From the Mirage of a Middle-Class Life to the Slavery of Debt

By Joshua Holland

America is very wealthy country, but one has to wonder how much of our wealth is in fact a chimera, spun of a consumerist ideal and given the appearance of solidity by a flood of easy credit? How much poverty and real economic pain is covered up by an endless succession of pay-day loans and EZ-finance rip-offs that eventually just bury people under mountains of debt from which they have little chance of digging themselves out.

What Scurlock's camera does brilliantly is lay bare an issue that affects millions of working Americans but is usually buried under layers of shame and taboo. The film tells the individual human stories that lie behind the bankruptcy statistics, behind the foreclosure numbers. The book, released this week, follows up with much of the narrative power and depth that the film missed.

Credit card fees went from $1.7 billion dollars per year in 1996 to almost $18 billion last year