Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

The worst of it was on the other side of the globe, on the tiny Caribbean island of Navassa, near Haiti. Rather ominously, it was called Devil’s Island. Although Navassa didn’t have much actual guano, its coral reef was packed with deposits of tricalcium phosphate, the fossilized legacy of centuries’ worth of marine life—also a rich nutrient for ex

he’s left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

Like Puerto Rico, the Northern Marianas were subject to some U.S. laws but not others. The federal minimum wage and much of immigration law were waived. The nearest Occupational Safety and Health Administration office was thousands of miles away. At the same time, for the purposes of trade, the Northern Marianas counted as part of the country. The

New York farmers and grain merchants were the big losers, but the chances of Congress requiring the roads to raise rates from the west were approximately zero.* What farmers did care about, on the other hand, was rate volatility, since the perennial price wars frequently caused a violent seesawing of tariffs. The Eastern Traffic Association, the la