Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  Technological advancement and wealth are conflated in capitalism with human progress. All aspects of human existence that cannot be measured or quantified—beauty, truth, love, grief, the search for meaning, and the struggle with our own mortality—are ignored and ridiculed.

  Walter Benjamin argues that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion” but an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mystery of life.55 And it is the religion of capitalism, the maniacal quest for wealth at the expense of others, that turns human beings into beasts of prey.

  “A Religion may be discerned in capitalism,” Benjamin writes, “that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”56 Capitalism, Benjamin notes, has called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and ultimately futile quest to find fulfillment in the endless amassing of money and power. This quest creates a culture that is dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy, and self-loathing and that enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages.

  Benjamin calls capitalism “a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.” In this system, “things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult.” Capitalism, he notes, has no specific dogma or theology. Rather, “utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones.” It “is the celebration of the cult sans rêve et sans merci [without dream or mercy].” There are no weekdays. Every day is a feast day filled with consumption. With every acquisition the starting point for new desires, capitalism leaves human beings with a sense of never being able to achieve equilibrium. “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement,” Benjamin writes. The system, he continues, “is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end.”57

  The barbarism of our new Dark Age will hold out Faustian pacts at the expense of others; first the poor in the developing world will be sacrificed, and then the poor at home. Communities and communal organizations that manage to break free from the dominant culture will find a correlation between the amount of freedom they enjoy and the amount of independence they attain in a world where access to land, food, and water has become paramount. Such communities that share the burdens of a disintegrating society, such as the ad hoc one formed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, are our best hope for sustaining the intellectual and artistic traditions that define the heights of human culture and permit the common good. As those who build these communitarian structures discard the religion of capitalism, their acts of charity and resistance will merge—and they will be condemned by the corporate state.

  II/The Post-Constitutional Era

  Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk we drink it at noon and at dawn we drink it at night we drink it and drink it we are digging a grave in the air 1

  —PAUL CELAN, “DEATH FUGUE”

  Lynne Stewart, with short, cropped gray hair and a dark, zippered fleece jacket, sat with her hands folded in front of her at her son’s dining room table in Brooklyn, New York. She had been released from a Texas prison thirty-seven days earlier because she had stage 4 cancer and had been given six months to live. She had served four years of a ten-year sentence.

  As an attorney, Stewart stood up to state power for more than three decades. She defended the poor, the persecuted, and the marginalized. She wept in court when one of her clients, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was barred from presenting a credible defense. But at the end of her life she was on trial herself, disbarred and imprisoned. Her career coincided with the collapse of the American court system and the rise of the post-constitutional era, in which the courts are used to revoke the constitutional rights of citizens by judicial fiat.

  “Can’t even work in a law office,” the seventy-four-year-old Stewart said when we spoke. “I miss it so terribly. I liked it. I liked the work.”

  When she started practicing law in the 1970s, she said it was a “golden era” in which a series of legal decisions—including rulings that affected police lineups and the information and evidence that the government had to turn over to defendants on trial—created a chance for a fair defense. But these legal advances were steadily reversed, she said, in a string of court decisions that, especially after 9/11, made the state omnipotent. As citizens were stripped of power, she said, the bar experienced “a death of the spirit.” Lawyers gave up. They no longer saw defending people accused of crime as “a calling, something that you did because you were answering a higher voice.”

  Stewart, working with former US attorney general Ramsey Clark and lawyer Abdeen Jabara in 1995, was the lead trial counsel for Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian Muslim, known as “the Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted for alleged involvement in an aborted bombing campaign in New York City. He received life in prison plus sixty-five years in 1996 for seditious conspiracy, a sentence Stewart called “outlandish.” She said that Abdel-Rahman was put on trial, not for any crimes he committed, but because both Washington and the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak were frightened by his influence over the Egyptian population. The United States, along with Egypt, wanted to “take him off the scene” and “get him put away where he would no longer exert the influence he had.” The cleric, seventy-six and in poor health, is imprisoned in the medical wing of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.2

  The proceedings at the Abdel-Rahman trial were a harbinger of the judicial assaults against Muslims in the United States after the events of September 11, 2001. I was based in Egypt as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times when Abdel-Rahman was arrested. I was stunned at the repeated mendacity of the government prosecutors, who blamed Abdel-Rahman for terrorist attacks he had publicly denounced. The prosecutors, for example, accused him of orchestrating the killing of seventy people in 1997 in Luxor, Egypt, although the sheikh at the time condemned the attack and had no known connection with the Egyptian group that carried out the massacre.3 When the guilty verdict was read, Stewart burst into tears, “the only time I ever cried in the courtroom.”

  Stewart continued to visit the sheikh after the sentencing. Three years after the trial, the government severely curtailed his ability to communicate with the outside world, even through his lawyers, under “special administrative measures” (SAMs).

  Abdel-Rahman asked Stewart during a prison visit in 2000 to release a statement from him to the press concerning a negotiated ceasefire between the Egyptian government and militants. The Clinton administration did not prosecute Stewart for conveying the press release, although she was admonished and prohibited from seeing her client for several months.

  The Bush administration, however, in April 2002, with the country baying for blood after the attacks of 9/11, decided to prosecute her for the two-year-old press release.

  Minutes before her arrest on April 9, 2002, her husband, Ralph Poynter, who later would organize the successful fight to win her a compassionate release from prison after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, was outside on the stoop of their house, which in New York, she said, “is where you go sit on the steps in the summertime when you can’t afford to go to East Hampton.” She heard him in a heated conversation.

  “I go to the door, and I hear him saying, ‘I don’t see any badge, I don’t see any warrant, what are you doing here anyway?’ ” she said.

  Assuming Ralph was being arrested, she told him to take it easy, she would have him home by lunchtime.

  “I come around the door and the guy looks and says—and he was clearly a cop, you know, the cheap shoes—and he says, ‘We’re not here for you. We’re here for her,’ pointing to me,” she said. “I was flabbergasted.”

  The FBI agents arrested her. She was released later on a $500,000 bon
d.

  US Attorney General John Ashcroft came to New York in April 2002 to announce the arrest and appear on The Late Show with David Letterman. He told the television audience that the Justice Department had indicted Stewart, along with a paralegal and an interpreter, on grounds of materially aiding a terrorist organization.

  The government demanded that Stewart be given a staggering thirty-year sentence. During the trial, the government lawyers spewed endless myths about Islamic terrorism. The prosecutors displayed on a ten-by-twelve-foot screen a photo of Osama bin Laden found in a codefendant’s basement. The US District Judge John Koeltl repeatedly told the jury that the photo of Bin Laden wasn’t evidence of the truth of the charges.4 Stewart was sentenced, to most people’s astonishment, to twenty-eight months.

  After the sentencing, Stewart publicly declared that passing along the information from Abdel-Rahman had been “based on my understanding of what the client needed, what a lawyer was expected to do.” It had been “necessary,” she said, adding that, in the same circumstances, she would “do it again.” A federal appeals court under the Barack Obama administration demanded that the district judge reconsider Stewart’s sentence and make further fact-findings. She was given a new sentence by Koeltl—ten years.

  The federal government’s heavy-handed orchestration of fear, Stewart said, has cowed the nation. In the Carswell federal prison in Texas, the women’s facility where she was incarcerated, she heard numerous accounts of gross injustices endured by poor women. She frequently asked these women why they had not demanded a trial rather than submit to a plea deal, or why they had not stood up and proclaimed their innocence. The answer, she said, was always the same: “I was afraid. I was afraid.”

  The right-wing Federalist Society, after its founding in 1982, unleashed a frontal assault on the legal system that has transformed it into a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state. After Stanford University asked Stewart to speak there in 2002, she arrived on campus to find that the Federalist Society had pressured the university into rescinding the invitation. Sympathetic students found her a place to talk, but Federalist Society members appeared at the event to jeer and ask caustic questions.

  By the 1980s, she said, the federal government was “mopping up” the remnants of radical activists, many of whom had been underground for years. She and other civil rights attorneys were able to battle on behalf of these political radicals, but by the end of the 1980s the state had finished its hunt for underground activists. And lawyers, Stewart said, “were no longer part of the game.”

  The occasional victories that she and other civil rights lawyers were able to win before the attacks of 9/11 became nearly impossible to replicate afterward.

  “The playing field suddenly changed, and everything favored the prosecution, certainly in federal cases,” she said. “There was no level playing field anymore. It was like if you were the last guy standing and you had to keep them from making the goal. You were at the six-inch line trying to do it. It was impossible to stop them. They controlled it. They controlled what the charges were. They controlled whether an adjournment would be given. They determined whether the cooperation is worthy, and everybody must cooperate, and it changed into a very different system, certainly on the federal level.”

  In her own trial, the government presented audio recordings of her meetings with Abdel-Rahman in the prison in Rochester, Minnesota. The taping of that conversation before the federal Patriot Act would have violated attorney-client privilege, but now such tapings are legal.5

  “We continue the facade that we are fair,” she said, “that we have this Constitution we respect, and we can rely on, and that we can embrace. ‘You can’t do that, that’s my constitutional rights, etc.’ When really [our constitutional rights are] a puff of smoke. They don’t really exist.”

  She began to reflect on the cost of being imprisoned, something she said she had not fully understood until she was locked up.

  “I don’t think I ever appreciated the unrelenting stress,” she said about being in prison. “That you’re always waiting for something to come down. That there’s such arbitrary authority. Guard A says, ‘Go down those stairs, use the stairs.’ Guard B says, ‘You can’t use the stairs, you’re not permitted on the stairs.’ And you say, ‘But Guard A just said—’ ‘I don’t care what he said, this is my rule!’ That kind of arbitrary thing, you’re always guessing. What does this guy, what does this woman, want me to do? Where am I? Where is this? And that’s 24/7.”

  “You’re always on the cusp of doing the wrong thing, or getting in trouble for something,” she said. “I wrote a letter for a woman, and in order to make a copy I emailed it to Ralph.” She went on: “It was basically asking a judge to stay any decision because they were going to take all of her pension as payment for what she had done. And she wanted to get this letter in right away. So I emailed it to [Ralph,] and for that I lost, I think, about three months of commissary, and email.”

  “I found it virtually impossible to convince the women at Carswell that they should not be always thinking that what happened to them was personal,” she said. “They should be looking at political answers, that where they ended up was not because of some personal lack or weakness, but because the political system has designated them to be there as one of the kick-arounds, as one of the not-for-consumption.”

  One of the saddest moments in prison was mail call. The names of those who had letters would be read. Some women “waited for their name to be called, and it never happened.” Those who did not get mail or visits, Stewart said, “become more and more institutionalized. The world of the prison is the only world; the outside world does not exist for them anymore.”

  She no longer believes the working class has the ability or consciousness to revolt.

  “I’m not waiting for the working class to make the revolution,” she said. “I think that’s a day long gone by. That might have happened in the thirties. It didn’t. We have to look at a new way, some new force.”

  But at the same time she wants people to prepare.

  “The most important thing is, don’t let yourself get isolated,” she said. “Don’t feel that you’re the only one in the room that thinks this way and you must be crazy or something, and they’re going to get you because you’re the only one. Find the other people who think like you. They’re out there. There are people out there. There are groups. There’s everyone from the raging grannies right up to the very serious lefties, but there’s somebody out there, make sure you’re not all alone. That’s the worst part of what we face these days. As long as you’re with other people, you have a fighting chance, and you can organize more people.” “This is a pretty loveless world we live in,” she concluded. “We have lots of romantic love. We have lots of Sex and the City. But real love, love that is the kind that saves people, and makes the world better, and makes you go to bed with a smile on your face, that love is lacking greatly. You have to search for that.”

  The courts were perhaps the last institution that liberal reformers had faith in before they too fell victim to the demands of corporate power. There are no institutions left that provide the citizen with a voice.

  My own dead end with the judicial system occurred in April 2014 when the US Supreme Court refused to hear Hedges v. Obama, the lawsuit I brought against Barack Obama concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This provision permits the military to seize US citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process.6

  The refusal by the Supreme Court to hear the case means that extraordinary rendition by our government of US citizens on US soil is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, are now exclusive servants of corporate power. It means that the consent of the governed—in a poll conducted by OpenCongress.com the NDAA provision had a 97 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke.7 And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements t
o overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose what remains of our liberty.

  The attorneys Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer and I had brought the case to the US Southern District Court of New York in January 2012. I was later joined by coplaintiffs, the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers; the journalist Alexa O’Brien; activist Tangerine Bolen; Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir; and Occupy activist Kai Wargalla. US District Judge Katherine B. Forrest in 2012 declared Section 1021(b)(2) unconstitutional. The Obama administration not only appealed—we expected it to appeal—but demanded that the law be immediately put back into effect until the appeal was heard. Forrest, displaying the same judicial courage she showed with her ruling, refused to do this.

  The government swiftly went to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. It asked, in the name of national security, that the court stay the district court’s injunction until the government’s appeal could be heard. The Second Circuit agreed. The law went back on the books. Afran, Mayer, and I surmised that the administration acted this quickly because it was already using the law to detain US citizens in black sites, most likely dual citizens with roots in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The administration would have been in contempt of court if Forrest’s ruling had been allowed to stand while the federal authorities detained US citizens under the statute. Government attorneys, when asked by Judge Forrest, refused to say whether or not the government was already using the law, buttressing our suspicion that it was in use.