POLITICS: Has the United States become a banana republic?
2008 October 11
Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens argues that the United States has evolved into a banana republic or a quasi-banana republic. Some of the factors pointing to the United States’s evolution into a quasi-banana republic include:
- “[A] paper currency which is an international laughingstock.” The dollar is weak and overseas travel is increasingly becoming out of reach.
- The Bush Administration operates as a kleptocratic government, or a government that uses its political position to convert the country’s resources into personal profit. The use of no bid contracts comes to mind.
- There is little, if no accountability or transparency with the Bush Administration—no apologies, no firings, and no resignations equals no accountability. Certainly, the Bush Administration has a fetish for voluntary regulation, deregulation, and the power of markets to self regulate. Free markets cannot work without regulation, because reliance on markets to run free is an incentive for individuals to accumulate wealth by abusing, cheating, or behaving unethical at the expense of taxpayers as the markets crashes, and golden parachutes deploy.
- “In a banana republic, the members of the national legislature will be (a) largely for sale and (b) consulted only for ceremonial and rubber-stamp purposes some time after all the truly important decisions have already been made elsewhere.”
- “[T]he tendency for tribal and cultish elements to flourish at the expense of reason and good order.”
- Crumbling infrastructure, or as Hitchens puts “a money class fleeces the banking system while the very trunk of the national tree is permitted to rot and crash.”
- “[A] president who is a figurehead one day and a despot the next, and who goes all wide-eyed and calls on witch doctors when the portents don’t seem altogether reassuring.”
