The Development Myth

What is occurring right now in Hawaii is not development. The elite call it development, like they promise to bring infrastructure and jobs to impoverished areas and lift people living below a poverty line.

What is happening right now in Hawaii is happening right in front of our eyes. What is happening in Hawaii is not history in a book. It is now.

What is happening is not reading about what happened when the United States took half of Mexico's territory and pirate settlers, like the Irvine Family, moved in to steal Mexican-owned ranches for their own. The Irvines still own the city of Irvine, a wealthy part of Orange County. I read Irvine is called a "planned" city: this too is not development. "Planned" is the inelegant prose of elites who don't want you to know what they are doing, in this case opening a kasbah of speculators, bankers, and venture capitalists.

What is happening in Hawaii is the building of resorts and the creation of golf courses, and they call it development. But this is not development.

Elites have always presented their projects as a gift from above to the poor and disenfranchised.

If you don't believe me watch how your next sports stadium is forced down your throats by the people you thought were elected to serve you and your communities. The joke is on you.

I remember when Willie Brown, mayor of liberal San Francisco, went all folksy and down-home for the Blacks of impoverished Bayview/Hunter's Point. Bayview is to San Francisco what Watts is to LA or Harlem was to NYC before they started running Blacks out or East St. Louis is to ... whoever claims it. Brown had to sell the stadium for his Masters, the bankers: that was the mandate. So he had to convince the people of San Francisco in general, and the Blacks of Bayview in particular that this stadium was their salvation. Jobs. On TV, radio, and bullhorn he sounded like a Texas sharecropper pretending to speak the language of these people.

Developers are never lacking in house slaves to tap dance to whatever tune is played for them.

First an area or region is abandoned [are you listening Detroit?]. The area becomes desolate, the communities poor and subsisting on government handouts. There: they have you where they want you.

Incidentally, you got that way by so-called development.

Back in the day, after the Civil War, developers wanted to build up an industrial age and built their factories of death in cities and forced us off the countryside and into a wage slave system.

That was their development, and our Hell. On farms we did not romanticize poverty; it existed. No one measured it, there was no poverty index or unemployment rate because while you may not have had any money you had food, and you had a roof over your head. You weren't so gullible as you seem to be now because you could for the most part take care of yourself. I mean: you could really take care of yourself.

Their development cured you of your development.

In the cities, you were not only dependent on wages to pay rent but you were also dependent on wages to buy food. So there. And within a few generations, you probably forgot how to grow food. And, by "grow food" I do not mean that charming little herb garden at your kitchen window.

What has been developed? They have gotten richer, and you have gotten dumber, hungrier, and more gullible.

So when the source of your wages begins to disappear - the factory downsizes or closes altogether to find new wage slaves in the global South -  it affects you and your community. It breeds hunger but it also breeds fear. I wish in my heart it bred anger: would the National Rifle Association say then: "If they had guns they would not have lost their jobs"?

What is happening in Hawaii is impoverished native Hawaiians and Hawaiians who were imported here generations ago for cheap labor have become impoverished enough to sell what land they might have, be guided by a menace called the Hawaii Tourism Authority, which seems to be sort of the last viceroy of India who doesn't want to relinquish the old system, a Pacific Camelot, for tourists to come and pretend they are the British Raj.

This is a ripe moment for developers to move in, buy up virtually whole islands, like Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, was allowed to do, buying "98%" of the island of Lanai. He bought it from Castle & Cooke, white land settlers who never should have had the island. Castle & Cooke describe their beginnings in 1851 as "humble" - but not nearly as humble as the people they stole from in their zealous "entrepreneurial spirit and vision." I love how white settlers deify their beginnings.

If I knowingly buy a stolen piece of property from a thief we both go to jail.

The speculators and bankers build resorts for rich tourists, sell tracts of gated communities for rich Americans, like Oprah Winfrey and Men's Wearhouse founder and former CEO, George Zimmer, to buy vacation homes, and poison the land with more golf courses.

There seems to be no limit to these bloody golf courses.

Golf courses require an immense amount of resources to maintain, and they produce nothing beneficial. What they do produce is never, ever in the brochures: poison. The immense amounts of fertilizers poison the ground, and, here in Hawaii, that poisons run off into the ocean and kills the once-beautiful, once-vibrant corral reefs, drives away fish populations, and sullies the water.

What is this developing?

If the developers have an answer to this collateral damage it is to create a Nature Reserve where a section of reef is said to be preserved for tourists to pay and come and look at, like they pay to look at animals stolen from their homelands in zoos, like they pay to watch friendly Hawaiians hula in front of the hotels.

By the way, the tourist magazines here are not funny, usually on the cover depicting a young Hawaiian Cosmo-Girl woman in "native" dress. Can you imagine if the tourist brochures for Alabama portrayed a Black man happily picking cotton?

Come to Dixie and spend a weekend on our restored plantation being waited on by our darkies.

The communities who were sold infrastructure and jobs by the development mafia do get both,  but read the fine print.

The infrastructure is actually designed for the developers to move their clients and their merchandise more easily to and fro, like paved roads and highway improvements.

And developers never tell you the truths about paved roads and highways, just like they never tell you truths about golf courses. This is because developers are serial killers. They kill ecosystems.

Nature does not like a paved road. If you don't believe Nature has feelings, find a road that has been neglected, or a highway, or a sidewalk. Nature desires to consume and overtake it and reestablish an equilibrium.

It takes a lot of constant work and resources devoted to building and maintaining a paved road and fight Nature.

Nature's persistence is probably the only thing that gives me any ounce of optimism: when this Death March of this Death Culture is stopped, Nature will seek to reestablish its equilibrium. Nature is antithetical to the development mafia.

What is happening in Hawaii is when these developers have gotten their land, built their resorts and their golf courses, the communities are actually poorer.

This is happening everywhere.

We know why this is so: the jobs that are offered are low-wage, low-skilled jobs. You can always find a sucker Uncle Tom with his shoes shined for his Master prattling about his luck to have a job, but he won't prattle about how easy it is to meet ends. He won't prattle about how is rent is cheap because developers will inflate property values.

These house boys are housebroken, but they are not hopeless. I just can't devote much time to he who drinks the Kool-Aide and asks for more!

So in sum: developers do not develop anything: they destroy the land base, they destroy people, they destroy communities. Like their industrialists forebears who only polluted the land, air, and water - for the stock exchange - the developers today are homicidal.

What is happening here in Hawaii is in the sunlight of these resource-sucking resorts, where tourists play golf on poison-infused courses, native Hawaiians are fishing for their food on the one hand, while other native Hawaiians, Filipinos, and some poor whites who came here with a dream sold them by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, are serving food to tourists with the other.

Development of this sort is mass murder.

The United States which stole Hawaii was never a nation of laws. I know some social critics like to suggest the white lie that it was a nation of laws to contrast to how bad things are now, but this only shows their myopia to how things have always been.

If the US were a nation of law, Hawaii would today be a sovereign state. It would have developed. Its people - in my opinion - would have by now thrown out its monarchy and implemented a truly bottom-up, democratic, vibrant civil society: this is how all societies and work places should be run, but since this is the wrong lesson, it cannot happen anywhere.

It could not happen in Cuba, which celebrates the 60th year of the start of its revolution this week, which aimed to create such a bottoms-up, vibrant, democratic society. The US launched such a vicious war on the revolution immediately, that the Cubans had to hunker down in defense mode, so this lesson has been lost to everyone.

If we had a bottom-up, democratic, vibrant civil society we'd treat this development mafia as the sociopaths they are: with swift justice. We'd see them for what they are. We'd see a lot of things for what they are, like patriarchy, management, and newborn white babies predestined to be kings, head an entire military, be the head of a whole church, and have at his disposal vast tracts of land and real estate and the rent which comes from them when four out of ten of his peers are born into poverty. That is development.

What is happening right now in Hawaii is not development, it is anti-development. It has happened for a long time wherever the West has Won, and why the Western system, its nation-states, its state economies, are Death Cultures.