Barbara Ehrenreich: Movie Analysis

Gustafson, Kaaryn. "The Criminalization of Poverty." Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 99.3 (2009): 643-716. ProQuest. Web. 8 Oct. 2013

First, there is a huge number of poor people in America being affected by the government mistreating them. In the article, “How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty,” Barbara Ehrenreich shows the difficulty of being poor in America. Ehrenreich states, “Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the states, being in debt can now land you in jail” (381). The government makes it even harder for people struck by poverty. It seems law enforcement singles out poor people and fines them for ridiculous things such as, not being able to pay for their children education, having a messy yard, or littering. Also, Ehrenreich notes, “If we take an extremely low ball $200 per misdemeanor, and bear in mind that 80-90% of criminal offenses are committed by people who are officially indigent, them local governments are using law enforcement to

“It is Expensive to be Poor”, a work by Barbara Ehrenreich, published in The Atlantic January 13, 2014 discusses the trials and tribulations faced by struggling families. One may ask themselves why Ehrenreich published this article in The Atlantic, who is she trying to reach? According to stateofthemedia.org, The Atlantic’s average reader is 53 years old and has a household income of $88,000 per year. Ehrenreich’s works are often opinion pieces related to social injustice, women’s rights, healthcare, and economic injustice. With this information I can infer the audience are middle- aged, middle class women who are likely to empathize with the “struggling heroines” mentioned in this work. Ehrenreich wrote this article to educate her audience on the lifestyle of the poor in “the wealthiest country in the world”. She uses rhetorical devices such as

Tirado’s husband, an army veteran, was denied the stipend owed to him because of a clerical error, which took months to sort out. During this time, their family moved and the system pegged them as receiving benefits for the state they had departed and were not able to get the benefits transferred to their new home state, so they couldn't qualify for food stamps. With this trouble, Tirado and her husband had to scrape together and budget enough from their minimum-wage jobs to put themselves at low-end private landlords in order to avoid public housing. One day, the rental quarters flooded and ruined everything they had, and the landlord refused to treat the mold that had began to spread after a lousy clean up job. Since Tirado could not afford to find another place to rent, their family moved into a motel. Upon moving out of the mold-infested rental, the landlord had sued them for breaking the lease. With no

It is easy for anyone to tell that the life of the working poor is not the ideal lifestyle. Though in Ehrenreich’s words, “It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition.” (214)She means to say that it is easy for the nonpoor to ignore the true realities of those in the working class. Many in fact are not ignoring the realities but have never become aware of them in the first place. This is further supported by Ehrenreich statements about how the media rarely ever truly shows the realities of the working poor. It is hard for society to take action for a cause they truly don’t understand. Though by declaring the working poor as a state of emergency this would draw attention to the realities of the average lifestyle. In such creating

In Barbara Ehrenreich's bold and honest book she tackles the issue of poverty in America head on, by becoming a low wage worker herself. Ehrenreich delves into the often unheard of issues relating to poverty and low wage work, providing her readers with a new perspective on America's working poor and manages to give her audience a stark emotional, yet logical and factual, look into the working class' poverty epidemic. She uses her own anecdotal evidence and supports it with statistics and facts, appeals to ethos by challenging the ethics of corporate America and it costs, finally she hits an emotional chord with readers by reminding them of what low wage workers must endure so that we can live in our America.

Deborah E. Lipstadt is one of the literary writers who have always used various strategies in portraying their messages and ensuring that their ideas reach the potential target groups without failure. Also, in ensuring that her ideas rich the target group, Lipstadt have moved an extra mile of publishing written information which is later elaborated through the use of movies such as the one analyzed inhere. These tend to concentrate on the main ideas which are written and by use of the same characters. This is a factor that has enhanced full understanding and conceptualization of the details by the readers and the moviegoers.

Like the previous example of our class activity, you can gather some information about the family to personally consider whether you think the people portrayed deserve help. In the opening of the book, Andrea Campbell gives us information about the couple’s job status, income, and family size, which allows the reader to make a first opinion on the family’s deservedness. Once this introduction is made, the reader can see the twists and turns that can lead a family into needing government help, which is often the part of the story that gets lost – as most assume those in poverty are there because of their own ambition or actions. The wife gets in an accident, which forces the couple to take an insurance plan from the California government that is designed to keep them in poverty by taking away their income after a set cap is reached (Campbell 2014). The book continues to take the reader through the experience of trying to survive on social insurance and means-tested programs (those where recipients must hold a job or other status to maintain benefits), and ends with three Chapters discussing the difficulties that means-tested programs create for those in poverty. By forcing the reader to, in some way, experience a very average story about surviving in poverty, the book forces the reader

As the author moved from locale to locale she identified a variety of recurring hardships faced by the working poor. The chief concern for many was housing. Finding and maintaining economical housing was the principal source of disruption in their lives. For many of the working poor it’s not uncommon to spend more than 50% of income on housing. These leaves a scarce amount of money left over for anything else and creates a situation where the person is always worried about losing their shelter. In a nutshell, it’s Ehrenreich’s conviction that wages are too low and rents are too high. She does speak with many individuals who simply cannot afford the high rental rates and are forced to live with family, friends, or in some

Go to Chicago, New York, Paris or Madrid, on every street corner you see a person less advantaged, poor, and desperate. Then go in a store, see others carrying expensive bags, swiping their credit card left and right. We live in a world of extreme poverty, balance seems nonexistent. Poverty can result in broken homes and in turn, broken lives. In the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Walter Mcmillian’s adult life, Trina Garnett’s childhood and Antonio Nuñez’s domestic life show that poverty was the cause of their incarceration and determined the success of their lives.

Barbara Ehrenreich began her research to explore how people attempting to move from welfare to work are managing—if at all. This exploration also extended to those who are apart of the working class and having not been on welfare. Attempting to place herself in the position of her subjects, Ehrenreich strived to see if she were able to survive on the minimal income provided by a series of low level and low paying jobs. In was her foreknowledge of laws and the inclusion of these laws in Nickel and Dimed that brought about exposing historical and present-day 21st century contradictory practices, laws, and regulations that exploit the poor working class (if not through her experiment but by the subjects’ honest experience). In

In No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing, the author Waverly Duck tries to understand why all the residents of Bristol Hill would live in a crime and poverty infested neighborhood. He challenges the views of dated theories from well-known sociologists, Erving Goffman and Elijah Anderson, and policy making strategies regarding the poor communities in America. The book takes a considerable step towards distorting the misconceptions about Bristol Hill that most outsiders have. Waverly helps readers recognize the race, inequality and value of collective efficiency in such isolation.

Many reforms in the UnitedStates have been passed to help fight against the “War on Poverty”; but it has not been effective in eradicating poverty in the U.S. There are about 46 million people who are living in impoverished conditions and poverty continues to be a social issue in this country (Heritage Foundation, 2011) In the beginning, our country was formed under the belief that “this land is the land of opportunity and if we worked hard enough the American Dream can be gained” (Schwarz, 1997). People immigrate to this country today in hopes of becoming rich so they could gain a better life. In spite of coming to this country for a better life, many are faced with the lack of skills and money to succeed. In the end, most will end

Many people in the United States are currently or have been a victim of poverty in today’s society. A number of economic poverty lines, poverty gaps and poverty orderings have been proposed. In general poverty it is the terms of income distribution and inequality (Poverty: An International Glossary. 2006, p61-62. 2p). In regards to poverty, there are various aspects in life that affect people in these communities. The largest concentration of poverty is public housing which is also known as “The Projects”. This then leads to many drug trade transactions and a growing epidemic of violence. Many people that are victims of poverty feel that the system is designed for them to fail.

During my experiences in and out of the country, I have noticed, everywhere in the world, that the lower class is being discriminated against. Poverty is the society’s way of perpetually dehumanizing people and subjecting them to unlivable conditions while calling it just (Taniguchi). Years ago in 1895, Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, in which he highlighted that “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (Dickens 7). Unfortunately, this is still a fact today. The wealthy are in their best times while the poor are being oppressed against.