Read Wages of Rebellion Online

Authors: Chris Hedges

Wages of Rebellion (40 page)

24.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “in 2013, the union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions—was 11.3 percent.” US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release: Union Members Summary,” January 24, 2014,
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
.

25.
“Trial Judge to Appeals Court: Review Me” (editorial),
New York Times
, July 16, 2012.

26.
Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(New York: New Press, 2010).

27.
Jennifer Schuessler, “Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate,”
New York Times
, March 6, 2012.

28.
Hanqing Chen, “What Militarization Has Done to Our Police Departments,”
Mother Jones
, August 21, 2014.

29.
Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,”
International Security
33, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 7–44.

30.
Ibid., 11–12.

31.
Heather C. McGhee and Amy Traub, “State of the American Dream: Economic Policy and the Future of the Middle Class,” Demos, June 6, 2013,
http://www.demos.org/publication/state-american-dream-economic-policy-and-future-middle-class
.

32.
Berkman, “The Idea Is the Thing.”

33.
Thomas C. Schelling, “Some Questions on Civilian Defense,” in
Civilian Resistance as a National Defense: Nonviolent Action Against Aggression
, ed. Adam Roberts (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1967), 351–353.

34.
Berkman, “The Idea Is the Thing.”

35.
Ibid.

CHAPTER IV

1.
Thomas Paine,
Rights of Man and Common Sense
(New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994), 196.

2.
Peter Parker and Joyce Mokhesi-Parker,
In the Shadow of Sharpeville: Apartheid and Criminal Justice
(New York: New York University Press, 1998), 19.

3.
Ronnie Kasrils,
Armed and Dangerous: My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid
(Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1993).

4.
Ibid., 22.

5.
Ibid., 23.

6.
“There are excellent grounds for believing that Lenin’s radicalism flowered after Alexander’s death, and largely as a result of reading his martyred brother’s books,” writes Adam Ulam in
The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 10.

7.
Albert Camus,
The Rebel
(New York: Vintage, 1984), 304.

8.
Sean K. Anderson and Steven Sloan,
Historical Dictionary of Terrorism
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 685.

9.
“One Year On, Marikana Is Emblematic of South Africa’s Woes” (editorial),
The Independent
, August 16, 2013,
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/one-year-on-marikana-is-emblematic-of-south-africas-woes-8770862.html
.

10.
Camus,
The Rebel
, 249.

11.
South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR), “South African Survey, 2011/2012,”
http://irr.org.za/reports-and-publications/south-africa-survey/south-africa-survey-2012
.

12.
Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in
The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe
, ed. John Keane (Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2010), 13.

13.
Ibid., 21.

14.
Ibid. (emphasis in original).

15.
Human Rights Watch, “China’s Rights Defenders,”
http://www.hrw.org/Chinas-rights-defenders
.

16.
Tania Branigan, “US Calls on China to Release Liu Xiaobo,”
The Guardian
, December 10, 2013.

17.
Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, and Lauren Ross, “An Open Letter to the Occupy Movement,” Tikkun Daily, November 10, 2011,
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2011/11/10/an-open-letter-to-the-occupy-movement/
.

18.
Ibid.

19.
Nelson Mandela,
Conversations with Myself
(Toronto: Random House, 2011), 233.

20.
Hanna Krall,
Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
, trans. Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 8.

21.
Ibid., 37.

22.
Ibid., 48.

23.
Ibid., 42.

24.
Ibid., 50.

25.
Ibid., 9.

26.
Ibid., 9–10.

27.
Ibid., xii.

28.
Ibid., 85.

29.
Ibid., 38.

30.
Ibid., 10.

CHAPTER V

1.
“August Wilson on Blackness,”
Moyers & Company
, October 20, 1988,
http://billmoyers.com/content/august-wilson/
.

2.
Richard Wright,
Black Boy
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 302.

3.
Amnesty International, “United States of America: A Life in the Balance: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” AI Index AMR 51/01/00, February 17, 2000,
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR51/001/2000/en/0987a185-dfd3-11dd-8e17-69926d493233/amr510012000en.pdf
.

4.
Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal
(2012), directed by Stephen Vittoria.

5.
“Mumia Abu-Jamal Sues Pennsylvania over New Convicts Gag Law,” Associated Press, November 10, 2014.

6.
Criminal Justice USA, “10 Stats You Should Know About Our Prison System,” May 17, 2011,
http://www.criminaljusticeusa.com/blog/2011/10-stats-you-should-know-about-our-prison-system/
.

7.
Erica Goode, “Incarceration Rates for Blacks Have Fallen Sharply, Report Shows,”
New York Times
, February 27, 2013.

8.
Adam B. Ulam,
Ideologies and Illusions: Revolutionary Thought from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 12.

9.
Legislative Analyst’s Office of the California State Legislature, “The Federal Crime Bill: What Will It Mean for California?” (policy brief), September 27, 1994,
http://www.lao.ca.gov/1994/pb092794.html
.

10.
US Department of Justice, “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994: Fact Sheet,” October 24, 1994,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/billfs.txt
.

11.
“Bill Clinton Was Incredibly Destructive to Black People,” Prison Culture, April 24, 2012,
http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2012/04/24/bill-clinton-was-incredibly-destructive-for-black-people
; see also Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 103rd Congress (1993–1994), HR 3355, available at:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-103hr3355enr/pdf/BILLS-103hr3355enr.pdf
.

12.
Justice Policy Institute, “Too Little Too Late: President Clinton’s Prison Legacy,” February 2001,
http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/too_little_too_late.pdf
.

13.
Tracey Kyckelhahn, “State Corrections Expenditures, FY 1982–2010,” US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 239672, December 2012, revised April 30, 2014,
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/scefy8210.pdf
.

14.
Mumia Abu-Jamal,
All Things Censored
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 195.

15.
Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004), xi–xii.

16.
Marie Gottschalk,
Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1.

17.
Ibid., 4–5.

18.
Mary Bosworth, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities
(London: Sage Publications, 2004), 273.

19.
Ibid., 707.

20.
Harry Camisa and Jim Franklin,
Inside Out: Fifty Years Behind the Walls of New Jersey’s Trenton State Prison
(Adelphia, NJ: Windsor Press and Publishing, 2003), 195; Bosworth,
Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities
, 708.

21.
Bosworth,
Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities
, 570.

22.
Ibid., 16.

23.
Massachusetts Department of Correction, Office of Investigative Services, “Security Threat Group Monthly Report,” March 2012,
http://www.mass.gov/eopss/docs/doc/march2012.pdf
.

24.
Center for Constitutional Rights, “CMUs: The Federal Prison System’s Experiment in Social Isolation,”
http://ccrjustice.org/cmu-factsheet
.

25.
Rachael Kamel and Bonnie Kerness, “The Prison Inside the Prison: Control Units, Supermax Prisons, and Devices of Torture,” American Friends Service Committee, Justice Visions Briefing Paper, 2003,
http://www.afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/PrisonInsideThePrison.pdf
.

26.
Alfred McCoy,
A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror
(New York: Macmillan, 2007), 6.

27.
Ibid., 8.

28.
Bonnie Kerness, ed., “Torture in United States Prisons: Evidence of Human Rights Violations,” 2nd ed., American Friends Service Committee, 2011,
https://afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/torture_in_us_prisons.pdf
.

29.
Ibid., 15–16.

30.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Viral Hepatitis Specific Settings: Correctional Facilities and Viral Hepatitis,”
http://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/Settings/Corrections.htm
; Dara Masoud, Dato Chorgoliani, and Pierpaolo de Colombani, “TB Prevention and Control Care in Prisons,”
http://www.euro.who.int/_data/assets/pdf_file/0005/249197/Prisons-and-Health,-8-TB-prevention-and-control-care-in-prisons.pdf?ua=1
;
AIDS.gov
, “HIV/AIDS and Incarceration,”
http://www.aids.gov/federal-resources/policies/incarceration/
.

31.
Council of State Governments, Justice Center, “Medicaid and Financing Health Care for Individuals Involved with the Criminal Justice System,” December 2013,
http://csgjusticecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ACA-Medicaid-Expansion-Policy-Brief.pdf
.

32.
Matthew R. Durose, Alexia D. Cooper, and Howard N. Snyder, “Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 30 States in 2005: Patterns from 2005 to 2010,” US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, April 22, 2014,
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4986
.

33.
Staughton Lynd,
Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2004), 153.

34.
Ibid.

35.
Jeanne Theoharis, “The Legal Black Hole in Lower Manhattan: The Unfairness of the Trial of Muslim Activist Fahad Hashmi,”
Slate
, April 27, 2010; see also Jeanne Theoharis, “My Student, the ‘Terrorist,’ ”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, April 3, 2011,
http://chronicle.com/article/My-Student-the-Terrorist/126937/
.

36.
Theoharis, “The Legal Black Hole in Lower Manhattan”; Theoharis, “My Student, the ‘Terrorist.’ ”

37.
Sami Al-Arian, a former computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida and a leading Palestinian activist, was indicted on terrorism charges in February 2003. In 2005 he endured a six-month trial in Florida with three codefendants in which the government’s case collapsed. The Justice Department spent an estimated $50 million and several years investigating and prosecuting Al-Arian. The government called eighty witnesses and subjected the jury to hundreds of hours of trivial phone transcriptions and recordings made over a ten-year period that the jury eventually dismissed as “gossip.” Out of the ninety-four charges made against the four defendants, there were no convictions. Of the seventeen charges against Al-Arian—including “conspiracy to murder and maim persons abroad”—the jury acquitted him of eight and was hung on the rest. The jurors disagreed on the remaining charges, with ten of the twelve jurors favoring his full acquittal. Two others in the case, Ghassan Ballut and Sameeh Hammoudeh, were acquitted of all charges.

Following the acquittal—a disaster for the government, especially because then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had announced the indictment—prosecutors threatened to retry Al-Arian. The Palestinian professor, under duress, accepted a plea bargain agreement that would spare him a second trial, saying in his agreement that he had helped people associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad with immigration matters. It was a tepid charge given the high profile of the case. The US Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida and the counterterrorism section of the Justice Department agreed to recommend to the judge the minimum sentence of forty-six months. But US District Judge James S. Moody sentenced Dr. Al-Arian to the maximum fifty-seven months. In referring to Al-Arian’s contention that he had only raised money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s charity for widows and orphans, the judge said acidly to the professor that “your only connection to orphans and widows is that you create them.”

The government kept him in jail for five years after he refused to testify before a secret grand jury in Virginia investigating Islamic organizations in the United States in a separate case. Al-Arien’s lawyers said that his plea agreements had exempted him from any further testimony.

Al-Arien was jailed and then held under house arrest in northern Virginia from 2008 until 2014. In 2014, US District Judge Anthony J. Trenga signed the order dismissing the indictment against Al-Arian. All charges were dropped.

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