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POSTED: Monday, April 26, 2010

Time to prohibit shark finning

The practice of cutting limbs off of live animals and then just letting them die is an abhorrent thought to all civilized people. We associate this kind of cruelty with developing psychopaths.

Yet a whole industry does exactly that so that it can harvest the fins off of sharks without having the drag and waste of storage space by keeping a “;worthless carcass.”;

Sharks are possibly the most valuable animal in our seas. They keep the oceans clean, and they trigger the natural selection process by culling out weak and sick animals.

In the past we have tried various legislative ways to rid our islands of this horrific industry, but somehow it's always managed to wriggle out of it. It's time we got rid of it.

Today the Legislature will vote on a conference draft of the shark finning bill (Senate Bill 2169). If our leaders are wise enough to vote yes, it means that possession or sale of shark fins will be illegal in Hawaii.

By not allowing boats to land their fins here, it means that most boats from Asia won't come this far and our regional sharks may be spared.

 

               

     

 

 

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Illegal donors should suffer, too

My compliments to Barbara Wong and the Campaign Spending Commission staff for their professional work in the John Henry Felix campaign spending-violation case.

With an important and contentious election season commencing, it is gratifying to know that they are “;watching the store,”; especially if there are any others out there who may be thinking of ways to circumvent campaign spending rules.

One aspect of the enforcement process does bother me, however. The candidate receiving the illegal contributions is sanctioned, but the contributors usually are not. Aren't both sides part of the same equation?

 

Put term limits on all politicians

“;We the People”; are the first words in our nation's Constitution. We need to let our elected official know that we the people are the reason they are civil servants. We have broken federal and state governments, but we can repair them. We need to get to the voting booth and vote.

We have term limits for our president, our governor and our mayor, yet our representatives and senators have none. Why? They are aware of this and will not make any change. We need to vote out any representative with more than four terms and any senator who has been in office more than two terms.

If you want change, you must vote. Our elected officials will never pass a law that will limit their term of office. Do you have the guts to vote them out of office, even if you think that they are doing a good job?

It was not the intent of our Founding Fathers that these officials serve for life.

 

'Public servants' serve themselves

Instead of furloughing the bread and butter (teachers and human service workers), furlough the pork (all politicians).

If they are such great public servants, they all would take a voluntary pay cut.

Kauai County Council members currently make $53,066 a year, with the Council chair making $59,699 a year plus great health insurance. There is only one requirement: that they attend weekly County Council meetings; besides that, they can manage their time however they wish.

Politicians need to step up by example and show what a public servant really is. If any person in political office were to take a voluntary pay cut, or work as a volunteer in lieu of being a paid employee, it would all but guarantee them reelection.

I challenge any politician to step up to the plate, keep schools open and keep human services alive.

Any volunteers?

 

Rail proponents ignore the figures

Since Nancy Bey Little has branded those opposed to rail as Luddites (”;Rail-transit critic becoming a joke,”; Star-Bulletin, Letters, April 15), I would like to brand the pro-railers as Ostriches.

The Luddites were opposed to mechanization during the industrial revolution; my definition of Ostriches is those pro-railers who choose to stick their head in the sand instead of hearing and seeing the facts about rail. If some of the Ostriches will just read a few more words, I will tell them why this Luddite opposes rail.

Estimated cost of rail as reported by the city:

» 2004: $2.7 billion
» 2006: $3.7 billion
» 2008: $4.28 billion
» 2010: $5.5 billion

The 2010 amount does not include costs for recent changes to accommodate the Federal Aviation Administration. Note that this is not a full build out; it only goes from a dirt field in East Kapolei to Ala Moana Center. The full build out to the University of Hawaii-Manoa and Waikiki is over $7.7 billion.

 

Charter schools leading the way

All teacher furlough days have been eliminated by 17 of the 31 charter schools. Others have eliminated some of the furlough days.

By contrast, not a single furlough day has been eliminated by any regular public school.

Charter schools are public schools that are independent of the state Department of Education. Each charter school has its own governance structure, with teachers, school administrators, parents and members of the larger community involved in setting policies for the school.

Regular public schools are controlled largely by the DOE bureaucracy, with school-level staff having insufficient decision-making authority to be effective.

The vast difference in the ways that teacher furloughs were handled by charter schools compared with the DOE indicates the capacity of each to address not just management issues but also academic ones.

Charter schools are flexible, creative and able to accommodate change, characteristics absent from DOE schools. Yet charter schools receive thousands of dollars less per pupil per year than regular schools.

Charter schools should be fully funded, and the cap on the number of charter schools should be removed so that more of them can be established.

The only realistic possibility to improve regular public schools is for the Legislature to pass the bill proposing a constitutional amendment to have the governor appoint the members of the Board of Education. Voters then would have to approve the amendment.

The governor would then have to appoint BOE members committed to shifting decision-making from the DOE bureaucracy to the schools. Ultimately, the schools would have to use their expanded authority to make the changes needed.