baltimore

Last week, the war in Afghanistan hit a sad milestone: the 1000th American casualty. This Monday will be Memorial Day, when we stop to remember the soldiers who have given their lives in battle in the U.S.'s many wars. But there are many veterans from the wars still alive and struggling with the consequences of active duty every day, both physically and mentally. Jose Vasquez, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, joins us in studio to talk about the ongoing struggles on behalf of veterans, whether they be discharged and fighting for benefits or still on active duty and fighting repeated deployments. Debt has a tendency to snowball, getting bigger and bigger and leaving people less and less likely to be able to pay it off. While big banks and corporations get bailed out by the government as "too big to fail," small debtors like Vicki Valentine, who missed one deadline to pay off sewer and water charges and suddenly found herself in a mass of debt that led to a tax lien and foreclosure. This video from the Huffington Post Investigative Fund tells her story. Broken glass is a hazard of city living. It's everywhere. So when a meeting of architects and urban planners were trying to come up with uses for vacant lots around New York, one of their chief challenges was figuring out what to do with the glass. David Belt and his company Macro-Sea took a comment from an attendee at the meeting, Bethany Edwards, who suggested creating a place where people could go to break glass. Ready-Made magazine, which cosponsored a contest to find uses for the broken glass, describes the location as "Part game, part art installation, part mobile recycling center, Glassphemy! is a 20-by-30-foot steel structure lined with bulletproof glass." We at GRITtv don't care what they call it, we thought it sounded fun and our own Sam Alcoff and Isabel Braverman took a trip to check it out. As states scramble to stay afloat -- how are they balancing their budgets? On the backs of working women of course. The new big trend is to cut subsidies for child care. And with child care -- poof -- a critical lifeline to working moms is disappearing. The same states that cut welfare entitlements in the 90s, forcing moms out to work, are now cutting the subsdized child care that was promised in return for workfare.

The Olympics have seen more than their share of controversy this year, from the death of a Georgian luger early on to the ongoing debate about policing, spending and co-opting Native land for sports. But many people still love the games, and tune in to watch sports that get forgotten the other three years--or to see dream teams put together to compete for gold. To talk about the good, the bad, and the corporate at the Vancouver games, we're joined by two veteran sports journalists, Ann Liguori of WFAN and Robert Lipsyte, PBS contributor and former New York Times contributor. And of course, we couldn't talk sports without touching on the media's ongoing fascination with Tiger Woods... You've seen them: the signs that pop up everywhere, with just a phone number and a seemingly-unbelievable promise. "We Buy Houses" "Make $45 an Hour." They're becoming even more common during this recession, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found, and they made this video in Baltimore with Robert Strupp, director of research and policy at the Community Law Center. President Obama revealed his health care plan this week, and activists across the country are gearing up to push to actually pass health care reform. In this video from Ramblin' Man Films, we check in with protesters in Los Angeles outside of Anthem Blue Cross's office, angered by a 39% rate hike by the insurer. Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God and Patience with God, has had enough of claims that America is now in a "post-racial" era; if that's true, he asks, why does so much of the opposition to Obama's actions seem to have a nasty undertone? Last week, while Esther Armah held down the fort here at GRITtv, Laura was in Santa Fe meeting with activists. Of course, she took a camera with her, and captured this interview with Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water and one time Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly. We've also got the trailer for the documentary film FLOW, which Barlow also appeared in. Jose Alcoff was in Honduras recently, and contributed this exclusive report recapping the turmoil, and checking in with the social movements there about what's happening next. Finally, Laura and Mother Jones magazine have some suggestions for what we could do with the bankers' $20 billion.

How much senior executives earn, in cash and stock, is public information. How they make it is public too. Trouble is, the two are barely brought together in reporting. One story's a business story, the other's, well, for the "human interest" file. As all humans have a reason to be interested, let's pull the pieces of one tale together. Let's take Wells Fargo, the bank whose CEO just topped the charts -- as the top earner in the country for 2009. According to analysis released by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm, Wells Fargo CEO John G. Stumpf was paid a personal best of $18.7 million in cash and stock in 2009. That's up 64 percent from two years earlier. That means that Mr. Stumpf is making twice as much as Lloyd C. Blankfein, his counterpart at Goldman Sachs -- the "great vampire squid" himself. Does that make Stumpf Mr. Super Squid... ? More names might come to mind if the public were reminded of just what's been going on at Wells Fargo on his watch. The company is currently being sued by, among others, the city of Baltimore, for civil rights violations related to racist lending practices. As we've reported on this program, Wells Fargo made a bundle, selling risky, high-cost subprime loans to African Americans, including long-time African American homeowners. On GRITtv last year, former subprime mortgage broker turned whistle-blower Beth Jacobson described how African American brokers were sent into Black churches: "Plenty of people there might not even have thought of taking out loans or leveraging their property," but through Black churches loan officers found a motherlode of clients who they steered into subprime loans, even clients with good credit scores. The rewards for the brokers were massive: what some Wells Fargo brokers called "ghetto loans" brought upwards of twice the fees that they could make off prime-rate kind. But the cost for borrowers ? and cities like Baltimore ? were deadly. Now Baltimore's suing, foreclosures are continuing... and Stumpf's the country's best-paid CEO. A footnote? Hardly. Of human interest? I think so. -- Laura Flanders