YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS? BULLS--T / AMERICA: THE NEW BANANA REPUBLIC

Vol. II | Issue. 156 | April 3, 2023

“Yes, we have no bananas… We have-a no bananas today.”

-Frank Silver and Irving Cohn (March 23, 1923)

Samuel Zemurray, nee Schmuel Zmurri, was born in 1877 to an Orthodox Jewish family and came to America as an impoverished immigrant fleeing the incessant pogroms and abject poverty of Czarist Russia. After landing in New York, Zemurray’s family settled in Selma, Alabama, where his uncle owned a general store. After working several odd jobs, Zemurray was first introduced to the world of bananas on the docks of Mobile, Alabama in 1895.

At the time, bananas were a new delicacy, not widely available to the broad market due to their short shelf life before rotting. Zemurray specialized in buying ripening bananas at a discount and distributing them quickly before nature took its course. Through his hard work, innovation, and business acumen Zemurray started with $150 in savings, accumulated $100,000 by age 21, then moved to New Orleans, and formed the Hubbard-Zemurray Company with his partner, Ashbell Hubbard. The newly formed Company signed a contract with United Fruit Company, the largest importer of bananas in America, to distribute their ripest bananas throughout the country. United Fruit itself bought a portion of Hubbard-Zemurray. Zemurray, through special innovation with refrigerated rail cars, was able to take the banana from an esoteric delicacy to an everyday item on the American breakfast table. His success earned him the nickname "Sam the Banana Man". Eventually, Zemurray became the largest shareholder of United Fruit.

In 1910, Zemurray bought 5,000 acres of land along the Cuyamel River in Honduras, near the town of Omoa. He then continued to borrow money and buy more lowland forest land in Honduras, well-suited for growing bananas. He developed this land by adding plantations, railroads, and bridges. With his accumulated wealth, power, and influence, it was said that he effectively controlled the country. Accordingly, Honduras was labeled the first "Banana Republic".

”The Banana Republic” has taken on the universal meaning of a country owned and or controlled by a Dictator, or an illegitimate government without any democratic systems, means of governance, or a functioning impartial justice system.

”The Banana Republic” is most conjured when the term is used to make most of us think of a South American Dictatorship, run by a South American Drug lord, who rapes and pillages the country for the benefit of himself and his coterie of criminal miscreants. In such dystopian hellholes, there is one common element, there is no functioning system of equal justice under the law. Anyone who is a threat to the crowd that’s in power, either mysteriously disappears through foul play, or if necessary to appease the public is put on trial in what's known as a "show trial”, the outcome of a guaranteed guilty verdict of which is a foregone conclusion… Just like Stalin's brutal hatchet man, Lavrentiy Beria, once said "You show me the man, and I'll find you the crime.”

America, our Constitutional Republic has been a light onto the world for many reasons, one of the most compelling of which has been our system of "equal justice under the law”.

We now live in an America where the Left has embraced, adopted, and effectuated the Stalinesque “Banana Republic” practice of targeting political opponents for criminal prosecution. Obviously, this is a reference to the recent indictment of Donald Trump to eliminate him as an effective candidate in the 2024 election.

Enter Alvin Bragg, the political official elected as New York City District Attorney, charged with the responsibility to protect the residents of New York City from violent crimes of all stripes (i.e. rapists, murders, home invaders, and violent thugs), and who campaigned on the promise to "Get Trump".

Of course, the Left, with its usual brand of lying and sophistry, claims that the normally pro-crime New York District Attorney's prosecution of the ex-President is not politically motivated, but that it stands for the proposition that nobody is “Above the Law”. Ok, sure… They will also claim that rendering an opinion before the Trump indictment is "unsealed" is improper (i.e. rendering an opinion before knowing what the alleged crimes are is by definition improper).

Yeah, sure... There is no doubt that if public officials, even former Presidents, are guilty of crimes they should be prosecuted. It is a cornerstone of American jurisprudence that Justice is "blind”, but to make that assumption in this case… You would have to believe that if justice were blind, then the American people are DEAF, DUMB, and BLIND. 

Bragg, in that tradition, has found both his man and the crime, while taking a giant leap forward in destroying the American System of “Equal Justice under the Law” and making clear that American Justice is being meted out to the political enemies of the Left that would make Stalin proud.

Yes, we have no Bananas… Bulls--t! Even Samuel Zemurray, “The Banana Man”, could never have foreseen the United States of America becoming a “Banana Republic”.

If America allows this to stand, then we are already a Banana Republic, and there may be no way back.

-Emes