The Broken Trust: New report on the True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi
 | In 1980 the Supreme Court awarded the Lakota Sioux over a hundred million dollars for land the government had stolen from them. They refused the money. It sits untouched today, worth more than $2 billion, because what they want back is the land. I thought about them while I read a new report called “The True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi.” For the record, I served. And I have a hard time trusting any institution with our local resources when it cannot account for its own. The U.S. military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. It holds the largest portfolio of contaminated sites in the country, hundreds of polluted soil and groundwater lands across its installations. It is the only major federal agency that has never passed a full audit, leaning on trillions in unsupported adjustments to paper over decades of waste. Trillions. A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion is about 32 years. A trillion is about 32,000 years. Trillions in unaccounted stuff is bonkers. The big picture I got from this research is that for over a century, the case against U.S. militarization of Hawaiʻi has been a moral argument made mostly by Native Hawaiians and largely ignored by the institutions that make policy. This new report from six respected organizations takes that same argument and runs it through the Pentagon’s own valuation models. The conclusions are the conclusions activists have been shouting for decades. The difference is that they now come in a form that cannot be dismissed as activism. Since 1964, the military has leased more than 46,000 acres of public trust land for $1. Not per acre. Not per year. One dollar total. If any other trustee leased trust assets to a tenant for a dollar, they would be removed and sued for breach of fiduciary duty. Here the trustee is the State of Hawaiʻi, the tenant is the Pentagon, and the breach has been allowed to stand for more than sixty years. Let me back up on that word. Trust. If you live in Hawaiʻi, you are a beneficiary of a Public Land Trust. About 1.4 million acres, originally the Crown and Government Lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom, were taken after the illegal overthrow of 1893 and transferred to the United States through the contested annexation of 1898. At statehood in 1959, those lands were placed in trust under the Admission Act and made the responsibility of the new State of Hawaiʻi. The Admission Act named five purposes for that trust. The betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians. The support of public education. The development of homeownership. The provision of lands for public use. And the funding of public improvements. The state is the trustee. The people of Hawaiʻi, with Native Hawaiians named as a specific class of beneficiaries, are who the trust is meant to serve. A legal equivalent was not hard to find. The U.S. government once held about 500,000 individual Indian trust accounts holding revenues from leases on Native American allotment lands. From the late 1800s into the early 2000s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs systematically mismanaged them. Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet treasurer, sued in 1996. Thirteen years later the case settled for $3.4 billion. The plaintiffs argued the real mismanagement ran into the hundreds of billions and that the settlement was a fraction of the actual damage. Which brings me back to the Sioux. The Black Hills were reserved for them in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Then gold turned up in 1874 and the United States took the land anyway. Crown and Government Lands here were reserved for a kingdom too, until they were not. The Sioux are still waiting. So are we. In my piece this month in Ka Wai Ola, I shared that if we used what the U.K. pays the Republic of Mauritius for Diego Garcia or what the U.S. pays the Republic of the Marshall Islands for Kwajalein, the value of Pōhakuloa’s 23,000 leased acres lands somewhere between $313 million and $460 million a year. This research uses more conservative U.S. government accounting and still arrives at $133.7 billion in unpaid back rent. That figure does not include cleanup. The cleanup is its own story. PFAS forever chemicals at just three sites, Mākua, Schofield, and Bellows, conservatively $493 million to remediate. Statewide it runs into the billions. The report is clear that true remediation with current technology is not possible. We are talking containment and monitoring for generations to come. Then there is the economic story we have all been told. The military’s real contribution is about 6.4% of our GDP, not the 9.2% the Pentagon and the state like to repeat. At least five other industries already contribute more. Once you subtract cleanup costs and rental market damage, the net benefit shrinks further. Speaking of rentals. Drop your finger on a map of Oʻahu four times. Chances are one of those points lands on military controlled land. They control a quarter of the island. With all that land you would think they would house their own people. Nope. They have pushed them onto the rental market, taking up one in ten rentals with generous vouchers that enrich landlords and drive ʻohana out of their own neighborhoods. The report puts the cost to non-military renters at $234 million in a single year. So picture the other path. Put real resources behind an ʻāina-based economy. Farming, food, land and water stewardship, the work this place was built on. Done right, it could match the military’s 6.4% or beat it. And it would create real jobs. Jobs that do not rise and fall with a federal defense budget. Jobs that do not poison our ʻāina, kai, and wai, or push ʻohana out of their homes. Do you think we have the State leadership to finally honor this trust? References: The report The True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi and my Ka Wai Ola article Maunakea, Pōhakuloa, and the Word They Keep Using. [link] [comments] |
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