Olin Kealoha Lagon, The True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaii

[mahina]

https://open.substack.com/pub/olagon/p/the-broken-trust
The True Cost of the
U.S. Military in Hawaii

olagon The Broken Trust: For sixty years the State has leased our public lands to the military for a dollar. A new report runs that arrangement through the Pentagon's own math, and the numbers are staggering
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 Hawai'i."
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 Hawai'i 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.
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Olin is a light in the world. Hawaii’s best. Brilliant compassionate brother. Olin says: be kind.

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