by Lanny Sinkin on 26 October 2007
I was born under the Chinese sign of the Dog. As most folks know, dogs have a very well developed sense of smell. The smells detected transmit information to the brain that is translated into images of the surrounding reality.
So this morning I have paused in the ongoing work to sift through the smells on the political air.
The most obvious smell is fear.
Look at the bill the liberals drew up. They had their opportunity to incorporate all the passion, insights, and challenges brought forth at the hearings in the outer islands and make a stand against the tyranny emanating from the Governor's office and the criminal conspiracy she organized to keep Superferry operating after the Supreme Court ruling.
The bill the liberals drew up is pathetic. The conditions imposed are negligible. The only purpose they have served is to raise hopes among the resistance and then dash those hopes in an apparent effort to demoralize the resistance. Their service to the central command will certainly be acknowledged with support in the coming election cycle.
Of course they must take individual responsibility for their actions. We are each gifted with life and free will. We are always capable of rising to meet any challenge and acting from a place of fearlessness. When we decide to blend in and go along, even with tyranny and criminality, we give away our birthright. We need not worry about the perspective future generations will have of our cowardice; we need only look in the mirror and ask "Is that who I really
am?"
What are they afraid of in the Superferry scenario? "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Benito Mussolini.
The second smell is rot.
The liberal legislators do give some of their power away to the Democratic Party leadership. An official in the party told me at the O'ahu hearing that the new law was a done deal and that the Senators had gone to the outer islands to provide the Senators with some cover within their constituency. The party leadership had, therefore, joined in the unconstitutional effort to overturn a final court judgment on behalf of a criminal conspiracy.
Just as the Democratic Party at the national level took impeachment off the table, the Democratic Party at the state level never allowed impeachment to be on the table in the first place. In its place, the Party put appeasement.
Brother Hightower's column asks a very important question: Where have all the politically courageous leaders gone? Maybe fear is the answer to that question as well. After a spasm of political assassination changed United States history, speaking the truth as a politician became a life threatening act. More and more politicians hid within political packages designed to convince people that there was a gift inside when actually there was only a frightened child hiding
from commitment.
One speaker at the hearings said "We are not in the sixties anymore" as a reference to the resistance as a historical artifact. The more appropriate historical framework would be Germany in the 30s, where the silence of those who saw what was happening and did nothing led directly to the imposition of dictatorship and the gas chambers.
There is another smell on the air – puakinikini, lilikoi, plumeria, tuber rose, and all the other flowers in the garden where we live. We bathe in their fragrance and express gratitude for their existence. We find healing and peace within their embrace.
So from that place of peace, we forgive those who act from fear and apologize if our expressed perceptions appear harsh. The love we have for the planet that makes life possible produces a passion that speaks truth in terms that are blunt to those who disrespect the planet. The anger we feel stems from the love we feel. Ours is righteous anger towards attitudes and actions that can indeed be characterized as haole because they are foreign to the Hawaiian way of thinking
and behaving.
We see the beast in the greedy, destructive behavior of those who insist that the Earth and the Natural World are the beast that must be crushed and domesticated. We are constantly amazed at people who live life as if they hate life. Upside down and backwards we call them.
So we use the tools that they pretend to believe in to help them believe in something outside their appetites. We go to their legislative hearings and testify. We go to their courts and petition. We go to their media with press conferences, letters, and opinion editorials. We participate in their elections. We go where they are and speak in their language to try to connect them to their higher self and to a vision of a better world.
While we can see their sickness so clearly, getting them to even acknowledge that they might be sick is a tremendous challenge. They are so immersed in their State of Consumption and pursuit of empire that they consider us quaint, as throw backs to a time which no longer exists. They will increase their speed towards the cliff rather than engage in self examination.
So what do we do? We rededicate ourselves to love. We send our love to the planet with our intention of healing. We send our love to the sleep walkers with the intention that they awake. And we leave our garden once again to see whether any of their tools still work and whether our living example of commitment to the Earth can awaken them.
Back to the courts. Back to the water.
Lanny Sinki
P. O. Box 944
Hilo, Hawaii 96721
phone: (808) 936-4428
email: lanny.sinkin@gmail.com
Attorney at Law (Federal Practice)
Ali'i Mana'o Nui (Chief Advocate and Spiritual Advisor) by appointment of
Ali'i Nui Mo'i (King) Edmund Keli'i Silva, Jr.
| While Most of the Democrats Cower
the Presidency Is Taking Over
the Courts & Congress
by Jim Hightower on 23 October 2007 in the Hightower Lowdown
Where is Congress? It's way past time for members to stand up. Historic matters are at stake. The Constitution is being trampled, the very form of our government is being perverted, and nothing less than American democracy itself is endangered - a presidential coup is taking place. I think of Barbara Jordan, the late congresswoman from Houston. On July 25, 1974, this powerful thinker and member of the House Judiciary Committee took her turn to speak during the
Nixon impeachment inquiry.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total," she declared in her thundering voice. "And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution."
Where are the likes of Barbara Jordan in today's Congress? While the BushCheney regime continues to establish a supreme, arrogant, autocratic presidency in flagrant violation of the Constitution, members of Congress largely sit there as idle spectators - or worse, as abettors of Bush's usurpation of their own congressional authority.
Why It Matters
Separation of powers. Rule of law. Checks and balances. These may seem to us moderns to be little more than a set of dry, legal precepts that we had to memorize in high-school history class but need not concern us now. After all, the founders (bless their wigged heads!) established these principles for us back in 17-something-or-other, so we don't really have to worry about them in 2007. Think again. These are not merely arcane phrases of constitutional law,
but the very keystones of our democracy, essential to sustaining our ideal of being a self-governing people, free of tyrants who would govern us on their own whim. The founders knew about tyranny. The monarch of the time, King George III, routinely denied colonists basic liberties, spied on them and entered their homes at will, seized their property, jailed anyone he wanted without charges, rounded up and killed dissidents, and generally ruled with an iron fist.
He was both the law and above the law, operating on the twin doctrines of "the divine rule of kings" and "the king can do no wrong."
(Alert: Ready or not, the following is a high-school refresher course on American government. There will be a test.) At the front of the founders' minds was the necessity of breaking up the authority of their new government in order to avoid re-creating the autocracy they had just defeated. The genius of their structure was that legislating, administering, and judging were to be done by three separate but coequal branches, each with powers to check the other
two, and none able to aggregate all three functions into its own hands (a result that James Madison called the very definition of tyranny). Just as important, to deter government by whim, all members of the three branches were to be subject to the laws of the land (starting with the Constitution and Bill of Rights), with no one above the law. As Thomas Paine said, "The law is king."
These were not legal niceties but core restraints designed to protect citizens from power grabs by ambitious autocrats. Such restrictions also make our country stronger by vetting policies through three entities rather than one. This balanced authority helps avoid many serious policy mistakes (or at least offers a chance to correct them later), and it is intended to prevent the one mistake that's fatal to democracy - allowing one branch to seize the power to
rule unilaterally.
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