#civilbeat

A major rail contractor has prevailed in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by its former in-house counsel, who had alleged he was fired after warning the company not to conduct “illegal activity” related to the multibillion-dollar transit project.

Big Island Lava Flows Reach Site Of Geothermal Plant https://t.co/KcLkDI8eWt pic.twitter.com/zm1uOqrT5j

Featured last year on PBS and in some of the world’s best film festivals, Kumu Hina is now up for best documentary at the GLAAD Media Awards.

by Todd Simmons - Jan. 29, 2016:

Kumu Hina, an acclaimed documentary about a Honolulu transgender teacher, her halau, a particularly remarkable student and mahu identity, has been nominated for a prestigious GLAAD Media Award, often referred to as the Oscar for LGBT film and television.

It’s the latest in a series of high-profile recognitions for the 2014 feature, which is nominated in the Best Documentary category for the annual awards presented by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. It was featured in 2015 as part of PBS’s award-winning Independent Lens series and in some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, including Berlin, Toronto, Beijing and Budapest.

Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson of Honolulu, whose previous films Out in the Silence and Otros Amores have earned prominence and acclaim including an Emmy Award and feature treatment on PBS, are the first Hawaii filmmakers to have a project nominated for a GLAAD Media Award.

In the documentary category, Kumu Hina is up against four other nominees, including a biopic on 1950s-60s sex symbol Tab Hunter and two men who in 1975 became one of the first same-sex couples in the world to legally marry. Wilson said it’s particularly noteworthy that Kumu Hina was nominated in a breakout year for transgender issues around the world.

“In a year when a record number of nominees included transgender people or characters, Kumu Hina introduced the world to the Hawaiian philosophy of honoring and respecting mahu, those who embody both male and female spirit,” Wilson said. “The GLAAD nod is symbolic of the growing recognition of all that Hawaii and Hawaiian culture have to offer beyond the tourist brochures.”

In fact, 75 of the 147 nominees this year include transgender characters or issues, according to GLAAD, which released the nominations earlier this week.

Welcome to our year-ending “Choose Your Headline!” edition of HI-Spy. Ready your darts. Get set. And this week’s choices, 3 drawn from last Sunday’s Star-Advertiser, are:

1.      Violent Vegan Haole GMO Protesters Threaten Mom-n-Pop Monsanto

Subtitle: Horrifying Tales From Kauai of Peace-Loving Locals Being Forced to Beat-Down Irritatingly Vocal Malihini to Defend The Unregulated Pesticide Spraying and GMO Crop-Growing of Their MultiNational Corporate Employers

      The Story: In which the local monopolist paper, by omission and misattribution and misquotation positions a leading anti-GMO activist, Joan Conrow, as anti-anti-GMO protest; hints that violently haole vegans provoked attacks on themselves by sweetly aloha-humming farmers; claims that a mayor’s veto of a council vote was all-but-illegally overridden by a shocking appointment of a council member at the 11th hour—but never mentions that a council member abruptly resigned to take a job with said mayor’s patronage machine, leaving the council short of a majority on the eve of the override...

      If the above were written from the opposite point of view you could easily assert that Monsanto et al. were quietly encouraging so-called locals to beat up activists. Same burden of proof. It doesn’t need to be a written memo. Monsanto is already saying: Wow, what if we were to shut down and there goes your job? Hmmmm?

      Let’s say you’re getting paid to spray and also beat up someone who’s anti-spray. Aren’t you also getting paid to beat up people? Discuss.

Source: Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Sunday, 12/15, “Seeds of Division”  

2.      To Stay (Barely) Employed, the Construction Industry Needs 50 New Condo Towers A Year; 500 over the Next 10 Years; 1,000 For the 20-Year Career of a Single Construction Worker

Subtitle: Help Save the Authentic Construction Worker Lifestyle!

The Story: In a startlingly frank admission, an official from the PAC-like Hawaii Construction Alliance explained that a new Kuhio Waikiki tower sprung on unsuspecting residents (with the city’s connivance) will provide “24 months of employment” for 600 workers out of the organization’s 15,000 members.

If you do the math that means each 280-340-unit condo (the size of the two Kuhio towers) is worth one job for 300 people per year. Do the math again: to employ all 15,000 workers we need 50 towers a year.

Yes, 50 towers a year. Remember how a few months ago Kaka’ako was suddenly slated for 29 towers? How do you think they arrived at that number?

Let’s run those numbers one more time. One tower over 24 months means we're providing a quarter of a job for each HCA worker a year. A quarter of a job. For full employment, that means the next 10 years we’ll see 500 towers; the next 20 will see 1,000 towers; and so on. That's the true price of a 20-year career of a construction worker. Now we understand what the quote meant a couple months ago, the one where the state economist said “the economy is passing the torch from tourism to construction”—adding, chillingly, “as expected.” As expected. They’ve known all along.

If you combine this with yet another chilling detail—the state permitting and planning head saying that sea-level rise will mean no Oahu beaches by 2035, effectively ending tourism as an economic engine, we are left with that sinking feeling familiar heretofore only to residents of Vanuatu and Bangladesh.

At 50 towers a year we get a new state motto: lucky you leave Hawaii.

So we’re watching Hawaii destroy itself. For the benefit of mainland and global investors, of course—the money doesn’t stay here once the towers are up. Jobs? Short-term. All to keep happy a bunch of lager louts who never outgrew their collection of Tonka Trucks.  

However, political reality makes it a state priority to preserve authentic local and Hawaiian culture, or, in its place, a culture of high-wage-work-whenuwant, collect unemployment restadatime, own big trucksnstuff, wear color-coordinated t-shirts to meetings, beatdown Malihini for exercise...

      Source: Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 12/15/13, “Second Tower in Waikiki Plan Raises Furor”

      (Note: the math has been re-done since this was first posted; the results didn't get any better.)

3.      Rail Isn’t Working! But 140 Political Patronage Employees Are

Subtitle: So What If Italian-Based Contractor Ansaldo Is Mafia/Bankrupt/Incompetent as well as Refusing to Perform?

The Story: “We knew that already,” sighs HART head Grabauskas, happy that at least Parsons Brinckerhoff gave a job to a Malihini like him (and 139 others). Ansaldo, which has been under investigation for Mafia ties back in Italy for almost a decade, is claiming it never promised a flexible train configuration based on passenger use projections. That means, folks, we will never see more than a two-car train with about 64 seats. (Doesn’t seem like a lot to serve a couple hundred thousand West Siders and we pointed that out for years...but $6 billion buys a lot of silence in this town.) Now Ansaldo is daring HART to sue them for non-performance, since then they can withhold train cars and charge overruns to the moon, win the mediation (since the state and city notoriously can’t write or read contracts), and raise the overall bill into the $7 billion range.

You are paying for this, right? Did you see your new tax assessment this week? Ours went up 33 percent. Yes, that rail is quite an income redistribution scheme. And it lines the pockets of 140 hack politician operatives.

      Source: “What we needed to show was...[ellipsis courtesy of Honolulu Star-Advertiser]...the package of positives outweighed the decision. When we look at this, this was the right decision. There’s no way this decision doesn’t save us money.” –Dan Grabauskas, HART exec director. Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 12/15/13, “Rail Agency Alters Train Design.”

 4.      State Wants Inouye, Obama Libraries But Won’t Put One in Nankuli

Subtitle: Priorities Say Everything About Morality

The Story: Nanakuli has been waiting for a public library since the 1970s. But the political interests and seed money men only care about digging another trough to stick their snouts in. Who needs educated children? They’re only going to have ideas. We know where those lead.

 5.      UH Football Program Losses Mean Cutting Up to 12 Other Athletic Programs

Subtitle:  One Big Loser, Football Gets a Break and Over $2 Mil of Debt Forgiveness

The Story: They were an entertaining, never-quit bunch of guys who would’ve won more games with a defense. But the economics are against them in the newly re-aligned college sports world. If you follow the money, it’s going far, far away, over the rainbow. Rainbow Football should follow it. The UH sports program can compete in smaller sports; it doesn’t need 54-man rosters flying all over the country to lose while paying other schools ($245,000 apiece!) to come here and win.  

 ###

So, yes, the past couple of weeks have seen the wheels coming off Hawaii in a lot of ways. Climate change, over-construction, the train to nowhere eating up fantastic amounts of public money for absolutely nothing... Indeed, there are so many incipient disasters thrusting up from our good red earth it almost seems Biblical—if only that word didn’t conjure up the specter of God’s wrath over the same-sex marriage bill. (Then again, Coleen Machado invoked the Lord’s name against the sinners and look what happened to her...)

Still, to bravely dare the Biblical theme: Is the end nigh? No, not quite. At 25 towers a year we still have a good 10 years before a thick brown cloud of smog settles in permanently, our streets and oceans run black with sewage, drug abuse and disease and violence stalk our barrios and favelas—and the great tax generating machine of tourism decamps for good. Then it’ll get interesting. Maybe Monsanto will be running human-GMO trials by then, using those spare bodies Hawaii has produced without purpose, place, or payroll to come up with ways to prolong the lives of the 1 percent.

And who know, the Star-Advertiser might even be around to report on it.

DC808: On the Wire Episode 5 (by civilbeat)

There was a lot to think about after Monday's debate, "Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future," with authors from "The Value of Hawaii" and "The Price of Paradise.".