In the wake of World War II, the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document was intended to prevent the kind of atrocities the world had just witnessed from reoccurring in the future.

More than 60 years later, as the Utne Reader’s January-February 2012 human rights package illustrates (“Tortured,” “The CIA in Somalia,” “Jihad Against Islam”), the world continues to struggle to meet the principles put forward in the text.

Several groups continue to fight for the ideals that were set forth, however. And they need your help. Here is a partial list of some of your options, vetted using Charity Navigator.

Human Rights Watch 
This fact-finding nonprofit has spent the last three decades sorting out often complicated human rights issues. The organization has deployed on-the-ground monitors to 80 countries around the world, and their team of academics, journalists and lawyers publish more than 100 policy-shaping reports every year. Their funding comes entirely from private individuals and foundations. hrw.org                                                                                                    

Human Rights First 
Founded in 1978, Human Rights First offers direct legal services to refugees and asylum seekers, fights against hate crimes, works with retired military leaders on issues of torture and detention, and works to quell mass atrocities by putting pressure on third-party enablers. A nonpartisan, nonprofit based in New York and Washington D.C., the organization accepts no government funding. humanrightsfirst.org 

Physicians for Human Rights  
Physicians for Human Rights was created in 1986 on the belief that health professionals could be a strong voice for preventing human rights abuses. Their expert opinions, epidemiological research, and forensic research are sought by international courts, the United Nations, and other government entities. The group’s targets include everything from wartime rape in Central and East Africa to the persecution of medical workers during times of civil unrest and armed conflict. physiciansforhumanrights.org 

Amnesty International 
In its 50 years of work, Amnesty International has fought against the death penalty, corporate abuse, and censorship. Their work, including trial observation, advocacy, and victim outreach, spans more than 150 countries and is funded primarily by members and public donations. The group also seeks volunteers to help raise money, translate, monitor the press and assist with research. amnesty.org 

Freedom House 
Freedom House publishes four reports a year – including their flagship, democracy-tracking work, Freedom in the World – assessing the state of freedom in the world. Founded by American leaders looking to bolster public support for fighting Nazi extremism, it continues to fight totalitarian regimes around the world by offering training and support at a grassroots level. Celebrating its 70^th anniversary, the group is soliciting $70 donations that will go to translation services in Africa, supporting women’s rights in the Middle East, or training human rights advocates in Central Asia. freedomhouse.org 

Global Exchange 
Leaders of this grassroots group say they want to build a “people-centered globalization that values the rights of workers and the health of the planet” and have built a network of activists, students, labor unions, and environmentalists to do just that. Based in the Bay Area, their efforts include everything from a trick-or-treating campaign in which people were encouraged to give fair trade chocolate to organized “reality tours” of Palestine. globalexchange.org  

National Religious Campaign Against Torture 
Formed in 2006, this coalition of faith communities, including the Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim faiths, fights U.S. policies that enable torture at home and abroad. The group is urging President Obama to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which has been ratified by 60 nations, and advocates a program that would limit U.S. aid to governments that enable torture. nrcat.org 

Center for Victims of Torture 
The Center for Victims of Torture helps torture victims overcome their trauma at counseling centers in St. Paul, MN, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Jordan. The organization also works with researchers around the world to learn about effective treatments. Donations are accepted, and volunteers are sought to serve as “befrienders” of torture victims, tutors, and drivers. cvt.org 

Earth Rights International  
After winning a settlement from now-defunct oil company UNOCAL on behalf of Burmese villagers in 1997, Earth Rights International has continued to fight alleged human rights abuses through U.S. courts. The group focuses on the intersection of environmental degradation and human rights – what they’ve coined “earth rights.” Their work is funded solely through private donations. earthrights.org 

Equality Now 
Equality Now operates on a grassroots level in more than 160 countries to document, expose, and fight human rights abuses against women and children. Their main focuses include sexual violence, trafficking, discrimination in law, and female genital mutilation. The organization accepts donations and invites supporters to organize their own fundraisers on their behalf. equalitynow.org 

Free the Slaves 
Free the Slaves is working to release all people from the bondage of slavery still festering in impoverished corners of the world. They work with businesses to improve worker conditions and with governments to pass strict anti-slavery laws. The group invites supporters to join their “I Am the Change” campaign, which works to educate people about slavery around the world. freetheslaves.net 

Image by Zina Saunders / www.zinasaunders.com 

Pessimists, skeptics, and conspiracy theorists often have a fairly similar point of view. The difference is in the packaging of their arguments. It’s hard to tell where Guernica’s Russ Baker falls on the Chicken Little spectrum with his latest essay, which questions whether or not the federal government is grooming U.S. citizens for a war with Iran.

Baker’s evidence is of two types. First, he cites that the discourse around Iran’s nuclear ambition sounds very aggressive. Of course it’s important to note that many policy makers and analysts are still throwing their hands up on the Iranian nuclear situation, and Baker notes this. Further, there seems to be whispers, by Baker’s account, that the U.S. is trying to pin a financial donkey-tail on Iran for involvement with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “This one may gain traction due to powerful lingering emotions on the topic,” he adds, soberly. The other type of evidence he draws from is historic, namely the well-funded campaigns to depose Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

Although Baker doesn’t provide links or extended quotes to back his argument, it remains persuasive—at least in a knee-jerk sense. But even if it turns out to be merely armchair speculation, it serves as a reminder of why we should keep a critical eye on mainstream media and federal government.

Source: Guernica 

Image by AZRainman, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Although it pains me to even type these words, new research from Princeton University suggests that the least informed citizens provide a crucial damper on our democratic process. Ecology professor Iain Couzin used a model animal that, on the whole, is more intelligent that about 30 percent of Americans: fish.

The experiment involved golden shiner fish, which innately are drawn to the color yellow (as many humans are drawn to the ice cream freezer at the grocery store or to cable news channels on the television). Couzin and his fellow researchers trained a number of them to swim against their nature prefer the color blue instead. “In experiments where a minority of fish was trained to swim toward a yellow target,” reports Miller-McCune, “and a majority toward a blue target, the minority swayed the whole group more than 80 percent of the time.” Think of these as the “informed” actors in a democracy who have a very specific, possibly extreme, goal for the country.

When the research team introduced “uninformed” fish—those that hadn’t been turned-on to blue—the crowd did something surprising. “Adding those individuals dramatically changes the outcome of group decision-making,” Couzin told Miller-McCune. “They inhibit the minority and support the majority view, and this allows the majority to be heard and that view to dominate.” The views of the Ron Pauls and Dennis Kuchiniches of the fish world get drowned out for something a little more moderate—and in line with the wants of the majority.

“But these are fish!” you say. That’s true, and Couzin concedes as much. But, the researchers point out, as a citizen crowd, we have much in common with Couzin’s model. Humans, Miller-McCune points out, have “the ability to influence and be influenced by each other. We also have the capacity for strong opinion.”

The implication of this study could be very transformative about how we behave in large groups. If Couzin’s experiment shows similar results on human subjects, it will have the “potential to knock down a bit of conventional wisdom about how people make group decisions — that is, that uninformed people are easily swayed by the loudest voice in the room, enabling extreme minority views to spread.”

Source: Miller-McCune 

Image by Benson Kua, licensed under Creative Commons. 

“We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation,” said this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Leymah Gbowee, when accepting her award (News.com.au). The pain: rape. The bodies: women’s. The nation: Liberia, West Africa.

The violent crimes committed against women have been at the forefront of protests in Africa and the Middle East for years, writes News.com.au, and the Nobel committee recognized the successes and value of feminist protesters with its prestigious award:

Ms Gbowee, 39, challenged Liberia’s warlords as she campaigned for women’s rights and against rape. In 2003, she led hundreds of female protesters through Monrovia to demand swift disarmament of fighters, who continued to prey on women….

She called the peace prize a recognition of the struggle for women’s rights not only in Yemen and Liberia, but anywhere that women face oppression.

Gbowee shares the prize with fellow protesters Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was elected president of Liberia in 2005, and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen, who was instrumental in the Arab Spring demonstrations and is the first Arab woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Says Gbowee, “There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where all men and women are considered equal and free.”

Source: News.com.au, Nobelprize.org 

Leymah Gbowee portrait by Michael Angelo for Wonderland, courtesy of Michael Angelo for Wonderland; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf photo by Center for Global Development, licensed under Creative Commons.

By Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich 

This post originally appeared at TomDispatch/The Nation.   

***

“Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”

-- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class 

The “other men” (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1% of the wealth distribution -- the bankers, hedge-fund managers, and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the “super-rich,” in recent years.

Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions, $25,000 chocolate desserts embellished with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1% to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our political system stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.

Still, until a few months ago, the 99% was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) articulating “the identity of their interests.” It contained, and still contains, most “ordinary” rich people, along with middle-class professionals, factory workers, truck drivers, and miners, as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawns of the affluent.

It was divided not only by these class differences, but most visibly by race and ethnicity -- a division that has actually deepened since 2008. African-Americans and Latinos of all income levels disproportionately lost their homes to foreclosure in 2007 and 2008, and then disproportionately lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that followed.  On the eve of the Occupy movement, the black middle class had been devastated. In fact, the only political movements to have come out of the 99% before Occupy emerged were the Tea Party movement and, on the other side of the political spectrum, the resistance to restrictions on collective bargaining in Wisconsin.

But Occupy could not have happened if large swaths of the 99% had not begun to discover some common interests, or at least to put aside some of the divisions among themselves. For decades, the most stridently promoted division within the 99% was the one between what the right calls the “liberal elite” -- composed of academics, journalists, media figures, etc. -- and pretty much everyone else.

As Harper’s Magazine columnist Tom Frank has brilliantly explained, the right earned its spurious claim to populism by targeting that “liberal elite,” which supposedly favors reckless government spending that requires oppressive levels of taxes, supports “redistributive” social policies and programs that reduce opportunity for the white middle class, creates ever more regulations (to, for instance, protect the environment) that reduce jobs for the working class, and promotes kinky countercultural innovations like gay marriage. The liberal elite, insisted conservative intellectuals, looked down on “ordinary” middle- and working-class Americans, finding them tasteless and politically incorrect. The “elite” was the enemy, while the super-rich were just like everyone else, only more “focused” and perhaps a bit better connected.

Of course, the “liberal elite” never made any sociological sense. Not all academics or media figures are liberal (Newt Gingrich, George Will, Rupert Murdoch). Many well-educated middle managers and highly trained engineers may favor latte over Red Bull, but they were never targets of the right. And how could trial lawyers be members of the nefarious elite, while their spouses in corporate law firms were not?  

A Greased Chute, Not a Safety Net 

“Liberal elite” was always a political category masquerading as a sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite some traction, though, at least for a while, was that the great majority of us have never knowingly encountered a member of the actual elite, the 1% who are, for the most part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes, gated communities, and walled estates.

The authority figures most people are likely to encounter in their daily lives are teachers, doctors, social workers, and professors. These groups (along with middle managers and other white-collar corporate employees) occupy a much lower position in the class hierarchy.  They made up what we described in a 1976 essay as the “professional managerial class.” As we wrote at the time, on the basis of our experience of the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there have been real, longstanding resentments between the working-class and middle-class professionals. These resentments, which the populist right cleverly deflected toward “liberals,” contributed significantly to that previous era of rebellion’s failure to build a lasting progressive movement.

As it happened, the idea of the “liberal elite” could not survive the depredations of the 1% in the late 2000s. For one thing, it was summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the actual Wall Street-based elite and their crimes. Compared to them, professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1% took your house away.

There was, as well, another inescapable problem embedded in the right-wing populist strategy: even by 2000, and certainly by 2010, the class of people who might qualify as part of the “liberal elite” was in increasingly bad repair. Public-sector budget cuts and corporate-inspired reorganizations were decimating the ranks of decently paid academics, who were being replaced by adjunct professors working on bare subsistence incomes. Media firms were shrinking their newsrooms and editorial budgets. Law firms had started outsourcing their more routine tasks to India. Hospitals beamed X-rays to cheap foreign radiologists. Funding had dried up for nonprofit ventures in the arts and public service. Hence the iconic figure of the Occupy movement: the college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a hour, or no job at all.

These trends were in place even before the financial crash hit, but it took the crash and its grim economic aftermath to awaken the 99% to a widespread awareness of shared danger. In 2008, “Joe the Plumber’s” intention to earn a quarter-million dollars a year still had some faint sense of plausibility. A couple of years into the recession, however, sudden downward mobility had become the mainstream American experience, and even some of the most reliably neoliberal media pundits were beginning to announce that something had gone awry with the American dream.

Once-affluent people lost their nest eggs as housing prices dropped off cliffs. Laid-off middle-aged managers and professionals were staggered to find that their age made them repulsive to potential employers. Medical debts plunged middle-class households into bankruptcy. The old conservative dictum -- that it was unwise to criticize (or tax) the rich because you might yourself be one of them someday -- gave way to a new realization that the class you were most likely to migrate into wasn’t the rich, but the poor.

And here was another thing many in the middle class were discovering: the downward plunge into poverty could occur with dizzying speed. One reason the concept of an economic 99% first took root in America rather than, say, Ireland or Spain is that Americans are particularly vulnerable to economic dislocation. We have little in the way of a welfare state to stop a family or an individual in free-fall. Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a year, though in a recession they are sometimes extended by Congress. At present, even with such an extension, they reach only about half the jobless. Welfare was all but abolished 15 years ago, and health insurance has traditionally been linked to employment.

In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60% of American firms now check applicants' credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.

Making Sense of the 99% 

The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the 99%’s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people -- we may never know the exact numbers -- from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they managed to create self-governing communities.

General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers, and plenty of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part, constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building. The 99%, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence.

Can the unity cultivated in the encampments survive as the Occupy movement evolves into a more decentralized phase?  All sorts of class, racial, and cultural divisions persist within that 99%, including distrust between members of the former “liberal elite” and those less privileged. It would be surprising if they didn’t. The life experience of a young lawyer or a social worker is very different from that of a blue-collar worker whose work may rarely allow for biological necessities like meal or bathroom breaks. Drum circles, consensus decision-making, and masks remain exotic to at least the 90%. “Middle class” prejudice against the homeless, fanned by decades of right-wing demonization of the poor, retains much of its grip.

Sometimes these differences led to conflict in Occupy encampments -- for example, over the role of the chronically homeless in Portland or the use of marijuana in Los Angeles -- but amazingly, despite all the official warnings about health and safety threats, there was no “Altamont moment”: no major fires and hardly any violence.  In fact, the encampments engendered almost unthinkable convergences: people from comfortable backgrounds learning about street survival from the homeless, a distinguished professor of political science discussing horizontal versus vertical decision-making with a postal worker, military men in dress uniforms showing up to defend the occupiers from the police.

Class happens, as Thompson said, but it happens most decisively when people are prepared to nourish and build it. If the “99%” is to become more than a stylish meme, if it’s to become a force to change the world, eventually we will undoubtedly have to confront some of the class and racial divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so patiently, respectfully, and always with an eye to the next big action -- the next march, or building occupation, or foreclosure fight, as the situation demands.

Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch regular , is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword ). 

John Ehrenreich is p rofessor of psychology at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. He wrote The Humanitarian Companion: A Guide for International Aid, Development, and Human Rights Workers .  

This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print at the Nation magazine.

Copyright 2011 Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich

Playing off of Elizabeth Warren’s widely publicized quote about taxes (see picture above), the editors at The New Republic take the argument one step further, making a moral case for paying them. Their defense of taxation hinges on two arguments. “The first is distributional,” write the editors. “A civilized society recognizes [that capitalism will create losers as well as winners, often because of forces beyond any individual’s control] and vows to mitigate” that problem. “The second reason we need taxes isn’t about the least fortunate; it’s about public goods.” This is the point Warren made, and the editors at TNR make the same point, asking, “Could Bill Gates have made his fortune without government-financed education and technology?”

It’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to taxes. Even the most liberal among us may scoff at their property taxes from year to year. The New Republic’s editorial is a good reminder that, indeed, “Taxes are an act of citizenship. We should all be proud to pay them.”

Source: The New Republic (article only available to subscribers)