Hawaii should tax each cruise ship visitor

The Hawaii Tourism Authority, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau and our state government courted the cruise ships to come to Hawaii. They are spending a lot of our tax dollars, and the cruise ships are asking our state government to dish out $50 million to improve our harbors and berths.

So why are we supporting a billion-dollar industry that registers ships in foreign countries, escapes American minimum wage requirements and other labor laws and avoids corporate income tax and environmental laws?

We need legislation to pass a $20-head tax for each passenger who sets foot on our islands. That will help the economy even more!

Julie Lopez
Kualapuu, Molokai

Library use increases as support declines

Public library use is up here and nationwide. That's good!

Library staffing in Hawaii has been on hold since 1990. That's not so good!

People are swarming to libraries to use computers. That's good.

Libraries now have to process what they buy (15 minutes per book). Big work load increase. That's not so good!

The price of library materials increases 11 percent every year. That's not so good!

Family use of libraries is up. That's good.

How long can library employees be expected to put on a happy face and do more and more with less and less? Something has got to give. That can be very bad.

Sylvia Mitchell
Liliha Public Library

'Experts' agree there's no need for quarantine

In his Jan. 15 letter, Dr. Frank Tabrah indicated he thought experts should decide what Hawaii's quarantine laws should be. I agree.

Dr. James Foppoli, our current state veterinarian, testified under oath that he is not an expert on rabies or risk analysis. He is the one who has said, "I will never be convinced" by other experts' reports. He has stood in the way of experts previously engaged to provide advice on the most effective rabies prevention systems.

They have many reports from the Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization and others indicating that a system of rabies prevention, including microchip identification, vaccination and blood testing, is superior to quarantine in rabies prevention.

The Community Quarantine Reform Coalition has presented a system based on these expert reports to make Hawaii safer. It was endorsed by more than 40 medical and scientific professionals.

Meanwhile, Foppoli tried to discredit this report to continue his quarantine fiefdom. He kept his work secret and introduced his own report claiming his work was peer reviewed by experts in New Zealand.

But we have statements by the New Zealand experts that they never saw his final report, only an early draft and their advice was not implemented.

Is this the kind of professional or scientific competence Tabrah seeks in establishing health policy for Hawaii?

Chris Quackenbush
Founder, Community Quarantine Reform Coalition

Vagrants discourage visitors' spending

I am a repeat visitor each year from California and I would like to tell the city the completed construction on the beach front is a great improvement.

Now what needs to be done is to rid the streets in Waikiki of the "strong urine" smell from sleeping vagrants right in front of the stores. We avoided some areas during our two-week stay. That must hurt businesses. How can health officials close their eyes to this?

C. Wokan
San Francisco, Calif.

Akaka Bill would result in more lawsuits

Your Jan. 5 editorial stated that "the best way to avoid further litigation" over Hawaiian preference laws is the enactment of the Akaka Bill. The truth is exactly the opposite.

The first spate of lawsuits would be over constitutionality. In the 1913 case of U.S. vs. Sandoval, the court stated that Congress could not "bring a community or body of people within the range of this power by arbitrarily calling them an Indian tribe."

As anyone living here knows, there is no Hawaiian "tribe." The Akaka Bill uses ancestry, and no other standard, to determine who may participate in the creation of the "governing entity" to be formed. Rice vs. Cayetano held that the ancestry-based definitions of "Hawaiian" and "Native Hawaiian" are racial. There is no meaningful difference between these definitions and those in any of the versions of the Akaka Bill.

But even if it survives a constitutional challenge, its other defects promise endless litigation. The bill fails to provide resources for the new "entity." It offers federal cooperation to obtain the state's ceded lands, but it ignores the fact that these lands belong to all the state's citizens. It permits the new entity to redefine "Native Hawaiian," so a majority of the entity's members could exclude the rest, not only from membership in the entity, but from the very status of "Native Hawaiian."

The Akaka Bill would provoke, not avoid, litigation. It would racially divide us and foster other social and economic ills.

Paul M. Sullivan

Relaxing limits on wiretaps is foolhardy

Regarding your Jan. 11th editorial: The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii has good reason to be concerned over a law-enforcement coalition's push to ease restrictions on wiretaps, the vast majority of which are used to fight the war on drugs. Police searches on public transit, drug-sniffing dogs in schools and random drug testing have led to a loss of civil liberties in America, while failing miserably to prevent drug use.

The drug war threatens the integrity of a country founded on the concept of limited government. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, in large part due to the war on some drugs.

It's not possible to wage a moralistic war against consensual vices unless privacy is completely eliminated, along with the Constitution. America can be a free country or a "drug-free" country, but not both.

Robert Sharpe
Drug Policy Alliance
Washington, D.C.

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