Monday, June 25, 2018

David Ruccio — Worker rights in the United States

Ambassador Nikki Haley’s decision last week to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council is remarkable. The United States is the first nation in the body’s 12-year history to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the council while serving as a member.
Some have alleged that the timing of Haley’s decision is conspicuous. “The move,” read the second paragraph of a CNN report on Haley’s decision, “came down one day after the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights slammed the separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border as ‘unconscionable.’”
It’s true the Trump administration has been threatening to leave the Council for much of the past year. And the condemnation of the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents on the border was perhaps the last straw.
However, in my view, at least as important was a report last month by the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, on his mission to the United States late last year…. 
Occasional Links & Commentary
Worker rights in the United States
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

5 comments:

Andrew Anderson said...

In ancient Israel, foreign wage labor was welcomed because Hebrews normally owned their own farms, vineyards, etc. and unlike the US, could not lose them permanently (50 years at max because of the 50 Year Jubilee in Leviticus 25). Thus Hebrews did not normally work as wage laborers themselves and thus were not threatened by foreign wage labor.

Konrad said...

Imperial propaganda has long used “human rights” as a talking point. Any national leader who declines to crush his people on behalf of the Empire is a “dictator” who is guilty of “human rights abuses.”

In the 1500s, Europeans started “civilizing” the New World (i.e. exterminating the natives) and sending out Christian missionaries to “save” the natives (i.e. torture the natives into submission). Genocide was called “settlement.” Theft and enslavement were all about promoting “human rights.”

Whenever this “human rights” rhetoric does not serve the Empire, the Empire withdraws its support for the rhetoric. That’s what happened when the UN Human Rights Council described poverty and the lack of human rights in the USA, including Trump’s policy of tearing children away from their asylum-seeking parents.

An especially sickening aspect of this was the U.S. cover story that it was withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council because of the Council’s alleged “bias against Israel.”

Yes our beloved Israelis: the most cowardly, sub-human, sewer-dwelling parasites that ever defiled the earth. More than half of Britons and Americans are Israelis, regardless of what they call themselves. They have a Jew inside them, urging them to indulge in hate, filth, and depravity. Just as Jews are God’s “chosen,” so are these Britons and Americans “exceptional and indispensable.” The “six million”™ hoax is a get-out-of-jail-free card not only for Jews, but for all “exceptional and indispensable” Anglo-Americans. In 2015, Darth Cheney wrote a book that reveled in this filth, titled Exceptional.

The UN Human Rights Council’s crime is not that it singled out the USA and Israel for special condemnation, but that the Council did not single out the USA and Israel as “exceptional” and “chosen.”

If the original Star Wars movies were real life, then the Evil Empire would call Luke Skywalker a “dictator,” and the rebels “terrorists” and “anti-Semites.”

Matt Franko said...

Konrad you should sign up with the alt-right....

GLH said...

No one describes it better than Konrad.

Noah Way said...

Franko would sign up with the Klan if he wasn't already the Exalted Cyclops.