks to the hypocrisy of so-called fiscal conservatives willing to spend trillions on an unnecessary war while battling over spending billions to improve their own country.
Minimum Wage
The fight to raise the minimum continued well after publication of the book. Sanders introduces one concrete image with which it is very difficult to argue that raises the specter of who and who is not deserving of an increase in their wages.
“Wal-Mart claims it cannot afford to pay its workers $15 an hour, it was able to find enough money to pay its CEO more than $19.4 million in 2015 —or more than $9,000 an hour. If Wal-Mart can pay its CEO $9,000 an hour, it can afford to increase the wages of its workers to $15 an hour.”
Inherent—but unwritten—in this image is the focus of the battle over wages: If the CEO of a company who has been deemed more valuable to the company than the employees working beneath him were to take off work for a month, would the consequences of that absence be more or less devastating than if the number of employees whose yearly wages collectively equaled the salary of that CEO were to take off for a month? The imagery that Sanders proposes is not really about the sum total of its CEO’s salary, but rather than hourly worth it assigns to its employees. Or, in other words, using the figures Sanders provides above, Wal-Mart is asserting that in any given hour, the work the CEO does is worth more than 600 times the work done by any hourly wage earner in the company.
