New England fisherman are being shut down by Obama's appointee: Lubchenco
Like small farms, the fisherman will be displaced by large AquaCorps. Nice. Thanks.
Apparrently Wall Street wants to play Go Fish, too!
And you have to love the Aussies. For those so inclined, this indepth and recent report on what they call their AquaCulture Industry, is enlightening:
Overview of the Australian Fishing and Aquaculture Industry: Present and Future, 2010
http://www.frdc.com.au/...
This story was off the radar this week. The fisherman of New England all sailed in a flotilla to Martha's Vineyard to protest the administrations policy that will put them out of business.....forever!
We can help. You can read up on the issue below, then call your Congressional representatives/senators and ask them to help.
Let's start with the NOAA report on the status of the fish. Much has been rebuilt in the past few years and is not overfished:
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/...
You can read the details at this link
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/...
Here are the highlights:
The ardor of Environmental Defense graduates now running NOAA to convert the wild schools into tradeable stock attractive to Wall Street traders has sparked a national resistance;
Honed at Environmental Defense Fund, where both Medina and NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco worked during the Bush administration, the catch share system regulates fishermen's catch through allocating shares that be bought, sold or traded, as on a commodities market.
No wonder the New England fisherman are fished off.
Especially at Obama for his appointments of Medina and Lubchenco. Instead of change, it appears another neo-liberal privatization plan is coming to fruition. Sadly unsurprisingly.
Here's how it went down:
Whose Medina:
Medina had been chief counsel at NOAA during the Clinton administration and along with legal work for EDF during the Bush Presidency, she was a vice president for the government backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae (a lobbying client for her husband before entering the Obama White House) and senior officer in the Pew Environment Group.
Oh, I guess Medina's husband, Ron Clain, is also Joe Biden's Chief of Staff.
After his election, Obama named Medina to the NOAA transition team.
Whose Lubchenco:
After Lubchenco, an academic scientist at Oregon State University, was named to head NOAA and confirmed by the Senate — without once mentioning catch shares — she organized a catch share task force and hired Medina, at more than $115,000 as its chairwoman.
Monica Medina, a top political operative in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was assigned to produce a re-engineered, privatized, investor based system for the nation's fisheries: catch shares.
Most disturbing to the New England Fisherman is Lubchenko stated purpose to kill their jobs reported in a Boston Herald article:
In a statement to the Times soon after her confirmation by the Senate, Lubchenco’s office said her goal was to see a "significant fraction of the vessels ... removed."
The fisherman see it differently and so do their local Mayors:
With the stocks rebuilding strongly, fishermen wonder at the need to reduce the size of the work force.
Mayors Carolyn Kirk of Gloucester and Scott Lang of New Bedford have condemned federal fisheries policies for bringing unnecessary social and economic hardship as a certain price for the uncertain resource management benefits of catch share regulations.
Lubchenco has argued that consolidation, which has consistently followed catch shares, produces fewer but better jobs while giving the government a stronger hand in conservation.
The industry sees catch shares as an invitation for market speculation that will condemn the fishing culture to the same fate that conglomeration brought to the family farm.
http://www.bostonherald.com/...
So two days ago, the New England Fisherman sailed to Martha's Vineyard desperately hoping to get President Obama's attention, hoping that the sight of their desperation might soften his heart enough to ask Lobchenco and Medina to scrap their Wall Street Go Fish Game once and for all.
Here is the letter the fisherman paid to have placed in a full page ad in the Martha's Vineyard paper:
“MR. PRESIDENT, WE NEED YOUR HELP”
Dear President Obama,
My name is Russell Sherman, and I am a life-long fisherman. Like New England fisherman before me have done for 387 years, I take my vessel, the 72-foot F/V Lady Jane from the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, into North Atlantic waters to bring back cod, haddock, flounder, and other groundfish for America’s table. I hope that while you’re in New England, you and your family are enjoying a few meals of our fresh catch – there’s none better tasting or healthier in the world.
Mr. President, my fellow fishermen and I need your leadership. We are small businessmen and women who want to continue the profession we love. We have worked hard over the past 16 years to rebuild groundfish stocks. Today, some stocks are fully rebuilt, and most others are expected to rebuild in three years, by 2014. According to federal forecasts, a fully rebuilt fishery will yield a sustainable catch nearly five times current landings.
At a time when we should be hopeful about the future of our businesses, we are desperate instead. We are being driven from our work and the fishery we have helped to rebuild. Ironically, what’s putting us out of work are the rules to rebuild the fishery. The most recent version of these rules – effective on May 1, 2010 – impose very low annual catch limits on stocks for the next three years, and at the same time institute a
“catch share” system.
Take my case. Under the 2010 rules, my permit allows an annual catch of only 60,000 lbs of groundfish. At an average price of $1.50 a pound, that’s an annual gross of $90,000, or about one-quarter of my business’ gross income last year. I simply cannot run my business and support my crew of four – each with a family – on only $90,000 a year.
My business is only one of hundreds facing extinction. While there will be a small handful of “winners” under these new rules, the vast majority of us will be losers.
And when we “losers” are forced out, jobs will be lost, coastal communities gutted, and crucial commercial fishing infrastructure gone forever. Is this the way to rebuild our storied, centuries-old groundfish fishery?
I belong to an organization called the Northeast Seafood Coalition, a New England-wide organization of 255 small, entrepreneurial fishing businesses and allied support businesses that participates in the public process. The Coalition has tried to bring this matter to the attention of your Department of Commerce.
We have tried to offer constructive solutions to the challenge of rebuilding fisheries without at the same time destroying them. But our efforts have fallen on deaf ears.
Mr. President, we desperately need your leadership. We ask that you please direct your Department of Commerce to listen to us and work with us. We know that we can meet this challenge by working together.
Sincerely yours,
Russell Sherman, Captain, F/V Lady Jane Port of Gloucester, Massachusetts
Why, why, why would Obama appoint someone who wants to dismantle the fishing fleets of New England? Or maybe Obama is unaware. Well, he isn't after this weekend.
Ignoring the pleas of the very people faced with losing their livelihood, their homes, and all hopes for their childrend's future is inviting chaos.
Maybe someone here can whisper in the President's ear, or the Vice President's ear (don't let Medina's husband hear you though).
HELP THE NEW ENGLAND FISHERMAN.
Make Washington explain how involving Wall Street to trade fish will help the FISH?
This is another handoff from the LITTLE guys, to the BIG GUYS.
IT SUCKS.!
So far, the are being ignored:
.....l.. has sparked a national resistance; it coalesced last February into an rally of roughly 5,000 commercial and recreational fishermen and their families and political allies at the side of the Capitol.
Apparently, Medina has been systematically replacing those on the New England Fishing councils with her own people. Hey, it's politics, and there's a lot of money under the sea:
In New England, Maine lobster dealer Dana Rice was replaced by Glen Libby, a leader of a small, struggling fishing fleet in Port Clyde, Maine, which has survived in part through winning philanthropic grants. Libby typically aligns with Lubchenco and current EDF senior staffer Sally McGee, who holds a council seat and heads the panel's Scallop Committee.
Rice had predicted that catch share-type programs were coming and would produce dynamics ensuring that the "big guy buys up the quotas and the little guy gets pushed out of the fishery."
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/...
Merritt said she made much the same point as Rice last March in a sharp exchange with Medina, who was leading a forum to introduce fishery managers to catch shares in the South Atlantic region.
"I was somewhat tough on Monica Medina," Merritt told the Times.
After Medina — whose husband Ron Clain is chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden — repeated a favorite aphorism that, in catch share conversions "there will always be winners and losers," Merritt said she responded that "catch shares historically eliminate half the participants."
All this SAVE THE SMALL BUSINESS rhetoric is a smoke screen, it seems. Or that's what it looks like to the nations commercial fisherman.