>If their society doesn't collapse around them, which I'm more and
>more thinking is a real possibility.
I remember Chomsky saying somewhere that the rich need streets without potholes so they won't let things fall completely apart. But I think that ain't necessarily so:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42332-2002May31?language=printer
Brazil's Elites Fly Above Their Fears Rich Try to Wall Off Urban Violence
By Anthony Faiola Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, June 1, 2002; Page A01
SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Michael Klein, a 52-year-old executive known as the Home Appliance King, switched off the lights in his cavernous office, took a private elevator to the gusty rooftop of his fortress-like corporate headquarters here and caught his evening ride across town -- in a helicopter.
Beefy bodyguards guided Klein into the dimmed cabin of his midnight blue Agusta A119 Koala. Within moments, it lifted off, joining other airborne limousines darting over the hazy skyline. Klein is one of hundreds of new helicopter commuters in Sao Paulo, the world's fourth-largest metropolis, where the rich and powerful soar high above exploding urban ills.
En route to his mansion in Alphaville -- a walled city where the privileged live behind electrified fences patrolled by a private army of 1,100 -- Klein quietly stared out the window. His pilot clipped low over the honeycomb-like slums and clogged highways below. More than halfway through a nine-minute commute, the copter grazed over a cluster of inner-city prisons. A squad of machine-gun-toting guards stood near a perimeter wall, their gaunt faces squinting upward as Klein's copter buzzed by.
"The perspective is different from up here," remarked Klein, a graying hulk of a man and executive director of Casas Bahia, one of Brazil's largest electronics retailers. Over the din of the blades, he told a reporter that "it even looks beautiful sometimes. Up here, however, it is safe. Down there -- ." He paused, staring across the metal and glass horizon. "Well, it's another story."
Sao Paulo -- a city of 18 million, populated by the fantastically wealthy and the severely poor with little in between -- is, by some accounts, a vision of future urban life in the developing world. As homicide and kidnapping rates have soared to record levels, civilian helicopter traffic here has become what industry executives describe as the busiest on Earth. Helicopter companies estimate that liftoffs average 100 per hour. The city boasts 240 helipads, compared with 10 in New York City, allowing the rich to whisk to and from their well-guarded homes to work, business meetings, afternoons of shopping, even church.
It is, sociologists here say, a sign of the way urban society in Latin American's largest nation is changing. Amid rising crime and overpopulation, the rich are retrenching into hyper-insulated lives.
[...]
Despite a lackluster economy, a $2 billion-a-year security industry is thriving across Brazil. Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war. A wealthy Sao Paulo businessman, who spoke on the condition his name be withheld, said he allows his daughter to boogie at nightclubs only under the eyes of a commando turned bodyguard. In a city where the wealthy are known for ostentation, many are now buying low-profile economy cars to fool kidnappers and thieves.
"We have become prisoners in our own homes," said Ellen Saraiva, the elegant wife of a construction magnate, as she sat in her tasteful living room in a heavily guarded building in Sao Paulo's fashionable Jardims neighborhood. After a series of high-profile kidnappings on nearby streets last year, she and her husband paid $35,000 to bulletproof their understated gray Volkswagen. The armoring cost twice as much as the car.
"I pray to God every time I leave my building," she said. "I live in fear for myself and my family. One of my daughters is studying abroad right now, and as much as I miss her, it makes me feel at peace to know she is not here living through this nightmare."
[....]
"The elite have made a decision. Instead of looking to better Brazilian society in general, they are abandoning it and finding their own personal protection behind guarded walls," said Teresa Caldeira, a noted Brazilian anthropologist and author of the book "City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo." "The rich are retrenching, restricting their lives in incredible ways and living their lives in an increasingly paranoid fashion."
[...]