The term “Banana Republic” was coined by O. Henry in “Cabbages and Kings” (1904) to describe a fictional republic marked by an authoritarian dishonest government run for profit by the ruling family and friends. The name refers to the United Fruit Company’s influence in Central America, its singular goal being economic and political power for its own benefit, perhaps similar to the values and goals of Trump and his billionaire cabinet and friends.

Welcome to American elections, in which the person who LOST the popular vote becomes president in two of the most recent five national elections.

Welcome to a nation where an electoral college structure gives voters in small states more power than voters in large states.

Welcome to a nation in which national elections are under the control of state governments, many of which systematically make registering to vote and even voting either difficult or impossible, where voting machines regularly fail, and in which there are no national voting standards in effect in national elections—that is left to the mercies of the states.

Welcome to a nation in which the Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturned laws approved by Congress to protect minority voters, in effect stating that states don’t do that bad stuff anymore. Since then, Republican-controlled states have suppressed voting by reducing the number of polling locations in minority neighborhoods, limiting early voting, reducing voting hours, and harassing potential minority voters.

Welcome to a nation in which the same Republican-dominated Supreme Court decided that corporations were ‘citizens’ under the Constitution and entitled to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections; that decision from a Court that claims loyalty to ‘originalism’ as a judicial philosophy—i.e. interpret the Constitution as it would have been interpreted when adopted, even though corporations were in fact developed as a legal concept years later.

Welcome to the game of Gerrymandering, where seats in Congress and state legislatures are designed to benefit the party controlling the process. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide a challenge to Wisconsin’s gerrymandering that resulted in Democrats having one-third fewer seats in the Wisconsin State Assembly than Republicans, although the Democrats had a majority of all votes.

Welcome to a U.S. Senate that defies history, custom and the U.S. Constitution and refuses to even hold hearings on the President’s nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court for nine months, all for the successful purpose of maneuvering to get that seat for Republican nominee.

Welcome to the United States where the Republican party gets away with accusing the Democrats and the media of “rigging the election” to divert attention from the fact that they were doing just that—suppressing voting rights of millions of American citizens, encouraging Russia and WikiLeaks  to hack the Democratic party confidential material, and likely much more interference in our elections by Russian intelligence operatives.

This is the Big Lie, accusing the others of doing what you are in fact doing—leading the incompetent media to draw equivalent but wrong conclusions on the theory “let’s give equal attention to the accusations of both sides” with no judgement or thorough analysis applied—until after the election of course.

Welcome to the United States where the Republican party assiduously and purposefully suppressed voting rights, but got huge (his favorite word) media coverage by accusing the Democrats of “massive voter fraud”.  Trump even claimed, after losing the popular vote by almost 3,000,000 that he really won because there was massive voting by millions of people illegally—this after his party successfully prevented many minority voters from voting: Another Big Lie.

Warning from Cassandra—Restore equal voting rights for all or slide further into authoritarian governance.

–Cassandra