ABSTRACT
Th ese representative stories on the We Are Th e 99 percent blog indicate that when we use an international human rights framework to evaluate U.S. society, we see that our own nation falls short in many important ways (Armaline, Glasberg, and Purkayastha 2011). Some of the greatest insuffi ciencies in the contemporary United States have to do with rights to wellbeing. If you look back at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights again, our list of shared expectations about what people deserve in life and what they should be protected from, you’ll not only see calls for the guarantee of rights to the material conditions necessary for life, but also calls for the right to a life with dignity, for adequate healthcare, and accessible education. In this chapter, we will examine U.S. society in regard to these rights, and try to answer why it is that these rights go unfi lled for so many people within one of the most wealthy nations on the planet.
