The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’  By Chris Hedges

- I am sitting in the visiting area of the SCI Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pa., on a rainy, cold Friday morning with Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner and one of its few authentic revolutionaries. Abu-Jamal’s venom is reserved for politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he correctly excoriates for speaking in the language of traditional liberalism while ruthlessly disempowering the poor and the working class on behalf of their corporate patrons. And he has little time for the liberals who support them.“It was Clinton that made possible the explosion of the prison-industrial complex,” he says, speaking of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill.He looks around the visiting area at the 30-odd prisoners with their families.“Most of these people wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Bill Clinton,” he says of the other inmates. “He and Barack Obama haven’t done anything for poor people but lock them up. And if our first African-American president isn’t going to halt the growth of the prison-industrial complex, no president after him is going to do it. This prison system is here to stay. The poor and the destitute feed it. It is the empire’s solution to the economic crisis. Those who are powerless, who have no access to diminishing resources, get locked away. And the prison business is booming. It is one of the few growth industries left. It used to be that towns didn’t want prisons. Now these poor rural communities beg for them. You look down the list of the names of the guards and see two or three with the same last names. This is because fathers, brothers, spouses, work here together. These small towns don’t have anything else.”