Hawaii Superferry: Green Democrats’ Racial Power Game
by Andrew Walden, 8/30/2007
The attacks against the Hawaii Superferry follow an established pattern well known to any who watched the Hokulia battle unfold on the Big Island. Wait until a major capital project is at its most financially vulnerable point -- just before beginning operations -- then swoop in and obtain a court order to stop their activities. In both cases the Hawaii Supreme Court plays the key role. In the Hokulia case, the Hawaii Supreme Court intervened by refusing to act. In the Superferry case the 5 justices intervened by waiting until the last minute and then coming up with their Aug. 23 decision in record time.
The attacks on Hokulia were an operation controlled and funded by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs through the native Hawaiian Legal Foundation. Their objective was to expand the power of OHA (and a future Hawaiian tribal government) by legally establishing its ability to extract millions of dollars from developers.
The attacks on the Superferry are an operation of the “green” wing of the Hawaii Democratic Party. Green Democrats playing a prominent role include anti-Superferry lawsuit plaintiff Maui Sierra Club chair person (and Maui Democratic Party Chair) Lance Holter, Kauai Democrat Senator Gary Hooser, and failed former Kauai Democratic Mayor JoAnn Yukimura—unceremoniously ousted after Hurricane Iniki. According to the anti-Superferry civil disobedience organizers, HUI-R (Who we are), website, Yukimura took part in some of their organizing meetings.
The green-Democrat controlled County Councils of Hawaii, Maui and Kauai all voted resolutions hostile to the Hawaii Superferry. Holter’s lawsuits have stopped Superferry service to Maui. In Kauai protest videos, numerous people egged on by Hooser and joined dockside by Yukimura are seen waving William Aila for Governor and David Henkin for Lt Governor signs left over from the green Democrats’ failed effort to defeat the union Democrat Iwase-Solomon team in the 2006 Democrat gubernatorial primary. As they blocked the ferry full of local visitors from Oahu, a nearby cruise ship sat in the harbor unmolested.
Money and political power go together in Hawaii. At Hokulia the money grab was announced by the published demand for millions of dollars in payments to NHLC’s lawyers and their clients as individuals. OHA’s gang on the ground includes many of the same individuals now trying to stop the Sea Mountain development at Punaluu. They also include many of the same people who in the 1990s attacked the True Geothermal plant in Puna, leading the federally funded transfer of 25,856 of the acre Wao kele o Puna tract to OHA, a transaction just completed Aug. 27, 2007. OHA claims this land will be the first property of a new Hawaiian sovereign government. All of these activists are enabled by creation of a passive-aggressive cult of Hawaiian victimology swimming in a sea of lies about Hawaiian history and about the environment.
In the case of the Superferry, the greens are seeking to expand their power by dramatically enlarging the scope of environmental assessments. The Honolulu Advertiser August 25th article turns to Denise Antolini, boss of the taxpayer-funded Environmental Law Program at the University of Hawaii Richardson Law School, and explains the basis for the Supreme Court decision: “A 1981 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling in a case involving a water transmission project and the Molokai Homesteaders Cooperative clearly set the role of the environmental review law as covering the secondary impacts and socioeconomic consequences of major projects.” Antolini, of course, once worked for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.
See http://tinyurl.com/yw4tsg
Obviously the Supreme Court’s sudden choice, after only 5 hours "deliberation" to unanimously remember this 26-year-old Molokai case, is driven not by the demands of legal precedent, but is rather an exercise in politically motivated cherry-picking from past decisions.
None of the cruise ships or high-speed whale-watching catamarans introduced over the last 26 years has been held to this standard. Since everything has “secondary impacts and socioeconomic consequences,” the Hawaii Supreme Court decision, when finally written and published, could give the greens a legal (and therefore financial) claim on any type of economic activity they choose to attack.
Why is this happening? The green faction of the Democrat Party recognizes that they are going to need a new source of money once the flow of federal pork is cut off by the departure of U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, now 83 years old. The Akaka bill will be one source of continued pork. Closely interrelated, the green Democrats are devising these legal strategies to create additional sources of cash and power.
The green Democrats projected new power base rests on the cancerous expansion of environmental law and laws allegedly based on Native Hawaiian traditional rights -- all rooted in the 1978 state constitutional revisions which created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and expanded by a long series of Hawaii Supreme Court decisions. These are being used to extract millions of dollars from any enterprise foolish enough to invest in Hawaii projects.
Two taxpayer-funded departments of the UH Richardson School of Law—Environmental Law and Native Hawaiian Law -- have been created to train lawyers in the method. The expansion of these "laws" comes mostly from Supreme Court rulings, not acts of the Legislature. These precedents are being selectively used to create a new power base which the green Democrats hope will be in place to take over from Inouye’s decaying union-Democrat machine. Their current strength within the Democratic Party is demonstrated by the approximately 25 percent of non-blank Democrat primary votes which went to Aila and Henkin in 2006 and the 27 percent of Hawaii Democratic delegates pledged to Dennis Kucinich for the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Unlike the money hungry gang which OHA and NHLC relies on for shock troops against Hokulia, True Geo, and Punaluu, the green Democrat ground forces are motivated by a belief in their own superiority over other humans. This ideology is known as “deep ecology” and is openly anti-human, hence the attacks on passengers waiting to board the Superferry, the numerous derisive comments about Oahuans, and the slogan “stupid ferry, stupid riders.” As one protest leader on Kauai explains, “people too, can be a form of pollution.”
There are many elements of farce to this power game. Giving cover to the overwhelmingly haole Kauai protesters is the so called “Polynesian Kingdom of Atooi.”
Announced in an April 1 (yes, April 1) letter to the editor of the Garden Island and headed by Dayne Aipoalani, the group claims to want to overthrow both the United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom. As usual the reality is a bit more prosaic. As the Garden Island explains April 12: “The Hawaiian Homeland Department visited Aipoalani at one point and offered him land. “They tried to bribe me with a little hill,” he said. “That wouldn’t solve the problem.”
http://www.kauaiworld.com/articles/2007/04/12/news/news01.txt
On Maui, the Sierra Club and “Maui Tomorrow,” a group dedicated to re-making Maui to serve the whims of rich part-time residents, went to the Maui circuit courtroom of Judge Joseph Cardoza in an effort to force a halt to Superferry operations. Unlike other groups who pretend to have local roots, Maui Tomorrow unabashedly seeks support from rich outsiders for whom Maui is just a pretty tropical escape from the stresses of Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Maui Tomorrow leader Roger Sussman, writing in the March 2, 2005, Haleakala Times, describes his effort to contact and solicit funds from the Beatles’ George Harrison who “had picked gorgeous Maui's North Shore, out of all the attractive places in the world, to have his tropical retreat.”
Sussman then explains: “Alas, I never did find George, but there remains a need for potent, admirable, Maui-loving philanthropists to step forward and contribute in a big way to MT's operating funds. The challenges of keeping things sane, fresh, and beautiful around here continue, and those challenges aren't going to go away as our population increases.”
Unwittingly describing his own organization, Sussman continues: “There are forces at work in the islands which are motivated by greed and undue power. Stopping the forward movement of these forces requires education and litigation, both of which cost money -- often fairly large amounts of it -- to make them effective.
“There's a great opportunity for public service here with your money, Oprah, or whoever else cares about Maui enough to call this island home, or who visits us here fondly from time to time.”
The green Democrats and OHA have been working on their power structures for a long time and the results show in the recent census figures. For the first time ever, the sister islands are majority white. This is due to two trends -- rich new-age cultists moving to ‘paradise’ -- and locals moving to the mainland.
The driving force of both trends is the increase in Hawaii property values which prevent young local families from owning their own home in Hawaii and provides a financial incentive for wealthy transplants. The more “sacred” the land and the more environmental and cultural restrictions placed on its development, the more expensive any property development must be -- and the more lucrative the investment of existing land owners.
The only exception to this pattern is on parts of the Big Island. The 2006 census figures show Hawaii County is the only county to have a net inflow of locals since 2000. The green Democrat Hawaii County Council majority -- with advisors including a County Clerk imported from the Environmental Law dept of U.H. Richardson -- is working every trick in the book to choke it off. These efforts include blocking road construction, flood-plain restrictions, fair share payments and concurrency, and ironically, affordable housing requirements designed to drive up the cost of construction and eliminate sources of blue-collar work. If successful, Hawaii Island would cease to be the last refuge for young local families. The environmentalists’ de-facto “white Hawaii” policy would be victorious.
None of this is limited to Hawaii. Sierra Club national board member Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society calls for the elimination of 5.5 billion humans. In a May 4 commentary he explains: “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion ….”
And who does Watson want to get rid of? Not people like himself. He gives some clues: “fifty millennia ago, the entire ecosystem of Australia was disrupted and transformed by (the Aborigines).” Another clue: Watson complains about the alleged loss of crabs along Vancouver, Canada shores blaming: “Vietnamese immigrants that descended like locusts onto those beaches ….” Says Watson: “Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans.” In other words only the “enlightened, conscious and progressive” may reproduce.
Link: http://tinyurl.com/2qkn4h
Watson is not alone; many of the leading anti-immigration (including legal immigration) groups including Numbers, USA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform are headed by green activists who tried in 1998 and 2004 to take over the national Sierra Club board. They argue that third-world people endanger the environment by rising to American levels of prosperity. The solution? Keep them out and keep them poor.
Link: Greens vs Illegals http://tinyurl.com/27g9yb
Watson describes human beings as “both pathogen and vector” and “the AIDS of the Earth.” Kauai Superferry boycott organizer John Tyler Cragg in an Aug. 30 letter to the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin says having a Superferry without an EIS is like, “an anxious boyfriend wishing to have unprotected sex without a preliminary AIDS test to his new girlfriend (Kauai).” Apparently Oahu visitors are a disease, but cruise ship tourists elicit nary a peep.
http://starbulletin.com/2007/08/30/editorial/letters.html
In 1954 the rise of the union-Democratic party machine in Hawaii came on the backs of unionized, mostly Asian, plantation workers, displacing the previous Republican haole-Hawaiian alliance, which had ruled ever since native Hawaiians embraced the Territory in the 1902 elections. Nationally, the 1968 Presidential race marked the abandonment of Democrats’ previous white segregationist base in favor of blacks and numerous special-interest groups. Does the coming transformation of the Democratic Party in Hawaii foretell yet another racial transformation, this one marked by the gradual expulsion of their previous Asian base in favor of settlement by “enlightened, conscious, and progressive” whites? The census figures show it is already becoming a reality on the sister islands.
There is a solution. Law enforcement and the Coast Guard can choose to exert the effort necessary to keep the protesters from blocking the Superferry. Judge Cardoza can rule that the Superferry be allowed to operate while the Environmental Assessment of the Kahului harbor improvements is completed. Voters can elect representatives not beholden to the Democrats’ competing power games.
A state or county cap on hotel rooms can be enacted to shatter the link between ever-increasing tourist development and tax revenues. The laws, taxes, and regulations strangling non-resort businesses in Hawaii can be repealed to diversify the economy. Instead of hiring more government employees just to keep the unions flush, roads could be built.
Newly elected representatives can enact laws overturning some of the most egregious Supreme Court decisions and stopping OHA and Kamehameha Schools trustees from holding Hawaiian Homelands and Kamehameha Schools admissions hostage to the Akaka Bill.
Until these things happen we can expect to see more political games and power grabs played out in attacks on business and on human rights such as the right to travel freely and we can expect the exodus of locals to the mainland to continue as ‘Hawaiiland’ becomes more and more of a reality.
Link: Hokulia
http://tinyurl.com/26rct2
Link: Punaluu
http://tinyurl.com/29of7h
Native Hawaiian Autonomy Act:
http://tinyurl.com/2hat2z