Those bananas were of the Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety. Big Mike's gone now, felled by fusarium oxysporum or Panama Disease, a fungal infection which attacks the banana tree's roots and starves it of water. There is no cure and it spreads like wildfire. The big plantantion growers, like the United Fruit Co., substituted the Cavendish variety for Big Mike, and it's a Cavendish I just ate. Smaller, not as sweet, derived from a Vietnamese strain. Panama Disease has now hit the Cavendish and it's only a matter of time before it too goes extinct. There is no successor in waiting. We have to come up with something because bananas are just too important. For example, when Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, hit on the idea in the early 1950s that Guatemalan peasants ought to own some of Guatemala's land, Eisenhower went along with Allen Dulles's idea (head of the CIA and also on the board of directors of United Fruit Co.) that Jacobo had to go. Arbenz was clearly a Commie sympathizer; what could be more Commie than the idea that poor people ought to own land? So the United Fruit Co., with the assistance of the CIA, overthrew Arbenz and installed a more banana-friendly dictator, thus giving rise to the term "Banana Republic." I wonder if the company selling all those khaki pants and oversized cotton shirts ever reflects on the origin of the name? Probably not - this is America!
I'm concerned that as America itself sinks into the economic status of a banana republic that we won't have any bananas to eat. There are areas of the United States where we can grow okay bananas, like Florida and the Gulf Coast, but it's just a matter of time before Panama Disease shows up. Naturally, big growers favor monocultured bananas (which is how we got into this problem in the first place), so they're looking for ways to modify the Cavendish genetically so it can resist fusarium, such as splicing in some fish genes or something. What if the bananas then get ich? (That's a joke for tropical fish people.) Or what if for some strange reason bananas start tasting good with a wedge of lemon and tartar sauce? So much for the lunch bag memories.
I watched Barack yesterday give his "economic" speech. To call his various nostrums "generalized" is probably too specific a word. I wonder if he's having second thoughts. Maybe this would have been the year for Hillary to become President. The general plan of reducing interest rates to zero and pumping vast amounts of government money into the economy has already been tried, in Japan beginning in the early 1990's. Fellow citizens of the American Banana Republic (Mackerel variety), I ask you: in all humility, and allowing for a perhaps understandable tendency toward feelings of Exceptionalism, between the two cultures, Japan & the U.S., which would you say is the harder working, better educated and more technologically advanced? So would I. Nevertheless, Japan has been in a deflationary slump since about 1991. The problem was brought on by a real estate bubble, bank insolvencies and a credit freeze due to distrust among lending institutions. Let me know if any of that sounds familiar. Also, its manufacturing base had gotten hollowed out because of Asian competition where the cost of living was much lower.
Barack's general plan is reminiscent of a man standing on a ladder a few feet shy of the roof attempting to reach the roof by lifting the ladder on which he's standing. (I know, I used that before, but doesn't it just get it?) There's a Catch, and it's Catch-22, which says that the United States can borrow the money it needs to get the economy moving if the economy is moving so that Americans can buy stuff from countries like China who need our money in order to lend it back to us; but if the economy is not moving, then we can't buy stuff to give our money to China so they can give it back to us so we can get the economy moving.
That's some Catch, whistled Yossarian. Indeed. So perhaps, as the esteemed Nouriel Roubini prognosticates, the recession will end somewhere around mid-2010, meaning the economy will stop moving backwards. At that point about 40% of the net worth of the United States will have been lost, and we will come into equilibrium. But that's it. We're there, just where Japan has been. It's essential to recognize that the Congressional Clown Troupe is doing this Final Act, the one where they stack up four chairs on top of a unicycle and Bozo does a handstand on the top chair while holding three pool cues topped with spinning plates, not because they necessarily believe this can possibly work. They're doing it because Congress must always appear to be doing something. Barack can't come out and say, hey, we just took a 40% hit. Better learn to deal with it. How do you start your Presidency with that? And then follow it up by telling us the really bad news: no bananas for you.
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