Uncle Sam, the Human Rights Hypocrite
By
Paul Street
An image of Uncle Sam from a 1918 poster celebrating the Fourth of July
during U.S. engagement in World War I. (National Archives Archeological Site
/ Wikimedia)
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Signed by the United States and adopted by the United Nations
General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, the document was a great and shining step
forward in the articulation of how human beings might organize their social
and political systems in accord with democratic and civilized ideals.
The U.S. has long wielded the Universal Declaration (UD) as a weapon to
brandish selectively against officially designated enemies. But seven
decades after its signing (and trumpeting) the document, American society
stands in rarely noted gross violation of the declaration's key principles.
Take the UD's first's article: "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."
The United States falls far short here. Someone born into one of the 57
percent of U.S. households with less than $1,000 in savings will not enjoy
remotely the same amount of "dignity and rights" as those enjoyed by someone
born into the top 1 percent of households, which together possess as much
wealth as the bottom 90 percent of U.S. citizens. Access to basic means of
comfort, dignity and freedom-like quality housing, quality education, strong
legal representation, leisure, travel, health care, quality food and
recreation-is filtered by the militantly disparate distribution of wealth
and income in the U.S., the most savagely unequal nation among all Western
"capitalist democracies." Like the polarized and nasty political culture to
which it is merged, the nation's extreme socioeconomic imbalance is
inconsistent with calls for conscience and brotherhood.
Article 2 of the UD proclaims, among other things, that everyone is entitled
to human rights and freedoms without distinctions of "race, color" and
"national or social origin." Here again, the U.S. stands in stark
contravention.
Median white wealth is 12 times higher than median black wealth in the
U.S.-a reflection of persistent anti-black discrimination and segregation
built into the nation's social structures and institutions. Reflecting stark
racial disparities in arrest, prosecution, legal representation and
sentencing, black and Latinos make up 56 percent of the nation's 2.2 million
incarcerated people though they comprise roughly 32 percent of the U.S.
population. One in three adult black males is saddled with the crippling
lifelong mark of a felony record-a critical barrier to opportunity and full
citizenship (even the right to vote in many U.S. states) on numerous levels.
Thanks to the racially disparate waging of the so-called war on drugs, one
of every 10 U.S. black men in their 30s is in jail or prison on any given
day. African-Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the
imprisonment rate of African-Americans for drug charges is almost six times
that of whites.
Millions of undocumented immigrant workers and residents are unwilling to
fight for their "universal human rights" in the U.S. because they reasonably
fear arrest and deportation.
The UD's fourth article declares, "No one shall be held in slavery or
servitude." Hundreds of thousands of U.S. prisoners-the modern-day and very
disproportionately nonwhite human chattel that provides the essential raw
material for the self-declared "Land of Freedom's" curiously gigantic
prison-industrial complex-perform labor tasks for tiny levels of
compensation and often for no payment at all. The Global Slavery Index
estimates that 57,000 people are victims of human trafficking, the modern
form of slavery, with illegal smuggling and trading of people, for forced
labor or sexual exploitation, in the United States.
Hundreds of millions of nominally free Americans are de facto slaves and
servants to employers (upon whom a shocking number of Americans absurdly
depend for health coverage), financial institutions, insurance corporations,
retail corporations, credit agencies, property associations, government tax
collectors, gambling agencies (including state lottery systems), health care
providers, lawyers and drug dealers.
The UD's fifth article says, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." Torture and such
treatment is endemic across the United States' vast prison system, the
largest in world history. One particularly widespread and egregious form of
cruel and inhuman treatment inside that system is solitary confinement-a
punishment well known to cause grave damage to its victims' mental and
physical health. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that:
"
Over the last two decades, the use of solitary confinement in U.S.
correctional facilities has surged . 44 states and the federal government
have supermax units, where prisoners are held in extreme isolation, often
for years or even decades. On any given day in this country, it's estimated
that over 80,000 prisoners are held in isolated confinement. This massive
increase in the use of solitary has happened despite criticism from legal
and medical professionals, who have deemed the practice unconstitutional and
inhumane.
Other forms of torture and cruel and inhumane treatment that are common in
the nation's vast archipelago of racially disparate mass incarceration
include widespread beatings, rape, ignoring cries for help, overcrowding,
underfunding, forcing inmates to fight, dehydration, starvation, denial of
medical care, executions (including botched executions) and forced scalding
showers.
Article 7 of the UD proclaims, "All are equal before the law and are
entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law."
This principle, too, is brazenly violated in the purported homeland and
headquarters of global freedom and democracy. Many Americans are familiar
with the old working-class aphorism that "money talks and bullshit
walks"-meaning that the wealthy few hire high-priced lawyers to enhance
their chances and power in the courts while everyday people do far less well
with fewer resources to pay for legal representation. It's no joke. As the
Georgia gubernatorial candidate and former Georgia House Minority Leader
Stacey Abrams noted last February, people with money "artfully navigate the
criminal justice system and maybe even avoid it altogether," but those who
are poor are overwhelmed.
Wall Street chieftains who threw millions of Americans out of work and
destroyed billions of dollars in lost savings through their reckless and
often criminal practices have escaped prosecution while the nation's jails
and prisons are loaded with disproportionately black, Latino and poor people
serving long terms for comparative small-time drug offenses. Hundreds of
thousands of Americans rot in jail prior to conviction for the simple reason
that they lack the financial resources to "make bail." Abrams reports, "The
majority of Georgians incarcerated in local jails have never been convicted
of crime. They are simply too poor to pay their bail."
The UD's ninth and 10th articles say that "[n]o one shall be subjected to
arbitrary arrest, detention or exile" and "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."
The 11th article says, "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right
to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public
trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence."
The "land of freedom" contravenes these core civil-libertarian principles
without the slightest hint of embarrassment. The U.S. National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) authorizes the indefinite military detention,
without charge or trial, of any person labeled a "belligerent"-including an
American citizen. The legislation overrides habeas corpus, the critical
legal procedure that prevents the government from detaining you indefinitely
without showing just cause.
In addition, the federal government has used the post 9/11 Authorization to
Use Military Force (AUMF) law to justify the direct killing (without a trial
or verdict) of anyone proclaimed an "enemy combatant" in the global war on
terrorism. The AUMF is unbound by geographic or time limitations. U.S.
citizens are not exempted, nor is U.S. territory.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported last January, "For the third year in
a row, [U.S. local and state] police nationwide shot and killed nearly 1,000
people. ." Police killings, disproportionately inflicted against poor people
and people of color, amount to executions, without trial or verdict.
The presumption of innocence does not prevent hundreds of thousands of
American from experiencing the torture of incarceration simply because they
cannot pay bail while awaiting trial.
The UD's 12th article proclaims, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary
interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence." So what?
Americans are subject to a vast private and public surveillance apparatus
that has essentially abolished privacy in the name of "national security."
As the ACLU reports:
"
Numerous government agencies-including the National Security Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and
state and local law enforcement agencies-intrude upon the private
communications of innocent citizens, amass vast databases of who we call and
when, and catalog "suspicious activities" based on the vaguest standards. .
Innocuous data is fed into bloated watchlists, with severe
consequences-innocent individuals have found themselves unable to board
planes, barred from certain types of jobs, shut out of their bank accounts,
and repeatedly questioned by authorities. Once information is in the
government's hands, it can be shared widely and retained for years, and the
rules about access and use can be changed entirely in secret without the
public ever knowing.
Article 15 of the UD says, "Everyone has the right to a nationality" and "No
one shall be deprived of the right to change his nationality." Millions of
"illegal" immigrants in flight from impoverished and repressive regimes
supported by the United States are stateless people, too afraid of
deportation to declare their foreign citizenship or to fight for decent
conditions inside the U.S. They are not free to change their nationality by
becoming U.S. citizens.
The UD's 19th article declares, "Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without
interference." That's nice. Millions of U.S. citizen-subjects know very well
that they cannot write or say (or sing or post or march on behalf of) what
they believe without putting their livelihoods at risk by offending or
otherwise concerning their employers and other authorities. And in the
United States, where health insurance is strongly and absurdly tied to place
of employment, putting one's job at risk also endangers a person's and his
or her family's access to health care.
Freedom of expression is strictly qualified, to say the least, in the hidden
and despotic abode of the capitalist workplace, where most working-age
Americans spend most of their waking hours under managerial supervision.
Even tenured academics can be fired for expressing their opinions. The
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fired tenured professor Steven
Salaita over his personal tweets criticizing Israel's mass-murderous 2014
assault on Gaza. The prolific radical Native American author Ward Churchill
was stripped of his tenured professorship on trumped-up grounds because of
political comments he made on the 9/11 terror attacks.
Article 20 of the UD says, "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful
assembly and association."
These rights are strictly qualified in the U.S., where public assembly is
controlled by onerous permitting processes and fees and peaceful protest
gatherings commonly face militarized police forces that make random arrests,
infiltrate marches and meetings, target organizers, give protesters petty
charges (and deadly criminal records) and rough-up protesters. Numerous
Republican-controlled states have passed bills that increase penalties for
public protest in the wake of the many protests that accompanied Donald
Trump's election and inauguration.
Workers are fired for trying to organize unions in the U.S., where once
union-friendly labor laws have been eviscerated.
The UD's 21st article proclaims that "Everyone has the right to take part in
the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen
representatives. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority
of government; this shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections
which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret
vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."
The reality of U.S. politics and policy stands in brazen defiance of this
universal human right. As the distinguished liberal political scientists
Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their
expertly researched book, "Democracy in America?" last year:
"
[T]he best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually
have little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy
individuals and organized interest groups-especially business
corporations-have had much more political clout. When they are taken into
account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually
powerless. . The will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and
the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special
favors for themselves. . Majorities of Americans favor . programs to help
provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical
insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with
progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut "corporate welfare." Yet
the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked
such new policies [and programs].
"Elections alone," Page and Gilens note, "do not guarantee democracy."
Majority U.S. opinion is regularly trumped by a deadly complex of forces in
the nation's politics, including:
. .The campaign finance, candidate-selection, lobbying and policy
agenda-setting power of wealthy individuals, corporations and interest
groups
.The special primary election influence of full-time party activists
.The disproportionately affluent, white and older composition of the active
(voting) electorate
.The manipulation and restriction of voter turnout
.The widespread dissemination of distracting, confusing, misleading and just
plain false information
.Absurdly and explicitly unrepresentative political institutions like the
Electoral College, the unelected Supreme Court, the over-representation of
the predominantly white rural population in the U.S. Senate and the
one-party rule in the House of "Representatives"
.The fragmentation of authority in government
.Corporate ownership of the reigning media, which frames current events in
accord with the wishes and world view of the nation's real owners-its
"unelected dictatorship or money"
.Americans get to vote but mammon reigns nonetheless in the United States,
where, Page and Gilens find, "government policy . reflects the wishes of
those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who
turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted
candidates for federal office.
You wouldn't know a thing about these and other brazen violations of the UD
(you can find supplemental text on U.S. "homeland" violations of UD articles
22, 23, 24, 25, 27 and 28 on my website) by reading the U.S. State
Department's recently released annual "Country Reports on Human Rights
Abuses." Beyond two disturbing novelties-the deletion of most prior
reporting on women's rights and reproductive rights and the redaction of the
term "Occupied Territories" from the report's description of Israel and its,
well, occupied territories-the Trump-era rendering of the annual State
Department document (this year's is the first put together entirely by the
Trump State Department) runs in four familiar grooves. Consistent with
previous versions, it fails to acknowledge the United States' longstanding
political, economic and military backing of governments whose human rights
abuses it mentions-as if Washington had nothing to do with them.
We learn, for example, that Saudi Arabia kills civilians in Yemen and
carries out "unlawful killings, including execution for other than the most
serious offenses and without requisite due process; torture; arbitrary
arrest and detention, including of lawyers" in its own territory. The report
says nothing about how Washington considers the Saudi regime one of its most
prized allies. Or that it equips the absolutist Saudi state (whose crown
prince was recently hosted by Donald Trump, who boasted during the royal's
visit of U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia) with tens of billions worth of
lethal military equipment. Nor does it say anything about the United States'
own direct egregious abrogation of human rights through things like its
horrific torture camp at Guantanamo Bay and its ongoing arch-criminal drone
war program of "targeted assassination" (execution without trial) Noam
Chomsky has called "the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world
has yet seen."
The world has every reason to respond to the State Department's report with
another old maxim: "Don't piss on my boots and tell me it's raining."
The Country Reports document continues the United States' longstanding
practice of selective criticism, playing up violations in rival and enemy
nations over those in allied nations. Relying on just the document's
country-level write-ups, one would think that human rights are no better in
Iran and Cuba than they are in Saudi Arabia and Honduras. You'd never know
that the Saudis make Iran look like a bastion of civil liberties, women's
rights and democracy by comparison. Or that ordinary Cubans enjoy remarkable
guaranteed incomes and access to educational resources and health care
services that are unrivaled across Latin America and especially in
right-wing Latin American states like Honduras, where a vicious right-wing
regime was installed with no small help from the U.S. nine years ago.
The State Department report vastly understates the scale of the Saudis'
U.S.-backed and U.S.-equipped crimes in Yemen. It gives no sense that the
U.S.-Saudi war on that small nation has created there one of the worst
humanitarian catastrophes (replete with a mass outbreak of deadly cholera)
in recent history.
In rolling out the report, John Sullivan, Trump's then-acting secretary of
state, singled out Russia and China as leading "threats to global
stability," claiming that their poor human rights records put them in the
same dastardly club as evil Iran and North Korea. Where, one might well ask,
should we rank U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Egypt and Israel?
The last country has recently and openly slaughtered unarmed Palestinians
who were peacefully protesting along its border with Gaza, which is
essentially an open-air Palestinian prison subjected to a vicious blockade
by Israel and Egypt since 2007. What about other U.S.-allied states like the
Philippines, whose strongman president Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the
death-squad killings of drug dealers and drug users and been praised by
Trump for doing "an unbelievable job on the drug problem"?
It has not been lost on properly critical observers that that the Trump
administration has curiously designated the American Empire's top strategic
rivals-China, Russia, Iran and North Korea-as the world's worst human rights
violators.
As per usual, the latest State Department global human rights report ignores
positive human rights accomplishments of states on the wrong side of Uncle
Sam's division of the world into friend and enemy. It has nothing to say,
for example, about Cuba's remarkable achievements in reducing poverty,
providing health care, educating its citizens and developing its economy and
society with a low-carbon footprint that reduces its contribution to the
greatest problem of our times, one whose advance is being led by the United
States: anthropogenic climate change.
Last, but not least, this year's version of the report has, as usual,
absolutely nothing to say against or about egregious and endemic human
rights abuses carried out by (both at home and abroad) and inside the United
States-the supposed "beacon to the world of the way life should be," to
quote former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (currently Trump's permanent
representative to NATO) in a fall 2002 speech in support of Congress
authorizing George W. Bush to criminally invade Iraq if he wanted to (he
did). The State Department's "Country Reports on Human Rights Abuses" covers
every country on the planet but one: The most powerful nation on earth, the
headquarters of a historically unparalleled global empire that most of the
world's politically cognizant populace has long and with good reason
identified as the leading threat to peace and stability on earth. Fully 194
countries are covered in the reports, just not the world's only superpower,
itself home to 4.4 percent of the world's population but 22 percent of the
world's prisoners-quite an accomplishment for the self-declared homeland and
headquarters of global freedom and democracy.
As far as the State Department, Washington and the nation's reigning
corporate, financial, and imperial power elite is concerned, the violations
of the UD outlined at the outset of this article (and in my linked
supplemental text) belong down George Orwell's memory hole, consistent with
the principle that history is written by and for the winners and Big
Bother's maxim: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who
controls the present controls the past."
It's nothing remotely new or distinctive to the Trump era. The United States
sees itself as an inherently splendid and humanitarian City on a Hill, fit
to judge other nations, particularly those it deems as rivals and enemies,
while giving itself an "exceptionalist" free pass because, as Bill Clinton's
Secretary State Madeleine Albright once explained, "The United States is
good." That's no way to get its human rights reports taken seriously by
world citizens familiar with the timeworn adage that "people who live in
glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
