Sumamba Buwhan
27-09-2004, 21:39
Bush Leads ... in Sales of Canned Beans
Sep 26, 8:10 PM (ET)
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD
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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Judging by the bean vote, President Bush could be on his way to a second term. A Tennessee company that has been in the chili business for more than 100 years is selling satirically packaged 15-ounce cans of beans for in honor of Republican Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
Every online order draws a vote, and the Republicans were ahead 2,402-2,316 as of Friday.
"We don't call it scientific by any means," says Philip Connelly, president and chief executive of Vietti Foods Inc., of Nashville. "But it could be what they call a bellwether, one of those barometers of public opinion."
For Republicans, a grinning cartoon elephant graces Vietti's "Conservative Republican Texas Chili Beans" on a label promising "Dubya would love!" them.
The counterpoint is a smiling donkey on Vietti's "Liberal Democrat Boston Baked Beans," described as "liberally spiced Boston beans married to a rich ketchup-based sauce," presumably Heinz. Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is heir to the $500 million Heinz food fortune.
The labels carry other messages, too.
"Let's make sure no Kerry-bashing, meat-eating, fur-wearing, gun-toting, oil-drilling, SUV-driving, Limbaugh-listening, conservative Republican, capitalist pig gets elected," the Boston baked beans bellow.
To which the Texas chili beans counter: "Let's make sure no Bush-bashing, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, government-loving, NPR-listening, Hollywood-hobnobbing, animal activist, bleeding heart, left wing socialist gets elected."
The beans went on sale at $9.95 for a case of 12 in early September, around the time of the Republican convention.
Wear your gasmasks on Nov 4
Sumamba Buwhan
27-09-2004, 22:04
Speaking of stenching up the vote, I just got this at an email address that noone has because I just created it. That was wierd, but it happens to deal with the joke of an election they plan to be holding in Iraq, so I am gunna share it with you too. :)
Bush, Iraq, and Demonstration Elections
by Rahul Mahajan
Last October, when Vladimir Putin engineered the election of his
hand-picked subordinate Ahmad Kadyrov as president of Chechnya through
tactics such as pressuring the leading candidate, Malik Saidullayev, to
withdraw (and then forcing him out with a court injunction) and hiring
another candidate to be on his staff, Western punditry was not slow to
condemn the election as a farce and a sham. It did so again when he
interfered as blatantly in the recent August elections in Chechnya.
Ever since 9/11, however, the Bush administration has been treating us to a
series of equally farcical “elections” with minimal or no comment from the
same sources. The matter has now come to what should be a crisis point over
plans to engineer the upcoming U.N. Security Council-mandated elections in
Iraq.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was once again in the news regarding his
concerns that the main U.S.-affiliated political parties (the ones that
formed the Governing Council and that now dominate the transitional
assembly) are negotiating on a “consensus slate” of candidates for the
elections. While his main reported concern is that the Shi’a majority of
Iraq will be underrepresented, based on an estimate from the early 90’s
that 55% of the Iraqi population is Shi’a Arab compared to his estimate of
65% today, there is a much more serious question at stake – the legitimacy
of the elections.
In some countries, with a well-established parliamentary system and a
history of active political parties and an inclusive public discourse,
slates like this are not necessarily a problem. In systems like India’s,
with numerous parties and a first-past-the-post voting system (no matter
how many candidates there are, the candidate with the most votes wins, with
no runoffs), such electoral alliances may be necessary to get smaller
parties some degree of parliamentary representation.
In Iraq, however, this is simply a setup for a sham election. Let’s look at
the history of recent U.S. demonstration elections.
In the June 2002 Afghan loya jirga, roughly 1500 delegates assembled to
pick the interim president of the country. Although all delegates were
under a great degree of pressure by U.S.-backed warlords (who did
everything from killing delegates before the assembly to controlling the
floor at the assembly), over 800 signed a statement in support of Zahir
Shah, the exiled monarch. According to Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi,
delegates to the loya jirga, the United States then stepped in and “the
entire loya jirga was postponed for almost two days while the former king
was strong-armed into renouncing any meaningful role in the government.”
(NYT, 6/21/02) When the assembly resumed, delegates were given a choice
between Hamid Karzai and two unknown candidates running for symbolic value
(one of them was a woman) – essentially, as in the Chechnya elections, they
were presented with a fait accompli.
More recently, the Bush administration pushed to have Afghan elections
before the U.S. elections, then switched around and pressured the Afghan
Electoral Commission to delay the parliamentary elections until next April
(CSM, 7/13/04) while going ahead with presidential elections in October.
There has been no time for anyone in the country to emerge as a national
rival to Karzai, so this will effectively be a one-candidate election with
a veneer of democratic choice; the results of the parliamentary elections
would not be nearly so predictable or controllable by the United States,
and serendipitously they have been put off.
In Iraq, the U.S. record is worse. Much propaganda has been made of the
local “elections” instituted by U.S. forces, but to believe it calls for a
willing disjunction from reality. In some places, the “election” was an
appointment of mayor and/or city council members by the local U.S.
commander, sometimes disastrously, as when U.S. forces appointed a Sunni
from Baghdad to be mayor of the mostly Shi’a Najaf, cancelled an election
he would surely have lost, and later had to remove him anyway because of
charges of corruption and Ba’athist links (WP, 6/28/03, and others). In
Basra, British and U.S. forces appointed local officials and then removed
them and decided explicitly that Iraqis would only serve in a technocratic
capacity, not a political one (WP, 5/29/03). In other places, like Kirkuk,
the “election” was one conducted by 300 delegates all hand-picked and
vetted by U.S. forces, not by the people of Kirkuk.
In late June, U.S. commanders had ordered a halt to all local elections,
because they had determined that in many places people and groups they
didn’t like were too popular and might win (WP, 6/28/03). That is
unfortunately one of the problems with democracy. A few days later, Paul
Bremer approved resumption of elections (WP, 7/1/03), but allowed local
commanders to choose between appointment, election by specially vetted
caucuses, and actual elections; unstated was the conclusion that U.S.
commanders should choose the form of “election” based on the likelihood of
getting the result they wanted.
All of these experiments in “democracy” were, of course, in a context where
U.S. commanders could countermand any city council decision and dissolve
any council as they so chose.
At the national level, things have been worse. Of course, elections have
been postponed repeatedly, even though the difficulties that exist in
Afghanistan did not exist in Iraq (for example, the ubiquitous ration cards
could have been used as a basis for voter identification and registration);
even the January elections are mandated only because other countries on the
Security Council insisted on the setting of a date as a condition for
approving Resolution 1546, on the so-called “transfer of sovereignty.”
But numerous other ostensibly national political processes have been
cancelled or manipulated as well. An assembly planned for June 2003, that
would have involved mostly the U.S.-designated exile-dominated “Iraqi
opposition” was cancelled by Paul Bremer. He said it was because the
“opposition” was not representative of the country; then, a month later he
chose, entirely on his own authority, 25 people, 16 of them exiles, to form
the Governing Council.
In August, as the center of Najaf was ceaselessly bombarded, a national
assembly of roughly 1300 delegates met to select the transitional national
assembly, a body of 100 people whose formation was mandated by the
“transfer of sovereignty” process (actually, 81 delegates were to be
selected, the other 19 coming from the old Governing Council). Ostensibly
picked by democratic processes in their locality, the delegates certainly
did represent a wide variety of parties and views, although major groups
opposed to the occupation were under-represented (Moqtada al-Sadr, whose
organization was under military assault at the time, boycotted the conference).
Imagine the surprise of the delegates when they came to the conference and
found out that there would be no nomination of candidates, campaigning, or
elections. Instead, they were confronted with a pre-selected slate of 81
candidates, picked by back-room negotiations between the major
U.S.-affiliated (former Governing Council) parties, and expected to
rubber-stamp it. Smaller parties made an attempt to come up with an
opposition slate, but were unable to, and at the end the U.S.-backed slate
was not even presented to the delegates for formal approval (AP, 8/18/04).
This last sham would likely embarrass even Vladimir Putin. Apparently, the
Bush administration is happy with elections in places it controls, like
Afghanistan or Iraq, as long as there are no choices (when there are, as in
Florida, strange things can happen). There is not a shred of a reason to
doubt that this is precisely what is planned for the January elections in
Iraq – collusion by the U.S.-backed political parties to pick Iraqi figures
who will continue to collaborate with the occupation and to shut out all
other Iraqi voices.
There is a deplorable tendency in this country to use words like “freedom”
and “democracy” in a purely talismanic manner, without attaching any actual
meaning to them – only thus could the coups in Guatemala in 1954 or in
Haiti in 2004 be hailed as advances for democracy. But the current
administration, the Republican Party, and George W. Bush take this to
heretofore undreamed of extremes, as could be seen clearly at the
Republican National Convention this year. For Bush, apparently, democracy
means any kind of election at all – a definition that would make Saddam
Hussein perfectly happy (he won an “election” with an unprecedented 100% of
the vote in October 2002).
Or, more pointedly, to Bush, democracy and freedom mean “anything the
United States does” and, even worse, “anything I do.” The implications for
the United States and its internal affairs ought to be as clear as the
implications for Iraq. If you mobilize to ensure that the elections in Iraq
in January are real elections, the freedom you save may be your own.
Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the blog Empire Notes
(<http://www.empirenotes.org/>http://www.empirenotes.org) and teaches at
New York University. He has been to Iraq twice and reported from Fallujah
during the siege in April. His latest book is “Full Spectrum Dominance:
U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond.”
(<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20)
He can be reached at <mailto:rahul@empirenotes.org>rahul@empirenotes.org