From Dick Grachek

Hi Local Combatants, Just wanted to pass this along. Don’t mean to sound “teachy” with this; it’s the version I’ve sent to my local political contacts to try and alert them to the practices of these scam artists.

Proven again and again: 99.9%(…I’m being kind) of anything Pew (or EDF, CLF, Oceana, Lenfest etc.) claim about fishing are lies.  It’s the way they make their money in contributions and do the bidding of the Oil-igarchs and their long term goals of clearing off the outer continental shelf and building there an Industrial Water Park.

They (Pew, Lenfest, Oceana, EDF, etc.) are presently working on eliminating the East Coast Menhaden fishery(aka Bunker,Pogies) after going after West Coast sardines recently.  It’s all part of the “save the forage fish” campaign, another strategy to shut down all the fisheries they can.  It’s a relatively recent anti-fishing angle and bogus as usual, the forwarded article below explains some of their lies and manipulations.  They’ll be out for our Squid and Scup and Whiting soon, which more or less fall into the same category of the  boom and bust type species.

Actually, I believe “Forage” is any fish that a larger fish can get into his/her mouth.  The fish that Pew is calling “forage”, i.e., Menhaden, Herring, Sardines, Anchovy, Squid, and Mackerel, Scup, and Whiting, are most of the time amazingly abundant.  But, their populations vary along with everything else in nature, i.e. variations in wind, currents, air and water temp. food supply, spawning conditions, abundance of a particular predator.

These fish are prolific breeders when conditions are right.  They are short lived and populations go through boom and bust naturally. These stocks can vary widely and have done so forever; and because of this fact, population statistics can be selectively manipulated by choosing a particularly scarce or abundant year to “prove” statistically just about anything you want. Squid for instance live for approximately one year; but, when conditions are good their eggs cover the bottom and are so thick they’ll plug the net and almost stop the boat.  The following year’s spawn might be a fraction of the previous year’s for a myriad of factors, the least of which is fishing mortality.

The fact is that fishermen cannot work on depleted stocks.   When a particular species is scarce, boats will either stay at the dock, or re-rig for something else, another species that’s abundant that year or that season.  The fact is also that fish regulation is big business, bigger than the business it claims to regulate.  The more alarming the claims, the more the tax-sheltered contributions flow, from both the duped general public and the overlord corporate boards and the more relevant the hoards of “fish management” jobs at NOAA appear.

The real tragedy is that these shysters have discredited the entire ecological movement, the need for which is becoming more evident every day in terms of climate and air quality etc.  But these scam artists at Pew are the oil companies, the polluters, so they certainly won’t bite the hand that feeds them and engage some of the real threats to the atmosphere. They’ll continue to go after the fishing communities, the “little people”, who are real easy to catch.

I’ll also attach a little piece about chasing down that mythical “Last Fish”.

Thanks, Dick Grachek

Speaking of little fish with a big impact, there seems to be a reel Pew disconnect.

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