This Week:

Quote of the Week

Commercializing Democracy, Part 2: “Responding to the Authenticity”

“Helping America Vote” – NOT!

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Greetings,

It’s election year in the United States, and thus a good time to consider who votes in this country. And, who does not. Two separate articles this week—one about direct corporate efforts to register the comfortable classes and the other about some Republican-sponsored impediments to voting for the rest of us—paint a small picture of what we might call the privatization of voting.

Coupled with the other restrictions on and interference with voting that we already have or will have (think here of felony disenfranchisement laws and electronically-enabled voting fraud), poor people and people of color are increasingly seeing their voting rights eroded. Is that surprising? Maybe not, but it’s worth knowing exactly how it’s happening. There is, after all, no overt attempt to repeal the 15th Amendment, so the erosion must be a little more subtle.

This is the last week of the Spring 2004 Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive. THANKS A MILLION to those of you who have responded so generously with your pledges. You are a part of the independent media movement, and should be proud of yourselves! I am proud of you, and grateful as well.

I seem to have a rather large pile of newspapers sitting next to me. Long-time readers know that I only have one way to get rid of it, and that is to condense the pile down into a selection of the most telling, the most incredible, the most illuminating notes and quotes found there, along with my comments and context. This will be presented in the next week or two, in the form of the semi-regular feature known as A Stroll Through the News With Nygaard. I love this feature. I hope you do, too.

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

A triple-feature this week, all from an Associated Press article about U.S. actions in Fallujah, Iraq, that was published in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) on April 29th:

First:

“‘Even though it may not look like it, there is still a determined aspiration on the part of the coalition to maintain a ceasefire and solve the situation in Fallujah by peaceful means,’ Brig.-Gen. Mark Kimmitt said in Baghdad.”

Second:

“When a marine was wounded, [U.S.] warplanes dropped 10 laser-guided bombs – most of them 500-pound bombs but at least one 1,000-pound – on buildings that were the source of guerrilla fire, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said.... Witnesses reported at least 25 buildings wrecked...”

Third:

“At the White House, President Bush said ‘most of Fallujah is returning to normal.’”

Commercializing Democracy, Part 2: “Responding to the Authenticity”

Last week I talked about a March 22nd Advertising column in the New York Times with the headline “Marketers Discover Election Day, Embracing Get-Out-The-Vote Efforts for Young People as a Way to Reach Potential Consumers.” The article pointed out how “Rock the Vote” and other youth-oriented get-out-the-vote campaigns are taking on what they call “corporate partners” who say they want to “support the mission of engaging voters.” The president of Rock the Vote reminded us that “One of the realities that we face post-9/11 is an increased awareness of public service, patriotism and participation.”

I claimed that these corporate campaigns show a class bias, and pointed out how that was to be expected given the natural desire of corporations like Motorola and Ben & Jerry’s to use such campaigns to reach out primarily to “potential consumers” of their cell phones and upscale ice creams. I was struck by the fact that Ben & Jerry’s has even created a special get-out-the-vote flavor called “Primary Berry Graham” that will be featured on “Free Scoop Day, an annual promotion scheduled for April 27, [where] Ben & Jerry's stores will set up voter registration tables.”

I left off last week by quoting a spokesman for one of the “corporate partners,” who said “Any company that's honest about it is saying, ‘Look, we want to do good, but we also want our name to be associated with doing good.’” The point there was that I don’t think it is “doing good” to target the already well-represented classes to vote in greater numbers, while largely ignoring the less-represented classes who do not. But that’s not the most important point.

The most important point is that it doesn’t really matter to these corporations whether the campaign is “doing good” or not. This is a marketing campaign, after all, and what is important to marketers is that the company whose product they are selling appears to be doing good. That, after all, is the basic idea of modern marketing: Manipulate the public mind so that your company or product is “associated” with something that feels “good.” It’s not about what is actually happening; it’s about the belief or emotional meaning attached to what is thought to be happening.

Consider the U.S. occupation of Iraq: The PR task is to associate Brand America with the feel-good terms of freedom, democracy, and peace. Never mind the reality of occupation, neo-colonial rule, and war. Keep the images of the actual reality off of the TV screens, and keep the feel-good words in the public mind. This is how marketing works. Now let’s take a look at get-out-the-vote “corporate partner” Ben & Jerry’s.

Unilever and the Palm Trees

The Unilever corporation sells many of “the world’s best-known and most-loved brand names” (according to them, in their 2003 annual report), and last year made a profit of about five billion dollars doing so. One of the “most-loved” products they sell turns out to be Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which is a “corporate partner” of Rock the Vote.

Is it plausible to believe that Unilever—with headquarters in London and Rotterdam—really cares how many young people vote in the United States? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, I can’t say. What their marketing department cares about is that people who are trying to decide which type of ice cream to buy have a vague but powerful association of good old Ben & Jerry’s ice cream with the ideas of “public service, patriotism and participation.”

When Unilever purchased Ben & Jerry’s from Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in 2000, they purchased not only the factories and the stores, but also the good name—deserved or not—of these entrepreneurs. Go to their website now (http://www.benjerry.com) and you’ll find pictures of flowers and cows, you’ll be encouraged to “Help fight global warming,” and they’ll offer you “50 ways to support peace.”

Keep looking around, and see how long it takes for you to discover that Ben & Jerry’s is now owned by Unilever (that information is in there). Then, while you’re at it, see if you can find any mention of the use of child labor by Unilever facilities in India. Or, how about the dumping of toxic mercury by other Unilever facilities in India? That information is not in there.

Oh, and there’s one other thing that is not in there: Unilever, in the 1980s, began “propagating genetically uniform oil palm trees,” using biotechnology developed at Indiana University. As Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman reported in the January 11, 2000 issue of Mother Jones magazine:

“The biotech method worked, and Unilever's palm-oil business boomed [in the late 1980s and 1990s]. Unilever started buying out small farmers in places like Malaysia. Its massive palm plantations needed space, meaning thousands of acres of tropical rainforests were cut down, indigenous peoples were displaced, and the nearby waterways were severely polluted by runoff from the palm oil processing factories.”

Back to the Times article:

“Walt Freese, chief marketing officer at Ben & Jerry's in Waterbury, Vt., part of Unilever, said the young people now in the cross hairs of voting groups and marketers tend to be skeptical. ‘If we come in there for the right reasons they'll respond to that authenticity,’ Mr. Freese said. ‘If involvement really becomes an excuse to do nothing more than sell more products, then we could have a problem.’”

Here’s another problem they “could” have: “Primary Berry Graham,” the Ben & Jerry’s flavor that Unilever wishes to associate with “public service, patriotism and participation,” is made with palm oil. There’s some “authenticity” for you: Get out the vote at home, while half-a-world away you’re cutting down the rainforest and displacing and poisoning indigenous people. That’s production and consumption in the Global Economy.

I don’t mean to pick on Unilever; their job is to make as much money as possible, just like every other corporation. The point is that when we put our voter-registration efforts in the hands of such mega-corporations, then yes, “we could have a problem,” and we do. The problem is a voting campaign that is run by the winners in a competitive capitalist system. And it seems reasonable to expect that such a campaign, run by those winners, will end up recruiting other winners. And that those winners will, in their turn, likely vote in favor of maintaining the rules – and the very system – under which they and their fellow winners will continue to win.

“Helping America Vote” – NOT!

While corporations are busy registering “potential consumers,” the Minnesota Legislature is doing its best to keep the rabble away from the polls. You’d know this if you had seen the May 12 edition of the excellent newspaper The Union Advocate of St. Paul. In that edition The Advocate ran an article by editor Michael Kuchta headlined: “Every Vote Counts? New Election Laws Hamper Voter Registration, and It May Get Worse.” The article spoke of a proposed Minnesota state law that would, theoretically, bring Minnesota into compliance with the federal “Help America Vote Act,” known as HAVA. Let’s look at how we are being “helped” by our elected leaders.

“...Minnesota is a state that traditionally has made it easier to vote” over time, the Advocate reports, but as C.Scott Cooper of the Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action (http://www.mapa-mn.org/) points out, “Every one of the changes [proposed by the legislature] is going in the opposite direction and making it more difficult to register voters.”

Why does Cooper say this? First of all, the federal legislation itself is so complex that the people in charge of implementing it aren’t at all sure about what’s going on. One result is that many “community organizations...have gotten very conflicting messages among county and state elections officials on exactly how much and what kind of identifications voters must provide in order for their registration to valid,” says Cooper. “It’s very messy.” The proposed state legislation does not address this problem.

What the proposed state legislation does do is to make the registration process even more tricky. According to the proposal, anyone who does not register in person at a government office will have to produce a required identification document, beforehand. If you register at an official site, then you just show them your drivers license or other acceptable ID. But if you register by mail, or at the State Fair, or at a union meeting, at your church or school, or when a canvasser knocks on your door, then you have to send in a photocopy of your ID. This could be a problem for those conducting a grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign. As MAPA’s Cooper points out, “We can’t carry a copy machine around with us.”

If a new voter’s registration is challenged—as it may well be if the Republican-sponsored legislation becomes law—the government will contact that individual and tell them there is a problem. For native-born Minnesotans of the middle and upper classes, this would likely not be a problem. But it may well be a problem for the kind of voters signed up by, for example, Minnesota ACORN, a grassroots political group whose constituency is largely “low- to moderate-income individuals, communities of color, communities that don’t typically vote in large numbers,” in the words of head organizer Becky Gomer. For these people, as the Advocate points out in a separate article, “An ‘official’ government letter or a phone call informing [them] about a problem with their registration could backfire...” As Cooper says, “It could be very intimidating, especially if you’re a first-time voter.” Gomer reminds us that, after all, “Not everyone has good experiences with the government.”

Joe Mansky, elections manager for Ramsey County, home of Minnesota’s capital city of St. Paul, sums up the net effect of the proposed legislation by saying that the proposed changes “would make this whole process [of registering new voters] a whole lot more difficult for a whole lot more people than it is now.” And this, in the Orwellian world of George W. Bush and Minnesota’s Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty, is how we “Help America Vote.”