If the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Is a Test, the United States Has Failed

[McCamy Taylor]

Usual disclaimer. Why are you reading this journal if you do not like long posts? That is all I ever write. And when dealing with the U.S.’s MONUMENTAL failure to respect human rights and dignity, only a long article will come close to tackling the subject.



I. The Test

We hear all the time how things in America are the best . Our health care system---which costs twice as much per person and achieves crappy results compared to medical models in other developed countries---is commonly described by its proponents as the best health care system in the world. . Politicians boast about our freedom . We have more nukes than anyone else in the world, except maybe Russia, enabling us to spread democracy at the working end of a gun. To bad that “democracy” is so often coupled with “free market” which is code for “some big multinational wants to move in and sell you your own water at a jacked up price.”

Since people are basically decent and loving towards one another, it is easy to find individual instances of kindness and altruism. Little rays of sunshine that some claim more than make up for the heavy shadow with the United States and its predator corporations cast on the rest of the world. Sometimes life is good, sometimes it is bad, but hey, it is the best of all possible worlds. Right?

Over fifty years ago, after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, the world decided that it was time to spell out human rights. So, the UN crafted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which began

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Snip

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

Who knew that there was a SAT for countries, designed to measure their respect for human rights? Apparently not the folks who have been running this country. As I examined the Declaration today, I was dismayed at how many articles the United States has violated. Not 10%, not 25%. Try 100%.

In anybody’s grading scale that adds up to an F for failure.

II. The Score

How do you judge a country on the way it treats people? The folks who run the country---in the United States that means the corporate bosses who bankroll the political candidates and who run the press---are always going to say that their system is a success. Third world business endeavors will be praised as long as they make a profit. Our legal system will be proclaimed “fair and just”, as long as those with money get a satisfactory outcome when they go before the courts. If there is a sheltered enclave somewhere for the elite to escape pollution, crime and disease, then our standard of living will be judged “jus’ fine.”



I prefer something a little more objective when I try to decide whether a student---in this case our own government---is learning a subject---in this case how to treat human beings with the dignity and respect they deserve. So, forget the jingoism. Let’s grade the U.S. on how well it has studied and learned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Pencils ready? Start the test!

Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

A child born in the United States is offered different levels of health care, education and even nutrition based upon whether or not his parents have money. “Different” in this case is the opposite of “equal”. Fail.

Article 2 Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Has everyone been paying attention to the way that the United States has been treating immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries and Asia? Families have been thrown in jail where they languish for months, even years---all so some private prison operator can make easy money housing noncriminals---before being sent back to “homes” which some of them do not even remember. Sometimes just being Latino is enough to get you sent to Mexico---even if you are a U.S. citizen, like Pedro Guzman.

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1118919320070611

Fail.

Article 3 Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Um…. We kill our own citizens, especially if they are African-American and charged with a criminal offense against someone who is white.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-penalty-black-and-white-who-lives-who-dies-who-decides

And if your name is Jose Padilla, you can forget about your right to liberty and security of person. All the U.S. president has to do is label you an “enemy combatant”. I am not too sure what that means. I think it stands for “less than a dog” since most Americans would be outraged if a canine was treated the way that Padilla was.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3208

Fail again.

Article 4 No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

That one’s easy. Abe Lincoln abolished slavery in this country.

Too bad no one told the slave masters.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2006/010106sexslavescandal.htm

Almost a year after Representative Cynthia McKinney was told by Donald Rumsfeld that it was not the policy of the Bush administration to reward companies that engage in human trafficking with government contracts, the scandal continues to sweep up innocent children who are sold into a life of slavery at the behest of Halliburton subsidiaries , Dyncorp and other transnational corporations with close ties to the establishment elite.

What’s that I hear? It isn’t slavery if U.S. companies do it in other countries? Read about how migrant farm workers are kept locked up by their employers in Florida.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/hp/content/moderndayslavery/reports/migrant_part1.html

Failure.

Article 5 No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

After the revelations of the last few weeks, I do not think that I even have to discuss the reason we get a great big fat F on this one.

Article 6 Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Unless the president decides you do not have that right. Fail.

Article 7 All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

The writers of the Declaration must have left something out. What they really meant to say was all white male straight Christians without physical disabilities are equal before the law---unless one of them has more money than the other. That is the way the United States continues to interpret this article. Equal pay for women? Ridiculous. How can they be equal to men when they are just girls? Protection for gays? Come on. If the powers that be can not attack folks for being homosexual, how will they persecute their political enemies who happen to be healthy white male Christians? You can not accuse a white socialist male of being "an uppity Negro" or a "broad with PMS.". You can call him "queer" and get his ass fired. F.

Article 8 Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Oh, really? Then why has the Legislative branch (Congress) and the executive branch (first Bush then Obama) refused to allow the folks whose rights to privacy were violated by AT&T to sue? How come people held hostage by Iran or injured by Iraq (under Saddam) can not seek compensation? The United States would not be trying to protect its own right (and the rights of its most favored multinational corporations) to kick folks in the teeth without fear of consequences, would it? Fail again.

Article 9 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

See Articles 1-4 and 6 above. F.

Article 10 Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

We do not have kangaroo living in the wild in this country, but we have kangaroo courts.

http://www.counterpunch.org/frank08012005.html

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) obtained two leaked emails from former military prosecutors at Guantanamo Bay over the weekend. The emails both claim that the military committees set up to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are "rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused."
In the first email obtained by the Australian news organization, Gitmo prosecutor, Major Robert Preston, wrote to his supervisor that the trial process at Guantanamo was perpetrating a fraud on the American public. Preston also wrote that the cases being tried were insignificant at best.
Snip

Carr also wrote that Gitmo prosecutors were continually told by the chief prosecutor that the panel set up to try detainees was specially selected in order to guarantee convictions.
"You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel," Carr wrote.

Oh my. So much for the rule of law. In the U.S. we have the rule of make it look good for our puppets in the press. Failure.

If I keep evaluating these test questions one by one, this is going to take forever. I will try to speed it up a little. Article 11…are you kidding? With federal grand jury leaks and blabbermouth federal prosecutors, in the U.S you are guilty until found innocent. Just ask Eliot Spitzer. Article 12, right to privacy---the NSA may have spied on all of us, according to whistle blower Russell Tice .

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/nsa-whistlebl-1.html

What’s next? Article 13, freedom of travel---these guys had never heard of a “No Fly List.” Article 14 the right to political asylum. Not if you are Haitian and trying to enter the U.S.

http://www.hagcoalition.freehosting.net/custom4.html

Article 15, the right to a nationality. The Republicans want to take away the citizenship of the children of immigrants born in the U.S. That will make them people without a country----and easy targets for American employers who need cheap, compliant workers who have no Constitutional rights and no where else to go if they get fed up.

http://www.uniset.ca/naty/maternity/lat_gopbirthright.html

Article 16, the right to marry and have a family. Not if you are gay. Not if you are a woman of color or are on federal assistance.

http://www.cwluherstory.org/CWLUArchive/cesa.html

A few examples should serve to illustrate the types of abuse I've been discussing. In L.A. in 1975, 10 Chicana women sued L.A. County Hospital and state officials. One of the women had refused to give her consent to a sterilization. She was punched in the stomach by a doctor and then sterilized. Some of the women signed consent forms after being in labor for many hours and under heavy medication immediately prior to undergoing childbirth by caesarian sections. Two were led to believe that the consent forms they signed were for temporary sterilizations. One of the women was not aware that a sterilization had been performed and wore an intrauterine device for 2 years afterwards.17
Then there is the case of the South Carolina physician who refused to deliver a black welfare mother's fourth child unless she agreed to be sterilized postpartum. He subsequently sterilized 28 women in three months, all of them Black.

Land of the free, home of the brave my ass.

Article 17, the right to own property. You can own it. Just don’t drive it through any small southern towns in east Texas while being Black.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-texas-profiling_wittmar10,0,6051682.story

Article 18, freedom of religion. Americans really value that one---but not if you are in the military. Not if you are Muslim. Turns out the Founders really meant to say freedom of Christian denomination .

Article 19, freedom of expression, Article 20 freedom of association. Big political donors are free to express their opinions via lobbyists, PACs and generous financial contributions to candidates. The courts have ruled that a fundamental right. And yet, at the same time American corporations have made it all but impossible for workers to come together to form unions, as I described in detail in a recent journal. Even though the right to unionize is internationally recognized as part of the right of association. And if you joined an anti-war group under Bush, you were targeted by law enforcement. The moral? Those who want to join clubs had better stick to bowling and sewing circles.

Article 21, the right to fair representation through elections. I have just two words for this. Florida. Ohio. Another failure…

Does anyone else get the impression that our government has used this document as a “things not to do” list?

Article 22, right to social security. This should include health, but in the U.S. health care is not a right, it is a privilege----because our current system of denying millions preventive care until they turn 65 and develop bad diseases like heart failure, coronary artery disease, renal failure and emphysema makes a whole lot of money for the Medical Industrial Complex. Never forget that in the United States, some rich person’s right to get richer always trumps any other right you might think you have.

Article 23
1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

This is one of the most important articles in the document, since almost everyone in the world (except for a handful of elites) is a worker whose labor is potentially subject to exploitation. Sadly, in the U.S. the phrase “right to work” has been co-opted by anti-union forces, who have successfully managed to use the press and politicians to reduce unions to a kind of pariah status.

The best thing you can say about the test results so far is at least we are consistent in our failure.

Article 24, the right to rest and holidays. Ask those working two jobs just to make ends meet how rested they are. Article 25, the right to health care. We already did this one. Article 26 covers education. Note that it says parents have the right to choose how their child is educated. It does not say “Parents will have the right to choose how their children are educated only if their idea of an education is even more reactionary and Christian than that being taught in our public schools and if they can afford it.” How many parents want their kids to attend under funded “warehouse” schools?

Article 27---wow, who knew that intellectual property rights were covered by the UN? To bad that in the U.S. so many people work with the restriction that anything they create becomes the property of their employer. Make that kind of rule universal enough, and Leonardo De Vinci becomes a wage slave for Disney.

Article 28 Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Except when a country like the U.S. decides that it needs to invade your country, killing and displacing millions as was done in Iraq, because it has a pressing need for your oil/bananas/precious minerals/canal.

Article 29, laws exist to protect human freedom and dignity. No, that’s not it. Laws exist to protect the rights of rich folks to get richer. That’s why it is so hard to unionize.

Article 30 Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Hmm. Obviously the United States did not sign this document, even if Eleanor Roosevelt helped writeit. No one at Standard Oil (later Exxon and Co.) or Morgan or Brown & Root or any of the other big corporations that run this country ever intended to follow any of these rules.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080106114904AAhX9iR

So I guess that is supposed to make our failing score alright.

III. Remedial Study

We do not quiz our school children so that we can pronounce them failures and ship them off to a labor farm. Tests are meant to teach us those things we need to work on, so we can improve ourselves.

Just off the top of my head, things that we can do to make up our failing grade include:

1. Investigate and prosecute war crimes and violations of civil liberties under the Bush administration, since these are so clear cut, and since punishment for some folks who oppress is likely to deter others.
2. Protect the rights of workers to form unions. That is what the Employee Free Choice Act is all about.
3. Provide health care to every American.
4. Shore up our ailing system of indigent legal services so that we really will be equal before the law.
5. Take the money out of elections and fix the voting system so that one person gets one vote which is counted.
6. Pass equal pay for women.
7. Legislate equal protection for gays, including the right to marry and adopt children.
8. Make it harder for our country to go to war. One person should not have the ability to twist the arms of (an all too often compliant) Congress in order to meet the needs of his corporate masters.

That would be a start. Since our president is on record as supporting most of these measures and since we have a Democratic Congress, all of these are doable. Failure is not inevitable. Our inhumanity towards our fellow human beings is not something that is hard wired into us. We are, by nature, compassionate beings---unless we are deprived of a sense of our own worth, in which case, no one else will seem worthy of love, either.

[imdjh]

1. Damn! Shot down in the first sentence. What are you , psychic? n/t oops, forgot the :)

[cali]

2. Fail. you fall into the trap of American Exceptionalism.

Not only that but you, don't seem to grasp several important concepts, chiefly the Platonic Ideal. The Declaration of Human Rights is a Platonic Ideal. There is no country that lives up it. Not one. And such things as the mistreatment of migrant workers, although horrible, isn't the same thing as slavery. The state, despite your contorted reasoning, doesn't sanction it.

So now, I confess. Having had it with the turgid prose and the pretzel thinking you exhibit, not to mention the lack of critical thinking, I skipped from the slavery section of your piece to the end. But again, the most striking element- and the most amusing- is your falling for the reverse American Exceptionalism hooey.

I must also add this:

"Since people are basically decent and loving towards one another". Wow. That's simplistic.

This is not, as Voltaire so famously said, the best of all possible worlds. It never will be. We can and should strive to better it, but with eyes wide open and with the most sweeping perspective we can manage.

[McCamy Taylor]

3. Congrats on being the first to bring up the GOP's favorite excuse---"They all do it."

That, along with "Divide and Conquer" are their main strategies. They Divide and Conquer Democrats (and workers) by creating silly arguments so that folks will not discuss solutions. And when they are caught doing something bad they exclaim "It's ok. They do worse things in (fill in the blank but nowadays it is mostly China)." By that argument, Cheney's murder squad is ok, because of the existence of Charles Manson.

The U.S should be held to a higher standard, because we suffer less from the burden of absolute poverty (though wealth disparity is institutionalized). Poverty is the greater dehumanizer in the world. Somehow a rich as sin country like us has been able to keep dehumanizing despite its wealth. All part of the scam to keep the ultra-rich rich.

[cali]

4. um, I didn't bring up "they all do it", but knock yourself out making up

what I said. And neither did I bring up others doing worse. You managed to utterly miss my point. Perhaps you're simply not familiar with the philosophies I noted in my post. I didn't justify anything, least of all Cheney or American malfeasance which doesn't need to be looked at comparitively except in the general way in which I linked it to basic human nature.

Thanks for playing, you still fail. I suggest you read Plato, commentary on Plato and Voltaire's Candide. Those are my references. Oh, and if you want to read someone who really spoke to the human condition in cutting through language, read Forster's and Russels essays entitled "What I Believe", as well as Forster's "Two Cheers For Democracy".

I'm beginning to think you're really confused. you certainly projected crap into my post that wasn't even implied. Weird.

[McCamy Taylor]

5. Thanks for the reading list. I recommend Blake's "Book of Urizen" for you.

"Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!
Self-closd, all-repelling: what Demon
Hath form'd this abominable void
This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?--Some said
"It is Urizen", But unknown, abstracted
Brooding secret, the dark power hid."

Check it out. It's good stuff.

http://facstaff.uww.edu/hoganj/contents.htm#uricont

[cali]

7. love it. I have a beautiful edition that belonged to my

father with Blake's illustrations. I grew up in a house of books. There was a focus on history, but poetry, philosophy, fiction- all there. Books everywhere, in every room and a serious library.

[RufusTFirefly]

6. We're America, dammit! That's just a lousy piece of paper!

Thanks McCamy. The truth hurts.

[sailor65]

8. Lather, Rinse, Repeat......ad nauseum

Simple physics.

When the flow out drastically exceeds the flow in, then the OP might hold some water.

[Captain Hilts]

9. No country meets this standard, but it's a good goal. And, yes, the Bush Admin would get the skunk

eye from Eleanor. No doubt about that.