Big money is a corrupting influence on our democracy, on our elected leaders, and on the legislative and government decision making process at all levels – County, State, and Federal.

The actions of Pacific Resource Partnership (PRP) and related SuperPacs such as For a Better Tomorrow prevent grassroots candidates from winning, and raise the fundraising bar so high that it limits many potential candidates from even thinking about running for election to public office.

PRP’s history of intense and personal negative campaigning (Did you see how they treated former Governor Ben Cayetano?) – further inhibits new candidates unwilling to put their family and business through such a process. Read Civil Beat: An Inside Look at the Hawaii Super PAC That Helped Defeat Cayetano

Without a doubt, PRP controls the biggest and baddest of the SuperPacs in Hawaiʻi. They’ve already spent in excess of 5 million dollars to ensure the successful election of “their people” on August 8.

For an overview AND for a list of the candidates benefiting from the money, read Civil Beat: Big Money In Hawaiʻi Politics — The Carpenters Union Is Crushing Everyone


The candidates who benefit from PRP’s financial support will claim they do not “cooperate” with PRP and they don’t actually receive the money spent by the SuperPac.

Core supporters will claim their candidate is a “good guy”, doing nothing wrong, and PRP’s support is “part of the game” and does not mean the candidate has “sold out” to big development or big money.

My response: Corruption by any other name is still corruption. The money could be coming from the good lord herself, and it would still be a corrupting influence on our democracy.

Regardless of whether the candidate is a nice and good person. If they’re not willing to publicly state their support for true campaign finance reform and opposition to the big money political influence being wielded by PRP and related SuperPacs, they do not deserve our votes and support.

It’s way past time for ALL candidates benefiting from this corruption (legal or illegal) to declare out loud and in public, their position on this.

AND, let’s clear something else up.

PRP membership consists of Union Carpenters AND 250 companies that do contracting/development and who earn their profits to a great extent via government contracts to build bridges, stadiums, highways, schools, harbors, airports, and rail systems etc.

Those same contractors/developers, benefiting from the government contracts, then hire/pay members of the carpenters union, who then kick back some of that money for SuperPac “political action”.

So please – let’s all stop characterizing PRP as simply “the Carpenters Union”.

The people driving this money and attempting to control our elections, are business executives who own and operate some of the largest businesses in Hawai‘i, they are not men and women wearing tool belts, pounding nails, or carrying the lumber.