"Hawaii is being sold down the river--not by legitimate foreign competition, but by runaway production engineered by Americans to the detriment of America," State Senate President David McClung said last October.
He charged Dole and Del Monte companies, who have invested heavily in Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines, with "creating their own competitive foreign monster."
RECENT bickering between shipping managers and longshoremen (both within mainland-owned firms like Seatrain and Hawaiian companies with large mainland interests) has resulted in several labor strikes that have crippled Hawaii.
The state, where more than 60 per cent of its goods and food is imported from the mainland, suffered 220 days of interrupted shipping since 1971 due to strikes in the West Coast.
The strikes and threats of strikes left a growing number of local businesses short of supplies and capital which has resulted in sales losses, temporary shutdowns, layoffs and high prices for consumers.
Letters by Hawaii's congressional delegation urging federal intervention in the strikes were almost wholly ignored in Washington. Even efforts by pro-Nixon Senator Hiram L. Fong failed to relieve the problem; Hawaii had to wait for management and labor to reach settlement by themselves.
The Honolulu Chamber of Commerce last year wrote President Nixon, "If the 800,000 residents of the District of Columbia were shut off from vital supplies, you might consider such a situation a 'grave emergency.' But nothing is being done for the 800,000 residents of Hawaii."
To deal with a concurrent population growth crisis, state leaders have appealed to Washington for a constitutional amendment to limit in-migration in Hawaii by mainland Americans.
Myron B. Thompson, a member of the governor's cabinet, said in an August speech that domestic immigration was the main reason for Hawaii's current public welfare and housing crisis.
"Hawaii does not have to allow itself to be passively raped by this uncontrollable growth," Thompson said.
He said that in November 1970, 30.6 per cent of Hawaii's welfare recipients had moved only shortly before from the mainland. By January 1973, the percentage jumped to 52.4, Thompson said.
ARGUMENTS for secession have been bolstered by Hawaiian groups which last year attacked the federal government for its illegal seizure of Hawaiian lands during the U.S.-incited revolution of 1893.
The congress of the Hawaiian People, a collective of several political action groups, charged that American revolutionaries, led by Yale graduates Sanford B. Dole and Lorrin A. Thurston, took lands without Hawaiilan consent.
The United States offered no compensation for the land following annexation in 1898, the Hawaiians claimed.
Alaskan natives, whose lands were also acquired illegally by Americans in 1867 (there was no native consent), recently received 40 millions acres of land and $950 million in compensation from Congress, indicating that a similar' compensation for Hawaiians is feasible.
Though the prospect of federal compensation has temporarily stalled talk of secession, residents are not abandoning the idea because prospect of legally limiting inmigration by out-of-staters and a reduction of the military in Hawaii appear slim.
Residents remember how Washington turned its back on them during the recent shipping crises and treated Hawaii more as a foreign country rather than a state of the Union. A fear persists among residents that Washington recognizes Hawaii only as a military base in a strategic Pacific location.
A Hawaiian businessman said last fall, "If we threaten to secede from the Union, restore the monarchy and then threaten to accept aid from Russia or China, it might be enough to get recognition of our problems."
Crimson staff Richard Sia, a resident of Hawaii, has spent the last three summers as a full-time reporter for The Honolulu Advertiser.