Human Rights Now

Singing in America 

#002

The rich in America enjoy human rights. The rest of can imagine that they sing as they enjoy their rights -- :

Housing. ♫

Healthcare. ♫

Decent job. ♫

Good income. ♫

Food. ♫

Education for their children ♫

Besides that they enjoy: Clean water. ♫ Security in old age. ♫ Opportunities to enjoy culture. ♫ Benefits from science. ♫

We can say that these rights that the rich enjoy have been stolen from the rest of us – ordinary men and women. It is quite clear in international law that these are everybody’s rights. Just as we have inequality of wealth in America, we have inequality in the realization of human rights. 

But how much inequality is there?

America suffers from extreme inequalities. In  2001, the top 1% of households owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth. More details can be found on Professor Domhoff’s webpage.

Those who are poor in the United States are denied their fundamental rights to live fully as human beings in the richest country in the entire world.  Singing joyfully is probably not the first thing on their minds. Below are some depressing facts:

►Housing: HUD reports that 3.5 million persons are likely to experience homelessness during a given yearand 40 percent of them will be children.

►Healthcare: Census data show that over 47 million Americans are uninsured,

►Decent job: A third of American workers, according The State of Working America, are in nonstandard jobs (not regular and not full-time)

►Good income: Forbes ran an article on the fastest growing jobs in America and  Wal-Mart came out on top.

►Food: 35.5 million people lived in households considered to be food insecure, with blacks and Latinos far higher than the national rate.

►Education: Jonathon Kozol describes the confoundedness of poverty, race and isolation in inner city schools: “In the typically colossal high schools of the  Bronx, for instance,  more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic.”

The moral of the story is clear enough – all Americans would join in the chorus were human rights to be distributed equitably, fairly, and lawfully.

♫  ♫ ♫  ♫

We would dance and sing for joy.

Do Americans Have Human Rights?

#. 001

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only American president who recognized that Americans have human rights. (Citizenship rights, in contrast, are part of the US Constitution.) In his 1944 State of the Union Address Roosevelt proposed that all Americans are entitled to sufficient food, an education, housing, a decent job, health care, and security in old age. That was the first and last time we heard an American political leader defend human rights, in spite of the fact that they have become international law and most countries include human rights in their constitutions. To be sure, we Americans enjoy citizenship rights and can protest when our government has violated them. Yet we Americans cannot protest violations of human rights because we have none, at least none that are constitutionally binding

Returning to Roosevelt. He died in 1945. After that the Cold War ideology took fierce hold in America, but it was a more comprehensive ideology than often described. It was not only anti-Communism, it was also about class, race, and gender in America. This ideology justified patriarchy, kept racial minorities in their place, and defended a class hierarchy. The "undeserving," it was said, were coddled in communist countries, but not in capitalist America. Why? The answer that ideologues gave was that the system was fair! Those who did not meet the mark simply would go hungry, unhoused, unemployed. "Too bad. Maybe the Salvation Army would look after them"

Fast forward to the 1990s. Same system, same myth, but what has changed is that Americans workers had to compete with all workers around the world, and American workers – lots and lots of them – began to recognize that the whole system is rigged. Again fast forward, this time to 2007, The top one percent of American households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s.( Saez). The ratio of the wealth of the richest one percent of US households to the typical US households was 190 (State of Working America 2006-07, Figure 5B).

Life chances in America are not only unequal, they are perniciously linked with race and ethnicity. The poverty rate is 24.4 percent for blacks, 22.5 percent for Hispanics, and 23.2 for Native Americans. (US Bureau of the Census), and a disproportionate many of the 47 million without health insurance are people of color. A recent Harvard Public Health study found that Indigenous males lived only to about 50 years of age.

The problem in America is that we may be dismayed and shocked at these facts but we have no objective grounds to protest them. Of course we have human rights, which are birthrights, but they are not birthrights that are recognized by our government.

There are many questions: Why are human rights so dangerous that they were pushed underground in America? Where do human rights come from? What countries have adopted human rights? Do all countries agree about human rights? I always welcome your comments.