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Senator Ted Stevens. THE Stevens in Magnuson Stevens Act. The much revered Senator from Alaska. The Icon to every quota holding participant in Alaska, and now New England, soon in California. The hero of Catch Shares. Consolidation.
A lot of fish folks from around the country have learned not to hesitate or give up, because they now understand the economic and social harms of privatization of Alaska fisheries into catch shares – government giveaways to special interests.
Catch Shares are an economic tool that awards exclusive rights to our national resource, while excluding us. The corporations, both foreign and domestic, are getting filthy rich, as this theft leaves us behind. At the same time, the heart and soul of the fisheries on every coast, the small family operated fishing fleet that actually operate small businesses, and share the proceeds of the catch, with the crew, are being destroyed. The crewmen are stake holders. All self employed. Never considered in the Stevens Ponzi Scheme.
This timely article, the day before election day, has many Alaska names that are in the news, and it behooves us all to review the whole article, as written.
About Stephen Taufen
A public watchdog and advocate for fishermen and their coastal communities. Taufen is an "insider" who blew the whistle on the international profit laundering between global affiliates of North Pacific seafood companies, who use illicit accounting to deny the USA the proper taxes on seafood trade. The same practices are used to lower ex-vessel prices to the fleets, and to bleed monies from our regional economy. Worked 20 years in the Alaska seafood industry for processors in cost accounting, fleet management, operations.
“Hesitating in the face of evil is equivalent to siding with the enemy”
- Marion Pritchard
A chat for those with fishing patience:
As for Alaska, big changes are in order, now that ‘Ted’s Dead’ and all the planned lobbying money won’t be there to enrich the Stevens family. Where will his attorneys now send the legal bills?
It was an odd political event when the Prevo Baptist Broadcasting Studio had flags draped everywhere and Air Force Two flew out an embarassing group of suckass politicos to lionize the chief Berkshire of Pork in Anchorage. Not once during the hour-and-a-half event did even one of Ted’s offspring or Alaskan buddies give a eulogy. In other words, it was not a funeral.
And now that Lisa Murkowski – Miss What Do I Stand For? – lost the Republican primary (but unlike the Quitter, she won’t give up), she stands to fill the six-inch pumps of Alaska’s federal lobbyist stormtroopers. In all likelihood, Arne Fuglvog will trail along at her heels to service the fishing companies of Seattle, Tokyo and Seoul. Lisa’s failure to take on the industry regarding about $2 billion in revenues missing annually from Alaska’s fisheries - due to illicit accounting techniques as foreign-owned firms shift revenues and expenses across borders among their affiliates and parent firms, all to avoid U.S. nexus taxes (and even foreign taxes) - will be richly rewarded as a lobbyist.
It’s the one thing she and Sarah Palin have in common – a repeated failure to take on Abusive Transfer Pricing on the national political level while in office or running for office. Yet they both talk of Alaskan self-sufficiency. Hah! But don’t be surprised if Joe Miller – Mr. Let’s Stop Federal Pork to Alaska – fails to take on the ATP cause, as well – along with whomever becomes the next governor.
Now, Lisa simply has to spend a year in a K-Street lawfirm as a ’special advisor’ (to her future clientele), then she can sign up as an official lobbyist in 2012. From the looks of all the fish industry carpetbaggers and cartel representatives (UFA’s Arne Thomson, the processors’ John Iani, and good ol’ fishery aide Arne Fuglvog) who were looming over her shoulder at her campaign headquarters, she will have a lively lobbying business and make millions. It’s a lot easier than being a Senator; and Ted left behind a lot of clients who need her.
Abusive Transfer Pricing will always matter:
It’s not personal, Lisa; but your failures to take on Abusive Transfer Pricing losses to our economy say it all about whether or not you are for family fishermen and dependent communities or for the multinationals and their “Faustian bargain” IFQ-holder partners. The same applies to your continued efforts (along with Senator Mark Begich’s support) to introduce a Senate version of H.R. 4213 to allow the non-profit Community Development Quota groups in Western Alaska a rare federal tax exemption for their for-profit fishing subsidiaries. This bill would be the largest financially devastating event and harm for real competition in the Alaska seafood industry since Ted Stevens’ rationalization riders dropped in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2004. Other competitors as well as fishermen wanting to buy quota could not compete given the tax-disadvantaged position they’ll be forced into.
The lack of full federal enforcement of ATP amounts to a subsidy given to foreign controlled corporations and other global tax evading multinationals to come into Alaska and steal our resources on the cheap. ATP is an important factor in national competitiveness and the Conduct of Trade, and a matter of sovereignty in Commerce.
Joe, Scott and Lisa - PS: ATP – the major global tax and trade topic of this Century – also explains how tens of billions a year are ripped off via high costs of drugs we import, at grave expense to our Medicare and private health care plans. Groundswell has been reassured by the Government Accountability Office research team on the high costs of drugs that it will take our November 2009 public comment into consideration as they pursue this issue for five House of Representative chairpersons and their committees.
CDQ Subsidiaries’ Tax Exemption Scheme:
It would not be a good idea for Lisa to move forward with the Senate embodiment of H.R. 4213 before leaving office! Groundswell is pretty convinced that the IRS and others will have a say, because this would grant extreme special favors to only a few of the nation’s non-profit entities, and set a rotten precedent. Lisa, you no longer need those CDQ votes! Strategically alone, as a crook does, you’d be better off to convince them that this is why they will need you as a lobbyist later, and you can squeeze a million bucks out of the CDQs over the next few years.
CDQ $ Wasted on Wall Street games ...
Lisa, isn’t it grievously wrong to allow CDQs to go to the casino economy and drop tens of millions of “Red 3″ at the roulette wheel (Wall Street during its downward spiral), as one CDQ did, losing something like $17 million. And we thought CDQs were set up to serve the communities themselves (not!).
Fractured Politics:
For now, instead of tredding around the lame-duck pond, Murkowski seems to many observers to be having a vendetta based cat-fight with ‘Sarah and her choice’. So much for party unity when the lead Republican won’t gracefully concede in full and tell her constituents to support Joe Miller – the Republican choice for Alaska’s next U.S. Senator. Groundswell now backs Scott McAdams simply because he has an Alaskan heart, and it’s time to prioritize education and other needs after a decade of military-industrial-congressional complex priorities that have created a political dead zone where the rest of us little fish can’t survive. Besides, McAdams commercially fished and might actually want to seriously look out for our fishery-dependent coastal economy.
Had the selfish club misleading the Alaska Democrats not discouraged Ray Metcalfe to run – because he believes that bad Democrats also should be prosecuted for unethical acts – we could have had a very lively candidate in the general election. Name recognition alone – for all of Ray’s years of fighting the corruption by VECO and legislators in Juneau - would have probably carried him to the top of the list… and we’d have a chance to send a real challenger into the U.S. Senate (i.e. someone who might help the entire nation clean up crooked politics).
So, it is not that the GOP is ’so together’ as much as the Dems are so self-destructive that seems to be making the mess. All things considered though, we think McAdams (at this point) looks like the kind of genuine and compassionate, down-to-earth type of fellow our nation needs to offset the lords of the Senate.
Of course, Groundswell remains open to ‘a bribe’ from Miller, to support him, if he’d just step up to his promise to get Alaska off the federal dole and truly help the nation, as the sponsor of a landmark bill to give the IRS another $3 billion a year to go after the $60+ billion per year in federal taxes missing from the Goods and Services economy due to multinational corporations practicing Abusive Transfer Pricing. But we’ll guess that his Tea Party credentials doesn’t mean he has the courage to go after corporate tax evasion on that scale. If he wants to give us a call, we’d be glad to educate him about ATP and how to really fix the Alaskan economy… and why it is wise to start calling the bluff of global resource exploiters who steal us blind.
N.Pac. Council Still Refuses to Properly Display US/Alaska Flags:
It’s been an interesting year for us on other fish concerns, as well. In a May meeting in Anchorage of the Council Coordinating Committee, we got to reach out to all of the national regional fishery management and conservation councils – and also make the point that once again U.S.A. and Alaskan flags (of full size) don’t occupy the North Pacific Council’s room, as protocol should require. The same thing happened during August when had it not been for Groundswell, Senator Murkowski and Governor Parnell would have arrived at the NPFMC meeting to find no proper flags on display – a day after having seen Ted’s flag-draped coffin and Prevo’s stage full of flags at the “funderal” show. When are the North Pacific council members going to understand that other councils across the nation are proudly displaying the flags, instead of acting like resentful fools? All it takes is for Alaska’s representatives to make a motion and second it, to establish a flag display policy as a standard council procedure, and dare those with conflicts of interest not to vote in favor of the motion. Hint, hint … are you listening Governor Parnell?
End-Run Legislation Meets Resistance in Congress:
Also, we watched on-line as Chairman Bordallo of the US House subcommittee on Insular Affairs told the Bering Sea/Aleutian Island freezer longliners to go back to Alaska and the NPFMC because her committee did not favor another piece of special legislation to grant more quota share private rights (public larcenies) just because the other quota-sucking lemmings were jumping off the rookery cliffs before, in pollock and crab rationalizations. Hey, if it is the Magnuson-STEVENS Fisheries Act, then maybe it should be Alaskan fishermen who follow the law foremost, instead of always doing end-run legislation greed packages to avoid the regional council process.
Catch Shares as a Faute de Mieux:
A Frenchman would sum up the Catch Shares approach of Lubchenco, the NPFMC, and Fuglvog et al as faute de mieux: for lack of something better. They should all visit an Otolaryngologist who could clear up their nostrils to quit smelling the rosy public relations flowers, the perfume of the mutual fund and hedge fund Ponzis; and who could remove the earwax, so they can actually listen to thousands of fishermen and others who oppose the greedy formula of industry consolidation and hear about the dozens of other means of addressing management and conservation.
This makes a very good point (originally put forth by professors Jeremiah Sullivan and Per Heggelund in 1979) - that when the FCMA was passed it was classed as ‘tier one’ legislation, dealing with management and conservation, and that Congress would have to come back later and define a body of fisheries law that would establish ‘tier two’ legislation, dealing with the economic issues. That does not necessarily mean catch shares, as communities and states could have been awarded a portion of the resources for locally decided solutions among competing interests, etc.
The 2007 MSA reauthorization plopped on deck some underdebated issue of ‘limited access privilege programs’ in substitution, and EDF-polished NOAA jackboots goosestep to the tune of tradable shares — nothing short of a public larceny. We need Congress and the IG Office to ask the SEC about the progress they made on their investigation after Groundswell filed a complaint last July after learning that the Milken Institute was involved in April to profess catch shares in the NE model of cooperatives, before the NEFMC even voted on the final package. The Milkens have a SEC lifetime order against them, not to meet with any investors etc. but it seems that has been forgotten, even though the Milkens were also convicted of multiple investment frauds and other felonies.
In short, a body of unfinished fisheries laws that were not designed for economic allocations in accordance with Antitrust, Restraint of Trade, Competition and Trade laws is the wrong basis for giving up the Public Commonweal to special interests. Congress should call for a 3 year or longer moratorium on “Catch Shares” until it properly designs tier-two fisheries legislation and audits how many billions have gone missing due to foreign-owners who practice global tax evasion.
Gulf of Alaska Rockfish Privatization Checked:
A particular highlight came in June, when the Rockfish rationalization program (part of the Stevens Rider of CAA2004) was restructured - with the stripping away of the illegal processor linked cooperatives, no grant of harvest shares for processors, a 10-year sunset on the Amendment and other measures that slowed down the 100-year plan of the shoreside trawler fleets and their foreign-owned and -controlled processor cartel. Who would have thought in 2005 that we’d be here in 2010 without a full-on quota share private ownership program in place? But don’t be too fooled, as the march to IFQs and PQs continues, if on a slower creep.
The take home message for the rest of the nation is that a small group can fight back with the Truth and stop the insane privatization of public resources, and force NOAA to adapt their approaches. The more who do not hesitate, the more who contribute ideas, then the more possibilities there are for good change — and keeping the money within the fishing industry, instead of it flowing to outside ‘investor class’ hands. Elitism must be stopped, and you must do your part. See below to assess which boxes you can stand on…
East Coast Fleet Visits Obama’s Vacation:
Catch Shares = Corporate Shares
We’ve also been watching the folks back East, a fleet protesting at Obama’s vacation shorestep; and other fishing news venues have covered all that pretty well. The eastcoasters are fast learning the hazards of Catch Shares programs designed solely to serve special interests.
You can visit SavingSeafood.org’s website, the South Coast and Gloucester Times news sites, and Ahab’s Journal to stay up to speed. We’d like to thank all our friends on the East Coast who are sharing the Alaskan experience (harmful effects) through our writings, by educating congressional offices about the truth that not all in Alaska are happy with elitism by outsiders.
We support those fishing brothers and sisters, cities and lawyers who are suing NOAA Fisheries and the Secretary of Commerce on New England States fishing “public larcenies” of Catch Shares. Groundswell did its part last year when we took on Lubchenco in Anchorage, after we filed a complaint at the Securities and Exchange Commission about the creation of tradable shares to serve the interest of outside investors instead of the fishing communities. We’ve continued to join with disenfranchised crab crewmembers in written testimonies to the US House subcommittee on Insular Affairs and other appropriate venues.
Our best projects remain behind the scenes, though, as it was when Groundswell began in the early-1990’s. The greatest tasks are about getting federal law enforcement offices to do the investigations that can lead to prosecutions, or at least to returns of revenues to the United States side of the trade equation — so that fishermen might get higher fish ticket prices. And in working toward greater accountability and transparency. After all, this is a significant balance of trade issue.
Felony Prosecutions Needed for False Testimony Behind Allocations:
One mention we can make is that we advised the NPFMC and the Inspector General’s Office (Commerce) that they should prosecute false testimony repetitions before the council. Either prosecute Clem Tillion – who continues to blatantly lie about the Aleut Corporation having made ‘an investment’ in Adak, when the Land Transfer Bill clearly stated it shall not be treated as a sale or investment – or prosecute me for saying Clem is a liar. One of us is giving False Testimony, so please, prosecute me or that liar. Same holds true for Arne Thomson of the Alaska Crab Coalition, now president of the (sick!) United Fishermen of Alaska for lying on the record about crew issues. Prosecute him or prosecute the crab crewmembers who point out his lies. The Five-Year Review of Crab Ratz is coming up in December, and it’s time the IG office prosecute these criminal violations, before they get repeated on the federal record again.
The East Coast should also care about this issue, because without the lies – the repetitive lies – the ‘proponents’ of Catch Shares could not attain their goals to privatize (steal) public resources. If the Truth does not matter enough to enforce the prohibited acts section in the MSA, then can’t our side also lie with impunity without consequence too? Although we hardly need to lie when just telling the Truth is damning enough. This is not about liars having any right to their ’opinions’ on catch shares under cover of white lies and outright lies - truth is not an issue of debate, it is supposed to be essential to a due process that should guarantee that truth comes out before NOAA and Commerce give away what does not belong to them. Otherwise, why would Congress have specifically made “False Testimony” a criminal prohibited act under the MSA?
Alaska Needs RESCue Plan for Resource Sovereignty Protections:
We also reached nearly all the Alaskan gubernatorial candidates on the issue of creating an Alaskan “Resource Economic Sovereignty Commission” (RESCue) with underlying Resource Accountability and Transparency Boards for fishing, timber, mining, and other resources. Self-sufficiency – and being weaned off earmark milk from the federal teets – can only come about with full knowledge of the value of our exploited resources as they enter global commerce, and knowing all the economic facts up to the consumers’ doors. But, typical of Resource Curse states, Alaskan politicians continue to cower under the power of Big Oil and the Japanese-fish Cartel &c.
So, we’ll sit back and watch how things go for the next few months… while staying active behind the scenes. And now that some website technical issues have been worked out, we’ll have to post up more archived files – from The Fishermen’s News, AlaskaReport.com, and other writings.
What Are Your Current Boxes?:
We’ll leave you with some advice, heard from an anonymous writer, that “There are four boxes one needs to have in life. First is a soapbox, second is the ballot box, and third is the jury box. Lastly, the ammo box. Likewise, the boxes should be used in that order.” It is clear that a lot of folks are standing on the third box right now. NOAA would be wise to start obeying the laws of this Nation, though, before the-gods-forbid someone finally steps up with their fourth box. If a government doesn’t want anarchy, it must not create the conditions for it.
Congress would be wise to see that the real problem lies in how Dr. Lubchenco is in consort with the Environmental Defense Fund, and mutual and hedge funds — hellbent on destructing one of the greatest and most essential U.S. industries. At some point,Obama is going to have to grab Joe Biden by the collar and tell him that the financial ponzi-like catch share schemes must be shut down.
Groundswell continues to encourage all fishermen and citizens to bear witness; don’t hesitate, educate; and please use all legal means possible to stop the illicit privatization of the public commonweal.
One final word of advise: Participate! Public input is what validates the council process, so make sure you participate - but in the right ways. However, you must ensure that the Councils actually address that public input, instead of simply backfill in crooked congressional riders or end-run legislation.
Because if bad things happen while you were absent from the process, you have no legal grounds to stand on. This is why even now, five years later, we are pressing the IG office to recognize that when Alaska Crab rationalization was done by the NPFMC, crewmen were present but were held back by vessel owners from testifying on the federal record to get crew IFQs. Later, crew were intimidated under threats of job loss not to testify at NPFMC meetings. Coercion – an illegal act – while crews were participating now forms the basis for a continuing legal right. Pay attention to AAFC’s advise to also show up at meetings and in court rooms, so that judges and decision makers know you have leadership and membership that opposes Catch Shares. You were there to haul George Washington and his troops across rivers to fight for freedom and liberty, fishermen – so be there today: as this Nation owes you still.
AAFC, American Alliance for Fishermen and their Communities, has a group on newsvine. You are encouraged to join!BH007
