POLITICS AS VALUES AND DRAMA: Joan Didion and the Kavanaugh hearing

     Joan Didion's POLITICAL FICTIONS remains as relevant as ever in the age of Senate Public TV hearings.   Her book begins with politics of the Dukakis candidacy.  She is eloquent about how insiders create a political message that captures the public response without relating to the issues of the people.  This has become a major occupation of political strategists,  even perhaps by foreign intervention!  Discussing the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, she seems more partisan about the Right marshaling forces against Clinton through Starr.   Didion moves to the left here,  and there is little discussion of the political manipulation of the Clintons toward their opponents.  Their role in politics, for better and worse, has impacted right up to the last election.   The last part of the book is about the rise of the "Religious Right" and here she paints a broad negative picture exploring the effectiveness in this group's rise to power.  
     In this last section, she misses a fundamental point from her own SLOUCHING TO BETHLEHEM:  The 60's was a chaotic time.  The PBS special on the 60s describes the "baby boomer" generation split:  those who smoked dope, had free love, and believed in personal self gratification, and those who studied, stayed home, and believed that self denial and discipline is essential for a good society.   The commentary of Bork, Meese, and Buchanan commenting in the documentary is instructive.   While the narrator extols the 60's rebellion as the seeds of social change in various countries, these men see the events as a failure to respect authority, and self indulgence without any social value.   This is the fundamental conflict of the 60s,  which has become the political world of the 90s and beyond.   It is what fueled the rise of the "Religious Right".  She is correct to see that their media presence is no different than any other political manipulators, just as compromised, but it appeals to the values of certain constituents.  Today,  as cannabis is gradually legalizing across the country,  Sessions still threatens to prosecute its use at the federal level.
     The “rebel” agenda proposes to relax certain social constraints:  pro-abortion,  decriminalize marihuana, provide social rights for gays,  more social and economic recognition for women,  and (some) racial equality.  The opposing view sees "rebels" as “self indulgent”, creating moral chaos,  and is reactive to perceived changes:  women are getting too many abortions, MJ is too freely used,  gays have become a major minority in the population despite AIDS,  and women make up more of the labor force as the needs of the society move away from physically demanding jobs, leaving uneducated White Males behind.  This is the reality of the society changing,  and it is doubtful that liberal views accelerated this, nor that conservative ones will stop it.  The “Conservative” agenda (i.e. “moral majority”, “Religious Right”, “compassionate conservative”) is an attempt to return to a value system that rejects the social changes that have been expanding in the country since the 60s.   There is no evidence that a political system can enact laws, policies or whatever to counteract the prevailing social mores of a society.  There can be a major conflict of legitimacy with the society taking a turn at totalitarianism and then a collapse of the regime.   Will we go through a cycle of South American politics to learn this?  

     What makes this political focus on value struggles so troublesome is how it fails to reflect the actual tasks of the government.   Clinton was the archetypal “rebel”,  a self indulgent, brilliant, self motivated person, who was willing to take whatever position necessary to gain his personal power.  Though it seemed that his goal in office was to lead an “inclusive” and caring government,  in fact his administration was often the opposite.  It extended the trend of favoring the grow of wealth for the super rich.  It grew the economy with limited benefit to labor. “Welfare to work” was not a boon to the welfare mothers.  While encouraging minority groups he enacted "law and order" statutes that expanding the mostly Black prison population.  Clinton was busy with his sexual imitation of JFK and his ability to co-opt the center of politics which drove the Republicans farther to the Right.   Also consider the Reagan administrations. Reagan is viewed both during and afterward as a high point in the vision of “conservative” politics and personally given credit for this, though it is  clear that he was in some stage of Alzheimer’s disease, and unclear how much policy was decided by others.   The “invasion” of Grenada, and the Marine debacle in Lebanon were the examples of a poor foreign policy which “took credit” for the “collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism”, a process which began long before that administration, to which they made almost no contribution. The supposedly fiscal conservatives created tax cuts for the wealthy and excessive spending that drove the country into its worse deficits.  Didion’s portrayal of the Reagan administration as a movie script esp the Iran-Contra mess is not far fetched,  and it expresses the underlying wish for a macho, morally black and white story with a successful outcome which is the product of years of watching Hollywood “oaters” by the generation just before the “boomers”.   The movie WAG THE DOG, where script writers and media fabricators create a media distraction for presidential misconduct assumes a public with very limited capacity for ambiguity and discrimination, a public that requires simple one dimension adolescent stage heroes.   Citizens who cannot tolerate moral complexity and balancing competing interests are unable to make careful political decisions.
      Fast forward to the present.  The country elects a president who promises to reverse all the social and economic issues that distress conservatives,  with a joint majority in Congress that grudgingly supports him.  Though not elected by majority, enough people in critical states support this fantasy to vote for a man with no experience in politics,  and marginal success in his business.  They want to believe the fantasy promoted by political operatives that this will correct the imbalances of the last 8+ years.  The results so far suggest the same favoring of the needs of the wealthy over middle and lower class citizens and a total disregard for debt (that only a real estate developer can have).  This simple minded view of world relationships in both the Bush and Clinton eras is exaggerated in the current administration:  America is the "lone superpower" and can tell everyone else what to do.  The failure to recognize how this supports unification against our country is idiotic.   No country is powerful enough to ignore the rest of the world,  nor should be.
     In this context,  the Senate hearings on Kavanaugh are pure political theater.  The idea of holding public hearings on television to assess the reality of accusations against a man is stupid.   Once informed of the accusations, if the committee was unwilling to carry out the personal investigations by professionals to assess this situation,  they should simply have said they were are unwilling to do so.  Instead,  the two characters are the leads in a drama which devolves down to whose fault it is because the investigations have never taken place.  The shallow and mindless grandstanding of the various senators reveals more than anything else the silly and hollow nature of the proceedings.  The hearing pretends to be about values,  but are simply empty political maneuvering about a major decision regarding the Supreme Court.  The country is careening toward a situation in which the balance of power established in the Constitution is systematically undermined.

      Governments must believe the fantasies they spew out to convince voters.  If actions exaggerate the economic and social imbalances while assuring they are reducing them eventually they will hit a wall.  If problems in security and economic stability are addressed with repetitive platitudes instead of exploring the complex changes in policy needed no changes occur.  Reagan becomes a dramatic cowboy hero despite the myriad failures and impotence of his administration.  JFK is champion of a bold new vision, cut down before his prime, despite his inability to move civil rights in the congress,  his dangerous course in Vietnam, the failure in the Bay of Pigs,  and his drug addiction and sexual distractions.  The fifties are idealized as a high point in American moral culture despite the betrayal of personal liberty by HUAC and McCarthy (which ultimately had to be stopped by the US Army!), using FBI data collected by a closet homosexual/transsexual. The nuances of reality are so collapsed in this discourse that no balanced approach to governing society is possible.  The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which have left the Arab world in chaotic turmoil are not so easily dismissed.  In the words of Colin Powell, "If you break it,  you own it."     
     It is no wonder that with increasing frequency we are selecting leaders for the country who portray themselves in fundamentally adolescent terms (and often behave that way as well).   The public is encouraged to believe that the country is weakening because of its failure to fulfill its adolescent dreams (either “rebel” or “conservative”) instead of recognizing that an adult world is never so idealized and must accept compromises to function.

9/11 REDUX

      Niall Ferguson wrote a piece about 9/11 soon after (Dec2001) that sees the event as a marker in certain trends occurring in the world:  1)    international spread of terrorism with its arrival in NYC so recently  2)    ECONOMIC contraction of the world economy due to the paradoxical segmentation occurring despite efforts at globalization and free trade.  He cited the growing wealth inequity across richer and poorer countries as well as the strain of demand on raw materials esp oil as a source of energy and its long term pressure on the world economy.  He specifically cited the dilemma in Saudi Arabia of decreasing prices at the demand of western allies which contracted the internal economy of the country.   He did not comment on the irony that globalization of economic development would favor the emergence of China and India as it has to challenge US and European dominance.  3)     The shift from informal to formal imperialism in US foreign policy.   He chose to frame this as "imperialism" because he was writing a book comparing US as an imperial power to Britain in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  I think it is more accurate to frame this as the failure to transition from a view of the US as a superpower antagonist to some other role in international relations.  
     He did not explore the subtle interweaving of the three elements:  The spread of terrorism is the globalization of a symptom.   Terrorism arises when a minority attempts to overpower a vastly more powerful majority.   It is the statement that the minority does not see a more legitimate route to power and is always abandoned for legitimate recognition.   The  majority recognizes the power demand for what it is,  and can be caught in a struggle to prevent sharing of power.  When this occurs a totalitarian shift seems inevitable because of the population control needed to manage, and end, terrorism in a country.  And paradoxically,  it ends almost immediately when its power sharing demands are recognized (Ireland, Algeria , etc).   
    The economic changes in the world are about a complex shift in inequities:  in developed countries,  the lower tier of the labor market and middle tier of white collar labor are being devalued down to a level of world wide labor costs.  At the same time, in underdeveloped regions like China and India there is substantial improvement in the economic position of labor in the middle and upper range tiers,  and some improvement in lower tiers as well.   This is a shift of economic activity  across borders,  and not an overall contraction,  but in developed countries it is felt as a contraction.  One would expect that this would lead to terrorism in these countries,  and is probably doing so in individual acts of violence,and more dramatic political changes.
     Islamic terror does not always seem to be primarily religious, and the anti-Americanism provides the focus for this energy,  but not its fundamental source.  The 9/11 bombers were identified out drinking before the attack, not a sign of Islamic purity and tradition.   The US response to challenge terror "completely," in the Bush administration and after,  misses the problem of rising expectations and economic instability.   All those who preached NAFTA and etc are now reaping the whirlwind of rapid and unstable economic changes.   Instead of addressing the root issues in world affairs,  which are north/south issues now tearing apart the UN,  the current administration has set itself in a hardline imperialist position,  the exact response to favor the view of the terrorists about the US role.   When the US does things to ameliorate the north-south divide, as in responding to humanitarian crises in other countries,  it immediately undermines the terrorist position in the local region. 

The President Bush/Secretary Rice  view reframed the north/south issue as "promoting democracy".   This has given rise to the  result that in  deposing the Taliban and Saddam,  we have left the resulting countries in a worse position re economic stability than they were before and less democratic!  ISIS and the horrible mess in Iraq and Syria are the direct consequence that Colin Powell predicted before the 2nd gulf war:  It's the Pottery Barn slogan:  you break it,  you own it.
     It appears that the laws of Karma operate in international affairs:  
1) US deposes the ruler in Iran and install the Shah for more favorable oil relationship
2) The Iranian people revolt and install Khomenei to attack the US and reject the intrusion
3) Saddam H is armed and encouraged to fight Iran as a proxy.
4) He fails but attacks Kuwait instead.  
5) US eliminates  Saddam in two invasions and leaves Iraq in chaos.
6) The residual military and others unite with forces in Syria to create ISIS and recapture the country.  
7) The war to topple ISIS destabilizes both Iraq and Syria and facilitates Russia's re-entry.
A similar Karmic cycle can be drawn for the interventions in Afghanistan that led to Bin Laden.
     The 9/11 attack on the US sent a message that the US interventions could be countered by external agents.  The US responded to this by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (2) ignoring the karmic implications.   Bin Laden's goal was to cause fundamental political fragmentation of the US.  The long and unproductive wars in both countries have weakened and divided the country.   The failures of previous administrations has given President Trump the resources to take advantage of the very divided country.  This is not just a disagreement like Vietnam,  whether to fight or not,  it is a loss of national resources:  respect for US interventions,  decimation of the military and the young men and women injured in the endless war,  and the economic costs.
     The lessons of 9/11 have not yet been learned.

ON RELIGION

Religion is the answer to man's humanity.  The two great sources of suffering are loneliness and death, the perception of the end of existence of self.  Religion,  Marx's "opiate of the masses" is offered as the cure for these.  It offers a strong group affiliation that will not be overcome by other group or individual values,  with a morality to protect the integrity of the community.  And in one form or another,  it promises eternal life,  the end of death.   Each major religion embodies the words and insights of some wise person who thought about life and proposed guides on how it might be lived successfully.  Every religion has evolutionary survival as its basic value, though few acknowledge evolution as a reality! 

The great irony is that as groups coalesce around a specific body of wisdom,  t become hostile to groups that embody another wisdom,  and this often leads to violence and death.  The insight that is meant to ease the fear of death only makes it that much more likely to occur!  And this is not the result of any particular teaching,  but, across humanity,  wars between religious groups have been frequent and violent.  The "cure" for death has lethal side effects.

Is there no solution to this?  After centuries of religious wars,  and two world wars,  Europeans seem to be reducing their commitment to religious institutions,  and becoming more secular.   The Islamic countries,  unified by Ottoman imperial power,  have fragmented into traditional religious subgroups,  and ignited a series of wars,  with the help of western nations that reflect their religious differences.  The belief that you get to heaven sooner by dying in battle only allows the escape from intolerable features of earthly life.  War as a solution to human suffering is a cruel solution indeed.  And the world is moving toward it.

One answer is to make everyday human life pleasant enough to be worth living.  This is a social and economic challenge to society,  not simply a religious one,  but there is a morality to social and economic decisions.  The marxist solution to a fair society has proven no more valid than the capitalist model it intended to replace.  The problem is not in the theory,  but in the human capacity to find balance in life.   

How do you create a society in which each person is fairly valued for her ability to contribute to the community,  and still recognize that some persons are more gifted than others?  And who can be trusted to decide?  This is the social challenge of living effectively in groups that manage the loneliness of human life.  This is the morality of economic planning and the intersection of religion and economics.  The current Pope Francis is noteworthy for his efforts to address the issues of social inequality within the confines of Catholicism.  The wealth inequality gap that has ballooned in the US,  and in the world at large,  indicates that the process for valuing people is totally out of balance at this time.  The political pressure of the wealthy to preserve and expand their relative wealth in current US society,  with notable exceptions like Warren Buffett,  are clear signs that our society does not understand the moral basis of economics,  and will cause more suffering as a result until the process is re-balanced.

This will not come by praying.  And it will not come by returning to a traditional patriarchal religious system,  as is clear from the current battles in the Islamic world.   The notion of right-livelihood,  and respect for the environment,  and the ability to value others who are different without needing to make them join your tribe ----these are the skills that are needed to create a livable human society.

The challenge of dealing with death is always the same: acceptance.  Acceptance of the reality of being a living thing,  and human and therefore bound by death.  Illusions of immortality only devalue the importance of the present moment.   When living everyday is meaningful enough for each person,  then there will be no hurry to escape the present,  and no need to be afraid of doing so when the time comes. 

The French Take a VACATION

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(I wrote this back in 2004 or 5.  It captured my sense that the US was going off in the wrong direction,  though the French had their own strange ideas.  14 years have exaggerated the differences and complicated the picture with the role of immigration in both countries.)

A recent NPR piece gives a significantly different perspective on human values.  It seems, according to the reporter, that France guarantees each citizen a month of vacation every year.  This includes every working citizen, and even extends to those who are unemployed.  This surely exceeds the social tolerance of American culture.  But wait, there is more:  it seems, according to the reporter, that not all French citizens are accepting this right (or is it a responsibility?) and going on vacation.  So the French government has assigned counselors the task of identifying why certain families do not choose to go, and then counseling or educating them so that they will begin to enjoy this benefit. To the average American,  this seems truly “over the top”:  it typifies the peculiar French culture and its seeming deviance from any rational course of action.  How can we make sense of this culture, with its concern for art, fine food and wine, and this apparent obsession for the relaxation of its citizens?

While still nominally a capitalist economy, France shows an unusual concern for the well being and lifestyle of its citizens.  According to capitalist principles, the primary concern for the individual or the state should be the return on expended capital, ie money or its equivalent.  As Marx eloquently pointed out, humans are equivalent to “labor”, and represent a cost (or, more recently, a “consumer”).   It is the job of the human consumer to allocate his/her capital for whatever vacation he or she may choose.  For the French government to encourage or demand that the citizen choose vacation is to reverse the capitalist flow.   Perhaps the wily French have calculated that the increased consumption, which occurs during the vacations of the French, helps pay for the cost of encouraging this, or even covers the cost of lost production to the economy.  (Probably not.)   Surely there are other ways to stimulate consumer demand that are more product specific and not so geared to improving the lives of the citizens.

France is not REALLY a dedicated capitalist system.  As a country they put far too much emphasis on quality of life, REGARDLESS OF THE PROVEN ECONOMIC RETURN.  A country that is so concerned about culture, or the preservation of language, or  the careful preparation of food, even to the point of being too expensive to create truly “profitable restaurant chains” cannot claim to really be capitalist.  While its social welfare system is extensive,  it is not so extensive to justify being considered Socialist.   And what’s more, many of the cultural concerns of the French are not part of the social welfare system.

In the end we must conclude that the French are concerned about some other value, not directly related to return on capital,  and therefore not readily translated into American language or culture.   It is no wonder that they remain such a mystery.

Thoreau at 200

      H. D. Thoreau would be 200  July 12th.  There has been much  finger pointing over recent changes in national policy regarding conservation.  Let's assume that there is reasonable evidence that the earth is getting warmer, overall.  Also assume that human activity makes some contribution to this warming,  though the percentage is unknown.  And for that matter,  if the entire world population became totally involved in radically reducing greenhouse gases and other conservation measures,  no one knows how much that would slow global warming if any,  and how long it would take to have an impact.   So climate change deniers and conservationists have in common the inability to translate observable data on global warming  into the "correction of" global warming at a defined rate of improvement.  Thoreau was a surveyor and scientific observer of Nature,  and he would have been concerned about this lack of information.
    The verbal battle between the "deniers" and the "conservationists" is intense and both sides call on scientific studies,  some of which are useful but limited,  and others are of dubious validity.  This does not mean that there is no way to decide the issue.  There is ample data to show that carbon emissions pollute the environment and cause public health problems.  There is ample data to show that the exponentially increasing human population is making the earth less habitable.  And there is ample data to show that the accumulation of human waste and discarded materials (trash!) are impacting people's lives.  Why then did Al Gore choose to focus on climate change as his "Inconvenient Truth" rather than pollution?  Why do environmentalists so often focus on "extinction of species"("extinction is forever") as the crucial issue,  rather than quality of life of human habitability?   The answer is political,  not scientific.  Climate change and extinction are dramatic extreme situations which are presumed to be irreversible.  They are presented as relatively all or none:  either we prevent the earth from "warming up"  or the seas rise, cities are flooded, and crops dry out = major human crisis.  This would have appealed to Thoreau.  Living for two years in a cabin by a lake,  and withdrawing into the simplest lifestyle was his way of saying "all or none":  either you give up all the useless trappings of modern (19th century) life or you don't.  Most people didn't and still don't and this stance is more symbolic and media driven than practical and life focused.
    If we want to be "measured" conservationists we might start with a few simple assumptions:
1) set aside some land for wilderness and natural beauty and do not develop it,  and utilize other lands effectively for economic purposes
2) regulate the discharge of toxic materials into the environment so that each person has a safe and practically healthy surrounding space
3) consume materials in such a manner that the earth and people in it are self sustaining and do not degrade its habitability.
Each of these proposals seems reasonable enough until one begins to ask "how much" and "which places" and "who must stop consuming what".   For both individuals and countries these complex issues became controversial debates with frustrating outcomes.
     The Grand Canyon is relatively preserved though parts are flooded by the Hoover dam which provides significant hydroelectric power for Nevada and California.  But Glen Canyon was flooded and destroyed by the Glen Canyon dam in the 1960s despite a major political battle by the Sierra Club.  This is considered a great natural loss of a beautiful environment.  But without it,  the silt debris in Lake Mead would likely have choked off the Hoover Dam by now and created new problems.  Changing environmental patterns always have consequences not always foreseen.
   New England was beset by acid rain in the 1950s,  (and London terrible smog storms),  and power plant emissions were presumed to be significant factors.  After major political battles,  emissions were reduced and coal firing greatly reduced,  and now the coal industry is fighting back to try and regain jobs it will probably never use.   Changes in regulation of the environment have human consequences which must be factored in.
   The oceans are currently filled with unthinkable amounts of pollution,  especially along coastlines, because it is easy to dump trash into them,  and the assumption is made that they are so vast that the trash would somehow "disappear".  It hasn't and it now forms island like accumulations in regions of current intersection.  Do we really not care enough about the preservation of ocean space to find other ways (more expensive) to eliminate trash,  or not create it in the first place? None of these are big headline issues for the nightly news.  They are the basis for fund raising drives by organizations that advocate for conservation and the environment.  Why do we need such organizations instead of a general societal goal for preserving the earth as habitable?
   Thoreau's message was that it was each individual's task to balance his or her life to the needs of the natural world.  But what if the person is too greedy? or doesnt have any knowledge of the natural world because he grew up in Queens(you know who you are)?  or  works for a company that saves money for profits by not attending to environmental issues?
Is it possible to create a sustained environmental focus based on individual initiative?  The Sierra Club arranges outdoor activities and trips for its members,  and the general public,  including trips to National Parks and scenic areas.  If everyone in the country visited natural regions every year would that help?  Or would it just crowd the natural areas and make them "theme parks" with horrible traffic?   Should everyone bear the additional costs of recycling trash and waste,  or should the poor be required to pay less and the wealthy more?  What is fair?  For centuries rivers around great population centers have been polluted by waste human and industrial.  The Ganges is a dramatic example,  the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire because of pollution, Love Canal in New York is credited with multiple cancer deaths as a result of pollution.  Who should bear the cost of protecting the rivers and how to offset the disposal of chemicals and other materials if they cannot just be dumped?  Environmentalists see this as clearly all-or-none:  stop polluting,  stop developing and honor the land.   Commercial interests all agree except for the particular interest of theirs:  stop polluting, but what I am doing doesn't have evidence that it is toxic "enough" to humans.  (Why is it ok to dump any manufactured chemicals into rivers?)  Political solutions are most effective when they balance the needs of both parties in the situation.  But it is becoming increasingly difficult to find this balance,  and no small part of this is the rhetoric of the conservation movement and its assurance that in a certain number of years the world will be irreversibly         The current administration has withdrawn the US from the Paris Accords (has it really?).  This backlash is the result of targeting key corporate "bogeymen" and they in turn fund political opponents.   Companies do some bad things.  And so do people.  And getting people and companies to change is a political process best accomplished by real negotiation and not by the polarization of the current debate on both sides.  And by the way,  does anyone really think that the country will return to using coal as a major fuel source?  How can the people impacted by this declining industry be realistically empowered to economic recovery?

How wealth inequality subverts the rule of law

     The New York Times recently published an article that highlights a special issue in wealth inequality:  how the very rich protect their money.  (Permalink =  http://nyti.ms/2gIYlf9 ).  A wealthy couple who were both born in other countries but have lived and worked mostly in Florida,  are getting divorced.   Their work involved several businesses that offered services over the internet while delivering little and have been the subject of suits by several state attorneys general.  In response to these suits,  the husband took steps to move his wealth "offshore" and put it into accounts in locations  impervious to legal attack in the United States.   His wife claims not to have known about this,  and to be surprised, when they filed for divorce, that she too has no access to this money in the divorce proceedings.  She hired attorneys specially skilled in tracking "hidden" funds.
      At one level,  this is about the breakup of an unhappy marriage and how it leads to a fight over money to deal with the emotional distress.  But it also tells something about the super-rich.  The couple had several different homes in different countries and spent time living away in order to qualify for favorable tax rates based on where they were in residence.  The husband spent little time in the US  to avoid being vulnerable to legal proceedings.  The suits against the various companies allege consumer fraud and even if this is not proven,  it seems that the companies generated enrichment mostly for the owner(s?)  and for the legal and accounting staff hired to sequester the wealth.
     In the tension between the legal structure of local jurisdictions,  and the protective desires of the super rich,  individuals will make every effort to escape the regulation of the local system.   And this is equally true for large multinational corporations.  Apple,  a tech darling,  is known for sequestering much of its profits in a derivative company in Ireland where it pays much lower taxes.  For some time, Switzerland was famous  for a banking system which would allow wealthy from other countries to hold money in "secret" accounts,  not readily accessible to foreign legal proceedings, though reportedly this has recently improved, and the Swiss have been replaced by several other banking havens.   If we understand the "rule of law" as rules administered by a specific jurisdiction,  then this story is about the super rich and major corporations  do not believe they are subject to the jurisdiction or rule of law of the places where they earn their wealth!  
     And it would be a mistake to see this only as an offshore issue for the US.  A "60 minutes" story repeated twice in the last year,  shows how someone, pretending to represent a wealthy foreigner,  is offered help in sequestering money by New York attorneys (not all of those approached agreed!) to protect their wealth from the local countries from whence they are escaping.  There are super rich everywhere who, for one reason or another, wish to protect their money from local jurisdictions and legal suits and  there are  cadres of experts for hire to find ways to do so.   Though the story in the New York Times features the wife's outrage at discovering that she is "locked out", in reality the entire country is "locked out".   Such people believe their wealth can protect them from having to deal with their local society including litigation and tax laws.  They believe that their wealth places them above the law.  
      This gives a different meaning to being super rich.  It is not about how much you can buy or own, or how much you can enjoy your life.  It is about how much you can "control" your life circumstances to avoid the consequences of your actions.  Though you may have to live in special havens,  avoid previous partners who have claims on your money,  and subject yourself to other constraints to control your fortune.  This is not a problem that can be solved by one country alone.  Such transfers  can only be managed by a system of international coordination of banking.   And the rules protecting the rights of legal jurisdictions must be part of this process.   The world is far from having that sort of cooperation.  And it is not clear that the current US government sees this as a problem.

Economic development that destroys natural beauty

     The September 19th, 2016 New Yorker magazine has a profile on Yvon Chouinard,  the rock climber, adventurer,  developer of new climbing hardware,  and founder of the clothing company  Patagonia.  The profile captures the conflict between the adventurer and the businessman,  and reveals a fundamental split in the agenda of the outdoor community.  In keeping with Chouinard's personal values,  the company has championed high risk outdoor wilderness adventures,  primarily through the photographs in its catalog,  while maintaining a strong support for environmental protection.  The company has several initiatives to make its products more environmentally friendly and produces them with less environmental impact.  (Less than other outdoor clothing manufacturers?) He is personally famous for his climbing exploits and other adventures.  And the profile reveals his desire to be an environmentalist in the strongest terms.   Along with a few other colleagues of his generation (now 77) his career embodies the dream of people who pursue their favorite activities and are financially rewarded at the same time --- like Hobie Alter developing his beach boats,  and the Meistrell brothers who founded Body Glove wet suits.
     Chouinard is not happy though.  The natural world that he loved to explore and challenge is becoming crowded and overdeveloped.  Ski areas to him are "golf courses" of social and real estate development.  And climbing has become so popular  that major climbs require scheduling by serious climbers.   Surfing along the California coast is so crowded that on good days there is competition for waves that sometimes gets ugly.  What happened?  Success.  The adventures  of Chouinard and others were so appealing that more and more people were attracted to them,  and bought outdoor clothing,  and ropes,  chock and expansion bolts,  surf boards,  etc.  Outdoor adventure has become a major business.  REI of Seattle,  once a clubby supplier to hard core outdoorsy people is now a large marketer of the "outdoor lifestyle" with clothing,  lessons,  trips,  and everything you might need to enjoy your adventure.   Going outdoors is no longer for an odd group of folks who want to escape the more developed part of the world.  Major climbs like Mt. Whitney and Mt. Everest must be scheduled to deal with the high demand.  To be sure these are still daunting climbs requiring training and conditioning.   But more and more reports indicate that some of the climbers are marginally prepared and in mortal danger if the situation turns against them.  Deaths have occurred.  There are still wilderness areas in several parts of the Americas,  and the Himalayas.  But the most desirable of these areas get very busy at the peak times of the year and it is hard to say that you are "alone in the wilderness" at those times.
     Chouinard the businessman has succeeded in defining a lifestyle and a premium clothing brand that draws others to fantasize and sometimes populate the outdoors, so he is chipping away at the wilderness he is fond of, and wishes to protect.  It makes no sense to focus on him personally: there is now an extensive industry of equipment, clothing, travel planning,  and training all designed to make money off people wanting to be outdoors, in relatively wild and unspoiled places.  A similar challenge faces the National Park Service every year when it must deal with the seasonal demand for access and utilization of its most popular parks,  effectively degrading their "natural" and "wild" qualities into crowded tourist experiences.  Even the Sierra Club sponsors guided wilderness trips on the justification that getting people to experience the wilderness will make them stronger advocates for it.  There is a long history everywhere in the world of people discovering beautiful natural places and wanting to live around them. Housing developments are built by people wealthy enough to afford multiple homes,  and the sites become real estate projects.  Yvon's life story is just one poignant example of the incompatibility between the desire for natural experiences and the desire to have some economic benefit from the access.
     The solution is elusive.  It is possible to restrict the access to wilderness locations and require controlled reservations to enter them.  This already occurs in some popular National Parks.  And this effectively nullifies that sense of spontaneous wandering into wild places!  There are still beautiful unrestricted natural areas in the US and other parts of the world,  but the threats of development,  including high end tourist development are current challenges  along with natural resource development of logging,  mining,  and drilling.   How many ski mountains, once wild places with a few lifts and some rambling shacks, have been transformed into condo cities which flood to overflowing in good snow seasons and otherwise languish.  Avid skiers seem to rarely notice that the part of the mountain that is "wild and natural" has poles going up it to carry lift lines,  and the base is covered with lodges and resorts that are anything but "wild and natural".   Everyone is entitled to enjoy the gifts of nature in their own way,  but some ways effectively nullify the benefit for others.
     The only solution is changing the public's attitude toward using the natural world.  Give up using it to prove what a great climber you are.  Give up using it as a party space away from home with all the pleasures of home.  Give up making it easy and accessible to large numbers of folks.  Encourage visitors to concentrate only on seeing and understanding the natural features and beauty and not any way of exploiting or "using" it.  And this includes emphasizing natural means of navigation around the sites and limited access by motorized vehicles.   In short,  give up trying to make money off of the natural beauty in any aggressive way,  and fund access to preserve and protect the natural beauty that people initial claim to care about.  One can compare the North and South rim of the Grand Canyon to see how two different ways of developing the same site result in dramatically different experiences.  None of this is new.  Edward Abbey had the same rants in Desert Solitaire half a century ago.  And he did not slow the changes,  and neither will this.