This provocative comment came in via email, and I thought it worth sharing.

It suggests we should not assume that key proponents of the city’s rail transit project are actually wholeheartedly behind the proposed rail system, but driven by other external pressures/demands.

What do you think?

As for Carrie Okinaga, I suspect that she, like her boss Carlisle, is not really in her heart a rail advocate. In fact, she may be a rail opponent who, like Carlisle, is now pushing for the rail but simultaneously dedicating their lives to cleansing the City of all the most troublesome (and loathsome) rail advocates (e.g., Hannemann, Rollman, Caldwell). I do not even know if Don Horner is really for rail, at least in its present form. I suspect that Horner as a banker is a man of conservative temperament (like Carlisle, Lingle and even Obama) who is personally disgusted with that mix of hype, lies and union patronage that makes conservatives blanch.

But of course, as a banker, Horner would support rail. That’s the punchline. The biggest rail supporters today outside of the labor unions are actually very similar to Cayetano in outlook — in private. But whenever there is a big project, the local banks would support it or they would lose out to the banks that they compete against. That’s just like Goldman Sachs, which at the height of the feeding frenzy in 2005 (of loaning money to poor people to buy overpriced houses and then bundling all these mortgages and selling them as stock) figured out that it was all just a massive house of cards; yet Goldman Sachs kept on engaging in this sham for a while because it needed to compete against other banks, even as Goldman Sachs tried to get out of what they realized would be a self-destructive activity. If the local powers-that-be decided to build a massive $10 billion swimming pool out on the lava flats of the Big Island, First Hawaiian would get behind it because they would want all that money to cycle through their own bank rather than through another bank. It’s funny but also sad, like a leftist governor (Abercrombie) resurrecting the old guard that his political career was supposed to vanquish. It’s the dynamics of the system that will ultimately undermine and destroy the system. We all need to read Marx.