Howzit Howard

When you do that doodoo that you do so well

Michael O'Leary is a man who always keeps his eye on the bottom line. The CEO of Ryanair, in an interview, said he was thinking of charging his passengers to use the lavatory on flights. A spokesman later confirmed he wasn't kidding; the company is really considering this. The Irish discount airline has the lowest fares in Europe but nickel-and-dimes its passengers by charging extra fees for things which are still free on U.S. airlines even now. It was also a pioneer in the business of selling you other stuff on its website while you're there to book travel. I know this because Mesa Air Group CEO Jon Ornstein told me a few years ago that he was a fan of Ryanair and that the biggest misstep of his career was a missed opportunity to get involved in that carrier. Ryanair probably won't charge a fee to pee. The mere proposal has made the carrier an international laughing stock, as if they spent good money buying television commercials with the slogan: "Ryanair: We Actively Look for Ways to Annoy Our Passengers."

How the tourism authority will change if Mike McCartney runs it

Sometimes I get inside information because a little bird tells me. My inside information on Mike McCartney comes from having worked for him. I have a pretty confident idea of what it will be like to work for him if the Hawaii Tourism Authority board votes next week to accept its search committee's recommendation that he be hired to succeed Rex Johnson as CEO, the authority's executive director post. McCartney was a state senator and served as state human resources director. He's currently the executive director of the teacher's union and before that he was state Democratic chairman. He has even been the chairman of the tourism authority. But I know him from his days as president of PBS Hawaii. He hired Michael Harris, then the director of the KHON Morning News, as his director of creative services, waved his hand in the main studio, and told him, "I want you to make this place busy again." Harris responded by increasing local programming including the creation of "PBN Friday," later known as "Everybody's Business With Howard Dicus." I've seen this guy in action. McCartney is not a hands-on guy in the sense of interfering with your work and second-guessing the details. His idea of hands-on is to put his hands on your shoulders, tell you you're doing a good job, and make sure you're happy and motivated. He knows how to give instructions but he dislikes being bossy, so you get the minimum supervision necessary to keep your work consistent with overall goals. Some high-level bosses are starring in the movie of their own life and like to enter a room and make a scene. Some are insecure and want to reassure themselves by ordering others around. Some were mentored by bad supervisors and think they aren't doing their job unless they micromanage. McCartney has none of these problems. As former HR guy he knows most people perform well if you're careful not to distract them with annoyances. He knows it's not true that people don't embrace change, they merely don't embrace it instantly, and he knows how to give the calm persuasion and space for someone to get used to the idea. He does not have an us-and-them mentality. When he was state Democratic chairman, and KHON wanted me to sit in on their election coverage, I wanted to meet with him off-the-record and go over the candidates and have him word-associate to fill me in on backstories. He agreed but only on the condition that I do the same thing with state Republican chairman Sam Aiona -- and gave me his phone number. (I did wind up meeting with both of them and both were immensely helpful.) The staff of the tourism authority might fear a boss who does too much or too little -- I have not have any encounter with McCartney in which he said or did anything that would debar him from performing this job.

Hawaii Biotech vaccine test even better than reported

There are several steps in testing a new vaccine, and the only trials completed for the new West Nile vaccine invented in Hawaii were simply to determine if the vaccine is safe, not whether it works. So even though the successful completion of the trials is good news, is does not immediately sound like a big deal; it sounds like all the developer has done is make sure the vaccine doesn't give you hives or something. But in point of fact Hawaii Biotech found out much more than that. It had to do blood tests to make sure the vaccine didn't produce any unintended and undesired results. Well, if you're doing that, you might as well test to see if the vaccine is producing the desired result, the production of virus antibodies. And it did. For Hawaii Biotech, which employs several dozen people at its lab across from the bowling alley in Aiea, it's a convincing validation of its new vaccine, the first ever developed for West Nile. West Nile virus has killed more than 1,000 people since it was identified in the eastern U.S. in 1999. It causes brain fever and kills the very old and other people with compromised immune systems. I was in Washington, D.C., and well remember the scare it caused. West Nile killed some birds but not others; mosquitos bit the birds, and then bit humans. That was the vector. Health officials told us to eliminate all standing water in our yards so mosquitos couldn't breed, but the Chesapeake Bay is one of the world's largest wetlands. Hawaii Biotech has earned $36 million in venture capital funding and $55 million in government funding to make this virus. The lavish funding stems in part from the fact that it's a completely new kind of virus, based on proteins rather than whole virus molecules, making it safer than all existing vaccines. Hawaii Biotech is already planning a similar vaccine for ebola. Your tech sector at work.

Tipping point for tourism

The Hawaii tourism slump has reached a new low even at a time of some hopeful bits of news here and there. The tipping point was last May. Up to then, even though arrivals were falling below the levels of the previous year, revenues were still rising, due to higher room rates. After May, the year-to-year visitor decline went to double digits and spending started to fall, too. The state's wrap-up report on January, just out, is even worse, showing that visitor spending fell by a greater percentage than visitor arrivals despite longer average stays. Now you know we're on the slippery slope of slumping. So you would probably like to know the hopeful bits. Okay. The percentage declines in visitors have gotten a little smaller this month. Hotel rate discounting seems to have eased very slightly on some islands. Japan Airlines says its April-September Jalpak tour bookings are actually up 3% so far (according to Hawaii Tourism Japan). And the big news (drum roll, please): January honeymoon traffic from Japan was up almost 50% from last year. Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!

Brooksley Born and the Nominee of Doubt

When last we left Brooksley Born, our heroine was vindicated for her warning that unregulated derivative investment instruments could totally screw up our financial system. Now she finds herself in the bizarre position of meeting the nominee to run the same regulatory agency she ran, a man who was part of the cabal that opposed and neutralized her in the late 1990s, making our current calamity possible. Gary Gensler is President Obama's nominee to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He was scheduled to be grilled by senators Wednesday, and insiders said he prepared for this by meeting more than once with Born. Gensler worked at the Treasury Department as an undersecretary at the same time Born, as CFTC head, was telling Congress it needed to regulated derivatives. Born became a real life Cassandra when her dire warnings, which turned out to be right on the money, were dismissed on the advice of a boy's club of free marketeers in the Clinton administration. The two treasury secretaries under whom Gensler worked, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, are both senior economic advisors to President Obama now. Along with then-Fed head Alan Greenspan and current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, these other three guys, Gensler, Rubin, Summers, were all part of the boy's club that persuaded Congress to ignore Born.  Bloomberg News, quoting sources, says Born agreed to meet with Gensler twice in recent days and they have also spoken over the phone, but the sources were careful to say this does not imply Born supports his nomination, and Born herself has been consistently refusing all interviews, though her predictive feat was the economic equivalent of landing a plane on the Hudson River. The sources told Bloomberg that Gensler's views of derivatives have "evolved." That's not good enough. His view needs to revolve, not evolve. There is no sensible view except to say that his previous view was incorrect. Anything less than that, and I will regard what he says as evasive or dopey. Greenspan, as I have noted before, has flatly stated that he was wrong in thinking the investment houses would take care of things on their own to safeguard their good names. He now knows that the people working at those investments houses were less interested in the firm's good name than with their own good performance bonuses. On the other hand, if Gensler realizes he was totally wrong and says so, and means it, then that makes him "older but wiser" and he could actually be good on the job.

RIP to E & O

E&O Trading Co., the mischievious Asian fusion restaurant at Ward Centre, has been unable to renegotiate its lease with General Growth Properties, and will close Saturday night after four years. Let me tell you that I thought E&O was a great restaurant and dined there many times. If you ordered the right combination of appetizers and entrees you could play with your food for hours, because of all the different sauces. The first time I ate there it was as a guest of my friend John Heckathorn, who intended to review it. It was the first time I saw John at work. It made me think about a key difficulty of a restaurant reviewer's job. I could try something and like it and say so and move on. If he tried something, he had to ask him, do I like it? Do I like it more than anyone else's? If not, where did I like it better? Why was it better? What was wrong with it here? The job, in other words, practically forces you to be negative except when you're lucky to eat something that excels anything similar you've ever consumed. I wrote about this in a column for Pacific Business News, hoping John would be pleased, but it turned out that I beat him into print -- his review hadn't run yet -- and I always wondered if he really didn't mind or was just being kind! E&O is the third restaurant to close at Ward Centre since September. Brew Moon and Compadres had been there for many years. All three were victims of restricted parking (due to construction across the street), recession, and the inability or unwillingness of landlord General Growth Properties to work with them on the rent.

Return of the ticket books

Mokulele Airlines, flying significantly fuller now than in the first few weeks of its new jet service, has added some revenue by bringing back ticket books. Hawaiian Airlines and Aloha Airlines used to sell books of tickets, and many kama'aina families bought them. Both airlines abandoned ticket books years ago for economic reasons. But Mokulele cut its fares so low to induce people to try the new service that the ticket books improve its bottom line. Mokulele CEO Bill Boyers announced the ticket books on KGMB9 Tuesday morning because, if you must know, I had suggested ticket books to him in a casual conversation while he was waiting to go on the air a few months ago. I didn't think he would do it. I just thought it would be a cool kind of retro thing. After announcing that he was indeed doing it, when the cameras turned to Jeff for weather and traffic and our mikes were turned off, we both wondered aloud how Hawaiian and/or go! would respond. Well, Hawaiian responded with $43 dollar fares for travel taken over three months, fare guaranteed, no money up front, with online registration. Sort of a virtual ticket book, you could call it. What this does for Hawaiian (and for go! if it launches something similar) is defend its market share against the upstart. What it does for the upstart, Mokulele, is improve cash flow. But what does it do for you? Low fares aimed specifically at kama'aina can jump start interisland travel by local residents, at a time when a very nice vacation on another island is an affordable alternative to virtually any kind of trip to the mainland. In a recession that is hitting neighbor islands much harder than Oahu, anything that encourages Oahuans to visit Kauai, Maui County or the Big Island is helpful. You can even say that Hawaiian and Mokulele, though they are first and foremost activing to safeguard their businesses, are investing in the Hawaii economy through these actions.

Which restaurant do you want not to fail?

As we work ever harder to earn money and pay our bills, reducing our discretionary spending just in case something bad happens, we seem to be spending more money at the drive-thru and less in Hawaii's many fine dining restaurants. One of the leading lights of Hawaiian regional cuisine confided to a friend that he is surviving right now on his catering business. My friend Derrick Malama from Hawaii Public Radio and I met for lunch today at Willow's and were astonished to find only half a dozen cars in the parking lot. The food was good and so was the service; all that was lacking were more people to enjoy it. You're going to be really sorry if you don't give Willows some of your business and they go out of business. They're open on Mondays, too; not everyone is. This is a landmark, people, this is history. It's bad enough McCully Chop-sui is gone.

The big mouth of Sen. Chris Dodd

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., sent bank stocks into a tailspin Friday with an unguarded comment. The White House had to issue its own comment later to restore equilibrium to stock markets. Some speculators could have made or lost millions. What Dodd said, to Bloomberg News, was that while he did not like the idea of nationalizing banks, he could see where it might become necessary for a short time. And investors, thinking, "What does he know that we haven't heard yet?" sold their bank stocks. He didn't know anything. He was just shooting off his mouth. But major bank stocks lost a quarter to a third of their entire value in a matter of minutes. The White House was obliged to issue its own statement that the administration feels private ownership is the way to go. Translation: "Don't pay attention to Chris Dodd. He is a babooze." The Washington Post noted that someone who bought Bank of America on Friday morning and sold during the Dodd panic could have lost 28% of his investment, while someone who bought at the bottom and sold after the White House restored order could have made a 30% profit. The senator's stupid comment is a reminder that it is hard to overstate the degree to which incompetence can be found in the overpaid senior levels of our life, whether in the corporate management suite or the halls of government. Never assume that the chairman of a legislative banking committee is an expert on banking, or the chief executive of a bank fully understands the investments his own institution is getting into. In real life there is no "Mission: Impossible," nor even a "West Wing." In real life, many key jobs are filled by people who don't really know what they are doing.

Clef ' s Notes: Piano Concertos

Next weekend on my Hawaii Public Radio show (5am-7am Saturday) in the 5:30 a.m. half hour I'll play two movements from Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto bracketed a work that is clearly influenced by it, John Adams' double piano concerto "Grand Pianola Music." Beethoven composed five piano concertos and the "Emperor" is the biggest and brassiest. My personal favorite is the Fourth, which defies all sorts of piano concerto conventions. It starts very quietly with solo piano, for example. And in the biggest cadenza, when the orchestra plays the usual cliche cadence, the soloist, before vamping on the work's main theme, vamps on the cadence itself. I laughed out loud in the Kennedy Center the first time I heard it and angered the patrons around me. My favorite piano concerto is George Gershwin's Concerto in F, and one of my favorites is Maurice Ravel's response to it, Concerto in G. Both open with percussion. Both have jazz influences. Both have bluesy middle movements. Yet Gershwin's is really American and Ravel's is really French. Jazzier than both put together is Copland's one piano concerto. Truth be told, I'm not a fan of conventional piano concertos, which seem to be more about one person showing off than stageful of people making music. And this extends to other concertos, too. My favorite violin concerto is one by Prokofiev that has no solos. All of all the concertos for all instruments that use traditional forms and solos, the one that I like the most, and consider the most musical, is a fairly obscure one by Vaughan Williams for oboe. Discuss.