Category Archives: Politics

Looking back: Early 1990s

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I launched my tiny monthly newsletter, Hawaii Monitor, in 1990 after leaving Neil Abercrombie’s staff at the Honolulu City Council. It was informed by what I had seen going on behind the scenes as well as my several years as director of the Hawaii office of Common Cause.

After a year or so, the 8-page monthly publication was having an impact.

Two years later, I accepted an offer to join the old Honolulu Star-Bulletin, back when Honolulu had two competing daily newspapers. I had successfully managed the transition from activist to self-taught journalist, but not before being named one of the Star-Bulletin’s “10 Who made a Difference” for 1993.

Protest of prison conditions in 1981.
A previously untold story, Part 1

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Prisoners hang a sign from Old Oahu Prison cellblock at OCCC calling attention to hunger strike protest a few months after the shakedown.

This is my most memorable story about Randy Kalahiki, including details never told publicly before.

It’s a follow-up to my recent post about the Kalahiki brothers, Randy and Mel.

Hoomana School

Back in 1981, both Meda and I were both teaching classes in the Hoomana prison school offered through Honolulu Community College.

Meda had been teaching full-time at HCC since about 1974, and by this time was a veteran at OCCC. She had done an evaluation of Ike Na Paahao, an outreach program by prisoners who visited classrooms to warn students away from crime, a version of the then-popular “Scared Straight” programs. After that evaluation, she taught several classes of at OCCC over a couple of years, earning a reputation and a following among those in custody.

Ian’s OCCC ID

Meanwhile I was a newbie, a first-time instructor teaching a single introduction to political science class as a lecturer.

The Hoomana classroom was deep within OCCC and the whole teaching experience, which included getting through the front entrance (where the security door was often not functioning and was simply left propped open), then taking a long roundabout walk to and from the classroom, proved to be quite educational for us as visiting faculty as well as for the paahao who attended class as students. Everyone in the facility routinely referred to those in custody as paahao, using the Hawaiian word for prisoner.

In mid-December, 1981, prison officials launched a large multi-day “shakedown,” a mass sweep of OCCC targeting weapons, drugs, and other contraband. It was conducted by correctional officers and police, aided by a number of the more hardened guards from the high security prison at Halawa.

Within days, we started getting phone calls from family members of inmates who passed along details of alleged beatings and violence initiated by guards during the shakedown, even while some prison administrators and other state officials reportedly stood by and watched.

After the shakedown was finished and family visits were being restored, we quickly decided to seek out additional information about the rumors of official violence.

We drove out to OCCC early in the morning on one of the first two visiting days, and approached people as they left the facility. We introduced ourselves to visitors, and solicited information they had been told about incidents involving official violence during the shakedown. Some reporting injuries they had seen, bruises, etc. The reception was very positive, and word of our presence quickly spread and brought forward other informants.

Using details learned that had been cross-checked from multiple interviews, Meda and I wrote a brief 4-page report describing alleged use of excessive force, including names and descriptions of injuries. This while officials were publicly denying any incidents like this had taken place.

I had already stepped down as program director of the small Honolulu office of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, but was part of a small criminal justice task force formed to discusss issues in Hawaii’s prisons and plan appropriate Quaker responses.

We naively thought that when state officials saw our compilation of the more serious and better documented allegations, they would quickly order an investigation.

We were absolutely wrong.

(Next: How the report ended up on the governor’s desk—and how this led to Randy Kalahiki contacting an organized crime figure.)

The collapse of the Trump administration’s lies about the Reflecting Pool damage

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For those interested in primary documents, here is the full 20-page motion filed Friday by federal attorneys in Washington, D.C., requesting the dismissal of all charges against a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the pool’s recently replaced lining. The motion blames the failure of the pool lining on botched installation by a new contractor who had been awarded a non-bid contract to do the work.

It’s one of those rare admissions that a Trump-backed prosecution was wholly unsupported by the facts.

Who Gives Together? Mapping Hawaii’s Political Contributors

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The recent bribery indictments that included two former powerful legislative committee chairs raised a familiar question: Who really holds the levers of power in Hawaii politics?

To find out, I turned to a massive dataset: nearly 128,000 campaign contributions made to state and local candidates across Hawaii from 2015 to 2026.

By feeding this decade of data from the Campaign Spending Commission nto ChatGPT to perform network co-giving analysis, one clear conclusion emerged:

Hawaii’s donor class doesn’t invest in ideology. They invest relationship building and institutional access.

The pattern is consistent with relationship-building and institutional access rather than strong ideological alignment.

Mapping “Portfolio Similarity”

When analyzing campaign finance, looking at who cuts checks on the exact same day is rarely where the real story lies. The strongest evidence of donor alignment comes from persistent portfolio similarity—donors who repeatedly back the same slate of viable candidates cycle after cycle.

By filtering for donors who appeared in at least ten election cycles and shared eight or more candidate selections, the AI analysis isolated a core network of 577 recurring donors connected by 1,415 strong co-giving relationships, falling into 55 distinct statistical communities.

These recurring donors generally fall into three key categories:

Small Household/Partner Circles: Near-identical small portfolios, typically representing families, partners, or close business associates.

Large Institutional Networks: PACs, registered lobbyists, and government-relations executives who give broadly to viable, winning candidates.

Cross-County Executive Networks: Individuals and organizations that repeatedly support winning county mayors across different islands.

The third category is particularly telling: the common denominator isn’t shared geography or partisan ideology—it is executive governmental authority.

The Central Donor Networks

Rather than functioning in isolated industry silos, Hawaii’s donor landscape is best understood as a web of interlocking political communities.

Donor Cluster Core Participants & Sectors Primary Focus & Leverage Points
The Institutional Core Insurers, Utilities, Corporate PACs, Major Unions, Government Relations Firms Access to legislative leadership, incumbent committee chairs, and regulatory policy across Democratic factions.
Development & Infrastructure Engineering firms, Land-use attorneys, Contractors, Planning consultants County-level zoning, permitting, capital improvement projects (CIP), and procurement contracts.
Organized Labor Public-employee unions (HGEA, UPW), Building trades (Carpenters, Laborers, IBEW), Teachers Incumbent relationships, department budgets, collective bargaining, and legislative leadership support.

The Institutional Core

The most influential cluster consists of major corporate PACs, labor unions, top government relations executives, and active individual donors.

Key players in this broad access network include Island Insurance PAC, Alexander & Baldwin’s HIPAC, Local 1186 IBEW PAC, Nareit Hawaii, Hawaiian Telcom Good Government Club, Matson Navigation, HGEA, UPW, Hawaii Laborers PAC, Hawaii Regional Council of Carpenters, and General Contractors Association of Hawaii PAC. Active individuals and lobbyists appearing in this space include Bruce Coppa, Blake Oshiro, Jennifer Sabas, Ross Yamasaki, Bert Kobayashi, and Stanley Kuriyama.

Their connection isn’t necessarily about giving identical amounts on the same day—it’s about repeatedly selecting the exact same set of key decision-makers across election periods to ensure a seat at the table regardless of which faction holds power.

Development, Engineering & Professional Services

A second major cluster centers on individuals in the built environment: developers, civil engineers, land-use attorneys, and contractors.

Prominent figures in this recurring co-giving group include Patrick Kobayashi, Greg Hiyakumoto, David Tanoue, Dexter Kubota, James Yamamoto, Richard Asato, Leonard Leong, Ken Hayashida, Susan Kobayashi, and Collins Lam.

This group’s portfolio overlaps heavily around county-level governance where critical decisions on land use, infrastructure, permitting, and construction contracts are made.

Organized Labor: Overlapping, Not Monolithic

While labor unions are among the most active political donors in the state, the data shows they do not act as a single, indivisible bloc. Instead, distinct sub-networks exist—public employees (HGEA, UPW), construction trades (Laborers, Carpenters, Operating Engineers), education (HSTA), and utilities (IBEW). They converge most heavily around viable incumbents and leadership figures who control committee assignments and budget allocations.

A Note on Network Analysis & Legal Context

Co-giving patterns reflect persistent portfolio similarity—meaning these donors consistently back many of the same viable candidates over time. While this methodology identifies the institutional relationships most worth examining through public records, co-giving does not, by itself, establish improper coordination, illegal straw contributions, or undue influence.

Next Steps: Building the Full Investigative Map

Mapping campaign contribution records is just step one. To turn this donor network map into actionable investigative reporting, the next phase requires integrating six additional public datasets:

Employer Normalization: Standardizing name variations across thousands of entries (e.g., matching “A&B” with “Alexander & Baldwin”).

Corporate & Non-Profit Boards: Cross-referencing top donor clusters against DCCA corporate filings and IRS Form 990 board rosters.
Government Boards & Commissions: Overlaying recurring donor lists against state and county board appointments (e.g., Land Use Commission, HART, Planning Commissions).

Lobbying & Procurement: Matching contribution timing against registered lobbying clients, government contracts, and contested land-use proceedings.

By layering these datasets, we can move from simple campaign finance tallies to a clear, multidimensional map of how institutional influence operates across Hawaii.

But whether these data are available in a form that can be accessed for such an analysis remains to be seen.

Have a specific donor cluster, contractor, or board you’d like to see analyzed in the next phase? Leave a comment below or drop a tip.

[Original post revised at 6:33 a.m. with assistance from ChatGPT and Gemini.]