The testimony below was given by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis at the Sixth Consulation on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR) by the ESCR Unit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in Washington, D.C. on January 27, 2015.
Good morning. Thank you for having me here. My name is Liz Theoharis and I joined a budding movement of the poor and homeless in the United States 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 Taylor and Sylvia Orduno 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.
I am part of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice / Poverty Initiative housed at Union Theological Seminary and we are part of a 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. and Canada in widespread ways. Indeed, there are systemic and gross violations of human rights happening in the U.S. Nearly 1 in 2 people in the United States are poor or low-income. And this poverty exists next to extreme wealth.
When I was without adequate housing in Philadelphia there were more than 45,000 abandoned homes in Philadelphia alone and about 39,000 homeless people. It was illegal for us to move into those abandoned homes but perfectly legal for us to be homeless, jobless, without adequate food or health care. The resources existed to resolve homelessness, the will to resolve it did not.
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 the growing 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. In fact, three days after Pungo Hospital closed, a woman died of a heart attack. And in Texas, parents had to hold their 18-month daughter as she choked to death because the nearest hospital was closed.
There are homeless encampments all over the US, in Aberdeen, Washington; Salinas, California; Denver, Colorado; Nashville, Tennessee; Rochester, New York, and elsewhere who are fighting for affordable housing and against the criminalization and targeting of homeless encampments by police and public authorities. A community in Grays Harbor, Washington that was facing eviction from their encampment by the river, during the Rural Hospitals March I mentioned above, 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 just for being poor and homeless. Yet no resources are being made available for housing, adequate standard of living, living wages jobs, just for a police presence.
In other places in the country, as we all know, poor black people, poor Latinos, 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. Storms in the Midwest left communities in Ferguson and St. Louis flooded and homeless. These communities have received no help to build an economic infrastructure or to address these forced evictions. The narrative has been entirely on police brutality, not the 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 spill and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita – families there left with no way to provide for their families; 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, like hookworm, are reemerging.
Low wage workers, domestic workers, day laborers, fast food workers, are not able to afford their basics necessities – education, housing, health care, food. Food workers go hungry, health care workers can’t afford health care for themselves and their families. Corporations are building incinerators next to schools and pouring money into prisons and not the education and well-being of families. Fracking and mountaintop removal are destroying communities and displacing and dispossessing families and ancestral burial lands.
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.
The Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and across the country are actively organizing and fighting against these violations. When they came together a few years ago to form a 12-point plan, they talked about the various violations that people were facing. They 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, the cutting of affordable housing, the polluting of water, the privatizing of public education.
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 silosand looking at each economic human right as separate and different. And our proposals and plans must be about outcomes, the realization of human rights, not simply providing opportunities or setting goals.
We have also found in our work that those most vulnerable are the most impacted by multiple human rights violations, and as anywhere else, we are not silent victims. Indeed, much of the attention that any struggle for ESCR gets is based on years of organizing on the ground with people insisting that we need to be heard and seen, by basically forcing a space in the public consciousness for our voices and selves to be recognized. The attention that the mass poisoning of children in Flint is now getting, is one example of how poor people facing desperate conditions are forcing open that kind of space.
What would help our work and the realization of ESCR in the United States is for this commission and unit to continue to partner with grassroots efforts, amplify to the rest of the world what is going on, including showing that the U.S. is no exception to gross violations of human rights of their own people. Just as importantly we need you to help show that people here take our rights seriously and are fighting for their realization.
Breaking the isolation of the poor of the U.S. is not only building strength for the realization of human rights here, but also enabling those fighting for their rights around the Americas and 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.