Looking through the international news this morning, I noticed that there was a general election in the Bahamas yesterday. I was shocked.
Why? Because there was no news about the campaign in any news website anywhere on the net. There's stuff about Bush, Sarkozy and Royal, Blair and Omert, there were elections in Nigeria too, and while that recievd far less coverage than it should have, it HAD coverage in the major newspapers and magazines.
The Bahamas? NOTHING. Well, actually the AP had a small article, which is how I found out about it, but since the Bahamas are a small country, no one gave a darn.
Former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham's Free National Movement won 23 seats in the 41-seat legislature, ousting incumbent Perry Christie's Progressive Liberal Party, which claimed the other 18, according to the government-owned Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas.
The issues were finances, tourism (which is the country's major industry) and Anna Nicole Smith's allegedly fucking her way to a residency visa.
While the PLP had a more leftist program, the FNM accused it of being corrupt and incompent. The Anna Nicole imbroglio was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back on this account. Real estate was another big issue. Apparently foreigners have been buying it up for retirement homes.
Which is the big problem with Bahamian politics. Outside of tourism and oil transhipments [there's a huge refinery and storage area near Freeport], there's really no industry there. The soil is bad, fresh water is scarce, the population is generally poor, and outside of Grand Bahama [Freeport] and New Providence [Nassau] islands, the population is rather sparse.
Then you've got all those Hatians and Cubans trying to escape their homelands and trying to settle.
So outside of commercials promoting tourism, the Bahamas will fade out of the American conciousness again.
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