Video and Multimedia

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Video Links
Bill Moyers--Expose on the Business of Poverty
Poverty has become big business in the United States as a number of corporations have found ways to fill the “need” many poor people have for credit/financing. This investigative report describes predatory lending practices that specifically target poor people.

West Virginia, Still Home
This short video from the New York Times profiles economically depressed McDowell County, West Virginia. The area offers few economic opportunities and so its young people are moving away. It depicts an unfortunate cycle that is difficult to halt, much less reverse.

Audio Links
This American Life 331: Habeas Schmabeas 2007
The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means that our government has to explain why it’s holding a person in custody. But now, the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas--or even by the Geneva Conventions--because they’re the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes? In Act 1, Jack Hitt explains how President Bush’s War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war and how it is that under those rules, it’d be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States could still be locked up indefinitely--potentially forever!--at Guantanamo. Act 2 explains that Habeas corpus began in England. And recently, 175 members of the British parliament filed a “friend of the court” brief in one of the U.S. Supreme Court cases on habeas and Guantanamo--apparently, the first time in Supreme Court history that’s happened. In their brief, the members of Parliament warn about the danger of suspending habeas: “During the British Civil War, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief.” In London, reporter Jon Ronson goes in search of what happened. Act 3 explains that though more than 200 prisoners from the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay have been released, few of them have ever been interviewed on radio or on television in America. Jack Hitt conducts rare and surprising interviews with two former Guantanamo detainees about life in Guantanamo.

Tough Choices: How the Poor Spend Money
This Marketplace segment examines how those at the economic margins make decisions about how to allocate their scant economic resources.

Web Links
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics is a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of U.S. men, women, and children and the families in which they reside. Data on employment, income, wealth, health, housing, food expenditures, transfer income, and marital and fertility behavior have been collected annually since 1968.

The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study
The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is a study of the social and economic life course of 10,000 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957, and who have been followed up at ages 25, 36, and 53–54.