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	We have to reorder our priorities and put people first by The Center for Economic & Social Rights   What began as a financial crisis is turning into a global human rights crisis.   Just as greater poverty threatens the realization of economic and social rights, the repression of growing social protest is threatening civil and political rights. A rising tide of xenophobia and discrimination is also already threatening the rights of migrants and minorities. Yet despite the human rights dimensions of the crisis, government responses have largely failed to fully take human rights into account.   We call on governments and policy-makers to take into account their obligations to respect, protect and fulfill human rights for immediate crisis responses and longer-term decisions about economic policy and economic governance.   A human rights approach challenges complacency over the terrible consequences of the economic crisis on human lives and human dignity. Many organizations are estimating how many millions of people will lose their homes, their livelihoods, their incomes, their health and education. The World Bank, for example, estimates that up to 400,000 children will die this year as a result of the crisis.   But these terrible consequences of the crisis often are accepted as inevitable, as if there is nothing that we can do about them. A human rights approach challenges this complacency - it is not inevitable, and nor is it acceptable to accept these losses to human life and dignity. We have to reorder our priorities and put people first.   Governments have obligations under human rights conventions to prioritize the fulfillment of "minimum essential levels" of economic and social rights, to guard against any discrimination and to target the most vulnerable.   These obligations are not derogable - they become even more essential in times of economic crisis. It is not acceptable that governments can allocate billions of dollars for banking bailouts, yet make few resources available to prevent 400,000 children from dying during the crisis.   Human rights must be central to our understanding of the impacts and consequences of the crisis, but also the causes of the crisis. This understanding helps to frame choices of policy responses in ways that address human rights concerns.   The real consequences and the greatest burden of the impacts has fallen on the poorest and most marginalized communities and the realization of their human rights. The rights to housing, work, food, water, education, health, and even the right to life are all being threatened, yet states responses so far do not appear to be guided by the need to avoid violations of these rights.   A human rights analysis requires us to take a step back and analyze the deeper, structural causes of the crisis. This includes, for example, understanding the role of the international financial institutions actions and failures to act that contributed to the crisis. Examples include the failure of states to regulate in the public interest and the failure of states to address unequal development, rising inequalities, stagnating wages, where these amount to failures to respect, protect and fulfill human rights.   In the short term, the choice of responses must prioritize the people - rather than the banks and businesses - that are most affected. In the long term, it means addressing the structural causes and abuses of power that have caused the crisis, redefining the principles that underlie the global economy to ensure the capacity of governments (and non-state actors) to respect, protect and fulfill the human rights of all people. Visit the related web page
	More than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968 by Bob Herbert NYT / Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence USA   January 10, 2011   If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads. We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely violent society. The vitriol that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric, most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad contributing factors in a society saturated in blood.   According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed. That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.   Excluding the people killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than 150,000 Americans have been murdered since the beginning of the 21st century. This endlessly proliferating parade of death, which does not spare women or children, ought to make our knees go weak. But we never even notice most of the killings. Homicide is white noise in this society.   The overwhelming majority of the people who claim to be so outraged by last weekend’s shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others — six of them fatally — will take absolutely no steps, none whatsoever, to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. And similar tragedies are coming as surely as the sun makes its daily appearance over the eastern horizon because this is an American ritual: the mowing down of the innocents.   On Saturday, the victims happened to be a respected congresswoman, a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge and a number of others gathered at the kind of civic event that is supposed to define a successful democracy. But there are endless horror stories. In April 2007, 32 students and faculty members at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute were shot to death and 17 others were wounded by a student armed with a pair of semiautomatic weapons.   On a cold, rainy afternoon in Pittsburgh in 2009, I came upon a gray-haired woman shivering on a stone step in a residential neighborhood. “I’m the grandmother of the kid that killed those cops,” she whispered. Three police officers had been shot and killed by her 22-year-old grandson, who was armed with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle.   I remember having lunch with Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a few days after the Virginia Tech tragedy. She shook her head at the senseless loss of so many students and teachers, then told me: “We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”   If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment, and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.   Ordinary citizens interested in a more sane and civilized society would have to insist that their elected representatives take meaningful steps to stem the violence. And they would have to demand, as well, that the government bring an end to the wars overseas, with their terrible human toll, because the wars are part of the same crippling pathology.   Without those very tough steps, the murder of the innocents by the tens of thousands will most assuredly continue.   I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Gabrielle Giffords story is big for the time being, but so were Columbine and Oklahoma City. And so was the anti-white killing spree of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo that took 10 lives in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., in October 2002. But no amount of killing has prompted any real remedial action.   For whatever reasons, neither the public nor the politicians seem to really care how many Americans are murdered — unless it’s in a terror attack by foreigners. The two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it. The horror prompted by the attack in Tucson on Saturday will pass. The outrage will fade. The murders will continue. Visit the related web page
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