This article ran as the lead piece in the September 12 GIR. We hope you will find it as alarming as we did. Why don’t we hear more about this side of the Global Warming issue?

“People here have no jobs,” Mark Fenn admitted, after taking documentary producers on a tour of his $35,000 catamaran and the site of his new coastal home. “But if you could count how many times they smile in a day, if you could measure stress”–and compare that to “well-off people” in London or New York–“then tell me, who is rich and who is poor?”

Use link to read the whole article by Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This article first appeared on Townhall.com, and is reprinted with permission.

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The next issue of ‘Grass in Review’ will examine how some environmental policies end up keeping the people of the Third World in a state of perpetual poverty. A perfect example of this is explored by Brendan O’Neil over at the iconoclastic Brit website Spiked:

In a feature about carbon offsetting in The Times (London), it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. So Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.

Welcome to the era of eco-enslavement…. (click to read more)

We don’t normally think of Hawaii and Puerto Rico as all that similar. Sure, both are islands, both have restless anti-US segments of the population, and both incorporate a lot of pork in the regional cuisine. And then there’s there’s the whole mass transit thing. Hawaii may get a rail system, Puerto Rico already has one. As Randal O’Toole explained in a recent ‘Grassroot Perspective,’ the experiences of our Spanish-speaking cousins should make us think twice before embracing a similar system here:

The Honolulu City Council is determined to spend billions of dollars on a ridiculous rail-transit line in Oahu. State Rep. Marilyn Lee happened to visit Puerto Rico and came back gushing about that island’s new Tren Urbano in Honolulu’s leading paper.

“There are many similarities between Hawaii and Puerto Rico,” says Rep. Lee. “We must proceed with our scheduled plan to build transit — our sister island state has shown it can succeed.”

There are so many fallacies in Rep. Lee’s column that it is hard to know where to begin. Needless to say, Puerto Rico is not a state. Further, Honolulu rail proponents have a nasty habitat of calling rail transit “transit,” implying that Honolulu doesn’t have mass transit because it doesn’t have rail transit.

In fact, there are lessons that Hawaii can learn from Puerto Rico, just not the ones that the apparently innumerate Rep. Lee learned. As Honolulu rail skeptic Cliff Slater has noted, far from showing that rail transit can succeed, the Tren Urbano is just one more rail disaster…. (click to read more)

In his Sept. 10 Washington Post column, respected DC insider Robert Novak takes a look at the much-heralded ethics bill recently passed in Congress, and finds it lacking. While the measure promises greater government accountability, according to Novak, “this measure, avowedly dedicated to transparency, actually makes it easier for the Senate to pass pet projects without the public — or many senators — being aware of it.”

You can read Novak’s analysis here:

The Senate’s Ethics Sleight of Hand

For the month of September 2007, Letters to the Editor for the Honolulu Advertiser are running 20 - 10 and the Honolulu Star Bulletin are running 18 - 13 in favor of the Superferry or against the protestors. I am not counting letters which appeared to be against the government or were unclear.  I will update this post periodically.

wendy@grassrootinstitute.org

Received in an e-mail from Dale Evans (GRIH Board of Directors)

One of the problems we have is convincing the powers that be that they have the wrong costs for the HOT lanes aka Managed Lanes. The Hawaii DOT tells that, for example, that the latest estimate of costs for the Nimitz Flyover, 2.2 miles from the Nimitz Exchange to Pier 16 just two lanes wide, is $540 million.

Please see this powerpoint presentation, which shows the recently opened Millau Bridge in France. This bridge, the tallest in the world, costs less to build than what is estimated for the Nimitz Flyover. French construction labor costs are the same as ours.

Millau Viaduct - Worlds tallest bridge - FunOnTheNet

If you would like to see any particular subjects posted, email wendy@grassrootinstitute.org

The leftist state of Kerala, India has been held up as proof that socialism works. Alas, as a recent NY Times story reveals, the only way Kerala has been able to survive is because so many of its citizens get jobs elsewhere and send money back home: “Remittances from global capitalism are carrying the whole Kerala economy,” said S. Irudaya Rajan, a demographer at the Center for Development Studies, a local research group. “There would have been starvation deaths in Kerala if there had been no migration. The Kerala model is good to read about but not practically applicable to any part of the world, including Kerala.”

You can read more about it here (may require registration):

Jobs Abroad Support ‘Model’ State in Inda

Dale Evans (GRIH Board Member) makes her point very clear in this article on the rail project. Is this what most people actually believe?

The story of Robin Hood, in reverse, is what Honolulu’s rail project is all about — taking money from poor and common folks, and giving to the rich. Wealthy buyers of high-end real estate projects planned for Kapolei and other transit-oriented developments (TODs), stand to benefit from tax credits, exemptions, abatements and direct subsidies because of the proposed multi-billion-dollar rail project.

Read the rest on hawaiireporter.com: Hawaii Reporter: Robin Hood in Reverse

If you have topics you would like to see in our blog, email wendy@grassrootinstitute.org.