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Monday, January 11, 2016
January 11, 2016 News Read
By Andrew Walden @ 11:27 AM :: 4096 Views

Update on Honolulu Charter Commission – Meeting Friday

Hee steals from other Hawaiians and gives to me me meeeeeee

CB: I’m very disappointed in people I know or have respected by reputation for appealing to a judge against prison time for the blatant tax cheat Albert Hee. (You shouldn’t be surprised.  Its who they are.)

That list includes former State Supreme Court justice James Duffy Jr., former state lawmaker Heather Giugni, current state Sen. Brickwood Galuteria (who has his own residency problems), former Public Utilities Commission chair Hermina Morita, retired Vice Adm. Robert Kihune, executive director Jeff Gilbreath of Hawaii Community Assets, and Alvin Parker, principal of Ka Waihona Charter School, who should be impressing his students with honesty rather than excusing fraud and misuse of public money.

Fortunately, their pleas went nowhere and Hee got the federally-suggested incarceration time for his kind of felony — 46 months, just short of four years….

Hee paid from public funds the membership fee at Waialae Country Club for supporter and business associate Kihune, so maybe that’s Kihune’s excuse for his letter of support.  (Hee steals from other Hawaiians and gives to meeeeee….)

The prosecutor noted that Hee showed “no remorse and absolutely no acceptance of responsibility.” He blamed his accountants.

So I ask all those letters-of-support writers named above what that says to taxpayers and good citizens?

Judge Susan Mollway was unimpressed. She said in court that Hee’s demeanor during his trial “seemed to be minimizing the seriousness of what he had done.”

The federal guidelines for sentencing in the Hee case called for between 41 and 51 months in prison, and Mollway went for 46 — the halfway point.  (Should’ve gone for 102.  The double.)

Dec 3:  Politicians and pals of convicted criminal Al Hee push judge for lenience

read … Supporters Of Convicted Tax Cheat Are Sending The Wrong Message

Real Income: Hawaii Residents Lose 3.8% in Decade

CB: …A primary sign of slippage is that, while Honolulu residents’ incomes rose 26.6 percent from 2005 to 2015, the cost of living rose 30.4 percent, according to the consumer finance website NerdWallet.  Losing 3.8 percent of our buying power in the space of a decade is demoralizing….

So it is perhaps logical that island residents have the second largest credit card debt among all states, after Alaskans; the typical Hawaii resident owes $4,251.24….

Hawaii residents also owe a lot to the banks for our homes. Our average mortgage debt is $236,125, placing us second after California — another place with a soaring real estate market….

Perhaps more problematic is that more than 30 percent of all renters in the islands spend more than half of their income on rent, which places them in an especially tenuous financial position….

A recent examination of the best and worst places to find a job by the personal finance website WalletHub found that workers entering the job market face a huge obstacle: Honolulu has the least affordable housing out of the nation’s 150 largest job markets when the cost of living is factored in.

That is a big part of why Honolulu also came in at the bottom of the list in the starting-salary metric — again, when the cost of living is factored in. It was even worse than Brownsville, Texas, where the median household income is less than half of Honolulu’s….

read … Brownsville Better

New Laws for 2016

SA: As the Legislature prepares to open for business on Jan. 20, it’s worth remembering why it’s important to pay attention. Of the 2,894 bills introduced in the 2015 session, only 252 passed. Of those, 243 became law. Such a low passage rate is typical, and may make it easy to ignore the Legislature’s daily work. But what doesn’t pass can be as important as what does. And what becomes law can have a direct effect on our lives.

The following laws, for better or worse, took effect Jan. 1….

read … Don’t leave politics to just politicians

Secular State Just Can’t Reach Spiritual Hawaiians

SA: The study showed Hawaiians were arrested for juvenile violations or status offenses at a greater rate than any other ethnic group and were nearly twice as likely to be arrested as whites.

But the report also had another key finding: The Hawaiian offenders expressed the greatest level of remorse, acknowledging that what they did was wrong. That remorse, however, mostly went untapped, according to Lee, former chairman of the Juvenile Justice State Advisory Council.

“The problem is there’s no place in the system to ask for forgiveness,” he said.

Striving to reverse the seemingly endless cycle of arrests, Lee and others involved with the system held dozens of meetings in Hawaiian communities around the state, asking what was needed to get at the root of the overrepresentation problem.

They got their answer: People wanted a program grounded in culture, aina, ohana and spirituality, which are all part of Wahi Kana‘aho, according to Lee, who ran a similar program on Molokai.

read … Need Religion

Kauai: Jail is a Great Place to Work

KGI: Something is working over at Kauai Community Correctional Center.

That’s what Lt. Thomas Weston Keolaikepapalua Lindsey Jr. will say if you ask him about the culture surrounding Kauai’s prison, its guards and the inmates who live there.

“We’re all one community,” Lindsey said. “It’s not us against them, bad guys. Crime comes in every shape, size and color. They come from good families, bad families, rich families, poor. If you were to ask me what a criminal looks like, I cannot describe him.”

Lindsey, who’s been working at the prison for 20 years, said as a corrections officer he has to carry a level of respect for those in their cells. Mutual respect is part of the job if you want to do well by the inmates, he said.

And that’s the kind of thing he wants those responding to the Hawaii Department of Public Safety’s recruitment call for new adult corrections officers to understand. The statewide recruitment period just opened and closes at midnight on Jan. 29.

Although there are no vacancies at KCCC, that can change as people retire or move on, said Toni Schwartz, spokeswoman for Hawaii Department of Public Safety. That’s why the department likes to keep a list of about 100 to 150 qualified applicants statewide, Schwartz said….

read … ‘Honorable calling’

We Use GMOs, So Does Everyone Else—and we’ve been doing it for 20 Years with no harm

KE: As the food industry and anti-GMO groups continue to wage war over labeling, Campbell Soups has copped a brilliant marketing move, introducing a label that discloses genetically modified ingredients in a favorable way….

read … Musings: Winning! Losing!

Death In Paradise Is All Too Frequent For Visitors To Hawaii

CB: Yet state, county and even tourism officials are doing little to try to reduce what’s become one of the highest rates of visitor deaths in the nation….

read … Death

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