Our Eroding Empire

"Washington concerned about the secrecy surrounding the Chinese defense budget. During a visit to Washington last month by Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to be the next leader of China, the Obama administration specifically asked for greater transparency in the Chinese military budget and for deeper communications between the two militaries"--NY Times, March 5, 2012

"The top-secret world the [U.S.] government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work"--Washington Post, July 19, 2010

Apart from making money, the point of having an empire, particularly a powerful one, is that you can ignore the golden rule. You can do unto others what you would never let them do onto you.
So we can demand that other countries tell us their military plans. Or that Afghanistan continue to allow us to kill and imprison its citizens on its territory. Or, as President Obama likes to say, keep all options open when it it comes to blockading, bombing and subverting sovereign nations whose policies irk us. Or that we can spend hundreds of millions influencing foreign elections even though we have a law barring foreigners from doing the same to us. Of course, most of this is illegal, but, then again, the law is there to keep the lesser classes in line. If it, as idealized, applied equally to all, half the greedheads on Wall Street would be doing time right now.
Americans have become so used to bossing around foreigners that they don’t notice that their commonplace utterances, as well as their deeds, create new enemies daily. I don’t think my next door neighbor would be charmed if I kept referring to his property as my back yard. Nor would the guys at the bar bow down because I had anointed myself the greatest and therefore their leader. More likely, they’d kick me out on my ass.
That’s exactly what’s happening world-wide right now. The American empire is getting booted out of its satrapies. Not all of them, of course. And it’s even adding a few new ones. Burma comes to mind, while Syria appears up for grabs. But the trend is on the down side. Latin America, our longtime “backyard,” has already become free. And it’s not just the leftist nations like Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Even conservative politicians from Mexico to Chile are finally realizing that there are fewer and fewer reasons to take orders from the decaying gringo empire. They see that it’s better for the whole continent, with nearly twice the population of the U.S, to unite than to continue to singly submit to Washington and Wall Street. Indeed, there you have a prime reason for the empire's ennui. Another is that when it comes to products, ideas, or protecting foreign elites from their own people, the U.S. no longer has anything special to offer.
Behemoths China, Russia and Brazil are powers unto themselves. India is defying the U.S.-led economic assault on Iran. Pakistan has announced it will stand with Iran if Israel and/or the U.S. attack. Turkey and South Africa are growing in influence. Regional powers are strengthening despite Washington’s resolve to never let them rise up.
While eastern Europe seems satisfied to retain its satellite status, merely switching masters from the USSR to the U.S., western Europe is another story. Its politicians and money managers are still yoked to Washington and Wall Street, but its people haven’t been so restless since the Great Depression. Unlike Americans, large numbers of Europeans are willing to do battle with the enforcers of austerity. From Spain to Greece, there’s even a whiff of revolt in the air.
In the Middle East, the whiff has already turned into a whirlwind. Whether it will ultimately blow left towards secularity and social democracy or right towards a Muslim version of Santorumism remains to be divined.
In short, stuff’s happening everywhere. Not so much here yet out on the right cusp of the world, where folks remain as ignorant of their empire in its dotage as they were in its heyday. But that can change, too. And quickly.


Post Script

For three days, Iran has dominated the agenda of the annual conclave of Aipac, a must-have ticket for politicians eager to prove their pro-Israel bona fides--NY Times, March 7, 2012

I was finishing the blog above when I ran across the above quote from a Times story about the ubiquitous and all powerful influence that the politicians and generals who run a country the size of Honduras have over the world's self-declared most powerful nation. One of the many unmentioned ironies of this election year is that Obama is being trashed both for being insufficiently tough on foreign policy and insufficiently servile to a tiny foreign state. Only in America!

God Help Us

Anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God which conflicts with Church dogma must be burned without pity--Pope Innocent III

Amen--Rick Santorum

In 1929, when John F. Kennedy, our first Roman Catholic president was 12 years old, the last vestiges of the Papal States were dismantled and reduced to 110 acres in central Rome. The Pope’s armies had long since been defeated, his police powers revoked, his dungeons and torture chambers emptied. Catholicism had lost the temporal power that it exercised for 1600 years in what Montesquieu called the bloodiest kingdom of all.
The America of 1929 had just rejected the presidential candidacy of New York Governor Al Smith, partly because he was a papist. The KKK, the Tea Party of its time, was clamorously anti-Catholic. The fear was, as now with Muslims, that the Vatican was out to control America and the rest of the world.
At the birth of the United States, even the Protestant majority was leery of the likely power of its own clergy. America had freed itself from Britain, a nation with a meddling state church. Europe had suffered centuries of horribly bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Few wanted a repeat of that history here. What’s more, small towns in those days were often congregational rather than civic, making the minister the ex officio mayor. Not very democratic, that. With all this in mind, the founders wisely put in the Constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Better to keep church and state separate.
By 1960, when JFK won the presidency, anti-Catholicism and even anti-Semitism were fading. Americans were becoming ever more willing to vote for politicians who professed belief in anything shy of atheism. The issue of church and state had been settled. Or so it seemed.
Yet here we are in 2012 with papist Rick “Google Me” Santorum in unholy alliance with Protestant fundamentalists to spread theocracy throughout the land. Like the kissy-face relationship between usually antagonistic Bible thumpers and Zionists, the stench of opportunism overwhelms the incense of ecumenism. Should they ever retake temporal power, the three faiths, each with its own perfect message, will be at each other's jugulars in short order. It will be minutes, not hours, before the garottes are unwound and the strappados cranked.
For what is most noticeable about Santorum and the cretinous cut of Christianity he inspires is their apparent eagerness to harken back not just to the idyllic slavery times that ordinary American reactionaries dream about, but all the way back to the actual dark ages. Instead of sitting on the porch and enjoying a mint julep while watching the slaves being whipped, this crowd hankers for seats at the star chamber meting out tortures to those who would dispute dogma. I hope the rest of us have learned enough in 2,000 years to treat this replay of tragic history as farce and blaspheme it out of existence.

Back at the Blog

...As I Was Saying
Last June, after turning out 141 blogs over three years, I began telling myself every day that I would write something tomorrow. For various reasons, it took all these months for tomorrow to finally come. To my surprise, the world kept spinning without my two cents.
So let’s review.
I guess the most dangerous news since then is that we’re escalating our long-running war on Iran. So far, we’ve hit them with assassinations, subversion, sabotage and economic blockade--all to no avail. The next step, if it comes, is bombing. Invasion looks exceeding unlikely. If you recall, back in the 80’s the Persians fought off a half million Iraqis armed and advised by our Pentagon.
Unlike our fracases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, a shoot-em-up with Iran will cost all of us as much as ten bucks a gallon at the gas pump (Europe is already there). That would plunge us deeper into depression. Thus the traditional calculus by our leaders that war is good for the economy won’t work this time. We’ll all end up poorer--except for the defense contractors and the oil companies.
The cover story for Iran is that we can’t let them build their own nukes because they’re suicidal nuts. The real story, which hasn’t changed in 33 years, is that we want to overthrow their government and take their oil. With Iran’s ally Syria in flames this looks like an opportune time to tumble Teheran.
American foreign policy appears very complicated, given that we’re at dagger points with all sorts of foreigners from medieval Muslims in the Middle East to modern-minded secular leftists in Latin America. Not to bore you, but the current list of countries we have problems with include:

Afghanistan Argentina Belarus Bolivia Brazil China Cuba Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Haiti Honduras Iran Iraq Libya Nepal Nicaragua North Korea Pakistan Russia Somalia Syria Turkey Ukraine Venezuela Yemen and Zimbabwe

Among them, you’ll find just about as wide an array of politics, cultures and economies as this old world has to offer. No matter, we have exactly the same problem with all of them: they are to one degree or another disobedient. Most often that means that they have asserted their own interests in their own parts of the world. In other words, they have challenged Washington’s doctrine of “full spectrum dominance” over the whole, entire and total planet and space beyond.
As noted above we have a variety of means to show the other 95 percent of humankind who’s boss. These range from propaganda campaigns to invasion and occupation. The problem is that we’re getting weaker thanks to a corrupt and insolvent economy while those we target are getting smarter, if not actually stronger.
The tough talk about Iran, a large and well-defended country numbering 80 million people, conveniently hides the reality that we just lost two wars against feeble foes. The comprador regime we imposed on Iraq has turned on its master and given us the boot. Washington built a Vatican-sized embassy in Baghdad to accommodate a staff of 16,000. This was to be our imperial control center for the Middle East. But that ambition faded as our troops were politely but firmly asked to go back where they came from.
Meanwhile, the Afghans have, as they’ve done with every other invader, worn us down. We spent ten years training their troops, while they spent that time outfoxing ours.
Now, President Obama tells us, the Pentagon’s Grand Guignol of mercenary mayhem will be moving on to East Asia to deal with the threat of Chinese influence in the China Sea. Shades of Teddy Roosevelt, the first of our presidents to declare that America’s future resided an ocean away from these United States.
So what we have here is a current crisis in re Iran and another that we’re cooking up with China. Not only do the media take this news in stride, but they frame it in a context of permanent war. I remember when politicians used to regularly applaud peace as if it were a worthy goal. You don’t hear such sissy talk any more.
Until 9/11, war was good--and safe--business, so long as we picked on those who couldn’t do us much damage. It even hardly mattered if we won or lost over there so long as the profits rolled in over here. Today, the game is much more fraught. Just talk about bombing Iran gooses gas prices. The real thing will make them soar. And just imagine if the wily Persians have a couple of 9/11s up their sleeve. Or, catastrophically worse, that they are really suicidal and already have the bomb. It looks like we’ll be paying for our pleasures from now on.

Three Short Takes

War And Peace
The NY Times has revealed yet another war being conducted by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama. “The extent of America’s war in Yemen has been among the Obama administration’s most closely guarded secrets...” said the paper of record. The Times also reported that “as things get more and more chaotic in Yemen, the space for the Americans to operate in gets bigger.” The Nobel medalist in the White House is currently overseeing four public wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya and a number of clandestine ones from Latin America to Asia. Peru is likely to be added to the list now that its people have elected a leftist president by a narrow margin. The Guinness Book of Records has yet to list the most number of wars fought by a peace prize recipient.

Wimpy Europeans
At Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995, the Serb general Ratko Mladic reportedly committed the worst war crime in Europe since World War II by ordering the massacre of nearly three times the number of innocent civilians who died on 9/11. He was finally arrested in recent days and will stand trial at the Hague. Apparently, there is no sentiment in Europe to shoot him in the face, dump him in the ocean, and then joke about it on late night tv.

Funny What Doesn't Get Played Up
Which one of these current sex stories have you heard little or nothing about?
1. Congressman Anthony Weiner admits to cyber flashing women he didn’t know after first engaging them in political palaver.
2. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for the presidency of France, accused of sexual assault on a hotel housekeeper.
3. Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy, now on trial for committing “bunga-bunga” with an under-age prostitute.
4. Arnold Schwartzenegger, former Governor of California, admits to fathering a child by a woman working in his family home.
5. Moshe Katsav, president of Israel, sentenced in March to seven years in prison for serial rape.

On Memorial Day
My city of New Haven doesn’t feel a need to guard our municipal security by keeping police precincts in Atlanta, Los Angeles or Omaha. My state of Connecticut doesn’t maintain statal security by assigning troopers to Alaska, Montana or Arkansas. Neither do the mayor of New Haven nor the governor of Connecticut project themselves as national leaders
By contrast, my country’s leaders assert that our national security requires military bases just about everywhere on earth--plus weapons pointing down from the Heavens as well. And our president never stops proclaiming our “global leadership” despite the fact that no world-wide election has ever given cause for such a claim.
These declarations about national security and cosmic captaincy are preposterous. Except for the local compradors, barkeeps and whore masters, few foreigners want an American base in their backyard. By the same token, few are willing to accept "leadership" by the pols, spooks and generals of a different and distant land. Their reaction runs from resentment to resistance. The inevitable result is endless crisis and war.
When Americans die in those wars, it is in service to our empire of power and pelf such as those of the Romans, the Ottomans, Brits, etc. Because our national myth will not admit to that, we dissemble about their deaths. We dare not say they fell to procure oil contracts or even to ensure our “national interests.” It’s more comforting, even though corrupting, to pretend they died for their country or for the freedom of others.
The profits of empire enrich only a chosen few, while the costs of empire in blood and taxes are paid for by the many. Nevertheless, even in this era of austerity, Americans remain willing to buy the myth and pay its price, no matter the amplitude of deaths or deficits. The conventional wisdom holds that we no longer pay attention to our constant wars because they are fought by a professional military rather than draftees. But that doesn’t explain the indulgence that we, and particularly proponents of small government, grant to the Pentagon despite its ginormous record of corruption and incompetence. Americans have long since grown cynical about Wall Street, but still excuse and even adore an equally rapacious “defense” establishment. Maybe if we put our bankers and brokers in uniform, they’d be more lovable as they rob us blind.

Human Rights, Ha Ha
Imagine that in his more sober moments between binges and bimbos Charlie Sheen was wont to lecture us on probity and decorum. Wouldn’t that be a fun thing? At least as chucklesome is the irony of Washington’s mendacious moralizing on human rights. In recent days, the Obama administration has been slagging the Chinese on that score. Beijing is, to be sure, guilty as charged. But China’s leaders have the right to their cynicism about the provenance of the accusations. Indeed, if I were the Chinese foreign minister and Hillary Clinton started hectoring me about human rights, I would simply read the following list by way of reply:
Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, Rios Montt in Guatemala, Lopez Arellano in Honduras, Pinochet in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay, Noriega in Panama, Perez Jimenez in Venezuela Galteri and Videla in Argentina, Mendez in Uruguay, Rojas Pinilla in Columbia, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, the Greek colonels, Mobuto in Congo, Savimbi in Angola, the apartheid regime of South Africa, Idriss in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia, the Saud family in Saudi, Hussein and Abdullah in Jordan, Saleh in Yemen, Al Khalifa in Bahrain, Saddam in Iraq, the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Diem and a succession of generals in Vietnam, Chiang in China, Marcos in the Philippines, Rhee and Park in South Korea. And that’s without mentioning the Bush family’s profitable dealings over the years with A. Hitler and the bin Laden clan.
Those are just a sampling of the long list of murderous monarchs and martinets that Washington has installed, armed, advised and otherwise underwritten in recent times. I haven’t checked Tacitus in a while, nor have I recently read an account of the British Empire. But just off the top of my my head, I would venture that no nation in history has sponsored more dictators in more places than we freedom-loving Americans.
You can add to that the facts that the U.S. has by far the biggest prison population on the globe, and that, uniquely among first world countries, it treats torture as a debatable public policy option rather than a criminal evil. Indeed, we are the first country to globally franchise pain parlors.
One reason China is finding so much success in the world economy is that it trades with everyone, good and bad, and dispenses with the cynical and sanctimonious lectures that our empire inflicts on an increasingly hostile and mocking world. How about our leaders either put up by cleaning up their own act or simply shut up?

The Two bin Ladens
As far as I know Osama bin Laden was killed only once. Nevertheless, revises of his demise are still issuing daily from Washington. He was armed, he wasn’t armed. He either did or didn’t use one of his wives as a shield. There were continuous fire fights at the compound or only one. Only one woman was wounded or one woman was killed. And what about the children?
Every sentient American should be aware that their leaders lie about everything all the time. Information for them is not meant to inform, but to placate or provoke. The offing of Osama was organized as much as a theatrical offering as it was a commando raid. The changing versions we get daily thus may be seen as the revisions of a play during tryouts. With the Osama drama, we’re still in New Haven. That doesn’t mean we will ever get a final script. The JKF assassination produced three contradictory official versions. All have lived comfortably side by side for all these years. Go see the excellent film “The Conspirator” and learn that the circumstances around Lincoln’s killing remain vexed.
What we do know is that there were two Osama bin Ladens. One is a stock super terrorist out of Fox Channel’s “24” series. He’s the mastermind who slips away till next week while Jack Bauer tortures his henchmen--always at the very last minute--in order to save West LA from damage worse than that wrought by Charlie Sheen.
Then there’s the real Osama, the one who’s rarely revealed in the popular culture. He’s the scion of a wealthy family fascinatingly on friendly terms with the Bush clan--but apparently not fascinating enough for the media to take a look at that relationship.
And what of his religion? If you substituted Jesus and God for Mohammed and Allah, his pietical preference wouldn’t be much different from any hardscrabble holy roller down in dear old Dixie, But here again the media is hardly interested in examining why Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalisms actually have more in common than in conflict.
Consider his military doctrine. Little has been said about the fact that it mirrors ours. The Pentagon, attacked on 9/11, was obviously a military target, while the World Trade Center, home to the largest domestic CIA base and enormous corporate economic power, was a command and control center. Had we attacked such locations in Iraq, Iran or wherever, the civilians killed in whatever number would have been written off as “collateral damage.” Likewise the hijacking and destruction of civilian airliners with all their passengers becomes terrorism depending on the nationalities involved. One of the anti-Castroites who bombed a Cubana airliner, killing 73, just died a peaceful death after a long life while his leading co-conspirator is enjoying his dotage in Miami, feted as an heroic old soldier by his erstwhile CIA buddies. Repeated calls for their extradition to face terrorism charges were simply ignored by our nominally anti-terrorist government.
First world nations like Spain and Britain have much experience battling serious and persistent forms of terrorism. Their tools were primarily civilian: intelligence gathering and police work. London never bombed Dublin or invaded the Irish Republic. Madrid didn’t burn Biarritz with white phosphorus or torture and disappear thousands of Spanish and French Basques. Neither nation vastly increased its military budget to meet its particular threat.
It’s plain by now that first the Bush and now the Obama administrations cynically used 9/11 and terrorism to further militarize and dominate the Middle East while turning the U.S. into a quasi police state. The first goal has failed miserably. The unanticipated Arab spring has shattered U.S./Israeli plans for the region. Washington favored the local dictatorships, so that any turn towards popular rule and democracy can only be to its detriment. A new battle for the Middle East is just beginning. This one will not pit the empire against a few thousand feudal fanatics of the Al Qaeda stripe. Unless America realizes that the odds have dramatically turned against its corporate crusaders and pulls back its desert legionaries, we will find ourselves saying, yes, bin Laden is deservedly dead, but that's just one down and a billion to go!

Slavery and Treason, Really?
I’m happy to see on this sesquicentennial that some of us are finally admitting that the Civil War had something to do with slavery. Back when I was a kid in the 50’s, the conflict starred Scarlett O’Hara and Uncle Remus and was all about tradition, chivalry, romantic rebels and devilish Yankees. Millions, mostly in lower America, still buy that nonsense. Thanks to the civil rights movement, Roots and some good and popular scholarship, lots of us came to understand that the war was fought, in Lincoln’s simple but perfect truth, because the nation could no longer exist half slave and half free.
We never liked to talk about slavery because it revealed the hypocrisy of our central freedom myth. So we pretended that the chains and whips in our historical attic could be forever ignored. Meanwhile, the more shameless of us actually held that slavery was not so bad. After all, they smirked, it Christianized heathen.
That reluctance is still there. All across the south this spring, fat white men are donning gray and clumsily pretending to be young and lean Johnny Rebs--only with fire crackers for minie balls and no blood and blacks to remind them of the horror of this country’s greatest killing fest. But to their annoyance, there are now lots of voices ruining their fantasies by bringing up slavery and sedition.
The latter is another skeleton in our attic that we are only beginning to acknowledge. Forget about terrorism or communism. The greatest treason and existential threat we ever faced came from fellow Americans determined to destroy these United States and supplant it with a slave empire stretching west to the Pacific and south to Latin America. Such was the founding ambition of those who created the Confederacy. To realize it, they trampled our flag and and made war on the United States. It took 600,000 dead to end that imperious impetus.
Americans at the time detested that betrayal. Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, Judah Benjamin and their confederates were condemned as treacherous and anti-American.They fled or were jailed when their cause got lost in gore. For decades afterward, Yankee politicians made hay by waving “the bloody shirt,” which meant denouncing the sedition of the south and the rise of the KKK after the war.
But over the years something odd happened. Northerners gradually forgot about the conflict while southerners rewrote its history to make themselves the victims of what they dubbed The War of Northern Aggression. They claimed to be merely affirming “states rights” when the Yankees viciously set upon them. Never mentioned was that the particular state right they had in mind was owning, buying, selling, working, whipping, raping and killing other human beings.
Dang if the upholders of bondage didn’t win their propaganda war, mostly thanks to indifference and racism in the rest of the country. For Americans, the Civil War became summed up in the romanticism of Gone With The Wind. More outrageously, the south began to hold itself up as the most patriotic corner of the country. Its politicians became vital, if not dominant, in Washington (five of our last ten presidents hailed from formerly Confederate states). It supplied officer cadre and endless bases to the U.S. military which it had formerly so murderously despised. When reactionary, imperial, racist and yahoo opinions flooded our media, they were often delivered in the dulcet drawls of Dixie.
So here we are today perfectly indulgent of those who still sympathize with ancestors who would have destroyed the United States. And though all stripes of progressive reformers continue to be labeled “un-American or, more commonly nowadays, ‘European’ or ‘soft on Canada,’ no one dreams of questioning the Americanism of those unashamedly harboring warm spots for secession, segregation and, yes, even slavery.
One of the great frauds in this land is that right wingers are considered super patriots. Quite the contrary. When they’re not whistling Dixie, they’re championing an economic system that has long since shed any pretense of patriotism and now calls itself multinational. That sounds right furren to me.

The Cells Effort
Though we call ours a free country, the truth is that we Americans keep more people unfree than any other nation. Roughly 2.3 million of us are, in the immortal lyric of Hank Snow, in the jailhouse now. That’s far more in total and per capita than China, a no-nonsense dictatorship with five times our population. As far as democracies go, we Americans are five to ten times more likely to call a cell home than Europeans.
There are a couple of ways you can look at this grotesque statistic. If all these folks belong in the clink, that makes America the most criminal country that ever was. Since we are also among the most pious of people, that number doesn’t say much for the supposedly benign effects of religion. On the other hand, if all those people don’t belong in the jug, we have the most energetic police state in existence.
There is, in fact, a third reason. The basic direction of these United States is to transform human activity, in so far as possible, into commercial transactions. Whereas communists believed in a utopia of happy workers dancing around the May Pole, the American dream is to get rich lending people money to buy tickets to the May Pole event. Thus it’s not surprising that our entrepreneurs came up with the insight that prisons were little more than cheap hotels with bad food whose doors only locked from the outside. Why they asked, in free market funk, should the socialistic state have a monopoly on these hostelries? Thus the private prison industry was launched.
Lobbying and loose money soon persuaded local pols that corporations could run jails more cheaply than could governments. Of course, that was pure bait and switch. The corporate outfits ran up their prices as soon as they got in. And, of course, what every business needs is customers. With jails, you can’t advertise weekend packages or letting the kids stay for free. You can only keep prodding the government to lock up ever more human beings.
Arizona is a case in point. It passed a law making it easier for cops to jam up likely illegals. In practice, this meant anyone who looked Mexican. This created a firestorm of protest by those being singled out--as well as anyone else still subscribing to justice, decency and the American way. Soon, it was reported by NPR and others that the law was less about preserving jobs or appeasing anti-immigrant yahoos than profiting Arizona’s private prison companies. In fact, it was literally drafted by those companies and handed to the governor to read to the legislature.
Things went hunky dory for a while, with the unlucky being given 20 years for jay walking and mopery. There was even a judge in Pennsylvania (now himself heading for the cooler) who was getting kickbacks for sentencing junior high kids to hard time in a private reformatory for not doing their homework. The correctional con artists were swimming in spondulicks. Then the recession hit and the states ran shy of revenues. Police were laid off, arrests dropped, and, horror of horrors, the states started freeing inmates to save money. The prison profiteers, who had planned on ever-rising incarceration rates till presumably half the country was being paid minimum wages to guard the imprisoned other half, took it on the lamb. Towns that had invested in now empty for-profit jails found themselves straining to pay off their bonds. Just like the housing bubble, the big house bubble had burst. No doubt it will bounce back, given the degree of our greed and the fact that we have hundreds of millions of potential prisoners.
For the first half of this country’s history, business profited from keeping people in chains. It was called slavery. Now they profit from keeping them in cells. It looks very much like the same thing here in the self-proclaimed land of the free.

Good times on the Vineyard. Yours truly, Suze, Jill and Enzo

Suze Rotolo Bartoccioli
We were friends forever, if you can say that about fifty five or so years. Platonic but passionate, personal but political. Occasionally hitting clinkers but always in tune. Laughter was our bread and wine. If you didn't know her, read this remembrance by someone who knew her well, or better still her book, A Freewheelin' Time.
Suze not only gave me her lifelong friendship, but brought me that of Enzo and Luca as well. Next to my own Jill and Alex, I’ve received no greater gift. She was a golden girl at sixteen and grew wiser but never older. As another old friend of hers once wrote, she was forever young.
Ciao, bella.