III. On Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
The United States is the world's richest country, but quite a lot of Americans still lack guarantee for their economic, social and cultural rights that are necessary for personal dignity and self-development.
The United States has not done enough to protect its citizens from unemployment. At no time in the last 60 years had the country's long-term unemployment been so high for so long as it was in 2011.
It has been one of the Western developed countries that provide the poorest protection over laborer's rights.
It has not yet approved any international labor organization convention in the last 10 years.
Moreover, the United States lacks effective arbitration system to deal with enterprises that refuse to make compromise with the employees.
The New York Times reported on December 12, 2011, that at last count, 13.3 million people were officially unemployed and that 5.7 million of them had been out of work for more than six months (The New York Times, December 12, 2011).
The unemployment rate was 8.9 percent for 2011 (www.bls.gov), and the unemployment rate for American youth between 25 and 34 stood at 26 percent in October of that year (The World Journal, November 18, 2011), with more underemployed.
A total of 84 metropolitan areas reported jobless rates of at least 10.0 percent, and El Centro, California, recorded the highest unemployment rate of 29.6 percent in September of 2011 (www.bls.gov).
The unemployed people suffered from not only financial pressures but also mental pressures including anxiety and depression.
There is a widening of the gap between the extreme top and bottom (The USA Today, September 13, 2011), showing apparent unfair wealth distribution. The United States claims to have a large population of middle class, making up 80 percent of its total population, while there is only very few impoverished and extremely rich people (The China Press, October 13, 2011).
However, this is not the truth. According to the report issued by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on October 25, 2011, the richest one percent of American families have the fastest growth of family revenue from 1979 to 2007 with an increase of 275 percent for after-tax income, while the after-tax income of the poorest 20 percent grew by only 18 percent (The World Journal, October 26, 2011).
Cable News Network reported on February 16, 2011, that in the last 20 years, incomes for 90 percent of Americans have been stuck in neutral, while the richest 1 percent of Americans have seen their incomes grow by 33 percent. Economic Policy Institute published a paper on October 26, 2011, saying that in 2009 the ratio of wealth owned by the wealthiest one percent to the wealth owned by median household was 225 to 1 (www.epi.org).
Besides, in the United States, the best-off 10 percent made on average 15 times the incomes of the poorest 10 percent (Reuters, December 9, 2011).
The wealthiest 400 Americans have 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars' worth of assets (The China Press, October 13, 2011), or the same combined wealth as the poorest half of Americans -- over 150 million people (www.currydemocrats.org).
The annual incomes of the richest 10 chief executive officers (CEO) were enough to pay the salary of 18,330 employees (The World Journal, October 16, 2011).
Roughly 11 percent of Congress members had net worth of more than 9 million U.S. dollars, and 249 members were millionaires. The median net worth: 891,506 U.S. dollars, was almost nine times the typical household (The USA Today, November 16, 2011).
A commentary by the Spiegel said that the U.S. has developed into an economic entity of "winners take all." American politician Larry Bartels said that fundamental shifts in wealth allocation was caused by political decisions rather than the consequences of market forces or financial crisis (The Spiegel, October 24, 2011).
Contrary to the wealthiest 10 percent, the number of Americans living in poverty as well as poverty rate continued to hit record high, which is a great irony in the affluent America.
A report published by the Census Bureau on September 13, 2011, showed that 46.2 million people lived below the official poverty line in 2010, 2.6 million more than 2009, hitting the highest record since 1959.
The report also said that the percentage of American who lived below the poverty line in 2010 was 15.1 percent, the highest level since 1993.
An analysis done by the Brookings Institution estimated that at the current rate, the recession would have added nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor by the middle of the decade.
According to the analysis, 22 percent of children were in poverty (The New York Times, September 13, 2011). Another survey showed that 12 states of the U.S had poverty rates above 17 percent, with Mississippi's poverty rate standing at 22.4 percent (The Huffington Post, October 21, 2011).
The U.S. has grown into a country dependent on food stamps (Reuters, August 22, 2011).
The percentage of Americans who did not have enough money to buy food grew from 9 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2011 (The World Journal, October 15, 2011). In 2010, 17.2 million households, or 14.5 percent, were food insecure (www. Worldhunger. org).
In 2011, 46 million Americans lived on food stamps, about 15 percent of the total population, up 74 percent from 2007 (Reuters, August 22, 2011).
Millions of homeless people wandered around streets. Reports said that about 2.3 million to 3.5 million Americans did not have a place that they call home to sleep in the night (www.homelessnessinamerica.com).
Between 2007 and 2010, the number of homeless families grew by 20 percent (The Huffington Post, August 26, 2011).
Over the past five years, the percentage of singles arriving at shelters after living with family or elsewhere in the community has jumped from 39 percent to 66 percent (The USA Today, December 9, 2011).
There was an all-time record of more than 41,000 homeless people in New York City, including 17,000 homeless children (www.coalitionforthehomeless.org).
On any given night in Santa Clara County, California State, 7,045 people were homeless according to a 2011 Santa Clara County Homeless Census and Survey (www.santaclaraweekly.com).
And advocates estimated that Chicago had up to 3,000 homeless youths in need of shelter on any given night (www.chicagonewscoop.org).
The U.S. declared it has the best health care service in the world, but quite a lot of Americans could not enjoy due medication and health care.
The Cable News Network reported on September 13, 2011, that the number of people who lacked health insurance in 2010 climbed to 49.9 million (Cable News Network, September 13, 2011).
Bloomberg reported on March 16, 2011, that 9 million Americans have lost health insurance during the past two years.
An additional 73 million adults had difficulties paying for health care and 75 million deferred treatment because they could not afford it (Bloomberg, March 16, 2011).
Death and infection risks caused by AIDS grew. Since the first American patient was diagnosed with AIDS in 1981, 600,000 people have died from the disease in the U.S. By the end of 2008, 1,178,350 Americans had been infected with AIDS (The China Press, June 3, 2011).
AFP reported that nearly three quarters of Americans with HIV do not have their infection under control and one in five people with human immunodeficiency virus are unaware that they have the disease. Among people who know their HIV status is positive, only 51 percent get ongoing medical treatment (AFP, November 29, 2011).
Statistics given by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention showed that, in the last 10 years, death caused by prescription drugs in America had doubled and that one would die from taking prescription drug every 14 minutes.
Prescription drug overdose caused 37,485 deaths in 2009, exceeding traffic fatalities (The China Press, September 19, 2011).
The U.S. government has significantly cut the expense on education, reduced teaching staff, and shortened school hours with tuition fees soaring. The guarantee for teenagers' rights to education is weakening.
The New York Times reported on October 3, 2011, that since 2007, school budgets in New York city have been cut by 13.7 percent every year on average.
Since 2008, 294,000 posts in the American education industry, including schools of higher education, have been cut (The China Press, October 25, 2011).
Four-day per week classes have been practiced in 292 school districts, which was only put into use during the financial crisis in the 1930s and the oil crisis in the 1970s (The World Journal, October 30, 2011).
A report by College Board showed that the average tuition fee of American four-year public universities in the school year of 2011 through 2012 was 8,244 U.S. dollars, 631 U.S. dollars more than the last school year, up 8.3 percent (The China Press, October 27, 2011).
About 3,000 people gathered on Sproul Plaza to protest tuition increases at Berkeley on November 9, 2011 (The New York Times, November 13, 2011). Reuters reported that two-thirds of undergraduate students would graduate with student loans about 25,000 U.S. dollars on average owing to the expensive college tuition (Reuters, February 1, 2011).
The Indian culture in the United States has long been suppressed. The country assimilated the Indian culture through legislation and mainstream culture. At the end of the 19th century, the United States carried out "white man's education" and implemented compulsory English-only education. Most of the people who now speak Indian languages are the seniors living in reservations.
It is estimated that only five percent of Indians will speak their own languages 50 years later if there are no measures from the U.S. government.
The financial crisis was far from being the sole reason for the inadequate guarantee of Americans' economic, social and cultural rights. So far, the U.S. has not approved the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The above problems concerning human rights are the reflection of the U.S. ideology and political system that ignore people's economic, social and cultural rights.
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