“There’s always money in the banana stand,” Pop-Pop used to say. His sage advice stuck with me during the years the banana stand grew like wildfire, fueled by consumers’ insatiable appetites for frozen, oblong treats and Pop-Pop’s money laundering. His wisdom stuck with me when the banana stand burned, fueled by hastily hidden and highly flammable legal tender. And his wisdom lives in me today, guiding my stewardship of a global empire of wildly improbable, not to mention unprofitable, banana stands in far flung locales like Panama, Moscow, Scotland and Kiev.
Yes, although these banana stands are black holes for local currency, revenue-producing marketing deals mint mountains of cash for my web of enterprises. Every time my name and face are slapped on another Tiki hut staffed by teenage contractors hired by licensees, my banana stand empire shifts into a higher gear, sluicing dollars, euros and rubles through hundreds of interconnected offshore companies. It creates a lot of wealth, believe me.
Banana stand brand licensing and merch, as well as my star turn on the CW Network’s reality show “Top Banana” have made me a billionaire. Modesty prevents me from saying how many billions, but there are a lot. Many, many billions that I have had to protect through legally-dubious, one-sided agreements with a long list of ex-wives, bastard kids, hookers and mistresses.
Normally, I would let my billions speak for themselves, but news vultures have been flooding the zone with stories about me, the banana stand empire, and my considerable wealth. Based on dubious sources like public records and government documents, it is alleged that bad things were done. I’ll counter that they weren’t, or in the worst case, mistakes were made.
So I am setting the record straight on a number of points.
First, I am a billionaire. Would I say I’m a billionaire if there weren’t millions of banana stand customers who line up each day to attest to my wealth, genius and handsomeness?
Second, allegations about my paltry contributions to the US Treasury are false. The best taxes are no taxes, any taxes make my stomach hurt, and I have a perpetual stomach ache and uncontrollable flatulence every day. So I must pay a lot of taxes!
Third, I’m personally hurt that nasty people on the Internet say I’m a bad businessman. I’m a very, very good businessman and it’s only natural that when you’re trying to keep a thousand balls in the air–each of those balls representing an obscure LLC that serves as a financial conduit for ever-larger corporations’ cash flows–one of those balls, like a banana stand-themed casino, will eventually fall to the ground and take down a local economy. That’s not my fault.
Finally, it is not true that the banana stand is a house of cards backed by unknown actors who hold a fiscal sword of Damocles over my head, and that my only way out of financial ruin is to co-opt the operations of a good sized government and start squeezing ’em for cash. No, this is not true at all, but it’s an excellent idea.