The co-optation continues

read this carefully...

A US military base might be set up near the village of Chubra in the region of Bourgas, Chubra mayor Georgi Kendov said.

The municipality was hoping that establishing the base would lead to the modernisation of infrastructure in the region, Dnevnik daily said.

Kendov said that the money to be earned from the base could be used for a polyclinic and daily emergency centre with ambulances.

NATO asked if the former buildings of a tank brigade in the town of Aitos could be turned into a reserve storage base. NATO planned to store here the equipment for one or two battalions, which would be based in the military bases of Novo Selo and Bezmer.

The US investment in the municipalities where military bases would be set up, would be nearly $200 million, Dnevnik said.

In late December 2007, at a public discussion, experts explained that the bases would remain Bulgarian, under Bulgarian flag and command. The villages near the bases would benefit from infrastructure development. The US planned charity for the social institutions in the region of the bases, Dnevnik said.

Sungulare mayor Georgi Kenov said that the bases were a possible way to solve some of the problems in the municipality, including unemployment.

i've driven through many small towns in the balkans, bulgaria included... the same thing is happening to them that is happening to small towns all over the world, only with an additional twist... small towns in hundreds of countries are being essentially abandoned as community residents move to urban centers in search of employment and a better life, leaving the community's poor, children, and elderly with diminishing or non-existent services and a rotting infrastructure...*

in the former socialist countries, there's an extra twist... prior to the socialist collapse, many small communities in countries like bulgaria relied on some form of manufacturing, food processing, agriculture, military activity, or other economic base to sustain them, all of which were placed there by the command economy of the socialist state... with the fall of socialism and the mad rush to privatization, much of that local economic base disappeared, virtually overnight... driving through these small towns, you can often see massive factories, shuttered, looted, and empty, broken windows everywhere, surrounded by apartment blocks filled with people barely making it... by contrast, capitals like sofia are bustling and apparently prospering, that is unless you consider the shanty-towns springing up all around the outskirts...

is it any wonder communities like the ones described above, notwithstanding bulgaria's new status as a member of the european union, are susceptible to the blandishments of nato and the united states when their very survival is at stake...?

* as an example, i am currently typing this in buenos aires, argentina... the city proper, capital federal, has approximately 5 million residents... the metro area, gran buenos aires, has roughly 17 million residents... argentina, in terms of land mass, is the 7th largest country in the world, and has 35 million people in TOTAL, which means that more than half of the people live in a single urban area...

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