our nation. owes a debt to its fallen heroes that we can never fully repaired. but we cannot are their sacrifice. and we must. all fallen soldiers were indeed on earth this memorial day weekend but what about the plight of those who returned from war alive we're going to explore how america's female veterans are battling to survive. and nuclear meltdowns fuel shortages was and hurricanes global disasters are bunty well foresight seems to be in short supply so when disaster strikes could we ourselves

be to blame. and it's a blast from the past debtors' prisons are making a comeback here in the u.s. but its own money is a criminal offense why are those down on their luck and not behind bars. good evening it's tuesday may thirty first eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm lucy catherine and you're watching our team now on memorial day we pause to honor the men and women who perished in america's many conflicts but all the dead were honored of countless ceremonies across the country this weekend those who came home from the battlefield are just now fighting to survive in our genes on a saucy churkin and gives us a glimpse into 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 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 come home 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 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 chiquita a mother of two homeless to see both her children lost in a custody battle she served america for three years did was tell you that in the 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'm making now 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 they cause 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. lives could have been saved. there are many. 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 america your affair 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 sets to receive them on return while veterans like chiquita suffer neglect and physical disability others are tormented by demons like jessica

goodell's 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 i didn't want anybody. and a lot of it you can feel it. you know until it that you see 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 are suffering from p.t.s.d. do you think that if chelsea clinton if alexandra pelosi had their arms or legs blown off in war 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 are female five percent we 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. all we experience we should keep it to ourselves and that is no one else's problem and that we need to bear it would hold much is too much obama has vowed to eliminate that are in homelessness by twelve fifteen but i don't see him doing any more than president moon food needs to be done and anything but an end to wars would be a band-aid on a wound that requires or turn a carrot to stop bleeding and this is sure can see gary indiana and as of this memorial day nearly one hundred fifty female u.s.

soldiers have made the ultimate sacrifice in the iraq and afghanistan wars more than seven hundred female soldiers have been wounded in those conflicts while countless more come home with unseen scars in the form of flaws traumatic stress disorder now official defense department policy prevents women from serving in the front line to combat the reality is that those lines are often blurred war is war and when those women come home getting help is often a graphic nightmare now earlier i spoke with one such veteran in two thousand and five and her strong serves as a medic with the third infantry division in iraq sautter city she's now a member of military families speak out as an organization of more than four thousand families who are opposed to the wars in iraq and afghanistan and i first asked her to describe what she experienced herself on the ground in iraq take a look. there were several times where my colonel had asked me to go out on missions to treat children people that were giving us and our nation

and every time we go out it's usually in father's city and father's day was the city that hated us the most and every time i would go there i would have and rock and pieces and then thrown at me the entire time i was out there i would come back with rees's all up and down my arms and legs everywhere. just to treat these children you know their own children and that was really topic variant but then i also worked in the aid station and we read the lot of casualties and then a station that were very. well they had a lot of holes and they were bleeding. really and the and women and children you name it that came through there and it was just.

for me it was a heartbreaking experience and. it really affected me. and you know that gave me a humanitarian by being and i felt for the people you know and i didn't know why they even done anything to have been shot i mean i can't even i can't imagine any human being that wouldn't be affected by something like that. and of course war is never easy war is not supposed to be easy but it does seem from some of the stories that have come out that for many west veterans of the battlefield the actual on the ground experience is really just half the battle you know when you came home from iraq your experience on the ground might have concluded but in some ways you had a bigger battle before you walk us through what happened when you came home. i had one year in the army serving active duty when i returned from iraq i was

extremely angry all the time my coworkers could not stand that's how angry i was and i did not know why. it took me probably two years of going through the never ending cycle of going through depression and. anger anxiety. isolation totally cutting off friends and family and camping out on my earth to remind out a time and just not moving not leaving my house not wanting to be around people. it was to me it was a bigger worry when i came home and like a couple years before i really something's not right here you know because i i was i was i was that it you know i was supposed to be strong and nothing could possibly be wrong with me but there was and there is and i still struggle with it today.

you know there's i go to therapy i go this group therapy i take medication i. you know am an involved in all these organizations and yet i'm still fighting a war within myself now if i. go ahead and or the pattern welders that are still active duty i'm buying i'm fighting for them from war right and and to not read the void as they're traumatized and on my control but medication now the u.s. military obviously does a good job of preparing the the men and women of america of actually going out to war how have they handled their return experience have you have you been helped with by the defense department. it has been or will. i have tried i have been diagnosed with p.t.s.d.

i'm not a real different doctor and i have put in my claim for them and they've been denied and because i'm a man and they still go by vietnam anders and up until a couple months ago iraq veterans against the war which i lost in. we helped deal to hold a change and change it to where you no longer have to tell your triggers like oh i was you know hit by roadside bomb and not like i have p.t.s.d. it's not it's not just one and. it's the whole picture and they're not understanding that they think that because we're the memo that we didn't see combat and that's and the thing they don't understand is all of iraq is combat you can be hit even when you're on your job you know mortars an r.p.g.

you can come in and kill people any time not to mention the fact that at least according to reports of themes that on the ground commanders often attached female soldiers to combat troops and i'm sure in your case as a medic that that that sort of one there as well so it's just baffling to me that as you are soldier first you're not a woman first you're a soldier first to restore a life you came home and you expect that i'm sure as any human being who was in the military was that the country would take care of me upon your return and yet are you saying that gender got in the way of that to some degree. bender has been in the way extremely i had to do a congressional on one of the doctors that was doing my compensation exam and. i you know complained and through the v.a. . i have actually a friend who's about to retire from the marine corps who works in that the office

in the d.c. that bills. people having problems especially the mild having problems getting the compensation that they did there are and so i call you know because i have is personal number three and a longtime friend of mine and i let him know and he. told me to do congressional and things like that and it will it's still has not helped me ever are you and i. am i what i am angry at is that our parents make you angry i would think really really wrong mind and i learned that in order to heal properly you have to get rid of some of that anger it's ok to hold some of it because i have every right right now to hold anger due to the way i'm being treated by the v.a. the. but i did like most of my anger and.

wow i mean people hang on to that. and really believe. they can really just roy they holy cross. that was amber stone an iraq war veteran and a member of the group military families speak out. so very few people in this world would volunteer to spirits a disaster like a nuclear meltdown or catastrophic flood or earthquake or drought or anything else scary for that matter but while disasters can't always be of bird their effect on humans doesn't always have to be devastating you see it takes a little bit of planning long term planning which is all too often something that our politicians and communities and not something of a good actually engage in so could the world use a little bit more foresight well or a harvest of the resident took to the streets of new york to talk about.

tornadoes ripping down buildings nuclear power plants melting down are we building our society responsibly our with any forethought at all this week let's talk about that do you think society thinks that long term or they just always doom's of 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 i don't know honestly you know we that those are just not enough for thought put into i just maybe that 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 something covering conspiracy or i think that it and friends the companies public so. there is no private interests in the nuclear power plants that i hope that it's sure so maybe if their people weren't worried about making money so much they'd make things better i think we're done with the. i phones i pads there's no thinking past next

five minutes do you children i do this may 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 it will be ok well you know back in the thirty's we said build projects that lasted. for a hundred years well it looked good to last that hoover dam is going to last a long time you don't build projects that this should last a thousand years because hopefully we'll get around in a thousand years right you put my buddy had to work in construction so there's a lot of that is that against the corporation mainly. because you know i mean it's from a purely economic bunch of you taking. cost a lot so who's going to win 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. so from hurricanes tornadoes floods even nuclear disasters are we our own worst enemy when it comes to preparation are better yet the lack there of well for more i spoke with harvey wasserman he's a long time anti-nuclear activists and also the editor of new york and he told me what he thinks is really behind us there are two basic zero words that come to mind arrogance and greed i was in fukushima actually pay and in my nineteen seventies a new career industry was warned look here billy needs an earthquake faults are there a tsunami is a japanese word you have tsunamis at this site in fact i spoke with someone today who lived in the area and as a child experienced a 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 accidents that have happened have been predictable. what happened to three mile island was predicted people understood it going to happen it's what could happen but the people in power who profited from it and who are to have an interest in the bureaucratic momentum simply would not 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 effect i mean 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 two thousand and 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 costs of of actually acting productively well the great irony is that doing the right thing is actually

going to be a huge economic benefit to germany i hope you have me on in ten years and we will discuss how germany has jumped ahead of the rest of the world and is now a dominant energy was solar and wind geothermal and all the other good increased efficiency and mass transit those with the technology of the future the irony is that it's the corporations and the governments howard vested in nuclear power were 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 go of herco and the other ruling establishment in germany not understood that jumping ahead to green power is probably the best their economic decision that germany has made since world war two as a matter of fact 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 the society of global society

it's easier to maintain the status quo than to make changes that will essentially harden people's lives for example katrina. new orleans the area work a train it 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 of potential flood. 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 of 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 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 the country argument cuts both ways of a matter of design ordered. was protected by diets but it was poor people if the people of the more wanted were willing to invest in the direct system the way they

should have a network where proposals on the table to invest the money in the dark system that would have the levee system that would have protected the one and 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 rich against poor and always that way you do want to help the bureaucratic momentum in the united states there's a famous battle a gettysburg tickets charge which is completely insane and all the confederate generals do it was insane except for robert e. lee 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 because you commission the savings in france by the way and they went ahead with nuclear power and now it's quite turning a giant ship around it's just very difficult but what we have but what about what

do you do in that situation i mean do you do you turn extreme do you start lobbing molotov cocktails that corporations and lock yourself up in front of power plants. yes the latter you do i thought unpopular. no not no a caucus but you do are you can walk over to the twenty first century we have come to understand there's nonviolence is the way to go gandhi harvest and martin luther king u g v debs and united states the environment is the map of making social change we understand we also understand now the environmental movement there was good for the environment even though it may cost of corporations some money in the in the short term is ultimately good for the economy everything that we're arguing or it renewed energy is good for the economy and the same is true social justice and that was harvey wasserman is the editor of the new cree. some ideas are simply best left in the past whether it's legwarmers bell bottoms the so-called

paleolithic diet but there is one disturbing comeback that's flown largely under the radar it's the return of the debtors' prisons and it's happening right here in twenty first century america now it's a trend that was uncovered in part by bryce covert she's an assistant editor at new deal two point zero blog and here's part of my conversation with her it's clear that there's a huge jump in arrest warrants being used for that collectors trying to collect their debt from ordinary citizens as you said america outlawed debtors prison back in eighteen 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 warrant 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 the 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. 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 to pay for clothes and during the bubble build up that was all well and good been out of the bubble 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 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 centrally getting thrown in jail for debt 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 data collection agencies aren't necessarily doing their job to let people know that they're being pursued for that so it just could be someone who owes the 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 at 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 they 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 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 debtors that they're supposed to be going after and you know exact cost of 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 this trend that something may actually be done about it. definitely

there's been some movement to make sure that. when this is happening that the. debt collection agencies like i said they're not always letting people know that they're doing this are using wrong addresses and 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 some movement to make sure that the deck collector half of 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 then 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 that 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 is 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 that. 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 the agencies that s t c are out there trying to protect them but they've just been stretched thin starved of the manpower and the cash that 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 been acting its own roles 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 bit of a lot of these practices will be uncovered and then addressed 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 i re definitely and straw stronger regulatory system i think that the financial reform bill that passed the dodd frank act is going a long way to reforming that system there were 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 with the f.t.v. standing alone and focus just on consumers of exactly what we need here and i was braced coverts of the blog new deal two point zero and unfortunately that does it for this evening show for more on the stories that we've covered go to our to dot com fashion or say check out our you tube page at you tube dot com slash archie america and there's always follow me on twitter at lucy kathy. you know it's a pleasure to story. you think you will.