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by Anthony Pignataro

May 22, 2008

WEDNESDAY, May 14

Hawai‘i needs to attract global investment dollars. So said John Rutledge, “who has advised two presidents on tax and economic policy,” at a recent economic conference, according to today’s Honolulu Advertiser. Maybe this state really is filled with out-of-touch hicks, but blanket statements like that strike me as a tad obvious. Hawai‘i is part of the U.S., which is part of the global marketplace, where money, labor and products flow like water over a fall. What isn’t obvious from the story is that, truism or not, Rutledge probably isn’t a guy we should be taking uncritically. The Advertiser describes Rutledge as simply a guy “who advised President [Ronald] Reagan on a plan that brought the country out of a recession and more recently was an adviser to the [George W.] Bush White House on tax policy.” Neither former job is all that impressive. Yes, recession did plague the early years of the Reagan Administration, and yes, economic growth marked the closing years. But in between Reagan pushed two tracks—tax cuts for the wealthy and unchecked defense spending—that changed our national debt from a fairly minor budgetary issue into a cancer that is today heavily constraining government spending. As far as Bush’s “tax policy” is concerned, that was simply tax cuts, for any and all economic problems. Economy’s growing well? Cut taxes. Economy is falling into recession? Cut taxes. It’s exactly the kind of mindless dogma that appeals to simpleton like George W. Bush. The end result—to no one’s surprise—has been an even larger national debt than that given us by Old Man Reagan. Is Rutledge seriously the best we can do for economic advice?

THURSDAY, May 15

And now some bad news for Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL). Today the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that NCL America will settled a civil rights lawsuit by paying $485,000 to seven former Pride of Aloha workers. Back in June 2004, NCL fired six of the seven workers—all of them Middle Eastern—after one asked another crewmember the location of the ship’s engine room, bridge and security office while the boat was docked on Maui. That crewmember apparently freaked out and contacted ship’s security, which in turn called NCL, which in turn contacted the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, which sent agents aboard and questioned the Middle Eastern worker and his buddies. After a brief investigation, the anti-terrorist guys concluded there was no threat to anyone and told NCL that the guys were harmless. NCL’s reaction was a little different—they fired the six workers (a seventh quit soon after), which prompted the lawsuit. Of course, NCL continues to deny that it did anything wrong, and why shouldn’t it? That fine breaks down to a little more than $62,000 per worker, and as a whole constitutes a mere 0.02 percent of the $2.2 billion in revenue NCL made during 2007. It’s probably company officials actually feel they did nothing wrong, and with a punishment like that, it would be surprising if they thought otherwise.

FRIDAY, May 16

Oh, how I love corporate euphemisms. Reading over this morning’s Pacific Business News stories on the big first quarter losses at the Hawai`i Medical Service Association (HMSA) and the moderate profit at Kaiser Permanente Hawai`i, it’s hard to imagine doctors in this great nation of ours used to make house calls. “The state’s largest health insurer said it fell short of its breakeven point by 2.7 percent of dues revenue in the first quarter of this year, which continues to be outpaced by rising health-care costs,” PBN reported on HMSA’s $10 million loss. Then 18 minutes later, PBN quoted Kaiser regional Chief Financial Officer David Delaney as saying his company’s profit “shows that we are working hard to continue controlling our costs.” Have we become so crass as a society that we must now refer to “treating people” as “health-care costs?” Perhaps if we were more honest about this—saying things like “It’s getting more expensive to provide people proper medical care”—then we might be less willing to accept these types of corporate explanations at face value.

SATURDAY, May 17

I can hope, can’t I?

SUNDAY, May 18

I know.

MONDAY, May 19

Both the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser tell us this morning that the Grand Old Party (GOP) is in trouble. Governor Linda Lingle—the only Republican in the entire state with any tangible power—wants more candidates for the state Legislature. Really? There are just 11 Republicans in the state House and Senate combined—a mere 14.5 percent. The Star-Bulletin holds up 2001 (when the GOP controlled 22 legislative seats) as some kind of high-water mark, but even that pencils out to just 29 percent. Republicans have never been very popular in Hawai‘i, and these days are the darkest yet. President Bush has broken the back of the GOP on two anvils named Iraq and Katrina—the former scorching our military and incinerating our moral authority abroad; the latter, referring to Bush’s tardy and feckless response to deadly Lousiana and Mississippi hurricanes, exemplifies Republicans’ inability to govern domestically. For all the GOP’s talk of being the “party of ideas,” they provided precious few when given the chance to govern. That a complete inability to govern foreign and domestically—as well as being perceived as one of the most bitterly partisan administrations since Tricky Dick Nixon—is hurting Republicans nationwide at the polls is not surprising. That this apparent collapse comes just four years after the drubbing Bush gave the Democrats in 2004 is, though, and suggests that Democrats are gaining in power not because of any superior organization or governing skills, but simply because they’re not Republicans.

TUESDAY, May 20

With Memorial Day less than a week away, it’s always nice to read things like yesterday’s outstanding Associated Press story—which ran on the front page of The Maui News—on the mass executions ordered by the South Korean government during the awful summer of 1950. It’s always heart-warming to learn that many thousands of American soldiers fought and died to protect a government that, while the North Korean army was sweeping down the peninsula, was gunning down as many as 100,000 “leftists and hapless peasants” with little or no judicial cause. Oh, and U.S. Army officers apparently stood around and watched, too, during many of the killings, but did not intervene. Kinda makes you wonder what our buddies in the current Baghdad regime are up to these days, doesn’t it?

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