Larry Ellison
Ka Pae Aina
In 2012 Larry Ellison purchased the island of Lanai, of Ka Pae Aina, including most businesses and housing for 300 million dollars.[1] The purchase of the island included:
... 98 percent of the island, including the two Four Seasons resorts and their championship golf courses, the more modest Hotel Lānaʻi, the majority of the luxury homes, and all of the employee cottages. In essence, most of the accommodations on the island are under his control, along with the gas station, the car rental agency, the supermarket, Lānaʻi City Grille, a solar farm, and all the buildings that house the small shops and cafes in Lānaʻi City. He owns 88,000 acres of former pineapple fields and 50 miles of beaches—but technically, in Hawai‘i, no one, with the exception of the U.S. military, is supposed to own beaches or control beach access....[2]
Ellison claims that his motives for purchasing the island and the majority of its businesses/ housing are rooted in creating a sustainable island. What this means for the Native Peoples of Ka Pae Aina and Ellison are likely not the same thing.
It is one thing to own an uninhabited island; it is a different thing altogether to purchase an island, as Ellison has, on which lives a sizable group of permanent residents with far longer connections (including genealogical ones, for many) to the land than the landlord has. For over a century, the lives and livelihoods of the residents of Lana'i have been tied to the destinies of a succession of white landowners with the resources to change not just the economy but also the geographical terrain of the island in the hope of achieving their singular vision of making the island "profitable."...[3]
Island Transportation
After the purchase of Lanai, Ellis also purchased Island Air (one of two airlines that serviced Lanai,) and considered buying the ferry, but never did. In 2016 Ellis would sell controlling interest in the airline and the company would go on to end service to the island of Lanai.
This series of sales point to the difficult position that island residents are put in when access to transportation is connected with ownership of the island. While restricting access to the island makes Lānaʻi a more exclusive destination, that same control over movement onto and off the island affects its residents’ ability to see family on other islands and its high school students’ ability to participate in statewide competition. Residents’ access to medical care is largely restricted to what they can receive on the island.[4]
Feudalism
Sally Kaye, a long time resident, wrote an open letter to Ellison pertaining to the sale, as reported in 'Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaii:[5]
First, don’t be intimidated by all the angst over how it could even be possible for a single really, really rich guy to buy an entire island in the state of Hawaii, United States of America, from another rich guy, in this day and age. You have to understand that since the 1850’s [sic] and Walter Murray Gibson and all those Mormons, this island has been owned and exploited by one really rich guy or another. There are generations here who don’t know any other way to live but under some sort of feudal-serf system. I know this is bizarre, that such a medieval lord- of-the-manor system of control could still be functioning in the Land of the Free, but there you have it.[6]
Laura E. Lyons in her essay 'Fantasy Island: From Pineapple Plantation to Toursit Plantation on Lana'i' discusses the feudalism present on Lanai as a consequence of wealthy white land owners purchasing and then selling the island to other wealthy white land owners:
Feudalism entails structures of debt and dependency that are significantly magnified in the context of a small island. Consider rents. While working on the $450 million renovation to the Four Seasons Resort at Manele Bay, construction workers stayed at the other resort, Koele Lodge. With both resorts closed, employment temporarily dropped. Worse yet, when the Manele Bay resort reopened and renovations shifted to transforming Koele Lodge into a $75 million wellness center, the need to house the construction workers elsewhere drove up the rents for those who have lived on the island for generations. It is not uncommon for a two-bedroom home to rent for over $2,000 per month. With an average annual income of $55,000, Lānaʻi’s residents pay a much greater percentage of their income for housing, much of which is owned by wealthy nonresidents with small holdings or by Ellison himself. For many who live on the island, the paychecks they receive from Ellison are largely returned to him in the form of rents or as payment for goods and services.[7]
Lyons continues her analysis later stating:
If capitalism is what makes possible the sale of this island and even the wind above it, then there is some irony in noting that rather than feudalism giving way to capitalism, as Karl Marx suggested, the two seem to exist on Lānaʻi in a codependent relationship. Capitalism has made it possible for a series of wealthy men to buy the island and to impose and imprint their egos and fantasies on the land. Yet when those visions prove less than profitable or more difficult to realize, these owners turn the island over to the next highest bidder, so that Lānaʻi is often on the verge of being abandoned by capitalism. Groups such as Kupa‘a no Lānaʻi refuse to accept capitalism as the inevitable and only conceivable way to organize their communities economically and politically, and they reject a rhetoric based on the fear of indebtedness to and dependency on landowners such as Murdock and Ellison.[8]
Private Property
The idea of buying and selling land didn’t really come into being in Hawaiʻi until the mid-nineteenth century. “The single most critical dismemberment of Hawaiian society,” explains Native Hawaiian historian Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, “was the Mahele, or the division of lands and the consequent transformation of the ʻāina [land] into private property between 1845 and 1850.” Private property rights not only led to the sale of land but also changed the political balance of power in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, as land ownership gave non-Natives greater influence on the politics of the day. Plantations require vast acreage, and U.S. imperialism proved the way to secure that land. By 1893, Queen Liliʻuokalani was overthrown by the white oligarchy, many of whom were heavily invested in the sugar industry, with backing from James Dole’s older cousin, Sanford Dole, who became the first territorial governor when the U.S. annexed the islands in 1898.[9]
Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos
https://theorg.com/iterate/the-people-who-invested-in-theranos
https://news.crunchbase.com/health-wellness-biotech/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-trial-investors-board/
Sources
- ↑ https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/hawaii-island-sex-drinks-insurrection/larry-ellison-lanai
- ↑ AIKAU, H. K., & GONZALEZ, V. V. (Eds.). (2019). Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvvj; Page, 87
- ↑ AIKAU, H. K., & GONZALEZ, V. V. (Eds.). (2019). Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvvj; Page, 87
- ↑ AIKAU, H. K., & GONZALEZ, V. V. (Eds.). (2019). Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvvj; Page, 88
- ↑ https://www.dukeupress.edu/detours
- ↑ AIKAU, H. K., & GONZALEZ, V. V. (Eds.). (2019). Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvvj; Page, 88
- ↑ AIKAU, H. K., & GONZALEZ, V. V. (Eds.). (2019). Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvvj; Page, 89
- ↑ AIKAU, H. K., & GONZALEZ, V. V. (Eds.). (2019). Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvvj; Page, 92
- ↑ AIKAU, H. K., & GONZALEZ, V. V. (Eds.). (2019). Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smvvj; Page, 89