What Does Burger King Have to do with Modern Day Slavery in U.S. Agriculture?

Read latest posting by Catherine Albisa, NESRI Executive Director on Burger King's complicity in modern day slavery. See http://www.dmiblog.com/

What about Human Rights for the Holidays Instead?

This holiday season over 4600 units of public housing will be demolished in New Orleans. Simultaneously, almost a thousand people will be summarily thrown out of the cramped FEMA trailers they have called home since the storm. If I didn’t know better, I would think HUD and FEMA were extremely well coordinated in their cruelty. But we have all learned from the storm that they can’t coordinate at all, so this must be one of those tragic coincidences that emerge to sharply remind us what a degraded state we have reached when it comes to social justice.

How is it that these government agencies can freely throw poor families into the street and demolish their homes without any way to effectively stop them? In fact, how is it that after two years in our resource rich country these families are not back in adequate and safe homes, with accompanying support to get over the trauma of the storm and put their lives back together?

There are no protections against these abuses that push poor communities out of their homes, schools, jobs, healthcare and ultimately to the outer margins of society where people are treated as disposable, without legitimate needs and desires or real potential. Economic and social rights are concepts we desperately need to imbed in our policy framework to break this degrading dynamic of handouts – meager support afforded without dignity or respect – and push outs.

Affordable and adequate housing is part of the foundation of human dignity, freedom and equality. No person can truly be free if they are deprived of these essentials and, in a very real sense, cast out of society. How can we bear to see children doing homework in shelters? History will not be kind to us, knowing we had the resources and we had even collectively recognized, through the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, that these rights were fundamental.

Don’t let the year end without reaching out to the public housing community in New Orleans and asking what can be done to walk in solidarity with them. These demolitions and evictions are imminent – therefore our actions must be imminent as well. For more information on what you can do to help, e-mail tiffany@nesri.org. Defend and protect the human right to housing today!