Archive for July, 2012

Help to protect Health and Safety

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

I’m posting this in support of the PunaPono Alliance.  Please pass on to others

There are three BIG things happening this week concerning Geothermal in Puna.

1. First is that the petition calling for the Hawaii County Council to, amongst other things, override Mayor Kenoi’s veto of Bills 256 and 257 has as I write this got 596 supporters, we’d love to see that reach the biggest number possible by Wedand ask that you sign if you haven’t already done so and encourage your family and friends to also sign it before its presented it at the meeting of the Hawaii County Council. The petition will read the Council before it is presented.
2. If you’ve always wanted to have some burning questions answered by HELCOabout the grid, geothermal, solar, wind or whatever, Tuesday evening at 6pm HELCO President Jay Ignacio will address your electricity concerns when he speaks before the Rotary Club of Pahoa Sunset  at the Akebono Theatre in Pahoa. Questons about electricity bills and renewable/sustainable energy will be entertained.
3. We need a huge turnout at the Hawaii County Council meeting this Wed in Hilo – we need lots of people to testify, and we need more people to show support by being there throughout the day, even if you can only come for an hour, it will make a difference. The County Council will at this meeting vote whether to override the Mayors veto of these two bills. The meeting will start at 8am.
The Mayor has asked that the pro veto group get employees and nearby residents to come out and testify in support his veto, with the primary emphasis that there are no health issues that exist, and that the plant has been operating safely, hence no reason for a buffer zone. (Their words not ours!?

Please come to Hilo even if you don’t want to give testimony, because we need numbers!
OR give testimony in person in Pahoa, at Fred Blas’ office next to the Medical center in the Malama marketplace, the Council office in Waimea and the Council office in Kona. Your verbal testimony can also be emailed to council members at the email addresses below.

If you need help with preparing your testimony, call 339 4344. 

To submit written testimony by e-mail, send it to counciltestimony@co.hawaii.hi.us by 8am Tuesday July 31, you can also e-mail each council member individually: 

Dominic Yagong – dyagong@co.hawaii.hi.us
Donald Ikeda – dikeda@co.hawaii.hi.us
J Yoshimoto – jyoshimoto@co.hawaii.hi.us
Dennis “Fresh” Onishi – donishi@co.hawaii.hi.us
Fred Blas – fblas@co.hawaii.hi.us
Brittany Smart – bsmart@co.hawaii.hi.us
Brenda Ford – bford@co.hawaii.hi.us
Angel Pilago – apilago@co.hawaii.hi.us
Pete Hoffmann – phoffmann@co.hawaii.hi.us

When you come to the council meeting, you can read the testimony you submitted by email. If you have not emailed the testimony, they ask that you bring 14 copies of it and give it to the clerk that day.


As part of our outreach Puna Pono Alliance is planning a regular newsletter and wishes to reach out to people directly with this newsletter rather than asking people to forward emails to their friends forever.  To do this we need your help so we are requesting that you broadcast this email to your friends throughout the islands of Hawaii who may want to find out how this may affect them in the future.

This is now an important topic for all of Hawaii, no just Puna. Geothermal is now firmly on the agenda for all of Hawaii as stated by the Dr Don Thomas, geologist for PGV and Professor of Geology at the University of Hawaii in Hilo, at the community meeting in Leilani on Tuesday evening this week. He is proud to be heading the study of all of the Hawaiian Islands to seek out new Geothermal areas to put these toxic power plants.

If you do not want Geothermal activities to increase in Puna or indeed where ever you live in Hawaii, you will want to keep up with and support the efforts of the Puna Pono Alliance.  

All those who are concerned about this and wish to receive this newsletter please email Punapono@gmail.com with your name, phone number and  email address and we will add you to the list. If you received this email directly from Punapono@gmail.com, you are on the list already, if you are receiving it through a friend, we’d love to put you on the list.

Who are Puna Pono Alliance….We are a group of individual people (with busy lives like you and your neighbor), who have seen that unless Geothermal is something we want in our neighborhood, we had better stand up and be counted, or we may as well give up and move out now while our properties still have some value. For lots of reasons, the same reasons most of us value being here, we feel passionately that our loved ones, homes and farms are worth stand up for now. Not next year but now, because deals are being done as I write this and tomorrow is simply too late! Will you stand up too?


If you wish to unsubscribe from the Puna Pono Newsletter list please email Punapono@gmail.com with Un-subscribe in the subject line.

Response to Mr. Harper re “will of the people”

Monday, July 30th, 2012

Woody Harper asked:
“Why don’t you respect the will of the people here in Hawaii that they permit and profit from being American citizens? and allowing the use of PTA by the beloved military?”

First of all, “the will of the people” is a meaningless phrase, unless Mr. Harper specifies exactly which people he is talking about. It is clearly not the will of all the people to bomb Pohakuloa. It is clearly not the will of all the people that the Nation of Hawai’i is illegally occupied by the USA. The leader of the so-called “free world” at that time, President Cleveland, attempted to prevent the completion of the illegal overthrow.

See http://www.hawaii-nation.org/cleveland.html for President Cleveland’s thorough and well grounded objections to the machinations of corrupt congressmen. Cleveland’s words clearly indicate that there was no “will of the people” – except for the will of a few rich American businessman people – asking for Hawai’i to be occupied by the USA.

Second of all, “profit from being American citizens” makes no sense. There is no inherent “profit” in simply being an American citizen. I do not get paid for being an American citizen. If Mr. Harper does, I need to talk to a lawyer, since we are all supposedly equal as citizens and thus I should be getting my share of that profit as well.

Third of all, there is specifically no profit involved in military operations. Military operations are a complete and total loss of money. The military does not make money – it spends money. Specifically, it spends taxpayer money.

Our tax dollars are used to build bombs, missiles, guns of all kinds and sizes, ammunition for those guns, fighter jets, helicopters, land mines and other military devices. These devices are used to kill people, or to train people to kill people.

In the case of training such as at Pohakuloa, our tax dollars are being blown to bits on a regular basis. Expensive bombs, bullets, missiles and other devices we paid for are purposely destroyed – in some cases destroyed by being used to destroy other expensive military devices we paid for. It seems beyond obvious that this is loss, and not profit.

It seems to me Mr. Harper is disrespecting the actual “will of the people” of Hawai’i at the time of the overthrow. With the exception of a tiny and disproportionately powerful minority of foreigners, “the people” of Hawai’i  did not ask for, revolt for, or vote for occupation by the USA. He is also disrespecting “the will of the people” as expressed by the then-leader of the United States, President Cleveland, who objected to what was clearly an illegal action against a sovereign nation, proposed and promoted by corrupt members of congress.

John Schinnerer
Kea’au, Hawai’i

Reflection on Aurora Killings

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

Killing Nation!

       The tragic killings in Aurora, Colorado on July 20th, should give the U.S. pause to take stock of its violence. It’s still not clear what prompted the attack on a packed theater showing a Batman film. But one thing has been clear for a long time. “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” Black activist H. Rap Brown said during the 1960s.

      Recently, Doug Noble published an article that takes stock of official U.S. Violence carried out in every citizen’s name.  Noble’s article is entitled Assassination Nation –Fifty Years of US Targeted ‘Kill Lists’: From the Phoenix Program to Predator Drones. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31925.htm

      Then CIA Director William Colby, conceded that Phoenix operations killed over 20,000 people between 1967 and 1972 in Vietnam and by 1973, Phoenix generated 300,000 political prisoners in South Vietnam. The My Lai massacre, hardly an isolated incident, was itself a Phoenix operation.

      Noble says “Phoenix-derived reigns of terror, kill lists, and death squads were applied by the U.S. throughout Latin America and beyond. The U.S. Army’s School of Americas (SOA), started in 1946, trained mass murderers and orchestrated coups in Peru, Panama, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico. The SOA trained more than 61,000 Latin American officers implicated in widespread slaughter of civilian populations across Latin America.”In 2001, SOA was renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), but peace activists know it as School of Assassins located at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. This program was exported to other countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and the Middle East.

      Today, we have a Global Phoenix Program of targeted assassination teams numbering tens of thousands ( also called Special Ops or Black Ops) and Predator and Reaper remote controlled drone attacks, initiated under George W. Bush and greatly expanded under Obama.

      Many innocent people have been, and are being, killed by U.S. assassination teams and drone fired missiles. The grief of their families is as real as the grief of the families of victims in the Aurora killings, though seldom acknowledged by western media.

      U.S. policy today embraces assassinations and drone attacks. Our youth play computer killing games with such names as “Call of Duty.” The U.S. is a nation armed to the teeth. It is the world’s number one arms merchant. We should not be surprised when the chickens come home to roost. Indeed the U.S.A. has become a killing nation.

End the Violence!

1. Mourn all victims of violence. 2. Reject war as a solution. 3. Defend civil liberties.4. Oppose all discrimination, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic, etc.
5. Seek peace through justice in Hawai`i and around the world.

Malu `Aina Center for Non-violent Education & Action P.O. Box AB Kurtistown, Hawai`i 96760.
Phone (808) 966-7622.  Emailja@malu-aina.org   http://www.malu-aina.org
Hilo Peace Vigil leaflet (July 27, 2012 – 566th week) – Friday 3:30-5PM downtown Post Office

More response to Walking Eagle with Bullhorn

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

yo walking eagle, keep on walking right oughta here. the military is not beloved to our queen nor the citizens of the hawaiian kingdom, nor the muslims in the middle east, nor the indians on turtle island. being a military person is not bad, what is evil is killing people to take what is theirs because they didn’t want to give it to whitey—skipito

Reply to Mr. Bullhorn

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012
Well – they did have a unilateral document for annexation – The Joint Resolution.  But then – a resolution is a domestic document, and if it has any force at law – it is only within the boundaries of that nation.  To remind Mr.Bullhorn – Hawai’i was a foreign country at that time.  And, Pohakuloa – where the bombs fall – is “Lands Stolen.”  They want to bomb – heck – bomb u.s. lands.  The days of “Doctrine of Discovery” and “Terra Nullis” are over.  In Hawai’i – They never started.
ku
editor’s note:  Ku is a retired attorney