Summary of Peter Chapman's Bananas

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#1 The Pan-American building on New York’s Park Avenue was the site of another suicide in 1975. Eli Black, the head of United Brands, a large food corporation, had thrown himself from the forty-fourth floor. He was a man of exceptional morality, it was said.

#2 I was a student at the University of Sussex in 1975, and I remember being shocked by the death of Black. The idea that anyone who ran United Fruit could be considered moral seemed absurd. The company had a long history of changing governments when they didn’t like them, like the one in Guatemala in 1954.

#3 The term banana republic is a form of shorthand for political and economic mismanagement, but it is actually a more patronizing and derogatory term than I had thought. It is used as if it describes their original state, while saying very little about what role any aforementioned large external force may have played in creating or exacerbating their predicament.

#4 The first multinational corporation was United Fruit, which was created in the mid-1800s. It set the template for capitalism, and its Great White Fleet of refrigerated ships, painted against the heat, ran cruises to places people could scarcely dream of.

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