American Winter: Middle-Class Fear: Disaster Capitalism and the Threat of Poverty

[HipChick]

Recommended Watch..

"2yrs ago, these people were giving to these food donations center, and now they are hard pressed to find a pint of milk"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/22/1196243/-Review-American-Winter-HBO
The place of American Winter is Portland, Oregon, and the situation, the wake of the 2008 economic downturn that swept across the U.S. and the world. But the single greatest achievement of the film is the focus on eight families (ironically also the most troubling aspect as I will discuss below) who put "people just like us" faces on the consequences of disaster capitalism and force the audience to reconsider stereotypes of people trapped in the clutches of poverty.

The people of these narratives are overwhelmingly white and entirely from the middle and working classes—simultaneously, literally not "people just like us" (considering the increasing racial diversity of the country) but also the characteristics historically associated with the idealized middle class of the American Dream myth. It is both important and problematic that the families in this film are not victims of generational poverty, but real-world models of people who have embraced and achieved, although momentarily, some elements of that American Dream—education, careers, homes or the promise of home ownership, marriage, children, and, not to be ignored in the background throughout the video, an abundance of assorted material possessions that can be found in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms across America.

Punctuating these stories are job loss, eviction, homelessness, hunger, sickness, and the frail as well as dwindling safety nets of government, church, and private organizations.

[HiPointDem]

1. "Our worker self is not a subset of who we are as humans; our worker self is our self."

Many scenes in American Winter haunt me, but few as much as Brandon, reduced and broken, at the end in a scene that likely was intended as one glimmer of light in a truly dark winter for these families.

But Brandon—like many of the children in these families—personifies how disaster capitalism and consumerism have created an existence whereby our humanity is almost entirely anchored to who we are as workers. Our worker self is not a subset of who we are as humans; our worker self is our self.

[HipChick]

2. The mother living in a garage with son

[FirstLight]

3. very good review/article

...I want to see this film now....didn't know about it, so thanks!

While the focus on the plight of the American worker is needed and vivid in American Winter, one consequence of the choice to examine American workers dropping into poverty is that poverty is regrettable and something to be addressed only because it can (and did) happen to the working and middle class—in other words, generational poverty is left at the side of this film and the corrosive myth that generational poverty is the fault of those in poverty remains untouched.

THIS is the big thing that sticks out in my mind. I wonder what category I fall into, seriously. Because my poverty is not 'generational' but more circumstantial...and yet many would say it is my own fault because of bad choices. I say it was a result of bad luck and timing and loss of opportunity. My family was upper middle class in the 70s. (My dad worked for the phone company and my mom stayed at home, because she could in those days we didn't NEED 2 incomes to keep a family afloat.) I was the one who got married too young and was abandoned at 22 with a baby, I was the one who has been struggling to balance children, school, career, and survival for 20 years...I guess it is easier to blame those with more complex reasons for being poor, or maybe it's easier to sympathize with the 'nouveau poor' - those who contributed to the GDP up until they hit the skids. Would it justify my poverty and make it more socially acceptable if I worked for 10 years at a good job BEFORE the shit hit my fan?

[HipChick]

5. I fall into the catergory of a couple of paychecks away..

[SoCalDem]

6. MOST people are 3 checks away from financial ruin

[xchrom]

4. Du rec. Nt

[BeyondGeography]

7. Watching it now...devastating

heartbreaking, infuriating. We are in a very dangerous place here in America. Props to HBO for this essential documentation of our race to the bottom. It's not going to end anytime soon.