"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...

Record unemployment and rampant corporate avarice, empty houses but homeless families, dwindling opportunities in an increasingly paralyzed nation—these are the realities of 21st-century America, land of the free and home of the new middle class poor. Award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West, one of the nation’s leading democratic intellectuals, co-hosts of Public Radio’s Smiley & West, now take on the...

Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, the author decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job, any job, can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from...

"Three of the nation's top scholars, known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America, turn their attention from the country's poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America's most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there....

Stereotypes tell us it's easy to spot the homeless-after all, life on the street tends to leave a mark on people. But is a "homeless profile" really meaningful? In today's economy a man in a business suit might well be living in his car; and besides, to those in society's upper echelons, homelessness is often invisible. This program offers a profound exploration of homelessness, focusing on factors like addiction, financial hardship, mental illness,...

This Prelinger Archives film visits poor areas of the United States, particularly hard-hit agricultural areas, and discusses social and economic programs encompassed by the "War on Poverty." This second part continues to focus on information about school and daycare programs helping to give poor children greater advancement. Viewers visit a school program helping teenagers who are working on a third- or fourth-grade level and a parent who has more-or-less...