Crisis Update: Maui Homeless Camp Out On Beaches

After the fire, Lahaina looks like a brutal exercise in artificial scarcity

Dec 10, 2023

Lahaina locals use beach fishing rights to find somewhere to live
Denied access to their land, others move from room to room
2,500 families face relocation by the new year
Diversion of water by multi-billion corporations continues
The fire struck a day before natives were to have water rights assessed
Temporary permits for resorts, hotels and Big Ag have now been renewed
From Maui to Gaza; Greece to Tenerife, a globalist pattern emerges
War to climate, the agenda is a lie
A pretext for a billionaire land grab - and it's mostly the coast

See also:
Questions Swirl After Maui's Fires (Sep 28, 2023)
Maui's Fire Hydrants Ran Dry; The Politics Of Water (Sep 18, 2023)
What Exit Did Maui's Children Take - Home alone and roads blocked (Sep 16, 2023)
From The World Trade Center To Maui (Sep 12, 2023)
Hawaii’s Deep State Billionaires (Sep 3, 2023)
Maui’s Children - Smart Cities And Sex Trafficking (Aug 25, 2023)
Indigenous People Under Attack – From Hawaii to Australia (Aug 18, 2023)
Maui Land Grab Explains The Great Reset (Aug 17, 2023)
Hawaii Islanders Hit With New Normal (Aug 16, 2023)

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Local people at Ka'anapali Beach protest for long-term housing

Dec 10, 2023

Local people are living on beaches. Those who have fishing rights make use of a bylaw that enables them to stay overnight.

Using beaches for camping, is one of the few levers they have to address a desperate housing crisis four months after a fire destroyed historic Lahaina. [1]

Others are forced to shuttle between hotels, moved at short notice and left to wait in lobbies for hours.

About 6,700 people, from 3,500 families, are being moved between temporary accommodation while state and federal officials trade responsibility.

More than 5,000 people are unemployed, down from the peak of 8,800 in Sep but that could be because of emigration.

More than 3,000 students and hundreds of teachers were displaced by the fires. They are asking for free school meals to cover at least the remainder of the 2023-2024 academic year. Hawaiian senators have appealed to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Federal aid to Lahaina families has so far been capped at $700 per household.

Thousands, sensing defeat, have left the island. Mike Cicchino, who has yet to reopen his dog care business, told Hawaii Free Press: “Every time I talk to Red Cross, they kind of encourage me, ‘Well, why don’t you just leave the island?’”

The Los Angeles Times, widely regarded as an outlet, like The Washington Post, close to the CIA, wrote as early as Aug 29: “Maui residents consider the unthinkable: Las Vegas, the ‘ninth island’.” [2]

Broken promise

Two thirds of families in temporary accommodation are due to leave their hotels by the start of next year. Locals are demanding the mayor convert short-term Airbnb rentals into long-term housing.

The cost of 2,000 units is estimated, by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement (CNHA), at $175 million, of which the federal emergencies agency FEMA would cover $92 million, leaving someone to pick up the remaining 83 million. Last week Governor Josh Green’s office reportedly said it would meet one third of the cost (whether of the total, or the remainder is unclear).

The mutual support group Lahaina Strong suggests that bureaucrats step up and pay a one-off sum, and overpay if necessary, in order to keep landlords happy.

The mayor has offered to suspend property taxes for year if landlords offer long-term housing. [3]

Government is more concerned to rebuild tourism, leading to a community protest at the Hawaii Tourism Authority last week. Hotels have been offering upgrades and discounts to attract visitors, while locals remain homeless after the fires of Aug 8. [4]

The daily visitor count was down 20,000 in October at 36,000. Spending was $326 million, from $436 million the year before.

Tourism accounts for 70 cents of each dollar generated on the island, according to Maui Economic Development Tourism Board. But this does not excuse the failure to address homelessness, locals say.

Economic motive

Part of the scheming underway before the fires involved land and water rights. It continues — blatantly.

Having sued hard for the restoration of their water rights, the deadline for Hawaiians to submit their claims to a review was Aug 9. The fire struck a day before.

Until native rights are restored, multi-billion dollar corporations are allowed to divert millions of gallons of water under temporary authorization.

BlackRock-owned Alexander & Baldwin, and East Maui Irrigation Co, have just received a new permit for 2024. It allows for 38 million gallons of water per day, across the year, to be diverted from East Maui streams.

Traditional Hawaiian agriculture depends heavily upon pond farming. Before the plantations and mansions, much of the islands comprised wetlands, on which the natives practised pond-farming of taro, called locally, kalo and, on the shores where fresh water mixed with seawater, grew crops like limu, a kind of seaweed.

See Maui's Fire Hydrants Ran Dry; The Politics Of Water (Sep 18, 2023)

To add insult to injury, at the height of the fire, water was shut off. Deputy director of water management, M. Kaleo Manuel delayed sending water to the affected district, claiming he must consult users — a fact confirmed by an executive of West Maui Land Company which runs various agricultural and residential units.

A Hawaiian studies major, Kaleo promotes an holistic “One Water” approach in which water is revered, not used. Water requires “true conversations about equity,” he says in a video posted a year ago.

Cover up

Rather than look after the public, Maui mayor Richard Bissen is avoiding their questions — and has taken money from a fund for victims to pay for more security.

Mayor Bissen was criticised for being AWOL on the morning of the fire. He claimed he did not know about the fatalities until the morning after Lahaina had been incinerated. Nor did he know who was in charge of Maui Emergency Management Agency.

He charged at least $110,000 for a security detail to accompany him to public events.

Camron Hurt of Common Cause Hawaii told television reporters the money “could easily be somebody’s rent for possibly the next year.” [5]

Curiously, instead of turning to Maui Police Department (MPD) for protection, “state investigators” (FBI?) were flown in from Oahu. If you see our earlier coverage, there is a history of suspicion and bad relations within MPD since police chief John Pelletier was flown in from Las Vegas, where he had coordinated the investigation (cover-up) of the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in 2017.

For more on Pelletier see What Exit Did Maui's Children Take - Home alone and roads blocked (Sep 16, 2023)

The buck passing continues, failing to account for a cascade of compounding failures.

No way out

Many residents have still not been allowed to see their homes four months after the fire.

Suicides are increasing: 18 were carried through, including a father who listened to his wife and children burn to death, and a Red Cross worker from despair. This does not include attempted suicides.

Whatever the cause of the fire — natural or assisted — there was a breakdown of services, and negligence, while emergency staff were visiting another island for a FEMA training session, with no-one deputised to communicate, leading to the failure to alert people during the fire, and the switching off of essential services.

Cell phones could call out to mainland but not locally within the island; they could receive text messages but could not send.

Several locals agreed that they had received no Amber Alerts on the day of the fire — though they did receive one the next day about a highway accident. With no warning, areas that had not reported wildfires were suddenly engulfed within seconds.

Candidate For Hawaii State Senate Sheila Walker has been asking uncomfortable questions:

“It's up to us, it's up to the people on the outside who can see the tragedy here and we have to keep this story going because, over in the mainland, the story is dead. No one is even talking about it any more because they're all on, already, to Israel and the tragedies happening there.
As these tragedies continue to unfold everywhere in the world, we are eventually going to be able to connect the dots because they are all connected. These are all events that will eventually add up to the New World Order agenda, and everyone will begin to see it.”

She criticises people’s failure to understand the SMART cities plan.

“It’s like, ‘oh yes, it’s going to be a really nice city where everything is convenient.’ An average person would think it sounds good but if you know what their agenda is — you will own nothing, and we will rent forever, we’ll have no equity and won’t be able to leverage anything, and they’ll control us. They’ll control everything from communication to our money and every single piece of our life.” [6]

Lahaina is the size of a fingertip compared to the island of Maui. As Sheila Walker points out, if you want to blame Hurricane Dora for the devastation, how did it strike only this fingertip? Walker lives close by and did not even stash her patio furniture, for the winds, she said, were not that strong.

She says “the oligarchs who are trying to take over these islands” will keep pushing but the people can win by standing against them.

See Hawaii’s Deep State Billionaires (Sep 4, 2023)

And then there’s the deaths. Hawaii officials say DNA tests have lowered the Maui wildfire’s death toll to 97. Officials admit to only two or three children.

“The numbers don’t add up,” says Walker. Children haven’t reported to school but the families are traumatised. Many still do not have regular cell phone service or internet. When approached face to face, she says, many locals appear frightened to speak.

Police have stopped accepting reports of missing people, having imposed a deadline of two months after the fire. Registering a lost loved one was a complex process that involved official data and full names and identifying documents. Also worrying is the lack of people posting messages about relatives — missing, injured or pleas for help.

Bureaucrats admit there is a media blackout. Bans on drones and restrictions on reporting were imposed the day after the fire. Only one network television reporter reached Lahaina because he happened to be registered at a family home in the town.

Reports of appalling neglect continue to emerge. Supervisors at the Hale Mahaolu old people’s home reportedly left behind seven residents aged up to 98. There was no evacuation plan. Lawyers are preparing to file a suit against management in the new year. [7]

Burn Back Better

The SMART city project is proceeding more slowly, in particular the plan to meet Maui’s energy needs with local, renewable resources.

Of five solar and energy storage projects approved by the Public Utilities Commission for Maui over the past five years, only one is being built. The latest to be cancelled is a planned grid-scale solar and battery storage project in South Maui, Paeahu Solar.

Innergex Renewable Energy blamed legal hurdles and supply shortages. [8]

Residents complain of a lack of communication from bureaucrats, including mayor Bissen. Bureaucrats seem to be focused on land management, such as 23 acres of newly acquired county land on Maui’s north shore, which includes Wawau Point.

Call of the sea

Everybody likes to live by the water. You can be poor as an urchin, yet with access to the sun and the sand, or rollicking across pebbles, feel like a king.

It has been the location of choice since antiquity, not only because in those days we largely travelled by water but because — as an Irishman, or Caribbean, or Pacific islander, or Cornish or Welsh, a Carioca of Brazil, or the wealthy of Nantucket or Cape Cod will tell you — there is nothing better for the eyes, the lungs and the soul.

It is practical: you can bathe, fish and feed. But above all it raises the spirits and opens the mind to possibilities. It has been from the beginning of time the call to adventure. Even for the criminally unimaginative, it offers a means of escape.

Immediately we spot a pattern. Prime coastal property seems to be a common theme in fires from Lahaina, Gaza and California, to lakeside property in British Columbia, to Tenerife to Greece.

Is it not strange how this focus on waterside real estate fits inversely with alarmist claims of rising sea levels — as if the Climate Change fear mongering was designed to drive the masses away from seaside locations?

In Lahaina, like Gaza, the poor are being dispossessed and those who live beside the water seem to be the first target.

Living in what Lord David Cameron, former British prime minister, calls an open air prison is bad enough. With concrete and barbed wire at their back, their only window is to the sea.

And yet Israel has defied the United Nations, reducing Palestinians’ access to the waters from 15 to nine nautical miles, as of May 2021.

From an economic perspective, such restrictions perhaps set a precedent for waters that contain valuable gas deposits as well as fish. From the perspective of mental health it replaces the horizon with a claustrophobic barrier.

If that is not enough, Israeli warships take pot shots at teenagers playing football or fishermen mending their nets.

It is not good enough just to blame Israel. The “international community,” the U.S. and others are complicit in such barbarity.

UN’s indigenous ploy

In Australia, aboriginals originally inhabited the prime coastal and riverside real estate, before they were pushed inland to the remote, arid outback.

The Voice To Parliament, recently defeated in Australia, was an attempt at a land grab disguised as equity and inclusion: to reassign land from the “interlopers,” vest it in a toothless indigenous assembly, and at some later stage likely manipulate that assembly to access land and resources “for the greater good.”

The overseers covet resources as much as they love toothless assemblies.

The communitarians of Agenda 21 are already, for example, breaking Britain down into tiers of assemblies replacing both nation and representative democracy. Eventually the members of these assemblies will be selected ideologically, and appointed according to metrics like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

This serves to create a fig leaf of representation, and the ability to manipulate the assemblies from behind the curtain. This is the reason why globalists infiltrate at the level of local government — it does an “end run” around consititutional checks and balances.

The key body that promotes such assemblies is the Institute for Government, which operates worldwide out of Britain, and is financed in part by the Sainsbury grocery family.

Genocide and hypocrisy

Last week on the eve of the 75th Anniversary of the Genocide Convention, the US again vetoed a ceasefire for Gaza in the UN Security Council. Britain abstained.

The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights today marks its 75th anniversary. The Palestinian foreign minister said the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights had never been extended to the Palestinians. Facts seem to bear him out.

Officials of the UN World Food Programme say almost 40 per cent of Gaza households are now experiencing “severe hunger.” There is “no safe place to go in the Gaza Strip” says Ashraf al-Qudra, the spokesperson for Gaza’s health ministry.

What once passed for “international relations” seems to have been reduced to a battle between the haves and have nots; the powerful taking advantage at every opportunity to seize what little the poor possess. The brutality is a simple matter of degree.

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