our nation. well was that it was full of heroes that we can never fully recover. but we can honor their sacrifice. and we must. while the u.s. may have all nervous fallen soldiers this memorial day weekend but what about the plight of those who returned home from the war we'll explore how america's female veterans are battling just to survive. and nuclear meltdowns fuel shortages floods and hurricanes global disasters are all plenty well foresight seems to be in short supply so could we have just ourselves to blame and are we setting up

a global foundation for failure. and it's a blast from the past debtors prisons are making up to come back here in the u.s. but if owing money isn't a criminal offense why are those down on their luck ending up behind bars. good evening it's tuesday may thirty fourth thirty first there is no thirty four pm here in washington d.c. i'm lucy coughing up and you're watching our. now as the country returns home from war from the three day weekend we wanted to take a little moment to remember what memorial day is supposed to be all about as a time to honor the men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice that of their laws and america's many conflicts from the civil war to vietnam korea iraq afghanistan the list of conflicts goes on but the lives of those who perished are not now all the dead were honored at countless ceremonies across the country this

weekend those who survived the ones who came home from the battlefield are now battling to make ends meet just to survive and among them are america's female veterans artie's honesty a church in their brings us the story of their struggle. first there are heroes the millions of us soldiers that have marched off to war under government whim then on their return abandoned souls they come home and see the truth about what they've been asked of you and i think this current glorification of the troops can't hide the reality of what happens when these young kids were men and come home and they are the real truth keris it is often and unexpected for many us war veterans come from simple places like this one often not the best off neighborhoods some are following a dream others are lured in by promises of a better life but there are also those that sometimes join the military because they don't have any other economic choice and what many people don't realize is

that american women can also fall into that category. women like a mother of two homeless and see both her children lost in a custody battle she served america for three years it was tell you that in the beginning you know it's going to be so glamorous the money is not as great as they say is going to be any more than what i make it. and when you get out is kind of you know difficult in a glimmer of hope amidst a daily fight for survival she's in the process of moving into this temporary home provided by a local shelter to chiquita america's wars are not worth the pain because a lot of lives were lost for no reason in the beginning it was weapons of mass destruction that there was no weapons of mass destruction. a lot of lives could have been saved a lot of people can still be. women make up fourteen percent of america's armed

forces officially banned from direct combat increasingly and are in it playing a more active role in america were fair than ever before more than two hundred thirty thousand women have served in iraq and afghanistan in the last ten years. but few welcome mat set to receive them on return for veterans like chiquita suffered neglect and physical disability others are tormented by demons like jessica goodell spent eight months in iraq collecting and sending home the bodies of well in marines i can leave my heart you know i don't have friends i don't like the anybody. and a lot of it you can't deal with. you know until it seems keep pushing it that alcoholism drug abuse and depression are widespread post-traumatic stress disorder affects the overwhelming majority of today's veterans there are some estimates of hundreds of thousands i actually think it's much more than that in my opinion anyone who stepped foot inside of iraq or afghanistan somewhere around ninety

percent of them have suffering from p.t.s.d. do you think that if chelsea clinton if alexandra pelosi had there on legs blown off or that it would be doing more for the veterans do you think there would be different treatment. of course there would instead there are an estimated one hundred thousand veterans who was on any given night one third to one fifth of the homeless population in america a minority or female five percent they often keep their plight so themselves the military's seems to have a very. what they call a tough mentality. and we've been taught at least what i was taught was that. what we experience we should keep it to ourselves and that it's no one else's problem and that we need to bear it but how much is too much obama has

vowed to eliminate veteran homelessness by twelve fifteen but i don't see him doing more than. anything but an end to wars would be a band-aid on a wound that requires are turning to stop bleeding and is this it sure can our party gary indiana now with us from war is dare crow a brave new foundation little to right there there thank you so much for being with us i wish we were talking about a more optimistic issue but unfortunately we're not what message do you have as this country returns back from his three day weekend honoring the dead. well i mean the problem with watering the living is that once these people come home they're also often forgotten their new statistics out just this week showing that the unemployment rate for returning veterans is a two percentage point increase over the unemployment rate for non-veterans it's even worse among those who are eighteen to twenty four they have

a one inside unemployment and that's because the jobs that they work when they're not in the military and the skills that they take up in the military i have been is there not marketable when they get home and those jobs takers have been really impacted by the recession so this points out not only the economic incentives that are being used to lure people into the military but also how those economic incentives are thought and that's just one flight tiny fraction of the bigger picture i mean when we talk about cutting defense spending on one of the biggest things you hear is well we know that the health care costs are are out of whack we need to spend less money on p.t.s.d. programs because we just don't have all of the money to support these veterans when they get home and i just find it ironic that when we talk about warming we usually talk and millions and billions were set to spend one hundred thirteen billion on afghanistan this fiscal year the white house wants i think one hundred seven billion for the next and yet when it comes to spending on those who've returned home from the conference the funds aren't there why the disparity. well it's

because on the balance sheet when you're trying to sell a war to congress or to the american people you can't show those indirect costs or the costs will be astronomical and that's the honest cost i mean just the glitz and linda bilmes show that the wars in iraq and afghanistan were going to cost originally three trillion dollars and they've since revised those estimates account for things like caring for wounded soldiers and if you remember when donald rumsfeld and his his cronies were selling the iraq war they were estimating only a few billion dollars worth of costs here but the reality is when these troops come home as she delivered to the center set up there many of them have p.t.s.d. that have to be dealt with many of them have life altering injuries and their families sometimes lose work because they have to stay home to care for them so when they recruit you for the military you should have this information in mind that your skills are probably not going to be marketable and you're probably not going to get that money for college and when you come home your injuries are going to not only affect your economic life but those of your family and the irony of

there is that the an announced that we spend on a deployed service person in afghanistan the according to the obama administration itself amounts to one million dollars per year on each service person in afghanistan because of rising fuel costs and cetera et cetera and yet we don't have that money to spend on folks to come back and it's really quite an outrage how do you not that we're actually talking a little bit more in congress about the impending drawdown of troops in afghanistan do you have any sense that there's a discussion about what to do with the veterans will be coming home. well i think what's really encouraging is that this week there's a story out of washington post it shown that the cost of war generally has become one of the top topics when we're talking about how fast it leaks troops and so i think that's a very encouraging sign because it's shifted away from the sort of scaremongering that got us into this mess into the more practical services can we afford to support and the cost of caring for the better and has got to be a part of it i mean just compare we spent a less than thousand dollars or more we're creating each person for the military

but less than a thousand dollars in the united states of educating each person or excuse me just slightly over the dollars and that tells you that our priorities are out of the black and we can't afford to keep sending people to this war that's not making us safer and it's not worth the cost and i think there is real hope that once these aftereffects of war are taken into account that congress is going to be a little more responsible about how how easily they allow the executives in to work you may have been encouraged by the washington post article but i was pretty discouraged by the wall street journal article i don't know if you saw that at the pentagon about saying that in retaliation to a cyber attack yeah we may use a real force and then troops on the ground in some instances so i don't know if i'd be thought to mistake about the end of a conflict that verify it's an absolute crazy idea also discouraged but it is what i mean we're going to invade a bunch of hackers a coffee shop somewhere. but i guess to close off this interview what what will it take how many. deaths how many what's what kind of toll will it take for the

country actually change its actions in the way that it treats and saturn's i think where they're actually at least as far as whether or not we're going to send people to war allow these or sitting in your most people oppose this wars and if you ask people how much we should spend to take care of veterans they'll tell you whatever it takes so the real question is are we going to allow ourselves to be taken into situations where we generate a wounded veterans of broken families in the future and judging by the way public sentiment is turning away from the afghanistan war and the way it's always been against the iraq war i think we've got a real chance here to solidify a foreign policy sentiment this country that says or should not be the first option it shouldn't be anything but the very last option of any option and when we do send people the taliban we have an obligation to take care don't we come on but to also be honest about how much that's going to cost well there thank you so much for helping us remember to honor not just those who have perished in the wars but the living as well that was their current political director at the briefing your

presentation now few people in this world would volunteer to experience something terrifying like a i don't know nuclear meltdown or catastrophic flood or drought for that matter but while disasters can't always be averted their effect from cumin seeds doesn't always have to be devastating now that is of course if we as politicians and societies actually do long term planning which sadly is often not the case so could the world use a little bit more foresight a lorry harvest of the resident dot net to the streets of new york to find. tornadoes ripping down buildings nuclear power plants melting down are we building our society responsibly are with any forethought at all this week let's talk about that do you think society thinks the long term or are they just always doomed to think of the short term i do depends which country you're in. i think americans are very short term. i think europe is. why aren't planes made of the material the

black box me out of. all it's like yeah we have those are just not enough for thought put into it i just maybe dad or maybe there's other things that we're not really seeing maybe it's you know i mean i'm sure a lot of i'm sure yeah some people are going to say it's some big government conspiracy or i think that the friends. companies but. there is no private interests in the. i hope that it's sure so maybe if there are people worried about making money so much they'd make things better for i think this is it i phones there's no thinking past the next five minutes do you have children i do doesn't that concern you that it does but i think we're ok the world in and last week and there were four billion years of the sun burns out so we will be ok well you know back in the thirty's we used to build projects that lasted. for one hundred years well they go to both of us the hoover dam is going to last

a long time with projects like that. this should last a thousand years because hopefully will be around in a thousand years right you put my buddy had a worker he's in construction so there's a lot of that too it is a fight against the corporation mainly. because you know i mean it's from a purely economic front of you taking. the it was going nowhere and the planet or the corporation who knows whether or not you think we're building society responsibly the bottom line is with lives and our planet on the line you can always strive to do better. i will ask you just watched from hurricanes to tornadoes floods even nuclear disasters it could be that we are our own worst enemy when it comes to preparation or lack thereof for that matter. well for more let's turn to harvey wasserman he's

a longtime anti-nuclear activists the editor of free dot org harvey thank you so much for being here now i know that you're more experienced in the specific specific issue of nuclear energy and sort of fighting to prevent disasters like for example fukushima from taking place ask someone who has spent such a long time blowing the whistle on potential dangers what do you think is to blame is it a lack of foresight by political leaders or is it corporate interests or what's really behind this i think there are two basic words that come to mind arrogance and greed i was in in fukushima actually in japan in the night midnight and seventy's the nuclear industry was warned that look your building needs on earthquake frogs the tsunami is a japanese word you had tsunamis at the site in fact i spoke with someone today who lived in the area and as a child experience that tsunami there's no there's no surprise here but for some reason corporate and government leaders believe that these things won't happen to

them and so it's incumbent on activists like myself and others to get together and make sure that these warnings are paid heed these nuclear plants have no business being built whatsoever and the the actions that have happened have been predictable what happened at three mile island was predicted people understood what happened it sure nobody could happen but the people in power who profited from it and who have an interest in the bureaucratic momentum we would not pay attention to this not really the full argument i mean at the end of the day in order to make changes there are sacrifices that have to take into effect something for example we heard that germany as a result of the fukushima disaster is now planning to shut down all of its nuclear power plants by twenty twenty two but what's going to fill that void and yes you can make a decision to be safe but are we really prepared to bear the cost of of. actually acting preventively well the great irony is doing the right thing is actually going

to be a huge economic benefit to to germany i hope you'll have me on in ten years and we will discuss how germany has jumped ahead of the rest of the world and is now dominating energy was solar and wind geothermal and all the other good increased efficiency and mass transit those are the technologies of the future the irony is that it's the corporations and the governments where investors and nuclear power who are trying to hold back their country germany did not do this by the way simply out of fear of a nuclear accident this decision would not have been taken in germany and ngo of merkel and the other the ruling establishment in germany not understood that jumping ahead the green power is probably the best economic decision the germany has made since world war two as a matter of fact because it is a tremendously well calculated and well understood jump to renewables the same

thing in japan that is fukushima is the prime minister of japan could not have made the decision to go away from nuclear power if japan did not already have a very well established program and solar energy and when power i mean short and solar and disagree c. in wind are going to be hugely profitable countries because of this decision but harvey it's not just about nuclear power it's really more of a way of thinking that the society has and i mean this is quite a global society it's easier to maintain the fattest closer to make changes will essentially harden people's lives for example katrina. new orleans the area where katrina took place should never have been built up to the state that it was i mean people simply should not have been living there because it's a potential project and yet you're not going to find a politician someone go say hey let's pack up an entire. city that has years and years and years of history and go so how do we do see him as a world as

a global society to be reaching this critical point where we need to take certain decisions otherwise who knows how the ecological situation's going to play out how do we get our political leaders our community leaders to a point where they're willing to look at the difficult fact that need to be taken but it's hard to katrina argument cuts both ways i mean the ninth ward. was protected by dates but it was poor people if the people of them or one were willing to invest in the dike system the way they should have a network work proposals on the table so invest the money in the dark system that would have the levee system that would have protected the oil and there was a huge scandal in the 1930's where the ruling powers of the one sacrificed a whole world area to protect the wealthy areas in the city unfortunately these decisions sometimes are made to benefit the race against war now it's always that

way you do wind up with bureaucratic momentum and united states there's a famous battle at gettysburg of pickett's charge which is completely insane and all the confederate journos do it was insane except for robert you really and none of the generals had any and none of the other generals had the courage to stand up to robert e. lee in the united states again with nuclear power and momentum developed in the government at the atomic energy commission the savings in france by the way and they went ahead with nuclear power and now it's like turning a giant ship around it's just very difficult but what we have what is so what do you do in that situation i mean do you do you turn extreme do you start lobbing molotov cocktails at corporations and locking yourself up in front of power plants . yes the latter you do not have a top down. no not knowledge not calculus but you do a lot you can lock yourself in the twenty first century we have come to understand that nonviolence is the way to go gandhi taught us and martin luther king eugene b.

debs in united states nonviolence is the map that of making social change we understand that we also understand now in the environmental movement that would be good for the environment even though it may cost some corporations some money and that in the short term is always some way good for the economy everything that we're arguing for in renewable energy is good for the economy and the same is true of social justice but hardly the question but i'm sorry about that the politicians aren't listening maybe the nonviolence message isn't all there as to whether some politicians are visiting a look at angle merkel she was pro-nuclear a month ago she's a scientist she was deeply affected by the way on a personal basis by fukushima so thankfully she has the scientific training to understand how bad fukushima is and that the german reactors are susceptible to similar damage and as an individual with a scientific background she made the decision so you know we have turned politician from being pro nuclear and being anti nuclear from being pro-war to being anti-war

from being pro wealthy to being working for social justice these things do work and what we found in the green energy movement as well as the social justice movement and so many of the women's rights movement so much they have a movement that's what's good for justice and what's good for the environment is ultimately good for the economy and that's a tough sell in the interim but in the long term it always proved to be true well it's a tough sell indeed and i guess we'll have to have you back in another decade if we're not done in the rapture first to see if the politicians are actually listening thank you so much that's harvey wasserman editor of music free dot org. now some ideas are simply best left in the past whether it's legwarmers bell bottom . to the so-called paleolithic diet or no into that but there's one disturbing comeback that has flown largely under the radar and search turned up better presence that's happening right here in twenty first century america and according to reports more and more american citizens are winding up behind bars for debt

arrested locked up in some cases just for missing a few credit card payments but owing money is not a criminal offense in this country america abolished its better prisons which we did used to have one a century ago so what's really going on here in our debtor prisons really truly making a comeback well for the answer we decided to turn to bryce covert she's an assistant editor at the new deal to point a blog at the roosevelt and stupid and. it's clear that there's a huge jump in arrest warrants being used for that collectors trying to collect their. ordinary citizens as you said america outlawed that is prisons back in one thousand nine hundred so it's not that there's a prison our people are being thrown to languish for not paying sixty cents like they used to be but arrest warrants and jail time is being used as a punishment or coersion to get people who aren't paying their bills or who missing court appearances to pay up and now at the same time i mean can't you argue that

people need to learn how to live within their means and there needs to be consequences for people who buy things with money that they they don't have i mean you know we're in an economic recession we're in a crisis there's a reason that we've gotten to this point should there be consequences for bad actions. sure there is no replacement for responsibility and people do need to pay the bills and the loans that they take out the problem is that over the past decade couple of decades people have seen their wages either stagnate or fall and to plug that hole americans have been using credit and basically debt to pay for rent to pay for food paid for clothes and during a global build up that was all well and good been out of the bubbles burst a lot of people are finding themselves in difficult positions and of course we need to encourage people to be paying back their loans but throwing them in jail isn't actually going to solve anything because your actually not able to go out and make money to pay back those debts are simply languishing in

a prison so you know we need to be able to punish people who are being fraudulent doing it to encourage people to pay the debt that they owe but we often need to make sure that it's being done in an effective way and from your from your reporting from the work that you've done what kind of people are essentially getting thrown in jail for dead i mean are these usually criminals or are they more i don't know soccer moms and sort of your average neighbor down the street. it's a really wide range and some of them are sort of ordinary people one of the problems is that the debt collection agencies aren't necessarily doing their job to let people know that they're being pursued for debt so it just could be someone who owes them money but isn't aware that they're being prosecuted until they're being arrested and that's one of the biggest problems with the system is that it's not really a system that the information isn't being accurately spread you know in a free market system and it only works if everybody's got the right information in their hands so you know it's it's guys who own money on car loans it's moms who are

trying to pay back credit card bills and it can be as little as eighty five dollars to a couple thousand well they're definitely using any tactics that they can i mean this is how they make their money to buy these debts for pennies on the dollar and then use any means necessary to go after them sometimes it's through threatening jail time arrest warrants sometimes it's just plain old harassing people the cops aren't really complicit in this they have also protested because this is misusing their resources they're having a hard time going after real crimes because there's this backlog of debtors that they're supposed to be going after and you know exact that cost them money that cost the manpower but it's not really a good way for these people to be going about getting their money back i mean there's always going to be the need to deal with fraudulent cases people who are neglecting their bills and really to sort of running from them but just as a means to try to coerce people to paying their bills this seems like an

ineffective use of their power and how do you have any sense of people finally catching on to the trend that something may actually be done about it. definitely there's been some movement to make sure. when this is happening that the. debt collection agencies like i said they're not always letting people know that they're doing this or using wrong addresses the mailings are going to someone else so the people who are actually being pursued don't even know about it until this arrest warrant comes so there's been a movement to make sure that the debt collector has to prove that they tried to contact the person and actually contacted them before an arrest warrant is actually used which would actually go a long way because some people at least aware of what's happening and they can either choose to pay it back or you know if they don't then things proceed but at least they're given the opportunity i mean i just i don't understand how people can just not get outraged about this that these companies could go and knowingly not provide old information that's needed to get to these poor people who probably would actually pay the money if they knew that they could be thrown in jail for not

doing it i'm just surprised that there's not more outrage from politicians from the media from people who have gone through the. i think it's an industry that's sort of flown under the radar a bit you know you can sort of in my mind i put them together with maybe payday loans and pawn shops that have kind of outrageous practices or outrageous fees and they prey upon the lower income people in our society and like i said agencies like the s.t.c. are out there trying to protect them but they've just been stretched thin starved of the manpower in a cash they need so there's just not the effective regulatory agencies keeping an eye on these people i do think that the consumer financial protection bureau once it's up and running has a chief and actually sort of an acting its own rules is going to go a long way to dealing with these things i'm sure this will be on their radar because they're out there to protect consumers and with someone dedicated to that idea i think that a lot of these practices will be uncovered and then address but haven't we gotten into this financial crisis because the people that are elected and put on boards to

protect consumers and the economy have not done their job to date and we don't exactly have a great track record in this country of protectors of americans doing their job and federal regulators doing what they're supposed to do. definitely we struck a stronger regulatory system i think the financial reform bill that passed the dodd frank act is going a long way to reforming that system there was too many loopholes there were too many you know agency that didn't have the authority they needed to go in and correct things and i think the c.f.p. be standing alone and focus just on consumers is exactly what we need here. that was price covert of the new deal two point zero firstly that does it for this show for more on the stories that we cover today or any other day you can go to our q dot com slash usa and check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america of course as always you can follow me on twitter as well it's at lucy and of so.