China exposes U.S. hypocrisy on human rights By Scott Scheffer The U.S. State Department issued a distorted review of global human rights to Congress on Feb. 25. The report presumes to analyze human rights in 195 countries-not including the United States. Countries that have inspired the world with their resistance to U.S. imperialism's efforts to plant its flag in their soil, like Cuba and Iraq, were said to have "rapidly deteriorating human rights conditions." On the other hand, the report obscures the class truth about the people's movements in Colombia and Palestine. It treats the repressive Israeli government and the murderous right-wing paramilitary forces in Colombia as gingerly as possible. Most of its venom was reserved for China. So, for the second year in a row, the Chinese government released a report the day after the release of the State Department's review entitled "U.S. Human Rights Record in 2000" that exposes the hypocrisy of the State Department. The statement draws most of its information from U.S. official sources. Much of the information has been made public before. Nonetheless, it is powerful for its timing, and by virtue of the fact that this damning information is all in one place. Of course, the statistics on the U.S. prison system alone are shocking enough. About 6.3 million men and women-3 percent of the adult population in the U.S.--were on probation, on parole, or in jail at the end of 1999. The U.S. prison population has grown by 44.6 percent since 1990 to more than two million men and women--or 25 percent of the world's prison population. Some 1.5 million children have one or both parents in prison. The authors point out that more than 98 percent of judges in the U.S. are white, and nearly half of the prison population is African American, while another 16 percent are Latino. Unemployment for African Americans is twice that for whites. The United States is one of only five countries that sentence juveniles to death, and has the highest number of such sentences. According to U.S. Department of Justice sources, between 1985 and 1997 the number of inmates under 18 held in adult prisons increased from 3,400 to 7,400. But prison statistics aren't all. The article goes on to show that human rights for poor people in the U.S. are abysmal in many other ways. It points out that "Human trafficking and sexual slavery is now the third most profitable form of illegal business in the U.S., at about seven billion U.S. dollars annually, according to incomplete statistics." It cites a United Nations Children's Fund report that the number of U.S. children in poverty is second highest of all industrialized countries. Thirteen million U.S. children are poverty-stricken-three million more than in 1979. It also exposes the myth that the road to justice and equality is through capitalist elections, pointing out that the 2000 elections cost $3 billion, and that 26 out of 32 Senate races and 417 out of 433 House races were won by the candidates with the most money. The authors slam the imperialist military, saying that "the U.S. has waged wars in foreign countries and regions more than 40 times in the 1990s." They turn the tables on the question of weapons of mass destruction, pointing out the Pentagon's use of "cluster bombs and Depleted Uranium shells, which are banned by international law." The article by the government of the PRC is a timely retaliatory strike against the lies of the U.S. State Department. It's also a well-documented response to the anti-China propaganda that comes from the world's worst violator of human rights. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org) "...all truly great scientific abstractions are both universal and simple. They are simple not because they explain so little but because they explain so much. Generality does not arise because an abstraction represents everything that could possibly happen, but because it remains valid no matter what happens." Alan Freeman _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
