We can’t win…if we don’t fight!
03/23/2014
We can’t win…if we don’t fight! “Save the Oceans” – Not from “overfishing”; but from GREED!
This is a response (and hopefully an alternative) to the position of “Well, it’s coming anyway, it’s inevitable; so’s we might as well take whatever we can get out of it…go on home, and call it good”
In fact, we probably won’t survive at all…if we don’t fight.
Are we willing to give over our fisheries to the barnstorming energy industrialists looking for a new pair of financial roller skates? Are we willing to let them turn our fishing grounds into oilfields and windfarms, where for “security reasons” they’ll install multi-mile buffer zones preventing any and all craft from entering—except the “officially authorized” of course? Are we willing to let a bunch of Conservation Law Foundation lawyers take over our fisheries management and influence public opinion and cowed officials to regulate fishing into oblivion?
These are groups of lawyers that are operating under the false neutral flag of environmental non-governmental organizations, but in reality are working directly or indirectly for mega-industry agenda driven entities such as the Pew oil company money spawned Environmental Defense Fund. These CLF and Natural Resource Defense League lawyers, for instance, are getting rich collecting fees from both ends: from the government when it’s an EPA issue and then of course from whatever beneficent mega-corporation funded eco-group they happen to be representing at the time.
They move the scams from one “endangered marine species” to another.
NOAA Fisheries is steered by lawsuits; it’s quite obvious. Pew and CLF lawyers will stand up at a Regional Fisheries Council Meeting and openly threaten the council with a law suit if they dare to consider this or that proposal which might actually not constrict the fishing industry. CLF and company make their living from going to court collecting fees from the NGOs that hire them and again collect fees from the government (that they are suing) when they win the EPA suit. The lawyers are working for big biz, mostly the oil industry through “Foundation” money with many profit-securing directive strings attached.
Are we willing to give over fisheries management to this kind of destructive trickery, the shilling for the minerals hungry energy industry and the choking regulations that result and then presented as what?—as an inevitable consequence of the greedy fishermen overfishing and discarding their by-catch“due to “unfavorable market prices”? Fishing operations are in the way and as citizens and members of the “public trust” are we willing to turn over the precious ocean resource to the perpetrators of Exxon Mobil Valdez, Deepwater Horizon and many, many other oil spill atrocities that have largely been kept out of the complicit media? Are we willing to sacrifice our food producing resources to our increasingly addictive “energy needs”? What about our increasing (clean and edible non-GMO) protein needs?
If you think this is all nothing but “conspiracy theory paranoia”, keep in mind that when a conspiracy is hatched in a corporate board room it is known as an “Upstream Profit Business Plan” and this top floor meeting room thinking is never paranoid but considered ivy-league clever strategizing.
So if it’s not conspiracy paranoia then what is the connection then between the Oil-igarchs and the corrupt and absurdly destructive fisheries “management”? The systematic dismantling of the fishing industry is a crime. If proof is needed of that, just visit one of our nearly empty fishing ports and talk to one of the remaining fishermen. What you will find and hear there is on its face a crime. How would we normally analyze any crime to find the villain? Probably the first question to ask is who is it that would gain from committing a particular crime?
Who would, in this case, gain from getting rid of the US fishing industry on the east and west coasts, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico? A fishing industry that might, for instance, be seen as small fleets of whistle blowers bobbing around the oil slicks and constantly calling in reports of leaks and spills, and maybe even bring their own law suits—all very troublesome and undesirable. Who also is having some geo-political difficulty stealing raw (crude) material from countries around the globe as they’ve done for generations? Who needs to “bring it all home” where the “booked reserves” and the drilling is secure and even more profitable? Who has switched the focus form oil to domestic natural gas (in order to tout clean energy) and avoid the extra expenditures for shipping and building gas liquefying factories and infra-structure in foreign lands, countries which might nationalize their resources at any time? And who is on their second “5 year Plan for the OCS”? That is, a plan to exploit the entire U.S. Outer Continental Shelf where there is abundant gas and oil reserves—especially in the North East and especially on Georges. Connect the gooey dots. Not only is the fishing community and our vital national food security at grave risk, but our precious oceans and seashores are about to be turned into an industrial wasteland. This is no time to roll over and play “agreeable compromiser”.
It’s not an option to be compliant and sign up for the handful of jobs maintaining the oil and wind structures—minimal compared to the tens of thousands of jobs lost to a polluted ocean. It’s also not a desirable option (unless there’s no alternative) to elect to accept a onetime buyout at the expense of the entire fishing industry by contributing to the resulting port-destroying consolidation. Those are not options if we care about the ocean and about an industry that supplies thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of pounds of local, clean, healthy, unadulterated protein.
People around the rest of the world are taking to the streets to stop this kind of injustice; how long are we willing to put up with this kind of resource grabbing corporate greed? Where’s the democracy? Where’s the fight for it? Anyone who cares anything about fishing or about their own general health and the health of their neighbor, or for that matter anyone who cares about the world economy functioning for all the world’s people, has to speak out against this corporate takeover and privatization of everything—of our lives!
I realize that this campaign to eliminate fishing has already cost many fishing families their livelihoods, and we need to speak out and advocate for those people in order to make sure they are made whole and get some actual “relief” from the coveted disaster relief funds. For those still standing though, we owe it to the people who have already lost their ability to fish, to use whatever energy and skills we have to truly “Save the Oceans”. Not from “overfishing”; but from GREED!
Stand up! Speak out! Write comments; make calls; talk to neighbors; talk to friends; go to meetings; send emails or letters. Let uninformed and misled people know what’s going on here—give them a fillet and a message! Show up; don’t stay home and lament! Pull the covers off the reprehensible scams of the “non-profits”.
“Democracy is not what governments do. Democracy is what people do.” Howard Zinn
We can’t win…if we don’t fight!
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