America has finally become the banana republic it has accused others of being.
That's a funny way of looking at it because the banana republics weren't called that because they were "bananas" or something. They were called that to identify which of those countries had had state and megacorp interference and government toplings, by mostly the United Fruit Company - an American company.
Whatever the banana republics were they were turned into that by the US's doing, so it's funny that now the term comes back home.
It bears some resemblance to the Imperial Boomerang.
This has been the best TIL moment for me on HN.
Thanks, man, I am now in the rabbit hole of reading up.
In that same context, did you read the article about how diplomats were "convincing" the Mexican government to not use open source over Microsoft?
It sure sounds like the same strategy.
People commenting here about Trump corruption are correct, but it's also not new. This is regression to the mean. America has historically been a highly corrupt nation with extreme wealth inequality that occasionally has shocks (e.g. Abolitionism, the Progressive movement, WWII) that allow liberals to take over and purge the system of corruption. If anything, we've had to deal with and defeat (or at least, outlive) smarter and more well-connected fascists than Trump.
I agree and my rationale of it is that it's related to the US dedication to capitalism and thus aversion to any form of socialism (even small pockets that, in my opinion, are evidently positive for society as a whole) as some kind of governmental totalitarianism.