RUTHFULLY YOURS

As demonstrated by both Trump and Sanders, a key feature in the 2016 US election has been a populist narrative about how foreign governments and companies, in cahoots with political and institutional insiders, have wrought ruin upon the nation.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has endured two populist insurrections over the past eighteen months, one from the Left and the other from the Right. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have played the populist card, a conviction that ordinary men and women have been rorted by “the system” and that strong decisive action was required on behalf of regular folk to take back control of the nation from a coterie of cronies. The populist’s worldview is invariably a Manichean one of blameless “outsiders”—in alliance with a would-be political saviour—fighting the good fight against the “wicked insiders”. Sanders’s gripe was the state’s failure to safeguard the little person; Trump’s grievance is much the same, albeit for mostly different reasons.

A populist movement is a function of voters going rogue after deciding that the political status quo has lost its legitimacy—in the American case, the customary policies of the Democratic Party and the customary policies of the Republican Party. Populist revolts in America have emerged before at times of stress, from the People’s Party of James B. Weaver in the 1890s to the “Share the Wealth” movement of the Great Depression, the latter cut short by Huey Long’s assassination in 1935. Jack Ross, writing for the American Conservative in March 2016, insisted that Sanders’s politics should be seen as a contemporary version of Huey Long’s proletarian-flavoured radicalism rather than in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt-style liberalism and Henry Wallace’s progressivism or, we might add, Barack Obama’s New Left-style identity politics. Ross rationalises Sanders’s recourse to the middle-class identity politics of Black Lives Matter as the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, then, Senator Sanders differentiated himself from Hillary Clinton in his populist morality tale by implicitly casting her as the establishment candidate, an insider compromised by long and intimate association with “Wall Street speculators”.

Bernie Sanders, fittingly enough, kicked off his primary campaign by refusing to set up a Super PAC (political action committee) as proof that shady plutocrats and their Washington accomplices could not buy off the aspiring people’s hero. He was free to remain an independent operator and, presumably, the champion of outsiders. Central to his populist narrative was that an overclass had subverted democracy in America; decisions were being made that profited powerful oligarchical interests by selling out ordinary American workers, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being two obvious cases in point.

Sanders’s self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” insurgency also drew on a pervasive bitterness at the wage and wealth inequality in the modern-day US. Accordingly, Sanders’s policy rollout began with a range of government-guaranteed benefits for ordinary workers, from a new minimum wage to longer holidays. Sanders also pledged full remission on student-debt loans and a $70 billion plan to make tertiary education free. It was payback time for the outsiders.

Five weeks before the November 8 election an audiotape (dating back to a March 2016 fundraiser in Virginia) emerged of Hillary Clinton dismissing Bernie Sanders’s supporters as ill-informed Millennials who believed America should have “free college, health care” and that the Obama administration had not “gone far enough” in transforming the United States into “Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means”. However, as Sanders’s campaign was surging at the time, Hillary Clinton entered into a bidding war with her rival. For instance, she promised a $250 billion infrastructure upgrade, only for Bernie Sanders to top this with a $1 trillion undertaking, throwing in high-speed internet access for rural America as a bonus. Why not? Add to that, of course, his plan for universal health care (or so-called Berniecare), a single-payer health plan that Sanders himself acknowledged would increase annual government spending on health from $1 trillion to $2.9 trillion. A Sanders presidency would have likely seen the resentments of the Occupy Wall Street movement to “the greed of corporate America” become the de facto creed of the White House.

Such was the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s leftist version of “the system is rigged” that he garnered almost 39 per cent of Democratic delegates in the primaries, possibly his most surprising victory being the March 8 victory in Michigan. In fact, he collected 46 per cent of delegates if “superdelegates”—party-appointed delegates not elected in primaries or caucuses—are excluded from the count. This was not the only way in which Democratic Party apparatchiks worked in favour of the establishment’s candidate. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks revealed that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had conspired against Sanders from the beginning. For instance, some of the 20,000 leaked e-mails show that the DNC considered making Sanders’s Jewish background a campaign issue in some states. There was also evidence of collusion between the DNC and the Washington Post in the interests of the Clinton campaign. These troubling revelations forced DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign but, tellingly, immediately afterwards she was hired by the Clinton campaign.

Candice E. Jackson, an attorney and advocate for women who have been the victims of other women in positions of power, recently agreed to an interview regarding the Kathy Shelton rape case.

Ms. Shelton, whom Ms. Jackson represents, was 12 years old in 1975 when she was brutally raped by Thomas Taylor.

Mr. Taylor’s defense counsel was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Below, read this interview of Jackson by John L. Work, a former investigator with the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office and a retired Colorado law enforcement officer.

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Work: Thank you so much for joining me, Candice. You’re an attorney, an author, and an advocate. One of your clients is Kathy Shelton, who as a 12-year-old child was the victim of a brutal rape in 1975.

During the pre-trial proceedings against the man who was eventually arrested and charged with that crime, Thomas Taylor, Ms. Shelton encountered Mr. Taylor’s defense counsel, now known to us as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Please tell my readers how you came to represent Kathy Shelton as an attorney and advocate.

Jackson: During the process of writing my book Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine back in 2005, I became close friends with women like Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey.

Based on my advocacy on their behalf over the years, when Kathy began being contacted by more and more press this year, she reached out to me feeling the need for an attorney to guide and advise her through this overwhelming process.

I was glad to get to know Kathy and represent her both as a lawyer and spokesperson. My foundation, Their Lives Foundation, fits this case like a glove, as my primary mission is to expose abuse of power (particularly when committed by powerful women) and give a voice to victims of power abuse.

Hillary Clinton’s mistreatment of Kathy Shelton is a stark illustration of women victimizing other women out of motives of ambition and ego, but there are hundreds of similar, lower-profile examples of abuse of power out there needing to be exposed. I also plan to continue to investigate and re-examine Kathy’s rape case from a legal and evidentiary angle so that the historical record is more complete with respect to how one of America’s most powerful female leaders chose to conduct herself in this particular situation, with respect to this particular victim.

This investigation will be important regardless of the results of this presidential election. Because the case is so cold, statutes of limitations likely bar any private action on Kathy’s behalf, even if evidence of wrongdoing crossing the line into civil or criminal misconduct were discovered; however, the court of public opinion and the history books warrant turning over every stone to reveal the facts of Kathy’s rape case.

Work: Central to Ms. Shelton’s grievance against Ms. Clinton is the affidavit in support of a pre-trial mandatory psychiatric evaluation, which Ms. Clinton filed with the Court.

In that affidavit, Ms. Clinton made some allegations which were destructive, to say the least, to your client’s character and reputation. Ms. Clinton’s affidavit attacked your client’s veracity, as well as her mental and emotional competence to testify.

The affidavit was devoid of named sources for the accusations. We have no idea who provided Ms. Clinton the information she used and represented as facts to support her motion for a Court-ordered psychiatric examination, because she didn’t include the names of those persons in her affidavit.

Will you please comment on the specific accusations Ms. Clinton made against your client and the effects they produced on Kathy Shelton, both in the short and long terms?

Jackson: What Ms. Clinton (then Ms. Rodham) said about Kathy Shelton in a court affidavit, under oath, was for the most part made up out of whole cloth.

There’s no reason to believe that Ms. Clinton had any credible source or factual basis for the outrageous, insulting, hurtful claims she made in that affidavit.

For instance, Ms. Clinton wrote that Kathy was emotionally unstable, that Kathy was prone to exaggeration, that Kathy had falsely accused people of touching her in the past, that Kathy came from a “disorganized family” (i.e., raised by a single mother) and therefore was prone to fantasize about older men and romanticize a sexual encounter.

These assertions and insinuations were probably typical blame-the-victim tactics of bygone eras, but in the mid-1970s when feminism had come into its own (particularly the anti-rape culture) and even our behemoth of a legal system was slowly catching up to standards of gender equality (e.g., rape shield laws began to be enacted state by state in 1974), one might expect a politically aware feminist and anti-rape advocate like Hillary Rodham to refuse to engage in blame-the-victim tactics — especially against a child victim.

The overall impact on Kathy as a young girl was to leave her feeling completely deprived of justice for the heinous crime committed against her, and leaving her feeling like it was somehow her fault.

I’d like to add, too, that this court affidavit was not the only place where Ms. Clinton has chosen to outright lie about Kathy and about this case.

Hillary’s two previous explanations of how she took the case are at odds with each other. In her audiotaped interview in the 1980s, she told journalist Roy Reed that the prosecutor (Mahlon Gibson) called her and said he had a defendant accused of rape and the guy “wanted a woman lawyer and would I do it as a favor to him.”

In her book Living History, she states that Mahlon Gibson called to tell her that an indigent prisoner accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl wanted a woman lawyer and that Gibson had recommended that the judge appoint Hillary. She states that she told Gibson she didn’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but that Gibson “gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.” More recently, Hillary and her spokespeople have insisted that she was “court appointed,” implying that she was required to accept the case.

Significant questions exist as to all three of Hillary’s explanations. CONTINUE AT SITE