Concert Review: Roger Hodgson, Mountain View Plaza, Snoqualmie Casino, Snoqualmie, WA, 7/3/14

Roger Hodgson appears to have a soft spot for the Pacific Northwest. He's played at Snoqualmie Casino three summers in a row now, and he said during last week's performance here that he managed to grab the only date the casino still had open for this year's concert season, and that he'd love to come back in 2015 for a fourth year.

If that doesn't speak to his dedication to the fans here, perhaps this does: He and his band flew nearly 6,000 miles to get here, after playing in Sofia, Bulgaria, just two nights earlier.

"Does anybody here know where Bulgaria is?" Roger asked after he finished the night's opening song -- which, appropriately enough, was "Take the Long Way Home." As he was greeted mostly by silence and nervous laughter from his geographically challenged American crowd, I resisted the urge to be the smart guy who shouted out, "Southeastern Europe, near Greece and Turkey!" Being the good-natured guy he is, Roger just smiled and said, "Well, do you know where Spain is? It's nowhere near there."

Roger said he felt as if his body was still in Bulgaria, and with the rest of his band presumably feeling the same, he promised us an evening in which "anything could happen." It's anyone's guess what the guys had to do to prepare themselves for such a dramatic change of location in so short a time -- and for his part, Roger wasn't talking. "I can't tell you what happened backstage before the show," he said with a gleam in his eye -- to which one member of the crowd behind me yelled out, "It's legal now, Roger!"

After the Snoqualmie show, Roger would be off to Chicago for another performance, and then his tour would shut down for a few weeks before he headed back over to Europe. He's earned the break -- but he needn't have worried that anything might go wrong at the Snoqualmie show, as he and his band sounded as sharp as ever on this warm Northwest evening, with Roger confidently leading the charge. Whether he was sitting at the grand piano to begin the wistful grandeur that is "Fool's Overture," beating out those familiar percussive electric-piano riffs on "Dreamer" and "The Logical Song," or getting us all up to dance and sing as he put on his 12-string to play "Give a Little Bit," Roger exuded the joy of performing music that's a hallmark of his concerts.

Indeed, this is no typical legacy artist going through the motions and bored with his own songs after playing them thousands of times. He brings a bright exuberance to his performance that makes it seem as if he's playing all his wonderful classics for the first time. And the crowd feeds off his joyful energy, making the evening feel less like a concert, where we all sit and listen to the performer, and more like a pure celebration of music, in which Roger pulls us in and makes us part of the ceremony. Imagine sitting around a summer campfire and singing songs with more than a thousand of your closest friends, and that's kind of what it feels like.    

You'd never have guessed it from listening to his flawless performance, but Roger did joke about halfway through the show that his voice was starting to ask him, "What the hell are you doing to me?" Maybe the jet lag was starting to catch up with him? If so, he didn't let it affect his performance for the rest of the evening, though he did mention at that point that he could really go for a cappuccino. And he got one, after the next song was over! Somebody -- my guess is a casino employee -- walked a cup out to him onstage, and Roger nursed it along for the rest of the performance.

Maybe that was the magic elixir that allowed him to hold up through the show, but in any event, he and his band rally did pull off all the old Supertramp hits to perfection once again. And as far as Roger's voice goes, it amazes me that he sounds as if he hasn't aged a day since his Supertramp days. The man is 64 years old, and he has yet to transpose any of his songs down that I can hear. I don't have perfect pitch, but I can tell when a song's key has been changed, and none of his repertoire sounds as if it's been altered to accommodate his voice. A lot of singers start to lose their upper register with age, but Roger's voice still manages to enter the stratosphere on "Fool's Overture," "The Logical Song," and "Dreamer," the last of which has him hitting an E two octaves above middle C. That's amazing.

It's a testament to his band's talents that they also sounded flawless under the challenging circumstances. Roger went out of his way to thank them for their performance, going so far as to point out that everything he and his guys play is done without a click track. If they were in perfect sync, and they were, it was a result of their own remarkable skills. In particular, Roger called out his drummer, whom he says he barely ever notices because they're so perfectly locked in with each other every night onstage.

He also drew attention, and deservedly so, to his all-around utility player, Aaron MacDonald, who so effortlessly moves from one musical duty to another all night on stage. He handles all the woodwinds; he contributes percussion, additional keyboards, and harmony vocals; and he covers Rick Davies' original vocal lines -- and he seems to do it all without ever breaking a sweat. On this night, Aaron and Roger said they were just a few weeks short of their 10th anniversary of playing together, and Aaron took a moment to thank Roger and the audience for the opportunity. Amazing to think that Roger has been performing with Aaron almost as long as he was in Supertramp -- 14 years.

Early on in the show, Roger promised the audience that he was going to play a few songs he usually didn't perform, and he seemed to take a kind of mischievous glee in leaving his band wondering what he had in mind. At one point between songs, he walked over to Aaron's keyboard stand, wearing a big grin, and ripped up what was obviously a setlist for the evening. Not long after that, he stood at the front of the stage, 12-string strapped on, and let the anticipation of his next move hang in the air. "See them?" he asked, tipping his head back toward the band. "They're all waiting to see what I play next."

One song that hadn't apparently been in the evening's playbook was "Love Is a Thousand Times," a gorgeous ballad from his solo album Open the Door. Roger began the song after asking a group of people in the crowd to raise the sign they were holding. From where I sat, I could see the title of the song on the sign, along with what looked like two names underneath it. Maybe there was a couple in attendance who had made that "their song." If so, having Roger honor their request must have been an enormous thrill.

It was clearly a night to fulfill requests and make the crowd happy, because Roger also played a piece for a gentleman who he said took his band out on Lake Washington the day before the show. (That's one of the big lakes in the Seattle area, for those who aren't local.) The man's request was a good one, as Roger dug deep into the Supertramp catalog and pulled out "Babaji," an excellent song that gives listeners a peek into Roger's spiritual side, from the Even in the Quietest Moments album.

But the request that came up before those two was the biggest surprise of all, as Roger called out my name from the stage before his band launched into "Along Came Mary."

Wow! Are you kidding me? The studio version of "Along Came Mary," the hauntingly beautiful lead-off track from Open the Door, has played over the PA as the exit music for Roger's Snoqualmie shows the past two years, and both times I left wishing Roger could have played the song as part of his set. So after I bought my ticket for the show this year, I dropped his management team an e-mail, totally on a whim, and asked if Roger would consider performing the song this year. I didn't expect anything to come of it -- I just figured it couldn't hurt to ask.

Well, as it turns out, it certainly doesn't hurt to ask. Roger's kind gesture made me feel very humbled and very grateful. How many artists would do that for their fans? Here's a guy who has sold millions of albums, is known around the world for his music, and owes his fans nothing -- yet he took the time to make one fan in the crowd happy. That just reinforces in my mind that Roger's smiling enthusiasm -- the happy, kind, gentle, warm, personal, down-to-earth demeanor that flows from the stage during his shows -- is more than just a gimmick. It's genuine and from the heart. He connects directly with his audience in a way few artists do, and little acts of kindness like playing a song I wanted to hear are a big reason why. 

Whatever it is that Roger likes about the Seattle area or the fans here, I sure am glad he keeps coming back, because his concerts are always a highlight of my year. At this show, just as he did the past two years, Roger was smiling from ear to ear and encouraged us to forget our cares for a few hours while we all got lost in the music together. He makes it easy for that to happen -- this year especially, when he went above and beyond to take extra good care of his fans.

See you next year, Roger.

Setlist:

Take the Long Way Home
School
In Jeopardy (from his solo album In the Eye of the Storm)
Lovers in the Wind (also from In the Eye of the Storm)

Breakfast in America
Along Came Mary (from his solo album Open the Door)
Lady
Sister Moonshine
The Logical Song
Only Because of You/Lord Is It Mine (medley)
Death and a Zoo (from Open the Door)
If Everyone Was Listening
Babaji
Love Is a Thousand Times (from Open the Door)
Child of Vision
Dreamer
Fool's Overture

Encore:

Two of Us
Give a Little Bit

"Human Rights and Dignity": Lessons From Tiananmen Square, 25 Years Later

The same week I graduated from high school, the Tiananmen Square massacre was unfolding on TV. Part of me wondered what kind of a world I was stepping out into, when young people half a world away were being beaten and killed in hopes of winning some basic freedoms from an oppressive Communist government.

But at the same time, I felt a sense of hope when I saw the iconic image of Tank Man -- the still unknown brave soul who stood in front of a line of tanks and refused to let them pass. That image, to me, has remained one of the most powerful of my lifetime, as it symbolizes the eternal struggles that everyday people encounter to remain free in the face of bigger, stronger powers that threaten to beat them down.

No one knows how many people died in Beijing in June of 1989. Estimates range from hundreds to thousands. We don't know because the Chinese government has always been tight-lipped about the event. And the government wants to make sure no one else speaks of it, either. A quarter-century later, discussion of Tiananmen Square is not allowed in China, as the Communist Party does all it can to make the Chinese people forget that the event ever happened. As The Telegraph reports:

On the Internet, blogs or social media posts about "Tiananmen Square" and "June 4" are quickly censored – as are all the various sleights of hand that the Chinese might use to indicate the forbidden date.

For example, 6-4, 64, 63+1, and 65-1 are all blocked. So too are "May 35th" and "April 65th". Even the Roman numerals for 6 and 4 (VIIV) are banned, as are mixing numbers and letters such as "8q b 4" for "89.6.4".

In the past, censors have removed posts containing the words "tomorrow" and "today" on the eve and day of the anniversary, as well "in memory of", pictures of candles, and even "sensitive word".

The names of the leaders at the time, especially of Zhao Ziyang, who was purged as general secretary of the Communist party for supporting the students, are all wiped.

Those who continue to speak out -- both about the 1989 event and the ongoing abuses of the government -- are harassed, detained, placed under house arrest, jailed on trumped-up charges, ejected from the places they live, or simply "disappeared." Families of dissidents undergo the same treatment.

As the AP's Christopher Bodeen reports, the government blends this type of harassment with cosmetic reforms that they hope will mollify the public. People can practice the religion of their choice, so long as the state approves of the religious practice -- and the fact that many churches have recently been demolished shows just how closely the churches are being monitored and how much "freedom" worshippers truly have. Labor unions can form, but they remain under strict government control, and labor activists are routinely targeted with intimidation. Non-governmental organizations can form and hold lectures and meetings, but they're prohibited from taking on political causes.

And if any large-scale protests do begin to take shape, Beijing is quick to crack down before they escalate into a Tiananmen-sized showing.

In short, people's lives are scrutinized and micromanaged. Known activists have had their passports rescinded to restrict their travel, preventing them from spreading their messages -- and if they still manage to slip away, the police track them down and return them home. Trying to spread those messages online is virtually impossible, as the government employs people to monitor the Web and censor anything politically provocative.  

China's economic reforms are well known, and they, too, have come about in part as an attempt to distract the people from demanding political freedoms. But as Human Rights Watch reports, the reforms have led to rampant corruption and a widening gap between rich and poor.

So while China has changed in some ways since 1989, one thing that has not changed is that its people are still not free.

On this day -- a day people died for democracy, and a day China wants the world to forget -- I would therefore encourage all of us to think about the system we uphold when we buy a product stamped "Made in China." If you're not in the habit of looking at those stamps and labels, take some time to do so the next time you're out shopping. You'll be astounded at how many of the things we consume were made by people who essentially have no political rights.

Think, too, about why this is happening. From 2001 to 2012, the United States lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs to China. The average Chinese laborer works a 12-hour day and, as of 2012, earned $1.36 an hour. It's all about the bottom line. U.S. corporations have offshored their labor, putting Americans out of work, so they can exploit a massive labor pool that has virtually no political power to ask for anything better. That's why, as Steve Jobs once infamously said, "those jobs aren't coming back." And that's also why China's economic reforms will not bring about political reforms, as some observers contend. The corporations that moved their manufacturing jobs to China don't want a politically free workforce that could demand greater pay, benefits, and working conditions. That would work against their interests.

China has ostensibly closed its forced-labor camps, where work conditions were naturally horrible -- but that still doesn't mean laborers' lots are improving. Speaking of Steve Jobs -- who told his biographer that he loved China's business practices and hated U.S. regulations and labor rights -- we can't forget about Foxconn, the infamous iPhone factory where conditions were so deplorable that workers were committing suicide. The only "reforms" the workers got? Nets outside the factory windows, preventing any further workers from jumping to their deaths.

Getty Images, via cnn.com.

If you still have any doubts about what things are like in China, ask someone who suffered for his part in the Tiananmen protests. Liao Yiwu wrote a poem titled "Massacre" in reaction to the violence he saw at Tiananmen Square, and for doing so he spent four years in prison, subjected to humiliating and painful punishments. He escaped from China after his release and wrote about his experiences in a memoir, For a Song and a Hundred Songs. A recent article in Buddhist magazine Tricycle says that Liao describes how inmates "would be forced to pick a 'dish' from the [prison's] 'menu,' which included such delicacies as 'Stewed Ox Nose: The enforcer rams two fingers up the inmate's nose until it bleeds,' among 108 dishes."

In 2011, Liao recounted some of his prison experiences to Spiegel:

"The (prisoners appointed as guards) examined the clothing they'd torn from my body. ... I clutched both my empty fists at my sides, then moved instinctively to pull up the pants that weren't there, when their leader ordered me to stick out my bottom -- and, with the utmost care, inserted a bamboo stick into my anus. ... The exhibition lasted about seven minutes, but it was longer than an entire lifetime."

... The guards beat him with electric batons, one time delivering 100 blows in a single interrogation, another time for 20 minutes without pause. They cuffed his hands behind his back, once for 23 days straight.

All this was for writing a poem.

In the Spiegel article, Liao also has some words for those in the West who try to soft-pedal the ongoing political climate in China:

Anyone who talks that way is afraid of jeopardizing trade with China, he said, but such people bring "bad thoughts into the world." If trade is more important than human rights and dignity, "then the end of the world has arrived." And no one should deceive themselves about the Communist Party, he said. "It has a golden body and two faces. It shows the Chinese people its fierce face, and the West its pleasant one."

We don't hear about these things in the Western media, and not just because China shows us a "pleasant face." We are beholden to China. China holds the largest share of our debt, at well over a trillion dollars. And the corporate reliance on China's cheap labor pool speaks for itself. When you strike deals with the devil, you lose the ability to call the devil out. This is what we've done to ourselves, in the name of reckless government spending and naked corporate greed.

So today, in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, I'm flying my Tibetan flag as a symbol of the ongoing struggle for freedom in China. Why the Tibetan flag? Because it's illegal to possess the Tibetan flag in China. Those who attempt to fly one are often imprisoned, and sometimes beaten to the point of permanent injury. It's also illegal to possess a picture of the Dalai Lama, who has been exiled from his native Tibet for most of his life.

Tibet has suffered greatly at the hands of the Chinese, ever since China invaded the country in 1949. Today, you won't find Tibet on a world map. The country is now considered part of China, and China has gone to great lengths to undermine Tibetans' distinct way of life. Thousands of monasteries have been destroyed, the numbers of people who can become clergy is strictly regulated, and all religious practices must be state-approved. China also appears to be encouraging the migration of Chinese to Tibet, in what is most certainly an attempt to dilute Tibetan culture. Political prisoners abound, including the 11th Panchen Lama, who was kidnapped at age 6, shortly after the Dalai Lama recognized the boy as the heir to the title, and has not been seen since. And the landscape is being drained of its natural resources. To top it all off, just last year, all Tibetans were ordered to fly the Chinese flag over their homes. When some Tibetans resisted, some 18,000 Chinese troops poured in to enforce the edict. Two people were sentenced to 10 years in prison for refusing to comply with the order.

Those who have openly demonstrated for a free Tibet have suffered brutal torture. A group of Buddhist nuns was taken from a demonstration, and once in prison, the nuns were stripped naked, beaten with nightsticks, subjected to dog bites, and anally and vaginally raped with electric cattle prods. Reports of similarly monstrous behavior against Falun Gong practitioners, political prisoners, and other prisoners of conscience have been reported over the years.

One of the Tibetan nuns was told by her torturer, "You will not get freedom, you will not get independence, not even in your dreams." To date, that remains true. China still rules over Tibet.

Therefore, what Tibetans are not allowed to do, I will do in their honor -- fly their nation's flag.

I also look at today as a reminder that we must always be on guard to defend our own freedoms. That I can fly a Tibetan flag and talk about Tiananmen Square on my blog is evidence that Americans still enjoy greater freedoms than many others around the world, but that doesn't mean those freedoms are forever safe, or that we should take them for granted. We now have a law on the books that allows for the indefinite detention of American citizens without charge or trial. Our government has determined that it can assassinate American citizens without due process -- and has done so. A massive surveillance system tracks our lives far beyond any reasonable limits. Whistleblowers are being prosecuted at an unprecedented rate. Freedom of the press is under assault. So are peaceful protests. We have the largest prison population of any nation on Earth, and people are ending up in those prisons -- many for petty crimes that wouldn't merit a sentence in other nations -- at the hands of overzealous police forces that have become more militarized and aggressive in their enforcement actions.     

If we want to hang on to the freedoms that our Founding Fathers guaranteed for us, we have to guard them and fight for them. If we don't want our nation to become more like China, we can't sit passively back and expect that it won't happen.

Because what happened here in 1989 ...

Is not all that different from what happened here in 2012.

May that serve as a cautionary reminder to us all.

When Life Becomes Trivial

I have very strongly held views on matters of life and death, as do most of us. Some of my views I make known explicitly here, especially when it comes to the violence of war. But I tend to err on the side of life in just about every ethical situation.

It's probably for that reason that I felt myself having a highly visceral reaction to the video making the rounds on social media of the woman who filmed her abortion procedure.

I don't like to promote people looking for their 15 minutes of fame, so I won't mention her by name or link to the video. Nor do I want to drag out the usual talking points surrounding abortion, because we've all heard them a thousand times, and no one's mind is going to be changed by hearing them for the 1,001st time.

But what struck me was the woman's cavalier attitude to the whole thing. Before the procedure, she smiles into the camera and proclaims, "I'm going to have an abortion tomorrow morning!" In a Cosmopolitan article, she said she called her supervisor and said, "Excuse me, I am going to need to schedule one abortion, please" -- as flippantly as if she was ordering a burger and fries at the drive-through. She smiled and hummed to herself during the procedure, as if she was doing nothing more than getting a manicure. And sometime afterward, she faces the camera, still trying to be upbeat but honestly looking as if she's struggling to still put a happy face on the event, and proclaiming how she's in awe of the fact that her body can make a baby.

Yeah, except that you ended that baby's life. There's that.

But the clincher? When she says, "I knew what I was gonna do was right, because it was right for me, and no one else."

The selfishness and narcissism wrapped up in that sentence are deeply emblematic of where I think we're heading as a culture. There are few things we do in life that don't affect other people, and this woman's decision was undeniably a decision for two people, not just herself. Yet she proclaims, "It was right for me, and no one else." Certainly not for the life that was growing inside her, obviously.

In one sense, I feel sorry for this young lady. She's obviously been conditioned to think of terminating a pregnancy as little more than a slightly invasive medical procedure that carries no ethical weight, as if it's no different from having a wart removed. I imagine that if you worked in an abortion clinic, you'd have to find a way to rationalize what happens there, lest the reality eat away at you. And it's not as if an abortion clinic is going to actively try to talk anyone out of the procedure. That would be bad for business.

Look, I know lots of women end up in these clinics out of desperation, and I'm not making light of that. But then that's one of the problems I have with the cheery flippancy of this woman's video. It trivializes what is surely a gut-wrenching decision for many women who choose to terminate their pregnancies.

I also acknowledge that I can't control the choices other people make. I would just hope that if women find themselves in a difficult situation such as this, they'd approach a life-or-death decision with a little more reflection and solemnity.

Equally upsetting about this woman's story is that she works as an abortion counselor yet admits she did not use contraception before her pregnancy. Contraception is so cheap, and so readily available, that there's virtually no need to resort to abortion as a form of birth control. The irresponsibility of someone who knew better is astounding, and certainly not something to hold up as an example to follow. Our actions have consequences.

I think what bothers me most about this story is that it undermines an unsettling truth about our modern world: Life is disposable. It's obvious in the way we emotionally insulate ourselves from thinking about the pain and suffering of the women and children who get in the way of the drone bombs we drop on sovereign nations. ("Collateral damage." "The kid probably would have grown up to be a terrorist anyway.") It's obvious in the way we think taking the life of a convicted killer somehow evens the score. It's obvious in the way we don't bat an eye when we bite into a steak or a chicken leg.

Nor do we have much reverence for life. If we did, we wouldn't abuse and neglect our children and elderly. We wouldn't think violence is the answer to every solution. We wouldn't be choking our own planet to death with our destructive actions toward the environment.

And we deal with it all by turning a blind eye. We don't want to see the scorched, disfigured, lifeless bodies of children killed by our bombs. We don't want to see animals screaming and struggling for their lives as their bodies are prepared to be dismembered for the sake of our appetites. We don't want to think about a fetus being torn from the womb and then discarded as if its suffering meant nothing.

We dehumanize the things we want to distance ourselves from. That's why abortion advocates talk about "choice" and speak in broad terms of "clumps of cells" and lack of viability. But what we're ultimately talking about is the termination of a life. Paul McCartney once said that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, we'd all be vegetarians. Similarly, if people saw what actually happened during an abortion procedure -- and, notably, this woman's abortion video shows only her reaction from the waist up -- I think many of us would change our views on just what this "choice" really entails. The pictures are out there online, readily available. I'm not going to show them to you or link to them. If you want to find them, you can. But you have to be ready to confront the consequences of this particular kind of "choice."

As the humanitarian Albert Schwietzer once said, "Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight."

Understand that I don't come at this from a right-wing Christian point of view. When it comes to matters of peace and social justice, I'm as aligned with the political left as anyone you'll ever see. Yet the abortion issue is for me the big disconnect on the left, and one of the biggest reasons I'll probably never consider myself part of the "liberal" camp. It's always struck me as odd that on things like war and the death penalty, the left takes the side of life and peace. And the left also usually takes a strong stand on behalf of those who are defenseless, voiceless, and powerless. Yet when it comes to abortion, the rhetoric immediately shifts to "choice," and any discussion of life and advocacy for the unborn is denounced as the ravings of right-wing religious fanatics at best, and an expression of hatred of women at worst.

I don't get it, and I never will.

I understand that the woman's (alleged) purpose in making this video was to show women that abortion doesn't have to be scary. But I think most women who resort to abortion aren't there hoping they can smile and hum through the procedure. They're there because they feel they have no other options. They may have no resources, no support network to fall back on. I don't really think putting a happy face on the whole thing is particularly helpful no matter what side of the debate you take. What we need are things that support women so they can avoid having to end up in a clinic in the first place, and alternatives so they don't think it's their only option. Better maternity leave policies, more flexible work schedules, the promotion of adoption, better education about sexuality and contraception -- all these things can help. Women deserve better than this, and their children deserve a chance at life.

But banning abortion won't make it go away, and that's something the political right doesn't seem to understand. What we need is to foster a culture in which women get the support they need, in which fewer pregnancies are unwanted, and in which other options are available and attractive. Under those conditions, abortion might become practically obsolete, regardless of its legal status. 

Trivializing abortion as if it's no big deal, as this woman's video does, isn't helpful. We need a culture that upholds and respects life, not one that constantly finds answers in death.

Due Process: It Was Nice While It Lasted

When did the Democratic Party stop supporting peace and civil liberties? Did the party's lofty ideals die with JFK? When I read Thomas Naylor's assertion in his book The Vermont Manifesto that "[t]he Democratic Party is effectively brain dead, having had no new ideas since the 1960s," I scoffed at the seeming hyperbole of the statement. But when you see an entire party vote in practical lockstep in favor of a man whose legal opinion undermined 800 years of due-process law, you can come to no other conclusion than that they've completely lost their way.

At issue is David Barron, who was the co-author of the Justice Department memos that provided the legal basis for the Obama administration to kill American citizens without due process. Barron's justification served as the basis of the administration's assassination-by-drone of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and Islamic militant living in Yemen. His 16-year-old son was killed in a drone strike shortly afterward.

In what was obviously a political favor for giving Obama the legal workaround, the president subsequently nominated Barron for a seat on the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

When the Senate wanted to see the memos, the administration said no, until their hand was finally forced in court. Even now the president forbids those who have seen the memos from saying what’s in them. But it doesn’t really matter, because killing American citizens with no legal representation or trial is blatantly unconstitutional. It doesn't matter whether al-Awlaki was a nice guy or not. As a citizen, he retained his right to due process.

Even more important, Barron's legal sleight of hand sets a terrifying precedent that undermines our entire rule of law. If the president can order an extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen in violation of that citizen's Constitutional rights, then due process is dead, and anyone can be killed in exactly the same manner.

That didn't seem to matter to the Democrats in the Senate, all but two of whom voted to confirm Barron for his judgeship.

I'll bet you think you can guess who the two holdouts were, but if you were thinking of "progressive" leaders Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, you'd be wrong. They voted for Barron, too. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana were the only Democratic defectors.

In fact, Rand Paul, from the Republican side, seemed to be the only person in the Senate with enough courage to actually call out Barron:

What we're talking about is the extraordinary concept of killing Americans who are overseas but not involved in combat. It doesn't mean that they're not potentially -- and probably are -- bad people. But we're talking about doing it with no accusation, no trial, no charge, no jury. ... Are we comfortable killing American citizens, no matter how awful or heinous the crime they're accused of; are we comfortable killing them based on accusations that no jury has reviewed?

... I rise to say that there is no legal precedent for killing citizens not involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber-stamps and grants such power to a president is not worthy of being one step away from the Supreme Court. ... [T]he Barron memos at their very core disrespect the Bill of Rights.

On the Democratic side, the comments were more along the lines of the spineless apologetics from Massachusetts' Ed Markey:

Let's be clear: Barron is ... certainly not responsible for the administration's drone policy or the decisions to authorize an attack. He is a lawyer who was asked to do legal analysis for his client: the president of the United States.

In other words, the Nuremberg defense: Barron was just following orders.

Of course, Barron was absolutely responsible for the administration's drone policy as it pertains to assassination of U.S. citizens. He was the one who twisted the law to give Obama cover for what he wanted to do.

It seems like a long time ago when candidate Obama was decrying the excesses of the Bush administration. Now he's one-upping Bush's appointment of torture-memo author Jay Bybee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 1215, the Magna Carta gave voice to the concept of due process under law, and it did not discriminate between good guys and bad guys:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution embraced the same concept in the Fifth Amendment:

No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

This is what we're undermining. Cornerstones of Western legal tradition that have protected the rights of citizens for centuries. Little wonder that Edward Snowden, who saw these rights unraveling before his eyes, said of his heroic efforts:

I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, "Hey, this is not appropriate."  

Someone needs to stand up. And it's apparently not going to be the Democrats, now that they've confirmed to a judgeship a man who should never even be allowed near a judge's bench. It's been clear for some time, to anyone who doesn't wear partisan political blinders, that the Democrats bow to the military-industrial-surveillance complex as deeply as the Republicans do, and that the parties' views on foreign policy and civil liberties are virtually indistinguishable. We already knew of the administration's hostility toward due process, with its repeated defense of the provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that allows for the indefinite detention of American citizens without charge or trial. But now we've gone one dangerous step further. Thanks to Obama and Senate Democrats, there will literally be a war criminal sitting on the First Circuit, one step below the Supreme Court -- which means Barron could one day end up sitting on the highest court in the nation.

Anybody who cherishes the rule of law should be outraged. And every person who was responsible for the nomination and confirmation of David Barron should be ashamed of themselves. They have betrayed the Bill of Rights.

In Honor of Cascadia, My Home

The Doug Flag, created by Alexander Baretich.

A month or so ago, I was browsing at Left Bank Books, a little anarchist bookstore collective on the grounds of Pike Place Market, when I came across a box of bumper stickers. On top of the pile was a sticker that featured the silhouette of a Douglas fir centered atop three horizontal stripes -- blue, white, and green. It was, unmistakably, a flag. Next to the flag, in all caps, read the command "FREE CASCADIA!"

Somehow, without knowing a thing about what Cascadia was, I felt that it must relate to a movement in the Pacific Northwest -- an expressed desire, perhaps, to take a different approach to how we live our lives here. I bought the sticker, went home, and began my research. Since then I've been to a Cascadia conference and a Cascadia organizational meeting, and for the first time in my life I've dipped my toe into a type of real-life social-political activism.

So, what is Cascadia? Well, it depends on whom you ask, but one interpretation that would find widespread agreement is that Cascadia is a way of thinking about one's sense of place, seen through the lens of our relationship to the natural environment. The lakes, rivers, mountains, waterfalls, flora, fauna, and seas are in large part the things that define Cascadia, which is the name given to our bioregion -- a region defined not by artificial political boundaries, but by shared ecological characteristics.

In the case of Cascadia, opinions vary on what ecological delineations define the region in a geographic sense, though a popular conception of Cascadia takes in a vast space that includes the Columbia River watershed, the watersheds of other Northwest rivers that flow into the Pacific, and a wide area encompassing the Cascade Range and surrounding lands. That conception of Cascadia stretches north into the Alaskan panhandle, south into northwestern California, and east to the Continental Divide and the Rockies. It includes all of the state of Washington, virtually all of Idaho, large sections of Oregon and British Columbia, significant fragments of Montana, California, and Alaska, and tiny slivers of Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, and the Yukon.

©Cynthia Thomas; taken from Sightline Institute.

For others, Cascadia takes on important cultural and political considerations, built around the shared values of the people who live there. That may seem like a tall order when you consider the political diversity of the Pacific Northwest. People on the coast tend to be quite liberal, while the farming communities in eastern Washington are more conservative, and a strong libertarian bent marks much of Idaho and Montana. But in my time here, and having the advantage of comparing this area with both the Midwest and East Coast, I've found one theme that uniquely presents itself across the spectrum, and that's a do-it-yourself attitude. It's probably something rooted in the region's history, when the white settlers were so far away from the population centers on the East Coast, including the nation's capital, that they found it easier, and in many cases necessary, to take matters of governance into their own hands.

Consider that Seattle, the largest population center in Cascadia, is 2,700 miles away from Washington, D.C. That's a five-hour flight even today. How can bureaucrats who are so far removed from daily life here in Cascadia ever hope to understand and effectively address the region's needs? The people best equipped to do that are the people who live and work here, who love the places they call home and know what's in Cascadia's best interests.

That's why there's an emphasis among those in the burgeoning Cascadia movement for taking local action and reclaiming the power to do so -- whether that means standing in solidarity with the region's workers for better wages and labor rights, protecting our waterways from pollution and our forests from being decimated, supporting the rights of the region's indigenous peoples, resisting corporate exploitation of people and the environment, promoting better transportation alternatives, shopping at locally owned stores, or even something as simple as promoting community gardening. It's the myriad small daily actions taken by ordinary people who are here, on the ground, with their roots firmly planted in Cascadia, that have the potential to transform our region for the better. Sitting back and expecting the nation's capital on the opposite coast to do everything for us won't change anything. Neither will blind obedience to its laws and demands. We do things our own way here, because it's the most practical, and most humane, thing to do.

The Cascadian flag flies at a Portland Timbers game. The Portland, Seattle, 
and Vancouver MLS teams compete annually for the Cascadia Cup. 
Timbersarmy.org.

That's not to say Cascadia is an independence movement, although that undercurrent does exist. Maximizing local autonomy, by way of building cooperative partnerships and alliances throughout the region, remains a central focus of the movement regardless of Cascadia's political relationship with D.C., or Ottawa, or the rest of the USA and Canada.

I therefore speak only for myself, and no one else in the movement, when I say that I wholeheartedly embrace the idea of Cascadian independence. I've always believed that accident of birth shouldn't dictate one's national loyalties, and I've long desired to expatriate to a place that better represents my values and would give my daughter the best opportunities in life she can possibly have. That dream, for various reasons, will probably never come true, but one of the things that made the idea of Cascadia such a revelation to me was that I could strive to build the kind of place I'd like to live in right here, amongst many like-minded people -- not in the place where I was born, but in the place I chose to call home. In his novel Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach envisioned an enlightened independent republic consisting of northern California, Oregon, and Washington, and if Cascadia could strive toward building a new nation based on some of the ideals Callenbach imagined for his Ecotopia, we would be in a good place indeed.

Then there's that matter of scale again, with the people in Cascadia being so far removed from those who rule over them. Can a large nation govern effectively over such a vast area? Does a nation reach a point at which it simply becomes unsustainable and unmanageable? Would it perhaps be more effective to let states and regions go their own way and do what they deem to be in their own best interests? When you get down to it, how much do New Englanders have in common with Southerners, or Southerners with Californians, or Californians with Midwesterners? Is it possible that we're not even so much a nation as a collection of regions long ago cobbled together by misguided notions of Manifest Destiny?

Several authors in recent years have been confronting that very question, from Colin Woodard in American Nations to Dante Chinni and James Gimpel in Our Patchwork Nation. And several other authors all propose a similar response to that question, from Bill Kauffman in Bye Bye Miss American Empire to Leopold Kohr in The Breakdown of Nations, and from Thomas Naylor and William Willimon in Downsizing the USA to the contributors to Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century. The titles should tell you all you need to know about their visions of the future. All things end, even nations, and it certainly does no harm to think about what form of governance, if any, will replace our current systems, and what nations, if any, will rise up in the place of those that dissolve. If we want to, we can even have a hand in building the kind of world we'll want to see. For some of us here in the Pacific Northwest, that's where the idea -- and the ideal -- of Cascadia fits in.

But even if one rejects the idea of political downsizing and chooses to embrace our national mythologies as they've been handed down to us through the generations, the problem with large, unwieldy nations remains: By their very nature, they simply cannot be as responsive to their people's individual needs on a local, personal level as a smaller nation can. And smaller nations, perhaps even more importantly, tend to mind their own business on the international stage. Who wouldn't want that? I know that I, for one, would love to be the citizen of a smaller nation that favors peace over empire and aggression, that doesn't violate its citizens' civil liberties through massive espionage programs and unchecked detention policies, that's more concerned with tending to its people's health, education, and economic sustainability than in handing out subsidies and tax breaks to those who don't need them. A nation that puts people before profits, values family and community over the unbridled pursuit of material gain, and doesn't neglect, belittle, and penalize those who have nothing at the expense of those who already enjoy great abundance. A nation whose citizens respect both the planet they live on and each other. A nation of equal people who make the best decisions for themselves and their communities from the bottom up, rather than the top down. We could have that nation, right here in Cascadia. Getting there would not come without great effort, although peaceful separation would always remain the goal.

whatchudrinkin.com

I realize that the very word "secession" carries a lot of historical baggage for Americans, but the desire for political self-determination need not be built on goals or ideals antithetical to human liberty. There are breakaway movements all over the world, many fueled by the simple desire for more local control or the pursuit of greater cultural, economic, or social justice. Scotland will hold a referendum later this year on whether it should break away from the United Kingdom. A similar vote in Quebec just barely rejected provincial independence back in 1995. In Vermont, one organization wishes to return the state to an independent republic, as it was between 1777 and 1791. (For more on the Second Vermont Republic movement, check out the collection of essays titled Most Likely to Secede: What the Vermont Independence Movement Can Teach Us About Reclaiming Community and Creating a Human Scale Vision for the 21st Century.) Even here on the West Coast, portions of southern Oregon and northern California once attempted to form their own state -- and they might have succeeded had the bombing of Pearl Harbor not diverted attention away from the idea. And finally, what is the United States itself, but a nation that long ago declared its right to secede from the British empire? All of these breakaway movements were and are built on the basic desire for something better.

And so it is in Cascadia, for those of us looking at the movement at least partially in those terms. If we so chose, we could embark on building a nation that in many ways might stand as an example of how to create a better world. Economically, an independent Cascadia could be a powerhouse rivaling Switzerland. Ecologically, it would be -- and is -- like no other place on the planet. Furthermore, consider that Thomas Jefferson himself expected that as the United States expanded westward, this region would one day become its own separate country, which he referred to as the "Republic of the Pacific."

Maybe Jefferson had the right idea all along. It's certainly an idea worth considering.

First row: Multnomah Falls, Oregon (Adam Sawyer/Craigmore Creations); Mount Rainier as seen from West Point Lighthouse, Seattle (Joe Lourencio/Panaramio); pisaster ochraceus starfish at Point Robinson, Vashon Island, Washington. Second row: Panoramic view of Portland (Little Mountain 5/Wikimedia Commons). Third row: Orca whale in Puget Sound (Carl Wodenscheck/komonews.com); driftwood at Point Robinson, Vashon Island, Washington; Snoqualmie Falls, Washington (City of Snoqualmie); moss-covered trees; Federal Way, Washington. Fourth row: Panoramic view of Vancouver, B.C. (Tourism Vancouver/Molecular Origins 2014). Fifth row: Mount Hood, Oregon; salmon swimming through the fish ladder at the Hiram M. Chittendon locks, Seattle (Three Sheets Northwest); Mount St. Helens and the remains of a tree leveled in the 1980 eruption. Sixth row: Panoramic view of Seattle (markanon/Panaramio). Seventh row: Olympic Mountains (Dale Ireland/Kitsap Sun); Capilano Suspension Bridge, Vancouver (desktopnexus.com).

But for now, simply increasing people's awareness of the movement is a leading priority. That's why my Cascadian flag is flying today and will be for some time to come. The "Doug Flag," as it's popularly called, incorporates the colors white, for our clouds and snow-capped mountains; green, for our verdant landscape; and blue, for the sky and our vast waterways. The Douglas fir, front and center, is a living symbol of the combined power of all three elements -- of nature itself standing tall, resilient, and defiant.

USGS/Robert Krimmel

Wikimedia Commons

I raised the Doug Flag at my house today because May 18 has been declared Cascadia Day. Some people are marking the day by traveling to the Peace Arch Park at the Washington-B.C. border to unfurl banners that inform passers-by in each direction: "You may be leaving [America/Canada], but you're still in Cascadia!" Work obligations prevented me from going, but I love the symbolism of the event, as a bioregion that crosses an international boundary line is being celebrated at a park that literally straddles that line -- part of it sits south of the 49th parallel, and part of it lies to the north, and those within the park can pass freely back and forth. Perhaps one day, there will be no international border there at all -- just the arch that reads, on one side, "Children of a common mother," and on the other, "Brethren dwelling together in unity."

So why is May 18 Cascadia Day? The date was selected in honor of the day Mount St. Helens blew her top in 1980. That deadly event reminds us of the magnificent power of nature and serves to humble us when we find ourselves under the illusion that we humans call the shots on this planet.

Cascadia is alive, as its flowing waters, lush forests, and active volcanoes all remind us. And today we stand in awe and reverence of the place we call home.

From McMillan to Yates, the Fight Goes On

Photo: Jenna Pope.

One of the most tragic parts of the Cecily McMillan trial is that the verdict may have turned out different had the jurors been fully informed -- not just of what happened the night McMillan was arrested, but of what fate a guilty verdict would bring, and also of their own rights to judge the merits of the case, regardless of the charges leveled against the defendant.

In the aftermath of the jurors' guilty verdict, one juror came forward and expressed regret, after learning what the verdict could mean for McMillan when the sentencing phase arrives. From The Guardian:

Finally freed from a ban on researching the case, including potential punishments, some were shocked to learn that they had just consigned the 25-year-old to a sentence of up to seven years in prison, one told the Guardian. "They felt bad," said the juror, who did not wish to be named. "Most just wanted her to do probation, maybe some community service. But now what I'm hearing is seven years in jail? That's ludicrous. Even a year in jail is ridiculous."

So why did this juror swing to the "guilty" side? Because the rest of the jury was basing its verdict on the only real piece of video evidence it was allowed to see: a grainy video showing only McMillan's attempt to flee from her assailant, but failing to show the larger context of the widespread police brutality against her and many others in Zuccotti Park that night.

"For most of the jury, the video said it all," the juror said. The juror said that an immediate vote after the 12 were sent out for deliberation found they were split 9-3 in favour of convicting. After everyone watched the clip again in the jury room, the juror said, two of the three hold-outs switched to the majority, leaving only the juror who approached the Guardian in favour of acquitting the 25-year-old. Sensing "a losing battle," the juror agreed to join them in a unanimous verdict.

And that's how a young woman will end up in prison: because one juror, rather than standing firm, felt he or she was fighting a losing battle against the rest. The juror caved.

Had the juror stuck to his or her guns, we could have seen a hung jury and a mistrial -- which certainly would have been a better outcome than what we ended up with.

On one hand, it's hard to fault the jury for seeing things the way it did. The jurors saw one video in isolation. The judge didn't allow them to hear about the police officer's own violent past, about the brutal police crackdown that evening, about how McMillan was beaten on the ground until she had a seizure and passed out, or about McMillan's own commitment to nonviolent protest -- since all of those things would be "prejudicial." Jurors saw an up-close picture of the elbow McMillan hit the officer with, but there were no close-ups of the officer's alleged injury. Prosecutors went so far as to suggest that McMillan faked her seizure and deliberately injured her own breast after the fact.

But on the other hand, how could these jurors have ever seriously thought that finding a woman guilty of assault on a cop would lead only to "probation, maybe some community service"? The system protects its own. There should have been no question that the potential sentence would be draconian.

One thing that seems certain is that these jurors had no concept of the right to jury nullification, and it always amazes me how many jurors seem to be oblivious to it. If some of the jurors were reluctant to find McMillan guilty, they didn't have to, regardless of what they thought the evidence showed them. It needs to be common knowledge among all potential jurors that you are under no obligation to render a verdict in accordance with the letter of the law.

One glimmer of hope is that the presiding judge, Ronald Zweibel, was so biased during the proceedings that the defense may win an appeal on that basis alone. Zweibel has been characterized as "a prosecutor with a robe." He placed a gag order on McMillan's defense team and raged against anything that even remotely resembled support for McMillan in his courtroom. Again from The Guardian:

Judge Ronald Zweibel.
Photo: New York Daily News.

When supporters entered court wearing paper hearts on their chests in an attempted show of solidarity, the judge furiously sent out the jury and ordered a police officer to confiscate the hearts. When a handful chuckled from the gallery at McMillan's bashful recounting of her university days in Wisconsin, Zweibel ordered them to shut up.

When the defense team complained about his tactics, all he did was bark at them to stop talking. From Chris Hedges:

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan's lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, "This debate is going to end." He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said "is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute" the prosecution's charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. "I'm totally handicapped," Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

All we can do is hope that McMillan doesn't become another political prisoner in this country, and that she wins justice on an appeal.

But even if she does, the fight goes on, as these complete abortions of justice will continue to happen over and over again. A case coming up in July highlights another example of police overreach, as Emily Yates goes on trial for the crime of standing in a park and not moving out of a public area when a cop asked her to. As it turned out, the police were sectioning off the area in preparation for a pro-marijuana rally later that day, but they never explained that to Yates. All she wanted was an explanation for why she had to leave an area of a public park where she'd been doing nothing but playing a banjo and singing during a rally opposing U.S. military action in Syria.

Here's how it went down:

Notice how the one cop continues to say "stop resisting" when she's not resisting, and "stop kicking" when there's no visual evidence that she was kicking anyone. She's being bent over a park bench and manhandled, screaming for help and overpowered, unable to do anything else. It's likely the cop knew he was being filmed and said "stop resisting" only to give himself automatic cover in court.

In Yates' own words:

As you can see in the video, I had my back turned when multiple Park Service rangers grabbed me by my wrists, bent me over a park bench, picked me up by my arms and legs, dragged me away from a crowd, dropped me face-first on the ground (as you can see in these photos: desrowvisuals.com/Arrests/Philadelphia-Arrest-83113/), then carried me to a truck, threw me in – again face-first – and dropped me off at the Philly Federal Detention Center, where I was kept for three days without any explanation. Upon my release, I was told I was being charged with assaulting the rangers (while they were manhandling me, not before). 

According to one report, she was ultimately charged with resisting arrest, failure to obey law enforcement officers, and disorderly conduct.

Here are a couple of those photos she mentioned:

Photos: desrowvisuals.com.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

What part of "peaceful assembly" is unclear to these thugs?

The fight goes on. Maybe one day the good guys will finally win.

When Is Enough Going to Be Enough?

How much are we supposed to take?

Virtually every day we hear stories about cops -- ever more militarized and aggressive -- who grossly overstep their bounds, even to the point of killing defenseless people, yet their deeds consistently go unpunished. Well, today came word that Cecily McMillan, the peaceful Occupy protestor who had her breast grabbed and bruised by a police officer, was found guilty of assaulting that officer.

Keep in mind that McMillan was grabbed from behind, and her natural instinct was to defend herself from an assailant. The cop apparently took an elbow to the eye, even though he couldn't seem to remember which eye when he was testifying. McMillan was promptly thrown to the ground and beaten until she had a seizure and lost consciousness. And she was far from the only victim of police brutality that night in Zuccotti Park.

But none of that mattered in court, since prosecutors and the hostile judge in the case seemed to want to make an example of McMillan and the Occupy movement from the very beginning, as if to send a warning to future protestors that if you attempt to peacefully assemble to speak out against the system, the system will find you and crush you. McMillan's lawyers were gagged, and relevant evidence was suppressed, making it difficult for the jurors to know the full story and practically impossible for proper justice to be served.

The moral of the story: If a cop sexually assaults you, you can go to prison for up to seven years. Welcome to Police State America.

Oh, the cops can assault you, of course. That's perfectly fine. Like in San Diego, where the police blasted a man in the face with pepper spray, slammed his face into the pavement, beat him with a baton, cuffed him, and threw him in jail for five hours. The man's crime? Putting up his hood and not responding when police called to him on the street. And why did he not respond? Because he has Down syndrome and the mental capacity of a 7-year-old. He's also 4-foot-11 and 158 pounds. Clearly a menacing threat to the cops.

Do you think the cop who assaulted this mentally disabled man will go to prison for assault for seven years? Hell, no. At last report, he was still on the job.

Always remember that the police are not there to protect you. The Supreme Court has ruled as much. They are only there to enforce the laws the government passes. And they are clearly free to use as much force as they want to, and often do. After all, who's going to stop them?

awsuit states that the deputy “looked Tony in the face and then unloaded a canister of highly irritating pepper spray into Tony’s face and eyes,” beat him with a weighted baton, slammed his face on the pavement and cuffed him.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/man-syndrome-beaten-police-walking-street/#qJEEXaX3z5RUFxdI.99

awsuit states that the deputy “looked Tony in the face and then unloaded a canister of highly irritating pepper spray into Tony’s face and eyes,” beat him with a weighted baton, slammed his face on the pavement and cuffed him.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/man-syndrome-beaten-police-walking-street/#qJEEXaX3z5RUFxdI.99

awsuit states that the deputy “looked Tony in the face and then unloaded a canister of highly irritating pepper spray into Tony’s face and eyes,” beat him with a weighted baton, slammed his face on the pavement and cuffed him.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/man-syndrome-beaten-police-walking-street/#qJEEXaX3z5RUFxdI.99

The Cecily McMillan travesty follows other recent judicial rulings in which the cops can now pull you over merely for driving in a "stiff" position with your hands at ten and two on the wheel, and you can be stopped and searched on nothing more than someone else's anonymous 911 call. So much for probable cause.

As we await McMillan's sentencing, we would also do well to keep in mind that while she almost certainly faces time behind bars, other people who actually deserve jail time get none. If you're a rich kid, get behind the wheel drunk, and kill four people, you get 10 years of probation and nothing else, because you suffer from "affluenza" and can't discern right from wrong because of your privileged status. Or if you're a wealthy heir to the DuPont family fortune, and you rape your own 3-year-old daughter, you get zero jail time because you wouldn't "fare well" in prison. Eight years of probation is good enough for violating your own 3-year-old child.

But if you elbow somebody who's grabbing your breast, and the assailant happens to be wearing a little tin badge? It's prison for you, after being railroaded in a kangaroo court.

In other acts of judicial malfeasance, the Supreme Court won't hear Chris Hedges' case against NDAA indefinite detention, upholding a lower court's ruling that he and his co-plaintiffs have no standing, in that they can't prove that they face any threat of being detained under the detention provision. Under those requirements, the only person who could ever bring a suit would be someone who's already been detained under the provision -- but the provision indefinitely denies detainees the right to a trial. So there's no way to create "standing," so the law can never be struck down. (Not that the Obama regime would ever let it be struck down, considering the zeal with which the administration has defended it so far -- a zeal that, Hedges believes, suggests that the administration is already holding people under the provision.) Consequently, the American military can now pull you off the street, here in the United States, and lock you away for as long as it wants. And as the executive branch has already shown, it will go so far as to assassinate American citizens without due process.

[Related: Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies]

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court does everything in its power to tip the tables in favor of the super-wealthy. The poor continue to be marginalized in every imaginable way, not to mention vilified as lazy freeloaders who steal our hard-earned tax dollars -- when it's the super-rich who place the burden of paying for the safety net on the rest of us because they use loopholes and overseas shelters to skip out on paying into the system.

What does our "progressive" president do about all of this? Not a thing. He stands by while the FCC prepares to undermine net neutrality to favor huge corporate interests, after campaigning for president in favor of net neutrality. He signs a farm bill into law that guts food-stamp benefits to the poor, while saying the bill will keep poor people from starving. And he turns the government's illegal surveillance of American citizens into a punchline.

What an embarrassment this man is.

Of course, I'm sure he's happy to have allies in sorry excuses for men like John McCain, who, when it comes to surveillance overreach, tells us it's "something you've got to accept." I wonder if he thinks the people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and God only knows where else also just need to "accept" having bombs drop on them from Obama's drones, leveling villages and killing women, children, and other innocent bystanders. In case you need a visual representation of how our Peace Prize winner is doing in comparison to his predecessor:

That's more than 2,000 dead on Obama's watch, with over 40 added to the total in April alone.

To top it all off, China is set to overtake us as the world's largest economy, and Canada's middle class has already overtaken us as the world's richest middle class -- even as Canada manages to pay for its citizens' health care and greatly subsidizes college education. Let me put that another way in case it's not clear: Canada makes sure its citizens get the health care they need, without making them worry about how they're going to pay for a massive pile of hospital bills, and it makes college affordable enough that new graduates don't go out into the world burdened by a crushing load of student-loan debt that can't even be discharged in bankruptcy -- and the Canadian middle class is still the richest on the planet. Maybe, just maybe, Canada's tax regulations and spending priorities aren't as screwed up as ours.

As for China ... well, we long ago shipped our manufacturing jobs to China, in a corporate race to the bottom to see who could get the cheapest labor, with no regard for American livelihoods, or Chinese human rights. We're now seeing the end result. Sure, the latest jobs report shows we're creating new positions here in the USA, but most of them are in the low-paying service sector -- things like cashiers and waiters. We simply aren't replacing the higher-paying skilled jobs that we lost. That's why it's such an insult for people to take swipes at service-industry workers and say they don't deserve higher wages, because if they only had the proper skills or drive, they'd have a better job. Well, guess what? Those low-paying jobs are increasingly the only ones available, which is how you end up having people with master's degrees serving coffee at the corner Starbucks. Try supporting a family on $7.25 an hour. And try walking in their shoes before you judge them. Bootstrapping is a nice fantasy, but it's not reality for a lot of people in an economy that's been raped by corporate greed.

[Related: An Apartheid of Dollars: Life in the Minimum-Wage Economy]

Yet when you have somebody come up with an idea to fight back against the oligarchy and dismantle the corporate state, people shoot the messenger and ignore the message. Consider Ralph Nader's new book Unstoppable, in which he argues for creating left-right alliances to fight against corporatism, militarism, civil liberties, and other issues whose solutions can easily transcend one part of the political spectrum. The reviews of the book have been fair enough so far, but the comments sections for most of the online articles invariably take shots at Nader, whether from right-wingers who see him as a left-wing avenger, or from left-wingers who still blame him for the 2000 election -- as if Al Gore was somehow entitled to every vote on the left. Nader calls for us to rise up out of our partisan camps and find common ground for the good of the country, and people respond by doubling down within those same partisan camps.

(Best comment I've seen so far online in response to the knee-jerk Democrats-good-Republicans-bad-Nader-even-worse mentality that keeps people voting for the lesser of two evils: "We definitely need to keep a Democrat in office. I was worried during the last two elections that if a Republican got in office there might be the constant threat of new wars, we might not see the end of Citizens United (or, heaven forbid it may be expanded), there might be increased surveillance, corporations might not lose power, there might be an attempt to establish more 'NAFTA' style free trade agreements, the wage gap would increase, social programs might be cut, and we'd see less government transparency ... what a nightmare that would have been." Ouch. Truth hurts.)

Sadly, to a lot of people in this country, Cecily McMillan got what she deserved, the poor are all lazy freeloaders who just need to work harder, and being ideologically partisan is more important than trying to find common ground with one's opponents for the sake of the greater good. Tea Party activists are derided as ignorant, rednecked "Teabillies" or "Teabaggers" who want to create an American theocracy, while Occupiers are dismissed as violent, clueless college kids who think they're all Marxists but really just need to take a bath and get a job. The stereotyping and incessant juvenile name-calling are enough to wear a person down.

Some days I just lose hope that things will ever get any better.

In fact, if I could, I would simply throw up my hands, leave this mess of a country behind, and never look back.