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"We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules."
Those words by President Obama during his State of the Union address Tuesday night understandably touched the nerves of a lot of Americans struggling amid today's continuing economic clouds.
It especially strikes a chord with those who work in or around the fishing industry, here in Gloucester, across New England and around America's three coasts. And they would have a couple of pretty basic questions:
If that's what the president believes, why, in the case of America's fisheries, is his administration pushing — not pursuing, pushing — a catch shares management policy that steers more and more of fishermen's quota and more of the revenue into the hands of few larger corporate hands, as documented by NOAA's own statistics for the 2010-2011 fishing year?
How can he allow his own appointee — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco — to continue to snub calls from congressional lawmakers to end her job-killing policies that, by her own stated goal, are aimed at consolidating the fleet while creating what Gov. Deval Patrick and others have long recognized as an "economic disaster" for Gloucester and other fishing communities?
Does the president not know or see what Lubchenco and allies — nonprofit giants such as the Environmental Defense Fund, which has given us catch shares and its land-based cousin, the cap-and-trade program — have done? Does he not care that, while he's campaigning on a pledge of jobs and social change, this wayward wing of his own government is actively putting more and more in the fishing industry out of work?
Perhaps Obama has not heard the calls from people such as Congressmen John Tierney, Barney Frank and U.S. Sen. Scott Brown for Lubchenco's ouster. Maybe he simply has not heard the fishing industry's cries for help.
That should change in March, when thousands of true fishermen are once again expected to rally at the U.S. Capitol in a demonstration themed "Keep Fishermen Fishing."
But, in the meantime, the president should wise up to the fact that, when he makes statements like the one cited above, he has a NOAA leader in his own administration who's making him look like a hypocrite — each and every day.
