Campaign Exposes U.S. Rights Violations
By David Schwartzman
June 1998
Volume 35 Number 5
The Economic Human Rights Campaign to document and draw attention to the systematic violation by the U.S. of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is coming to town, scheduled to arrive in D.C. on June 28, with a noon rally at Lafayette Park on June 29.
The Campaign is organized by welfare recipients, poor, and homeless people who are determined to fight for full implementation of the Universal Declaration in our nation. In particular, articles 23, 25 and 26 outline each person’s right to housing, food, education, health care and a job at a living wage. Recent federal and state welfare reforms violate these economic and social human rights.
The documentation collected by the Campaign will be presented in a march and tribunal at the United Nations on July 1. The Human Rights Campaign Bus Tour is scheduled to visit over two dozen cities coast to coast in the month of June.
The Campaign is a project of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), from Philadelphia. Referring to recent welfare reforms, Executive Director Cheri Honkala said, “No longer a safety net for the American people in times of need, the welfare system has placed additional obstacles on recipients in meeting the basic necessities of life. A year later...has brought restricted benefits for legal immigrants, limited access to educational opportunities, and a death sentence for poor and homeless families in the United States.”
For the District, the Economic Human Rights Campaign is especially relevant. For us the issue of violation of basic human rights has a powerful urgency. First, we have been stripped of the last vestige of home rule. In 1996, the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations issued General Comment 25, which held the status of the residents of the District to be a flagrant violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (see Timothy Cooper’s article in Legal Times, 5/26/97). The U.S., along with 136 nations, ratified this Covenant.
The lack of full congressional representation of D.C. residents and destruction of home rule are direct violations of the Covenant’s Article 25 which guarantees the right of every citizen to participate in national and local government through elected representatives. It holds that every citizen has the right to “take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives,” to vote and to be elected by “universal and equal suffrage” and to have access to public service on “general terms of equality.”
Second, we have been subject to budget cuts with ferocious impacts on our children and youth, the poor, elderly, disabled, and city workers. The instrument of these assaults on our human rights is the Control Board “junta,” a creation of Congress. We now live in a city of crisis where at least one in three D.C. children lives in poverty, one in four children under 12 years old are hungry or at risk of being hungry, and infant mortality rate is still twice the national average.
D.C. has the highest income inequality of any state in the nation. D.C.’s ratio of the top fifth to bottom fifth of average income of families with children in the nation is 28.2 to 1, compared to the U.S. ratio of 12.7 to 1 (New York Times, 12/17/97). Yet in the last several years, devastating budget cuts have been enacted and more cuts are included in the 1999 “consensus” budget arrived at behind closed doors by the Control Board, City Council and Mayor. Combined with the implementation of the national welfare law, these budget cuts will have very serious consequences for D.C.’s children.
Cuts in AFDC (now TANF) benefits began in the fall of 1994 with the Council’s 10 to 1 rejection of a cost of living increase in spite of the fact that the benefit level at the time was below the poverty limit. Maximum welfare benefits had by 1996 declined 46% from 1970, adjusted for inflation (P.T. Kilborn, New York Times, 12/8/96). So what has the Council done, under the pressure of the Control Board? Cut the benefit level even further (three times in seven months)! This drop in income security for the poor, and the institution of workfare is bound to pull down the wages of low and middle income workers.
Other cuts have resulted in reduction of shelter capacity for families, subsidized child care slots, drug treatment, closure of public health clinics and recreation centers and elimination of the chore aide program for seniors and disabled. The cuts in the Tenants Assistance Program will affect nearly 3,000 people.
The list of hurtful budget cuts goes on and on. One of the cruelest was the elimination of emergency assistance for rent, mortgage, utility and furniture payments for families at the edge of eviction.
Cuts have been made in the budget for the University of the District of Columbia resulting in loss of faculty, staff and a decline in quality of academic programs. In D.C. public schools, teachers and staff in “expendable” areas such as sports, music and art education have been fired. Municipal workers are losing their benefits or being fired with no provision for retraining or job placement. Once unemployed, these individuals find that the maximum unemployment benefit has been cut even though the fund is perfectly solvent.
The U.S. government and its instrument, the Control Board, with the acquiescence of D.C. government, now stand in clear contempt of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (signed by the U.S. on 2/16/95; the U.S. along with Somalia are the only nations in the world which have still not ratified this Convention!). This Convention asserts the following:
“The child has a right to the highest standard of health and medical care attainable. States shall place special emphasis on the provision of primary and preventive health care, public health education and the reduction of infant mortality...Every child has a right to a standard of living adequate for his or her physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.. The child has a right to leisure, play and participation in cultural and artistic activities.”
As documented above, all of these rights have been systematically violated as a result of budget cutting and the implementation of the national welfare reform.
The D.C. budget for this fiscal year has a projected multimillion dollar surplus as a result of the recent economic “boom” and increased efficiency in tax collection. It is a crime against D.C.’s children, the poor and elderly that this money is not being used to restore the safety net eroded by past budget cuts. Future surpluses, now projected to be hundreds of millions of dollars yearly (Washington Post, 3/8/98), should be used to restore and increase the safety net, providing income and health security for low income people, restoring benefits to city workers, not giving tax breaks to the wealthy. Moreover, a sustainable revenue increase can be obtained by restructuring our state/local tax system, changing the current regressive system to a progressive one, e.g., by eliminating the D.C. income tax for the lowest income bracket, while raising it for the high income bracket.
Rather than the so-called “tough love” for the poor (read callous indifference) we need tough love for the wealthy, sharing the wealth to meet human needs in the District. Luxury spending is booming in the metro D.C. area. Is another European vacation or Lexus this year really worth children going hungry, the poor not receiving health care, our youth not getting the higher education they deserve? It is no accident that the United States has the greatest gap between rich and poor families and the highest child poverty rate of practically all industrialized countries (Washington Post, 3/29/97). The “dirty little secret” of economics is that concentration of wealth at the top leads to poverty and misery at the bottom.
Contact the D.C. Economic Human Rights ‘98 Committee at (202) 986-5155.
David Schwartzman is a professor at Howard University. He is on the Central Committee and is the Tax/Budget Deputy of the D.C. Statehood Party. He can be contacted at (202) 829-9063.
