The Human Rights - Economics Connection
by Michael Leung
Grand Theft
The violence that constitutes the majority of human rights abuses is a result of the dominant powers using force to maintain a status quo of vast inequality. Of the six billion people in the world, half live on less than $2 a day, and a billion of those live on less than $1 a day. Only a small percentage of Americans will ever have a substantial interaction with the poorer half of the world’s population, and they are essentially ignored in the mainstream media. Their poverty is often fatal. Despite an abundant global food supply, over twenty thousand a day die of starvation, malnutrition, and associated diseases. Knowledge of this uncomfortable fact is limited and usually quickly forgotten.
Lack of clean water also takes its toll. Instead of large scale water purification and distribution systems to serve the bulk of the world’s population, we have expensive weapons systems to keep people in their place. Their place is anywhere but here, where their basic needs would be an unacceptable economic burden. Weapons are justified as a good use of resources because the US military instills a sense of pride in Americans. While people may starve, no expense will be spared to protect the troops by heaping profits on their weapons suppliers.
When the weak oppose their state of affairs in an organized manner they are labeled communists, socialists, terrorists, insurgents, or worse, regardless of fact. These people can be decimated at will once appropriately labeled. Their wholesale slaughter is largely accepted as a response to highly trumpeted threats to the national security and even the continued existence of the most powerful nation on earth. That the threatening nations or groups have minimal military capacity is rarely noticed.
The United States has active military personnel stationed in over 700 external bases spanning 130 of the 192 countries. It is the world’s sole superpower whose military expenditures equal the entire rest of the world’s combined. The US military is unique in its immunity from war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Failure of other countries to grant exemption results in halting of aid as well as political and economic punishment.
Empires have one function, to extract tribute from their weaker clients. The American empire robs third world countries by exchanging real goods for US dollars, which can be printed at will. The governments of the third world countries must use their US dollars to purchase US treasuries so they can maintain a low exchange rate which sustains their export based growth. They can thus continue to export their labor and natural resources to the US at a heavy discount. This trade of real goods and resources for dollars which are then recycled back into the US economy comes at the expense of domestic development in the third world. [more]