Stephen Lendman

Please, God, let them love me like they used to...

Except for bankers, war profiteers, other corporate favorites, and America's super-rich, it's hard imagining why anyone supports a president backing policies harming so many at home and abroad.

The good news perhaps is that growing numbers are awakening, the latest June 7 - 9 Zogby International poll showing recent lows in Obama's popularity:

● 56% disapprove of his job as president; 43% approve;
● 39% say he deserves reelection; 52% want change;
● congressional approval also dropped to 17%, a testimony to mass public disdain; and
● given America's direction, waging multiple imperial wars at the expense of vital homeland needs, expect an angrier public reaction ahead as pain levels rise.

Human need always trumps other concerns, especially when vast national resources aren't used to relieve it, many millions left on their own sink or swim when they most need help. War profiteering and other corporate priorities come first.

However, Main Street America is mired in depression. High unemployment and underemployment are unaddressed. For millions, depravation is extreme. Double digit inflation is rising. One in six Americans face hunger, yet Obama and lawmakers demand austerity when stimulus is needed.

More »

Patrick Martin
WSWS

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates delivered his speech on the future of the
alliance in Brussels on Friday. Former NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer is seated next to Mr. Gates. (Reuters)

Speaking with the arrogance of a feudal lord calling his vassals to order, Gates noted the danger of a “two-tiered alliance,” in which some countries pulled their weight in combat, but most did not.

The speech delivered by outgoing US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to a NATO conference in Brussels Friday amounted to a political ultimatum from American imperialism to its weaker rivals and co-belligerents in Europe. These countries must dramatically increase the money and manpower they devote to US-led military operations or the United States will go its own way and NATO will face a “dim, if not dismal, future.”

Gates delivered the speech less than a month after President Obama spelled out his new military doctrine in his speech on the Middle East, sweeping aside past limitations on the use of military force and declaring that any country could be the target of US attack, depending only on whether US interests, as defined by the White House, were at stake. The perspective was one of indefinite warfare to establish neocolonial regimes in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.

Now the secretary of defense was telling the European powers that they had to reorganize their own societies to provide the resources required for an enormous expansion of militarism. Otherwise, they face losing out on the booty—the oil that is to be plundered from Libya, and, more generally, access to raw materials and strategic territory.

While praising the NATO countries for contributing troops to the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, Gates declared that the Afghan war “has exposed significant shortcomings in NATO—in military capabilities, and in political will.” NATO has had difficulty providing sufficient resources—not just troops, but also “crucial support assets such as helicopters, transport aircraft, maintenance, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and much more.”

He pointedly warned against NATO countries reducing their deployments in Afghanistan, saying “we cannot afford to have some troop-contributing nations to pull out their forces on their own timeline…”

More »