Thursday, April 05, 2007

Chiquita bananas: now with plenty of colombian blood sprinkled on them



Colombia journal is one of those resources on the web one takes for granted, even though the people writing it are actually putting their lives at risk. Today’s article about Chiquita Banana company – you know, the banana company that pays paramilitary drug dealers to torture and murder union leaders so that it can pay its workers shit – is pretty good. Notice that the war on terrorism, for the Bush administration, certainly shouldn’t be interpreted to mean, like, war on terrorizing the working class. As always, wars are double pronged thing for the U.S. governing class – on the one hand, there is the positive of the military industry, that economic generator which has kept a generation of American engineers fat and happy on oceans of Pentagon welfare money; and on the other hand, there is the negative (which turns out to be a win-win) of targeting the working class. This is why the war on drugs is a model war, so appropriately given birth to during the cold war era. Find the small dealers, disrupt poor neighborhoods, enforce ethnic and racial bigotries, reverse civil rights laws, and at the same time – ally with big drug dealers, prop up corrupt U.S. allies, and shield, as always, upper class white people from ever having to face the consequences of the bogus laws that their paid reps have passed.

As for Chiquita, apparently the new slogan for their upcoming ad campaign is gonna be: ya want those bananas with or without blood?

No comments:

My Mount Rushmore: DIDION MALCOLM ADLER HARDWICK

  I have been thinking of Laura Kipnis’s applaudable and much applauded review of Lili Anolik’s book comparing the wondrous Eve Babitz -acco...