Take a bite out of kids

 

The selection of John Ashcroft as the United States Attorney General illustrates how far to the right we have gone in this country and how similar the two major parties are.  Aside from some token resistance from Democrats (42 of whom voted against him), Ashcroft rather easily sailed through the so-called Aconfirmation hearings.@ I would like to raise a few points missed by the mainstream media. 

First, it is surprising that so many who supported Ashcroft and even many democrats who voted against him seemed to take him at his word when he said that his personal beliefs will not affect his duties as the highest law enforcement man in the country.  His obvious support of the racist Bob Jones University, his support for the equally racist journal Southern Partisan (which glorifies the Old South and such racists as Andrew Jackson and Jefferson Davis, not to mention the KKK) and his attitudes about abortion, apparently will have no bearing on his decisions about which laws to enforce and which laws not to enforce, and which laws to Avigorously@ enforce.

This is like saying that there is no relationship between one=s Aworld view@ (attitudes, beliefs, values, etc.) and his behavior.  This is denying about 100 years of psychological research and theory!  This may not be too surprising, however, in that there is and has been for many years, an anti-intellectual bias that runs deep within this country.  Many distrust academic research, often merely dismissing it, since it comes from these "ivory-tower, pointy-headed liberal intellectuals (like both Bush and Gore who both believed that the death penalty is a deterrent despite over 50 years of research demonstrating that it is not).

There are plenty of documented instances of where Ashcroft displayed almost total ignorance of what the research community was saying.  For instance, data (from the Justice Department no less!) show that youth crime - especially violent crime - has been going down rapidly in recent years.   In the Senate Chamber recently Ashcroft dismissed this by calling it a "little dip" in an otherwise high juvenile crime wave.  In 1997 he said that "the murders, robbers, rapists and drug dealers of yesterday were typically adults.  Now they are typically juveniles."  This statement is a bald-faced lie (according to Justice Department data)! (You'd think Ashcroft would at least be aware of the data collected by the department he is going to run!) He also claimed, without any factual basis, that "we have killers in the classrooms and predators on the playground" in today's school system (the odds of a kid being shot on school grounds was about one in two million in 1998).

In Senate testimony over the years Ashcroft has strongly supported the certification as adults of more and younger kids accused of crimes, eliminating confidentiality of juvenile records and calling for lowering the death penalty age from 18 to 16 in the federal system (the U.S. stands alone among western democracies in its use of the death penalty for juveniles, along with such stalwarts of democracy as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Somalia).  His total ignorance was displayed in this gem of a statement where he said that the criminal justice system "has been run by individuals of the blurry-eyed notion of rehabilitation, reconciliation, and root causes." 

Another point is the belief in the Arule of law,@ which supposedly replaced the Arule of Kings@ just over 200 years ago.  As with other capitalist democracies, the Arule of law@ has carefully hidden some unpleasant truths.  The Alaw@ gives the appearance of being impersonal. As historian Howard Zinn notes, the law Ais on paper, and who can trace it back to what men? And because it has the look of neutrality, its injustices are made legitimate.  It was not easy to hold on to the >divine right= of kings - everyone could see that kings and queens were human beings.  A code of law is more easily deified than a flesh-and-blood ruler.@  When we had the "rule of men" those who were oppressive could be readily identified - slaves rebelled against their masters, etc.  But in our own era we have impersonal bureaucracies, large corporations and laws contained within not easily understood state "penal codes" (e.g., California Penal Code, Nevada Revised Statutes), which all cover up injustices. 

            So Ashcroft will head up the United States Department of Justice as the "Attorney General," one of many bureaucratic positions that reflect this Arule of law.@  Ashcroft=s selection is a natural byproduct of a capitalist democracy, where the Arule of law@ masks and in turn reinforces great disparities in wealth and power. Ashcroft is merely filling one of several slots within the state bureaucracy, which more or less functions to fulfill the wishes of the ruling class. Our protests are falling on deaf ears, since both parties strongly support the very political system that makes such appointments inevitable. After all, the entire Senate and Congress is beholding to the sources of power and wealth.