our nation. owes a debt to its fallen heroes that we can never fully repaired. but we cannot other sacrifice. and we must well fallen for the soldiers more honored this memorial day weekend but what about the plight of those who returned from war alive we'll explore how america's veterans are battling to survive. and nuclear meltdowns fuel shortages floods and hurricanes global disasters are plenty of foresight seems to be in short supply so when disaster strikes could we ourselves be to blame. and

that's of blast from the past that our presidents are making a comeback here in the u.s. but if owing money isn't coming off france why are those down on their luck and then up behind bars. it's tuesday may thirty first i'm losing caffeine up here in washington d.c. and you're watching our t.v. . now as a country returns to work from the three day weekend we want to take a little moment to remember what memorial day is really all about as a time to honor the men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice out of their lives and riggers many conflicts from the civil war to vietnam korea iraq afghanistan the list goes on but the lives of those who perished unfortunately do not now while the dead were honored countless ceremonies all across the country this weekend those who came home from the battlefields are now battling to make ends meet and among them are america's female veterans as archie's honesty

a charkha brings us the story of their struggle seqlock. first their heroes the millions of us soldiers that have marched off to war on a government whim then on their return abandoned so they come home and see the truth about what they've been asked to do and i think this current glorification of the troops can't hide the reality of what happens when these young kids women and men come home and they are the real truth tellers it is often an unexpected many u.s. war veterans come from simple places like this one often not the best off neighborhoods some are following your 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 chiquita a mother of two almost to see both her children lost in

a custody battle she served america for three years did was tell you that in the medium in you know it's going to be so glamorous the money is not as great as they say it is going to be any more than what i make it. and when you get out is you know difficult in a glimmer of hope amidst to give you a fight for survival she's in the process of moving into this temporary. home provided by local shelter to chiquita america's wars are not worth the thing they cause a lot of lives were lost for no reason in the beginning it was weapons of mass destruction but there was no weapons of mass destruction and. a lot of lives could have been a lot of people still be here women make up fourteen percent of america's armed forces officially banned from direct combat pay increase and we end up in it playing a more active role in american war fare than ever before more than two hundred

thirty thousand women have served in iraq and afghanistan in the last ten years but few welcome assets to receive them on return while veterans like chiquita suffer neglect and physical disability others are tormented by demons like jessica goodell who spent eight months in iraq collecting and sending home the bodies of fallen marines i couldn't leave my apartment you know i didn't have friends and anybody. and a lot of it you can feel it. you know until it keep pushing it back out holism 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 actually think it's much more than that in my opinion anyone who stepped foot inside of iraq or afghanistan some around ninety percent of them are suffering from p.t.s.d. do you think that if chelsea clinton. if

alexandra pelosi had their arms or legs blown off or that they 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 homeless on any given night one third to one fifth of the homeless population in america a minority or female five percent the often keep their plight to themselves the military. to have a very. what they call a tough mentality. 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. and that we need to bear it but how much is too much obama has vowed to eliminate that are in homelessness by twelve fifteen but i don't see him doing more

than that and lose who did to me and is anything but an end to wars would be a band-aid on a wound that requires or turn a carrot to stop bleeding and i think you're going to archie gary indiana now with us from war is there crow a great new foundation he's a political director there dark you so much for being with us i wish we were talking about a more optimistic issue but unfortunately we're not what we got and what message do you have as this country returns back from a three day weekend honoring the dead. well i mean the problem with on or not living is that once these people come home there are also often forgotten there are new statistics out just this week showing get the unemployment rate for returning veterans is a true percentage point increase over the unemployment rate for non-veterans it's even worse among those who are eighteen to twenty four yet one in five unemployment rate and that's because the jobs that they work with are not in the military and

the skills that make up in the military have been not marketable when they get home and those job seekers and it's really impacted by the recession so it just points out not only the economic incentives that are being used to lower people into the military but also how those economic incentives are thoughts and that's just one flight a tiny fraction of the bigger picture i mean when we talk about cutting defense spending on one of the biggest things we 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 war i mean we really talking millions and billions were set to spend one hundred thirteen billion on a pianist and 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 conflicts the funds aren't there why the disparity. well it's because on a 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 stiglitz and lind of illness show that the wars in iraq and afghanistan were going to cost originally three trillion dollars and they've since revised those estimates up when you account for things like caring for wounded soldiers if you remember when donald rumsfeld and his his cronies were selling the iraq war they were estimating only a few billion dollars for it costs here but the reality is when these troops come home as to deliver to send your set up there are 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 and take care of 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 there is that the amount the we spend on a deployed service person in afghanistan this is according to the obama administration itself announced

a one million dollars per year on each service person in afghanistan now because of rising fuel costs etc etc and yet we don't have that money to spend on folks that come back and it's really quite and how do you now that we're actually talking a little bit more and 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 of the washington post and shown that the cost of war generally has become one of the top topics when we're talking about how fast the previous trips so and so i think that's a very encouraging sign because it has shifted away from the sort of scaremongering that got us into this mess into the more practical terms of can we afford these wars and the cost of caring for these veterans has got to be a part of it i mean just compare we spend a lemon thousand dollars or more recruiting each person for the military but less than a thousand. dollars in the united states of educating each person or she's going just slightly over a thousand times and that tells you that our priorities are out of whack and you

can't afford to keep sending people to this war it's not making us safer and it's not worth the cost and i think there is real hope that once these after effects of war are taken into account that congress is going to be a little more responsible about how how easily they allow the executive to take us 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 the pentagon is now saying that in retaliation to a cyber attack yeah we may use real force and 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's terrifying it's it's an absolutely crazy idea that guy but also discouraged by that i mean were they going to invade a bunch of hackers at a coffee shop somewhere. but i guess i have to close off this interview why 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 its reverence 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 seeking to new 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 the situations where we generate wounded veterans and 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 sense in this country that says war should not be the first option it shouldn't be anything but the very last option of any option and when we do sin people to come back we have an obligation to take care of and we come home but to also be honest about how much that's going to cost well their thank you so much for helping us remember to honor not just those who have perished in the wars that the living as well that was their crow political director at the brave new foundation. now few people in this world would actually volunteer to experience a nuclear meltdown or catastrophic floods earthquake drought and disaster. well

disasters themselves can't always be averted there are threats from humans doesn't always have to be devastating that is of course if we plan for the long term which unfortunately also often is not the case so could the world use a little bit more foresight for laura harvest of the resident dot net took to the streets of new york to find out. tornadoes ripping down buildings nuclear power plants melting down are we building our society responsibly our with any forethought it 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 a short term rich country or. i think americans are very short term. why aren't planes made of the material black knocks me out of. this like you know we that those are just not enough for thought put into it i 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 that it's something government conspiracy or i think friends. companies but. there is no private interests and. i hope that it's true so maybe if their people weren't worried about making money so much they'd make things better for i think this is the i phones there's no next five minutes do you have children i do doesn't it concern you that. i think we're ok the world in. four billion years the sun burns out so they will be ok well you know back in the thirty's we used to build projects that. for for one hundred years well they built their will to last that hoover dam is going to last a long time. just like that and more this should last a thousand years because hopefully will be around in a thousand years right you put my body had to work or use in construction so

there's a lot of that to it is a fight against the corporation on my mainly. because you know i mean it's from a purely economic or point of view taking. cost a lot so it was going to when 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 we can always strive to do better. i will have to just watch from hurricanes to tornadoes floods even nuclear disasters could it be that we are our own worst enemy comes to preparation or lack thereof for that matter but for more let's turn to harvey wasserman who's a longtime anti-nuclear activists and the editor of new free dot org harvey thank

you so much for being here and now i know that your more experienced in this but the specific issue of nuclear energy and sort of fighting to prevent disasters like for example fukushima from taking place absolutely was 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 there are two basic words that come to mind arrogance and greed i was in there in fukushima actually in japan in the my mid one nine hundred seventy s. the nuclear industry was warned that look you're building these 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 it's a balmy 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 accidents that have happened have been predictable what happened at three mile island was predicted people understood what happened it showed no boat could happen but the people in power who profited from it and who had interest in the bureaucratic momentum since we were god pay attention but that's not really the the full argument i mean at the end of the day in order to make changes there are sacrifices that have to take into stats i mean for example we heard to germany as a result of this because human disasters now it's like. 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 actually acting preventively all the great ideas to doing the right thing is actually going to be a huge economic benefit to to germany i hope you have been 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 an increase in efficiency and mass transit those are the technologies of the future the irony is that the corporations and the government supported best in the nuclear power who are trying to hold it 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 angola herco and there and the other the ruling establishment in germany not understood that jumping ahead to 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 back and fukushima is the prime minister of japan could not have

made the decision to go away from the clear power if japan did not already have a very well established program and solar energy and when power i mean short and solar and bits of b.c. and when you are going to be hugely profitable countries because of this decision for her that 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 fighting global society it's easier to maintain the status quo than to make changes that will eventually harden people's lives for example katrina. new orleans the area we're katrina took place should never have. then built up to the state that it was i mean people simply should not have been living there because of the potential flood risk and yet you're not going to find a politician someone go say hey let's pop 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 of a global society to be reaching this critical point where we need to take certain

decisions otherwise who knows how the ecological situation is 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 sacrifices that need to be taken but it's hard because you're in oregon it cuts both ways i mean the ninth ward. was protected by diets but it was poor people if the people of the more wanted were willing to invest in the very system the way they should have a network or proposals on the table so invest the money in that dark system that litter the levee system that would have protected no one when there was a huge scandal in the 1930's where the ruling powers of norman sacrificed a whole rural area to protect the wealthy areas in the city unfortunately these decisions sometimes are made to benefit the race against not always that way you do want to help with your crack momentum in the united states there's a famous battle at gettysburg of pickett's charge which is completely insane and

all the confederate generals do it was insane except for robbery 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 of your time and energy commission the savings in france by the way and they went ahead with nuclear power and now it's about 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 then locking yourself up in front of power plants. yes the latter you do modify found. no not molotov cocktails but you do or 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 v. debs in united states nonviolence is the my that i'm 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's in the short term is ultimately good for the economy and everything that we're arguing for in renewable energy is good for the economy and the same is true of social justice but hardly that we want to show back in front of the politicians aren't listening maybe the nonviolence message isn't all that so that other some politicians are listening to 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 and so much of the movement is what's good for justice and what's good for the environment is ultimately good for the economy 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 going in the rapture first to see if the politicians are actually listening thank you so much that's harvey wasserman editor of lucre dot org. now well foresight is one thing some ideas from the past are simply left over there whether it's legwarmers bell bottoms or of the so-called paleolithic diet i don't really know who's on that but it's a weird thing yet there's one disturbing comeback that's largely under the radar it's the return of the debtors prisons and it's happening right here in the twenty first century america now according to reports more and more american citizens are winding up behind bars owing money arrested locked up in some cases for just

missing a few credit card payments but owning money in itself is not a criminal offense in this country in fact america abolished it presents in a didn't used to help them more than a century ago so what's really going on here and are better prisons really making a comeback were the answer we turn to bryce kroger she's assistant editor at a new deal to probably know a blog at the roosevelt institute and here's where. it's clear that there's a huge jump in arrest warrants being used for that collectors trying to collect their debts from ordinary citizens as you said that america outlawed debtors prisons back in one thousand nine hundred so it's not that there's a prison now where 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. now at the same time i mean can't you argue that people need to learn how to live within their means and that 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 got to this point should there be consequences for bad actions. short 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 to pay for clothes and during the bubble build up that was all well and good but now that 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 you're 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 and need to encourage people to pay the debts that they owe but we also 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 so it just could be someone who owes some 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 guys who own money. 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 warrant sometimes it's just through 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 others that they're supposed to be going after and. that cost them money that cost them 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 paying 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 have you have

a new sense of people finally catching on to this 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 they're 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 in there's been some 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 but you actually go a long way because i'm people are 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 an opportunity i mean i just i don't understand how people can just not get help raged about this that these companies could go and knowingly not provide all the information that's needed 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 this. i think it's an industry that's sort of flown under the radar 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 as a man far 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 in an 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 strive 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 agencies that didn't have the authority they needed to go in and correct things and i think to see s.p.v. standing alone and focus just on consumers is exactly what we need here right there was very covert operative log new deal to porno and unfortunately that does it for this show for more on the story that we covered dot com slash let's say there's always you can find the stories and many more on our you tube page at youtube dot com party america and you can also always follow me on twitter at lucy power no one word.