Wages of Rebellion (33 page)

“I don’t know how other information I provided to him may have been used, but I think the government’s collection and use of this data needs to be investigated,” he went on. “The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?

“The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action,” Hammond told the court. “Yes, I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.”

As Hammond was escorted out of the courtroom on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street after the sentencing, he shouted to roughly 100 people—including a class of prim West Point cadets attending in their blue uniforms—gathered there: “Long live Anonymous! Hurrah for anarchy!” In a statement he read in court, he thanked “Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network, [and] Anarchist Black Cross” for their roles in the fight against oppression.

“Being incarcerated has really opened my eyes to the reality of the criminal justice system,” Hammond told me in the jail. “[It] is not a
criminal justice system about public safety or rehabilitation, but reaping profits through mass incarceration. There are two kinds of justice—one for the rich and the powerful who get away with the big crimes, then [one] for everyone else, especially people of color and the impoverished. There is no such thing as a fair trial. In over 80 percent of the cases, people are pressured to plea out instead of exercising their right to trial, under the threat of lengthier sentences. I believe no satisfactory reforms are possible. We need to close all prisons and release everybody unconditionally.”

After committing a series of minor infractions, as well as testing positive, along with other prisoners on his tier, for marijuana that had been smuggled into the prison, Hammond had already lost social visits for the next two years and “spent time in the box.” He said prison involved “a lot of boredom.” He was playing a lot of chess, teaching guitar, and helping other prisoners study for their GED.

He insisted that he did not see himself as different from other prisoners, especially poor prisoners of color, who were in for common crimes, especially drug-related crimes. He said that most prisoners are political prisoners, caged unjustly by a system of totalitarian capitalism that has snuffed out basic opportunities for democratic dissent and economic survival.

“The majority of people in prison did what they had to do to survive,” he said. “Most were poor. They got caught up in the war on drugs, which is how you make money if you are poor. The real reason they get locked in prison for so long is so corporations can continue to make big profits. It is not about justice. I do not draw distinctions between us.

“Jail is essentially enduring harassment and dehumanizing conditions with frequent lockdowns and shakedowns,” he said. “You have to constantly fight for respect from the guards, sometimes getting yourself thrown in the box. However, I will not change the way I live because I am locked up. I will continue to be defiant, agitating and organizing whenever possible.”

He said resistance must be a way of life. “The truth,” he said, “will always come out.” He cautioned activists to be hypervigilant and aware that “one mistake can be permanent.” Activists should “know and
accept the worst possible repercussion” before carrying out an action and should be “aware of mass counterintelligence/surveillance operations targeting our movements.” But, he added, “don’t let paranoia or fear deter you from activism. Do the down thing!”

“In these times of secrecy and abuse of power there is only one solution—transparency,” wrote Sarah Harrison, the British journalist who accompanied Snowden to Russia and who has also gone into self-imposed exile in Berlin. “If our governments are so compromised that they will not tell us the truth, then we must step forward to grasp it. Provided with the unequivocal proof of primary source documents people can fight back. If our governments will not give this information to us, then we must take it for ourselves.

“When whistleblowers come forward we need to fight for them, so others will be encouraged,” she went on. “When they are gagged, we must be their voice. When they are hunted, we must be their shield. When they are locked away, we must free them. Giving us the truth is not a crime. This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it. Courage is contagious.”
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I
walked down Sloane Street in London after I left Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. Red double-decker buses and automobiles inched along the thoroughfare. I passed boutiques with window displays of Prada, Armani, and Gucci. The global superrich, seeking a tax haven, have colonized this section of London. The area has the highest household income in the United Kingdom. “Much of London’s housing wealth now lies in the hands of a global elite for whom the city represents not a home but a tax haven attached to an exclusive resort town,” a
Financial Times
editorial bemoaned.
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Shoppers who seemed blissfully unaware of the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away crowded the sidewalk.

I stopped in front of the four white columns that led into the brick-turreted Cadogan Hotel. The Cadogan is where Oscar Wilde was arrested, in room 118, on April 6, 1895, before being charged with “committing
acts of gross indecency with other male persons.” John Betjeman imagined the shock of that arrest, which ruined Wilde’s life, in his 1937 poem “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel”:

The world has been turned upside down. The pestilence of corporate totalitarianism is spreading over the earth. The criminals have seized power. It is not only Assange, Hammond, Abu-Jamal, Manning, and Hashmi they want. It is all who dare to defy the destructive fury of the global corporate state. The persecution of these rebels is the harbinger of what is to come: the rise of a bitter world where criminals in tailored suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms—propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press, and a morally bankrupt political elite—hunt down and cage all who resist.

T
he man who waged the first significant war in North America against hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” was an eccentric, messianic Christian preacher named Wiebo Ludwig. Ludwig, with his small Christian community in the Canadian province of Alberta, sabotaged at least one wellhead by pouring cement down its shaft, and he blew up several others. The Canadian authorities, along with the oil and gas barons, have demonized Ludwig as an ecoterrorist—an odd charge given that they are the ones responsible for systematically destroying the environment and the planet.
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The anti-fracking movement, especially in rural communities in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York, is one of the most potent grassroots insurgencies in North America. The movement has been able to block the natural gas industry’s plans to exploit shale gas in New York State. And it is a huge stumbling block for the industry in many other parts of the United States and Canada. If the anti-fracking movement has a founding father, it is Wiebo Ludwig.

Ludwig swiftly understood that environmental laws are not designed to protect the environment. The laws are designed, at best, to regulate the environment’s continued exploitation. It was futile, he argued, to spend energy attempting to improve or adjust these regulations. We might be able to slow or delay environmental degradation, but we would not stop it.

Ludwig exposed the absurdity of attempting to build an environmental movement that had as its goal the more efficient oversight and regulation of the oil and gas industry. He realized that lobbying those in power, testifying in hearings, writing letters of protest, contacting celebrities to attract press attention, and organizing petition drives to get the government to intervene was useless. Corporations, he understood, determined and often wrote the laws that were ostensibly designed to regulate their activity. Environmental laws were, he found, a circular joke on the public. And the Big Green environmental groups that worked within these legal parameters were largely ineffectual and often complicit in the destruction of the ecosystems they claimed they wanted to protect. Resistance, he argued, would have to be militant and it would have to be local. It could not play by the rules imposed by the corporate state.

As Thomas Linzey, the executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has helped organize dozens of communities to impose local bans on oil and gas extraction, pointed out, “Forty years after the major environmental laws were adopted in the US, and forty years after trying to regulate the damage caused by corporations to the natural environment and our communities, by almost every major environmental statistic, things are worse now than they were before.”
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Calgary, Alberta, is a boomtown. Glittering skyscrapers, monuments to the obscene profits amassed by a fossil fuel industry that is exploiting the tar sands and the vast oil and natural gas fields, have transformed Calgary, declaring the city’s new identity as a mecca for money, dirty politics, greed, and industry jobs. The city is as soulless and sterile as Houston. The death of the planet, for a few, is very good business.

“Wiebo felt that our society was in a spiritual crisis, rather than an environmental or an economic crisis,” David York told me. York’s film
Wiebo’s War
is a portrayal of Ludwig and his fight with the oil and gas industry.
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“He felt that our addiction to fossil fuels, rampant consumerism and materialism, addictions, breakdown of family units, were all symptoms of a society that has lost its root connection to God. Further, he felt that we are in a kind of end times state, where the forces of good are in a terrible struggle with the forces of evil. He wasn’t so crass as to put a timetable on it, but in his view, ‘any fool can see the times.’ ”

That one of our era’s most effective figures of resistance against the oil and gas industry was a messianic Christian is perhaps not coincidental. He was propelled forward by a vision. I do not share Ludwig’s Christian fundamentalism—his community was a rigid patriarchy—but I do share his belief that when human law comes into conflict with what is moral, human law must be defied. Ludwig grasped the moral decadence of the consumer society, its unchecked hedonism, worship of money, and deadening cult of the self. He retreated in 1985 with his small band of followers into the remoteness of northern Alberta. His community, called Trickle Creek, was equipped with its own biodiesel refinery, windmill, and solar panels—which permitted it to produce its own power—as well as a greenhouse and a mill.
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Its members, who grew their own food, severed themselves from the contaminants of consumer culture. But like the struggle of Axel Heyst, the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s novel
Victory
, Ludwig’s flight from evil resulted in evil coming to him.

Ludwig’s farm was atop one of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world. Landowners in Alberta own only the top six inches of soil. The mineral rights below it belong to the state. The province can lease these rights without the knowledge or acquiescence of the owner. Beneath Ludwig’s farm lay a fossil fuel known as sour gas, a neurotoxin that, if released from within the earth, even in small amounts, can poison livestock, water tables, and people.

“Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions,” wrote Henry David Thoreau.
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This is what happened to Ludwig.

The oil and gas companies began a massive drilling effort in the early 1990s. At first, like many other reformers and activists, Ludwig used legal and political channels to push back against the companies, which
were putting down wells on the edge of his 160-acre farm. He spent the first five years attending hearings with civil regulators, writing letters—he even wrote to Jane Fonda—and appealing in vain to elected officials, government agencies, the press, environmentalists, and First Nations groups. His family—he had eleven children—posted a sign in 1990 that decried “the ruthless interruption and cessation” of privacy; “the relentless greedy grabbing of Creational resources”; “the caloused [sic] disregard for the sanctity of the Lord’s Day”; the legislation of land and mineral ownership policy “that does violence to the God-given ‘right to property.’ ”
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Ludwig then presented the offending oil company, Ranchmen’s, with a bill for the sign.