Hitchens: US is a Banana Republic

[Huckleman2000]

Why does Christopher Hitchens hate America?

America the Banana Republic
The ongoing financial meltdown is just the latest example of a disturbing trend that, to this adoptive American, threatens to put the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave on a par with Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Equatorial Guinea.
by Christopher Hitchens WEB EXCLUSIVE October 9, 2008

In a statement on the huge state-sponsored salvage of private bankruptcy that was first proposed last September, a group of Republican lawmakers, employing one of the very rudest words in their party’s thesaurus, described the proposed rescue of the busted finance and discredited credit sectors as “socialistic.” There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”
I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be “banana republic.”

 

[SlickTony]

I don't remember who said it before, but Hitchens is not the first to compare America with a banana republic.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

*biting tongue*

Be nice, be nice, you don't want to make enemies, shut up...

 

[Saucy_Sage]

I think the proper article here is "we," to wit: WE is a banana republic.

I don't think that making an observation like this - however much hyperbole he uses - constitutes "hating" America, though. He did choose to live here, after all.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

The method to the madness is to reduce all of you people back to the rabble you came from in the past. The fun is over, time to be peasants again.

 

[trysail]

Why does Christopher Hitchens hate America?

I don't think he hates us. I think he is telling us something that we don't want to hear, to wit: “banana republic.”

Unfortunately, our fiscal profligacy is sending us down a road that tends not to end well.

The trillions of pieces of paper with Geo. Washington's image that we have (thus far) been able to pass off to people who are willing to accept them in exchange for real goods eventually have to be invested in something be it Treasury notes, real estate or corporations. That game can continue for a while but the day may come when other nations demand payment in something other than those little green pieces of paper... and I don't think they're all that interested in being repaid with what we produce in this country: home pizza, tort lawyers, noise, illiterate college football players, and paper shufflers.

If our profligacy doesn't end, there will be a reckoning— one way or another. If servicing our external debt becomes so onerous that, like Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic or Venezuela or Argentina we end up repudiating it— that would certainly warrant the appellation... and boys and girls— that's exactly where we're headed if we don't shape up and face the reality that we have been living FAR, FAR beyond our means.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

TRYSAIL

Youre right. No one really wants a metric ton of lawyers.

 

[SlickTony]

I started seeing the comparison in print at least two years ago, and was inclined to agree with it: the steady encroachments on the democratic process, the superrich juxtaposed with the growing numbers of working poor and the hollowing out of the middle class, whose dwindling numbers, like the Red Queen, are having to run like hell to stay in one place--but find themselves sliding downward no matter what they do.