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GOP's Massive "Shutdown" Fraud Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=14516"><span class="small">David Sirota, Salon</span></a>   
Sunday, 06 October 2013 13:52

Sirota writes: "Because of the way shutdowns are structured, the only silver lining from a budget stalemate is that you might get to hear a few curse words and see some nudity on television."

House Speaker John Boehner. (photo: file)
House Speaker John Boehner. (photo: file)

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GOP's Massive "Shutdown" Fraud

By David Sirota, Salon

06 October 13

 

Sure, some parts of the government have stopped. But what about the drug war, NSA spying and the war machine?

f a government shutdown genuinely shut the entire government down, you might be able to trace a few silver linings from an otherwise bad situation. Military conflicts might end (or at least be temporarily suspended), the destructive drug war might grind to a halt, mass surveillance might be put on hold and congressional legislators might be financially punished for their malicious behavior. But a government shutdown is mostly just a shutdown of good things - stuff like Head Start and food assistance to low-income moms and kids. Indeed, because of the way shutdowns are structured, the only silver lining from a budget stalemate is that you might get to hear a few curse words and see some nudity on television.

Of course, there is an insidious method to the madness of government shutdowns. In general, the dividing line between what gets shut down and what doesn't is a similar dividing line between what America's political culture typically venerates as The State and what that culture lambasts as The Government. Consider what will not be shut down:

So, in sum, major portions of The State - aka the Military-Industrial Complex, the Police State, the revenue-generating apparatus of the IRS and professional politicians in Washington - are somewhat exempted from the effects of the shutdown. Meanwhile, The Government - aka the Safety Net, the Regulators and the Inspectors - gets hit hard.

At a practical level, this institutionalized double standard creates incentives for government shutdowns - at least on the political right. That's because while conservatives loathe The Government, they love The State.

Remember, Republicans in Congress have historically been stalwart supporters of ever-larger defense budgets, more expansive surveillance, a persistent drug war and basic tax collection services to finance those expensive initiatives. Quite naturally, they also like to get paid, even when everyone else isn't getting paid. Therefore, the laws that automatically exempt The State from government shutdowns effectively encourage Republican lawmakers to support said shutdowns. They get to close primarily the parts of the public sector they oppose - while protecting the parts of the public sector that they (and their campaign contributors) champion.

There is, no doubt, a larger political calculation at work in this shutdown strategy. Basically, the GOP is betting that the American public makes a similar distinction between a despised Government and a beloved State. And sadly, that political calculation may not be so dumb. After all, for all the well-deserved policy criticism now being aimed at the GOP for forcing a shutdown, the party is deftly evincing a pernicious attitude in America at large. Suffused with value-laden judgments about different kinds of national service, this mindset makes many Americans quick to valorize public employees in the military/police/security parts of the public sector - while simultaneously denigrating public employees in the other parts of the public sector.

You know these people because you've met them. They are the folks who angrily berate "lazy" government workers while slapping a "Support Our Troops" sticker on their bumper - without recognizing that the troops are government workers. In other words, they are the people who pledge flag-waving fealty to The State and also profess passionate hatred of The Government.

This perceived distinction between The State and The Government was manufactured by many forces. Popular culture, for instance, has long popularized the idea of the Brave Military and the Worthless Bureaucracy. Likewise, the conservative movement has promoted the Heroic Soldier and the Lazy Civil Servant memes. Meanwhile, the ordinary citizen's most memorable interactions with the public sector help fuel the mythology.

Think about it: Few cheer when The Government works, because when The Government works properly it means stuff like decent roads and smoothly functioning social services - that is, stuff that we simply expect. We remember, though, the relatively few times The Government doesn't work; we remember the line at the DMV, the delayed subway that made us late to work and the traffic created by ill-timed road construction. That can encourage many to hate The Government - and because many (particularly non-minorities) have comparatively little interaction with the police and military, it is easy to still love The State.

That dissonance is exactly what the Republicans are now counting on. Their shutdown may be a risky political gamble. But after decades of scorched-earth politics that denigrates The Government and venerates The State, it is unfortunately a gamble that could at once harm the country and further aid the GOP.


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FOCUS | The White Man's Last Tantrum Print
Sunday, 06 October 2013 12:01

Parry writes: "The real question is not what policy concessions the Tea Partiers may extract, but rather can a determined right-wing white minority ensure continuation of white supremacy in the United States?"

File photo, U.S. Capitol building. (photo: file)
File photo, U.S. Capitol building. (photo: file)

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The White Man's Last Tantrum

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

06 October 13

 

merican pundits are missing the bigger point about the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government and the GOP’s threatened default on America’s credit. The real question is not what policy concessions the Tea Partiers may extract, but rather can a determined right-wing white minority ensure continuation of white supremacy in the United States?

For years, political scientists have been talking about how the demographic changes in the United States are inexorably leading to a Democratic majority, with Hispanics and Asian-Americans joining African-Americans and liberal urban whites to erode the political domains of white conservatives and white racists.

But those predictions have always assumed a consistent commitment to the democratic principle of one person, one vote – and a readiness of Republicans to operate within the traditional standards of democratic governance. But what should now be crystal clear is that those assumptions are faulty.

Instead of accepting the emergence of this more diverse and multi-cultural America, the Right – through the Tea Party-controlled Republicans – has decided to alter the constitutional framework of the United States to guarantee the perpetuation of white supremacy and the acceptance of right-wing policies.

In effect, we are seeing the implementation of a principle enunciated by conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1957: “The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” Except now the Buckley rule is being applied nationally.

A Nationwide Strategy

This reality is hard to deny even though much of the U.S. political elite remains in denial. But the truth is apparent in a host of anti-democratic moves that have emanated from the lily-white Tea Party and that have been implemented by the predominantly white Republican Party at both the state and federal levels.

It’s there in the nationwide campaign to impose “ballot security” by requiring photo IDs for voting to cure the virtually non-existent problem of in-person voting fraud. The well-documented result of requiring photo IDs will be to reduce the number of urban minority voters who are less likely to have driver’s licenses and other approved identification.

It’s there in the reduction of voting hours, which — when combined with disproportionately fewer (and less efficient) voting booths in poor and minority areas — guarantees long lines and further skews the political power to wealthier white areas. In the pivotal election of 2000, we saw how this combination of factors in Florida suppressed the vote for Al Gore and handed the White House to the national vote loser George W. Bush.

It’s there in the sophisticated gerrymandering that Republican statehouses have applied to congressional districts around the country by lumping minorities and other Democratic voters together in one deformed district so other districts have comfortable Republican majorities.

This gerrymandering – now aided by computer models to remove any guesswork – played an important role in maintaining the current Republican “majority” in the House of Representatives even though congressional Republicans lost the national popular vote in 2012 by about 1½ million votes.

Congressional Tactics

The Right’s anti-democratic strategy is there, too, in the endless use of Republican filibusters in the U.S. Senate. Because of compromises made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, some of this anti-democratic bias was built into the system (from a deal to assure the small states that they would not be overwhelmed by the large states under the Constitution, which concentrated power in the federal government).

Except for that long-ago compromise, there is no logical reason why the 240,000 registered voters in Wyoming should have the same number of senators as the 18 million registered voters in California. (Or why the 400,000 registered voters in the District of Columbia should have none.)

However, this violation of democracy’s one-person, one-vote principle is exacerbated in the U.S. Senate when Republicans filibuster even minor bills and demand that Democrats muster 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate to proceed. That means that a handful of lightly populated states can block legislative action favored by large majorities of the American people, such as requiring background checks on gun-show purchasers.

Republicans also have found endless excuses to deny congressional voting rights to Washington DC residents. You can probably guess what color skin many DC citizens have and what political party they favor.

The New Jim Crow

If you step back and take a look at this ugly landscape, what you will see is something akin to a new Jim Crow system, a sickening reprise of what happened the last time white supremacists saw their political and cultural dominance threatened in the years after the Civil War.

In the late 1860s and 1870s, the two parties were on the opposite sides of the racial-equality issue. Then, the Republicans pressed for a reconstruction of the South to assure civil rights for blacks. However, the Democrats, the old party of slavery, acted to frustrate, sabotage and ultimately defeat those efforts.

What the United States then got was nearly a century of racial segregation across large swaths of the country although most egregious in the South. It was not until the 1960s when the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson broke with the old traditions of collaborating with the Old Confederacy. These new Democrats instead supported civil rights legislation pushed by Martin Luther King Jr. and other advocates for racial equality.

However, opportunistic Republicans, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw an opening to flip the electoral map by snaking away the South’s resentful white racists from the Democrats and locking them into the Republican Party. The maneuver – cloaked in coded messages about states’ rights and hostility toward the federal government – proved astoundingly successful.

Still, the white supremacists faced a politically existential problem. They were demographically fading from their historic dominance, steadily replaced in numbers by Hispanics, Asian-Americans and blacks as well as by younger whites who viewed racial bigotry as a disgusting residue from the age-old crimes of slavery and segregation.

Countering Demographics

So what to do? Right-wing billionaires helped by pouring in vast sums to create a powerful right-wing propaganda machine, an ideological media unparalleled in American history. The loud voices and angry words from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch whipped up white grievances, but – as the election and reelection of African-American Barack Obama showed – more was needed.

The votes of non-whites and the young needed to be suppressed via manipulated election rules; the use of scientific gerrymandering had to be expanded to further devalue Democratic votes; obstructionism in Congress had to become the rule, not the exception.

Finally, it became clear that a de facto transformation of the constitutional system was needed to prevent the rule of this emerging – and “undeserving” – majority. Thus, government by extortion became the ultimate solution. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Government by Extortion.”]

By using the Republican House and its gerrymandered “majority” to prevent votes on straightforward bills to pay for the government and raise the debt ceiling, the Tea Party is now testing whether the majority of the nation can be coerced into accepting the demands of a right-wing minority through threats of economic calamity.

Even some Republicans seem confused about their short-term goals. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Indiana, declared, “we’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

But the message that the Tea Party Republicans are delivering to the nation is that if the American people insist on electing Democratic presidents or enacting federal legislation to “promote the general Welfare,” the Tea Party will respond by making the economy scream. The economic dislocations from a credit default alone could be so severe that millions of people will be thrown out of work and out of their homes.

The implicit warning is that you will suffer that fate — you may be driven into poverty — if you don’t let whites continue to rule. Or as the urbane William Buckley put it, you must let whites “prevail, politically and culturally.”

An Unthinkable Idea?

For those Americans who recoil at this scenario – and think it must be unthinkable in the Twenty-First Century – they should remember their history. In the 1870s, racist whites – especially in the South but also in many parts of the North – refused to accept post-Civil War amendments that guaranteed equal rights and voting rights for blacks.

Through connivance and violence, the racist whites prevailed and it took nearly a century – and much more bloodshed – to reverse their victories. What America is witnessing today is the next phase of that war for white supremacy. Well-meaning people should not be too cavalier about the outcome.

The Tea Party-induced government shutdown and the upcoming extortion demands over the debt ceiling may indeed turn out to be the white man’s last tantrum – but this extremist strategy of mayhem and extortion could also be the inauguration of a grim new era of Jim Crow.


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Don't Call it a "Shutdown" Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>   
Sunday, 06 October 2013 08:14

Gibson writes: "This is simply another shot fired across the bow from the GOP's sinking ship in the class war they're waging on America's most vulnerable. So let's stop calling this a government 'shutdown.'"

The U.S. Capitol looms in the background of a sign on the National Mall reminding visitors of the closures to all national parks due to the federal government shutdown in Washington October 3, 2013. (photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
The U.S. Capitol looms in the background of a sign on the National Mall reminding visitors of the closures to all national parks due to the federal government shutdown in Washington October 3, 2013. (photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

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Don't Call it a "Shutdown"

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

06 October 13

 

s a current resident of Wisconsin, I'm not in California very much. I've wanted to see Yosemite National Park ever since my parents went there a few years ago and showed me some of the breathtaking photos they took of the Sequoias and the mountains. Ironically, I'm finally in California for an entire week, staying just a few hours from Yosemite, and now I can't legally go inside because some knuckle-dragging ideologues who get paid with my tax dollars and get free government healthcare for life don't want poor people to have better access to private health insurance.

But this isn't really about Obamacare or the debt ceiling, that's just more dog-wagging. This is simply another shot fired across the bow from the GOP's sinking ship in the class war they're waging on America's most vulnerable. So let's stop calling this a government "shutdown." Everybody knows that's a misnomer. If you like, call it a government amputation, or a dry run of the minimal state, or escalated class warfare. All of those are accurate descriptions. But the US government is, by no means, shut down.

If there were a "shutdown," there would be no more monitoring of our calls/emails/texts/social media by the NSA and other alphabet agencies. There would be no more dead children labeled as "collateral damage" on drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. There would be an end to the billions in free handouts for the big banks and the big oil and gas companies. There would be no more scumbag congressmen and congresswomen still getting paid six figures, with more paid time off than they know what to do with, getting raises while kids on Head Start get sequestered, and having guaranteed pensions while actively supporting the efforts of their campaign donors to bust the unions of workers who have pensions that amount to just a fraction of what Congress gets. If the government were actually shut down, these members of Congress would be locked in their offices and cowering under their desks, instead of grandstanding in front of media cameras next to the memorials they closed.

What they did shut down was the jobs of 800,000 federal employees. Cops in DC are working without pay even as they respond to someone attempting to drive her way into the White House and a guy who self-immolated on the National Mall (he recently died from his injuries). They shut down food assistance for hungry moms and their kids. They shut down food inspection, so biotech companies and slaughterhouses can poison our food with impunity. They shut down EPA inspectors and regulators at oil drilling sites, so the polluters can keep making big bucks without having to worry about consequences for ruining the Earth. They've shut down the National Institutes of Health, so kids with cancer can't get treated. And they've shut down hospitals and nutrition assistance in indigenous communities. They've shut down NOAA and FEMA, making it harder for these agencies to respond to the people directly affected by Tropical Storm Karen. But they never gave a fuck about those people and those programs in the first place, and as long as they keep getting paid and not being thrown out of office or chased out of the capitol by pissed-off constituents screaming for their heads, they'll continue to give zero fucks.

Scum-of-the-Earth congressmen like Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), Lee Terry (R-Neb.) and Renee Elmers (R-N.C.) have shown us that there really is no human being underneath their expensive suits, flag lapel pins, and meticulously-manicured appearances. The same people who voted to furlough 800,000 federal employees are telling them all to eat cake. This video of Rep. Neugebauer shows him haranguing a poor park ranger standing guard at the World War II memorial, telling her she should be "ashamed" for doing her job at the memorial he closed with his own vote. Rep. Terry said he shouldn't have to give up any paychecks, because he wants to keep his "nice house." Rep. Ellmers famously said, "The thing of it is, I need my paycheck. That's the bottom line." To Ellmers' credit, she quickly asked to have her pay withheld after US Uncut made her famous to our weekly audience of 1.6 million pissed-off Americans. But these are just three members of Congress. And the Democrats are just as bad.

Harry Reid and the Senate's Democratic majority already gave up when, in their rush to cave to the fascist GOP's every demand, they agreed to fund the government at almost RYAN BUDGET levels of $986 billion. The GOP is still kicking and screaming over Obamacare, but they've already moved the goalposts far to the right on the negotiating table. Even if they agree to a "clean bill" to fund the government, they'll have already won, since the Senate has signed off on wholesale austerity. Anyone who blames Republicans for their callous intransigence without lambasting the Democrats for being a spineless, worthless, pitiful bunch of buffoons who suck at negotiating is simply being dishonest.

If they haven't shut down oil drilling and fracking sites, and if there are no federal regulators to stop we the people from shutting those operations down ourselves, why haven't we already? Accountability for these high crimes cannot wait until November of 2014. Each day we aren't attempting to storm the Capitol is another day we tell our corrupt government to keep doing what they're doing, we don't mind. I, for one, will be part of Anonymous' Million Mask March on November 5th, 2013, and will be meeting tens of thousands of others at the Washington Monument who have had enough and are ready to take direct, militant, nonviolent action. In times of universal corruption and great distress, revolution has now become our civic duty.


Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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What Is John Boehner Scared Of? Print
Sunday, 06 October 2013 08:06

Alter writes: "He's the reason the government is still shut down. All he has to do is allow a vote on the House floor on the continuing resolution...and it reopens."

House Speaker John Boehner. (photo: unknown)
House Speaker John Boehner. (photo: unknown)

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What Is John Boehner Scared Of?

By Jonathan Alter, The New Yorker

06 October 13

 

At bottom, politics is always personal, so to understand why the current governing crisis isn't likely to be resolved any time soon, we need to know a little more about House Speaker John Boehner. He's the reason the government is still shut down. All he has to do is allow a vote on the House floor on the continuing resolution (a parliamentary term for a stop-gap spending measure, now entering the language) and it reopens. There's no problem in the Senate this time, and there are enough House Republicans to join with House Democrats and pass a "clean C.R."-one without various anti-Obamacare measures attached-despite opposition from the hardcore conservatives. So why doesn't Boehner allow a simple up-or-down vote?

Boehner is especially ill-equipped to show some guts just now, for reasons that relate to his history in the House. The public mostly knows him as a politician with a permanent tan and occasional tears. Biographical sketches stress his youth spent working in his father's bar and his love of golf and the Weather Channel. But there's also a little-known, traumatizing moment in his political career that took place fifteen years ago.

Upon arriving in Congress, in 1991, Boehner quickly became the leader of a rebel faction called the "Gang of Seven" that used overdrafts at the now defunct House bank to discredit the Democratic majority that had controlled the chamber for forty years. After the Republicans took control, in 1994, the new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, rewarded Boehner by bringing him into the leadership as chairman of the Republican Conference, the fourth-ranking position in the House. He quickly shelved some of his more radical ideas-abolishing the Department of Education and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration-but he remained more conservative than the garden-variety country-club Republicans who still populated Capitol Hill. In 1995, he was caught passing out checks from the tobacco lobby on the House floor. While he later apologized, the incident did nothing to harm him inside the Republican caucus.

Read More: What Is John Boehner Scared Of?


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Pentagon Making Italy It's New Playground Print
Saturday, 05 October 2013 12:32

Vine writes: "The Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for U.S. military power."

Thousands of protesters oppose U.S. military satellite ground station in Sicily over concerns about possible harmful electromagnetic radiation emissions. (photo: Reuters)
Thousands of protesters oppose U.S. military satellite ground station in Sicily over concerns about possible harmful electromagnetic radiation emissions. (photo: Reuters)

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Pentagon Making Italy It's New Playground

By David Vine, TomDispatch

05 October 13

 

he Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for U.S. military power. Especially since the start of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has been shifting its European center of gravity south from Germany, where the overwhelming majority of U.S. forces in the region have been stationed since the end of World War II. In the process, the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

At bases in Naples, Aviano, Sicily, Pisa, and Vicenza, among others, the military has spent more than $2 billion on construction alone since the end of the Cold War -- and that figure doesn't include billions more on classified construction projects and everyday operating and personnel costs. While the number of troops in Germany has fallen from 250,000 when the Soviet Union collapsed to about 50,000 today, the roughly 13,000 U.S. troops (plus 16,000 family members) stationed in Italy match the numbers at the height of the Cold War.  That, in turn, means that the percentage of U.S. forces in Europe based in Italy has tripled since 1991 from around 5% to more than 15%.

Last month, I had a chance to visit the newest U.S. base in Italy, a three-month-old garrison in Vicenza, near Venice. Home to a rapid reaction intervention force, the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), and the Army's component of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the base extends for a mile, north to south, dwarfing everything else in the small city. In fact, at over 145 acres, the base is almost exactly the size of Washington's National Mall or the equivalent of around 110 American football fields. The price tag for the base and related construction in a city that already hosted at least six installations: upwards of $600 million since fiscal year 2007.

There are still more bases, and so more U.S. military spending, in Germany than in any other foreign country (save, until recently, Afghanistan). Nonetheless, Italy has grown increasingly important as the Pentagon works to change the make-up of its global collection of 800 or more bases abroad, generally shifting its basing focus south and east from Europe's center. Base expert Alexander Cooley explains: "U.S. defense officials acknowledge that Italy's strategic positioning on the Mediterranean and near North Africa, the Italian military's antiterrorism doctrine, as well as the country's favorable political disposition toward U.S. forces are important factors in the Pentagon's decision to retain" a large base and troop presence there. About the only people who have been paying attention to this build-up are the Italians in local opposition movements like those in Vicenza who are concerned that their city will become a platform for future U.S. wars.

Base Building

Most tourists think of Italy as the land of Renaissance art, Roman antiquities, and of course great pizza, pasta, and wine. Few think of it as a land of U.S. bases. But Italy's 59 Pentagon-identified "base sites" top that of any country except Germany (179), Japan (103), Afghanistan (100 and declining), and South Korea (89).

Publicly, U.S. officials say there are no U.S. military bases in Italy. They insist that our garrisons, with all their infrastructure, equipment, and weaponry, are simply guests on what officially remain "Italian" bases designated for NATO use. Of course, everyone knows that this is largely a legal nicety.

No one visiting the new base in Vicenza could doubt that it's a U.S. installation all the way. The garrison occupies a former Italian air force base called Dal Molin. (In late 2011, Italian officials rebranded it "Caserma Del Din," evidently to try to shed memories of the massive opposition the base has generated.) From the outside, it might be mistaken for a giant hospital complex or a university campus. Thirty one box-like peach-and-cream-colored buildings with light red rooftops dominate the horizon with only the foothills of the Southern Alps as a backdrop. A chain link fence topped by razor wire surrounds the perimeter, with green mesh screens obscuring views into the base.

If you manage to get inside, however, you find two barracks for up to 600 soldiers each. (Off base, the Army is contracting to lease up to 240 newly built homes in surrounding communities.) Two six-floor parking garages that can hold 850 vehicles, and a series of large office complexes, some small training areas, including an indoor shooting range still under construction, as well as a gym with a heated swimming pool, a "Warrior Zone" entertainment center, a small PX, an Italian-style café, and a large dining facility. These amenities are actually rather modest for a large U.S. base. Most of the newly built or upgraded housing, schools, medical facilities, shopping, and other amenities for soldiers and their families are across town on Viale della Pace (Peace Boulevard) at the Caserma Ederle base and at the nearby Villaggio della Pace (Peace Village).

A Pentagon Spending Spree

Beyond Vicenza, the military has been spending mightily to upgrade its Italian bases. Until the early 1990s, the U.S. air base at Aviano, northeast of Vicenza, was a small site known as "Sleepy Hollow." Beginning with the transfer of F-16s from Spain in 1992, the Air Force turned it into a major staging area for every significant wartime operation since the first Gulf War. In the process, it has spent at least $610 million on more than 300 construction projects (Washington convinced NATO to provide more than half these funds, and Italy ceded 210 acres of land for free.) Beyond these "Aviano 2000" projects, the Air Force has spent an additional $115 million on construction since fiscal year 2004.

Not to be outdone, the Navy laid out more than $300 million beginning in 1996 to construct a major new operations base at the Naples airport. Nearby, it has a 30-year lease on an estimated $400 million "support site" that looks like a big-box shopping mall surrounded by expansive, well-manicured lawns. (The base is located in the Neapolitan mafia's heartland and was built by a company that has been linked to the Camorra.) In 2005, the Navy moved its European headquarters from London to Naples as it shifted its attention from the North Atlantic to Africa, the Middle East, and the Black Sea. With the creation of AFRICOM, whose main headquarters remain in Germany, Naples is now home to a combined U.S. Naval Forces Europe-U.S. Naval Forces Africa. Tellingly, its website prominently displays the time in Naples, Djibouti, Liberia, and Bulgaria.

Meanwhile, Sicily has become increasingly significant in the Global War on Terror era, as the Pentagon has been turning it into a major node of U.S. military operations for Africa, which is less than 100 miles away across the Mediterranean. Since fiscal year 2001, the Pentagon has spent more on construction at the Sigonella Naval Air Station -- almost $300 million -- than at any Italian base other than Vicenza. Now the second busiest naval air station in Europe, Sigonella was first used to launch Global Hawk surveillance drones in 2002. In 2008, U.S. and Italian officials signed a secret agreement formally permitting the basing of drones there. Since then, the Pentagon has put out at least $31 million to build a Global Hawk maintenance and operations complex. The drones provide the foundation for NATO's $1.7 billion Alliance Ground Surveillance system, which gives NATO surveillance capabilities as far as 10,000 miles from Sigonella.

Beginning in 2003, "Joint Task Force Aztec Silence" has used P-3 surveillance planes based at Sigonella to monitor insurgent groups in North and West Africa. And since 2011, AFRICOM has deployed a task force of around 180 marines and two aircraft to the base to provide counterterrorism training to African military personnel in Botswana, Liberia, Djibouti, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Tunisia, and Senegal.

Sigonella also hosts one of three Global Broadcast Service satellite communications facilities and will soon be home to a NATO Joint Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance deployment base and a data analysis and training center. In June, a U.S. Senate subcommittee recommended moving special operations forces and CV-22 Ospreys from Britain to Sicily, since "Sigonella has become a key launch pad for missions related to Libya, and given the ongoing turmoil in that nation as well as the emergence of terrorist training activities in northern Africa." In nearby Niscemi, the Navy hopes to build an ultra high frequency satellite communications installation, despite growing opposition from Sicilians and other Italians concerned about the effects of the station and its electromagnetic radiation on humans and a surrounding nature reserve.

Amid the build-up, the Pentagon has actually closed some bases in Italy as well, including those in Comiso, Brindisi, and La Maddalena. While the Army has cut some personnel at Camp Darby, a massive underground weapons and equipment storage installation along Tuscany's coast, the base remains a critical logistics and pre-positioning center enabling the global deployment of troops, weapons, and supplies from Italy by sea. Since fiscal year 2005, it's seen almost $60 million in new construction.

And what are all these bases doing in Italy? Here's the way one U.S. military official in Italy (who asked not to be named) explained the matter to me: "I'm sorry, Italy, but this is not the Cold War. They're not here to defend Vicenza from a [Soviet] attack. They're here because we agreed they need to be here to do other things, whether that's the Middle East or the Balkans or Africa."

Location, Location, Location

Bases in Italy have played an increasingly important role in the Pentagon's global garrisoning strategy in no small part because of the country's place on the map. During the Cold War, West Germany was the heart of U.S. and NATO defenses in Europe because of its positioning along the most likely routes of any Soviet attack into Western Europe. Once the Cold War ended, Germany's geographic significance declined markedly. In fact, U.S. bases and troops at Europe's heart looked increasingly hemmed in by their geography, with U.S. ground forces there facing longer deployment times outside the continent and the Air Force needing to gain overflight rights from neighboring countries to get almost anywhere.

Troops based in Italy, by contrast, have direct access to the international waters and airspace of the Mediterranean. This allows them to deploy rapidly by sea or air. As Assistant Secretary of the Army Keith Eastin told Congress in 2006, positioning the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Dal Molin "strategically positions the unit south of the Alps with ready access to international airspace for rapid deployment and forced entry/early entry operations."

And we've seen the Pentagon take advantage of Italy's location since the 1990s, when Aviano Air Base played an important role in the first Gulf War and in U.S. and NATO interventions in the Balkans (a short hop across the Adriatic Sea from Italy). The Bush administration, in turn, made bases in Italy some of its "enduring" European outposts in its global garrisoning shift south and east from Germany. In the Obama years, a growing military involvement in Africa has made Italy an even more attractive basing option.

"Sufficient Operational Flexibility"

Beyond its location, U.S. officials love Italy because, as the same military official told me, it's a "country that offers sufficient operational flexibility." In other words, it provides the freedom to do what you want with minimal restrictions and hassle.

Especially in comparison to Germany, Italy offers this flexibility for reasons that reflect a broader move away from basing in two of the world's wealthiest and most powerful nations, Germany and Japan, toward basing in relatively poorer and less powerful ones. In addition to offering lower operating costs, such hosts are generally more susceptible to Washington's political and economic pressure. They also tend to sign "status of forces agreements" -- which govern the presence of U.S. troops and bases abroad -- that are less restrictive for the U.S. military. Such agreements often offer more permissive settings when it comes to environmental and labor regulations or give the Pentagon more freedom to pursue unilateral military action with minimal host country consultation.

While hardly one of the world's weaker nations, Italy is the second most heavily indebted country in Europe, and its economic and political power pales in comparison to Germany's.  Not surprisingly, then, as that Pentagon official in Italy pointed out to me, the status of forces agreement with Germany is long and detailed, while the foundational agreement with Italy remains the short (and still classified) 1954 Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement. Germans also tend to be rather exacting when it comes to following rules, while the Italians, he said, "are more interpretive of guidance."

War + Bases = $

The freedom with which the U.S. military used its Italian bases in the Iraq War is a case in point. As a start, the Italian government allowed U.S. forces to employ them even though their use for a war pursued outside the context of NATO may violate the terms of the 1954 basing agreement. A classified May 2003 cable sent by U.S. Ambassador to Italy Melvin Sembler and released by WikiLeaks shows that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government gave the Pentagon "virtually everything" it wanted. "We got what we asked for," wrote Sembler, "on base access, transit, and overflights, ensuring that forces... could flow smoothly through Italy to get to the fight."

For its part, Italy appears to have benefited directly from this cooperation. (Some say that shifting bases from Germany to Italy was also meant as a way to punish Germany for its lack of support for the Iraq War.) According to a 2010 report from Jane's Sentinel Security Assessment, "Italy's role in the war in Iraq, providing 3,000 troops to the U.S.-led effort, opened up Iraqi reconstruction contracts to Italian firms, as well as cementing relations between the two allies." Its role in the Afghan War surely offered similar benefits. Such opportunities came amid deepening economic troubles, and at a moment when the Italian government was turning to arms production as a major way to revive its economy. According to Jane's, Italian weapons manufacturers like Finmeccanica have aggressively tried to enter the U.S. and other markets. In 2009, Italian arms exports were up more than 60%.

In October 2008, the two countries renewed a Reciprocal Defense Procurement Memorandum of Understanding (a "most favored nation" agreement for military sales). It has been suggested that the Italian government may have turned Dal Molin over to the U.S. military -- for free -- in part to ensure itself a prominent role in the production of "the most expensive weapon ever built," the F-35 fighter jet, among other military deals. Another glowing 2009 cable, this time from the Rome embassy's Chargé d'Affaires Elizabeth Dibble, called the countries' military cooperation "an enduring partnership." It noted pointedly how Finmeccanica (which is 30% state-owned) "sold USD 2.3 billion in defense equipment to the U.S. in 2008 [and] has a strong stake in the solidity of the U.S.-Italy relationship."

Of course, there's another relevant factor in the Pentagon's Italian build-up. For the same reasons American tourists flock to the country, U.S. troops have long enjoyed la dolce vita there. In addition to the comfortable living on suburban-style bases, around 40,000 military visitors a year from across Europe and beyond come to Camp Darby's military resort and "American beach" on the Italian Riviera, making the country even more attractive.

The Costs of the Pentagon's Pivots

Italy is not about to take Germany's place as the foundation of U.S. military power in Europe. Germany has long been deeply integrated into the U.S. military system, and military planners have designed it to stay that way. In fact, remember how the Pentagon convinced Congress to hand over $600 million for a new base and related construction in Vicenza? The Pentagon's justification for the new base was the Army's need to bring troops from Germany to Vicenza to consolidate the 173rd brigade in one place.

And then, last March, one week after getting access to the first completed building at Dal Molin and with construction nearly finished, the Army announced that it wouldn't be consolidating the brigade after all. One-third of the brigade would remain in Germany. At a time when budget cuts, unemployment, and economic stagnation for all but the wealthiest have left vast unmet needs in communities around the United States, for our $600 million investment, a mere 1,000 troops will move to Vicenza.

Even with those troops staying in Germany, Italy is fast becoming one of several new pivot points for U.S. warmaking powers globally. While much attention has been focused on President Obama's "Asia pivot," the Pentagon is concentrating its forces at bases that represent a series of pivots in places like Djibouti on the horn of Africa and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Bahrain and Qatar in the Persian Gulf, Bulgaria and Romania in Eastern Europe, Australia, Guam, and Hawai'i in the Pacific, and Honduras in Central America.

Our bases in Italy are making it easier to pursue new wars and military interventions in conflicts about which we know little, from Africa to the Middle East. Unless we question why we still have bases in Italy and dozens more countries like it worldwide -- as, encouragingly, growing numbers of politicians, journalists, and others are doing -- those bases will help lead us, in the name of American "security," down a path of perpetual violence, perpetual war, and perpetual insecurity.


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