TRUMP AND THE BANANA REPUBLICANS

Some people in the liberal media have starting calling the United States a Banana Republic, based on the actions of Donald J. Trump and his cronies. What exactly is a Banana Republic, I wondered, other than the store where I bought some shirts years ago? So I went to Wikipedia.

In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product, such as bananas or minerals. In 1901, the American author O. Henry coined the term to describe Honduras and neighbouring countries under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company.^[1] Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling-class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites of that society.^[2] Such a ruling-class oligarchy control the primary sector of the economy by way of the exploitation of labour;^[3] thus, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile dictatorship that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.^[3]

In economics, a banana republic is a country with an economy of state capitalism, by which economic model the country is operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class. Such exploitation is enabled by collusion between the state and favored economic monopolies, in which the profit, derived from the private exploitation of public lands, is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are the financial responsibility of the public treasury. Such an imbalanced economy remains limited by the uneven economic development of town and country, and usually reduces the national currency into devalued banknotes (paper money), rendering the country ineligible for international development credit.^[4]

OK, so we are not really a Banana Republic; however, a few things in the descriptions above have a familiar ring to them. Politically, the U.S. has come more and more under the control of wealthy and corporate interests that fund political candidates and lobby government to set rules and regulations that favor them. Economically, Trump has been and will be moving the U.S. more in the direction of running the country as a “private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class.” He and his Republican enablers in Congress have granted huge tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, are cutting back important regulations in order to benefit corporations, and are opening a lot of previously off-limit public lands to private extractive industries (oil, gas, coal, mining), and in the process of all this, greatly increasing the public debt.

Donald Trump is running the United States the way he has run all of his business ventures - poorly. His goal is to burnish the Trump brand, increase his and his family’s personal wealth as much as possible, reward his friends and cronies, and punish his enemies. He would love to be Dictator for Life; many of us would love to see him get something else for life. Trump has instituted a Friends and Enemies style of justice in America, rather than the Rule of Law that has prevailed since our founding. In his own words, Trump Insists that because he is President, he can do whatever he pleases, and the other branches of government - judiciary and congress - can just get over it. 

And so, although our country is not truly a Banana Republic, we have a President who sees himself as The Great Dictator of such a country, and the Republican Party has grabbed firm hold of his coat tails for the ride. 

We might not be a Banana Republic, but we certainly have a Congress of Banana Rerpublicans to deal with.

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(Note: the photo image is in the public domain. Don't look too closely or you will see that it from 2009.)