Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 22, Number 8, 1 August 2005 — Who's behind the Grassroot Institute? [ARTICLE]

Who's behind the Grassroot Institute?

'Think tank' against federal recognition has ties to state Sen. Sam Slom, national far-right network

By Derek Ferrar With the debate over the Akaka Bill kicking into high gear over the past few weeks as a possible vote loomed in Congress, opponents of the federal recognition legislation stepped up their efforts - both Hawaiian sovereignty activists who feel that the bill is a sellout of true Hawaiian self-determination and groups on the right who elaim the bill is racially biased. One of the loudest voices on the racialbias side has belonged to a hitherto little-known "think tank" called the Grassroot Institute of Hawai'i (GRIH). Among other things, Grassroot has hired Washington, D.C., lawyer and conservative columnist Bruce Fein, who has been busily promoting the position that the Akaka Bill "would summon

into being an unprecedented race-based Native Hawaiian Government ... with no constraints on its jurisdiction or immunities from federal or state law." This has led many who have been tracking the bill over its five-year history to wonder just who the Grassroot Institute is. Here are a few figures and facts that might help answer that question: The Slom connection While Grassroot's president is a comparatively little-known retired military man and two-time Libertarian candidate for Senate named Dick Rowland, Grassroot also has extensive connections with a far better-known loeal public figure, Republican state Sen. Sam Slom (Kāhala-Hawai'i Kai). See GRASSROOT page 6

Grassroot Continued from page 1 Slom sits on GRIH's Advisory Board, and several of the organization's key officers also sit on the board of the Small Business Hawai'i advocacy group headed by Slom, including Rowland and GRIH treasurer Walt Harvey, a real estate agent and member of the Hawai'i Kai Neighborhood Board. Also significant is the fact that Grassroot's co-founder and vice president is Malia Zimmerman, editor of the conservative on-line journal Hawai'i Reporter, who has longstanding connections with Slom. (See more on her helow.) Recently, Slom has been criticizing Gov. Linda Lingle, a fellow Republican, for her support of the Akaka Bill, telling the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that there has been "a great deal of political pressure" on loeal Republican lawmakers not to appear to be going against the governor on the federal recognition measure. Conservative "think-tank" network Although claiming to be "only slightly interested in the political left or right," Grassroot is clearly allied with an extensive national network of far-right "think tanks" designed to influence public opinion and government policy on issues such as taxation and private property rights. Such groups have also been prominent in a wide variety of initiatives to strike down minority rights and affirmative action programs across the nation. On its website, GRIH acknowledges ties to several such organizations, including the wellknown Heritage Foundation. And in a listing for GRIH on the website of the Atlas Eeonomie Research Foundation - an organization dedicated to "helping develop and strengthen a network of market-oriented think tanks that spans the globe" - Rowland is quoted as saying that "startup money, helpful networking, meetings, advice and leadership" from Atlas and other such organizations was "absolutely essential" to the establishment of GRIH. In at least one case, Grassroot has also teamed up with the Pacific Legal Foundation (motto: "Rescuing Liberty From Government"), whieh argued against Hawaiian gathering rights in the landmark PASH case and has filed briefs supporting the Arakaki v. Lingle lawsuit, whieh seeks to abolish all Hawaiian-preference government programs. (Not surprisingly, the plaintiffs' attorney in that case, H. William Burgess, has echoed Grassroot's position in his own testimony opposing the Akaka Bill.)

Dick Rowland According to his bio on the GRIH website, Richard "Dick" O. Rowland, who co-founded the organization with Malia Zimmerman in 2001, is a former military officer who first eame to Hawai'i in 1971 while he was still in the service, then later became a financial representative for Northwestern Mutual. In 1992 and 1994, Rowland ran for U.S. Senate as a Libertarian, garnering 2 percent of the vote the first time and just under 4 percent the second. He has also run unsuccessfully for Honolulu City Council and until recently sat on the 'Aiea Neighborhood Board. Malia Zimmerman GRIH Vice President Malia Zimmerman is the founder and editor of HawaiiReporter.com and a regular contributor to the newsletter of Sam Slom's Small Business Hawai'i. Over the years, Zimmerman has been closely involved in a number of controversial events also involving Slom. The most notable of these eame in 2000, after Zimmerman had been fired as a reporter for Pacific Business News, and she and Slom alleged that the paper had been forced to dismiss her under pressure from then-Gov. Ben Cayetano, about whose administration Zimmerman had consistently written negative articles. (One such article, written amid allegations by her, Slom and others that there had been voter fraud during the 1998 election in whieh Cayetano narrowly defeated Lingle, included the unsubstantiated charge that an unidentified "Chinatown bookie" had said that "the fix was in" on the election.) The state auditor and federal officials later found no fraud related to the election. More recently, Zimmerman was the first to circulate, in the last days of the closely contested Honolulu mayor's race, unproven charges that candidate Duke Bainum's wife, Jennifer, had committed financial misdeeds involving an elderly man for whom she had served as a caregiver. At the time, Slom was an active supporter of Bainum's opponent (and eventual winner by a narrow margin) Mufi Hannemann. Bruce Fein According to the online bio of Grassroot consultant Bruce Fein, a Washington, D.C.based lawyer and conservative media columnist, Fein held a variety of legal jobs in the Reagan administration and has been a scholar with the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks. Fein writes a weekly eolumn for the farright Washington Times, whieh is owned by the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

In addition to his Akaka Bill opposition, he has recently campaigned for a ban on the use of the filibuster in judicial nominations and advocated that President Bush "should paek the United States Supreme Court with philosophical clones of [conservative] Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and defeated nominee Robert H. Bork." The Grassroot poll In July, GRIH released statistics from an automated telephone poll it had commissioned, claiming that the survey's respondents opposed the Akaka Bill by a two-to-one margin. Critics, however, recognized that the survey bore the hallmarks of a "push-poll," whieh is designed primarily to spread a particular view of an issue, rather than to truly gauge public opinion. One such indicator is the slant of the questions, such as the Grassoot poll's statement that the Akaka Bill "would allow Native Hawaiians to create their own government not subject to the same laws, regulations and taxes that apply to other citizens of Hawai'i." Another elue is that push polls, in order to spread their embedded messaging, tend to contact far more respondents than would be necessary to obtain a statistically accurate sample. In Grassroot's case, the institute has claimed that the poller's automated survey system had called some 280,000 homes "in the eall universe in the State of Hawai'i," with more than 120,000 of the calls receiving a "live response," including more than 15,000 in whieh the respondents completed the entire survey. More typically, legitimate statewide polls conducted by newspapers and TV stations in Hawai'i involve fewer than 1,000 respondents. Finally, it appears that the company that was hired to conduct the survey, Virginia-based ccAdvertising - whieh also goes by a variety of other names, including Election Research and FreeEats Advertising, is primarily geared toward influencing opinion rather than gauging it. A press release issued by the company after the 2002 election stated: "The Republican force that swept America on November 5 was felt at Election Research, the political ann of Herndon-based ccAdvertising, where no fewer than six winning candidates and one hot ballot referendum were influenced by its proprietary and state-of-the-art Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology. 'We're thrilled to have been a part of such a historic day in American politics,' said Election Research President Gabriel S. Joseph. '...it was a Republican day in America and Election Research was there to serve.""