Below is the text of testimony from Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis at the Consultation on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in the US and Canada for the ESCR Unit of the Inter-American Commission Human Rights. Given on Wednesday, January 27th, 2016.
Good morning. Thanks for having me here. My name is Liz Theoharis and I joined a budding movement of the poor and homeless in early-mid 1990s, with groups like National Union of the Homeless, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, and the National Welfare Rights Union.
Many of the leaders from the National Welfare Rights Union and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization from Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan like Maureen and Sylvia who are here today have been my mentors in this movement. So it’s a special honor to be a part of something they’re involved in.
I have been part of a growing movement to achieve human rights for all here in the United States for more than 20 years. I have experienced poverty and homelessness first hand, I have lived for years without medical care, and now as a parent I struggle to pay my bills and provide my kids with an adequate education.
My work over these many years has been with these different communities, across the country, fighting for economic human rights. I am part of the Kairos Center housed at Union Theological Seminary and we are part of a new Poor People’s Campaign that is growing to build a broad based movement for realizing economic, social and cultural rights.
I want to start off appreciating that this unit is having this consultation, drawing attention to economic human rights violation taking place across the U.S. in widespread ways. Indeed, there are systemic and gross violations of human rights are happening in the U.S. and people and communities are responding, organizing, challenging this system.
I see a primary goal for this consultation and unit as partnering with and connecting up communities and organizations led by those most impacted to share the plight of what’s going on, and also highlight the fights for rights that are being undertaken, as well as the strategic and analytical insights coming out of these struggles – that can actually help shape our broader understanding of how a movement for economic human rights must be oriented.
In this new Poor People’s Campaign are leaders from Belhaven, NC who, two years in a row, have walked from their small town to here in DC to protest the closings of 283 rural hospitals including Pungo Medical Center in Belhaven. And when a hospital closes in a rural community, the whole community is at risk – health wise, economically – and these closures have meant deaths of children, elderly, etc., and also that these communities just shut down, die. In fact three days after Pungo closed, a woman died of a heart attack.
At the same time as this march was taking place, there are homeless encampments all over the country, in Aberdeen, Washington; Salinas, California; Denver, Colorado; Nashville, Tennessee; Rochester, New York, and elsewhere who are fighting around the criminalization and targeting of homeless encampments, of people who are homeless and living on the margins, being targeted by police and public authorities. In fact, a community in Grays Harbor, Washington that was facing eviction from their encampment by the river during the Rural Hospitals March is now being confronted by a police presence even as they’re leaving church. These are poor white people who are being targeted outside of their place of worship and sanctuary.
In other places in the country, as we all know, poor black people and poor people of color are facing terrible police brutality, alongside the total brunt of what it is to be poor and without economic rights. As storms in the Midwest left communities in Ferguson flooded and homeless, receiving no help, the narrative was entirely on police brutality and not these economic conditions and the intersections of all these issues and human rights violations.
There is the poisoning of children in Gulf Coast because of the BP oil disaster and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; there is raw sewage in Lowdnes County, Alabama in the Mississippi Delta and deep South where people cannot afford adequate sanitation and so children are playing by streams of open sewage and diseases formerly eradicated in the United States are reemerging. Low wage workers, domestic workers, day laborers, fast food workers, are not able to afford their basics necessities – education, housing, health care. Corporations are building incinerators next to schools and pouring money into prisons and not the education and well-being of families.
And across the Midwest and the South, states that have opted out of Medicaid expansion and provision of health care to low-income people are threatening the lives of thousands of people. A Harvard study done in 2014 estimated that states opting out of Medicaid expansion will result in up to 17,000 more deaths; 240,000 will suffer from catastrophic medical expenses; 422,000 fewer diabetics will receive medication; nearly 200,000 fewer women will receive mammograms, and 440,000 fewer women will receive pap smears.
The Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and across the country are actively organizing and fighting against these violations. They have come together with a 12-point plan. And when these leaders in North Carolina came together, they talked about the various violations that people were facing (the suppression of voting rights, the privatizing of education, the lack of Medicaid expansion, discrimination of LGBTQ leaders and communities, immigration detentions and deportations, etc.) and came to the conclusion that it was the same forces and interests that were fighting for the deportation of immigrants, the cutting of health care, gutting of voting rights, denial of women’s’ rights.
We see this over and over again in what we’re connected to throughout this country. The poor embody the fullness of these social issues in themselves. To be able to change these violations and realize economic rights, the connections between these issues must be drawn out and addressed. We are not served well by just deepening ourselves in our silos. We have found in our work that those most vulnerable are the most impacted, and as anywhere else, they are not silent victims. Indeed, the attention that any of these struggles get is based on years of organizing on the ground with people insisting that they need to be heard and seen, by them basically forcing a space in the public consciousness for their voices and selves to be recognized. The attention now focused on the mass-poisoning of children in Flint is just one example of that.
What would help our work and the realization of ESCR in this country is for the commission and its networks to partner with these grassroots efforts and amplify them to the rest of the world. That includes showing that the U.S. is no exception to gross violations of human rights, and is a purveyor of violence worldwide and at home, but just as importantly that people here take their rights seriously and are fighting for their realization.
Part of what we want this consultation to do is to pair up with these grassroots struggles to make more continued strategic analysis. Breaking this isolation of the poor of the U.S. is not only building strength for struggles here, but also enabling those fighting for their rights around the world to be able to see more clearly the connections between their fights and ours, rather than the differences, which can only lead to greater resilience and strength in the global fight for ESCR.
— source kairoscenter.org