One thing about being a newspaper reporter: You don't have to have a good memory, because you take notes about everything. And I saved mine when I retired.
RtO has no opinion one way or the other about NextEra, but RtO does have an opinion about Hawaiian Electric Industries. It stinks. Anybody would be better running our electric utility.
In case you, and Gov. Ige and Mayor Arakawa and -- apparently -- everybody in the state of Hawaii but me have forgotten, following Hurricane Iniki in 1992, HEI stiffed the poor shmucks who had bought homeowners' insurance from HEI's wholly-owned subsidiary Hawaiian Insurance and Guaranty.
Then president Bob Clarke said it would wreck HEI if he honored its contracts, so HEI just didn't pay. If your house blew away, tough. It's a dog eat dog world out there, and your dog was Clarke's lunch.
Clarke is retired now, although he continues to offer his worst in state history mismanagement advice at the Shidler College of Business (which is why I have no respect for the school), but as Mitt Romney reminded us, corporations are people too.
Not decent people, though. Since 1992, HEI has earned enough to make its Iniki victims whole.
Did it? Of course not. It may be a person but it's a corporation too. Decency is not in its bag of tricks. Some people have consciences but corporations never do.
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