Musings: Speculation and Unconsciousness

It’s only a week past solstice and already it’s noticeably darker in the mornings, which is why the sky was filled with stars when Koko, Paele and I went out walking in the delightful coolness. The moon had not yet risen, but Jupiter was high and bright, third in a celestial line up with Neptune, Uranus and Mars, which I could not discern, and Venus, still below the horizon.

The fighting roosters were lost in their usual chorus of crowing, but above the din I heard the wheezing call of a single Newell’s shearwater, and thought of the time, and surely there was one, when they were so numerous that their calls would have rivaled today’s roosters in raucousness.

How sad that their endemic voices have been replaced by the speculation and unconsciousness that a common fighting rooster farm symbolizes. But then, so goes Hawaii….

While we’re on the subject of speculation, I received an email yesterday that included links to two stories about Free Flow Power’s President and Chief Financial Officer, Henry Dormitzer. One, a three-year-old piece from the Belmont Citizen-Herald, reported that the former UBS investment banker, who went on to become a top aide to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, helped to design risky debt refinancing deals for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority that went sour.

The other, published last year on Bloomberg.com reported:

The same bankers who sold Massachusetts interest-rate swaps that blew up the debt financing for the so-called Big Dig road and tunnel project in Boston -- costing taxpayers $100 million -- are getting even more money to fix what they broke.

“Use of these types of derivatives is making a bet,” said Joseph Giglio, a business professor at Northeastern University in Boston and former head of municipal securities at Chase Manhattan Bank. “If it seems too good to be true, it is.”

Reading the articles made me think back to the KKCR show I heard where Scott Mijares was questioning KIUC board member Jan TenBruggencate about whether the cooperative had vetted Free Flow before approving the multi-million-dollar consulting contract. Jan’s reply:

“I believe our staff did, but I don’t know.”

While we’re on the topic of unconsciousness, I noticed The Garden Island today is reporting news that I broke on April 12: deputy county attorney and former deputy prosecutor Justin Kollar is running for prosecutor.

What’s worrisome about Justin is his regressive, as in Dark Ages, platform:

If elected, he said he will work to protect Kaua‘i’s ohana by focusing on quality life issues that effect families and their homes, including drunk driving, drug abuse and property crime tied to those addictions.

Yes, more criminalization of addicts and users is exactly what we need. Keep locking up the little fish and let the sharks swim free. And nothing builds an ohana like sending an addicted family member off to jail. Justin, as you may recall, has also been fighting reforms of the medical marijuana laws.

The article includes praise, but not quite an endorsement, from Police Chief Darryl Perry, which speaks as much to the strained relations between the cop shop and PA's office as it does to the merits of Kollar’s candidacy.

But even with Perry and former prosecutor Craig De Costa in his corner, as well as other attorneys who just can’t handle what they characterize as the “out of control” state of the PA’s office, Justin, with just three years on the island, faces a tough fight against well-connected local girl Shaylene Carvalho-Iseri.

What it all boils down to is once again, we lucky voters on Kauai will be asked in 2012 to choose the lesser of two evils. But then, so goes Hawaii. And when you look at the people lining up for the GOP nomination in the race against the ever-disappointing Obama, and the other “leaders” on the global stage, so, it seems, goes the rest of the nation, the rest of the world.