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 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.