We discuss the recent statewide hunger strike initiated by prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison. The strike is put in context, alongside a statewide grassroots movement calling for cuts in prison spending to address California's budget crisis, and a recent US Supreme Court ruling that calls for the reduction of California state prisoners by at least 30,000, in response to overcrowding.

This week Amnesty International launched a global campaign calling for US authorities to end the solitary confinement of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, of the Angola 3. Amnesty is calling for people around the world to contact Governor Jindal.

The racist sub-text of the neo-liberal political agenda succeeded in creating acceptance of mass incarceration while simultaneously creating the laws and industries to police, prosecute, cage and control millions of people—almost all poor people and people of color. Neo-liberal policies have been in place for more than thirty years. As a result many people are not aware that our current political and economic situation is not the result of a natural course of events, but rather, of a systemically created ideology that has pervaded every aspect of our daily lives.

Our guest, Robert Hillary King, (aka Robert King Wilkerson), one of the "Angola Three" (members of a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party), along with Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, was serving a life sentence at Angola State Penitentiary. In February 2001, after 31 years of imprisonment and 29 continuous years of solitary confinement, King walked out of the gates of Angola a free man. King continues to struggle for the release of his comrades and all political prisoners.

Video-interviewed by Angola 3 News this week while touring the SF Bay Area with his new book Dancing With Dynamite (AK Press), author Benjamin Dangl argues that “because South American social movements have been so successful in the past decade, I think it is important to learn and understand what’s been successful and to apply those strategies and tactics here, where we are facing very similar challenges.”

The Lucasville Five are now back in the news with an announcement last week that four of the five will be participating in a simultaneous “rolling hunger strike,” beginning today, January 3. They are using the hunger strike to protest their convictions (having always maintained their innocence) as well as their living situation, which is more restrictive than for most prisoners on Ohio’s death row.

Targeted for their militancy, co-captives Wallace, Woodfox and Robert King had organized a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party and they became known as the Angola 3 after they were falsely convicted by kangaroo courts and all-white juries.

The high point of struggle represented by the loosely used term “the sixties” and the violent repression against it, contains essential lessons for every young person seeking a more just society. More generally, people should not be misled by the myth of democracy, the idea that the system can be made to work for “us” or that those in power will somehow reach a moral epiphany and give up anything of consequence without a fight.

In 2007, veteran journalist Michael Richardson began writing a series of articles for OpEdNews.com about Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, who are two Black Panther political prisoners known as the Omaha Two. Richardson argues that they were framed for the 1970 murder of a policeman as part of the FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program, dubbed “COINTELPRO.”