It’s now fully 3 days since Katrina passed New Orleans, the city is now in a shambles, and now mainstream news, including BBC, presents the tired "it bleeds, it leads" philosophy in yellow journalism as they pretend to care about the tragedy facing the mostly poor, mostly black population of New Orleans. In the reporting, images are repeated of desperate black citizens taking necessities from stores and being castigated by the media as looters, while white citizens doing the same thing are represented as "just doing what they need to survive". Meanwhile, the latest tragedy of the Iraq quagmire goes unnoticed and unreported in all but the most raking of muckraking media (see counterpunch, 8/31). Meanwhile, capitalism presents itself in all its glory, as reports of retailers charging as much as 6 dollars a gallon pour in from all over the region, and the Bush Administration removes pollution requirements from gasoline producers (catalytic converters be damned!). But to get a real picture of the surreal nature of the current predicament, it's important to step back a bit, to the 1950's, and the US government's assassination of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
