This Week in Poverty: American Winter by Greg Kaufmann

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/09-0


City Harvest Mobile Market food distribution site, New York. (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, I’ve been waiting for a documentary to make the case that low-income people and the middle class are now in the same boat—that old distinctions people created to divide them are obsolete, with so many people living near poverty, or an illness, lost job, or disaster away from poverty.

A hundred and six million Americans, or more than one in three, now live below twice the poverty line—on less than $36,000 for a family of three, forced to make choices between basic necessities like food, housing, healthcare and education, and with little to no savings to help through tough times; wealth is increasingly concentrated, with the richest 1 percent now possessing 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Certainly the numbers suggest a convergence of interests among the poor and non-rich.

Now, finally, a movie has arrived that shows the precariousness of the US economy for the majority of Americans, refusing to distinguish between a deserving and non-deserving poor: American Winter.

Filmed over the winter of 2011–12 in Portland, Oregon, the documentary tells the stories of eight families, showing the human costs of a frayed safety net and a proliferation of low-wage work. Emmy Award–winning filmmakers Joe and Harry Gantz, creators of HBO’s Taxicab Confessions, worked with the nonprofit organization 211info in Portland, monitoring calls from distressed families who were turning to the emergency hotline in search of help. They then followed the stories of some of these callers over many months.