Howzit Howard

Top global stories of 2007

IRAQ WAR. Thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans have died in the midst of a civil war. President Bush's popularity fell to new lows and the federal deficit soared to new highs on heightened deployments and added spending, though Mr. Bush had inherited a surplus from his predecessor. Democrats regained control of the House. The original invasion of Iraq was to battle al-Qaida, the terrorist group behind 9/11, but its leader Osama bin Laden remained at large and the group took credit for the December assassination of Pakistani opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. In Hawaii, the war meant the absence of hundreds of residents, some of whom became casualties of the war. The war on terrorism in general also led to controversy on the freedoms that were sidestepped in fighting it. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned over his cleaning house of eight federal prosecutors and the CIA got caught destroying tapes of interrogations at a time when interrogation methods were under scrutiny. OIL PRICES GUSH. Oil prices rose more than 40% in 2007, nearing $100 a barrel. Dialing out inflation to get "real dollars," prices rose to the same stratospheric level of the 1970s Arab oil embargo. Hawaii maritime shipping costs soared because of it and virtually all Hawaii-based businesses were affected by that and by the rising cost of fuel for their delivery vehicles. Oil prices also led to airline and cruise ship fuel surcharges. Gasoline finally got so expensive that sales of "light trucks" (SUVs, vans and pickup trucks) plummeted as consumers showed new interest in cars that aren't so thirsty. In Hawaii there was renewed interest in renewable energy, with several companies planning biofuel operations. MORTGAGE CRISIS. Aggressive selling of "subprimes" -- home loans at extra-high interest rates -- to people who couldn't afford them led to record mortgage defaults. Since mortgages are bundled and sold as investments, the defaults led the mortgage investment market to dry up, creating a short of cash for lending -- a credit crisis whose effects went far beyond the original subprimes to affect companies and people not otherwise connected to the original risky business. The dollar lost about a tenth of its value against the euro in 2007. The CEOs of several major investment firms unfurled their golden parachutes and the Fed injected billions into the banking system to keep the economy moving. Hundreds of Hawaii residents with subprime mortgages faced foreclosure, but this was actually one of the lowest per capita rates of any state. THE CHINA SYNDROME. Millions of toys made in China were recalled over lead paint. Earlier, several toothpastes made in China were recalled for containing an ingredient in antifreeze. And pet food made in China, containing a chemical used in plastics, sickened hundreds of cats and dogs. CAMPUS SLAUGHTER. The worst mass murder in American history took place in April when 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho shot students and professors at Virginia Tech before taking his own life, for a death toll of 32. In Hawaii, KGMB9 exposed lax security at UH. In December a teenager killed eight people and himself at a mall in Nebraska. There was also an infrastructure disaster in 2007 when the collapse of an Interstate bridge into the Mississippi River at Minneapolis killed 13 and hurt 100. An there was a mine disaster in Utah one year after one in West Virginia. STEM CELLS. Scientists reprogrammed other cells to mimic stem cells, the kind you can use to grow any kind of tissue you need. Until now you needed embryonic tissue to do that. The breakthrough promises to advance disease treatment and prevention while disengaging from the abortion issue. GLOBAL WARMING. After decades of political debate about whether there was such a thing as global warming, the United Nations finally declared flatly that it was a scientific fact, and the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by U.N. scientists and former vice president Al Gore, who had been trying to tell people this for years and finally made a documentary movie to lay out the case. The administration acted in December by requiring an increase in vehicle fuel economy for the first time in more than three decades.

Top Hawaii stories of 2007

Everybody does these lists so here's mine.  + HAWAII AIRLINES WAGE WAR. Hawaii interisland airlines waged war on each other in 2007, at the ticket counter and in the courtroom. Hawaiian Airlines wins a suit against Mesa Air, persuading a judge that go! was launched with the illegal use of inside information Mesa gained as a prospective buyer of both Hawaiian and Aloha Airlines. Mesa agreed not to keep the information or use it to found a competitor, and then did. The judge awarded damages in the tens of millions of dollars, several times Mesa's 2006 profit. Mesa, falling into the red in 2007, failed to convince the same judge to rehear the case and at year's end was filing an appeal with a higher court. In the meantime, a 2008 court date was set for a suit against Mesa by Aloha. In the meantime, Big Island-based Mokulele Air converted from a charter service to a scheduled carrier to rebrand itself as go!Express and fly to smaller markets in competition with Island Air and Pacific Wings. Island Air pulled in its horns and laid off some of its work force -- and its CEO left the company -- while Pacific Wings launched a new division in New Mexico, undercutting Mesa in a "turnabout is fair play" maneuver. + ROUGH SEAS FOR SUPERFERRY. Hawaii Superferry, the first-ever attempt to operate interisland marine passenger service with multihulled vessels, launched late in 2007 after court opposition on Maui and protestors in the water on Kauai. Superferry won its battles, but wound up launching in the winter, when seas are rougher, and was bedeviled by sick passengers and canceled voyages in ocean swells. What starts as a harbor use controversy expands into a larger discussion of quality-of-life issues on neighbor islands, and the governor bans Superferry passengers from carrying opihi. + COPS CATCH CONS COPPING COPPER. Copper thefts worsened in 2007, often leaving highway lights out for miles, but for the first time it seemed that police were making real progress in catching the people involved, arresting not only some thieves but also mounting a sting operation against a stolen copper buyer, a business that had portrayed itself as above such activity. The family-owned business was embarrassed and the son said his mother, who bought the copper from an undercover officer, didn't know what she was doing. + SPORTS: UH football has an undefeated season. The triumph of June Jones, Colt Brennan and an unusually talented and cohesive team drew attention away from earlier controversies over UH athletic costs, schedules, and problems with aging Aloha Stadium. The Honolulu Marathon, previously held up as a remarkable example of a well-run annual event with no government financial support, ends the year with egg on its face after tracking technology fails to work -- partly the runners' fault -- leaving thousands with no finishing time. Michelle Wie falls from grace while Tadd Fujikawa goes pro. + HUMAN INTEREST: Genshiro Kawamoto, the Japanese real estate tycoon notorious for buying hundreds of homes and then letting them become delapidated, burnished his image in some quarters while confirming his wackiness in others by installing Native Hawaiian families in ritzy Kahala homes -- after first filling in the pools with rocks. Momi Akana gets her home rebuilt by "Extreme Makeover," and is portrayed as a struggling do-gooder until someone notices she makes a very good salary and her husband is a bank executive. Bountyhunter Dog Chapman extracates himself from legal trouble in Mexico only to lose face when he leaves a racist voicemail criticizing his son's black girlfriend that the son sells to a tabloid, and Honolulu has its own race controversy when slurs are yelled in a Waikele parking lot beating involving a local family with a history of using its fists. Hawaii and the world mourns Don Ho.

Oops, or, the vetoed defense bill

Sometimes a story is so political that partisans of either camp fail to notice the non-partisan insight that the matter offers. It takes someone who is not a diehard Republican or Democrat to see it. As one whose views are too much a mix of liberal and conservative for either party to hold me, I notice these things. President Bush had been beating up Congress for weeks for not passing the defense spending bill when Congress finally did -- and he vetoed it. He issued a statement of disapproval, better known as a pocket veto, which means the bill dies Monday night because he won't sign it. Mr. Bush did it because a provision in the bill would expand the right of Americans to seek financial compensation from countries that support terrorism. He said damage suits against Iraq could destabilize the government. (It's already unstable, but I assume he meant more so.) The veto holds up, among other things, a pay raise for military personnel, including thousands in Hawaii, that was to have started Tuesday. "Only George Bush could be for supporting the troops before he was against it," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who lost the last presidential election after the president said Kerry was for the Iraq war before he was against it. Turnabout is always amusing, but let's press on. Back to the reason for the veto. The bit in question would make it easier for Americans who lost family members to terrorism -- not just in the Iraq war but in the Pan Am bombing or the Marine barracks bombing of 1983, to sue Iraq or Syria or Libya or whatever nation they felt was culpable in their loved one's death. That may theoretically be a concern for Syria or Libya, but the pressing concern for Mr. Bush is that for Iraq this is no theoretical issue -- U.S. POWs in the 1990s Gulf War actually won a $959 million judgment against Iraq. The U.S. government has since said the new government of Iraq cannot be held responsible for claims against the Saddam Hussein regime -- which the United State first propped up and then toppled as Saddam began to display more malice than malleability. (This shocked -- shocked! -- the U.S. government, despite the fact that Saddam was a professional assassin before he entered politics. I am not making this up.) You may think, "So what? It's not like the current government of Iraq would actually pay the money, so this is a moot point." The reason it is not a moot point is that Iraq keeps an ocean of oil profits, at least $20 billion but probably loads more, in banks that the U.S. courts can get to with orders to freeze assets. The Iraqi government will not willingly pay hundreds of millions of dollars to wronged individuals or their families, but the courts might simply take it. And Iraq needs its Gringott-sized coffers to build a power plant or make a payroll or something. O.K., fine, but why didn't President Bush bring this up about eight radio addresses ago? THAT'S the non-partisan point I wanted to call your attention to. According to the Sunday edition of the New York Times, the potential fallout from the measure never occurred to anybody on Capitol Hill or at the White House. It was someone in Baghdad who figured it out. A couple of guys from the Iraqi government called in U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and apparently said something along the lines of, "What are you trying to do to us here? Do you guys even read your own bills?" Of course not! They're thousands of pages long and boring as hell. But Crocker sent a rocket to Washington, D.C., suggesting that maybe some legal eagle might want to actually read the provision and look into this. Someone did, and told his betters at the White House something along the lines of, "We have a problem here." The Times described a conference call with reporters in which a White House spokesman said it was less than two weeks ago that the matter came into "acute focus." That is Washingtonspeak for, "We had no clue, but that was then, this is now." Don't be surprised by this. And don't attribute it to incompetency by the Bush administration -- or, to put it more carefully, don't attribute it to incompetency SOLELY by the Bush administration. This has been going on for years, in administrations of all political stripes, no matter which party controls Congress. Legal and budgetary matters at the federal level have grown so unimaginably complex that nobody understands it all. There are unintended consequences all the time from stuff that gets done without the understanding of Congress or the president. Sometimes it's something slipped in by a senator, sometimes it's a line item in the president's own budget submission, but either way chaos theory is in play, because of the sheer complexity of the legislation that gets passed. It's a situation that will make more trouble until it comes into acute focus.

Stuff that catches on and stuff that doesn ' t

Some books that excite the public don't excite me. "The Closing of the American Mind" lost persuasive traction after about two chapters, and "The World is Flat" was little more than Cliff's Notes for people who haven't read newspapers in years. But "Freakonomics" was fascinating and I hope for more from fresh-minded economist-author Steve Levitt. He thinks of ways to measure the veracity of your suspicions about the behavior of others. And my thinking has been affected for more than 20 years by "Megatrends." John Naisbitt's 1982 bestseller foretold many of today's defining conditions, but some of his megatrends were more than megatrends -- they were observations about the human condition. Chief among them: high tech vs. high touch. Naisbitt noticed that people love new technology but they also love the good, old-fashioned human touch, and there seems to be a need to balance the two, because now and then consumers seem to require a pause in their acquisition of new tech, and when they do the next big thing will sell poorly, no matter what it is. Naisbitt cited Beta video as an example; almost no one was interested in going to the trouble of switching to a measurably superior format, and diehards eventually forsook beta video recorders over lack of choice in tapes to play on them. A few years later it happened again in the world of consumer electronics, when RDAT failed to catch hold with consumers and instead found its niche as a professional recording device, especially for long-form airchecks. The dotcom boom saw many fine ideas fizzle for no particular reasons unless you can imagine millions of websurfers eagerly learning several new applications until they suffer education fatigue and reject the next offering out of hand. Wal-Mart this week quietly killed its online video purchase service after Hewlett-Packard declined to support its own technology any longer. Wal-Mart chose not to seek another provider. But Chad Ho (Damien, 1990), senior VP for Hulu.com, who appeared Friday morning on "Sunrise," says Hulu already has hundreds of thousands of betausers for its free online video service. "The key is the business model," he said. "We don't charge. We'll make our money from advertising." Content is king, we sometimes hear, and this service is an alliance of NBC and Fox.

The killjoy of flying

Ten years ago I boarded a flight from Washington, D.C., to New York, and while we were taking off the plane lost an engine cowling. It was kind of exciting. I was the first one to notice it was loose, and tried to tell the flight attendant, but she was too busy shooing me back into my seat to listen to me. I was determined not to shout or betray panic, so I simply said, "The engine cowling is coming off. We need to return to the airport." "Sir, please return to your seat," she said. "I will. But look at the engine and tell the pilot what you see." "Sit down!" I sat down. I didn't want to die, but I didn't want to be arrested, either. Creating a disturbance on a commercial passenger flight was grounds for arrest even before 9/11. Next I tried to pass the message forward, figuring someone in the front row could argue with the flight attendant while remaining buckled in place. But the people in the next row started yelling, and the cowling tore off altogether at this point. The flight attendant deigned to look at this point and notified the pilot, who turned around and landed. I've never bothered to tell this story beyond that point before, but what happened next is that we returned to the terminal at Dulles airport and were told we would have to wait two or three hours before the next opportunity to get to New York. My companion was a high-powered vice president of a company I used to work for, who wanted me as a consultant to accompany her on a sales call to a publisher. The idea was to fly to New York, take a meeting, and fly home. Waiting two or three hours was not an option. But the airline was altogether unhelpful. We squeezed onto a rival airline's flight, arriving in plenty of time, and presumably the high-powered vice president gave the original airline hell later. Have you ever noticed that everybody has an airline story? This comes to mind after hearing about the meltdown in service at United Airlines, which made the world's second largest airline the common carrier that stole Christmas for some of its customers. United has more than 6,000 pilots, but that's down from nearly 10,000 a few years ago, and sometimes that's a problem. The FAA only lets pilots fly so many hours a month, and weather delays can cause crews to max out, making them unavailable until the next month. That's what happened to UAL this week. It started Sunday when gale force winds swept Chicago O'Hare, still one of the busiest airports in the world and mostly because of United, which is headquartered in Chicago. From Sunday to Wednesday the airline canceled more than 600 flights, according to the Chicago Tribune and the Reuters news agency, including more than 300 on Christmas. United said Thursday it hoped to finally be back to normal operation, but I noticed a deicing notice at Denver International Airport, so a declaration of normality may have been a tad premature. Bad weather, of course, is difficult to plan for. An airline with hubs at Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and Dulles knows it will sometimes encounter snow, strong winds, freezing rain or other problems, but it doesn't know how many blizzards it will get or when. You have to have enough flight crews to cover emergencies, or you can work with fewer crews and the risk that your customers will occasionally get hosed by a service meltdown. Blizzards are bad example of bad weather because other kinds of bad weather that occur far more frequently are also capable of snarling airline traffic. Lightning strikes on the runway, for example, once canceled my United flight from Dulles to San Francisco. I was told to go home and come back tomorrow. I did. But the next day there were still problems, and by the time I got to San Francisco there were no flights to Honolulu. By the time I was given a hotel and transportation voucher, there was no transportion, and I spent the night in fitful sleep in the terminal while the TVs blared. By morning I was ready to confess to being a member of al-Quaida. Waterboarding is nothing compared to the CNN Airport Channel. The point is that it doesn't take a gale or a blizzard to wreak havoc with flight schedules. What wrought havoc this time was merely some lightning on the runway. Bad weather abounds around the calendar. United saves a lot of money by not any longer having about 3,000 extra pilot positions, but there is a considerable cost to its customers. American Airlines and Southwest Airlines also have hubs in Chicago but their schedules were hardly affected at all by comparison. The chief executive officer of United is a former oil executive who never flew commercial, and I always wonder at times like this how much of a flier's pain he is capable of feeling. Not that I blame him -- I'm at a stage of my life where if I can afford to fly first class I do -- but I've flown United a lot over the year, as most Hawaii residents and visitors have, without often getting a sense that the airline is run for the customers. (Feel free to write if you had a sensational experience on UAL or a lousy one on another carrier.) P.S. USA Today reports today that bad weather and air traffic congestion now cause fewer flight delays than the airlines' own problems with short-staffing, a remarkable fact when one considers that flight delays reached a record level in 2007.

 

A different kind of job fair

Who in the wide world of sports would schedule a job fair on the same week as Christmas? Yuka Nagashima, that's who. Nagashima, the long-time CEO of LavaNet, is running the state-sponsored High Tech Development Corp.  these days, and that's the organization behind the Holiday Tech Fair this Friday at the Japanese Cultural Center in Moiliili. HTDC exists to nurture Hawaii's technology sector, and the chief way that sector recruits people is to invite qualified ex-pat kama'aina to return from the mainland. "We hold this fair in December," Nagashima explains, "because many of those folks, including college students on break, are back home to spend Christmas with their parents." The fair is Friday, 4:30-7 p.m., with networking 6-8 p.m. The Japanese Cultural Center is on the mauka side of Beretania across the street from Star Market. More than 25 tech employers will participate from Oceanit to Lockheed Martin to Sopogy. For more information: www.techjobshawaii.org. 

The (Christmas retail) post-season

The 13th month. That's what some retailers call this period between Christmas and New Year's, which accounts for 16% of all retail dollars spent from Thanksgiving to the end of the year. Once the Christmas post-season was merely a time for many happy returns, accompanies by the hope that the returners would see something they liked and make some other purchase on the same visit. But two other factors are in play nowadays -- gift certificates, and the Autosanta Effect. Gift certificate sales are up 6% from last year based on consumer surveys -- later reports on actual redemptions may change that figure, but as it stands now it's more than double the pace of overall retail sales increases. There are reports of some local stores actually running out of gift cards. The Autosanta Effect is my term for the phenomenon of affluent consumers going out after Christmas to buy stuff they hoped they would see under the tree but didn't. Both of these factors are driven by the relative affluence of consumers compared to time past. Gift cards are on the rise because people have more stuff and it's harder to shop for them. Self-gifting is up because many people can afford it. For bookkeeping and tax reasons, it is convenient for a store to move unsold merchandise now, even at a small loss, than to carry it over in the next year hoping to sell it for more later. So merchandise that was supposed to sell before Christmas but didn't will be cheaper now, maybe a lot cheaper. Want a tip? Women's apparel sales this season were actually lower than last year, a significant cool spot in sales. You could find deep discounting in clothing stores.

The truth about Christmas

We like to talk about how inscrutible other cultures are, but it's difficult to imagine anyone fully understanding Christmas who grew up outside its ambit. It's joyous but also sad. It's mercantile but it isn't. It's religious but secular. It's soothing but also stressful. For a household with children that isn't in straitened circumstances, "It's the most wonderful time of the year." If you're poor or alone it's "a blue Christmas." Those who don't celebrate the holiday, who may fit in perfectly the rest of the year, feel excluded or sidelined as society obsesses over decorated conifers and strings of light. If you prefer egg creams to egg nogs, or a Buddhist instead of a Baptist, suddenly life seems to be about other people. Thus is the most widely celebrated of all American holidays is an exclusionary experience. Even for celebrants, the ghosts of Christmas past can add a wistful note, the memory of loved ones no longer with us. How can you look at the same decorations you had when a family member was still alive and not think of that person? There are seasonal songs to remind us of estrangement ("I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams") and I recently blogged about tunes like "White Christmas" or "Chestnuts roasting..." in which the singer seems apart from the celebration, observing the happiness of others or merely holding out the hope of being happy at some point. Even the pious can experience a sense of estrangement. I know members of a fundamentalist church who had their own schism over the issue was whether the tree, with pagan roots, should not be used to mark Christmas. The history of the Christmas tree was not that much disputed -- the problem was that many of the congregation had become attached to the tradition and felt strongly that it did no harm. The mercantile aspects of Christmas are a similar story. For as long as I can remember, it has been a commentary topic at this time of year to rail against the "commercialization" of Christmas, but the history of Christmas is the other way around. Christmas was a pagan holiday that was appropriated by the Church. Then it was appropriated by merchants, mainly one particular New York department store owner, whose personal faith did not prevent him from leveraging the holiday to spur gift buying. Then it was appropriated by the rest of us, who somehow managed to turn it into a generous, amiable, loving holiday for family, friends and colleagues. Say, that's cheering, isn't it? Make a choice for yourself. Maybe you don't celebrate Christmas, or maybe if you do you won't get all you want, or someone else won't like what you got as much as you hoped. Don't fret about all that. Christmas can be a quiet day (if only by stepping into the next room for awhile) with its moments of happiness, and if the giving or receiving falls short for any reasons, you've always got next year.

" Full " employment

Even after rising eight tenths of a percent in one year, Hawaii unemployment is 2.9%, and anything 3% or less is considered by economists to be "full employment." Full employment basically means, anyone who who wants a job can get one, provided he applies for a job for which he is qualified. Anyone who can't find work has a misguided view of his qualifications or a serious personal problem. Below 2% is considered "overemployment." This means that people are being hired for jobs they are manifestly unsuited for. Anyone who dines out has run into waithelp that would never be employed in a normal economy. (The competent waitors must hate these people.) I bring this up because an entire generation of inexperienced young people are entering this abnormal labor market with nothing to compare it to. To them it will seem normal -- until years from now when there is a sluggish economy, their bad work habits get them fired, and being human they will blame their bosses or coworkers or anything else but themselves. I cannot stress enough, if you're a parent and your child can't find a job or can't hold one, look closely at things because it's a "what's wrong with this picture" situation.

Express checkout

If you live in Hawaii, chances are you know more about hotels than most mainlanders do, and have more interest in how hotels differ from place to place. So here's something bizarre I experienced on my visit to Los Angeles to meet my new grandson. My kids live on a quiet street in Hollywood about a mile east of all the famous stuff. I decided I would find a brand name hotel that was a short drive from their place, so the new parents didn't have the additional duty of making Granddad comfortable. I chose the Renaissance Hollywood, which is only a block from the touristy part of Hollywood Blvd. and, in the other direction, only a block from a parallel street that would take me directly to the kids' neighborhood. The decor was just about the most garish I've ever seen in a hotel -- really awful art, too -- but the property is fundamentally sound and the personnel were friendly and competent. They got creative with the express checkout envelope. Check out the way they expressed themselves. "Hasta la Vista, Baby!" was the first thing that hit me, but the envelope also said, "That's All Folks!" and "May the Force Be With You" and "Here's looking at you, Kid," and "Happy Trails," and "Farewell, Mr. Bond," and "Beam Me Up, Scottie" and "So long, farewell, Auf Wiederschen, goodnight." The goodbyes ranged from Shakespeare -- "Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow" to Hannibal -- "I do wish we could chat longer, but I'm having an old friend for dinner. Bye." -- to anonymous announcers -- "Elvis has left the building." "I'll Be Back" is printed backwards.