Conclusion

Abstract

Marlowe’s assertion that “[E]veryone should have housing and all the things that are necessary to sustain life, to sustain peace, to sustain us as human beings, to sustain us from having to go and be in poverty,” resonates strongly with core tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among those rights enshrined in the 1948 UN document are the rights to food, housing, health care, “to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, [and] old age,”¹ to a living wage,² and collective bargaining.³ In 2011, in the face of escalating assaults on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public housing, public education, and the right to collective bargaining, it’s easy to doubt Martin Luther King’s article of faith, drawn from the nineteenth-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” With the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich extended once again under the auspices of stimulating the economy and creating jobs, the rest of us are called upon to bear the cost of “austerity” measures in the form of cuts to public schools, health care, social services, housing, pensions, and Social Security. We are witnessing, in short, “the global race to the bottom” that was the focus of the 1999 WTO protest. Seattle activists involved in the continually unfolding global democracy movement recognized that under the logic of neoliberalism, corporate profits are treated as sacrosanct, while workers’ rights, and the very right to life of all but a narrowing corporate elite are treated as disposable commodities, the acceptable collateral damage of “Free Trade.”