When you hear the word “rights” in the American corporate media, it is usually preceded by “Constitutional” rather than “human.”
The Supreme Court has declared that corporations have the same rights as people. Their first declaration of this principle came as early as 1818 and most recently in 2010 in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case.
The Citizens United decision serves the latest cabal of robber barons and further empowers the military industrial complex, which may be credited by the Court as having enough brain to exercise rights but has manifested little in regard to a heart.
Indeed, in exercising their putative Constitutional rights, the profiteers of the military industrial complex have shown an enormous talent for crushing human rights both within the borders of the United States and in other lands wounded by US hegemony.
In one of the latest examples of human rights violations in the US, the City of Detroit has been shutting off water to the poorest residents of the city, unable to pay their water bills.
The shutoffs have been linked to a push towards privatization of the water system. Like the privatization of prison management, this effort is one more giant step forward in the rush to privatization that disproportionately violates the human rights of people of color and poverty in the U.S.
Former President Jimmy Carter is appalled by the U.S. record on human rights violations.
How about you?
Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology