Mike Gravel: US must treat Guam better

[TexasTowelie]

Americans do not often like to think of their country as an empire. And yet there is no denying that it is.

As Daniel Immerwahr shows in his valuable book, “How to Hide an Empire,” America’s expansionist imperialism, after surging in the late 19th century, faded in zeal by the mid-20th century. We have large shed the self-image of Americans as colonizers — especially since it would raise uncomfortable questions about nation-building projects like those in Afghanistan and Iraq — and thus it is little surprise we think little of the legacies of the colonialism vaunted by William McKinley and Albert Beveridge.

The most obvious legacies, of course, are territories like Guam.

Because most Americans think little of Guam, the U.S. government’s current policy toward the territory might be described as unsalutary neglect. Guam has a population of 150,000, far more than the 50,000 coal miners in the U.S. And yet whereas American leadership often crows about the plight of coal miners, nary a word is spoken about Guam unless, as happened in the summer of 2017, a flare-up in North Korean relations causes threats against its security.

It’s obvious why Guam is so often neglected — its residents can’t vote in presidential elections and its delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives can’t vote. Since Guam lacks the leverage to influence national elections or votes in the House, national politicians feel no need to appeal to Guamanians in the way they appeal to Floridians or Iowans. Thus, Guam’s issues go unaddressed year after year.

Read more: https://www.guampdn.com/story/opinion/readers/2019/06/18/mike-gravel-us-must-treat-guam-better/1484663001/

[comradebillyboy]

1. Japanese tourists who can't afford to go to Hawaii, California or

Okinawa go to Guam. At least that's how it was when I was stationed on Okinawa.

[NYC Democrat]

2. I mean Id like to make all of our territories states in some way

How to break it up is a bit harder, obviously Puerto Rico just full out deserves to be an individual state, but for our pacific Islands, just for the sake of representative population we might need to consolidate them all into a single state or something along those lines.