The 99% Solution: Human Rights and Economic Justice in the United States

Our story always seems to pit the good guys against the bad guys:the founding fathers versus the evil empire, man versus machine, Main Street versus Wall Street, the ninety-nine percent versus the one percent. Nobody, including those of us who struggle to realize human rights in the United States, ever totally believes that we are all in this battle for equality and justice together, that we really are ALL born equal in dignity and rights. It is not just that we appear, for example, to exclude the one percent from the protection of all people’s economic and social rights, but that we do not always include our fellow ninety-nine percenters either. Sometimes we discount even ourselves. This essay looks at the value of human rights as a frame for economic justice work in the United States. It focuses in particular on the potential of human rights to serve as a unifying platform for such work within a polarized national context that often pits one group against another, whether the rich against the poor or the poor against the rich or people in either of these categories against one another. It relies on both the idea of economic human rights and its practical application in the United States to exemplify the frame’s unifying value, to identify some of its potential limitations, and to consider how they might best be addressed. It envisions a new, values-based approach to greater economic equality in the United States that emphasizes the common good alongside that of any particular group.