Hawaii Monitor:

Organized Labor Has Different Faces
By Ian Lind

By the time next week’s election is over and all the bills are paid, the Hawaii Carpenters Union and its affiliates will have spent nearly $4 million in an unprecedented effort to elect their chosen candidate for Honolulu mayor, Kirk Caldwell and, perhaps more importantly, blasting his opponent, former Gov. Ben Cayetano.

The Carpenters main campaign vehicle has been the Pacific Resource Partnership, a joint marketing effort with its signatory contractors, which had already spent over $2.8 million as of October 22, most of it in an ongoing stream of relentlessly negative ads pounding on Cayetano with dubious allegations and misleading claims.

An affiliated organization, the Hawaii Regional Council of Carpenters, pumped $700,000 into “Workers for a Better Hawaii,” another political committee working on Caldwell’s behalf, while the Hawaii Carpenters Political Action Fund spent another $156,000 on the campaign effort.

Pub's Side Note: Talk about a dirty political campaign this is the prime example for all to see of what is bad. Push Polling is by definition "dirty tricks." and that is where they spend most of their money. But this is not for the citizens of this community, these are for the select few. If they win, these people stand to make billions and billions of of dollars in profits on the Rail. We may have to tear it down again some day but that is someone else's worry.

San Francisco found out the hard way: Looked like hell, terrible, low ridership, people definitely prefer buses, high maintenance. They finally tore it down. Now, the city looking nice and beautiful again. But somebody sure made some money along the way. That  is the name of their game. Just ask Romney.