The Superferry Chronicles
ANATOMY OF A BOONDOGGLE
In 2001, an entrepreneur got the idea to start a high-speed, inter-island ferry that would connect Honolulu with the neighbor islands. In a short time, the idea was hijacked by a corporation with vast military ties, and the Hawai‘i Superferry became a prototype for America’s sea-based military strategy for the new century.
Never approved by the people of Hawai‘i, the project rode in on a wave of deception and corruption — from the governor’s office to the Hawaii Superferry Corporation. On Maui, environmental groups blocked passage in the courts, only to be overridden by a special session of the legislature. On Kauai, citizens took to surfboards and effectively blocked the vessel from entering the harbor.
The Superferry Chronicles tells the full inside story of corporate and governmental collusion and, at the same time, of personal and political empowerment to protect Hawaii’s waters, lands, and people.
Koohan Paik is a Kauai filmmaker, writer, and media-literacy educator.
In the 1970s, Jerry Mander founded the Public Media Center to help the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other nonprofit organizations create very successful media campaigns. In 1998, he founded the International Forum on Globalization. Author of the bestselling Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred, San Francisco-based Mander has been called “the patriarch of the anti-globalization movement” by the New York Times and “the Ralph Nader of advertising” by the Wall Street Journal.