The Great Chinatown Fire

On New Year's Eve one hundred years ago, the first of a number of controlled fires were set in Chinatown as a way of defending Honolulu from bubonic plague, known in history as Black Death. Next to the Pearl Harbor attack, the outbreak of plague was the greatest public-safety disaster in Hawaiian history. The government was determined to do anything to save the city -- even burn it to the ground. Today we begin the first of a four-part series describing the events leading up to what became known as the Great Chinatown Fire.

- Star Advertiser, 1/24/00, 1/25/00, 1/31/00, 2/1/00

The one country that could stop Russia

With every passing day, the war in Ukraine becomes a bigger tragedy for the Ukrainian people but also a bigger threat to the future of Europe and the world at large. There is only one country that might have the power to stop it now, and it’s not the United States. It’s China.

If China announced that, rather than staying neutral, it was joining the economic boycott of Russia — or even just strongly condemning its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw — it might shake Vladimir Putin enough to stop this vicious war. At a minimum, it would give him pause, because he has no other significant ally aside from India in the world now.

Why would President Xi Jinping of China take such a stand, which would seemingly undermine his dream of seizing Taiwan the same way Putin is attempting to seize Ukraine? The short answer is that the past eight decades of relative peace among the great powers led to a rapidly globalizing world that has been the key to China’s rapid economic rise and the elevation out of poverty for some 800 million Chinese people since 1980. Peace has been very good for China. Its continued growth depends on China’s ability to export to and learn from that world of steadily integrating and modernizing free markets.

The whole Faustian bargain between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese citizenry — the C.C.P. gets to rule while the people get to be steadily better off economically — depends to a significant degree on the stability of the global economy and trading system.

To Chinese strategists caught up in old-think — that any war that weakens modern China’s two primary rivals, America and Russia, has to be a good thing — I would say the following: Every war brings with it innovations (new ways to fight, win and survive), and the war in Ukraine is no exception.

We have already seen three “weapons” deployed in ways we’ve never seen before or not seen in a long time, and China would be wise to study them all. Because if China doesn’t help stop Russia now, these weapons will either ultimately hammer Putin into submission — which means they might be used against China one day, should it seize Taiwan — or damage Russia so badly that the economic effects will radiate everywhere. These weapons might even prompt Putin to do the unthinkable with his nuclear arms, which could destabilize and even destroy the global foundations on which China’s future rests.

The most important innovation in this war is the use of the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, simultaneously deployed by a superpower and by superempowered people. The United States, along with the European Union and Britain, has imposed sanctions on Russia that are crippling its economy, critically threatening companies and shattering the savings of millions of Russians at an unprecedented speed and scope that bring to mind a nuclear blast.

Putin has now figured that out — and said so explicitly on Saturday: The U.S.- and E.U.-led sanctions are “akin to a declaration of war.” (Vladimir, you haven’t felt the half of it yet.)

Second, because the world is now so wired, superempowered individuals, companies and social activist groups can pile on their own sanctions and boycotts, without any government orders, amplifying the isolation and economic strangulation of Russia beyond what nation-states are likely to do. These new actors — a kind of global ad hoc pro-Ukraine-resistance-solidarity-movement — are collectively canceling Putin and Russia. Rarely, if ever, has a country this big and powerful been politically canceled and economically crippled so fast.

The third weapon is both new and old, and it’s a spiritual and emotional one: The West has rediscovered its voice. Faced with the raw, primitive onslaught by Russia against a flawed but aspiring democracy like Ukraine, the free world has been aroused. America and liberal societies in general can often look and act dumb and divided — until they aren’t. Ask Adolf Hitler.

These three weapons should be enough to get China’s attention. So let’s look closer at how they work in practice.

The Biden administration, in an effort to deter Putin, assembled a powerful package of deep and broad economic sanctions and warned the Russian leader that if he invaded Ukraine, he’d be betting his whole farm — the economic viability of his country and regime. Tragically, Putin bet the farm, and the results have been swift and merciless.

The Russian ruble-based stock market has been closed ever since Russia’s major financial institutions were either placed under sanctions or thrown off the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system, Barron’s reported, but “the dollar-denominated secondary listings of Russian companies in London are still trading. The destruction of market value is astonishing.” It added that shares in Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, “have collapsed more than 99 percent since mid-February, when its stock traded at around $14.” Last Wednesday in London trading, Barron’s noted, “the shares bottomed out at 1 cent.”

On Thursday the rating agencies Fitch and Moody’s “downgraded Russia by six notches to ‘junk’ status, saying Western sanctions threw into doubt its ability to service debt and would weaken the economy,” Reuters reported.

Ever since Putin faced sanctions in 2014 for annexing Crimea and fomenting rebellion in eastern Ukraine, he has been amassing reserves of foreign currency and gold — some $630 billion worth — to try to insulate Russia from more global sanctions by giving his central bank all the ammo it needed to protect the value of the ruble. Or so he thought.

“It turns out that Russia’s foreign reserves strategy had a major flaw: About half of the money was held overseas in foreign banks — and now Russia can’t get to it” because of the sanctions, noted Fortune. So the ruble savings of many Russians are being ravaged.

Bloomberg quoted Marina Gretskaya, a 32-year-old Russian living in London who moved last year to work in communications. She kept a ruble savings account in an online Russian bank, Tinkoff. Two weeks ago, her assets there were worth $7,400. On Monday, the ruble plummeted more than 30 percent against the dollar. That evaporated more than $2,000 from her savings. “It’s a month’s salary,” she said. The same is almost certainly true for tens of millions of Russians — and it’s just starting.

Oh, and by the way, in this wired world, guess who owns a significant portion of Russia’s commercial airline fleet.

Not Russia.

Roughly two-thirds of Russia’s commercial airliners were made by Boeing (334 jets) or Airbus (304), Reuters reported. A significant portion of those are owned by Irish leasing companies. The Dublin-based AerCap, the world’s biggest airplane-leasing company, owns “152 aircraft across Russia and Ukraine valued at almost $2.4 billion,” The Irish Times reported. In addition, the Dublin-based companies SMBC Aviation Capital and Avolon own 48 aircraft between them that are leased to Russian airlines.

E.U. sanctions require those companies to repossess all those planes on lease to Russian airlines by the end of March. And Boeing and Airbus announced that they will no longer service or provide spare parts for any of these planes. On Saturday, Russia’s state airline, Aeroflot, said that it would suspend all international flights because of “additional circumstances that prevent the performance of flights.” Domestic flights are sure to follow.

Russia spans 11 time zones. If this persists, the grip of the Russian central government over the Russian landmass could begin to loosen. In the Russian Far East there are a lot of cities closer to Beijing than Moscow. Just saying …

Now add the sanctions, boycotts and pressure points coming from the superempowered nonstate actors. My favorite is Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old University of Central Florida student who created a Twitter account — @RUOligarchJets, or Russian Oligarch Jets — that tracks the private jets of Russian billionaires close to Putin. “While the 19-year-old is hardly the only person to offer such services,” noted Bloomberg, what makes his account different is its “easy accessibility and the enticing window” it offers on the lives of Putin’s cronies.

The account garnered 53,000 followers in just a few days, and it now has almost 400,000; a single individual, Sweeney is making it more difficult for Putin’s pals to hide their often ill-gotten wealth.

This is the globalization of moral outrage: It goes from watching a short video online showing Russian soldiers firing on a Ukrainian nuclear energy facility to an employee posting that video on his or her Facebook page to a group of employees emailing their bosses or going on Slack — not to ask their C.E.O.s to do something but to tell them they have to do something or they will lose workers and customers.

It is happening in companies all over the world. Shortly after Putin invaded Ukraine, BP, on its own, said it was quitting its operations in Russia after working with an oil firm there for roughly 30 years. For Russia to lose the petroleum engineering talent of BP is a huge blow.

Russia and Russians are now being canceled from every direction — from ballerinas to soccer teams to companies to orchestras — and it is being driven increasingly by superempowered individuals and small groups. And when the cancel juggernaut gets going globally, it acts without mercy. As The Times reported last week, “A day after organizers of the Paralympic Winter Games announced that they would allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to take part in the competition, the board made a stunning reversal and barred athletes from both countries on the eve of the opening ceremony.”

There are two big dangers, though, with these innovations. If the economic nuclear bomb that the United States and its allies just detonated in Russia crushes its economy as quickly and deeply as I suspect it will, there is a danger, however remote, that Putin will go to greater, even unthinkable extremes, like launching a real nuclear weapon.

The second danger — and China, in particular, should keep this in mind — is that while nation-states may choose to lift their sanctions at some point for hard-core realpolitik reasons, the nonstate actors may not. These are highly decentralized organizations.

When Anonymous, the global hacker consortium, announced that it was attempting to take down Russian websites, that was not by government order; it just acted on its own. Who does Russia call to get Anonymous to accept a cease-fire?

Putin was a total ignoramus about the world he was living in, and so he bet the farm in the 21st-century casino of globalization, where, in the end, the house always wins — or there is no house left.

There are signs that China recognizes some of these new realities — that no country is too big to be canceled in the wired world. But its initial instinct seems to be to try to insulate itself from that reality, rather than step up to help reverse Putin’s aggression. To which I say: Good luck with that. China cannot be connected and disconnected at the same time.

So I hope not only that China’s leaders don’t bet their farm on a quick grab of Taiwan. I hope Beijing joins instead with the West and so much of the rest of the world in opposing Putin. China would emerge as a true global leader if it did that. If it chooses instead to ride with the outlaws, the world will be less stable and less prosperous for as far as the eye can see — especially China.

What will it be, Xi?

-- Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 3/6/22

Ukraine-Russia scenarios (Thomas Friedman)

The battle for Ukraine unfolding before our eyes has the potential to be the most transformational event in Europe since World War II and the most dangerous confrontation for the world since the Cuban missile crisis. I see three possible scenarios for how this story ends. I call them “the full-blown disaster,” “the dirty compromise” and “salvation.”

The disaster scenario is now underway: Unless Vladimir Putin has a change of heart or can be deterred by the West, he appears willing to kill as many people as necessary and destroy as much of Ukraine’s infrastructure as necessary to erase Ukraine as a free independent state and culture and wipe out its leadership. This scenario could lead to war crimes the scale of which has not been seen in Europe since the Nazis.

The wired, globalized world has never had to deal with a leader accused of this level of war crimes whose country has a landmass spanning 11 time zones, is one of the world’s largest oil and gas providers and possesses the biggest arsenal of nuclear warheads of any nation.

Every day that Putin refuses to stop we get closer to the gates of hell. With each TikTok video and cellphone shot showing Putin’s brutality, it will be harder and harder for the world to look away. But to intervene risks igniting the first war in the heart of Europe involving nuclear weapons. And to let Putin reduce Kyiv to rubble, with thousands of dead — the way he conquered Aleppo and Grozny — would allow him to create a European Afghanistan, spilling out refugees and chaos.

Putin doesn’t have the ability to install a puppet leader in Ukraine and just leave him there: A puppet would face a permanent insurrection. So, Russia needs to permanently station tens of thousands of troops in Ukraine to control it — and Ukrainians will be shooting at them every day.

I wish Putin was just motivated by a desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO; his appetite has grown far beyond that. Putin is in the grip of magical thinking: As Fiona Hill, one of America’s premier Russia experts, said in an interview published Monday by Politico, he believes that there is something called “Russky Mir,” or a “Russian World”; that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”; and that it is his mission to engineer “regathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.”

To realize that vision, Putin believes that it is his right and duty to challenge what Hill calls “a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force.” And if the U.S. and its allies attempt to get in Putin’s way — or try to humiliate him the way they did Russia at the end of the Cold War — he is signaling that he is ready to out-crazy us. Or, as Putin warned the other day before putting his nuclear force on high alert, anyone who gets in his way should be ready to face “consequences they have never seen” before. Add to this the mounting reports questioning Putin’s state of mind and you have a terrifying cocktail.

The second scenario is that somehow the Ukrainian military and people are able to hold out long enough against the Russian blitzkrieg, and that the economic sanctions start deeply wounding Putin’s economy, so that both sides feel compelled to accept a dirty compromise. Its rough contours would be that in return for a cease-fire and the withdrawal of Russian troops, Ukraine’s eastern enclaves now under de facto Russian control would be formally ceded to Russia, while Ukraine would explicitly vow never to join NATO. Meanwhile, the U.S. and its allies would agree to lift all recently imposed economic sanctions on Russia.

This scenario remains unlikely because it would require Putin to basically admit that he was unable to achieve his vision of reabsorbing Ukraine into the Russian motherland, after paying a huge price in terms of his economy and the deaths of Russian soldiers. Moreover, Ukraine would have to formally cede part of its territory and accept that it was going to be a permanent no man’s land between Russia and the rest of Europe. It would also require everyone to ignore the lesson already learned: Putin can’t be trusted to leave Ukraine alone.

Finally, the least likely scenario but the one that could have the best outcome is that the Russian people demonstrate as much bravery and commitment to their own freedom as the Ukrainian people have shown to theirs, and deliver salvation by ousting Putin from office. Many Russians must be starting to worry that as long as Putin is their present and future leader, they have no future. Thousands are taking to the streets to protest Putin’s insane war. They’re doing this at the risk of their own safety. And though too soon to tell, their pushback does make you wonder if the so-called fear barrier is being broken, and if a mass movement could eventually end Putin’s reign.

Even for Russians staying quiet, life is suddenly being disrupted in ways small and large. And then there is the new “Putin tax” that every Russian will have to pay indefinitely for the pleasure of having him as their president. I am talking about the effects of the mounting sanctions being imposed on Russia by the civilized world.

On Monday, the Russian central bank had to keep the Russian stock market closed to prevent a panicked meltdown and was forced to raise its benchmark interest rate in one day to 20% from 9.5% to encourage people to hold rubles. Even then the ruble nose-dived by about 30% against the dollar — it’s now worth less than 1 U.S. cent.

For all of these reasons I have to hope that at this very moment there are some very senior Russian intelligence and military officials, close to Putin, who are meeting in some closet in the Kremlin and saying out loud what they all must be thinking: Either Putin has lost a step as a strategist during his isolation in the pandemic or he is in deep denial over how badly he has miscalculated the strength of Ukrainians, America, its allies and global civil society at large. 

If Putin goes ahead and levels Ukraine’s biggest cities and its capital, Kyiv, he and all of his cronies will never again see the London and New York apartments they bought with all their stolen riches. Instead, they will all be locked in a big prison called Russia — with the freedom to travel only to Syria, Crimea, Belarus, North Korea and China, maybe.

Either they collaborate to oust Putin or they will all share his isolation cell. The same for the larger Russian public. I realize that this last scenario is the most unlikely of them all, but it is the one that holds the most promise of achieving the dream that we dreamed when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — a Europe whole and free, from the British Isles to Vladivostok.

— Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, March 1, 2022

a history of corruption in Hawaii

Unethical and criminal behavior from people in positions of trust in most cases begins simply enough.

An elected official accepts a free lunch. A bookkeeper short on cash takes $100 with the intent of paying it back. Employees at the city’s Department of Permitting and Planning welcome malasadas from people trying to get their projects approved.

The justifications for violating the faith placed in them by constituents, local families, churches, community groups and businesses can vary.

They typically boil down to: Entitlement. Hubris. Feeling unappreciated and underpaid. Or, even more cynically: Everyone else does it.

Their betrayal and the price tag of their crimes escalates until they’re caught, criminal charges are filed, reputations are ruined and offenders end up in state jails or federal prisons.