Several things occur to me as I ponder the Legislature’s apparent rush to accommodate Governor Abercrombie’s requests for exemptions from a variety of state and county laws and policies, unfortunately most dealing with environmental protections, planning, and the public’s right to know.
First, isn’t the obsession with “shovel ready projects” several years late? It’s been four years since this recession began, and the economy seems to be turning around. Although all the lost ground hasn’t been made up, the visitor industry’s bounce back was a leading economic indicator. The real estate market appears to have turned up, unemployment peaked and is now slowly dropping, several large new buildings are on the drawing boards, indicating developer confidence, etc., etc.
My point is simply that the time for what are essentially “emergency” measures has passed.
Second, it seems to me that what has really happened is the state has failed at the task of managing its affairs and dealing with routine bureaucratic hurdles. Instead of holding managers accountable and providing the training, support, and resources they need to manage state projects effectively, we’re instead simply sweeping aside the underlying public policies designed to protect our common interests. In the end, the exemptions will expire, and we’ll be back with inept managers trying to steer the state.
Third, I’m still trying to grasp the political “big picture.”
With this important U.S. Senate seat up for grabs, and a strong Republican contender in former Gov. Linda Lingle, Governor Abercrombie and Legislative leaders seem bent on demonstrating that there’s little difference in practice between Democrats and their pro-development, pro-business, deliver for the special interests and belittle public interest policies approach to governing, and the GOP’s version of pro-development, pro-business, deliver for the special interests and belittle public interest policies approach to governing.
I know, this is governing and that’s campaigning, but surely someone on the 5th floor of the capital worries about such things.
What’s the winning political narrative that comes out of the package of administrative bills?
Then there’s the strange ambivalence of the administration. At the same time that the administration is gung ho for development, Gov. Abercrombie told people in a recent informal conversation that he backs both Ben Cayetano’s mayoral bid and Cayetano’s opposition to rail.
Abercrombie said he had favored the original rail plan for a system that would link Kapolei with Waikiki and the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, but that isn’t the system that is now being built, according to two people who were present.
Neil has sidestepped the public rail debate, but I think he could make a difference if he privately backs Cayetano.
It’s an awkward political position, though, with big business interests now taking a more open advocacy position as they try to turn around collapsing public support for this rail.
It’s an interesting political tightrope for the normally blunt-speaking governor.
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“HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Just ten days after taking office Governor Neil Abercrombie has given the city’s rail project the state’s blessing.
Thursday Abercrombie signed the final Environmental Impact Statement on Honolulu’s 20-mile rail line that will run from Kapolei through downtown Honolulu to Ala Moana.
Abercrombie concluded that economic, social and environmental risks have been properly addressed under law.
In a letter to Wayne Yoshioka, city Director of Transportation Services, Abercrombie said, “I find that the mitigation measures proposed in the environmental impact statement will minimize the negative impacts of the project.”
By approving the EIS Abercrombie put the rail project back on track.
Former Governor Linda Lingle said she would not approve the EIS until an independent financial review, paid for by the state, was complete. On December 3, three days before Abercrombie replaced Lingle as governor, she announced the review’s findings. It estimates rail will cost at least $1.7 billion more than the city’s estimated $5.5 billion price tag.”
Recognizing that anecdote isn’t data, I have to say that darn near everyone I talk with is aghast at the apparent assault on environmental protections contained in the bills proposing exemptions. The general attitude being that the “fix is in” for the usual cast of big money players.
Can’t say much for rail except that it is unbelievably expensive, doesn’t go where its most needed, won’t solve the problem it was conceived to address and is now a poster child of how to antagonize the public. Other than that, winner.
Wow Ian….I almost never agree with your posts. Have to hand it to you on this one though. Well said. You nailed it.
Well stated, Ian. Neil , to regain credibility, needs to support Ben on the no rail issue.
Here’s part of the “big picture” Ian says he’s trying to understand:
One of the most disturbing characteristics of big government is that the people running it love to pass laws telling us what to do, because they think they know what’s good for us; while at the same time they exempt themselves from those laws.
Here we have a good example: environmental laws requiring environmental impact statements and multiple regulatory approvals that often take many years — but let’s pass a new law exempting transit-oriented development. I think it should be obvious that either the environmental laws are unnecessarily burdensome and should be toned down, or else those laws are appropriate and should be enforced for the rail project and other government-sponsored projects. Weakened environmental controls for government-sponsored projects, combined with burdensome regulation for non-governmental projects, is a good example of hypocrisy and arrogance.
The quest to exempt the Honolulu rail project from state environmental regulations by passing exemptions in the state legislature reminds me very much of the H-3 project a few decades ago, when Inouye felt compelled to pass a law through Congress exempting the H-3 project from a host of federal environmental laws.
Either the laws should be enforced on everyone, despite delays and inconvenience and huge cost increases, or else the laws should be modified for everyone because they are overly burdensome.
Ken, I get the sense you don’t subscribe to the Half-Pregnant School of Political Obfuscation.
… Governor Abercrombie and Legislative leaders seem bent on demonstrating that there’s little difference in practice between Democrats and their pro-development, pro-business, deliver for the special interests and belittle public interest policies approach to governing, and the GOP’s version of pro-development, pro-business, deliver for the special interests and belittle public interest policies approach to governing.
All political parties are equally the instruments of special interests.
Also, all political parties equally see themselves as the forces for public interest.
The right-wing, for example, genuinely see themselves as patriots opposed to the special interests of government bureaucracies and unions.
So-called “special interests” and so-called “public interests” are not opposites. The former relates to the latter the way ingredients relate to a recipe. The task of elite politicians is to create an alliance of special interests, and from that alliance form a new political worldview that justifies that alliance in terms of a vision of the so-called “common good”. The concept of “cultural hegemony” is useful to explain this relationship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
Perhaps the classic case of the rise of a new form of cultural hegemony is the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s, which involved the formation of a grand new alliance. From the wiki:
What this wiki article leaves out is that the single biggest beneficiary of the New Deal was corporations. All those government contracts for big projects went not to small businesses, but to corporations. Also, the widespread unionization that followed the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act stabilized labor relations (especially with mandatory federal arbitration), which helped corporations but hurt small business. Also, government regulations existed primarily to protect corporations from competition (e.g., the airline industry). It was not until the 1970s that federal regulations began to be aimed at actually helping consumers and the environment while, simultaneously, markets like the airline industry were (ruthlessly) deregulated. So under the New Deal coalition, it was small town, small business elites — people like Barry Goldwater — who came to embody the disaffected right-wing, as opposed to the corporate elite (like Goldwater’s adversary liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller).
A good review of the deregulation that began in the 1970s, which constituted the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, can be found in Daniel Yergin’s PBS documentary “The Commanding Heights: Battle for the World’s Economy”. Yergin is a famous oil industry lobbyist and consultant, and he is implicitly very pro-deregulation, although he is very cognizant of the scary “churn” or “creative destruction” that accompanies the unleashing of market forces, and he does point out how both regulation and deregulation were at the behest of corporations.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/
So prior to the New Deal, corporate interests dominated public policy; with the New Deal, corporate interests came to dominate public policy; and since the 1970s, corporate interests have come to dominate public policy.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The great realignment of political coalitions since the New Deal came from Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but the stage was set earlier. Since the Civil War and until the 1960s, the South had been core of the Democratic Party. Since Nixon’s “Southern Protestant, Northern Catholic” strategy, the South began to rapidly convert to the Republican Party. With Reagan, the white working class, including unions, began to vote Republican. Also, Reagan got not only small and big business on his side, but cultural conservatives and libertarians who are extreme cultural liberals. One of the only powerful constituencies who did not convert to Reagan were lawyers, who are mostly Democrats because challenging the wealthy (in lawsuits) is in their interest (e.g., the tobacco settlement).
Reagan’s coalition fell apart with Bill Clinton. Clinton got Wall Street on his side with financial deregulation. He neutralized cultural conservatives by criticizing things like rap music. This phenomenal rout of Reagan’s coalition was short lived because of the rise of George W. Bush. It has been noted that Bush was perhaps the only politician in the US who could unify both capitalists and cultural conservatives into a new alliance (Karl Rove immediately became a Bush aid on the day he met Bush, that’s how obvious this was). Obama, in turn, co-opted business elites by adopting Clinton’s strategy (and, amazingly, by posing simultaneously as both a man of the left and man of the center).
The whole point of this is that the Democratic Party in Hawaii is very much a pre-1970s New Deal type of creature, an alliance of corporations and unions. In the rest of the US, there have been dramatic shifts in political coalitions, from Reagan to Clinton to Bush and even Obama. Hawaii seems relatively trapped in amber. The formal platform of the national Democratic Party has adopted consumer and environmental protections since the 1970s; this is only given lip service in Hawaii.
In some ways, however, Hawaii does not fit the New Deal model. In Hawaii, it seems like there is a desire to grant the quasi-monopoly status that corporations sort of had under the New Deal (think of PanAm) to any business, to treat anything like a utility (think of the State’s attempt to take over a failing relatively small slaughterhouse).
Also, unions in Europe, for example, are still left-wing, and support things like public education, even if it does not benefit the union. The unions in Hawaii are feudal fiefdoms, and have a right-wing flavor, and are hostile to education (e.g., the carpenters and electricians could get jobs fixing up Hawaii’s decaying schools rather than with these big projects that few citizens actually want; the the unions in Hawaii seem to scorn education).
In this respect, Hawaii’s seemingly atavistic New Deal coalition (corporations + unions) seems more like something out of Japan. Perhaps some cultures, especially island cultures, like the idea of a sanctioned monopoly for the stability and security that it would supposedly bring. For example, the Yakuza is kind of a formally sanctioned monopoly on vice, and was historically pretty harmless. But everything changes. The Yakuza has become very violent and dangerous, and has taken over much of Japan’s economy and political system (even the stock market). Also, Japan has been stagnating economically for 20 years, and now seems to be on the verge of a steady disintegration, with a sudden collapse of creativity.
It’s interesting how Hawaii also follows that pattern of Japan. In Hawaii, we have simply run out of land to build, and everyone is in denial, with no real creative response to this crisis.
@Skeptical,
You sometimes have interesting insights into our political system, but you have gone far astray with your claim that “the single biggest beneficiary of the New Deal was corporations.”
Yes, corporations benefited. Guess what, the US is a capitalist society so most economic activity is going to flow through corporations.
The New Deal resulted in a turn around of a collapsed economy, raising the GDP, putting people back to work and profits into the coffers of corporations. It also, and your analysis omits this, shared the economic benefits of economic growth much more equitably than before. And the retreat from New Deal policies with the triumph of neo-liberal, conservative economic policies, has led us back to the extreme inequality of the 1920 and the Robber Baron period of the late 19th century. The New Deal and the Keynesian policies which it engendered, gave birth to the massive expansion of the American middle class. A middle class which is now collapsing.
You say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” but that just shows how much you are missing. A great deal has changed as economic policy has lurched rightward. The extreme unequal distribution of wealth in the United States is a major factor in the inability of our economy to recover. The net worth of most Americans has collapsed, and our wages, salaries have stagnated or shrunk, while the rich ARE getting richer. If the working and middle-class cannot afford to buy goods and services, the economy contracts, businesses large and small suffer and lay off employees, cut back their own purchases and the downward spiral continues.
So, yes, a return to Keynesian economics along the lines of the New Deal WOULD result in profits for the corporations, as regular folks return to work and start buying thigns again. But it would also result in greater equality, both economically AND politically.
How does your Big Picture, sweeping Historical perspective lead you to dismiss the sweeping different worlds offered by the Keynesian versus the neo-liberal policies?
In this comment, you have gone far astray.
Some special forces are pulling the strings of Puppet King Abercrombie.
Yesterday, the Senate approved an unqualified crony commissioner for the Water Commission. This makes 4 out of 5 commissioners from Maui.
There was an earlier attempt to rid Sunshine laws for county city councils. The biggest supporters come from Maui.
There’s full-blown war out on exempting projects from environmental review processes. The Republicans are saving the aina and the Democrats are destroying it.
Abercrombie Not Backing Cayetano for Mayor
http://honolulu.politics.government.blogs.civilbeat.com/post/21350883816/abercrombie-not-backing-cayetano-for-mayor
I just left a comment on Civil Beat pointing out that they were presented a “non-denial denial” and concluded, incorrectly in my view, that the Governor is not backing Cayetano. At least from what was reported, this wasn’t what they were told. They were told that Neil hasn’t formally endorsed in the race. That’s a very different kettle of fish, as they say.
Neil’s got to be somewhat careful in how he intervenes in the primary battles for fear of further alienating his supporters. Clearly, he is very close to Cayetano and his support for the Train has been luke-warm, at best. Abercrombie has been courting the building trades unions with his support for the gutting of environmental review laws, but if he is seen as too pro-Ben, that works against the courtship.
And Ben has cultivated a following among the rabid right, largely due to his anti-Rail stance. This group wants to demonize Neil as some sort of hyper-Liberal, so if Ben and Neil are viewed as too close, might that shave off enough support to keep Ben from winning in the first round?
If Ben does not get 50% plus one in the primary, he will have to go against either Kirk or Carlisle in the general. And if the pro-rail forces unite, that , along with people who do not like Ben for other reasons, might be enough to block his election.
Meanwhile, much of Neil’s campaign organization, “as individuals,” of course, has gone into helping Ed Case’s campaign, speaking of “odd bedfellows.” While this is probably more plausible a “non-endorsement,” it is creating some strains among active Democrats.
And I heard Neil has personally been soliciting campaign contributions for Tulsi Gabbard. Of course, Nancy Caraway and Amy Agbayani wouldn’t have lent their support so visibly to Tusli’s campaign if Neil were not supporting her in the background. The embrace of Tulsi is also awkward for a lot of liberal Democrats. Does the “anti-Mufi” impulse trump everything else?
Case, T-Gabbard and Ben, Neil’s coterie.
“A New Day.”
Non-answer:
“Dela Cruz said her boss (Abercrombie) has not formally endorsed Cayetano for mayor. Asked about whether he opposes the current Honolulu rail project, she said the governor has ‘long supported mass transit.'”
Perfect example of political double-talk.
Getting back to Ken Conklin’s comment on environmental protection policies and procedures:
“…it should be obvious that either the environmental laws are unnecessarily burdensome and should be toned down, or else those laws are appropriate and should be enforced…Weakened environmental controls for government-sponsored projects, combined with burdensome regulation for non-governmental projects, is a good example of hypocrisy and arrogance.
“…the laws should be enforced on everyone, despite delays and inconvenience and huge cost increases, or else the laws should be modified for everyone because they are overly burdensome.”
I completely agree with the above and the laws should be appropriate for both gov’t and private endeavors. Legislators could think about, for example, how does this change affect the process for a project that has community support and benefits as well as the project that has no support and would result in many undesirable consequences. Most projects are going to have some combination of benefits and drawbacks.
It is highly unfortunate that some private developers willingly choose not to follow the environmental and permitting process. Then, when it becomes apparent they cannot get away with that, they blame the process for causing the delay. Um, no, it was bad strategy at the start.
Making the process better or more streamlined in my opinion would benefit all. Reduce delay in gov’t reviews by holding Agencies to required timelines for their responses. Publicize and outline the process on the hawaii.gov site and county websites in plain English that allows developers to have a better idea of the reviews that will impact the timeline for a project.
@Kolea
How does your Big Picture, sweeping Historical perspective lead you to dismiss the sweeping different worlds offered by the Keynesian versus the neo-liberal policies?
It depends on what you mean by “neo-liberalism”. From the wiki:
From what I understand, much of neo-liberal policies are largely a subset of Keynesian economics.
Traditional conservative economic policy advocated balance budgets, through both cuts in spending and raising taxes. Keynesian economics assumes that this may be valid in normal times, but disastrous during an economic crisis. During a severe economic downturn, as we see in Europe, budget cuts are counterproductive and only lead to bigger deficits and might even cause a depression. What is needed are temporary increases in public spending to offset declines in private spending, lowered interest rates (although this has its limits, i.e., “pushing a string” in a liquidity trap) and tax cuts (although this is the least effective because during a downturn people panic and sit on savings rather than spend and invest). Conversely, during an economic boom, the government should raise interest rates and cut spending and raise taxes to prevent inflation.
(This is maxing out my knowledge of Econ 101.)
First, this has nothing to do with social justice. It’s a technocratic fix for a recession or crisis of overproduction. It’s capitalism with New Deal window dressing. (FDR was a free-market conservative as governor of New York, and the Democrats criticized Hoover for big project like Hoover Dam. The adoption of Keynesian thought was pragmatic, and done out of desperation.)
Second, much of what we think of in the (neo)conservative economics since the 1970s is a rejection of the need for public spending during a downturn, but an embrace of tax cuts and interest rate cuts. (Ben Bernanke is a student of the Great Depression and a follower of Friedman, and concluded his research by writing of Friedman’s assertion that interest rate cuts were all that was needed in the Great Depression, “Milton, you were right!”) That part of “neo-liberalism” is a kind of disguised Keynesianism embraced by the Republican Party (the death of Keynesian thought through partial osmosis).
In the context of the current debate about bypassing environmental law in Hawaii in order to stimulate the economy, drawing neoliberalism into the discussion is instructive.
First, I cannot think of a single economic theory that calls for a bypassing of the law to stimulate an economy during a downturn.
Second, as Ian points out, Hawaii is no longer in a downturn.
Third, the rule of law is one of the core principles of neoliberalism. (“At the centre of neoliberalism was the rule of law.”)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#The_Rule_of_Law
In this light, the effort to bypass environmental regulation in Hawaii might be seen as not a temporary measure to stimulate the economy. It could be a permanent fixture. It seems like it is being done because the politicians and developers finally figured out that they are running out of land to build on. Hawaii is sort of still in a 1950s mode of land development, because the economy never diversified. Aside from shrimp farms on the North Shore, I don’t know if there were any serious efforts at diversification. How could the politicians not know that this day would come? All of these environmental regulations were established by these same politicians with the understanding that land was limited.
Ian points out that “big business interests [are] now taking a more open advocacy position as they try to turn around collapsing public support for this rail”. This refers to the Star Advertiser’s recent piece “Business Leaders Seek to Raise Funds to Promote City Rail Project”.
It just seems to me that the kind of corporations getting involved with this pro-rail alliance have or had a kind of quasi-monopolistic status in Hawaii, and that their position does not reflect the kind of perspective that more competitive smaller businesses have. In a somewhat small, closed society, monopolies in various unrelated fields might be expected help each other out to quash competition. The creation of competition, innovation and diversification in one field might spread to all others fields, threatening all the big players.
Also, perhaps even ordinary people in a closed, isolated, resource-poor environment might be somewhat attracted to the idea of a monopoly-dominated economy and would be alienated by open competition. With limited opportunities, that would be rational behavior and very understandable. More competitive individuals from that society would simply move elsewhere and become President of the United States or start eBay; they might retire and return “home” someday, and shake up the society (say, by creating an online public affairs newspaper), but that would run largely against the grain of the culture.
Importantly, perhaps until the big monopolies in such a society collapse in the face of new technology in the 21st century, the society would never diversify economically and enter stagnation. For example, Hawaii might import natural gas, and people would generate electricity with it at home with a Bloom Box; subsequently, the local energy monopoly (HECO) might lose power and be broken apart, with the result that finally the energy sector would diversify.
(It might be a coincidence, but it jumped out for me that this pro-rail alliance by quasi-monopolies came out 12 days after Civil Beat article “Is Wind Really Hawaii’s Low Cost Option?”, which noted that electricity from solar PV now costs half that from wind, and that the cost of solar fell 50% last year, while HECO had stated that solar would cost five to ten times more than wind. Is the Big Wind trying to save itself by allying with the Big Rail because both of them are dying? “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”….)
What is interesting about neo-liberal economic theory is that much of it developed in Austria to oppose such a quasi-monopolist society. The exemptions from environmental regulation being sought today do not reflect a neo-liberal ethos, but rather the ethos of “corporate statism”. The wiki:
Ultimately, this system breaks down in the face of various forms of diversity.
Is this where Hawaii is?
(P.s., I am not a neo-liberal, just using that as a foil or contrast.)
Just a quick question. Do people like Skeptical Once Again really expect others who have anything else to do with their lives to actually read their endless disquisitions?
You have to hope it gets read.
The analysis of Skeptical Once Again rings true and is sorely needed.
Instead of holding managers accountable and providing the training, support, and resources they need to manage state projects effectively, we’re instead simply sweeping aside the underlying public policies designed to protect our common interests. In the end, the exemptions will expire, and we’ll be back with inept managers trying to steer the state.
Ian, your analysis would seem to confirm an editorial by Gil Riviere in Civil Beat.
http://www.civilbeat.com/posts/2012/04/26/15667-why-environmental-exemptions-are-a-terrible-policy-for-hawaii/
He asserts that proponents of the bill never offer any examples of how over-regulation is stifling development — with the exception of construction of Kahului airport. But then he did a little research on Kahului airport.
Extrapolating from this, it would seem that perhaps good projects are not getting done in Hawaii not because of environmentalists or cultural practitioners, but because the politicians and bureaucracy are inept. So the politicians blame the left-wing for paralysis — even though these politicians claim to be left-wing.