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    ‘Treason’ allegations bust open national Jones Act debate

    Grassroot Institute
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    ‘Treason’ allegations bust open national Jones Act debate

    Supporters of the protectionist law are admitting America’s shipping industry could be better served

    The revelation earlier this month that an advisory panel to the U.S. Maritime Administration recommended charging Jones Act critics with treason — a felony punishable by death — sparked a wave of media attention last week that is still rippling through the U.S. maritime industry.

    Notable is the comprehensive and thoughtful article by Capt. John Konrad, “Shots Fired in Jones Act Debate,” in gCaptain, a prominent maritime publication not known for crusading against the Jones Act.

    Konrad seemed to lament that neither current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg nor his predecessor Elaine Chau “have done much to address the threat from [the] Cato [Institute],” which was one of the targets of the treason allegation.

    However, he said, based on a “source inside the Maritime Administration” that’s probably because they think “Cato’s efforts have not been very effective.”

    He said a “Jones Act lobbyist” told him: “We haven’t worried too much about Cato because they have spent a lot of time focusing on the shipment of goods to Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Frankly, the majority of American voters don’t care about our distant islands.”

    Konrad, however, seemed to think the Jones Act actually is vulnerable to significant change.

    “What Americans do care about very much,” he said, “is the escalating price of energy, the price of food, traffic congestion, highway deaths from large trucks, and … decarbonization. All problems that — according to MARAD’s own Marine Highway initiative documents — could be solved by moving cargo via ships and barges which can move a significantly larger amount of cargo at roughly 1/10th the amount of energy and carbon emissions compared to trucks” — the implication being that the Jones Act has hindered this transition.

    Thus, “in recent months,” Konrad said, “gCaptain has become aware of several new efforts to reform the Jones Act, and increasingly these groups are focusing on swing states and voters in the heartland and politically powerful places that could benefit most from increased short-sea shipping. Places like New York, Texas, Florida, California and Virginia, as well as the states connected to inland waterways.

    “Most of these groups are still in the exploratory phase,” he said, “but the reframing of concerns from distant islands like Puerto Rico to the heart of America, could, if left unchecked (and in concert with the U.S. Navy’s increased frustration over the lack of DOT support for shipyard expansion and sealift), be a stake in the heart of Senator Wesley Jones.”

    Konrad noted the success of a week-old YouTube video posted by “the wildly popular geopolitical strategist” and author Peter Zeihan that calls for Jones Act reform. It has been viewed more than 130,000 times and generated more than 1,300 comments.

    Konrad added: “Before exposing Zeihan to the fury of gCaptain’s American readers, it’s important to note that he suggests reforming the Jones Act, not replacing it, a view that some of the act’s most ardent supporters … agree with.”

    In the view of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, the most politically feasible reform probably would be elimination of the law’s U.S.-build requirement.

    This would allow American carriers to buy less expensive foreign-built ships, expand their fleets, add more maritime jobs, increase competition, bring down consumer prices, make more ships available to the military in times of crisis and better serve America’s economic needs in general.

    To view the brief Zeihan video, go here. A transcript is included. To read the entire gCaptain article, go here.

    Oahu short-term rental ban based on misunderstandings

    Grassroot Institute
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    Oahu short-term rental ban based on misunderstandings

    By Keli’i Akina

    You probably have heard that if you want less of something, all you need to do is tax and regulate it.

    Politicians are aware of this idea, which is why we have taxes and regulations on things such as alcohol, e-cigarettes and other products they consider “sinful,” unhealthy or a threat to public safety.

    Those same politicians forget, however, that taxation and regulations apply to bigger things as well — such as entrepreneurship, transportation, healthcare and affordable housing. 

    Why are there so few job opportunities, so few medical facilities and doctors, and so few homes to buy or rent in Hawaii? 

    We all know that Hawaii is one of the most highly taxed and regulated states in the nation, so you can see where I’m going with this.

    A concrete example regarding housing is Honolulu’s new Ordinance 22-7, which seeks to ban all housing rentals of less than 90 days outside resort areas. 

    Formerly known as Bill 41, the new law was supposed to go into effect this week, but a federal judge temporarily blocked it until its provisions can be hashed out in court.

    Keli‘i Akina

    One of the arguments in favor of the bill is that by prohibiting short-term rentals to tourists, more housing will be available for local residents. 

    But as Greg Kugle, my guest on this week’s “Hawaii Together” program explained, that contention is based on a misunderstanding about whom the ban is actually targeting. 

    According to Kugle, the attorney representing short-term rental owners in the court case, the people most hurt by a ban on rentals between 30 and 90-days won’t be Hawaii’s tourists but rather people for whom staying at an expensive hotel in Waikiki doesn’t make any financial or logistical sense. 

    Those include doctors, nurses and other medical personnel who are in Hawaii on short-term contracts, families from the neighbor islands who have traveled to Oahu for medical care, and people who have been displaced by disasters such as fires or the Red Hill fuel leak.

    In short, these are people who can’t afford months in a hotel, would like to be closer to their jobs or medical providers, or would prefer to stay where they can cook their own meals and live something like a normal life. 

    Honolulu Council members were warned during the contentious hearings on the bill that another unintended consequence of the bill would be to kill Hawaii’s world-famous professional surfing scene on Oahu’s North Shore.

    Young surfers from around the world who come to Oahu for the competitions can’t afford the rates at Turtle Bay, and those in the know believe that without rental units that allow for shorter stays, surfers will either end up sleeping on the beach or in their cars, or won’t come at all.

    Kugle said the other big misconception about short-term rentals concerns who owns them. He said supporters of the ban suggest, “Well, these are really rich mainland or rich foreign owners who have second or third or fourth homes in Hawaii and who are making a lot of money doing this.“ But really, he said, that’s not the case.

    “Many of these people … could be retirees who have a cottage on their property or who rent out rooms to supplement their retirement benefits and Social Security income. They’re local people.”

    Kugle’s lawsuit against the ban makes a strong case for property rights, alleges the fines are excessive, and that state law prohibits the counties from using zoning law to bar uses of property that previously were legal.

    Kugle said all the plaintiffs want is for their properties to be grandfathered into the law through a nonconforming-use certificate so they can continue to operate their rentals as they always have.

    If the short-term rentals ban prevails in court, the people who suffer won’t be faceless corporations or wealthy mainlanders with three homes. It will be Hawaii’s ordinary families. 

    Moreover, housing will become more expensive and harder to find — because that’s what happens when you complicate matters with burdensome taxes and regulations.
    _________

    This commentary was Keli’i Akina’s weekly “President’s Corner” column for Oct. 29, 2022. If you would like to have his columns emailed to you on a regular basis, please call 808-864-1776 or email info@grassrootinstitute.org.

    “Dedicated Funding Source”?  Nah

    Tom Yamachika
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    “Dedicated Funding Source”?  Nah

    I’m sometimes asked how we can achieve true fiscal reform here in the Aloha State.  It’s easy to imagine an end goal, with government spending within its means and with no gargantuan liabilities (the big two are the State’s defined benefit pension plan and the EUTF health system for state retirees) hanging over our heads like swords of Damocles.  But to know which direction we need to travel, we need to know where we are now.  This, unfortunately, is a big problem. 

    Many individuals and companies have a budget.  So does our state.  But the individuals and companies have a few bank accounts at most, so figuring out their financial condition is not terribly difficult. Our state, on the other hand, has literally thousands of accounts called special funds in addition to its main account called the general fund. It’s questionable whether any one person or agency knows where all of these funds are, because they can be created either by law or by the action of an agency.   And these special funds can rack up a lot of dough.  Our Office of the Auditor, in Report No. 20-06, examined 1,877 special and revolving fund accounts, and flagged 257 of them with balances significantly exceeding expenditures and other outflows.  Collectively, these accounts held more than $2.28 billion.

    Agencies, both past and present, love special funds.  Because they are created and maintained mostly independent of the annual legislative budgeting process, agencies can spend the money in the funds, as long as the spending is consistent with the funds’ purpose, largely without needing to go back to the legislature to plead for money every year.   Often, they justify a fund by saying that a certain cause or project deserves a “dedicated funding source.”

    A “dedicated funding source,” however, has to get money from somewhere.  Sometimes the agency charges user fees to feed the fund.  Sometimes it’s able to get some money from the Legislature.  In a few instances, the Legislature allows the fund to tap a money source directly, such as through an earmark on a tax. This creates difficulties in accounting for state revenues and expenses. 

    And then, the “dedication” of the funding source is often porous.  On several occasions in the past couple of decades, when the state was weathering a financial storm, the Legislature passed “raid bills”— laws forcing money to be transferred from special funds to the general fund.  And even in good financial times, many special funds are required to fork over 5% of their balance to the general fund annually as a “central services expense assessment.”  (A former State Auditor, Marion Higa, wrote in a 1994 report that a flat 5% seemed to be an arbitrary percentage and wondered whether it was a reasonable amount, noting that other states charging a similar fee charged quite a bit less.)  There’s also a “departmental expense assessment” based on actual (so they say) costs of administering the fund. 

    Are these truly dedicated funding sources if they can be bled and raided for other purposes at any time?  Nah.  What a shibai!  What these funds really accomplish, together with their charges and cross-charges, is the obfuscation of our financial position.

    It would be much easier to assess our state’s fiscal health if money into and out of all the various funds could be tracked and totaled in real time.  Sadly, we don’t seem to have that capability now and there seems to be no rush to acquire it.   It’s just another way that our State keeps this critical information secret and closed off from scrutiny by us taxpayers. 

    Are your tax dollars lobbying for the Jones Act?

    Grassroot Institute
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    Are your tax dollars lobbying for the Jones Act?

    Salacious details keep rolling in from the thousands of pages of Jones Act-related emails obtained from the U.S. Maritime Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request made by Cato Institute researchers.

    The latest revelations concern attempts in early 2019 by then-MARAD Deputy Administrator Richard Balzano to obstruct efforts by Puerto Rico and the New England states to obtain Jones Act waivers for the importation of liquid natural gas — raising questions about whether MARAD has become, de facto, a taxpayer-funded lobbyist for the 1920 protectionist shipping law.

    In an article published earlier this week, Cato Institute research fellow Colin Grabow highlighted how Balzano engaged in back-door communication with government officials and collaborated with Jones Act-friendly special interest groups to deny those waiver requests.

    The backdrop is that Puerto Rico, the northeastern states and even Hawaii struggle to obtain cost-effective LNG from domestic sources because the 102-year-old Jones Act mandates that all goods carried between U.S. ports be on vessels built, flagged and mostly owned and crewed by Americans.

    That is a problem because not a single LNG tanker exists that complies with those requirements, making it impossible for Puerto Rico, New England and Hawaii to import LNG directly from U.S. producers. 

    In August 2018, a group of New England governors proposed amending the Jones Act to ensure that their states’ energy needs could be met during the coming winter — as they did again just several months ago. 

    Also in August 2018, almost a year after Hurricane Maria smashed into the U.S. territory, Puerto Rico lodged a formal request for a 10-year waiver from the Jones Act for LNG imports.

    As emails from January 2019 show, Balzano did his best to dissuade those requests through behind-the-scenes actions and statements that clearly were misleading.

    For example, to head off a possible Jones Act waiver request from U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Balzano sent an email to two of Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao’s top staffers asking if he could reach out to DOE officials to tell them about the alleged “devastating impact” such a waiver would have on the U.S. maritime industry. 

    “The claim is a curious one,” Grabow said, “particularly given that the entire rationale for such a waiver is that bulk transportation of LNG is not a service that the U.S. maritime industry provides.”

    In another email, Balzano told Massachusetts state officials there was a Jones Act‐​compliant LNG barge that could “support New England in times of need.” 

    However, Grabow said, that barge was “a 2,200 cubic meter capacity bunkering barge used to refuel LNG‐​powered ships [with] a storage capacity less than 2% that of a typical LNG tanker and … thoroughly impractical as a solution to New England’s energy needs.” 

    Balzano also told Massachusetts officials of “three large older LNG cargo ships in lay-up that could be brought back to life to use for this market that are JA compliant.” 

    But Grabow said those ships weren’t actually Jones Act-compliant. 

    “Balzano’s proposed use of ships exceeding 40 years of age as a stopgap solution wasn’t feasible even if there was interest in using the ancient vessels,” he wrote.

    Grabow wrote, “While the agency’s opposition does not surprise, the level of misinformation — if not outright dishonesty — is deeply concerning. These documents suggest that, at least in matters concerning the Jones Act, MARAD is properly regarded as a taxpayer‐​funded lobbyist for the U.S. maritime industry.”

    “The U.S. maritime industry is no doubt thankful it has a government agency dedicated to looking after its interests,” Grabow wrote, “but who is looking out for the American people?”

    Grabow noted that President Donald Trump reportedly was initially inclined to support a Jones Act waiver for LNG shipments, but ultimately caved to political pressure and decided against it. 

    Grabow, who is also a Grassroot Scholar, is set to appear in Honolulu in December as part of a forum on the Jones Act sponsored by the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. 

    His entire Oct. 24 article, “Emails Reveal the U.S. Maritime Administration’s 2019 Efforts to Derail a Long‐​Term Jones Act Waiver for LNG,” can be read here.

    NOVEMBER 10, 2022

    Albie Miles
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    NOVEMBER 10, 2022

    You’re invited to join us from 4:30pm – 8pm on Thursday, November 10, 2022, at UH Mānoa.

    4:30pm – 6pm Pau Hana (DURP, Saunders Courtyard)

    6pm – 6:30pm Welcome & Awards (Crawford 105)

    6:30pm – 8pm Presentations, Awards, Q & A (Crawford 105)

    Sleep: Is It Right For You?

    Sydney Ross Singer
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    Sleep: Is It Right For You?

    Are you finding it hard to sleep? Do you suffer from insomnia? The problem may be that your style of sleep is not the same as your style of life.

    The basic question is, what type of sleeper are you? You probably didn’t realize that there are actually different sleeper types.

    We treat sleep as a one-size-fits-all issue, as though everyone needs 8-hours of continuous sleep per night. And if you cannot achieve that goal, there are lots of drugs you can take to knock you out.

    But what if your body doesn’t need all that sleep at one time? What if you like naps during the day and sleeping less at night? What if you are a night person and want to sleep during the day? What if you don’t want any schedule, and want to simply nap when you are tired.

    When you have trouble conforming to the expected 8-hour-straight sleep regimen, then you are told you have insomnia. We all have times of insomnia, when we know we need to fall asleep, but we just can’t. We know that we have a big day tomorrow and need the sleep, so we try to make ourselves pass out with drugs or a hot bath, or some other method of interrupting our wakefulness so we can sleep. Sometimes, we awaken in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep, tossing and turning the night away, until we finally fall asleep an hour before the alarm rings to get up. 

    It’s all about the need to conform to schedules. Daytime is the time for activity, while nighttime is meant for sleep. We are effectively “on” for 16-hours continuously and “off” for 8-hours continuously. At least, that’s the ideal, according to sleep medicine.

    However, while it might be ideal for society to make everyone conform to a sleep schedule, as though we were robots that can be turned on and off, this could be one of the biggest stressors in our lives. We need to do things when it is convenient for others, our own needs be damned. And for most people, that requires sleeping through the night and working through the day, whether you like it or not. 

    The problem is not you. The problem is a cultural system that makes people conform to rigid schedules, ignoring their personal sleep needs. 

    This means insomnia is caused by the culture and its lifestyle requirements to have people sleep at fixed times. If people slept when they wanted to and not when they are told to, then they would not have insomnia.  

    So to understand this problem, we first need to identify what style of sleep a person has.

    There are four broad sleep styles which I propose: 

    1. Those who sleep throughout the night are nocturnal sleepers, or “Noctarians;
    2. Those who sleep during the day are diurnal sleepers, or “Diarians”;
    3. Those who sleep mostly during the night or during the day but take naps are “Naparians”;
    4. Those who sleep spontaneously, whenever they are tired with no schedules, are “Spontarians”.

    Once a person identifies their sleep style, they need to develop a lifestyle that fits.

    Most workers today are noctarians, and need to save all their sleep for night. This makes it necessary to sleep as long as possible throughout the night, since you will have no sleep during the day. This is ripe for creating insomnia, since the urgency to sleep will keep you awake, feeding a vicious cycle of frustrating sleeplessness while trying to fall sleep. 

    The solution to this may be taking naps during the day. Find a job where that is possible. Working at home may help. The problem is not in the sleeper, but in the requirement for sleeping only at night.

    People who are diarians do best working at night jobs. If you prefer sleeping during the day, then get a night job. And keep in mind that you may need naps at night like noctarians need naps during the day.

    Naparians are probably the most common style, since it allows rest between activities. People who regularly take siestas are in this category. They are mostly diarians or noctarians, but supplement their sleep time with naps. This breaks-up the time spent sleeping so you’re not lying down for 8-hours straight.

    However, the sleep style most liberated from schedules is the spontarian style, when you have no clear schedule and simply sleep whenever you feel like it.  This sleep style is best for retired people and the self-employed who work from home and have no firm schedules. When your time is your own, you can sleep whenever you want to, and be awake whenever you want to. Having to sleep at given times only matters when you have a schedule. 

    But what about the biological clock and circadian rhythm? Aren’t our bodies designed to follow a day-night cycle? Can’t sleeping at irregular times destroy this rhythm?  Shouldn’t we ideally be noctarian and sleep at night?

    Actually, the act of sleeping 8-hours without interruption is a luxury. It means you are not afraid that someone or some predator is going to kill you while you sleep. It requires a social order that enforces laws, a moral system that respects the rights of others, and a secure place to sleep with a door and lock. Most people, and animals for that matter, cannot afford this luxury of unconsciousness for 8-hours straight. But our culture has made this required, since we are expected to work all day. 

    Our culture’s schedules are the same throughout the month and year, but this is artificial. Nature is not so rigid. For example, not every day is the same. The amount of daylight changes through seasonal shifts. And nighttime is not the same from one night to the next. The moon waxes and wanes every month, which is known to affect our moods, hormones, and circadian rhythms. (The word “lunatic” refers to mental changes during the full moon, which is also when hospital emergency rooms are most busy.)

    Lunar cycles are ignored when considering sleep needs, but they should not be. Moonlight makes it possible to get around in the night. Before the invention of artificial light, the moon was an important illuminator. Many cultures performed outside activities in the moonlight, including fishing, harvesting, and traveling. This is still the case for many living in rural areas, where artificial lighting is limited. 

    Lunar light helps people adjust to the seasonal availability of food, staying up late at night during a bright moon to harvest while the crop is ready. People who lived without artificial schedules were able to sleep whenever needed, and work when needed. They were able to be spontaneous, managing their personal needs and the world around them in a natural way.  So we can guess pretty well that hunter-gatherer cultures were “spontarians”, or slept whenever they wanted and had the opportunity.

    When humans entered the age of agriculture, there was a greater need for many people to work together, which would benefit from scheduling. More complex society brought greater need for social conformity and the need to have schedules for work and sleep. 

    Societies had therefore moved from “spontarians” to “naparians”, to “diarians”, and“noctarians”. Human history has gone from being free and natural to being progressively more controlled, as sleep time became more defined and naps became less available to workers. 

    Some cultures, even today, encourage naps during the afternoon, as with siestas. Naps are especially beneficial during the hot time of the mid-afternoon, when you don’t want to be in the sun. Many animals live this way, too. About mid-day, everyone rests, even diurnal animals. At night, nocturnal animals also take a rest. 

    The fact is, for animals and humans, you need a rest after being awake for awhile, which is why naps are helpful. But what happens when your culture does not allow time for naps, and you need to stay awake for 16 or more hours straight, every day?

    What happens is that we learn to make ourselves go to sleep when the time comes for sleeping, not when we are necessarily sleepy. 

    And if you don’t get the sleep you will need for the next 16 hours of wakefulness, then you will start to feel fatigued and suffer from other problems from sleep deprivation. So you take sleeping pills to make your brain numb and fuzzy so you can sleep, which works some of the time, but is addicting and harmful in the longterm, and isn’t as restful as sleep without drugs.

    In the meanwhile, the stress of not sleeping enough makes it harder to sleep, until you have a bonafide case of insomnia. This is when the sleep aid businesses get to sell you drugs, more comfortable beds and pillows, relaxation therapies, and anything else they can sell you that keeps you in your sleep pattern. 

    All you really may need is a change of lifestyle that better conforms with your personal sleep style.

    Of course, when there are billions of dollars made selling sleep aids, there is no incentive to change the culture. People are suffering from sleep deprivation due to lifestyle demands that make you sleep when you must, not when you want to. 

    For those in slavery, there is no choice but to do what you are told. But for those who are free to choose their lifestyle, it is best to know what style of sleep you prefer so you can choose a job and way of life that lets you sleep whenever you want. 

    Here are some tips for better sleep:

    1. Don’t try to sleep if you are not tired. Sleep when you are sleepy.
    2. If you can’t sleep, get out of bed and do something else. 
    3. Take naps whenever you feel the need.
    4. Avoid sleeping pills, even melatonin, since these try changing your brain chemistry, instead of changing your lifestyle. They are addictive, have side effects (which often includes insomnia), and don’t solve the problem.
    5. Avoid stimulants before you want to sleep, including caffeine, alcohol, and exciting videos.
    6. If you still can’t sleep despite the above, consider mental health counseling, since stress could be the problem. This could also require changes to your lifestyle.
    7. Many people are uncomfortable in bed due to their body position and how they sleep. To find the best way to sleep, see my article, Rest In Peace: How the Way You Sleep Could Be Killing You.

    Conclusion:

    Our culture’s obsession with schedules has forced people into artificial sleep patterns, leading to dysfunctional sleep and insomnia. The solution can be changing one’s lifestyle to match one’s sleep style. Of course, this is easier said than done, and requires a commitment to one’s personal health and happiness. Meanwhile, the sleep aid industry is making billions trying to help people sleep on schedule, even when they can’t. In the end, we have sleepless, sleepy people, lots of sleep aid drug sales, and a system that is better run by programmable robots than by humans. 

    Pleasant dreams.

    The Obama Appeal – Part 1

    Guest Contributor
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    The Obama Appeal – Part 1

    by Manfred Henningsen

    Editor’s note: This is the first of a two part series on the Obama – Hawaii connection by Manfred Henningsen, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

     As of today, Barack Obama is probably the only American politician who is welcome in most countries of the world. The reasons for this exceptional distinction have certainly to do with the fact that he has been so far in the long history of the USA the only Black President and distinguished himself with a scandal-free performance. Yet this distinction became accentuated by the outrageous charges his successor Donald Trump launched against him, claiming that Obama was not born 1961 in Hawaii but in Kenya, the country of his African father.

    Trump’s baseless claims of a faked birth certificate may have created additional enormous sympathy for the unusual candidate from Hawaii. Yet Trump had also discovered with his charge a deep-rooted reservoir of racist prejudices that poisoned the two terms of the Obama presidency and became the steppingstone for Trump’s own presidential campaign and his surprising victory in 2016. Still, the Trump-factor doesn’t explain the continuing global appeal of Obama, it simply reminds the world, as it watches current American politics, of the presence of an obviously ever-present personification of the stereotypical ugly American.

    This photo provided by the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows the presidential hopeful, Obama, in 1979 during his high school graduation in Hawaii with his maternal grandparents, Stanley Armour Dunham and his wife Madelyn Payne, both natives of Kansas. (Presidential Campaign)

    One of the major reasons, if not the most important one for Obama’s appeal, is the never-recognized importance of his birthplace Honolulu and the impact of having been socialized in the state of Hawaii. Hawaii has remained for Americans on the continent a terra incognita, an unknown cultural, social, and political world. Yes, Hawaii was known in the past for its sugar and pineapple plantations and is still renowned as one of the most beautiful vacation destinations in the world. Yet the social complexity of Hawaii as the only state without a white or any other ethnic majority, has never been understood. A recent publication about the impact of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, on the mainland and Hawaii, highlights the amazing differences. These still existing and not recognized differences reach back into Hawaii’s history.

    The journalist Tom Coffman recreates in his book Inclusion (University of Hawaii Press 2021) the frantic atmosphere in the military command quarters of Pearl Harbor and in the city of Honolulu itself after the attack. He makes his readers understand the initial suspicion that the more than 160,000 citizens of Japanese ancestry that were living in the islands were facing. But what is even more fascinating in his depiction is the way how military, local and national law enforcement people, and community leaders of different ethnic backgrounds immediately recognized the threats Hawaii was facing and creatively responded to them.

    Former Obama residence on Oahu Ave, Honolulu (realtor.com)

    These threats became articulated in Washington, D.C. and translated into demands to intern all people of Japanese ancestry, whether they were American citizens or not, in camps on the mainland or on one island. President F.D. Roosevelt and some of the military leaders that advised him were actively pushing the internment idea for California and the whole West Coast and extended it to Hawaii as well. This policy became actualized on the West Coast with more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry being placed in Internment Camps. In Hawaii a small number of prominent people of Japanese ancestry with known connections to Japan were arrested and interned in a camp. A few German, Austrian, and Italian residents were interned as well.

    Coffman attempts to differentiate between the mainland and Hawaii attitudes towards the perceived possibility of a recurrent Japanese attack and the anticipated large scale sabotage activities by residents of Japanese ancestry. The subtitle of his book expresses his ideas: “How Hawaii Protected Japanese Americans from Mass Internment, Transformed Itself, and Changed America.” These widespread existential fears of American Japanese committing acts of sabotage were immediately raised in political and military circles in D.C. after December 7th, and FDR himself was very much affected by this syndrome.

    He took for granted, as most people in the Washington power structures did, that acts of sabotage had been committed by Japanese residents in Hawaii before, during or following the military attack. People in military and political power in Hawaii attempted to counter this false impression by emphasizing the non-occurrence of such activities. They were for some time not believed. Only when military and political emissaries, among them the Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy (who after the war became the American High Commissioner for West Germany) were sent from Washington to Hawaii to check out the reality, they finally accepted the fact that Hawaii was different.

    Hawaii was different from the mainland because it had experienced ethnic mixing since the days of the Hawaiian Kingdom at an unusual scale. This pattern of mixing between the indigenous Hawaiians, mainland whites and Europeans extended to the large influx of Chinese and especially Japanese immigrants in the late 19th century and Filipinos, after the Philippines became in 1898 after the Spanish-American War a US territory. Coffman’s thesis that Hawaii’s rather unusual response to the internment requests from FDR and mainland politicians and generals had a major impact on the mainland and changed deep-rooted xenophobic and racist attitudes is questionable.

    It isn’t clear whether Hawaii’s different response to the Pearl Harbor attack was even noticed at all by large segments of people on the mainland. Even today when xenophobic and racist prejudices are spreading in many states on the mainland, the ethnically mixed diversity of Hawaii is solidly affirmed by the growing number of mixed marriages between most ethnic groups and doesn’t show any signs of becoming disrupted by violent confrontations. Yet, young Hawaiian nationalists, who don’t celebrate this ethnic diversity as the primary identity of the islands, cannot escape their own mixed genealogies. Some of them had also misgivings about Obama being identified by the mainland media as being ‘Hawaiian’.

    Obama himself has never claimed this symbolic Hawaiian identity. In an almost paranoid way, he avoids wearing clothing, e.g., Aloha shirts, that would connect him superficially with Hawaii. Though he spent almost all Christmas vacations during his two terms as President with his family in Hawaii and has bought now an estate close to the ocean on the Windward side of Oahu. Yet he established his presidential library in Chicago, where his part African identity had become Americanized. After getting a law degree at Harvard, he worked as a community organizer in the Black community in Chicago, until being hired by a law firm, where he met his future wife Michelle, who happened to be a Black, Chicago-born lawyer.

    Obama with his Punahou Basketball teammates.

    This symbolic “Blackening” of Barack Obama in Chicago did not wipe out the origins of his cosmopolitan appeal, namely having had an African father and a white mother from Kansas, whose parents raised the teenage boy when he entered Punahou high school in 1970, while his mother, with whom he had stayed for four years in Jakarta, remained in Indonesia doing research for her anthropology PhD at the University of Hawaii (Surviving against the Odds. Village Industry in Indonesia (Duke University Press 2009).  After the divorce from Barack’s father (1964), Ann Dunham had married in 1967 the Indonesian graduate student Lolo Soetoro and moved with him and her six-year-old son to Jakarta. The young Obama encountered at an early age ethnic diversity in his own family, in the capital of the predominantly Muslim Indonesia and then again in Hawaii.

    When Obama finally appeared for the first time on the national stage in 2004 at the convention of the Democratic Party, he struck people by the contents of the unity speech and the demeanor of his ‘cool’ appearance. He was comfortable with himself, representing in his person the American unity he was appealing for, a longing for unity he had grown up with in Jakarta and experienced in Hawaii. His appeal to voters on the mainland, when he was first running for Senator in Illinois in 2004 and then for President, was remarkably different than the appeal of other Black candidates, which had run for that office. Certainly, anti-Black comments and slurs were also uttered against him during the campaign.

    The Birther-crowd followed him with Trump’s lies. Yet in July 2008 a glimpse at the cosmopolitan appeal of Obama became visible when an estimated 200,000 people attended a rally at the Victory Column in Germany’s capital Berlin. Pictures of this event became published on the front pages of all American and most international newspapers. These pictures became part of the aura that carried him to his victory in November.

    President Barack Obama signs H.R. 847, the “James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act” in Kailua, Hawaii, Jan. 2, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)..This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.. .

    The cosmopolitan appeal that makes him at this moment in this politically troubled country an exceptional American ambassador in most parts of the world, should have made it easy for him to select Honolulu as the place for his Presidential Center. The geographical equidistance of Honolulu to almost all places of power in the world, would have made it the perfect choice for a center that doesn’t only commemorate his eight years in office, but is going to train young candidates for political leadership from around the world. He chose Chicago for the obvious reasons of his political awakening in that city.

    Yet Chicago is a city that reflects the troubled USA of today, with its social and often violent tensions, whereas Hawaii’s Honolulu points with its diversity, which never shows signs of mainland style violent friction, not only at a potential future for this country but for the world. Why Obama did not choose his city of birth, despite all its preferable conditions, remains a mystery.

    ***********************

    Manfred Henningsen is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, where he taught from 1970 until 2020. He received his PhD under Eric Voegelin in Munich in 1967. His dissertation was a critical assessment of A. J. Toynbee’s A Study of History in the general context of comparative philosophy of history. It became published in 1967 as Menschheit und Geschichte (Mankind and History). From 1968 until 1974 he edited and contributed, together with Juergen Gebhardt and Peter J. Opitz the 14 volume paperback series Geschichte des politischen Denkens (History of political thought), Munich. In addition, he published Der Fall Amerika (Munich, 1974) and Der Mythos Amerika (Frankfurt, 2009), books that dealt with European Anti-Americanism and American self-interpretations. He edited Vol.5 of Voegelin’s Collected Works, Modernity without Restraint (2000); Vol. IX of the German translation of Order & History (Ordnung und Geschichte), Das Oekumenische Zeitalter. Weltherrschaft und Philosophie (Munich 2004) and the original German version of Voegelin’s 1964 Munich lectures on Hitler und die Deutschen (2006). In addition, he published 23 articles in the German cultural journal Merkur and articles and reviews in The Review of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, China Review International, and many edited volumes on history, political philosophy and politics.

    Photo and text courtesy VoegelinView

    Freedom: Is It Right For You?

    Sydney Ross Singer
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    Freedom: Is It Right For You?

    As the US goes to the polls to decide on mid-term challenges to the political landscape, the issue of freedom versus control is really what’s on the ballot. It’s always really about that. No matter what the time in history, there will be those calling for more management and control, and those arguing to be left alone to do their own thing. 

    The problem is that freedom and control are not merely opposites. Sometimes, freedom requires controls, and controls can set you free.

    Let me explain this with a short fable.

    Once upon a time, there were two birds. One lived inside a warm, cozy house, protected by a cage, and fed daily. The other bird was outside in the wild, weathering the elements, and constantly looking for food. 

    One day, the owner of the caged bird decided to let the bird see what was outside, and placed the cage on the window sill. The outside bird saw the inside bird near the window, and flew over.  The two birds looked inquisitively at one another. Then one began to chirp.

    “”You’re stuck inside that cage,” the outside bird said. “How will you get out?”

    The caged bird replied, “Why would I want to get out? I have everything I need.”

    “But don’t you need to be free? You’re stuck in a cage. You can’t fly anywhere you want, like I can.” 

    “Why would I want to fly anywhere? I have everything I need. And flying is dangerous. In fact, my owner clips my wings so I can’t fly. But that makes me safer. If I fly, I die.”

    “You only think that because you never experienced the freedom of flying and deciding where to go to look for food.”

    “But I don’t need to look for food. My owner provides for all my needs. My food and water bowls are refilled each day. But you, outside in the wild, need to find food, and you may go hungry and die.”

    “That’s true. I am sometimes hungry, and it feels great when I find food. My biggest concern is the cat next door.  I guess you’re lucky to be safe inside that cage.”

    “Oh, I’m safe and well cared for, so long as my owner wants me. I also overheard the owner talking about getting a cat. The last cat jumped on my cage and almost killed me. Thank goodness I was safe inside this cage. But the other day, my cage door was left open by mistake. If there was a cat, it would have been the trash bin for me. Maybe you’re luckier being outside and free, so you can fly away when attacked.”

    The two birds chattered on about the merits of being cared for inside a cage versus the benefits of being free and wild, until they both realized that each was free. The caged bird felt the freedom from concerns, with all its needs met. The wild bird felt the freedom of self-direction, allowing it to meet its needs by itself. 

    But they also both realized that each of them were unfree. 

    The caged bird was obviously at the mercy of its owner, who controlled its life. Losing one’s freedom is the price of being carefree and letting others control you.

    The wild bird was free, but also at the mercy of Nature and its demands.  The constant demands of finding food, water, and safety robs one of freedom. You may be free to do whatever you want, but needs come first.

    On the other hand, there are some benefits to being controlled. The bird in the cage had extra energy, since all it did was eat. So it learned how to do tricks with its owner. It learned to speak and say what the owner wanted it to say. Its entire life depended on pleasing the owner. It was a pet and loved being cared for, until it was ignored and began feeling food insecurity.

    The bird in the wild spent much of its time finding food, which it enjoyed doing. It also enjoyed finding other birds, one of whom became its mate. They had chicks, which they raised together. Nature provided the challenges and the instincts, and the birds had no choice but to be wild and free, except when there were predators and famine, at which time they felt oppressed and wished that they had someone to feed them in a safe, warm cage.

    The birds discussed all this and then decided to say goodbye. The wild bird flew away. As it flew, a hawk swooped down from above and attacked. It’s a bird-eat-bird world, and the hawk was very happy to find food that day. 

    The bird in the cage saw the attack and thanked its stars that it was protected inside its cage. Just then, a cat entered the room.

    Key Points: 

    Being free does not guarantee anything but choice, which is always limited by one’s reality and awareness. 

    Being caged does not guarantee anything but being out of control, which is always limiting of one’s reality and awareness.

    Those who feel free may actually be controlled, and those who feel controlled may actually be free. 

    The Moral of the Story:

    Life requires both freedom and control, and it’s up to you to decide on the balance.

    CASTRATION: Is It Right For You?

    Sydney Ross Singer
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    CASTRATION: Is It Right For You?

    Many scientists have ruminated over the strange anatomical fact that human testicles are external to the body, out there in the open where they can be kicked, banged, bruised, and bashed.

    Most thoughtful people would expect that the testicles, or the “family jewels” as they are called in medicine, would be better protected than this. Women have their ovaries, their equivalent of the testicles, protected in their abdomen. Reproduction, after all, is supposed to be the most important function to maintain the species. Why aren’t testicles better protected?

    Many other animals have internal testicles, including elephants, whales, seals, opossums, and more. It’s only some mammals, including primates, dogs, cats, cows, sheep, goats, and, of course, humans (which are a type of primate), who sport external testicles. 

    Some scientists have probed the origin of external testicles and have guessed that sperm needs to be cooler than body temperature, hence their needing an outside room with a view in the scrotum instead of being cloistered inside the body. 

    However, this theory doesn’t really make sense. Why would sperm need to be cooler? There is nothing inherent about sperm cells that requires cooler temperatures than body temperature. And since there are animals, including birds with high body temperatures, who have perfectly happy body-temperature sperm, it is not clear why there would be any need for cooler sperm. 

    If you think about it, the reason that sperm in external testicles like to be cooler is because they have to be able to perform their function in external testicles. It’s a chicken and egg issue with a clear solution. Balls come before sperm. 

    To put it differently, testicles need to produce sperm that thrives in the location and climate of the testicles. If it is a creature with internal testicles, then its sperm will be optimal at body temperature. External testicles need sperm that thrives at temperatures below body temperature. So we can’t explain external testicles based on the needs of sperm, but we can explain cooler sperm based on the external location of the testicles. 

    So we’re still left empty handed in our pursuit of the reason for having external nuts where they are easily cracked. If you were designing the human body from scratch, why would you ever want to place the scrotum and its contents on the outside of the body? 

    Perhaps a little animal husbandry can shed some light. 

    Sometimes, when you are raising animals, there are too many males. Testicles produce testosterone, the male sex hormone, which causes lots of physiological and psychological effects, including aggression and violence. This is more apparent during mating season, where males fight over females and can harm one another, and even harm the females in the process. 

    Farmers need to keep the male population under control. And an old and simple method for doing this, still used today, is castration. 

    For thousands of years, animal husbandry has relied on castration, which is remarkably simple to perform. Castrating a bull, for example, simply requires a tight rubber band around the base of the scrotum. This interferes with circulation, and over time the scrotum and all its contents wither and fall off, leaving less than a belly-button of a scar. The procedure can be done on any animal with hanging balls, and seems painless, according to reports from the animals. 

    Of course, the way we treat animals is often reflected in the way we treat people. And the simplicity of testicular removal has made castration a form of human male control over the millennia.

    When a bull is castrated, he becomes a steer, or ox. When a ram is castrated, he becomes a wether. And when a human is castrated, he becomes a eunuch, and history shows people creating eunuchs for thousands of years B.C.E. 

    What happens to a man, or boy, when he is castrated? According to Psychologist Robert Martin, in Psychology Today, 

    “Castration after puberty, turning men into eunuchs, diminishes or completely eliminates the sex drive. Muscle mass, physical strength, and body hair are all typically reduced, and eunuchs are usually beardless. Breast enlargement is also common. In the most familiar example of castration to prevent cuckoldry, eunuchs have often been used as harem guards. Historically, however, eunuchs — seen as less likely to stir up unrest — were far more widely engaged as servants, military commanders and senior political officials.” 

    Castration was also done before puberty to help choir boys maintain their sweet, high voices. Called Castrati, these ball-less singers were the rage of high culture for hundreds of years, into the 20th century. Again, from Dr. Martin, 

    “(C)astration has also been carried out on young boys before puberty to prevent their voices from breaking. Early castration blocks the radical size increase in the larynx that otherwise produces the characteristic “Adam’s apple” of an adult man…Men castrated before puberty retain an unusual high-pitched singing voice broadly comparable to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto, but covering a strikingly wide range.” 

    So apparently, castration is a great way to make a reliable worker who can sing like an angel, is not aggressive, and can be trusted to not womanize. Sounds like a great thing to have on your job resume.

    While there are clear social benefits of reduced male testosterone, including less violent crime, fewer sexual assaults, and more sopranos in the choir, there are also some biological benefits of castration. External testicles may be a product of natural selection, allowing for  castration and, hence, male violence control.

    In other words, being able to manage male aggression is beneficial to the social unit. While it will limit the ability for the castrated male to reproduce, the reduction of violence could be beneficial for overall reproductive success by society. In addition, society can decide on the best men to be allowed to reproduce, as farmers decide on the best males to allow to reproduce to improve their herd. Instead of culling the unwanted males, you can more humanely castrate them and allow them a full life, free of the cares and concerns about reproduction.

    Of course, living in a civilized society that respects human rights, we can’t just castrate people society deems undesirable or too aggressive, although history has shown the abuse of castration. So what we need is a way to make castration seem desirable, so men actually ask for it. It’s not abuse if someone asks for it, is it? So the trick is getting them to want their nuts removed.  

    And many people already do. Doctors these days perform lots of castrations, which are called orchiectomies, although they don’t just tie off the scrotum like the farmers do. Instead, they surgically remove one or two testicles as a treatment for testicular cancer, and to prevent testosterone production since male sex hormone makes some other cancers worse. The procedure costs from $2,000 to $8,000. Some clinics occasionally offer a two-for-one special, so look for those before booking your castration.

    Another popular use of castration is with the current craze for gender reassignment surgery. Transexuals who have been castrated are leading the way for a more peaceful, lower testosterone world.  

    All this castration, of course, has been made easier after years of promoting “fixing” one’s dog or cat. People who castrate their beloved pets know how much more peaceful they are afterwards. And if it’s good enough for Fido, then it’s good enough for Fred. (Note to self: will chipping of pets make it easier to chip people?)

    Castration is therefore an important procedure to achieve social justice for gender dysmorphic males, to prevent cancer, and to make for a more peaceful world. Maybe we need more castrations as a way towards world peace?

    Before you scoff at castration as a panacea, keep in mind that many boys are already circumcised for religious and/or alleged sanitary reasons, removing the foreskin of the penis. If the doctor is already there, why not go all the way and help your child become part of the new wave of peaceful men?

    Of course, this works better with children, who are helpless, which is why childhood is when most circumcision is done. However, it may be a hard sell to get adult men to agree to castration, so let me leave you with one more fact that might convince them. Castrated males live longer. That’s true for eunuchs and for other castrated male animals. 

    All a man has to do to have a few more precious years of life is to cut off his balls. What’s easier than that?

    So the next time you feel there is too much testosterone in those around you, ask them to consider castration. It’s easy and low-cost, it will help them live longer and more peaceful lives, and it will reduce the number of violent nuts in the world. 

    Yes, People Move Because of Taxes

    Tom Yamachika
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    Yes, People Move Because of Taxes

    This week, we focus on a study that has just come out of the national Tax Foundation (with whom the Tax Foundation of Hawaii shares a name but not much else).  That study looks at IRS and census data to see if tax considerations affect people’s decisions to move from one state and to another.

    In the study, the Tax Foundation started by ranking the states in terms of population lost or gained, relative to 2019 state population.  Here is what they found:

    In the map, the green states are the ones gaining the most people, and the red states are the ones losing the most people.  Hawaii, to no one’s surprise, is colored red; we lost 0.66% of our population, ranking 45th of 50 states. 

    Of the green states, it just so happens that a number of them have low or no individual income taxes.  Five of them don’t charge income tax on wage or salary income at all, and two of the others had individual tax rates that were below the national median at the time.  Of the red states, many of them are well known for high or complicated taxes (California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York).

    Hawaii was, interestingly, the only state to lose population but also gain in adjusted gross income being reported to the state.  We picked up nearly $71 million in AGI.  This means that we gained a few high-income individuals but lost more of those folks scraping to make ends meet.  And by the way, it doesn’t follow that we picked up full income taxes on that $71 million. Recent transplants may well be making money from business in the states they left. If that state taxes the income, we reduce our tax (HRS section 235-55) to protect against double taxation.

    Also, it turns out that four of the top five states that former Hawaii residents moved to, namely Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Washington, don’t tax individuals on wage income.  (According to the IRS data, we did lose 9,000 people to California, which is also on the red list at 46th in the nation.)  So, although the study can’t say for sure whether tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back, it seems clear that taxes and cost of living were in that camel’s basket.

    Now, which of our new lawmakers are going to do something about economic competitiveness with other states, including tax system competitiveness?  The “giant sucking sound,” as former Presidential candidate Ross Perot described it, of folks heading for the exits cannot be ignored.

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