The country's fishermen are gearing up for the Keep Fishermen Fishing Rally in Washington on Wednesday.
They will converge on Upper Senate Park to bring the message that there must be flexability in the Magnuson Stevens Act, to allow regulators the ability to extend rebuild time lines.
The need for reform is of the utmost importance, according to Bonnie Brady of Montauk, the executive director of LICFA, which issued a statement this week. “The 10-year timeline clause added to Magnuson in 1996, which said any fishery if depleted must be rebuilt within 10 years, was the nuclear option to US fishing communities,”
MSA specifies that both fish and fishermen are sustained during the rebuild time line.
If that is the message to be delivered by American Fishermen in Washington, it comes up short.
Fishermen are being eradicated by the agency that regulates the resource by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, and her fellow bureaucratic henchmen of environs, and politically appointed bureaucratic allies.
The EDF Catch Share Scheme, designed for privatization, and profiteering for outside investors proves one thing.
It is that catch shares is corporate resource theft.
She has shamelessly squandered valuable research dollars to privatize the industry, causing catastrophic financial hardship, wage degeneration of working fishermen, and small business failure of the family owned , single vessel fleet.
The lessons of outside investor influence that have caused decades of pain, have gone unheeded, and have been forgotten.
With the beginning Magnuson Act '76, came a tax credit scheme designed to build a fleet capable of catching the endless supply of fish the government claimed we exclusively owned in our newly established EEZ.
Lawyers, doctors, construction moguls, college professors, and others, all invested in the big build up.
1995 saw the buy back program costing taxpayers $25 million dollars to destroy vessels that were created on the backs of taxpayers.
Tax credit financed vessels, reduced to piles of metal, the victims of the wreckers shears, and cutting torches.
The stocks have been in recovery since then. The data proves that as truth.
What has not changed is the astounding mismanagement of this government, and in the last three years of the Obama Administration, has compounded, through the unscientific,predatory privatization drive of the agency that oversees the nations fisheries, aligned with corporate sponsored, wealthy foundation funded ENGO soldiers, and bureaucrats.
Oil industry money has sustained free market environmental profiteers to further destroy and imperil the nations last common owned resource that this administration is determined to deliver to the outside investors that are poised like vultures, while Jane Lubchenco finishes the kill.
John Kerry has not spoken against the Catch Share Scheme.
Neither has his "Fisheries Investment and Regulatory Relief Act" co- sponsor Olympia Snowe.
He was there when outsiders invested, and should remember what happened.
Olympia Snowe was there for the buy back.
They support Catch Shares, and obviously are EDF Lubchenco supporters.
The word around Gloucester, and the other New England fishing communities regarding Catch Shares, and the negative effects on the cod fish stocks in three very short years is not good. They have proved to save not one fish, but the free market conservation approach has dismantled twenty years of sacrifice to rebuild.
But the fishermen knew that was going to happen.
If ever there was a time to send the message that needs to be heard, it is Wednesday, March 21, 2012 in Washington.
President Obama! Fire Jane Lubchenco, and replace her with someone everyone can trust, and she must not be a replacement from another corporate friendly Pew funded ENGO.
Its time for YOU to take a stand and abandon the wreck less destruction of our oceans through subdivision for energy interests of ANY kind.
As you campaign relentlessly across the country, Mr. President, remember.
Fishermen vote.
ABOLISH CATCH SHARES NOW!
