Lichtweltverlag Blogspot: Eleven Reasons I'm Ashamed to Be an American

Foreword

written by Jahn J Kassl
translated by Franz

Honored Readers!

„I’m going to say it: I am ashamed to be a US citizen.“

This is how the investigative reporter Dave Lindorff starts
his article listing 11 reasons for it.
Besides the last and eleventh reason, whereby, from my
perspective, Dave Lindorff portrays a wrong picture of the
causes of climate change, I can totally agree with every point.

The mood and progressing destabilization of America are described
by someone, who must know it, because he lives in the USA, and
looks at the developments with open eyes. What is already known
to many of us, is deepened here and it becomes more than obvious
that the rat pack in Washington has already abolished democracy a
long time ago and has replaced it with a flawless fascism (fascism
in power is the “open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, most imperialistic elements of financial capital.”
Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1942), Politician and from 1946-1949
Bulgarian Prime Minister, (Wikipedia).

It is good that we do not have to fool ourselves also in the
New Year, and we face the facts courageously, which means:
To call persons and things by name, until they are recognized
in the Light of truth by all of mankind and until the
criminals will be held responsible for their
crimes in front of mankind and in front of
a world court.

2015, the year of truth, is ante portas and with it
further disclosures, until the good triumphs over evil.
„Only the good, if it encounters evil and is not infected
by it, prevails over evil.” Lew Nikolajewitsch
Count Tolstoi, Russian Writer (1828 -1910)

In Love

Jahn J Kassl

Eleven Reasons I'm Ashamed to Be

an American

Tue, 12/09/2014

written by Dave Lindorff

I’m going to say it: I am ashamed to be a US citizen.

This doesn’t come easily, because having lived abroad and

seen some pretty nasty places in my time, I know there are a

lot of great things about this country, and a lot of great people

who live here, but lately, I’ve reached the conclusion that the US

is a sick and twisted country, in which the bad far outweighs the

good.

I can remember first feeling revolted about my country

several times. The first was when I realized, at the tender

age of 17, what an atrocity the US was committing against

the people of Vietnam in my name the rape and murderous

destruction of peasant villages and the napalming of children

in the South, and the carpet bombing of North Vietnam (including

dikes, schools and hospitals). Later, I was shocked and revolted

when I belatedly learned how my country had rounded up native

born and naturalized Japanese-Americans and Japanese legal

residents into concentration camps during WWII, and how the

national government had been complicit in the taking of those

vilely incarcerated people’s farms, homes and businesses by
conniving white fascists in California.

But those crimes, horrific as they were, pale in the

face of what I see this country doing now. Let me

count some of the ways that this country makes me sick:

1. It’s not just the latest release of a heavily redacted report on

the Bush/Cheney administration’s deliberate program of torture,

launched in 2001 in the wake of 9-11, and carried on for years

against not just alleged terrorists, but even against people known

or suspected to be completely innocent of anything.

It’s that nothing has been done, or likely will be done, to punish

those who authorized and advocated for these war crimes and

crimes against humanity. And it’s not just that, but that so many

of my fellow Americans are okay with that. Even in the media,

including on NPR, I hear reporters saying that one of the “questions”
about the government’s torture program is whether it “worked”
or not in obtaining information about acts of terrorism.
Because it doesn’t matter whether torture “worked” or not.
The US and the rest of the nations of the world signed a treaty
after World War II saying that torture is a criminal act (the
penalty includes death under international law!). And so is
covering up or failing to punish the crime of torture.

2. The police in the United States have become so militarized

in both a physical sense and in terms of their training and self-image,

that they are now more of an army of occupation than “peace officers”

(there’s an anachronistic term you don’t even hear used anymore).

Over and over we see police aggressively using force, including

deadly force, in situations that call for calm and understanding.

The most sickening thing to me, was watching a squad car in
Cleveland race directly onto a park lawn right up to an enclosed
gazebo where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was sitting, alone,
playing with a toy gun. In less than two seconds, one of
the cops exits the car and shoots the boy fatally in the stomach.

There was absolutely no call for this execution. No one was around

being threatened by the kid. The cops should have pulled up safely

at a distance, assessed the situation, and then called on Rice to

exit the gazebo and drop the gun, even if they feared it was real.

Or they should have ordered him to stay put and drop the gun, and

then, if he didn’t comply, waited for back up, including a trained

negotiator.

Instead, they just raced in like it was a hostage rescue

attempt, and blew a little kid away. Then they did nothing to

help him after shooting him. Ugh! And yet, there is not a wave of
universal outrage over this monstrous police murder. Nor is there
universal outrage at the cops involved in the execution slaying
of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO or in the completely pointless
choking death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, both of
whose uniformed killers were exonerated by grossly manipulated
and misled grand juries. Instead, we hear whites interviewed
on TV shows saying that the cops did the right thing.

3. But that’s just part of it. I’m disgusted by having as

our president a man who lacks the intestinal fortitude to call

out these above crimes and to insist that he will prosecute those

who ordered the military and the CIA to use torture on captives

in the so-called War on Terror. President Obama should be

demanding that his so-called Justice Department aggressively

prosecute those cops who are killing unarmed civilians if local

prosecutors won’t do it, and he should be ordering the prosecution

of everyone who ordered, authorized, enabled or covered up torture

by US government agents. (No wonder President Obama has been

diagnosed with acid reflux: at least the man’s alimentary canal

appears to have a conscience!)

4. I’m disgusted that according to the Prison Policy Initiative,

the US has at any given moment some 2.4 million people

locked up (only two-thirds of whom have even been convicted

of a crime, with most of the rest awaiting trial because they

can’t post the excessive bail set by our corrupt court system).

And no wonder: Just between the late ‘80s and 2008, the number

of federal laws for which someone can end up being jailed has

soared from 3000 to 4450, and it keeps rising as charlatans in

Congress keep passing laws to create ever more “crimes” to punish.

And that doesn’t count state and local governments, which

explains why the US, with 5% of the world’s population,

accounts for 25% of the world’s prison inmates. Myself, I was

threatened with jail not long ago by a thug cop in a neighboring

town for hitch-hiking an activity that actually is legal in my state,

and that, if done improperly, is at most a citation offense like a

parking violation calling for a ticket, not an arrest. No matter

if I hadn’t put down my thumb, this bully in a uniform with

sidearm would have cuffed me, and trumped up something:

resisting arrest, disturbing the peace or some such tripe.

We live in a punishmentobsessed society,
overseen by cops who seem to derive
pleasure in lording it over the public.

5. I’m sickened to see community after community pass

laws making it illegal to feed the homeless. This in a country

where in the wake of the Great Recession, we still have a real
unemployment and underemployment rate of between 18%
and 20% depending on how you’re counting.

6. I’m ashamed and angry that Wall Street is essentially

one gigantic crime scene -- the place where trillions of dollars

of wealth over the last decade has been siphoned out of the

pockets of ordinary Americans into the hands of the wealthiest

1% or 5%, making this now the most unequal society among

the 34 developed nations of the world. Not one leading banker

from the nation’s top so-called too-big-to-fail banks has

even been charged with a crime, much less convicted and jailed

for the biggest swindle the world has ever seen. On those rare

occasions when the Justice Department has gone after some

of these bankster crimes, it has reached settlements” in the

form of meaningless fines, and hasn’t even, as part of the deal,

required any of these crooked executives to leave their lucrative

positions of power, or even to admit wrongdoing. In fact, these

crooks in pinstripes instead of jail stripes are regularly invited

guests at the White House and Congress, called upon to give

their “wisdom” on points of government policy, for which they

then reward their hosts generously with perks and “campaign

contributions” that are little more than bribes.

7. I’m outraged and ashamed that my country spends well

over $1 trillion a year on its military, and has military personnel

based in over 800 locations around the globe. This at a time when

50 million Americans are reportedly “food insecure”another way of

saying that 50 million people, many of them children, go hungry at

some point in the year and when support programs like Food Stamps

and Unemployment Compensation are being cut to save money.

Worse yet, there is no national scandal over this.

In fact, many Americans, perhaps a majority,

think that all that spending on the military is a

good thing, because it supposedly “keeps us safe” and
maybe “creates jobs.” The sad truth is that today,

the US, my country, is the world’s
largest terrorist state based objectively
on its recent unrivaled history of illegally
invading other lands, conducting drone
killings across borders, kidnapping,
torturing and disappearing people,
and funding and assisting in the overthrow
of foreign, often democratically elected,
governments.

8. I’m sick at heart because half a century after the Freedom

Riders and courageous local people won an end to Jim Crow laws

in the South that had for generations kept black people from voting,

at least half the country, and not just in the south but everywhere,

are now trying to make it hard or impossible for blacks, hispanics

and other people of color to vote. And our corrupted court system

is backing them in many cases, right up to the US Supreme Court,
which is now dominated by fascists, proto-fascists,
and religio-fascists.

9. I’m embarrassed that my fellow Americans, by and large,

care more about whether they can get the latest iPhone,

or whether they have a god-given right to own an unlicensed

automatic weapon, than about whether we still have a right to

privacy, a right not to be spied on by the government, or whether

corporations should be allowed, as now under Citizens United,

to buy government officials directly, like sides of beef.

10. I’m disgusted that my countrymen and women

no longer believe it is important for society to provide

everyone with the basic services that allow all people a

fair shot at climbing out of poverty. There is no longer a
sense that everyone should be able to attend a decently
funded public school, or have access to a tax-funded state
college for free or for a small tuition the kind that could be
covered with a 10-hour work-study job. There is no longer
any sense that all Americans should be entitled to quality
health care.

Even what support there is for the socalled Affordable Care
Act, far from being about making quality care available for all,

is mostly from individuals who selfishly want to be able to

afford insurance for themselves. It’s not about making it
available to all. It’s like, if the ACA enables you to afford
insurance, you’re for it, but it you have employer-provided
insurance, you’re against it. This is basically true in every area.

Americans today have lost any communal sense of

shared responsibility and shared struggle.

People used to talk (incorrectly, I think) about the ‘60s

generation being the “me” generation. Actually, it’s pretty

much the entire US that has become a “me” country.

11. Finally, I can't forget the issue of climate change.

The US has unquestionably been the primary contributor to

climate change over the last century, as the most industrialized

nation in the world. Even today, as it's carbon emissions are

surpassed by China, the undeniable fact is that on a per capita

basis, we Americans dump far more carbon into the atmosphere

per person than anyone in China, by a factor of five or more.

Yet our country has been a primary obstacle to any real efforts

to slow or reverse climate change. The US, during this administration

and the last, has actively subverted efforts to reach international

agreements to limit greenhouse gases, even using the National

Security Agency's spying abilities to monitor other countries'

negotiation positons and to blackmail leaders. It is simply sickening

too, how the selfishness of Americans even extends to caring not a

whit about the horrors that will be faced by not just our grandchildren,

but even our children (the World Bank, no environmental radical hotbed,

warns that today's teens will face a world that is a staggering

6-8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter by the time they are 80!).

This is selfishness or madness on a scale that is to me

incomprehensible. I could go on, but I think eleven reasons

to be ashamed of one’s country ought to be more than enough.

It is for me.

______________________________________________

Source URL: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2585

Dave Lindorff is an American investigative reporter,

a columnist for CounterPunch, and a contributor to

Businsessweek, The Nation, Extra! and Salon.com.

His work was highlighted by Project Censored 2004,

2011 and 2012.

Born in 1949, Lindorff lives just outside Philadelphia.

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