brendanjharkin - Tumblr blog

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What does the "banana republic is a fucked up name for a store" post you reblogged mean? I'm afraid of looking dumb.

The term "banana republic" was originally coined to describe countries in Central and South America (mainly Honduras and Guatemala) whose economies were rendered dependent on the production and export of bananas (among other agricultural goods, but mainly bananas) by American fruit corporations leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the U.S. military and the CIA.

Throughout most of the of the 20th century, American corporations such as United Fruit, Cuyamel, and the Standard Fruit Company owned large portions of these countries' lands, to the point that in some cases they controlled their railway, road, and port infrastructure, and they engaged in a variety of imperialist actions to lower production costs, such as violence against labor activists and anti wage reform lobbying.

The pinnacle of this phenomenon was the 1954 Guatemalan coup, when United Fruit convinced the goverment of US president Dwight D. Eisenhower that the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz (who had expropriated some of the company's unused land and given it to Guatemalan peasants) was secretly working with the Soviet Union, resulting in a CIA coup which deposed the Árbenz government and replaced it with a thirty-year right-wing military dictatorship which effectively acted as a puppet government to protect the interests of United Fruit and the U.S. government.

Nowadays the term has broadened to refer to any small, economically unstable country with an economy which has been rendered dependent on the export of a particular natural resource due to economic exploitation by a more powerful country.

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funny cat

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It amazes me how many teslas I see out and about. Like you guys bought one for real? On god? No joke?????

[brendanjharkin]

Me: I hate gossip

Also me:

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Taylor in her Dracula flow era

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Hey I saw you from across the bar but my girlfriend didn't. Are you some manner of spirit

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It’s practically 2014 and you guys still don’t know how to google if an article is real or not before giving it 100,000 notes

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if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality

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In 1988, ACT UP protested the FDA withholding HIV treatment due to requiring unethical double-blind studies of medication they already knew worked.

In 2024, trans activists protested promoters of an NHS-funded report requiring unethical double-blind studies of medication they already knew worked.

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The entire game from Kim's perspective:

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