Human Rights

High Roads for Human Rights

Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be a part of US law since it was signed in 1948, but it is recognized only selectively by the US.  (Full text of International Human Rights instruments.)

To pay for its far flung military adventures, the US has reneged on the social contract: pensions are an endangered species, healthcare coverage is shrinking, Republicans are attempting to downsize social security, privatized eldercare is obscenely expensive and often atrocious. The US is a country that no longer cares for its people: the sure sign of a failed state.  It is a consequence of Republican self-serving tax avoidance, profligate spending on foreign wars, war profiteering, corporate welfare, and downright corruption. A severe decline in the US standard of living appears inevitable. 

See Prisons

        Healthcare

Links

Human Rights and International Justice (McArthur Foundation)

Human Rights Watch

Bibliography

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

The Dark Side, by investigative journalist Jane Mayer, lays out the roles that Vice President Dick Cheney and his advisor, David Addington, played in setting administration policies for capturing and interrogating detainees.  It is a beautifully written, well-researched must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the U.S. slipped from a nation that played an essential role in the adoption of the Geneva Conventions to a nation known to violate those conventions, how the administration's secret adoption of torture as a policy contributed false evidence of an Iraq connection to the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda to justify attacking Iraq, and much more.

Sadly, it is a story of power that silenced or incapacitated the many members of government, the military, and the intelligence community who knew better but were powerless to do the right thing for the U.S. and for the world.  Hopefully the book's revelations will move our country and the next administration toward higher ground.  Doubleday, 2008.

While America Aged: Roger Lowenstein (video)

Books from the New Press

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