Let’s be fair here: Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences have not spent all the $7.9 million they have stockpiled to defeat the initiative that would ban growing genetically engineered plants in Maui County.
So far the agriculture giants, campaigning under the name "Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban" have spent just $6,335,083.
That means even counting weekends and holidays, the two companies are spending at a rate of $14.33 a minute between Jan. 1 of this year and Tuesday’s Election Day.
The Maui County GMO issue is intense, especially for the tiny island of Molokai where the two companies employ about 250 people to grow seed corn.
The island’s scrappy 29-year-old newspaper, the Molokai Dispatch, reports the issue has "ripped apart the Molokai community. It has turned friends into enemies, forced families to choose alliances and pitted neighbors against neighbors. Many feel the argument has been set up to ask the community to choose the economy or the environment."
Asked how the companies justify spending nearly $8 million on a county ordinance, spokesman Tom Blackburn-Rodriguez said the initiative is "harmful and deeply flawed."
"Our efforts are justified if it means that over 600 folks keep their jobs, and their families keep the incomes they depend on, and local businesses can still stay open because of patronage from those families," Blackburn-Rodriguez said.
Setting aside the "good for business but going to kill you" argument, just the amount of money on the table is historic and staggering. Former Gov. Linda Lingle set the record for political spending at $6 million in her 2006 re-election campaign.
This year’s political season is different. The 2010 Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed unlimited outside spending that just now is descending on and shaping local politics.
Power in Hawaii was first held by the Republican oligarchy of plantation owners and businessmen. That clout switched to a tension and competition between Big Business and Big Labor.
Still, the unions and corporations represented groups of people.
Today, for good or bad, one person or one corporation can spend enough money to influence political advertising and make the laws bend to their wishes.
For instance, voters will be asked to decide if the state can use public money to pay private schools to provide preschool education to Hawaii’s children. That proposed state constitutional amendment has spawned an assortment of private interests in coming together to support it. Kamehameha Schools is putting up $500,000, the National Education Association is putting in $275,000 and Good Beginnings Alliance is dropping $887,000. For the record, that’s a burn rate of $3.76 per minute.
Interestingly, Hawaii’s richest resident, Pierre Omidyar ($8.2 billion) through the Omidyar Family Trust, put in $350,000 of the Good Beginnings Alliance money.
Omidyar, through his Ulupono Initiative, was also the one to pony up the $505,400 to launch the Local Food Coalition, which is backing another constitutional amendment to permit state-authorized special purpose revenue bonds to be used for agricultural enterprises on any type of land.
It used to be that the special interests could shower enough money on a candidate that he or she would do just about anything the big bucks wanted.
Now there is enough money at stake, you don’t buy pols, you buy the state.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
