Brett Kavanaugh, Entitlements, and the Presumption of Innocence

-->

By Steven Halpern

The hearings to examine Brett Kavanaugh’s qualifications to become a Supreme Court Justice have received international coverage. The charge by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were in high school has also become an international issue.

These hearings have opened up a discussion on several issues that effect working people. They include: violence against women, the presumption of innocence, the so-called entitlements of the affluent, as well as how the law is interpreted. In this blog I will attempt to examine each of these issues.

Violence against women

In Dr. Ford’s testimony, we viewed a compelling story of how she was sexually assaulted. One reason why this testimony was so compelling is because we know that sexual assault is pervasive in this country. We are talking about rape, beatings, verbal abuse, as well as indifference by authorities to these charges.

Understanding how pervasive this horrendous problem is, we can begin to understand why Dr. Ford took 35 years to come forward before making these charges.

Anita Hill made charges of repeated sexual harassment on her job while she worked for Clarence Thomas. This was in his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. The result was that Thomas is now a Supreme Court Justice.

However, the violence against women isn’t just about assault. In what has been called The Second Wave of Feminism women have made advances on several fronts. It is useful to think about the reality of about fifty years ago. Only a tiny percentage of women were doctors. Women didn’t have the right to own homes in many states. Women who chose not to have a child needed to risk mutilation and even death with back alley abortionists.

While women have made many advances in recent years, on the average, women continue to receive a lower rate of pay than men. It is on the job that women often experience sexual harassment, or abusive treatment by male supervisors. After work, women are usually the ones who care for the children as well as to do most household chores.  

Every year corporations spend about $200 billion on advertising. Much of this money goes towards making women insecure about their appearance. The image these advertisers promote is the Victoria Secret runway model. Their goal is to convince women to purchase billions of dollars worth of clothes, jewelry, cosmetics, and even plastic surgery in order to conform to this image they promote.

By making women, in effect, second-class citizens, corporations gouge out profits. They do this by paying women less, and refusing to pay for the day care of children.

We should keep in mind a reality that the so-called educational system in this country isn’t interested in. In her book Woman’s Evolution, Evelyn Reed documented how for most of human history women experienced full equality.

Reed looked at various so-called primitive people from all over the world. She gave the evidence showing how women did some of the most important work in these societies. She also showed how this work was respected.

In the area of New York state lived and continue to live the people known as the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee. The women of the Iroquois organized themselves as the Clan Mothers. These Clan Mothers had the power to depose leaders known as Sachems. Making political decisions without the approval of the Clan Mothers was unthinkable to the Iroquois.    

Working people need to rediscover this history and promote the full liberation of women, on the job, as well as in all social environments. Without working for every aspect of liberation for women, working people can never hope to free ourselves from the exploitative system of wage labor.

The presumption of innocence

Clearly when a woman accuses someone of assault, these charges need to be taken seriously. However, we might also consider a new museum in Montgomery, Alabama of about 4,000 victims of lynchings by racist mobs. Many of those lynchings took place because of false accusations of sexual assault.

Three of those lynchings took place in Memphis, Tennessee and Ida Wells wrote about them in her newspaper. As a result, racists threatened her life and she needed to leave the city. However, Wells continued to report on over 700 lynchings and found that they were nothing more than acts of racist terror.

We can also say that today the United States has more prisoners in it’s dungeons than any other nation in the world. Over 90% of those in prison were not convicted of anything. These prisoners serve time because of plea bargains. Someone accused of a crime is given the choice of admitting guilt or facing a trial where they might receive a much longer sentence.

Understanding this reality, workers need to support the demand that all defendants have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Without this basic right anyone could be taken into custody and sentenced to a jail term with the flimsiest of evidence.

Understanding this we might consider that Brett Kavanaugh is not facing a jail term for alleged sexual assault. The testimony of Dr. Ford was in the context of his nomination for a Supreme Court Justice. Kavanaugh invited this scrutiny when he accepted the nomination.

The so-called entitlements of the affluent

Dr. Ford testified that the most difficult part of the assault against her was when the assailants laughed at what they were doing. Clearly, these assailants felt that they had some kind of entitlement to assault a young woman. Kavanaugh attended the so-called elite private high school Georgetown Prep.

Working people are raised in an environment where we are trained to do as we are told. However, parents don’t pay the exorbitant tuition costs of Georgetown Prep so their children will work in a factory. No, students attending these schools are trained to become the most highly paid managers of corporations or the government. In other words, they are taught how to become arrogant in their slavish pursuit of gouging out profits for corporations.

As a worker, I’ve been one of millions of workers who are witnesses to this disparity. While we toil at one or more jobs every day, managers sit in corporate boardrooms. They discuss how to get us to do more so the corporation can gouge out a maximum profit. These managers have the same sense of entitlement that students learn about at the so-called elite private schools.

We know something about Brett Kavanaugh that is common to all politicians who support the capitalist system. These politicians believe in the fantasy that there is a significant difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.

I’m 65 years old and have experienced both Democratic and Republican dominated governments. Throughout all those years all I’ve seen was a deterioration in the standard of living of working people. While this deterioration has unfolded, the number of people who are locked up in dungeons has skyrocketed.

The law and the working class

When I attended high school, every day my teachers asked me to stand up, place my hand on my heart, and to pledge allegiance to a flag that the government claims represents “liberty and justice for all.” As working people learn the reality of this country, we also learn the absurdity of this argument.

The history of the Supreme Court is that they consistently supported both slavery and Jim Crow segregation. The Court’s consistent support of Jim Crow was in complete violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, it wasn’t until the year 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal to have an inter-racial marriage.

According to the Constitution citizens are supposed to have freedom of speech. However, most workers understand that if we attempt to organize a union where we work, employers can and will find ways to terminate union organizers.

When we think about the reality of the capitalist system, we see that it is a system that extracts wealth from the labor of workers. Another word for this is theft. This kind of theft is perfectly legal. When we think of the fact that police officers are rarely put on trial for murders they commit, we have to question whether murder is in fact against the law.

We can also point to the millions of people who have been murdered in so-called wars that the United States government never declared. So, in reality, only certain murders are illegal, while the government has no problem with absolving itself of other murders.

Anyone can Google the words Invisible War. This is a film that documents how there have been over 20,000 rapes in the military every year. In most of these rapes the perpetrators were not placed on trial. In some cases, commanding officers covered up for rapists, while continuing to give orders to the victims. Understanding the reality of this film, we can ask the question: Is rape illegal in the United States of America?

When we look at these and many other facts, there is one inescapable conclusion. The legal system in this country in not interested in defending the basic rights of working people.

This brings me back to that Pledge of Allegiance that my teachers asked me to recite many years ago. The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy. Francis Bellamy was the first cousin and co-thinker of Edward Bellamy who wrote the novel Looking Backward.

Edward Bellamy imagined a future world that was devoid of poverty and based on human solidarity. Francis Bellamy’s original Pledge contained the words: “I pledge allegiance to my flag.” For Francis Bellamy his flag represented the future world his cousin Edward imagined in his book Looking Backward. He imagined that in that world there would be liberty, justice, and equality for all.

Francis Bellamy refrained from using the word equality because in the late 1800s most people in this country didn’t have the right to vote. However, Edward Bellamy titled his sequel to his book Looking Backward, Equality.

The hearings around the issue of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination underscore for me why working people need a completely different political economic system. In that system women will be totally liberated because an injury to one will be an injury to all. In that system, workers will no longer be alienated from work and the worst crimes will be seen as the drive to maximize profits from the labor of workers.

In that system workers won’t think about entitlements, but of basic rights that are guaranteed to all. These will include a lifetime right to: food, clothing, a place to live, education, health care, transportation, communication, as well as exposure to cultural activities.

So, when workers living in that kind of future world look back at the hearings around Kavanaugh’s nomination, they will ask a basic question: Why did humanity ever engage in this kind of seemingly perverse insanity?