SSSP 2011 Annual Meeting
Film Exhibit Schedule
The film exhibit is scheduled for Saturday, August 20 at Harrah’s Las Vegas Hotel. It is organized by Program Committee Chair Karen McCormack, Wheaton College.
8:00am – 9:40am
Ain’t I a Person*
*with apologies to Sojourner Truth
During the past quarter century, a myth has developed that poor people are lazy and that providing them with government assistance leads to dependency and a lack of personal responsibility. The reality is very different. The poverty rate dropped sharply in response to the War on Poverty programs, only to level off in the late 1970s when those programs started getting cut back, and increasing through the Reagan-Bush era attacks on social welfare. The slight drop in the late-1990s has already disappeared, and the poverty rate has skyrocketed during the so-called Great Recession. The plight of the poor has just gotten worse. While the accepted wisdom now is that public interventions do not work, that is a myth: the reality is that they have and still could.
Our goals with this film project were two-fold: first, to dispel some of the myths that are now rampant about poverty; and, second, to bring a human face back to poverty.
What does it mean to be poor? For 2008, the Department of Health and Human Service guidelines were an income $21,200 or less for a family of four (say, a two-parent household and two children). For a single earner, someone would have to earn almost $10.00 an hour to be at the poverty threshold for a family of four, while the minimum wage here in Ohio was $7.00 an hour then. In reality, how many families could pay all their bills in a typical urban area on a gross income of $1,703 a month?
Even at the height of the AFDC program, only about one-third of those falling below the official poverty line received public assistance. The myth of “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs is firmly entrenched but has virtually nothing to do with reality. So who are the poor? For the most part, they are working and struggling to pay their bills. Many work more than one job out of necessity. They are the people we see as cashiers in stores, as receptionists and workers in offices. They are the people who clean buildings, who paint houses, who fix cars, who drive buses, and so on.
In order to bring back a sense of community and caring among people in this country, we need to put faces on those in poverty. We need to show the faces of people who are working but who cannot afford health insurance for their children. We need to show the faces of people who are working but cannot afford after-school programs for their children. We need to show the faces of people who mingle with the non-poor everyday – in stores, restaurants, schools, theaters, shopping malls – but who have become invisible.
The focus of this film is the stories of the poor (and near-poor) about how they manage their lives and families – finding decent housing, finding adequate jobs and pay, dealing with sick children and health problems, finding affordable and quality day care, dealing with the education of their children, getting help when needed – problems that most of us face in this society. How can we have empathy and compassion for the poor without being able to put ourselves into their shoes? (length: 144 minutes)
12:30pm – 2:10pm
The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands
THE INSULAR EMPIRE is the first film to document the United States historical and ongoing role as a colonial power. Six thousand miles west of California, the Mariana Islands are American territory; but after generations of loyalty, the people of Guam and the Northern Marianas still remain second-class US citizens. Following the personal stories of four indigenous island leaders, this provocative film explores the history of American colonization in the Pacific. It is a moving story of loyalty and betrayal, about a patriotic island people struggling to find their place within the American political family.
2:30pm – 4:10pm
The Billionaire’s Tea Party: How Corporate America is Faking a Grassroots Revolution
In the summer of 2009, shortly after Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress swept to power promising a new era of hope and change, a citizens’ protest movement emerged out of nowhere threatening to derail their agenda. Some said this uprising was the epitome of grassroots democracy. Others said it was a classic example of ‘astroturfing’ – an elaborate corporate public relations effort designed to create the impression of a spontaneous uprising. Curious to find out for himself, Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham goes undercover into the heart of the movement. He visits raucous health care town hall meetings where irate voters parrot insurance industry PR; learns that home-grown “citizen groups” challenging the science behind climate change are funded by big oil companies; and infiltrates a tea party movement whose anti-government rage turns out to be less the product of populist rage than of corporate strategy. In the end, The Billionaire’s Tea Party offers a terrifying look at how corporate elites are exploiting the anxieties of ordinary Americans – capitalizing on anger, resentment, and paranoia to advance a narrow, often anti-democratic, agenda.
