Source: Telesur / UNHCR Report.
"Today's United
States has proved itself exceptional in ways shockingly at odds with
its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights,"
the United Nations reports.
The United States – one
of the world's richest and most powerful countries – is being
transformed by President Donald Trump and his Republican Congress
into the "world champion of inequality," according to a
scathing new report by the United Nations' monitor on extreme poverty
and human rights.
Special Rapporteur Philip Alston, an Australian academic and law professor at New York University, completed a 15-day fact-finding mission spanning California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico and West Virginia before making his findings public late last week.
He concluded that
"instead of realizing its founders' admirable commitments,
today's United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more
problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth
and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts
between private wealth and public squalor abound."
Alston, who spent time
with both public officials and people living in extreme poverty, also
dispelled the popular myth that the poor are derived exclusively from
ethnic minority groups.
There are, according to
his report, eight million more white people than African-Americans
living below the poverty threshhold. "The face of poverty in
America is not only black or Hispanic, but also white, Asian and many
other colors," Alston writes.
He also noted common
misconceptions among elected officials about the difference between
rich and poor, including the notion that "the rich are
industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic
success [while] the poor are wasters, losers and scammers.
"Despite the fact
that this is contradicted by the facts, some of the politicians and
political appointees with whom I spoke were completely sold on the
narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching
color TVs, while surfing on their smartphones, all paid for by
welfare."
Among the most alarming
findings in Alston's report is his conclusion regarding Trump's
proposed tax reforms, of which he writes: "The proposed
tax-reform package stakes out America's bid to become the most
unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already
high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1%
and the poorest 50% of Americans.
"The dramatic cuts
in welfare, foreshadowed by Donald Trump and speaker Ryan, and
already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will
essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already
full of holes."
Other key indicators in
the report include the fact that Americans can expect to live shorter
and sicker lives compared to people living in any other rich
democracy, and the "health gap" between the United States
and its peer countries continues to grow.
The report also notes
that inequality levels in the United States are far higher than those
in most European countries; that 25% of young people live in poverty
compared to less than 14% across the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development, and that the United States has the
highest incarceration rate in the world.
As Alston observes: "The
United States is one of the world’s richest and most powerful and
technologically innovative countries, but neither its wealth nor its
power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation
in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty."
Extreme poverty,
environmental degradation and toxic hazards in poor communities in
the United States are facing increased international scrutiny
following an inspection of rural Alabama communities by a United
Nations official. The conditions struck the official as shocking and
completely out of step with prevailing conditions in the wealthy,
developed world.
The tour by Philip
Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human
rights, has cast a light on an issue known well to poverty-blighted
communities and oppressed nationalities in the U.S.: inequitable
local policies that safeguard environmental racism by literally
concentrating toxic hazards in the backyards of the poor.
“Some might ask why a
U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights would
visit a country as rich as the United States. But despite great
wealth in the U.S., there also exists great poverty and inequality,”
Alston said.
The U.N. official's tour
aims to provide transparency to the human rights violations,
destitution, and lack of access to crucial basic services that have
blighted oppressed communities throughout the United States. U.N.
investigators have also toured cities and towns in California and
Alabama, as well as Washington, D.C., West Virginia and the colonial
territory of Puerto Rico.
According to Alston, the
level of degradation he found can only be compared to the disparities
that exist in the poor peripheries of the global economy – where
the vast majority of people have known little besides maldevelopment,
impoverishment and the institutional violence of inequality.
During a tour of a rural
Butler County community, Alston witnessed "raw sewage flows from
homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits,"
with one home's water line running straight through the fetid outdoor
pool.
"I think it's very
uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally
sees. I'd have to say that I haven't seen this," Alston
commented.
Prior to the Civil War,
the southern Alabama region was a cotton-farming area where
antebellum plantation owners exploited the labor of thousands of
Black slaves on vast estates.
In a fitting and sadly
typical sign of the long history of racist terror and
institutionalized discrimination in Butler County, the county seat
lies a mere two-minute drive from Confederate Park, where a 16-foot
marble Confederate soldier has overseen local affairs since 1903.
The U.S. Census Bureau
estimates that nearly 41 million people in the U.S. live in poverty,
ranking the country as the second-highest in terms of poverty rates
among wealthy countries.
The income disparities
and general dispossession of oppressed nationalities such as Black,
Native American and Latino communities are reflected by a denial of
civil rights, disproportionate levels of exposure to hazardous
industrial waste and effluvia, as well as displacement and
subjugation at the hands of local authorities who often shoot first
and ask questions later.
The violence of grinding
poverty in the United States has spawned disease outbreaks in the
United States that are more typical of nations with substandard
sanitary conditions. In recent weeks, Hepatitis A outbreaks have been
reported in San Diego, Maine and Southeast Michigan.
In Butler County and
Lowndes County, Alston also investigated a recent outbreak of E. Coli
and Hookworm – the latter of which is a “19th-century disease”
commonly found in regions like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,
according to The Guardian.
While health experts
assumed that basic advances in sanitation caused hookworm to
disappear in the 1980s, recent studies reveal that the parasitic
disease continues to thrive on a breathtaking scale – especially in
areas like Lowndes County, an impoverished region lacking waste
disposal infrastructure where 73 percent of the majority-Black
population have reported raw sewage inundating their homes due to
faulty septic tanks.
The prevalence of such
diseases is also rooted in a lack of consistent access to clean
drinking water, which is often contaminated by the raw sewage
effluence from homes that is spread across forests and grassy fields
whenever it rains, “spreading the waste and the pathogens it
contains, generating toxic conditions, repulsive visuals and an
overwhelming stench,” according to Al.com.
"These two pipes are
the raw sewage pipes coming from the house. And you've got your main
water line here, and it may have a hole in it, so everyone gets sick
all at once," local resident and activist Aaron Thigpen said.
"It's really bad
when you've got a lot of kids around like there are here. They're
playing ball and the ball goes into the raw sewage, and they don't
know the importance of not handling sewage," he added.
Alston was blistering in
his assessment of state and local authorities' brazen negligence of
residents' needs for basic human services and their disinterest in
minimizing environmental harm to poor communities.
“There is a human right
for people to live decently, and that means the government has an
obligation to provide people with the essentials of life, which
include power, water and sewage service. But if the government says,
‘oh no, we’re not going to do it,’ and leaves you to install
very expensive septic tanks, that’s not how it should work,”
Alston said.
Alston stressed that
governments play an instrumental role in addressing the environmental
inequalities, illnesses arising from exposure to hazardous waste, and
other toxic byproducts of systemic racism.
In spite of such clear
threats to public safety and social rights, however, the Republican
Party is set to pass a tax bill that will shred what remains of U.S.
residents' nearly-nonexistent social safety net, while the Democratic
Party has offered little more than lip service in its lackadaisical
“resistance” to the offensive being waged by the ultra-rich in
the era of Trump.
“The idea of human
rights is that people have basic dignity and that it’s the role of
the government — yes, the government! — to ensure that no one
falls below the decent level,” he said.
“Civilized society
doesn’t say for people to go and make it on your own and if you
can’t, bad luck.”
