by Stephen Lendman

As Americans festively celebrate Independence Day weekend, their leaders are busy conducting business as usual.

Attempting to topple popularly elected Ecuadorean and Venezuelan governance takes precedence over barbecues, outings and other celebratory activities.

So does waging genocidal direct and proxy wars as well as covert mischief worldwide - against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Donbass freedom fighters, Libyans wanting to live free, Somalis, partnered with Israel against Palestine and elsewhere - besides at home against Blacks, Latino immigrants, Muslims, environmental and animal rights activists, as well as political dissidents and people believing popular rights matter more than monied ones willing to risk harsh recrimination for refusing to accept less than equity and justice in a nation systematically denying both to most of its people while high-mindedly claiming otherwise.

Independence for growing numbers of Americans in the world's richest country means poverty, unemployment, underemployment, discrimination, police brutality, homelessness, hunger and deprivation levels not seen since the height of the 1930s Great Depression - when New Deal programs addressed human need compared to today's force-fed austerity exacerbating it.

The so-called "greatest nation on earth" - for Hillary Clinton an "indispensable" one - enriches its few, exploits its majority and cracks down viciously on nonbelievers. The world's largest gulag bears testimony to its lawlessness.

So do money-controlled elections mocking legitimate ones. America's Potemkin facade conceals government of, by and for its privileged few alone - on Independence Day like all others.

Judge America by its actions - not self-aggrandizing hypocrisy, by its lunatic imperial pursuits, its cruel and unreasonable brutality on millions worldwide.

On Independence Day and all others, remember no nation in human history caused more harm to more people over a longer duration than America.

None are more violent and inhumane on a global scale, none more committed to unchallenged global dominance, no matter the cost in human lives and welfare for most people worldwide.

The late Howard Zinn once asked who gained from America's revolution? Everything changed but stayed the same under new management.

America's founders were an earlier day Wall Street crowd - bankers, lawyers, merchants, slave owners, the rich, well-born and privileged.

"Do you think the Indians cared about independence," asked Zinn? Or Blacks considered property, not people? Or women consigned to homemaking and child rearing, denied the right to vote until 1920 Nineteenth Amendment enfranchisement - in the so-called land of the free and home of the brave.

America's founding fathers wrote slavery into the Constitution. They legitimized it - now transformed to wage slavery.

"What about class divisions," asked Zinn? "We try to pretend in this country that we're all one happy family. We're not," he said.

America's so-called revolution wasn't "a simple affair of all of us against all of them" - any more than sending young men and women warriors abroad to make the world safe for capital today advances democratic principles.

Zinn urged everyone to "rethink this question of war(s)" and why they're waged. America never fought liberating struggles, imperial ones only to advance its hegemonic agenda.

Its leaders serve its privileged few alone - protecting their freedom to "invest, speculate, trade and accumulate wealth," Michael Parenti explained.

Celebrants this holiday weekend enjoying outings, picnics, barbecues, ballgames, outdoor concerts, parades, fireworks displays, visits to the shore, and other pleasures might reflect about growing millions of Americans in need and billions worldwide harmed by their government's lunatic quest to rule the world at the risk of destroying it.

Washington's maniacal agenda is no reason to celebrate. Nor is the human misery it causes at home and abroad.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III".

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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