Human Rights Not Issues - a podcast by Laura Flanders

Human Rights Day is coming up. It's marked every year on December 10th -- an occasion on which the world commemorates the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the US spreads lies about what’s in that document.
On December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly by a vote of 48 to zero adopted a sweeping agreement. After two world wars in which governments, including elected ones, waged war on their own citizens and on each other, the Declaration was conceived as a global code of conduct for governments, drawn up by people, not of any one nation, but all of them, to be enforced, together.
In the US, when it’s marked at all, Human Rights Day is an occasion for rank hypocrisy. To take just one example, in 2009 President Barack Obama chest thumped his way through a statement about the US role in drafting the Declaration and then went on to shrink the rights in it to a teacup: the right of people to quote “live as they chose”, gather, speak, and have a say in their government.
Even as he spoke about those "inviolable" rights, the US government, of course, was violating them. Worse than that, beyond the routine violation of the few things American Presidents are willing to accept just might be rights, the 44th continued a decades-long tradition of systematically robbing American citizens of lots of other rights the framers of the Declaration believed citizens had legitimate reason to expect: social and economic rights, like the right of every person to have access to healthcare, housing and education.
Take a look. The right to be free of abuse like -- ahem – torture – is all very nice, but there are thirty articles in the Declaration and those have been elaborated on since, in agreements and treaties the US has mostly refused to ratify. Social and economic rights have deliberately been erased in the US consciousness because where Eleanor Roosevelt and the post-war signers saw human rights and government responsibilities -- US capitalists saw dollar signs and profit centers.
It’s taken almost 70 years for some human rights to become respectable -- and meaningless. You can sue for the violation of your human live-free-from-torture right, but good luck if you’ve ever been called a terrorist, or scary (to a white person, as in, say, Arab or African American).
US civilians can be ordered to bomb other nations for disrespecting human rights, but they’ll have a far harder time suing their own for affordable housing, education or healthy neighborhoods. In the US, those aren’t rights; they’re “issues", and we are free to talk, gather and start a million distinct organizations about them, and to petition our government and the rich people behind it to share what they’ve got with the rest of us.

When it comes to rights, the US talks up a storm, but for some very specific reasons, we are very foggy on the concept.

You can watch my interview with best selling author and activist Chris Hedges on this topic and more at GRITtv.org and find out more there about the syndication of The Laura Flanders Show. To tell me what you think, write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.

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