FISHERYNATION.COM

In 2010 and 2012 fishermen held two different successful protests in Washington DC with thousands of fishermen travelling from around the country to attend. Both commercial and recreational fishermen voiced their concerns regarding catch shares and Magnuson Act reauthorization, among the multitude of issues that threatened their livelihoods. During the Obama administration, Jane Lubchenco, a PEW fellow, oversaw a major shift in the way we manage our fishery resources by introducing “Catch Shares” a controversial form of individual transferable quota, that has destroyed the very fabric of the New England ground fisheries. Many fishermen were almost immediately put out of business by the passage of Groundfish Amendment 13, the rest have slowly gone out of business, with large, pocketed vultures scooping up their quota, ultimately resulting in a Dutch company, Blue Harvest, owning a large portion of not only Groundfish, but also Scallops. This outcome was predicted by many experienced fishermen, but their concerns were ignored, as the Obama administration plowed over any objectors. Lawsuits were filed, including one with me as lead plaintiff, but they all failed to stop this disaster to our industry.

Today, the fishing industry is facing a far worse enemy then fishery management, as thousands of square miles of their historic fishing grounds have been auctioned off to the highest bidder in order to make way for the wildlife killing machines called wind turbines. These auctions have been held by BOEM, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a part of the Department of the Interior. They are charged with the selling or leasing of US natural resources in our offshore waters, and apparently, they
have absolutely no regard for any wildlife that may exist within them, or any people who might derive a living from catching said wildlife. Before the Biden Administration, BOEM generally dealt with offshore leasing to oil companies for oil and gas reserves. Those companies employed research vessels using seismic air guns to locate oil reserves deep within the earth’s crust, making deadly sound waves of over 240 DBs, coincidentally in many places marine mammals would mysteriously strand themselves on beaches and die. Now, thanks to the green new deal, those research vessels have been blasting the east coast since last November, [about the time that Whales started washing up dead on the beaches], to map the sub seafloor for offshore wind turbines.

The fishing industry has been keenly aware of the disastrous fate that offshore wind poses not only to their existence, but also to the marine creatures who inhabit it. BOEM has run roughshod over not only the fishing industry, but the federal agency in charge of managing those fishery resources. Flexing their bureaucratic muscle, they have highjacked fishery management from the National Marine Fishery Service who has been relegated to an observer of the unfolding environmental disaster being created in order to save the world. The death of hundreds of marine mammals along the east coast, washing up on public beaches, finally awakened the public to the environmental dangers that offshore wind causes. Activist groups sprung up in opposition to offshore wind, and protests have been held regularly in many states. A petition circulated in New Jersey garnered over 500,000 signatures calling for a halt to sonar and seismic activities until an investigation into the strandings takes place. Multiple lawsuits have been filed and are working their way through various court districts. While these suits may eventually prevail, in the meantime construction and cataclysmic noise making continue. Every day that goes by more historic fishing grounds are lost as thousands of tons of large boulders are dumped onto the seafloor around turbine bases. These grounds will be unfishable to mobile gear for hundreds of years.

Now is the time for the American public to stand up and fight the corruption in our state and federal governments, a mass demonstration needs to be held in Washington DC as soon as possible, before the green new deal bankrupts our country, and destroys our ocean and its creatures. Northern European countries have the highest electric rates of any developed country in the world, excluding islands. Some of them are having serious doubts about their decision of closing down coal and nuclear plants for renewable energy sources that are not only more expensive, but totally unreliable. We can stop this, but it will require a lot of work, getting groups to work together to plan out details, getting permits, publicizing the protest, etc. Step one is to circulate this article among fishing and public groups opposed to offshore wind and generate a discussion among these groups and their leaders about organizing the protest. Wouldn’t it be amazing if those 500,000 people who signed that anti-wind petition showed up in Washington DC.? I think this amount of people is possible if properly publicized, and it would have an immediate effect. Although the east coast has been affected before the Gulf of Mexico, and the West coast, BOEM has plans for them too, so if fishermen value their livelihoods, no matter what coast they live on, they need to make plans and get involved.

Has everyone conveniently forgotten the precautionary principle?

Seemingly all of the self-professed significant actors (both personal and organizational) with self-professed interest and expertise in how potential threats to the oceans and the critters in them should be handled has been synopsized for us rather conveniently-in the Antarctic Ocean Alliance Briefing #2: Applying the Precautionary Principle to Marine Reserves and Marine Protected Areas.*

Borrowing from said briefing, we have:

The foundation of the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle has deep roots finding expression in sayings such as ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ or ‘better safe than sorry’. As the need to address environmental issues was increasingly recognized in the late 20th century, the precautionary principle became more widely used in national and international legislative contexts.

The precautionary principle was enshrined in International Law through Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, 1992. The concept is now central to law making on a large range of issues, including climate change, toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), forests, wildlife protection and oceans.

The use of the precautionary principle in ecosystem management is especially important in the case of the marine environment where scientific uncertainties abound. Repeated failures of management highlighted by the collapse of northern cod off Canada, the California sardine fishery, and herring, sandeels, blue whiting and capelin stocks in the North Sea have demonstrated the need for this approach in order to help address scientific uncertainty.

With the precautionary principle as a foundation many international agreements and bodies have sought to apply a precautionary approach specific to their particular challenges. In its essence the precautionary principle re-quires taking action in the form of protective conservation and management actions to reduce the risk of serious and/or irreversible harm from an activity before negative consequences become apparent. The establishment of MRs and MPAs is thus a precautionary act.

Precaution in regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs):

 Many international institutions and RFMOs have endorsed the use of the precautionary principle and precautionary approach in conserving marine ecosystems and protecting biodiversity.10 For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s Conference of the Parties (COP) links the precautionary principle to the development of MPAs, noting that the COP “has a key role in supporting the work of the [UN] General Assembly with regard to marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction, by focusing on provision of scientific and as appropriate, technical information and advice relating to marine biological diversity, the application of the ecosystem approach and the precautionary approach.”11 MRs and MPAs are thus increasingly recognized as an important application of the precautionary principle in the marine environment. Improving traditional fisheries management, data and modelling cannot always ensure the long-term sustainability of marine life.

Scientists note that “MPAs can serve to hedge against inevitable uncertainties, errors and biases in fisheries management. Marine Protected Areas (or as we have called them, simply, protected reserves) may well be the simplest and best approach to implementing the precautionary principle.”

The Antarctic Ocean Alliance is a coalition of more than 30 leading environmental organizations and high-profile individuals working together to achieve large-scale protection for key Antarctic ocean ecosystems.

Alliance members include the Pew Environment Group, Greenpeace, WWF, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), Humane Society International, Mission Blue (US), International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Oceans 5 (US), Deep Wave (Germany), The Last Ocean, Green-ovation Hub (China), the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM), Forest & Bird (NZ), ECO (NZ) and associate partners the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Oceana, TerraMar Project, the In-ternational Polar Foundation (UK), Plant a Fish, the International Programme on the State of the Oceans (IPSO), the Ocean Project, Bloom Association (France), OceanCare (Switzerland), Eco-Sys Action, Ocean Planet (Aus-tralia) and Corail Vivant (New Caledonia). AOA Ambassadors include actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Nor-ton, Oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, Chinese entrepreneur and explorer Wang Jing and Korean actor Yoo Ji-Tae.(https://www.asoc.org/storage/documents/resources/aoa-briefing-2-applying-precautionary-approach.pdf, undated.)

All of the above enumerated anti-fishing activists and their organizations (and then some) have been using their so-called precautionary principle as a reason to oppose just about any fishing industry originated or accepted proposal or management proposal for any action which might actually result in helping fishermen and fishing because the radical environmental “rightness” of any outcome can’t be assured.

Yet, when it comes to protecting huge swaths of ocean-and huge numbers of the critters in them or dependent on them-from a seemingly endless list of actual or potential threats brought about by envisioned unprecedented offshore developments, these same self-styled activists/ocean saviors have all conveniently forgotten that anything vaguely similar to their revered precautionary principle has ever existed or should be applied to anything but fishing.

Clog our near shore and offshore waters with hulking (approaching 1,000 feet tall today, who knows what’s in store for tomorrow?) structures supporting huge rotors with tips moving through the air at velocities approaching 200 miles per hour? So what? Festoon our seabeds with electrical cables carrying huge amounts of electricity, the passage of which will generate electro-magnetic fields that will almost certainly have some effect on some of the species of critters that will be influenced at some level by those fields daily, monthly or annually? Who cares? Influence wave/current/tidal scouring and associated turbidity in undetermined-and very likely undeterminable-ways on the fish, marine mammals, birds, phyto- and zooplankton, and other sea life? What’s the difference?

And what of undersea server farms (see David Myers’ Microsoft hails success of its undersea data center experiment—and says it could have implications on dry land, too in the 9/15/2020 issue of Fortune magazine at https://fortune.com/2020/09/15/microsoft-project-natick-undersea-datacenter-scotland/), tidal generators (see Jake Dean’s The Scots Are Unlocking the Ocean’s Energy Potential posted to Slate’s website last month at https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/orbital-marine-power-scotland-ocean-energy.html), and telecom cables (see Adam Satariano’s People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean in the 03/10/2018 NY Times at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html)?

In addition (though it doesn’t generate electro-magnetic fields), we certainly shouldn’t ignore the biological and oceanographic impacts of seafloor mining (see Olive Heffernan’s  Seabed mining is coming — bringing mineral riches and fears of epic extinctions in the 7/24/2019 issue of Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y ).

All of these (and very probably other) activities come with potentially huge though for the most part unidentified downsides, but it’s very doubtful that the well-entrenched and well-funded activists and organizations that are so anxious to employ the precautionary principle to protect the Antarctic and other oceans from fishing will most probably be “out to lunch” when it comes to those considerations.

If (as?) it becomes apparent that that is the case, the major question is going to be why? With potential negative im-pacts that might easily prove to be worse than even poorly regulated fishing could ever be, energy-, telecom- or mining-developments, are the members of the fishing industry going to be capable of surviving with what’s just around the corner? Back in the 70s the fishing industry worked with other (primarily environmental?) interests to regain control of the fisheries resources of what was to become our Exclusive Economic Zone. Is that possible now?

Of course the answer is yes, but is it likely? It’s definitely not happening with wind power today. Evidently, according to the enviro-orgs that have never failed to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to reducing restrictions on fishing, wind farm developers are on the side of the angels. The enviro orgs are apparently of the mind that windfarms and other proposed ocean uses-and misuses- are incapable of significantly harming the onshore, inshore or offshore en-vironment.

For an idea of where the anti-fishing activists might be going with this, take a look at A new home for fish: how offshore wind turbines create artificial reefs by Nicole DiPaolo in the National Wildlife Federation blog from 09/26/2019 (https://blog.nwf.org/2019/09/a-new-home-for-fish-how-offshore-wind-turbines-create-artificial-reefs/). This is the argument that got recreational fishing groups firmly behind the Gulf of Mexico oil industry before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Since that catastrophe, perhaps not so much.

But with the antifishing activists the beat is going on. Enric Sala, former Pew (Trusts) Fellow in Marine Conservation who is presently National Geographic’s Explorer in Residence and a dozen or so of his cronies-including ex-NOAA head Jane Lubchenco, who should long be remembered for her controversial use of the dispersant Corexit in the Gulf oil fiasco) published Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate (in the March 17 issue of Nature).

In essence Sala and his coauthors argue that one of the solutions for the imminent climate crisis is the coordinated establishment of fully protected (that is, protected from commercial fishing, of course!) marine reserves.

According to a review of the article in the March 17 issue of The Guardian (McVeigh, Karen/Bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel, landmark study finds), “the analysis shows that the world must protect a minimum of 30% of the ocean in order to provide multiple benefits. The scientists say their results lend credence to the ambition of protecting at least 30% of the ocean by 2030, which is part of the target adopted by a coalition of 50 countries this year to slow the destruction of the natural world.” According to the authors, bottom trawling releases roughly as much CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere each year as does global aviation. And (coincidently, because it’s right in line with the anti-fishing activists’ unrealistic and unnecessary “dream” of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans from fishermen) this could be reduced by establishing a corresponding network of marine protected (from fishing, not anything else) areas.

So evidently, in the view of a handful of marine scientists, most (we’ve been here before.See my February 2003 FishNet article The Pew Commission – a basis for national ocean policy? at https://www.fishingnj.org/netusa23.htm.) with direct or indirect connections to the Pew Charitable Trusts and all with the media influence that those connections afford them and who are willing to ignore actual and potential activities with massive negative impacts on our inshore and offshore ocean environments, this is one of the top priorities. They are still maintaining their campaign to continue persecuting commercial fishing and commercial fishermen needlessly.* And all of this in spite of their oft professed-though not so much lately-adherence to the precautionary principle and their blatant disregard of other stressors.

Their tunnel vision and short-sightedness seem staggering.

*In a response to Sala et al (above), Jan Geert Hiddink, S. van de Velde, R.A. McConnaughey, E. de Borger, F.G. O’Neill, J. Tiano, M.J. Kaiser, A. Sweetman and M. Sciberras wrote “Sala, et al. suggest that seafloor disturbance by industrial trawlers and dredgers results in 0.58 to 1.47 Pg of aqueous CO 2 emissions annually, owing to increased organic carbon (OC) remineralization in sediments after trawling. We agree that bottom trawling disrupts natural carbon flows in seabed ecosystems due to sediment mixing, resuspension and changes in the bio-logical community and that it is important to estimate the magnitude of this effect. We disagree however that their assessment represents a ‘best estimate’. Firstly, the assumption that OC in undisturbed sediment is inert and is remineralised only after disturbance by trawling is at odds with decades of geochemical research on natural processing of OC in marine sediments 2 . Secondly, the volume of sediment where carbon is mineralised after trawling is greatly overestimated. Thirdly, secondary effects, such as the removal of bioturbating benthic fauna and sedimentary nutrient release, which could lead to the preservation and production of OC in sediments, are ignored. Together these issues result in an upward bias in the estimated CO 2 emissions by one or more orders of magnitude.”   

Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet USA. © 2021 Nils E. Stolpe, July 31, 2021

Seemingly all of the self-professed significant actors (both personal and organizational) with self-professed interest and expertise in how potential threats to the oceans and the critters in them should be handled has been synopsized for us rather conveniently-and very obviously and (suspiciously?) conveniently-in the Antarctic Ocean Alliance Briefing #2: Applying the Precautionary Principle to Marine Reserves and Marine Protected Areas.* Borrowing from said briefing, we have:

The foundation of the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle has deep roots finding expression in sayings such as ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ or ‘better safe than sorry’. As the need to address environmental issues was increasingly recognized in the late 20th century, the precautionary principle became more widely used in national and international legislative contexts.

The precautionary principle was enshrined in International Law through Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, 1992. The concept is now central to law making on a large range of issues, including climate change, toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), forests, wildlife protection and oceans.

The use of the precautionary principle in ecosystem management is especially important in the case of the marine environment where scientific uncertainties abound. Repeated failures of management highlighted by the collapse of northern cod off Canada, the California sardine fishery, and herring, sandeels, blue whiting and capelin stocks in the North Sea have demonstrated the need for this approach in order to help address scientific uncertainty.

With the precautionary principle as a foundation many international agreements and bodies have sought to apply a precautionary approach specific to their particular challenges. In its essence the precautionary principle requires taking action in the form of protective conservation and management actions to reduce the risk of serious and/or irreversible harm from an activity before negative consequences become apparent. The establishment of MRs and MPAs is thus a precautionary act.

Precaution in regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs):

Many international institutions and RFMOs have endorsed the use of the precautionary principle and precautionary approach in conserving marine ecosystems and protecting biodiversity.10 For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s Conference of the Parties (COP) links the precautionary principle to the development of MPAs, noting that the COP “has a key role in supporting the work of the [UN] General Assembly with regard to marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction, by focusing on provision of scientific and as appropriate, technical information and advice relating to marine biological diversity, the application of the ecosystem approach and the precautionary approach.”11 MRs and MPAs are thus increasingly recognized as an important application of the precautionary principle in the marine environment. Improving traditional fisheries management, data and modelling cannot always ensure the long-term sustainability of marine life.

Scientists note that “MPAs can serve to hedge against inevitable uncertainties, errors and biases in fisheries management. Marine Protected Areas (or as we have called them, simply, protected reserves) may well be the simplest and best approach to implementing the precautionary principle.”

The Antarctic Ocean Alliance is a coalition of more than 30 leading environmental organizations and high-profile individuals working together to achieve large-scale protection for key Antarctic ocean ecosystems.

Alliance members include the Pew Environment Group, Greenpeace, WWF, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), Humane Society International, Mission Blue (US), International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Oceans 5 (US), Deep Wave (Germany), The Last Ocean, Greenovation Hub (China), the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM), Forest & Bird (NZ), ECO (NZ) and associate partners the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Oceana, TerraMar Project, the International Polar Foundation (UK), Plant a Fish, the International Programme on the State of the Oceans (IPSO), the Ocean Project, Bloom Association (France), OceanCare (Switzerland), Eco-Sys Action, Ocean Planet (Australia) and Corail Vivant (New Caledonia). AOA Ambassadors include actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton, Oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, Chinese entrepreneur and explorer Wang Jing and Korean actor Yoo Ji-Tae.(https://www.asoc.org/storage/documents/resources/aoa-briefing-2-applying-precautionary-approach.pdf , undated.)

All of the above enumerated anti-fishing activists and organizations (and then some) have been using their so-called precautionary principle as a reason to oppose just about any industry originated or accepted proposal for any action which might actually result in helping fishermen and fishing because the outcome can’t be assured.

Yet when it comes to protecting huge swaths of ocean-and huge numbers of the critters in them or dependent on them-from a seemingly endless list of actual or potential threats brought about by envisioned unprecedented offshore developments these same self-styled activists/ocean saviors have all conveniently forgotten that anything vaguely similar to their revered precautionary principle has ever existed.

Clog our near shore and offshore waters with hulking (approaching 1,000 feet tall today, who knows what’s in store for tomorrow?) structures supporting huge rotors with tips moving through the air at velocities approaching 200 miles per hour? So what? Festoon our sea beds with electrical cables carrying huge amounts of electricity, the passage of which will generate electro-magnetic fields that will almost certainly have some effect on some of the species of critters that will be influenced at some level by those fields daily, monthly or annually? So what? Influence wave/current/tidal scouring and associated turbidity in undetermined-and very likely undeterminable-ways on the fish, marine mammals, birds and other sea life? So what?

And what of undersea server farms (see David Myers’ Microsoft hails success of its undersea data center experiment—and says it could have implications on dry land, too in the 9/15/2020 issue of Fortune magazine at https://fortune.com/2020/09/15/microsoft-project-natick-undersea-datacenter-scotland/), tidal generators (see Jake Dean’s The Scots Are Unlocking the Ocean’s Energy Potential posted to Slate’s website last month at https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/orbital-marine-power-scotland-ocean-energy.html), and telecom cables (see Adam Satariano’s People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean in the 03/10/2018 NY Times at  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html)?

In addition (though it doesn’t generate electro-magnetic fields), we certainly shouldn’t ignore the biological and oceanographic impacts of seafloor mining (see Olive Heffernan’s  Seabed mining is coming — bringing mineral riches and fears of epic extinctions in the 07/24/2019 issue of Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y).

All of these (and very probably other) activities come with potentially huge though for the most part unidentified downsides, but it’s very doubtful that the well-entrenched and well-funded activists and organizations that are so anxious to employ the precautionary principle to protect the Antarctic and other oceans from fishing will most probably be “out to lunch” when it comes to those considerations.

If (as?) it becomes apparent that that is the case, the major question is going to be why? With potential negative impacts that might easily prove to be worse than even poorly regulated fishing could ever be, energy-, telecom- or mining-developments, are the members of the fishing industry going to be capable of surviving with what’s just around the corner? Back in the 70s the fishing industry worked with other (primarily environmental?) interests to regain control of the fisheries resources of what was to become our Exclusive Economic Zone. Is that possible now?

Of course the answer is yes, but is it likely? It’s definitely not happening with wind power today. Evidently, according to the enviro-orgs that have never failed to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to reducing restrictions on fishing, wind farm developers are on the side of the angels. The enviro orgs are apparently of the mind that windfarms and other proposed ocean uses-and misuses- are incapable of significantly harming the onshore, inshore or offshore environment.

For an idea of where the anti-fishing activists might be going with this, take a look at A new home for fish: how offshore wind turbines create artificial reefs by Nicole DiPaolo in the National Wildlife Federation blog from 09/26/2019 (https://blog.nwf.org/2019/09/a-new-home-for-fish-how-offshore-wind-turbines-create-artificial-reefs/). This is the argument that got recreational fishing groups firmly behind the Gulf of Mexico oil industry before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Since that catastrophe, perhaps not so much.

But with the anti-fishing activists the beat is going on. Enric Sala, former Pew (Trusts) Fellow in Marine Conservation who is presently National Geographic’s Explorer in Residence and a dozen or so of his cronies-including ex-NOAA head Jane Lubchenco who should be remembered for her controversial use of the dispersant Corexit in the Gulf oil fiasco) published Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate (in the March 17 issue of Nature).

In essence Sala and his coauthors argue that one of the solutions for the imminent climate crisis is the coordinated establishment of fully protected (that is, protected from commercial fishing, of course!) marine reserves.

According to a review of the article in the March 17 issue of The Guardian (McVeigh, Karen/Bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel, landmark study finds), “the analysis shows that the world must protect a minimum of 30% of the ocean in order to provide multiple benefits. The scientists say their results lend credence to the ambition of protecting at least 30% of the ocean by 2030, which is part of the target adopted by a coalition of 50 countries this year to slow the destruction of the natural world.” According to the authors, bottom trawling releases roughly as much CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere each year as does Global Aviation. And (coincidently, because it’s right in line with the anti-fishing activists’ unrealistic and unnecessary “dream” of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans from fishermen) this could be reduced by establishing a corresponding network of marine protected (from fishing, not anything else) areas.

 So evidently, in the view of a handful of marine scientists, most with direct or indirect connections to the Pew Charitable Trusts and all with the media influence that those connections afford them and who are willing to ignore actual and potential activities with massive negative impacts on our inshore and offshore ocean environments, this is one of the top priorities. They are still maintaining their campaign to continue persecuting commercial fishing and commercial fishermen needlessly.* And all of this in spite of their oft professed-though not so much lately-adherence to the precautionary principle and their blatant disregard of other stressors.

Their tunnel vision and short-sightedness seem staggering.

————————————————-

*In a response to Sala et al (above), Jan Geert Hiddink, S. van de Velde, R.A. McConnaughey, E. de Borger, F.G. O’Neill, J. Tiano, M.J. Kaiser, A. Sweetman and M. Sciberras wrote “Sala, et al. suggest that seafloor disturbance by industrial trawlers and dredgers results in 0.58 to 1.47 Pg of aqueous CO 2 emissions annually, owing to increased organic carbon (OC) remineralization in sediments after trawling. We agree that bottom trawling disrupts natural carbon flows in seabed ecosystems due to sediment mixing, resuspension and changes in the biological community and that it is important to estimate the magnitude of this effect. We disagree however that their assessment represents a ‘best estimate’. Firstly, the assumption that OC in undisturbed sediment is inert and is remineralised only after disturbance by trawling is at odds with decades of geochemical research on natural processing of OC in marine sediments 2 . Secondly, the volume of sediment where carbon is mineralised after trawling is greatly overestimated. Thirdly, secondary effects, such as the removal of bioturbating benthic fauna and sedimentary nutrient release, which could lead to the preservation and production of OC in sediments, are ignored. Together these issues result in an upward bias in the estimated CO 2 emissions by one or more orders of magnitude.”

On May 11, 2021 the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) issued a press release condemning the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management-in company with the Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Marine Fisheries Service  for issuing a Record of Decision (see https://www.boem.gov/sites/default/files/documents/renewable-energy/state-activities/Final-Record-of-Decision-Vineyard-Wind-1.pdf)-for the Vineyard Wind 1 Offshore Wind Energy Project Construction and Operations Plan (COP).

Quoting from the RODA release

 BOEM continues to abdicate its responsibility to the public and leave all decision-making to large, multinational corporations, including this Decision which includes effectively no mitigation measures to offset impacts to critical ocean ecosystems and commercial fisheries.

It has only included one such measure: a voluntary and non-enforceable suggestion for developers to cooperate with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to mitigate what the Final Environmental Impact Statement characterizes as “major” impacts to scientific research.

The proposed project (from Page 10 of the Record of Decision), which is planned to be sited about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, is described thusly:

 The proposed Project will consist of up to 100 WTGs in any of the 106 identified locations, each of which would have an 8 to 14 MW generation capacity, and up to two electrical service platforms (ESPs). The WTGs would be placed in a grid-like array (with WTGs in rows oriented northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast) within the WDA, with typical spacing between WTGs of 0.75 to 1 nm. The proposed Project would occur within the range of design parameters outlined in the Vineyard Wind COP (Epsilon 2020), subject to applicable mitigation measures.

 Again, from the RODA release:

 To the best of our knowledge, BOEM did not even consider any mitigation measures recommended by RODA or any fisheries professionals, scientists, or natural resource managers, despite having clearly defined requests available to them.

In one pen stroke, BOEM has confirmed its scattershot, partisan, and opaque approach that undermines every lesson we’ve learned throughout environmental history: the precautionary principle, the importance of safety and environmental regulation, the scientific method and use of the best available data, and adaptive management policies.

It is shocking that NMFS could sign off on a decision so inexplicably adverse to its core mission and the research, resources, businesses, and citizens under its jurisdiction.

To anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with federal fisheries management, which is supposedly controlled by the provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSFCMA) and, which is par for this course at least, subsequent interpretations by the federal court system, this Record of Decision can hardly be a surprise.

It is just another example of the commercial fishing industry being “thrown under the bus” for the benefit of more politically powerful interests-in this case the wind energy industry and the political support that has been generated by it.

Once again, woe is us!

But then again, perhaps not. Gina McCarthy, described as the Biden Administration’s “Climate Czar” (actually the first-ever climate advisor) “said the administration already took those complaints.” These are the comments RODA and various other folks and organizations made on the COP which were never addressed.

According to interviewer Ted Nesi, reporting for WPRI (Rhode Island and Southeast Massachusetts) “McCarthy said offshore wind is emerging as an even more important linchpin of the Biden administration’s clean energy strategy than had originally been expected. There are about 16 projects currently in the pipeline, and the administration says it hopes to have some operational by 2025, with a goal to have 30 gigawatts total by 2030. It’s way bigger than anyone anticipated,” she said, “because we’re seeing the resources off the coast not just in the East Coast, but now it’s opening up in the West Coast, we’re looking at the Gulf of Mexico, we’re even looking at the gulf coast up in Maine all the way down to Florida.”

While Mr. Nesi seemed to think that the fishing industry’-and others’-concerns have been and will be addressed, having spent more years than I would have liked as a bureaucrat, then even more years dealing with bureaucrats, Ms. McCarthy seemed to be offering the fishing industry the kind of reassurances that bureaucrats fall back on when they haven’t spent a whole lot of time considering particular problems, or on considering them seriously. Sort of a pat on the head while saying “there, there, there! Leave it to us and we’ll take care of you” kind of thing.

She’s baa-aack! (with credit to Heather O’Rourke in Poltergist 2)

And then again, we can’t forget Jane Lubchenco (could anybody who suffered through the Deepwater Horizon tragedy forget Ms. Lubchenco?) whose role in the Biden administration is only just starting. According to the Washington Post (White House appoints former NOAA leader Jane Lubchenco to key climate change role, 03/19/21) she has been appointed to “a high-level (White House) position coordinating climate and environmental issues within its Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)…. Lubchenco is serving in the renamed position of deputy director for climate and the environment, which in previous administrations had been known as the head of ‘energy and the environment.’ The renaming signifies the emphasis the Biden Administration is placing on climate change. Lubchenco’s portfolio encompasses a broad set of issues that President Biden asked OSTP officials to address in a letter on Jan. 15. In the letter to Eric Lander, nominated to serve as presidential science adviser, Biden tasked OSTP with finding climate change solutions that will help improve the economy and health, “especially in communities that have been left behind.”

 If you are reading this you probably have a fairly accurate idea of Ms. Lubchenco’s success in fixing the New England groundfish fishery specifically and in domestic commercial fishing in general in her previous government gig. From an article by Environmental Defense’s Julie Wormser on May 12, 2009 (A Turning Point for New England Groundfish Fishery: Jane Lubchenco sends a clear message, https://tinyurl.com/fy9c7h3n).

The meeting started at 8:30 am, with the room unusually full for that early hour.  The previous days had been crackling with speculation around the region about the reason for her visit. After brief introductions, Dr. Lubchenco thanked everyone for allowing her the time to speak to them. She described the main components of the new fishing rules and then said that she came to the council meeting with two clear messages.

 First, that NOAA would commit $16 million this year toward a new future for New England’s fisheries (in this case, groundfish, but also more broadly).  Second, she put the room on notice—Council members, agency staff, industry and other stakeholders—that we all needed to step up and move away from crisis management toward a lasting solution—catch shares.

 “We need a rapid transition to sectors and catch shares,” she explained.  “Catch shares are a powerful tool to getting to sustainable fisheries and profitability.  I challenge you to deliver on this in Amendment 16, to include measures to end overfishing.  I will commit the resources to my staff to do their part to ensure Amendment 16 is passed in June.

 To the surprise, consternation and chagrin of the folks at NOAA/NMFS, at Environmental Defense (Ms. Wormser’s article somehow failed to mention that Ms. Lubchenco had been a member and Chairperson of the Environmental Defense board, and those few who bought into Ms. Lubchenco’s assurances, though to not many other folks-at least those with a knowledge of and a concern for our domestic commercial fishing and one of our oldest and most important commercial fisheries-many segments of the New England groundfish fishery are in worse shape than they’ve ever been. And that has little or naught to do with who’s catching what, which is what Ms. Lubchenco’s groundfish fishery recovery was fatuously based on. And everything to do with the Gulf of Maine and adjacent waters heating up much more precipitously than the rest of the world’s oceans.

And on what is described as one of the biggest man-made environmental catastrophes that was ever visited on the world, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which occurred during Ms. Lubchencos reign at NOAA, from one of her regular updates on the progress of the spill (from my FishNet issue on June 10, (NOAA Inaction in the Gulf of Mexico, http://www.fishnet-usa.com/NOAA_Inaction.htm, 06/12/10):

 C-Span’s video library archives televised updates on the Gulf oil spill. In her response to a question about the availability of video from BP in the update on June 8, Ms. Lubchenco said “there were problems early on. We have directed BP to give everything they have and that has been forthcoming” (starting at 16 minutes into the video, which is available at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293950-1).

 In a letter on the same day to Lamar McKay, President and CEO of BP America, Senator Ed Markey wrote “it has come to my attention that the Flow Rate Technical Group (the panel of scientists and engineers tasked with determining the rate of oil release from the Deepwater Horizon) has not yet received archived video data for this period (after the riser was severed and before the cap was in-stalled). Since I have previously requested that you archive all video, I expect that you have stored a copy of all the chronological vid-eo feeds. Any efforts on your part to prevent experts from determining the size of the spill is unacceptable. I request that you immedi-ately release the archived video to the Flow Rate Technical Group and to me so that the size of this spill can be determined.” Senator Markey is the Chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

 One has to assume that the Chairman of the Senate subcommittee that is and has been most directly involved in the BP provided and NOAA permitted environmental atrocity that is still happening in the Gulf of Mexico knows what materials are and aren’t available to a federally convened panel of experts. So why would Ms. Lubchenco be asserting on the same day that he made his request to BP that “everything has been forthcoming” from BP? This seems to be another of Ms. Lubchenco’s irregularities and anomalies, but it appears that none of them are random in nature, all seeming to fall on the BP side of the fence. 

With friends like this, who needs….

So the federal representatives, in this case probably marching to either Gina McCarthy’s or Jane Lubchenco’s drum beat, have committed virtually nothing in writing, granting the wind industry carte blanche to do as they wish (or as their bottom line dictates) and leaving the domestic fishing industry with a “trust us, we’re from the federal government and you have our assurances that you’ll be all right.”

 I suspect that such assurances, when made to members of the U.S. commercial fishing industry, their families and their communities, might ring just a wee tad hollow. Too many fishermen-particularly in New England-(and far too many ex-fishermen) have been living with empty nets, idle vessels, unpaid bills and empty government assurances for far too long.

(I have to note here that I was surprised-no, I wasn’t actually surprised!-that what remains of the fishing industry press had hardly anything to say about this situation and the feds’ role in it. It almost seems as if the remaining (print and electronic) publications have sworn off taking up controversial issues, no matter how important they might be to the commercial fishing industry and the communities they support. To repeat what I quoted up above from RODA’s press release-because it’s absolutely central to this issue-“in one pen stroke, BOEM has confirmed its scattershot, partisan, and opaque approach that undermines every lesson we’ve learned throughout environmental history: the precautionary principle, the importance of safety and environmental regulation, the scientific method and use of the best available data, and adaptive management policies. It is shocking that NMFS could sign off on a decision so inexplicably adverse to its core mission and the research, resources, businesses, and citizens under its jurisdiction.”)

 I was equally surprised that so much of the commercial fishing industry has apparently accepted this pathetic state of affairs.

 Food for thought

When seen from a distance, wind generators seem to fit right into a bucolic landscape, the rotors spinning lazily away. The GE Halide X (12 MW), the largest wind turbine that has been built up until now, has blades that are 351 feet long. With a maximum rotational speed of 7.81 revolutions/minute the tips of those blades are travelling at approximately 195 miles per hour. Probably not so bucolic if you are up close to them. I’d guess it would be sort of like standing on the shoulder of a straight-away at a Formula 1 or NASCAR track during a race.

And a post script for West Coast fishermen- A U.S. Department of Interior news release begins Biden-Harris Administration Advances Offshore Wind in the Pacific 

Departments of the Interior, Defense and the State of California agree to accelerate wind energy offshore the central and northern coasts of California.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Dr. Colin Kahl, and California Governor Gavin Newsom today announced an agreement to advance areas for offshore wind off the northern and central coasts of California. This significant milestone is part of the Biden-Harris administration’s goal to create thousands of jobs through the deployment of 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2030. (Full release at https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDOI/bulletins/2dd9855)

Fasten your seat belts, folks!

© 2021 Nils E. Stolpe

Their master’s voice! by Nils Stolpe, 04/30/12

http://fishnet-usa.com/    http://www.fishtruth.net/

Measured by any meaningful criteria the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally held on the steps of the Capitol on March 21 was a stunning success. It was attended by thousands of fishermen from as far away as Alaska, twenty one Senators and Members of the House of Representatives, and at least a half a dozen other VIPs made room in their busy schedules to come out and address the people who attended. From the most conservative of the conservatives to the most liberal of the liberals, these politically divergent speakers had one message; fix the Magnuson Act and bring back the balance between conservation and harvest.

For the second time at the national level recreational and commercial fishermen – no matter what fisheries they participated in, no matter what their disagreements on allocation or lesser issues were, and no matter where they were from – were standing together and demanding a return to the original intent of the Magnuson Act; that independent fishermen regain the significant role they once played in Magnuson management which has been pre-empted by environmental extremists, the bureaucrats who seem to be at their beck and call, and their pet “fishermen.”

But, and this will come as no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of the hundreds of millions of dollars that a handful of charitable foundations have been shoveling into the coffers of what can only be described as anti-fishing ENGOs (for an idea of their contributions, visit The Big Green Money Machine at http://www.fishtruth.net), there were isolated voices raised both pre- and post-rally distorting the purpose of the rally and the single unifying message of Keep Fishermen Fishing. There was also a paucity of coverage in the main stream media, which might be understandable considering there were no crises involved (other than the manufactured world crisis in fishing), no angry confrontations and no civil or uncivil disobedience. Just a bunch of hard working people who invested their own time and money into trekking to Washington to voice their dissatisfaction with job-killing federal fisheries policies and their elected officials who have taken their dissatisfaction seriously and intend to do something about it.

Who were these people who objected to the rally?

Seafood.com

Let’s start out with John Sackton, editor and publisher at Seafood.com. In a video posted on March 19 on his website titled Recreational Fishing Alliance not a suitable partner for fisheries reform he states “recreational fishermen are not really a reliable ally when we think about sustainable fisheries or about reforming commercial fisheries laws. Too often the message of the Recreational Fishing Alliance is simply no regulation at all for recreational fishermen.” In this clumsy attempt at marginalizing the Recreational Fishing Alliance, it’s almost impossible to conclude that Mr. Sackton isn’t also attempting to marginalize all of the rally’s organizers and all of its participants.

In the first place, his “commercial fisheries laws” don’t need reforming because in the U.S. we don’t have commercial fisheries laws. We have The Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (for convenience The Magnuson Act), which applies to everyone who fishes in federal waters, and the probability of getting it changed in any way favorable to domestic fishermen or the businesses that depend on them without the support of recreational fishermen is remote at best.

As far as his alleged message of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, “no regulation at all for recreational fishermen,” I’ve followed the RFA for many years, have written about the RFA in not too complimentary terms for much of that time and for the last several years have gotten to know the people there fairly well. I can state unequivocally that nothing that I’ve heard or read from the RFA and the people who run it would make me leap to such a wild-eyed conclusion.

Mr. Sackton followed this up on March 21 with a column which was as about as far removed from factual reporting as anything from a commercial fishing/seafood industry source that I’ve ever read. He started out with a discussion of Pacific halibut management. Pacific halibut, because they are managed internationally, are exempt from Magnuson rebuilding requirements, but the fact that the fishery today is currently facing some dramatic challenges sure makes it a good example for anyone who doesn’t know that.

Then he states the obvious “fishery regulations are too important to be left to politics.” While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that statement, fishermen all too often find themselves in untenable situations because of the success of the anti-fishing ENGOs in radically distorting the original intent of The Magnuson Act. And they have done that with the political (and public relations power) that their multi-billion dollar foundation backers allow them.

Finally, he focuses on a supposed estrangement of East coast fishermen, who he would have his readers believe were in charge of the commercial fishing part of the rally, and seafood processors. According to Mr. Sackton, “because over 80% of most US commercially sold seafood products are imported, there is often a disconnect along most of the East Coast between the major seafood sellers and local production. The exception are those companies that specialize in local fresh distribution to supermarkets, like North Coast. But on the Gulf, the West Coast and Alaska, a much higher proportion of sales comes from US harvested fish. Yet this is not where we have seen the main push for these rallies and the reform of Magnuson. Non-East Coast US seafood companies like Trident, Icicle, Pacific Seafood, Bornstein and others have a huge stake in successful US harvesting. Yet their issues – access to resources, fair treatment for processing investment, the ability to do their sales and marketing free of interference, are not part of the push to reform Magnuson.”

Rod Moore, Executive Director of the West Coast Seafood Processor’s Association, took him to task for this (reproduced courtesy of Saving Seafood – see http://tinyurl.com/7cqrqog). The West Coast Seafood Processors Association was one of the sponsors of the rally and Mr. Moore served on the rally steering committee.

For the second non-surprise of the day, John Sackton has worked for the Environmental Defense Fund – though he responded to an inquiry that he hadn’t done so for two years. The Environmental Defense Fund is a strong ENGO supporter of catch shares, as is Mr. Sackton, and has received millions of foundation dollars to “revamp” U.S. fisheries policies.

Environmental Defense Fund

Then we have The Environmental Defense Fund itself. In a blog (EDF Statement in Response to Today’s “Keep Fishermen Fishing” Rally”), Associate VP John Minimakis wrote in his condemnation of the rally “the focus should not be on gutting the law.” Of course the focus of the rally wasn’t on gutting the law, but why should that constrain what Mr. Minimakis was willing to imply?

He continued “we need to use the flexibility in the law and innovative management approaches to address the challenges we face. For example, NOAA is using this flexibility to address the looming crisis with Gulf of Maine cod, using the law’s emergency provisions to allow higher levels of fishing while open scientific questions are investigated further.” What do you think the probability of NOAA using “existing flexibility” in Magnuson would be were it not for a rally at which a bunch of Senators, Congresswomen and Congressmen (with a large proportion from New England) were supporting the amendment of the Magnuson Act to make that flexibility dependent on the law rather than on the whims of whoever is in charge at NOAA?

He then wrote “we can’t go back to overfishing….” No one associated with Keep Fishermen Fishing, none of the legislators or other folks who spoke at the rally, and no responsible fisherman did or would suggest that we should, but the implication is surely there, isn’t it?

Finally, “while many speakers at today’s rally pushed various bills that would impose top-down mandates from Washington, we believe fishery management is best decided at the council level where fishermen can directly influence how the resource they depend on is managed.” Right on, Mr. Minimakis. But the codfish “solution” that you were so intent on praising above isn’t going to be coming from the New England Council and it isn’t going to come from the affected fishermen. It’s going to come from NOAA in the form of an approved Emergency Action for year one and it’s going to come from Congress – if it comes – in year two and subsequently. Not much “top-down” at all in that, is there?

The Marine Fish Conservation Network

And when it comes to ENGOs, I can’t leave out the Marine Fish Conservation Network. The MFCN goes to heroic lengths to present itself as a group of fishing and associated organizations that are banded together to save the U.S. fisheries from the uncaring and short-sighted fishermen who don’t really know what’s best for the fish and, by implication, for themselves – or at least for some of them. They are part of a grass roots organization of the greenest sort, they would have you believe.

While their roots are surely green, in truth they are the green of the Big Green Money Machine (linked above). In fact, if you follow the “Marine Fish Con Network” link on the “Connections” page, you will find that the Network has taken in almost five million foundation dollars. I suspect that doesn’t classify them as a grass roots organization in anybody’s book but their own. (For more insight into the Network, see a column I wrote for National Fisherman in 2007 at http://www.fishnetusa.com/All%20Stolpe%20Columns.htm#Here%20Again.)

In an opinion piece dated March 20 and titled somewhat cryptically Fishing against the fringe, Network Executive Director Matt Tinning starts out on the right track, writing “fishermen are conservationists. They cherish the resource that defines their lifestyle, and they are willing to do the hard work it takes to sustain it. Many of the most significant marine conservation advances are driven by commercial fishermen concerned by what they see on the water, and by recreational anglers whose love of the ocean fuels their sporting passion. Their interest in securing healthy oceans and productive fisheries isn’t abstract or merely intellectual. For fishermen, it’s personal.” Mr. Tinning couldn’t be any more on target than that.

However, he proceeds to crash and burn in the subsequent several hundred word rant. He begins by faulting the Recreational Fishing Alliance with the words “in contrast with myriad other recreational fishing groups that have been built from the ground up through the shared commitment of individual anglers and small businesses, RFA was established by a big dollar investment from Viking Yachts.” Let me remind you here that these are the words of the Executive Director of an organization that has gotten well upwards of four million dollars from a small handful of huge foundations.

And he goes on, and on, and on… in a similar vein. But he gets it right again in writing “RFA will be joined at this week’s rally by a number of well-meaning and hard-working commercial fishermen and recreational anglers. Some will come to voice legitimate grievances, others to convey directly to lawmakers the economic challenges they face. Rebuilding and sustainably managing federal fisheries–while weighing individuals’ immediate economic needs, providing for access, and securing the long-term prosperity of coastal communities–involves inherently contentious policy choices.” Again, not too bad, but then “certain Members and Senators who take their representation of fishermen seriously will be tempted to grace the RFA with their presence and weigh in on these complex issues with an easy applause line.” He was right about certain Members and Senators. They weren’t only tempted to do so, they actually did grace the RFA and a whole lot of other fishermen – far more than the 300 that Mr. Tinning estimated to be there post-rally – with their presence, with their words and with their commitments to fix the mess that the Network and its foundation-funded partner ENGOs have made of federal fisheries management and of independent fishermen’s ability to effectively participate in it.

But Mr. Tinning didn’t stop there. One of the ground rules of the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally was that it was open to any fishermen, anyone in fishing dependent businesses, and in fact anyone who wanted to show their support for fishermen and fishing in general.

In a press release for the Marine Fish Conservation Network dated March 26 Mr. Tinning wrote “on Friday, a photo came to light confirming that Omega Protein was a central participant in the March 21 rally.” Omega Protein is a large corporation that catches and processes menhaden, a small forage fish common on the East coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, into fish meal and fish oil (for those of you who are interested in cardio-vascular and neurological health, oil from menhaden is one of the few sources of the most desirable form of omega 3s). He continued ranting “for our nation’s anglers to have to learn that a group who falsely claims to represent them (the Recreational Fishing Alliance) is teaming up with ‘public enemy number one’ is a disgrace.” Now I might have missed the point of his earlier screed, but he did devote considerable words to what he perceived as the RFA’s propensity to produce “bile.” Considering that the Omega Protein fishermen who attended the rally have been employed in a legal fishery and have been fishing in compliance with very rigorous regulations for at least two generations, I can’t help thinking that Mr. Tinning is far ahead of the RFA in raw biliousness.

I couldn’t do any better than to reproduce the RFA’s Managing Director Jim Hutchinson’s words responding to the Network’s other charges:

In response to recent criticisms leveled against the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA) by the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s executive director Matt Tinning on behalf of his members, RFA will offer no such apologies for its participation in the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally in Washington DC on March 21, 2012. Mr. Tinning’s outlandish claim that the Recreational Fishing Alliance “teamed up” with Omega Protein to convene the Keep Fishermen Fishing simply because representatives of Omega Protein attended the rally is completely absurd. Given that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Marine Fish Conservation Network’s own executive director, and their own individual members, also attended the rally, by Mr. Tinning’s logic it must therefore be determined that both PETA and the Marine Fish Conservation Network also officially “teamed up” with RFA and the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally. The Keep Fishermen Fishing rally was a public event held on U.S. Capitol grounds, meaning that neither RFA nor official rally organizers were able to physically remove from the grounds any of those who would peaceably assemble to provide a counter-point to our reform Magnuson message. RFA supports efforts to reform the federal fisheries law, we do not however support any efforts to trample upon any American’s First Amendment rights, specifically “the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” RFA will never apologize for defending our members’ right to fish on healthy fish stocks, nor will we ever apologize for upholding the values of the First Amendment. Asking us to do either is un- American and a clear violation of our mission.

(Note – for a picture of Mr. Tinning’s “public enemies” at the rally that illustrates both the “central role” they played and the open derision that other participating fishermen greeted them with, see the pictures accompanying Julia Edwards’ article on the National Journal website at http://www.nationaljournal.com/pictures-video/fishermen-rally-on-capitol-hill-20120321.)

Natural Resources Defense Council

In his blog, David Newman, NRDC’s Oceans Program Attorney in New York, wrote that the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act “…the law that’s helped to bring America’s marine fish populations back from the brink of collapse…. is under attack right now by fishing lobbying groups that have organized a rally in Washington, D.C. today. Preserving the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) is the most effective way to keep fishermen fishing by ensuring that enough fish remain in the sea to spawn the next generation. Our work toward sustainable fisheries is not finished and challenges remain. But Magnuson-Stevens is proven to save fish species in danger, while keeping fishermen fishing at the same time, so our children can do the same. We need to keep what’s working in place and roll up our sleeves to improve what we have, rather than tearing it all down.”

In spite of Mr. Newman’s assertion, the goal of the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally wasn’t to do away with the Magnuson Act, and in fact wasn’t to do away with any major parts of it – which I assume he meant in writing “tearing it all down.” It wasn’t aimed at tearing down anything – other than, perhaps, a federal fisheries management bureaucracy that has become far too cozy with ENGOs like EDF, far too concerned with the welfare of fish and far too estranged from independent fishermen and what it takes to keep them working and to keep their businesses solvent.

Needless to say, the NRDC is well into the million dollars plus club of Pew and other megafoundation recipients.

Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations

The PCFFA stated in a press release on March 21“the root of the problem confronting the nation’s fishing industry is not the nation’s primary fishery statute – the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation & Management Act (MSA), which requires ‘science-based’ fishery management. The problem, rather, is flawed policies that fail to adequately fund critical fishery science, along with schemes to privatize public fish resources, and promote dangerous forms of fish farming.” PCFFA President David Bitts was quoted in the release that the problem “is not with a law that requires management to be science-based, but with policies that underfund or fail to fund the necessary science, along with policies that take money from scientific needs and apply it to political desires.”

Perhaps the PCFFA represents mostly small boat salmon fishermen, and if it does, then it’s possible that from their perspective the only problems with fisheries management are at the policy rather than the legislative level. However, and though inadequately funded – and interpreted – science is a problem, I’d venture to say that their narrow view is not shared by most fishermen.

The original intent of the Magnuson Act, to allow independent fishermen significant input into the federal fisheries management process, has been distorted by megafoundation-funded lobbying in recent years. The assumption today is that the science underlying management decisions is adequate and forces complete reliance on that science, allowing for no deviations regardless of the human impacts of an ever-increasing degree of easily demonstrated inadequacy (as discussed in the final section here on NOAA/NMFS, assessment science in the New England groundfish fishery – historically one of our most important fisheries and inarguably the recipient of more NOAA/NMFS attention than any other in recent years – has the Gulf of Maine cod stock going from good shape to wretched in three years, and the only thing that changed was how the assessment was done). Whether the science underlying a fishery management plan is good, bad or totally irrelevant, as long as it is judged “the best available,” it will be the sole determinant of what regulations are put in place and of what damage is inflicted on the fishermen and fishing dependent businesses in the name of “conservation.”

This is something that can only be changed by amending the Act.

The PCFFA, and the associated Institute for Fisheries Resources, has received well over a million dollars from the Packard Foundation.

The main stream media

There was an almost total lack of interest in the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally by the mainstream media. To set the stage, here we had a whole bunch of fishermen and a whole bunch of elected officials together, all on the same page, all concerned primarily about jobs and the economy (and their place in it), all being civil and with common sense suggestions for change. The speakers ranged from the most conservative of the conservatives to the most liberal of the liberals, and they were sharing the same platform and supporting the same legislative reforms.

What are the chances of that in Washington, DC in 2012? Yet it happened on the Capitol steps on March 21, but where were the reporters? Where were the camera crews?

Let’s take the Washington Post as an example. It would take a Post reporter and photographer perhaps 15 minutes to make the trek to the Capitol. They wouldn’t have to pack a lunch or a toothbrush, make reservations or anything much more complicated than going out the front door and walking towards the big golden dome well under 3 miles to the southeast.

Did anyone bother? If they did, nothing they wrote and no pictures they took turned up anywhere that I could find.

But like many stories, this one is kind of meaningless without context, and the unfortunate context of this one is that the people at the Post appear to be interested in fisheries issues only if they are a reflection of what the foundation folks think are important, in fisheries perspectives only if they are held by the foundation folks and only in fisheries experts only if they have financial connections to these few foundations. There sure weren’t any foundation folks participating at the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally.

Since the rally the Post has carried three fisheries articles. In Shark kills diver off southwest Australia on March 31 reporter Juliet Eilperin quoted 3 shark “experts:” Sonja Fordham, President of Shark Advocates International (a “project” of The Ocean Foundation which has received over a million dollars in funding from Pew and Packard); Matt Rand, who directs the Pew Environment Group’s global shark conservation program; and Rebecca Regnery, deputy director of wildlife for Humane Society International which partners with the Pew Environment Group on various issues. The article had little to do with the circumstances of the tragic death of the diver, Peter Kurmann, but focused on a recent international agreement to protect oceanic white tip sharks in the Western and Central Pacific. (Confusingly, Ms. Eilperin quoted Pew’s Rand as saying “of course it’s tragic every time there’s an accident with a shark. It is very rare” just three hundred words after her lead sentence “a diver was killed by a 13-foot shark Saturday off a beach in southwestern Australia, in the region’s fourth shark-related fatality since September.”)

In Little fish are most valuable when left in the sea, researchers say (April 1), Ms. Eilperin reports on an analysis by The Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force. Pew administers the Lenfest Ocean Program. In it she quotes Edward Houde, Ellen Pikitch and Dee Boersma. Pikitch and Boersma are both Pew Marine Conservation Fellows. Pikitch is the Executive Director of the Pew/Lenfest funded Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stonybrook University.

And in Some question whether sustainable seafood delivers on its promise Ms. Eilperin quotes Carl Safina (founder of Blue Ocean Institute and Pew Scholar), Daniel Pauly (one of the authors of the Lenfest/Pew sponsored report on “little fish” referenced above and recipient of multiple millions of Pew dollars through his fiefdom at the University of British Columbia), Rainer Froese, another Pew Scholar, and Michael Sutton, Vice President of the lavishly Packard funded Monterey Bay Aquarium who had previously worked for World Wildlife Fund, recipient of other multiple millions of dollars from the Pew, Packard and Walton foundations. She also included several quotes by a Florida fisherman who operates a small seafood business.

In these three articles, all of which dealt with controversial (in the fisheries science world) topics, Ms. Eilperin consulted with and quoted nine experts who had direct and significant ties to the Pew Trusts, and one who didn’t.

Ms. Eilperin’s focus on (mainly) Pew- and other megafoundation funded researchers is quite a bit more profound than even her coverage of sharks, forage fish and “sustainable” seafood indicate. As I wrote in In the belly of the big green beast while detailing my singular experience on a Society of Environmental Journalists panel that she chaired (http://tinyurl.com/7ovs35o), “and then there is Ms. Eilperin herself, who while not in the Gaines/Pauly/Lubchenco/Baron tier of ‘connectedness’ to the Pew/Packard/Moore/Walton multi-million dollar gravy train, has managed a few dribs and drabs herself. She writes in the acknowledgements section of her recently published book on sharks ‘more than any other single group, the Pew Marine Fellows have helped educate me about the ocean…. I would like to single out (among others) Jane Lubchenco, Daniel Pauly… Nancy Baron deserves the credit for introducing me to these scientists.’ Ms. Eilperin also acknowledges the American Littoral Society as one of the two sources of “travel grants” for the book. The American Littoral Society has received almost $6 million from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Ms. Eilperin has also been a participant in COMPASS media/scientist confabs.”

Is this reporting or is it cheerleading?

It strains the bounds of credulity to think that Ms. Eilperin and the Washington Post are the sole beneficiaries of the Pew Trusts and other megafoundation efforts to convince environmental journalists to adopt their equivalent of tunnel vision when it comes to fisheries and oceans issues, and the lack of coverage in the other major newspapers (NY Times, LA Times, Miami Herald, Boston Globe, and on and on…) would seem to bear this out.

(I’ll note here that last Saturday at 8:30 pm Ms. Eilperin contacted me for information on who she could talk to in New England ref her article on seafood sustainability. When I saw her message just before 4:00 on Sunday afternoon I provided her the email addresses of two well respected individuals. They both responded to her. She didn’t use any of the information they provided in her article.)

And finally, we have NOAA/NMFS

As has been widely discussed in the media, a recent stock assessment has called into question the recovery of Gulf of Maine codfish from prior overfishing. In a few short years, the NOAA/NMFS scientists would have us believe, their ability to assess the strength of this particular stock has improved to such an extent that what was previously recognized as a healthy population growth trajectory is now recognized to be a precipitous decline into, once again, a severely overfished condition.

Naturally, this precipitous decline in the health of the stock would demand immediate (starting with the next fishing year) measures to meet the arbitrary rebuilding schedule for Gulf of Maine cod. These measures would in all probability include either drastic cutbacks in or complete closures of the cod fishery and of all of the other groundfish fisheries in the Gulf of Maine that take cod as bycatch. While difficult to imagine, these cutbacks would inflict even more pain on the New England groundfish fishery than our federal fisheries managers have been able to inflict on them up until now.

And lest there are any misapprehensions floating around out there, for the last several years the groundfish fishermen have been admirably toeing the line. They have been fishing exactly as they have been told to fish by the federal fisheries managers and the perceived lack of fish is the result of nothing more than the managers figuring out another way – they insist a more accurate way – to estimate the condition of the cod stock.

But NOAA/NMFS announced, days before the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally, that it wouldn’t have to impose those drastic restrictions on the groundfish fleet (and the onshore businesses and the fishing communities and etc.) that the Magnuson Act seemed to require because, mirabile dictu, the Act already allowed the flexibility that we were in Washington rallying for. Is that a coincidence or what? We don’t need to fix Magnuson, because it can already allow what we are asking for.

Or perhaps, stated a bit more accurately, the Magnuson Act can allow whatever NOAA/NMFS decides it can allow if doing so will keep the Act intact.

Of course, that new found “flexibility” still demands a 22% reduction in codfish mortality in the next fishing year, and even with that 22% reduction, the Magnuson mandates are going to demand even more drastic reductions for the following fishing year.

It appears as if the only thing that’s going to keep the groundfish fishery alive the year after next – unless NOAA/NMFS can figure out yet another way to count codfish in the interim – will be an act of Congress.

So does Magnuson actually permit enough flexibility so that when NOAA/NMFS commits another massive assessment blunder, a blunder which in no way can be blamed on the fishermen, the fallout of that blunder can be made manageable for the fishermen? If that’s what NOAA/NMFS decides to do, apparently it does. But only for a year. That’s all the leeway that NOAA/NMFS can allow under Magnuson. And NOAA/NMFS is in no way bound to do it for that first year and Congress is not bound to do it subsequently. That isn’t quite good enough for the fishermen, that isn’t quite good enough for all of the people who depend on those fishermen, and that shouldn’t be good enough for all of those seafood consumers who are being told that the catch of the day is now imported basa, imported tilapia or imported shrimp.

(Note that NOAA/NMFS seems to be in the midst of another New England groundfish fisheries “crisis.” In this one the stock of Georges Bank yellowtail flounder seems to have mysteriously plummeted precipitously. This is going to place yet another burden on the people, businesses and communities that depend on the New England fisheries.)

All that the Keep Fishermen Fishing participants and organizers were and are asking for

In spite of all of the apparently megafoundation spawned – or at least subsidized – hyperbole to the contrary, Keep Fishermen Fishing was (and is – go to http://www.keepfishermenfishing.com to remain up to date) not on a one way mission to make overfishing a way of life. Keep Fishermen Fishing was, is and will be committed to sustainable fisheries now and into the future And all of the Members of Congress who addressed the Keep Fishermen Fishing rally were and are committed to sustainable fisheries as well.

As I see it, underlying the Keep Fishermen Fishing campaign is one very simple question. As long as a fish stock is increasing, is it worth forcing fishermen out of it so that it reaches an arbitrary level of abundance next year rather than reaching that level two or three years later would allow the businesses that depend on that fishery to remain viable?

Recent events in New England point to another question that everyone who fishes – and anyone with an interest in our U.S. fisheries – should be asking (particularly in view of the growing New England groundfish crisis). Shouldn’t we be seriously reassessing the adequacy of the philosophic and scientific underpinnings of our entire fisheries management system? Obviously it isn’t just fishing mortality that’s impacting our fisheries, yet we’re still managing as if it were. Just as obviously, the science that our fisheries management system depends on, supposedly world class science, has proven woefully inadequate time after time. How many billions of dollars is this costing us? How much human suffering?

And finally, for how much longer are we going to be shouldered with a federal fisheries management bureaucracy that acts as if its marching orders originate not on the docks or in the Halls of Congress but rather in the board rooms of a handful of multi-billion dollar “charitable” foundations?

Wed Oct 24, 2012 9:48 PM

My Alaska connection was ranting about the scmucks at EDF and I thought I’d share it with you. It is the second EDF related communication to my mailbox tonight. The other one was about a sell out saying, well, nothing like this, and I like this a Hell of a lot better. It’s all true. BH

Catch share proponents like EDF are not comfortable with just writing out the truth of what they want, or what they are willing to do to others’ rights in order to get what they want. They won’t simply write the US Congress or even the Washington Post or whatever major news venue, and use straight-forward facts about failures around the world of catch share systems, and reveal their true thoughts and intentions. To real fishermen, those thoughts apparently go something like this.

We are “the” Environmental Defense Fund, big powerful EDF, and we lay claim to knowing what is best for the entire environment, on nearly every issue you could imagine, especially concerning the ocean and its seafood resources. We do not believe that those resources belong to the world’s people. We do not believe that within our 200-mile limits that this nation has a non-property right to publicly hold ‘stewardship’ — the term that President Obama uses himself to describe Commerce’s and Congress’ role — over those resources.

We moved hundreds into Washington DC to spread the mythomania of catch share mentality. Our public relations style fabrications are proportional to the ends we envision, and just because it is all complicated and extensive doesn’t mean we are pathological liars. After all, we have a cogent plan and our lies present us fairly and support us and the others we share these values with in what we see as a zero-sum game. Somebody has to win so somebody can lose. We don’t want American fishermen to have any role in making the real decisions about the environment, and we love to spout the fairytale of the Tragedy of the Commons while we actually create one from the race for quota shares. Call it pseudologica fantastica if you want, but we prefer to call it our environmental cause. Just because we don’t include communities and thousands of fishermen doesn’t mean we have an antisocial personality disorder, we’re just experts at what’s best for everyone when it comes to the ocean environment.

We don’t want to deal with everyday fishermen, they are too hard to organize and handle, too independent. It is far easier to deal with greedy special interests in limited groups. We love it that the Alaska Crab Rationalization program has allowed ‘harvester’ quota share holders to take a half-billion dollars and 1,100 jobs away from those who go to sea and catch fish – the captains and crewmen who risk their lives to feed their customers, the consumers of the world. Lay Share laws are no concern of ours. That extortion by nondisclosable quota leases right off the top of ex-vessel landing revenues, combined with non-negotiable private contracts made ‘under duress’ has landed so many millions in the pockets of our friends, partners, and helped support causes that keep EDF itself going.

Don’t bother EDF with such examples that the proof is vessel inspections and related efforts have saved so many lives, not ‘crab rationalization’ quota-serving propaganda. We also don’t want to wait for best science. It has no place in policy making guided by selfish interests, and will only get in the way of what we want. The only thing we care about the facts about is how we can present a little peppering of them in our propaganda to fool Congress into thinking we are telling the real truth. Hey, after all, lies get us what we want from others we like. Fishermen don’t benefit us, but the investment crowd does. We relate more to kleptocrats than democrats; and catch shares are the reward system that benefits us.
We don’t question why Michael Milken’s group or any other hedge fund vulture capitalists got involved in this bastion of privatization of the most pure and natural protein on the —globe. EDF wants them as our partners because they serve our ends. We want to feel the power of fighting in a resource war, because we’re too darned afraid to pick up a real gun and fight for America’s freedoms.

To us, this is like a superior religious philosophy, and we have the gods of the ocean on our side. With backing from Sun Oil, and the support of people like Michael Milken’s investment group, and the praises of a select few who have the money to send to us their lobbyists to help, we don’t need poor fishermen and their families. We don’t care how much fishery-dependent communities have contributed in infrastructure and other support, or subsidies of major fish processors. Communities are right next to captains and crew on the list of those who can’t provide us with an investment portfolio or ‘ledgerdemain’ showing a record of direct financial investments of money they got from bankers or NOAA loan guarantee subsidies, or can otherwise quantify.

We believe that investment equals rights, and we don’t have to account for the depreciation allowances the People’s government has granted to corporations and licensed companies who “own” boats. We don’t want to recognize those gifts are a cost to this Nation. And EDF doesn’t want to hear a word about the labor sector, as if they invested a darned thing. Abraham Lincoln was, in our minds, wrong when he said “capital is only the fruit of labor, and could not have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves the much higher consideration.” That’s a bit too iffy for us, as no one can put a number on it. It would mean we have to do what’s right for so many people and communities that we’d lose the ability to gain control and power over everything.

EDF doesn’t want the government to collect the private information on public fisheries about what captains and crew make before and after catch share plans. We especially don’t want to know what the high rents or quota lease fees coming right off the top of delivery revenues are before crew trip settlements are calculated. If you upset the bankers and equity investors by showing how they stole from the crews to finance their rewards for interest rate incomes and equity fund growth, you’ll prevent Congress from letting us do more privatizations of catch share quotas. We don’t want to obey the law on fair and equitable allocations, we want to change the wording on our own to fair and equitable access to fisheries, because that goes right along with us making a privileged class, a select few winners, among those who held federal permits in a fishery – the limited license permit lords.

EDF can’t be satisfied with greater inclusiveness, precisely because it means sharing responsibility, and precludes us telling fishermen exactly what they can catch under rules we design. EDF wants control without responsibility. We see ourselves as the expert crisis managers in charge of oceans. We have to shout disaster and crisis, so we can demand catch shares, and then limit who can go to sea and fish. Gods forbid those who do fish would actually hold the rights we believe in, which is private ownership in perpetuity of fish. We don’t want quota rights to be restricted to those who must actively participate in the act of fishing. It’s a waste of time to have to deal with independent citizen taxpayers. It’s a lot easier to deal with other game players who hide behind corporate and investment company doors, and blacken the windows so that there’s little to no transparency or accountability.

EDF wants to support private leasing so that hedge and other private equity funds can own the rights. EDF wants to help choose the winners and losers, and we support catch share regimes whose designs promote a special few, not a general public. We are tickled when we see 75 percent leases on quotas, and the sealords doing the leasing don’t have to tell the public who is fishing their shares, as they sit on the golf course or in the kitchen clipping those giant catch share coupons, because it is good to know real fishermen can’t decide policy or get the full rewards from catching America’s fish.

We don’t care that the ill-named American Fisheries Act for Alaska pollock or the Crab Rationalization program had to be separately legislated in by a crooked former Senator, Ted Stevens. We don’t care about the Precautionary Approach and that many non-target species are so valuable, and that Stevens just renamed them as secondary species to pump up the profits of the large industrial sized catch vessels. We don’t care that took fish away from thousands of smaller family and community oriented boats and fishermen. We don’t want to live with the moral responsibilities of having to work hard to be good citizens, because we too are special, just for having declared ourselves heroes of the environmental world. We’re not lazy, we’re ‘efficient.’

At EDF, we believe that for all significant fisheries, of adequate size, that some group of private individuals should be identified, and only a few of those historically actively fishing for any one species be licensed or permitted as ‘harvesters’, and the nation’s fisheries should be treated as if owned and then privatized. We are driving “catch share” systems for special interests that will forever hold the quota rights to those fisheries, one by one, as they are privatized. At EDF, we do not believe in open competition, but rather we want to restrain trade and practice antitrust violations, and we want the US government – the People – to give up those rights for free, at no charge, with no annual harvest rents paid to the Treasury.

We want to have those special interests chosen from a few select years, not from the larger pool of fishermen who harvested those resources for decades. We do not want real fishermen, those who actually fish, the active participants known as captains and crewmen who invested lifetimes and that live in fishery dependent communities, to have any of the quota rights.
EDF supports processor quotas, or closed classes of buyers of harvested seafood, and want them to have the plenary level power to be able to take the majority of the profits. We do not care if they are foreign-owned and –controlled corporations hiding in America under Anglicized names as if they are really citizen persons of this country. We want those firms to be able to communicate with harvest quota holders and with each other, and to hell with antitrust, anti-competition principles and values. Of course, we do want to call it all “market-based solutions” so we can fool the ignorant congressmen who know little of fisheries.

You won’t find us at EDF ever looking into the extreme level of foreign-control and –ownership in America’s largest fishery zone of Alaska’s region. You will “never, ever, ever” hear us admit to the billions stolen nor talk about the practices of illicit accounting tricks these foreign controlled corporations (FCC) and transnational corporations (TNCs) use to cheat the USA out of billions in positive economic impacts, and billions in taxes due to our U.S. Treasury.

We don’t care that foreign interests extract all the seafood they can and exploit real fishermen, and then create the jobs overseas for the secondary processing and other economic intermediaries not in the USA. We don’t care that best science can set a total allowable catch, or allowable catch limit, and that it is the fish itself – coupled with the product forms demanded by customers – that determines the jobs, and creates the jobs in the seafood industry: not processors or quota sealords. We don’t care at all. We just want control, and to tell people what to do. We don’t care about best science.

At EDF, we don’t care about Alaska’s thousands of fishermen thrown out of work by catch shares. We don’t care if local low-wage plant workers and the influx of foreign workers who help keep wages low and take jobs away from Americans, all get paid near minimum wages and that value-added products are not done in the USA. Why build skills in America? Why should EDF care about economic philosophies that contradict its policy religion of catch shares? Besides, it is too darned inconvenient for us to have to understand all the little people who want to put fish in a box or can and stand on their feet all day long to do so. We want the processor companies to have quotas, and to limit overtime wages, because we don’t care how little of a final product’s dollars are actually for labor, no matter how fractional it really is, no matter how little a significant wage rate rise would benefit USA workers and not have to make any difference to consumers.

We don’t care that it is not a case of true ‘economic efficiency’, where consumers have a say in what they demand for product quality and are willing to pay a higher price to go with it. We don’t want an economist with real brains telling us that the supply curve for any species is a vertical line, set by the TAC or ACL – the amount best science says to annually take from the ocean – and that it matches up with multiple demand curves, one each for the various value-added products on a continuum from squished industrial mass fishery flesh pressed into analog protein mush, to fine troll caught top-quality flesh prepared by a professional chef for a five-star restaurant’s clientele. Don’t challenge us with what ‘economic efficiency’ really means, as we are just using the term to blindside some congressmen and policy-makers.

For the gods’ sake, don’t show us the British Columbia studies that show a TAC can be caught more ‘productive efficient’ by a group of smaller boats rather than a few large industrial ones. Don’t make us account for the government subsidies in the tens of billions of dollars, for the huge waste taken by the larger vessel fleet, for their high horsepower fuel inefficiencies or any other contradicting evidence to the story we must tell to support our chosen set of winners, the select few. Our winners are a lot more enticing to our hedge and private investor partners to own, as they get more collective bang for the buck and a lot more share of the fisheries to scalp off investment incomes from, because none of them are ever going to step on a deck and really participate.

The catch share proponent of EDF wholeheartedly supports having fewer, larger, more industrial operations in charge and pushing all the little boats out. You can count on us not telling you this in the newspapers or to Congress. We don’t want this game stopped. We at EDF are doing just fine, getting money from Sun Oil and others to drive this catch share privatization of the bountiful wealth of the USA zone fisheries into a few private hands, forming cooperatives with private agreements, secret meetings and no means of transparency and accountability. We want them to be able to lie to the regional federal fish councils. We want to do all this by creating mountains of regulations that we can later dismantle, once everything we need is tucked away behind private not public doors.

By having a few powerful financial interests in control, they can have the tax advisers and lawyers come up with all manner of tricks to organize subsidiaries to shift profits outside the USA. The certified public accomplices can ensure little to no USA taxes are paid as compared to patriot companies. President Obama has been good because he left the fisheries management in the hands of our friends, like Jane Lubchenco, and he doesn’t get informed about the use of abusive cross-border transfer prices among the subsidiaries of the multinational enterprises (MNE’s). The barely hidden secret is that our environmentalism actually takes a back seat to profits, and it looks like Romney would be an even better president for our cause, because he is a vulture capitalist who understands how to privatize public commonwealth to turn it into profits for a special few. He’d really go along with the cartel of MNEs, the private capital investors and hedge funders who know how to shave off a great share of the profits for themselves, and steal it all from the labor component of the economy.

Heck, under Romney, we might even go so far as to privatize oxygen itself, as long as we can control who makes the bucks from it, and not care if federal taxes are counted. We like global tax avoidance strategies, because it gives those MNEs more to donate for our cause. It is better when a few hundred of us have a job that doesn’t create any real wealth than for thousands of working fishermen to keep theirs.

We don’t care that the same thing is being done to other vast resources of timber and mining in places like Alaska, and we admire the state’s corrupt politicians drawing off the US Treasury as much as possible for earmarks and special needs, while contributing back a tiny fraction of what would be possible if only USA owned real world fishermen were able to secure the quota rights. We don’t care that this will bring about a deluge. As the French say, “Après moi le deluge” – after me the deluge will come, so we’ll get our share now!

We’re alive now, and so we chose to only care about the short term, just like the smart corporations and investors we support. But don’t accuse us of committing a public larceny or waging economic war, and don’t call us economic terrorists. We don’t care about the truth, and you can’t touch us. We feel the power we have, and that’s enough.
Because without it, we’d have to crawl back in the hole in the reef we came out of, and worry about ourselves. To criticize us is just being cynical, not appropriately skeptical or looking out for America’s best interests. Who backs us is nobody else’s business, and neither are our secret agendas. Leave us alone.

This way, we can create disasters and fear monger and demand the government fix it by giving away its public resource wealth. We feel just fine telling you it is capitalism and acting like you have no right to live with the uncertainties of real competition and fairer prices to fishermen instead of helping our friends in a closed-class of large processors and our investor associates, even if the source of all capital really derives from labor.

Just send in your $10 checks every chance you get, and support catch shares, and we at EDF will be alright. Don’t worry about labor. There are plenty of poor and unemployed bodies to indenture into service on the decks of the nation’s fishing fleets and in fish plants, so don’t worry about it, the fish will be caught. And you can always go to Japan or Korea if you want to eat it.

A quote from the article Longstanding fisheries act doesn’t need changing says Hogarth and Murawski, click here   “Much of our recent success has stemmed from quick action and firm timetables for rebuilding, and that approach has clearly worked.”

Dick Grachek writes,

Well No, that’s not quite true… Allowable Catch Quotas are still shrinking each year for most fisheries in spite of NOAA’s declarations of eliminating “overfishing” because the stock population recovery is not living up to unrealistic timelines perhaps? And more than half of the local family fishing operations have been eliminated. Fishing ports along with shoreside support businesses are disappearing. So what exactly is the authors’ idea of having clearly worked?
I guess it depends on the goal of all this management.

East Coast fishing communities have been devastated by the legislated rigidity in the timelines for rebuilding historically varying fish populations. Even Jane Lubchenco, NOAA Fisheries Director admitted in a congressional hearing that there was no scientific basis for the rigid rebuilding timelines in the 2006 Reauthorization of Magnuson Act. She was a contributor to the infamous “Oceans of Abundance” treatise http://www.edf.org/sites/defau… This was an eco-political leaflet and primer sponsored by and filled with NGO lobbyist talking points aimed at the signers of the 2006 reauthorization that installed the rigid timelines.

The proposals for flexibility, transparency, predictability, fishermen representation, and taking into account the environmental and socio-economic aspects of fishery management in this current reauthorization bill before Congress are long overdue. And actually most of these current reauthorization proposals are simply reinforcing and making more specific several existing—but mostly ignored by management—MSA Standards relating to “setting catch limits based on science” and insuring that it’s the “best available science” through utilizing cooperative surveys and assessments from “other sources” (National Standard 2). Current proposals also reinforce the National Standards 1, 4, and 8, which account for the survival of the fishing communities along with the fish.

Flexibility and transparency as stated in the House Proposals does not mean the elimination or undermining the necessity of catch limits based on science and flexibility in rebuilding timelines is not “…a slippery slope back to unsustainable fisheries.”

Flexibility in dealing with naturally varying fish growth and recovery rates is intelligent management practice. The current House Bill proposals clearly do not reverse or “gut” any of the basic fish replenishing tenets of the Magnuson Stevens Act:

Please see original proposals from the House Natural Resources website: http://naturalresources.house….

The draft proposal, while maintaining the key themes of the Act, would make the following improvements:

• Provide flexibility for fishery managers when rebuilding depleted fisheries
• Provide flexibility for fishery managers when setting annual catch levels
• Provide more transparency for fishermen and others in both science and management
• Provide more predictability and stability for fishermen and fishery-dependent communities
• Allow fishery managers to take the economic impact of their decisions into account when setting harvest levels and developing rebuilding plans
• Allow fishery managers to take environmental conditions into account when establishing harvest levels and developing rebuilding plans
• Allow fishermen in regions where catch share programs have been controversial to have a say in whether a new catch share program will be implemented and to be provided better information when considering such a program
• Provide a schedule for obtaining better fishery dependent and fishery independent data especially for data poor fisheries and provide greater protection for confidential information submitted to regulatory agencies
• Authorize appropriations for an additional five fiscal years at current funding level

None of the proposals are an attempt to “…loosen effective protections that have been so successful in eliminating overfishing and rebuilding stocks”.

All the proposed changes are suggesting is to include the fishing communities in the process and some common scientific sense regarding rebuilding expectations . After all this is “Fisheries” management, not “Fish” management, right?

For additional reading on the MSA proposed improvements please papers by Meghan Lapp and Dr. Brian J. Rothschild

The Magnuson Stevens Act and its Ten Year Rebuilding Timeline: Science or Fiction? By Meghan Lapp  http://centerforsustainablefis…

IMPROVING THE MAGNUSON STEVENS ACT,  Brian J. Rothschild (11/3/13)   http://centerforsustainablefis…

Another push for catch shares

FishNet-USA/May 11, 2016

Nils E. Stolpe

http://www.fishnet-usa.com/

(Don’t get the idea from this that I oppose any fisheries management regime. What I do oppose is having the future of particular fisheries determined by people and/or organizations and/or corporations with no meaningful ties to and no concern about the existing industry and the people in it. Irrespective of whether the decisions have their roots in in corporate, ENGO or foundation board rooms, the halls of academe or “investment” seminars, as the ongoing debacle in the New England groundfish fishery so clearly and tragically demonstrates, if the fishing industry doesn’t have final say in the imposition of measures that its members will be working with, the affected communities will suffer.)

With talk in the air of an upcoming Magnuson Act reauthorization which is coincident with the 40^th anniversary of its passage, the proponents of catch shares in general and individual transferable quotas in particular, are mounting a public relations barrage in a continuation of their efforts to “privatize” our fisheries.

Most recently, the April 19 New York Times Opiniator column How Dwindling Fish Stocks Got a Reprieve by freelance journalist Sylvia Rowley, touted the benefits of catch shares by citing the example of the West coast groundfish fishery. It also quoted catch shares proselytizer and NOAA ex-head Jane Lubchenco, back on the Environmental Defense board after her brief sojourn in the almost-real world of the federal bureaucracy, on catch shares: “If you have 5 percent of the pie, you’d like to see the pie grow.”

Implicit in all of the pro-catch shares rhetoric, as Ms. Lubchenco’s quote above amply demonstrates, is the idea that this particular form of fisheries management is necessary for healthy fisheries. She apparently believes, or wants us to believe, that fishermen who don’t own a part of a fishery aren’t interested in having a larger part of that particular pie.  In fact nothing could be further from the truth. “Successful” fisheries management requires only three things. The first is an accurate determination of the significant sources of mortality on a fish or shellfish stock and the relative magnitude of those sources. The second is ensuring that all of those sources of mortality that can be controlled are controlled. The third is determining on an ongoing basis what the acceptable (sustainable?) levels of harvest are and assuring that those levels are maintained.

Of course this is hardly possible in the context of so-called fisheries management today, which is in reality fishing management. In that context, which we seem to be stuck with, the three requirements are a bit different. The first would be an accurate determination of what the sustainable level of harvest is (i.e. the quota). The second would be the design management measures that insure that the quota is caught but not exceeded. The third would be the enforcement of those management measures.

As far as the fish or shellfish are concerned, how the quota is divided up is irrelevant.

In fact, Ms. Rowley’s words reflect this. She writes that in the years from 2000 to 2015 “the tally of federally managed fish populations that have been rebuilt went from zero to 39” and then a few paragraphs later “the total number of federal fisheries using catch shares rose from five in 2000 to 16 in 2015.” In its annual Status of the (fish and shellfish) Stocks report to Congress for 2015, NOAA Fisheries reports on the overfishing status of fish and shellfish stocks. From 2000 to 2015 the stocks managed via catch shares increased from .5% to 5% but the number of stocks where overfishing was not taking place remained at 91%. The proportion of fisheries managed by catch shares went from an insignificant level to a minimally significant level, yet the overall health of the stocks, as measured by the proportion of them in which overfishing was occurring, didn’t change at all. Could it be that Ms. Lubchenco’s “catch shares revolution” is, to quote Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, “full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing?” (Note that NOAA Fisheries recognized 905 stocks in 2000 and 313 stocks in 2015.)

So why are the people at EDF, including Ms. Lubchenco both while she was there, when she was in charge of NOAA and now that she’s back at EDF, so bullish on catch shares if it makes no difference to the critters in question? Perhaps because it allows them to use their tax exempt millions to finance fishing operations and dictate how the fishermen they are financing have to fish, sort of like having fishermen owe their souls to the company store (See The California Fisheries Fund, EDF’s unique way of controlling fishermen and fishing, at California Fisheries Fund Click here

Or perhaps it’s to fatten the bank accounts of EDF and/or its friends, directors, members, etc. From the transcript of a talk by then EDF West Coast Vice President David Festa to the Miliken Institute Global Conference in 2009:

“You know, so how do I – you know, but I know that if I fix all that, I can be profitable in the future. So I pull together investors and I buy the factory and I sink a whole bunch of money into it and, you know, retrain workers and then get paid back on the profits on the other end.

Well, why can’t we do that with fisheries? Well, first – and I hope David will address some of this – first, we have to have commitment from the government to the regulatory change.

And then, second, we have to have capital. And that’s where I think public-private partnerships come in because the government has the mandate and the authority to change the rules, but it doesn’t have as much capital as it once had.

The private sector has the capital but, of course, doesn’t have the responsibility of defending the public trust way the government does. So it’s a perfect partnership.

So that’s the second thing that I think needs to happen.

How much money is to be made out there, and how do we think about the risks associated with this? You know, that’s where we need your help.

Just one statistic, in all of the catch-share fisheries that have transitioned over, the value of that fishery tends to increase by – or the shares in that fishery tend to increase by a factor of four. That’s an average. The current U.S. industry is a $5 billion industry.

So, you know, it’s not – it’s not telecommunications-size money, but it’s real money.”

(In http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/ftp/pdf/public_comment/20110830_Helliwell_email_2_attachment_1_of_2.pdf on page 11.)

Now there’s a novel idea – turning over the ownership of a heretofore public resource to private sector investors so they can profit from the harvest and sale of that resource. Of course Mr. Festa didn’t mention that the world’s seafood supply has become so large and that the transportation of seafood from anywhere to here has become so cheap that the U.S. fishing industry has little or nothing to do with setting prices anymore. So where’s Mr. Festa’s investor’s profits likely to come from? Out of the holds of the fishing boats and out of the pockets of the fishermen, it would seem.

But even more troubling is the control that “outside” groups would gain over fishing – or not fishing.

As EDF’s California Fishing Fund does such a good job of demonstrating, it’s not who owns the fishing permits, it’s who – or what – controls them that matters. Suppose that an ENGO serving as the “company store” for a large number of permit holders in a particular fishery decides that boats should not be fishing in a particular area. If the agreements that the permit holders had with the ENGO allowed it, the ENGO could simply dictate that the boats could no longer fish there. Bye, bye fishing community (or communities)!  To suggest that this wouldn’t happen would be to ignore the devastation that various ENGOs have, with no qualms or compunctions, inflicted on logging communities in the Northwest for almost three decades.

Catch shares schemes are supposed to be designed so that no person or other entity can own over a certain number of permits in a particular fishery. In the first place, over several hundreds of years, corporate law has been evolving more and better ways of protecting the privacy of corporate owners. Piercing the corporate vail isn’t a trivial legal exercise, nor is the ability of a federal agency to do it successfully a foregone conclusion.

But that’s not the worst case scenario. We’re all far too familiar with the apparently unbridled thirst for power and profit that afflicts many of our largest corporations, as we are familiar with the increasing competition for ocean access by a host of industrial interests for mineral extraction, energy development, transmission cables/pipelines, offshore aquaculture, transportation and who knows what else. Many of these corporate interests could afford to acquire – then shut down – fishing rights in large areas, perhaps allowing them to dispense with what to some corporate leaders must be those annoying distractions, fishermen.

As a purely speculative what if, what if the people at Microsoft decided that a large part of their business in the future was going to be in offshore, submerged data centers (see Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center Click here ). Obviously such data centers would benefit from being close to the demand for them – users of the so called “cloud.” And what if the optimum locations for some of these data centers, the wave/tide generators that powered them, and the cables that connected them to onshore internet hubs were in prime fishing areas? What would it take for Microsoft – or a foundation with close ties to Microsoft – to gain control of the permits of those bothersome fishermen who wanted to continue fishing where they had for generations and to have them fish elsewhere, or to have them ride off into the sunset with their saddlebags stuffed with Microsoft dollars? How divorced is this scenario from what Mr. Festa and EDF, ex NOAA Head Jane Lubchenco and, perhaps inadvertently, Sylvia Rowley and the New York Times are pushing.

And what’s to stop them?

(2015 revenues for some larger corporations: Walmart – $482 billion, Samsung – $305 billion, Exxon-Mobile – $268 billion, Apple – $233 billion, Amazon – $107 billion, Hewlett Packard – $111 billion, Microsoft – $93 billion, Google – $74 billion, Dell – $59 billion, Intel – $55 billion, Sunoco – $44 billion. The across the dock value of U.S. commercial landings in 2014 were $5.5 billion.)

It’s interesting to note that Ms. Rowley saw fit to include W.F. Lloyd’s tragedy of the commons, which was popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968, as a pro-catch shares argument, though she made it by using what it would be difficult to classify as anything but weasel words, Ms. Rowley wrote ‘overfishing is often seen as a classic case of what economists call the “tragedy of the commons.”’ What Lolyd and Hardin were describing could only be considered unregulated commons, with no limits in place to control their use. Such is hardly the case in U.S. fisheries (or in many other fisheries around the world).

Our domestic fishermen and our domestic fisheries are among the most regulated in the world, and anyone who thinks he or she can draw parallels between any of our federal fisheries and Lloyd’s/Hardin’s unregulated commons should spend an half an hour or so doing some rudimentary background research.* Even the Wikipedia entry for “tragedy of the commons” states in the second paragraph “commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource….” (my emphasis).

Jim Ruttenberg, media columnist for the NY Times wrote in his 05/05/16 column that political journalism had lost sight of its “primary directives in this election season.” One of his three directives was “to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right.” While he was writing about coverage of national electoral politics, this directive should apply to every kind of journalism, and it should apply every day. I hope that Ms. Rowley was paying attention.

____________________

*Background research is something that print and broadcast journalists used to do, or used to have done, in those olden times when “getting it right” was as important as Jim Ruttenberg still thinks it is.

FishNet USA/NOAA Enforcement, media bias, and what’s fact checking?

www.fishnet-usa.com

16:44 3/8/2016

Much attention has been directed towards a recent IRS/NOAA investigation of alleged criminal activity of New Bedford (MA) fleet owner/seafood wholesaler and retailer Carlos Rafael. Particularly considering the fact that NOAA is trying to force New England fishermen to shoulder the onerous burden of paying for on-board observers to make sure that they aren’t “cheating” on federal fishing regulations, some industry observers have called into question the timing of the actions surrounding Mr. Rafael’s business dealings, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the anti-fishing activists are going to leap on this opportunity to clamor for even more – and even more expensive policing of fishermen (it’s been estimated that the costs of the existing level of observer coverage, if passed on to fishermen, will force on the order of 25% of New England’s groundfish fleet out of business).

In view of all of the interest in Mr. Rafael’s “case,” and in the amount of media attention it’s likely to generate, I thought it would be instructive to redistribute a piece I wrote in response to an article a writer named Brendan Borrell wrote for Bloomberg Business Week. In my estimation virtually everything that’s wrong with most media coverage of fisheries issues today is exemplified by Mr. Borrell.

As far as I could determine, there has been no long term follow-up to the findings/recommendations of the Inspector General’s investigation or any other investigations detailed below as far as the functioning of NOAA’s Office of Law enforcement is concerned.

The IRS has also been involved in the Rafael case. Unfortunately, I would consider that reporting as performed by Mr. Borrell is still the rule rather than the exception when it comes to fishing     

For the record, I have never met Mr. Rafael and to my knowledge have had no dealings, either personal or professional, with either him or with any of the people who work for him. Nils E. Stolpe

Who really “destroyed a decade of law enforcement?” FishNet USA/December 28, 2011 Nils E. Stolpe

In the last week of November Bloomberg Businessweek on the MSNBC website posted an article titled “The Gloucester Fish War – How a small town in Massachusetts destroyed a decade of law enforcement,” by Brendan Borrell.

Mr. Borrell’s point seemed to be that something approaching a conspiracy by Gloucester fishing interests, local, state and federal politicians, the Gloucester Daily Times and the Inspector General’s office in the US Department of Commerce victimized the entire federal fisheries enforcement process in the Northeast. Reminiscent of the horse operas of yesteryear, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration enforcement personnel, wearing the white hats à la such stalwarts as John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, gave their all to fighting the good fight; but rather than rustlers or bandits they were fighting fishermen from a community where cheating was an accepted way of life.

Given the title of his article, it will come as no surprise to anyone that Mr. Borrell painted the hats that the fishermen – and their supporters – wear a pretty unequivocal black.

Did Mr. Borrell get the right hats on the right heads? Having been a fairly close observer of the situation as it unfolded, I would have to answer that he wasn’t even close. And putting together the observations of a number of eminently qualified people and organizations who were directly involved in several connected investigations, people with no particular ax to grind, I’d suggest that they would agree with me. My purpose here is to lay out all of the information that seems to have escaped Mr. Borrell’s notice and let the folks who read this decide for themselves.

But before getting into that, let’s take a look at some of Mr. Borrell’s factual content, the kind of stuff that, particularly with today’s access to the internet, is so easy to get right.

Georges Bank? The Grand Banks? Newfoundland? Massachusetts? Collapsing stocks? Record recruitment? Haddock? Cod? They’re kind of all the same, aren’t they?
The story starts out with a “raid” on the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction on December 6, 2006. Wearing bullet proof vests instead of buckskin and armed with Glock semi-automatic pistols instead of six shooters, 16 federal agents descended on the auction with a U-Haul to cart off three years of business records in an attempt to prove wrongdoing on the part of “mustached” (I’ll get back to this later) Larry Ciulla, the founder and CEO of the auction.

Mr. Borrell wrote “at the time of the raid (December 7, 2006), cod, haddock, flounder, and other groundfish, which are all caught by dragging a net along the ocean bed, were being harvested so heavily that the stock was in danger of collapsing, as it seems to have in the much larger Georges Bank off Newfoundland.”

Considering that Georges Bank is off Cape Cod, and has been since it was deposited there by a withdrawing glacier at the end of the last ice age, I’ll have to assume that Mr. Borrell really meant to write “…in the much larger Grand Banks off Newfoundland.” Considering that most of the groundfish landed in Gloucester are caught on Georges Bank, he must have been referring to the “cod, haddock, flounder, and other groundfish” there.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Fisheries Center’s website shows that recruitment of Georges Bank haddock was at the highest point ever measured in 2003, and that in 2006 the biomass of haddock on Georges Bank was approaching a corresponding record level. Acadian redfish – another groundfish – were mostly unfished in 2006. Landings were over 100,000 metric tons in the early 1950s but had plummeted to less than 500 mt in 2006.  According to trawl surveys their abundance. like haddock, was approaching record levels. Cod and (yellowtail and winter) flounder stocks weren’t in as good shape as haddock or redfish, but to write that the entire groundfish stock on Georges Bank was in danger of collapsing is stretching the truth to epic proportions.

Unfortunately, we’ve become used to such “inaccuracies” in reporting on the condition of our fisheries. Why, after all, should something like accuracy intrude on a good story line or a particular agenda?

According to the author, the intent of this NOAA “raid” was to send the “overfishing doesn’t pay” message to the fishermen of Gloucester.

That it was necessary to get this message to Gloucester’s fishermen was required because, according to Mr. Borrell, University of Maryland economist Dennis King “estimated that 12 percent to 24 percent of the total trawl catch in the Northeast was illegal.”

The Pew Trusts – what are the odds?
This probably won’t come as a surprise to my regular readers, but Dennis King’s work was funded by the Lenfest Ocean Program, which is administered by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

I wrote a critique of Dr. King’s illegal fishing research, which he accomplished with John Sutinen at the University of Rhode Island (it’s available at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/All%20Stolpe%20Columns.htm#Law%20enforcement). In a footnote, Drs. King and Sutinen wrote “interviews with NOAA enforcement staff and others familiar with this database indicate that in many cases enforce-ment officers have probable cause to inspect for a violation and, if after inspecting they decide to report a violation, it probably is a violation even though it may not be prosecuted or have a resolution that results in a penalty.” Then “based on this criterion, 1,614 of the 1,689 incidents (95.6%) reported during this period probably are actual vio-lations and, for purposes of this analysis, will be treated as actual violations.”  Applying this “you’re guilty because we suspect you’re guilty, regardless of whether you’re charged or convicted” attitude seems to be a pretty shaky reason to indict an entire fishing community, but that surely didn’t interfere with Mr. Borrell’s story.

“Enrichment” is a subjective kind of thing Underlying Mr. Borrell’s “Fish War” and his destruction of “a decade of law enforcement,” is an investigation of federal fisheries enforcement in the Northeast and nationally by the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General (OIG). This investigation, which was called for by Members of Congress, local and state government officials and seafood industry members alike, brought to light significant problems that were endemic to the way that Administrative Law Judges, NOAA administrators, enforcement agents and attorneys had been persecuting (note that I didn’t use “prosecuting”) fishermen and people in related businesses who they felt were violators (as did Drs. King and Sutinen above), and benefiting from that persecution in the process.

Mr. Borrell wrote of the investigation “no agents were enriched, and the most significant problems that the Inspector General’s report identified were with the regulations themselves.” Much of the OIG investigation focused on the NOAA Asset Forfeiture Fund (AFF), which was composed of fines either paid by people/businesses that violated federal fisheries laws or funds that resulted from the sale of assets – mostly fish and other seafood – that were forfeited by those people/businesses. How those funds can be used was specified by Congress in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSFCMA).

But a financial audit isn’t

The OIG brought in the international accounting firm KPMG to perform a forensic audit of the AFF. Though the funds available wouldn’t cover a full audit, among KPMG’s findings were: •    AFF’s current balance likely falls within a broader range. Based on complicated definitional, data analysis, and reconciliation efforts, KPMG found that during the period of its forensic review (January 1, 2005, through June 30, 2009), the AFF received approximately $96 million (including interest on prior balances), while expending about $49 million through over 82,000 transactions. This analysis suggests that the balance could be much higher than $8.4 million; however, NOAA must review KPMG’s analysis and de-termine what a more accurate figure may be. NOAA should work with the Department to better define the fund and determine its balance. •    KPMG’s findings show that NOAA has administered the AFF in a manner that is neither transparent nor conducive to accountability, thus rendering it susceptible to both error and abuse. •    Regarding purchase cards issued to nearly all OLE special agents and enforcement officers, KPMG tested all purchase card transactions where the monthly total value purchased from any single vendor had a value above $3,000. KPMG selected 394 for further review, of which 54 percent (totaling approximately $204,000) did not have required supporting documentation. •    KPMG found that 62 percent of 604 transactions it selected for further analysis (i.e., document review) did not have required supporting documentation, and 27 percent did not have required approvals. •    OLE policy authorizes AFF expenditures for vehicle leasing and rentals, but does not include authorization of AFF expenditures for vehicle purchases. OLE’s vehicle inventory as of June 1, 2010, lists 202 vehicles, only two of which are leased. According to OLE, the other 200 were purchased at a cost of about $4.6 mil-lion, predominantly with AFF monies. OLE’s 202 vehicles exceed by a substantial margin its staffing of approximately 172 enforcement personnel. •    Between January 2005 and June 2009, OLE and GCEL charged nearly $580,000 to the AFF for interna-tional travel to over 40 destinations. However, only about 17 percent of the cost for this travel was directly related to specific investigations or enforcement proceedings (the only MSFCMA authorized expenditures for these funds), according to NOAA records. The remaining 83 percent of the cost for such travel was for the purpose of training or attending meetings. For example, in 2008, 15 OLE and GCEL employees traveled to Norway to attend the week-long Global Fisheries Enforcement Training Workshop, at a cost of $109,000. Mr. Borrell writes that an almost $100 million unaudited “slush fund” provided by fines levied on fishermen in the government agency charged with enforcing federal fishing regulations and having no effective limits on how the money was spent was not among the most significant problems identified in the Inspector General’s report. And he continues “no agents were enriched,” in spite of the fact that government agents and attorneys benefited from foreign travel for professional development, had lax (or no) “bothersome” controls on spending a whole bunch of money, and had what appears to be unlimited access to government vehicles bought with those funds. I’ve worked as a government bureaucrat and at the time, if I were offered the chance to be freed of purchasing controls, to have a vehicle permanently assigned to me and to be offered foreign travel for training and professional development, I would have certainly considered myself enriched.

And neither is having a workforce that is overqualified (and overpaid) for the work it’s performing.   In addition to the Department of Commerce Inspector General’s office problems with the Asset Forfeiture Fund, the report also noted that “NOAA needs to reassess its OLE (Office of Law Enforcement)  workforce composition (presently 90 percent criminal investigators), to determine if this criminal-enforcement-oriented structure is the most effective for accomplishing its primarily regulatory mission. Based on OLE’s data, its caseload from January 1, 2007 through June 30, 2009, was about 98 percent noncriminal…. There are also indications in the record that this workforce composition was driven by considerations of the better pay and benefits that apply to federal criminal investigators, rather than by strict mission requirements.”

Perhaps Mr. Borrell doesn’t consider that better pay and benefits for a workforce that is almost completely out of balance with the work it is required to do amounts to personal enrichment either.

NOAA enforcement was “dismantled” by one man?

In his zeal to implicate anyone or anything in wrongdoing other than NOAA, Mr. Borrell wrote “(Larry) Ciulla’s success in dismantling NOAA’s enforcement helped other fishermen.” While Mr. Borrell wants his readers to believe that the fisheries enforcement problems were limited to the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction and the fishermen of Gloucester, the Inspector General’s report stated “in short, we found systemic, nationwide issues adversely affecting NOAA’s ability to effectively carry out its mission of regulating the fishing industry. These issues have contributed significantly to a highly-charged regulatory climate and dysfunctional relationship between NOAA and the fishing industry—particularly in the Northeast Region (the Northeast Region extends from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to the Gulf of Maine).” He also implies that a demonstration that was held in the parking lot of the NOAA/NMFS administrative headquarters building in Gloucester was a “local” effort focusing on local problems. To the contrary, there were fishermen there and participating from fishing ports extending from Maine to New Jersey.

As the statements that were the results of all of the investigations make abundantly clear, neither Mr. Ciulla, the fishermen of Gloucester, nor other fishermen anywhere else were responsible for anything other than drawing national attention to problems that NOAA enforcement personnel and their higher-ups in the agency brought upon themselves. That’s what accounted for the “dismantling,” not Mr. Ciulla’s nor any other private citizen’s actions.

And that diminished “NOAA’s will to regulate?”

Mr. Borrell also wrote “as seems to have been the intention, the called-for investigation successfully diminished NOAA’s will to regulate.”

In his own words “…Ciulla no longer has to pay an $85,000 agreement he made to settle a trio of cases that dated back a decade. The ‘auction was clearly the target of selective enforcement and subject to excessive fines,’ the judge (appointed Special Master and retired federal judge Charles B. Swartwood, III) wrote.” Here a federal enforcement agency and its personnel were caught with their hands in the symbolic cookie jar up to their symbolic elbows and he describes the agency’s reaction as a diminished will to regulate? And that this was the intention of the citizens and their elected officials in clamoring for the investigation? And that those carrying out the investigations were somehow manipulated into enabling this bizarre campaign?

How about, much more simply, that people in the seafood industry nationally, but most particularly from Maine to North Carolina, were tired of being pushed around and manipulated by an out-of-control bureaucracy that benefited from the inflated fines that it’s conflicted, inadequately controlled personnel forced on them, went to their elected officials and finally got some high level attention focused on what had become a festering problem?

We’re from the government and we’re here to destroy your life.

Mr. Borrell wrote of “a precedent-setting case against a scalloper named Larry Yacubian, who was accused of fishing in closed waters. The case was the first to use satellite technology to track the position of fishing boats. Yacubian settled with the agency for $430,000, a loss that forced him to sell his boat and home. It was a major coup for NOAA and was supposed to mark the beginning of a new, more accountable fishing industry.” He then quoted an attorney in the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section “they (NOAA) have gotten some of the most sophisticated cases with some of the highest sentences I have seen in wildlife crime cases.” What he neglected to mention was that the “home” Mr. Yacubian was forced to sell – to pay for his fine and his legal fees – was the Quansett Farm in Westport, Massachusetts. This farm had been in his wife’s family since her ancestor Job Almy, built it in 1742. Mr. Yacubian, a lifelong fisherman, also lost his fishing permits. He and his family relocated to Florida.

While he did note that “scallop fisherman Yacubian is slated to get back $400,000 he paid in 2005,” Mr. Borrell also neglected to mention that the Honorable Charles B. Swartwood, III, the Special Master who was appointed to review a number of cases prosecuted by NOAA, determined that “the timing and circumstances of ALJ (U.S. Coastguard Administrative Law Judge) McKenna’s involvement in this (Larry Yacubian’s persecution/prosecution) case gives credence to the perception that, in general, the Coast Guard Administrative Law Judges are biased in favor of NOAA and in particular, that ALJ McKenna was biased in this case which, in turn, allowed EA (NOAA Enforcement Attorney) Juliand and EA MacDonald to extract an excessive settlement from Mr. Yacubian.” He recommended that “Mr. Yacubian be reimbursed the total sum of $330,000 as follows: $210,000, which was coerced in return for permission to sell the Independence (Mr. Yacubian’s scallop vessel), with its permit and $110,000 representing the excessive monetary penalty paid.” Of course that didn’t get the Quansett Farm back, but apparently in Mr. Borrell’s view, mentioning such “minor” points isn’t as important as keeping his good guy/bad guy fantasy intact.

The Special Master reviewed 31 cases that had been handled by NOAA Enforcement Agent Andrew Cohen, and ordered that $650,000 be returned to 11 fishermen.

Perhaps NOAA enforcement personnel didn’t all deserve Brendan Borrell’s white hats.

Below are some quotes concerning what it seems impossible to think of as anything less than endemic and wide-spread problems in NOAA enforcement:
•    “Of the 27 complaints we examined, we confirmed 9—including cases involving false information in an affidavit for an inspection warrant; entry into a facility for other than authorized purposes; excessive fines, including for first-time violators; and comparatively steep assessed penalties in the Northeast Region which leverage set-tlement while deterring respondents from taking their cases to hearing.” (USDOC, Report No. OIG-19887-2, 09/2010). •    “The AFF (Asset Forfeiture Fund) has not functioned as a coherent program, despite being a substantial source of agency operational funding―outside and supplemental to annual appropriations―drawn solely from the proceeds of NOAA enforcement actions against industry parties. Rather, as KPMG found, the AFF has operated through poorly defined, disjointed, and inconsistent processes that lack effective internal controls, and for which no single NOAA office appears to be in charge or accountable because it is so decentralized.” Memo from USDOC Inspector General Todd Zinser to NOAA Chief Jane Lubchenco, 07/01/2010). •    “As a result of my investigation, I have found conduct… which amounted to overzealous, abusive or arbitrary conduct by NOAA personnel which unfairly impacted the outcome of several of the reviewed cases.  Some of the inappropriate conduct which I have uncovered during my investigation was not known to the OIG when it concluded its investigation.”  (Report And Recommendation Of The Special Master Concerning NOAA En-forcement Action Of Certain Designated Cases, 04/2011). •    “As the top cop at NOAA and a longtime investigator himself, Dale Jones must be acutely aware that shredding documents during a federal investigation raises serious questions about his commitment to a full and fair look at all the facts,” (House Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee Chairwoman) Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam) said at a subcommittee hearing on the issue yesterday.” NY Times, 03/04/2010). •    (Congressman Walter B.) “Jones (R-NC) Praises Dismissal Of Fisheries’ Top Cop-Says Much More Needs To Be Done.” (headline of press release from Congressman Jones, 04/09/2010). •    “(NOAA Enforcement Agent Andrew) Cohen’s June 19, 2009, press release (that was provided to the Boston Globe four hours before anyone at the auction was notified) stated that ‘NOAA is now notifying the auction it must comply with the 2003 agreement’s terms and serve the 10-day sanction, effectively shutting down the auc-tion to federally managed fish for 10 days.’ The auction at the time had filed a federal court appeal of NOAA’s sanction decision, which precluded Cohen’s enforcement of the appealed order — and brought the matter to (U.S. District Court Judge Douglas) Woodlock’s courtroom. Woodlock chastised Cohen and NOAA for the tac-tics. NOAA never followed with news releases that reported the judge’s repudiation of Cohen’s efforts, or the settlement on terms favorable to the auction.” (R. Gaines, The Gloucester Daily Times, 09/21/2010) •    “U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced today that $649,527 in fisheries enforcement penalties will be returned to 11 individuals or businesses after an independent review of their cases concluded the NOAA en-forcement program had in some instances “overstepped the bounds of propriety and fairness.” In his decision memo issued today, Secretary Locke acted on 30 cases reviewed by the Special Master, Judge Charles Swart-wood III, accepting all of his recommendations that the law allows and taking additional actions in several cases. Secretary Locke appointed Judge Swartwood to conduct the independent review of cases identified by the Department of Commerce’s Inspector General as problematic. The individuals and businesses will receive their remittances within 30 days of receipt of payment information.” (From a Department of Commerce Press release on May 17, 2011) •    “Federal law enforcement officials buy a $300,000 luxury boat and can’t document that it’s used for work.” From the website of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley) The Secretary of Commerce, a retired federal judge, a sitting federal judge, the head of the Department of Commerce’s internal watchdog agency, an official report of an investigation by that agency, participants in a Congressional hearing and Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle representing constituencies far from Gloucester are on the record with thousands of words which can’t be looked at as anything less than a scathing indictment of NOAA enforcement’s operations and attitudes going back for years, and Mr. Borrell actually tries to convince his readers that this was all part and parcel of an effort to undermine NOAA’s enforcement capabilities in Gloucester.

But then again… and here we hear from some more Pew folks.

In his effort to minimize the significance of the results of an OIG investigation, an audit by an international accounting firm, a review of the most obviously questionable NOAA Enforcement prosecutions and a Congressional hearing or two, Mr. Borrell wrote that the Executive Director of the Marine Fish Conservation Network pointed out “that the number of complaints from fishermen that had any merit was “‘comparatively small.”’ The Marine Fish Conservation Network has received almost $5 million from the Pew Trusts. He continued “King, the (Pew/Lenfest funded) economist, says the findings of the Inspector General were misconstrued and blown out of proportion, and he says the industry needs more, not less, enforcement. ‘“This was political theater driven by a handful of fishermen.’” I have to emphasize that it wasn’t a fisherman, or a handful of fishermen, who carried out the file-shredding extravaganza in the midst of an investigation by the Department of Commerce Inspector General’s office, it was Dale Jones, the head of NOAA enforcement. That’s not political theater, it’s Cinéma vérité at its most real, and the people doing the driving weren’t a handful of fishermen, they were the people in charge at NOAA.

To really separate the good guys from the bad guys….

Mr. Borrell appears to go to significant lengths to draw as stark a contrast as possible between members of the fishing industry and the NOAA enforcement machine. He starts out with “mustached” Larry Ciulla, who he also describes as “the former bad boy,” a “thrill seeker” who bought a Corvette, took flying lessons, risked life and limb in the greasy pole competition each June at the St. Peter’s Fiesta in Gloucester and “married the former Ms. Massachusetts Petite America.”

He also refers to the auction’s “curly-haired bookkeeper,” who when questioned by the bulletproof vest wearing, Glock brandishing NOAA enforcement agents about the location of records, responded “I’m not saying anything.”  He later mentions that she “recently answered the phone at the Exchange” (that’s the Cape Cod Seafood Exchange, which took over the Gloucester auction site after it filed for bankruptcy) and said “she does not have current contact information for Ciulla.”

Levels of complexity and more Pew Trusts $millions

And then he writes “if politicians and the local media painted Ciulla as the face of an honest businessman battered by overzealous regulators, the situation behind the scenes was more complex.” The complexity is a suit filed by Eric Hesse and another fisherman “against Ciulla in federal court, demanding $1 million for breach of contract and deceptive business practices over six years.” Eric Hesse is the Chairman of the Board of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association (CCCHFA). The CCCHFA has received over one and a half million dollars from the Pew Trusts. Then, “on Oct. 4, Hesse’s lawyer—a partner in the firm that once represented Ciulla—brought a class action against the auction, adding two named defendants and alleging the auction violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.” “More complex” might be a world-class understatement.

Fancy cars, fast living, beautiful women, curly hair, mustaches and a lawsuit based on the violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; what kind of Hollywood inspired connections come to mind?

Contrast this with Mr. Borrell’s treatment of the NOAA enforcement people as victims of their war with what he wants us to think of as the illegal fishermen of Gloucester and their supporters. Compare his treatment of Larry Ciulla to that of Enforcement Agent Andy Cohen. While Mr. Borrell had Mr. Ciulla, the “former bad boy” driving flashy cars, flying airplanes, marrying beauty/talent contest winners and recklessly risking life and limb, Agent Cohen was fishing from a kayak or spending time in Haiti “with an aid organization.” There’s not much of a question of who Mr. Borrell wants us to think should be wearing the white hats, is there?

Last but certainly not least

In the program of 2nd International Marine Conservation Congress held in Victoria, BC, Canada in May of 2011, Brendan Borrell is listed as a grantee of the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea (COMPASS) Journalist Fellowship Program (along with fellow Society of Environmental Journalists members Juliet Eilperin and Jeff Burnside – see my In the Belly of the Big Green Beast at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/In_Belly_Of_Beast.pdf).
COMPASS has received over $2.6 million from SeaWeb, which was created by the Pew Trusts and has received over $17 million from the Pew Trusts and the Packard Foundation.

So.…  

From the title of his article onward, at the most superficial level it’s impossible to come away from Mr. Borrell’s over 3,000 words without the feeling that NOAA enforcement, whose agents and attorneys were the only things protecting the Northeast groundfish fishery, was victimized by the Gloucester fishing industry and its allies. Only by being familiar with an admittedly complicated situation or by doing significant background research does it become evident how much he downplayed the degree to which members of Gloucester’s and much of the rest of U.S.’s fishing industry had been “victimized” by NOAA enforcement, and he totally missed the connections of so many of his sources to the Pew Trusts, a multi-billion dollar foundation that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in furthering what many people consider an anti-fishing agenda. This, the rest of the story, should shed some much needed light on what it’s difficult to see as anything less than a major blot on the history of fisheries enforcement – and fisheries management – in the U.S. (For the broader implications of the NOAA fisheries enforcement scandal on federal fisheries management, see When it comes to the NOAA Law Enforcement scandal, “we’re sorry” doesn’t cut it at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/All%20Stolpe%20Columns.htm#Sorry%20not%20enough.)

NOAA OVERSIGHT PROJECT

Introduction

From Dutch Harbor to the Old Harbor Float in Petersburg, from Gloucester and all the way round to Corpus Christi, wherever Americans untied their boats to fish in the decades since the Magnuson Act passed, fishermen had to take on science, politics, and NOAA.

Some of you spent your shore time up to your knees in fish politics dividing the stock or arguing with managers about areas or days at sea.

Because you engaged in politics, new generations of kids setting and hauling gear can still catch fish. Sort of–

Like me, some of you believe that passing down the fishing tradition between generations is a bedrock of American independence and that after 2009 NOAA threatened it.

In 2008 a push for Catch Shares, which began in Alaska’s^[1] halibut fishery in the early 1990s and expanded 20 years latter to 20 percent of all US caught fish, threatened to spread to all ports.

^[1] In Alaska back in 1971, when I started to  learn how to troll and gillnet salmon, hook halibut and black cod, fish stocks were on their way to rock bottom even as the number of boats kept growing. One summer, we were down to fishing 12 hours a week. In 1975, the entire 400 mile long South Eastsalmon season shut down a month early. In 1976, the State limited entry of the number of boats who could fish salmon. In the late 1980s, a Federal program to give each fisherman a share of the halibut quota for the year began to take shape enriching captains at the expense of many crew members.

In early 2009, when the Senate approved Under Secretary Jane Lubchenco (and her right hand woman, Monica Medina, wife of Biden and Gore political operative, Ron Klain), Catch Shares were going to take off like a rocket.

James Balsiger, the acting head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, was going to be replaced by fisherman/ Senate staffer Arne Fuglvog who favored catch shares or scientist Brian Rothschild who did not.

But for Richard Gaines’ corruption busting headlines in the Gloucester Times and fishermen who turned in Fuglvog for illegal fishing, Catch shares would have applied to all fish stocks.

I hope you’ll learn a lot about one facet of how NOAA’s plans got busted. It springs from dozens of FOIAs I made since 2010. When I got stonewalled on getting 13,000 pages related to the Fuglvog investigation, I started a lawsuit in 2015 year that has forced NOAA to cough up out about 7000 pages so far.

Without the guidance and insight of some fishermen, lawyers, a scientist, and policy makers, and others it would have been pretty hard to pull all the pieces together.

For me, the story begins in 2010.

Out of the blue, a candidate for the US Senate in Alaska, who had won his party’s nomination, pulled me out of retirement in California by a phone call. “Help me fight corruption,” he said, “ I want you to be my regional manager.” I asked him if he had the right guy.

A decorated Army Officer and a Yale Law School alum, he was not going to let the old guard continue the corruption that had rocked Alaska.

Because of my ten years on the beach in California, I was out of touch, but he insisted. I took a deep breath and accepted. I never regretted the choice or doubted the character of the man.

I caught a plane up to Juneau where for several days we met with party members and agency heads and then I flew down to a conference in Petersburg to prepare the ground for his arrival. There, old fishing friends updated me on what had been going on in the fleet during my decade ashore.

They told me that Senator Murkowski’s fisheries aide, Arne Fuglvog, should not remain in that position, because he was a fish crook who had been pushing catch shares in 2008-9 before he suddenly withdrew his name to be head of the NMFS.

I was shocked. So were a lot of people in town. I knew and admired this guy’s dad. They claimed Arne had been fishing illegally for a long time for halibut and black cod under the Catch Share program or IFQs. NOAA should have investigated the crimes. But there was nothing public about it.

This was a campaign issue which could not be raised without facts. Details were few and I couldn’t locate crew members. In Juneau the candidate and I had met, at the Ted Stevens NOAA Lab/Monument, with high ranking NOAA officials who never uttered a peep about the investigation (or catch shares). It puzzled me then that NOAA would fly a guy fly up from Seattle to meet with an Alaskan politician, a guy who might scrutinize the money pipeline to NOAA.

Lacking hard evidence of a NOAA investigation, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to NOAA on my own behalf on October 21^st.

Just before Christmas, and more than six weeks after the 2010 November election, the mailman delivered NOAA’s Response. This first FOIA resulted in tantalizing clues and dead ends.

NOAA’s Response stonewalled by claiming that they could “neither confirm nor deny” an open investigation, a tactic the government first used to block inquires about Howard Hughes’ Glomar Explorer searching for a sunken Russian Nuclear Submarine.

Five years later, FOIA documents showed the investigation was almost or should have been closed before Christmas 2009, because NOAA knew many months before Christmas that Fuglvog was cooperating (“admitting guilt”) after a Grand Jury convened and his log books and vessel computer seized.

What the Christmas time 2010 NOAA response did prove were fishing violations in 2005. In May of 2005, Fuglvog was a Board Member of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council.

He exceeded his bi-catch by 100%. He also exceeded his black cod quota. NOAA blanked out the amount of pounds and the fines. (NOAA also withheld nine pages, and redacted dozens more– the good stuff).

I don’t know if Fuglvog revealed these 2005 fisheries violation on his 2006 job application to Senator Lisa Murkowski. The potential fine was $25,000 on one count. Certainly there was a long history of illegal fishing that he should have disclosed. I have yet to find out.

More important than NOAA’s stonewall on the Fuglvog investigation was a blackout in the press. In October 2010, I informed at least three large mainstream news outlets about the Fuglvog rumors. No stories ran. After I got the FOIA Response, I sent evidence to at least one national news outlet. No outlet mentioned the 2005 violations, even though they had documented proof and even though the election for Senator was still contested in the courts.

Disinterest in Fuglvog seemed surreal. I got calls from reporters in Paris and New York wanting to talk to my candidate. Gail Collins even crossed the Hudson to fly into Petersburg to interview and poke fun at my candidate and me. Yet when poop on Fuglvog surfaced, the media closed their collective eyes.

Winter turned to summer.

Then on August 1, 2011, Fuglvog announced a plea deal, agreeing to go to jail and pay about $150,000, copping to only one instance of illegal fishing. The media was all over it. O my gosh when and what did NOAA know. But they had had their heads in the sand refusing to report on evidence.

A few days before Fuglvog appeared in Federal Court, NOAA emailed me that “Records prior to 2005 were destroyed in 2009.” That was not completely true, as I discovered years latter when NOAA released documents referring to more illegal fishing prior to 2005.

There were few times, I have from a reliable source, when he did not fish illegally.

NOAA’s stonewalling and the media black out whetted my curiosity. What corrupt or illegal means did the government use to keep you in the dark about Fuglvog and the push for Catch Shares? Who within NOAA ran the game? How did they manage the controversy?

The picture I’ve assembled so far from the dozens of FOIAs and lawsuit is not yet a complete one. But enough salacious details are now available to give you a peek into the inside story about the Fuglvog scandal.

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of pieces revealing what the heck went wrong inside NOAA under Jane Lubchenco and who outside the agency supported her and Fuglvog.

Alan Stein

————————-

This is the start of a new probe into mysteries arising out of the 2010 Alaska Senate Campaign which, but for the Fuglvog Scandal –an investigation stalled, buried, and botched by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA)—most likely would have ousted Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Arne Fuglvog one year into his job as Fisheries Assistant to Senator Lisa Murkowski. She never fired him even though he admitted to officials in 2009 that he had habitually broke fisheries law. He resigned his job with Murkowski in August, 2011, after striking a plea deal more than two years after a grand jury considered his case in 2009 and three months after she claimed to have first learned of his plea. Picture Credit: Juneau Empire

Keep in Mind These Questions

  • Why did the press –which swarmed into Alaska from Los Angeles, New York, and Europe looking for any nit to pick– ignore a tawdry story about Senator Murkowski’s fisheries aide, Arne  Fuglvog, that would have changed the outcome of the 2010 election?

 • In 2010, why did the media miss digging into widespread rumors about a story that would have made headlines showing why Fuglvog in July, 2009 withdrew his quest to be the   top administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) after pursuing the spot for only three and a half months? (Documents I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act after filing suit against NOAA show, for the first time, that contrary to Fuglvog’s reasons for withdrawing from the race (he claimed the process was taking too long)— he withdrew his quest for the leadership slot in the NMFS immediately after he learned NOAA obtained evidence that could have convicted him on federal offenses; namely, someone turned in his fishing log books showing he had lied repeatedly on official documents submitted to NOAA.)

• Who or what organizations pushed Fuglvog to seek the top NMFS job and how would they benefit if he took the helm?
• Did NOAA botch or cover up 2007 complaints made about Fuglvog’s illegal commercial fishing?
  • In 2011, why, after he publicly admitted to crimes, did NOAA officials stonewall on what and when they knew about his crimes.
  • In 2009 or afterwards, did NOAA exchange information with the White House, Senator Murkowski, or any other member of Congress and if not, why not? If NOAA exchanged information, did the White House, Senator Murkowski, or Congress take appropriate action to expose Fuglvog in 2009 or 2010? If not, why not?

The NOAA Oversight Project will uncover and make public all the issues surrounding the Fuglvog Scandal, Catch Shares, and other national fisheries issues.

Six years after NOAA was forced to pursue Fuglvog, after over a dozen FOIAs to NOAA (many still outstanding) and a law suite filed to compel production, I can start to answer some of these questions.

Before discussing some of the information I’ve obtained under FOIAs from NOAA, I want you to remember that the back story involves the mainstream media asleep at the wheel (or beholden to editors acting as gate keepers who have no appetite to dog a story that could jeopardize a sitting Alaska Senate seat).

This story arises in a federal agency in disarray, subjected to strong manipulation by US Senators and their lackeys within the agency, and so committed to promoting its Catch Shares Program (reducing fleet size as a way to manage fish catches and enrich the big boys) that its golden boy, Fuglvog, escaped outing for federal fisheries crimes he had committed for over half a decade, before and after he was appointed by Frank Murkowski, to sit (as a Board Member of a regional fisheries management council . Starting in 2006 when he became the Senate’s foremost fisheries aide to Lisa Murkoswi, Frank’s daughter, Fuglvog sold the program to policy makers and fishermen around the country.

[Updates

September 11^th, 2015, I posted a small but revealing part of the story—emails recently obtained from NOAA which show how NOAA reacted on August 4^th, 2011, a few days after the US Attorney filed charges against Fuglvog.

September 18th, I added the names of Fuglvog’s supporters who sent letters to NOAA urging his appointment to the top job at the NMFS including the dates in 2009 when they did so.   These details that I am revealing have remained hidden in NOAA’s files, some for six years.

September 18^th, 2015: NOAA released three FOIA Requests I made near the start of the year. These documents were released about six weeks after I filed a lawsuit to get them and other FOIAs are still outstanding].

December 21st, 20015, NOAA released 19 pages concerning Monica Medina. One email shows Monica Medina had a private email account in April 2009 which Fuglvog used to communicate with her about a strategy for getting support for his run for the head of NMFS. Conducting public business on private email accounts we have learned in the cases of Hillary Clinton, Ashton Carter, and other officials is forbidden under federal law. Perhaps I am not getting more communications of Medina because most of them were on her private account and these were not archived by NOAA?

December 21st, 2015 NOAA placed in the US mail 2641 pages of the investigative file on Fuglvog, the second installment since I filed the lawsuit. A month earlier, they released about the same number of pages. More releases are scheduled. Without the lawsuit, I’m guessing it would be Christmas 2020 before I would have gotten this information.

The Rise and Fall of Fuglvog

Background and Connections

In 2009, a clamor for Fuglvog to be prosecuted arose when those who knew of his crimes learned he was a candidate to be the head of the NMFS. Complaints to NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) began in May, 2009, but as well, and significantly, were also made in 2007 when NOAA botched and buried investigations into the 2007 complaints.

The 2009 complaints occurred around the same time that his supporters in the fishing industry and Congress were inundating Jane Lubchenco, the new head of NOAA, with letters of recommendation to make him chief of the NMFS.

Thanks to an April, 2009 email, we now know Fuglvog was seeking a private meeting with Medina who was to coach him, apparently, on whom to solicit letters of support from the industry and Congress. Since Fuglvog wrote to her private email account on AOL, I’m not sure whether NOAA has Medina’s replies to Fuglvog’s repeated requests for help. FOIA allows the person who created the document to decide if it should be archived by NOAA and if it is deleted on a private account, no one is the wiser.

This exchange takes on added significance when we remember that the anti Catch Share choice was a scientist whom the records so far show was not being coached for support by Medina. It adds weight to claims I have heard that Fuglvog was Lubchenco’s choice and Rothschild’s short interview was just window dressing to appease the East Coast horde backing him.

Further evidence of stonewalling is the failure of NOAA to give me Medina’s scheduling calendar showing whom she met and when she met them. Perhaps that too resides on private account or server. In response for Medina’s calendar, NOAA provided Jane Lubcheco’s (without attachments). We shall see.

Obviously, Fuglvog who is not a scientist, was her first choice over the well regarded marine scientist, Professor Brian Rothschild. Many of my sources believe that the EDF, which promoted Lubchenco’s career, was a main force behind the push to make Fuglvog the administrator of our nation’s fish research and resources.

In 2009, NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement itself was in hot water, thanks to East Coast pressure. Its Director, Dale Jones, would be caught by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) ordering case files destroyed while OIG investigated. NOAA has yet to reveal whether Jones destroyed Fuglvog related criminal files. NOAA could neither confirm nor deny aspects of this. I have learned an Inspector General computer in the Denver Office charged with investigating the Fuglvog affair crashed which may have contained relevant information. Obfuscation can take many forms.

Alaska’s OLE office, it appears, had totally botched 2007 crew complaints against Fuglvog and some would say it covered them up. In late April, 2009

some crew again contacted OLE. Sensing more inaction from OLE , the complainants then contacted the FBI and the Inspector General.

By June, 2009, amazingly, OLE agents in Alaska were zealously conducting interviews concerning Fuglvog. Funny what happens when you go to the FBI. It wasn’t long before a fish log was seized and then the boat’s computer showing GPS positions. NOAA notified Fuglvog, FOIA information reveals, of its investigation on June 24th. Once the evidence was seized, he knew his goose was cooked.

But Fuglvog had discovered the investigation weeks earlier, indicating someone in NOAA may have warned him. NOAA has not yet responded to FOIAs that may clarify this all important issue. I have evidence that will also clarify, but want to see how it fits with NOAA’s ability to answer my request.

After 2009, over two years passed until Fuglvog’s prosecution became public August 1, 2011 and another half year elapsed before he went to jail. Meanwhile, he continued to work on fisheries issues while on Senator Lisa Murkowski’s staff, no news of his crimes leaked in 2010 to affect the tough reelection fight for the Alaska Senate seat, and NOAA escaped scrutiny for not prosecuting him for years after the 2007 complaints were made.

Fuglvog’s Rise to Power

Fuglvog did not get where he was because he was a ladies man or a nice guy—though he was both:

• Fuglvog was room mates with Alaska fisherman Bobby Thorstenson Jr. who supposedly inherited a lot of Icicle Seafood stock from his father, the founder of Icicle Seafoods.
• Fuglvog’s dad held one of the largest blocks of stock in Icicle Seafoods.

Fuglvog got appointed by Lisa Murkowski’s father, the Governor of Alaska, to the North Pacific Management Council (NPFMC) which

• allocates some of Alaska’s billion dollar a year stocks of fish that are not salmon or herring.
• One of his votes on the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council was key to benefiting Icicle and a couple of other mega players in Alaska fisheries.
• Subsequently Icicle, which had been on the block for a long time, sold for about 80 million dollars, according to one of my sources.
• We’ll never know how much his votes raised the value of the company. He never disclosed to NOAA, nor was he required to disclose, his father’s interest in the company.
• His policy for promoting Catch Shares was in line with organizations funded by Sam Walton (the Wall Mart Sam) or Pew Trusts, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Eco Trust, and Sea Web.
• In 2008, EDF funded a seminar for members of the many regional Fishery Management Councils under NOAA by giving several hundred thousand dollars through Stanford University to the Woods Foundation. The latter two refuse to answer questions about the money which paid for Fishery Council Members to attend. A NOAA memo raised the question of whether bribery was involved. (I will examine this issue later).
• At the California event, Fuglvog, by then Murkowski’s fisheries aide, conducted a day long explanation of Catch Shares that was the best attended of all the items on the agenda. Having passed his audition in California with flying colors, Fuglvog got a green light for his next career move—to take over NMFS.
• Lubchenco long favored The Aldo Leopold Leadership Project, while she was a long time EDF trustee, and it received $2.1 million in funding from the Packard Foundation of Palo Alto.

After being confirmed by the Senate, in March, 2009, Lubchenco had to replace the acting leader of NMFS, a Phd scientist named Balsiger who was also Fuglvog’s friend. In April, Fuglvog applied for the job. She favored Fuglvog – who had no scientific background in fish management – over an East Coast fisheries scientist of national stature, Dr Brian Rothschild, according to an inside source.

In May, 2009,Fuglvog was on the brink of claiming the the NMFS prize position. Support peaked in late May just as unfriendly forces were about to dash all his dreams, for as the Bard says, “false hope lingers in extremity.”

 NOAA Stonewalled and Stalled

2007 Cover Up

2009 Political Cover

In 2007, NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) investigated and then dropped, some sources say covered up, several complaints about Fuglvog’s long standing illegal activities, but in 2009 when OLE again stalled a new investigation, the FBI, Inspector General, Congressmen, and finally the White House were contacted. Finally a vigorous investigation began in earnest.

Some political motives for stalling the investigation and stone-walling the release of information about his guilt for two years are obvious, others are obscure. Fuglvog was picked for the NMFS directorship for his skill in advocating for Catch Shares ⎯ an objective he shared with Jane Lubchenco ⎯ and also because it is believed, under Senator Murkowski, he was a player in clearing the way for Shell Oil to drill in the Arctic.

Was NOAA’s stalling and lethargy in pursuing him politically motivated? A partial answer emerges by reviewing the sequence of political support he received during the spring of 2009.

• Fuglvog became a candidate for the NMFS directorship on April 9^th, 2009 (weeks after the Senate confirmed Jane Lubchenco to be head of NOAA on March 19^th). But no sooner did Fuglvog throw his hat in the ring than a former crewman complained to NOAA on April 27 about Fuglvog’s misdeeds as a fishing captain.
• April 9^th, letters of recommendation began pouring in from the EDF Senators, including Murkowski and Murray, and fishing companies

• May 6^th David Benton of the Marine Conservation Alliance wrote a letter recommending Fuglvog addressed to Lubchenco (from # 80022772 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015 )
• May 8^th Gregg Block, Wild Salmon Center, supported Fuglvog in his letter to Lubchenco (#80022849 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015 )
• May 8^th, Ben Landry, Omega Protein, wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog (#80022954 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015 )
• May 8^th, Glen Brooks, Gulf Fisherman’s Association wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog . (#80022957 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015 )
• May 11^th, Keith Criddle, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog ( # 80023002Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015 )
• May 11^th, Shirley Marquardt, City of Unakleet, Alaska, wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog. ( # 80023003 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
• May 18^th, CONGRESSIONAL Recommendations came from
  • Representative Mike Thompson,
  • President Bob Dickinson,
  • Representatives Robert Wittman,
  • Brian Baird,
  • Chairman Don Young,
  • Representative Frank LoBiondo,
  • Co-Chair Representative Sam Farr,
  • • Representative Walter Jones,
    • Representative Jay Inslee,
    • Representative David Wu (NOAA Congressional Correspondence Log #80023162, FOIA released September 18^th, 2009
    • May 18^th,another letter of recommendation for Fuglvog arrived at NOAA signed by
      • Senator Mel Martinez,
      • Senator (Texas) Kay Bailey Hutchison,
      • Chairman Mark Begich,
      • Chair Senator Mary Landrieu,
      • Senator Bill Nelson. ((NOAA Congressional Correspondence Log # 80023163) FOIA released September 18^th, 2009
    • May 19^th, Margaret Williams, World Wildlife Fund, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. ( #80023088 , Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
    • May 19^th Ed Backus, EcoTrust,wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. ( 80023092 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015 )
    • May 19^th, Mark Vinsel and Joe Childers, United Fisherman of Alaska, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. ( 80023090 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
    • May, 19^th TJ Tate, Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. (#80023080, Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015 )
    • May 19^th, Jack Stern Esq., and David Wilmon Ocean Champions wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. ( 80023081, Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
    • • May 19^th Kathy Hanson, Southeast Alaska Fisherman’s Association, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog . ( 80023082, Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
      • May 19^th, Don Giles, Icicle Seafoods,wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog . ( #80023084 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
      • May 19^th, Dorthy Childers, Alaska Marine Conservation Council, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog . ( #80023085 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
      • May 22^nd, Dan Castle Southeast Seiners Association,wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog . (#80022948 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
      • June 2^nd, Chris Zimmer, Rivers without Borders, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog . (#80023303 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
      • June 3d, Julianne Curry, Petersburg Vessel Owners Association, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. (80023328 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
      • June 16^th, Representative Dave Reichert, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. ( #80023519 80023328 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)
      • July 9^th, maybe the only one in Alaska’s fishing industry who did not now then know Fuglvog was being investigated, Alvin Birch, Alaska Whitefish Trawlers Association, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. (#80023086 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18^th, 2015)

      Powerful forces at this point were backing Fuglvog for a variety of reasons, not least of which was his ability to sell national fish council members on the Catch Share concept of fish management—kinda like fencing in the range in the 1890s out West— demonstrated the year before at a retreat near Stanford University that was bankrolled by EDF money passed through Stanford. Lubchenco, had been an EDF Board Member for  ten years and a trustee https://www.edf.org/news/environmental-defense-fund-honored-board-vice-chair-reportedly-picked-noaa-administrator

    • https://www.edf.org/people/board-of-trusteesShe has recently won EDF’s prestigious prize for her work on Catch Shares, while heading NOAA. https://www.edf.org/media/dr-jane-lubchenco-wins-tyler-prize-environmental-achievement ).
      • On May 22^nd, Lubchenco announced federal funding of almost $19 million to implement Catch Shares in New England. More importantly, she announced a National Catch Shares Task Force, comprised of many of NOAA’s top brass who, a year and half later, would be controlling information to the press, Congress, and presumably the White House about Fuglvog’s criminal behavior.

       

      • With his “friends” and, we believe, former wife, being interviewed in Alaska by OLE in June and July 2009 and a Grand Jury convened on July 21^st.

       

      • Fuglvog withdrew his name for consideration to be head of the NMFS on the last day of July, the day after he discovered someone had confiscated his vessel fish log. He knew his goose was cooked. So did NOAA.
      • Months later, in December 2009, during his first interview with NOAA, Fuglvog admitted it was “common” practice to make misrepresentations in his log book.
      • Between the July 2009 Grand Jury, when much evidence against Fuglvog was aired, and August, 2011 the public did not know of Fuglog’s guilt— though there were rumors aplenty in Alaska.

      Meanwhile, Fuglvog, though his dream took flight, was scot free for two more years to advocate for Catch Shares, while still an aide to a powerful US Senator. Until of course

      The Fish Hits the Fan

      2011

The following is but a sample of what you can expect to read about the Fuglvog Scandal and how it was integral to the Catch Share push from NOAA. To throw the cold light of truth onto this story, I posted emails from high level managers in NOAA after the Fuglvog story broke which I obtained from NOAA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) after I had to file suit to get them. (NOAA had 20 days to comply, it took them about eight months to produce. Some of my requests for information have languished for years).
On August 4^th, 2011, Politico’s August 2nd headline read:,

Former Murkowski Aide Arne Fuglvog Admits To Breaking Fishing Laws

Senator Murkowksi being asked about Arne Fuglvog 2011.

Politico failed to ask the obvious question. What did NOAA know and when did they know it? Instead, Politico’s story downgraded the crime, calling it a misdemeanor, even though Fuglvog had agreed to pay $150,000 and go to jail for ten months. At a subsequent hearing, more facts became public. Fuglvog had broken the law multiple times but was being charged with only one instance. Because he was caught red handed, he copped a plea in exchanged for shorter jail time and a smaller fine and agreed to testify

against others. Others had been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and required forfeiture of million dollar boats.

Politico made no mention of OLE’s Chief who ordered case files shredded, as revealed in a 2010 report by the Office of Inspector General. I have an outstanding FOIA to investigate if Fuglvog’s files were shredded. I was informed that after the Inspector General investigated OLE for this outrageous conduct, the computer containing information relevant to my FOIA request crashed. Sound familiar?

Still, NOAA was getting phone calls from reporters who were curious to know why a misdemeanor deserved a 150 grand fine and they caused NOAA’s upper management to scramble.

It is not yet clear if this apparent born again concern by upper management as reflected in the following emails was a ruse to conceal prior knowledge of the investigations or only decision making on what to release to the press. It is clear DC was controlling the flow of information carefully. Nor is it yet clear which members of the upper management team had knowledge prior to August 4th. I have yet to get a full Response including all of Lubchenco’s emails. I do have a document and sources have confirmed that in June of 2009 she was made aware about allegations against Fuglvog. In a FOIA release, NOAA omitted the red herring email to Lubchenco that I have. It is inconceivable that others on the email list of August 4th were ignorant of Fuglvog’s prior acts.

Here’s the sequence of events that followed the filing of charges against Fuglvog:

• On August 1^st, 2011, the US Attorney in Anchorage filed charges against Fuglvog and entered his plea deal into the record.

August 2nd, Senator Murkowski issued a news release announcing his guilt and his resignation from her staff. It was the talk of Washington and fishing communities which were shocked, simply shocked–except those who knew all along.

August 4^th, back at NOAA headquarters where all the facts were becoming known or well known, frenzied exchanges occurred between alarmed

• officials, keeping Lubchenco out of the loop, which utterly belies the “misdemeanor” story-line Politico was pushing.
• August 5^th, Murkowski announced though her Press Secretary, that she knew in late June of the plea deal. She knew he faced some violation, she claimed, back in December, 2010 ⎯ right after her reelection. (We are researching to discover if the delay in Fuglvog’s firing qualified him for a pension from the Senate.)

 

The cast of Lubchenco’s top NOAA management team on August 4th, engaged in media containment included the following:

 

• Monica Medina, Principal Deputy Undersecretary for Oceans and Atmosphere of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration She led the Catch Share Task Force that Lubchenco announced in May and appointed in June 2009. Her husband, Ron Klaine, was the Ebola Czar, who led the recount effort in Florida for Al Gore. He’s closely connected to the White House through Joe Biden.

       •  Lois J. Schiffer, NOAA General Counsel

       •   Margaret Spring, Chief of Staff, who is now with the Monterey Bay Aquarium near Palo Alto.

        •   John Oliver Deputy Assistant Administrator for Operations, NOAA’s Fisheries Service. He is also the Executive Director of the NPFMC He was a member of the Catch Share Task Force. He found the Office of Law Enforcement’s Dale Jones was blameless in 2006 even though an Inspector Generals Report four years latter found the head of OLE shredded case files for four hours while under investigation by the IG. NOAA has not yet turned over documents showing if Jones shred Fuglvog’s case file  http://www.savingseafood.org/news/enforcement/nmfs-dep-admn-john-oliver-and-ex-admn-hogarth-knew-of-ole-complaints-four-years-ago/

• John Gray, Director of Legislative Affairs

 

• Samuel Rauch, Fisheries Acting Assistant Administrator, now head, was the author of a 2010 policy paper distributed to all the national fisheries councils called, “NOAA’s Catch Share Policy under Development” (2010)calling for 15 fisheries limited by 2011 and 31 in coming years. http://www.fisherycouncils.org/SSCpapers/Catchshares abstract.pdf He administered national fisheries management councils and Fuglvog had sat on the NPFMC. He is a key player in catch shares within the agency. He was a member of the Catch Share Task Force

 

 

• Alan Risenhoover, Office of Sustainable Fisheries, was the author of a 2010 policy paper distributed to all the national fisheries councils called, “NOAA’s Catch Share Policy under Development” (2010), calling for 15 fisheries to be limited by 2011 and 31 more in coming years. http://www.fisherycouncils.org/SSCpapers/Catchshares abstract.pdf He administered national fisheries management councils and Fuglvog had sat on the NPFMC. He is a key player in catch shares within the agency. He was a member of the Catch Share Task Force

 

• Justin Kenney Director, NOAA Office of Communications & External Affairs. He was an ex officio member of the Catch Share Task Force
• Amanda Hallberg Office of Legislative Affairs and former Congressional Staffer

 

On August 4^th, 2011 between noon and 4:30, a string of emails went out between the individuals on the above list under the subject head:

CONFIDENTIAL FUGLVOG CASE.

The flow initially— from the limited records I obtained so far— went to John Oliver, a much over looked play maker, to Monica Medina, Lubchenco’s right hand gal whose husband was a key Biden and Gore player.

It is not clear if the first email was sent by Risenhoover prior to 12:08, since the content of that message was not provided to me and the sender is deleted, but the 12:08 email appears to have been sent to John Oliver who managed the day to day of NOAA. Oliver appears to have gotten “info” from Risenhoover. Note that the account Oliver is sending to Medina is blanked out. Was it to her private or NOAA account? Oliver’s NOAA account is provided

 

Twenty minutes after Oliver got the “info,” Medina forwarded “very sensitive” materials to the following:

• Schiffer, the General Council
• Samuel Rauch, Fisheries Acting Assistant Administrator
• Justin Kenney, Director of NOAA’s Office of Communications & External Affairs.
• Amanda Hallberg, Office of Legislative Affairs and former Congressional Staffer
• Justin Kenney, Director of NOAA’s Office of Communications & External Affairs

See the 2:23PM email below:

By about an hour and a half later, it became clear the information sent was “confidential,” because Rausch told the legislative affairs officer Halberg and the others it was so:

What was the confidential information? Why would someone in fisheries be the one to determine political and legal information was confidential? Note everyone was now using Medina’s NOAA account.

NOAA’s FOIA Response did not include any of the “info” alluded to, several years after Fuglvog got of jail. NOAA may or may not provide it in the coming weeks. So who is NOAA protecting in 2015 by so far withholding this “info” and will a judge order them to release it? The facts suggest NOAA is stonewalling to protect itself from the prying eyes of the pesky public.

Did the “info” include the results of the criminal investigation or did the Management Team already know about that? Did the details inform them when and to what extent the agency knew Fuglvog was committing crimes say back to 2002? Did the “info” include facts showing Murkowski knew about Fuglvog long before she said she did? Did the White House know and do nothing? Was the 2009 email to Lubcheco about Fuglvog part of the “info” packet? Did other people in Congress know? All inferences can be drawn from a stonewalling agency.

While that exchange about “info” obtained about Fuglvog from John Oliver or the NPFMC was taking place, another exchange was occurring about him between Lubchenco’s Chief of Staff and Lois Schiffer, the General Counsel. But the instruction goes far beyond the letters of recommendation for Fuglvog from US Senators et. al. that are on file. The following emails reflect the team’s “info” was everything NOAA knew about Fuglvog.

The Counsel General of NOAA herself, Schiffer, recommended stonewalling about what NOAA knew.

Ms. Schiffer’s instruction to the publicity officer, Kinney, and the Chief of Staff, Spring, is most disturbing. Schiffer wrote that when talking to the press:

 

“I WOULDN’T ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT WE KNEW OR DIDN’T KNOW [ABOUT FUGLVOG’S ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES]”.

(Email Schiffer to Spring et al 3:36PM EST):

After five years of effort using FOIA and the courts, NOAA has still not revealed all of what it knew or didn’t know and when it knew it. For if it did know Fuglvog was cheating between 2007 (when complaints were made to OLE) and 2011 when news broke of the prosecution, it was going to look like NOAA had held back information that could have changed the course of the 2010 election for Senator in Alaska as well as added weight to the criticism Congress was making that OLE needed major reforms. Why would Lubchneco welcome that kind of news? Why would the White House be happy that its new appointee was in deep muck soon after Senate confirmation?

 

Burying a National Story

If NOAA had informed the public about the investigations it conducted on Fuglvog up through 2009—as I had requested before the 2010 vote—-instead of waiting until January of the next year), the outcome for Alaska’s US Senate Race almost certainly would have been different that year.

For between July, 2009 and November, 2010, NOAA was sitting on enough evidence to throw the book at this aide to Senator Murkowski, including evidence presented to the 2009 Grand Jury and his own 2009 admission, for which he would later serve time in federal jail.

This is but a sampling of what you can expect to read about the inside story about Fuglvog Scandal and how it was integral to the catch share push from NOAA, a story essentially and potentially affecting tens of thousands of lives in fishing communities around the country ⎯ and the 2010 Senatorial campaign in Alaska.

It is a complicated story, one that any one of the national outlets could have explored had their budgets not been slashed, their reporters demoralized, and their editors cowered, as Sharyl Attkisson has recently shown in Stone Walled (2014).

Instead, except for a few right wing web sites, and one thorough story by Libby Casey ion Alaska Public Radio, the story got buried. A few reporters had their FOIAs delayed or incompletely answered and then they were on to hotter topics. After all, Mitch McConnell’s gal won the Senate Race.

Unless the lame stream press latches on to this story, I hope to unwind more of this story as NOAA, excruciatingl slow, produces more information requested under the FOIAs and the Federal Court System. Stay tuned.

This material is copyrighted @ 2015 by Alan Stein. None of it may be reproduced in any form, in or on any platform or publication without permission which can be obtained by contacting this web site.

P.S. Up date 12/27/15 NOAA has still not released all of the 13,000 pages of the investigative files I requested years ago and to which I am entitled to under the FOIA. Five months after the lawsuit was filed in 2015, I now have about 5,000 pages. The quest for documents continues.

 

 

 

 

 

From Dutch Harbor to the Old Habor Float in Petersburg, from Gloucester and all the way round to Corpus Christi, wherever Americans untied their boats to fish in the decades since the Magnuson Act passed, fishemen had to take on science, politics, and NOAA. Some of you spent your shore time up to your knees in fish politics dividing the stock or arguing with managers about areas or days at sea. Because you engaged in politics, new generations of kids setting and hauling gear can still catch fish.

Sort of– Like me, some of you believe that passing down the fishing tradition between generations is a bedrock of American independence and that after 2009 NOAA threatened it. In 2008 a push for Catch Shares, which began in Alaska’s1 halibut fishery in the early 1990s and expanded 20 years latter to 20 percent of all US caught fish, threatened to spread to all ports. In early 2009, when the Senate approved Under Secretary Jane Lubchecno (and her right hand woman, Monica Medina, wife of Biden and Gore political operative, Ron Klain), Catch Shares were going to take off like a rocket.

In Alaska back in 1971, when I started to learn how to troll and gillnet salmon, hook halibut and black cod, fish stocks were on their way to rock bottom even as the number of boats kept growing. One summer, we were down to fishing 12 hours a week. In 1975, the entire 400 mile long Southeast salmon season shut down a month early. In 1976, the State limited entry of the number of boats who could fish salmon. In the late 1980s, a Federal program to give each fisherman a share of the halibut quota for the year began to take shape enriching captains at the expense of many crew members.

Picture Credit: Juneau Empire 2007
• Why did the press –which swarmed into Alaska from Los Angeles, New York, and Europe looking for any nit to pick– ignore a tawdry story about Senator Murkowski’s fisheries aide, Arne Fuglvog, that would have changed the outcome of the 2010 election.
• In 2010, why did the media miss digging into widespread rumors  about a story that would have made headlines showing why  Fuglvog in July, 2009  withdrew his quest to be the top administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) after pursuing the spot for only three and a half  months?  (Documents I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act after filing suit against NOAA show, for the first time, that contrary to Fuglvog’s reasons for withdrawing from the race (he claimed the process was taking too long)— he withdrew his quest for the leadership slot in the NMFS immediately after he learned NOAA obtained evidence that could have convicted him on federal offenses; namely, someone turned in his fishing log books showing he had lied repeatedly on official documents submitted to NOAA.)

Who or what organizations  pushed Fuglvog to seek the top NMFS job and how would they benefit if he took the helm?

Did NOAA botch or cover up  2007 complaints made about Fuglvog’s illegal commercial  fishing?

In 2011, why, after he publicly admitted to crimes,  did NOAA officials  stonewall on what and when they knew about his crimes.

In 2009  or afterwards, did NOAA exchange information with the White House, Senator Murkowski, or any other member of Congress and if not, why not? If NOAA exchanged information, did the White House, Senator Murkowski, or Congress take appropriate action to expose Fuglvog in 2009 or 2010? If not, why not?

The NOAA Oversight Project has and will uncover and  make public all the issues surrounding the Fuglvog Scandal, Catch Shares, and other national fisheries issues.

Six  years after NOAA was forced to pursue Fuglvog, after over a dozen FOIAs to NOAA (many still outstanding) and a law suite filed to compel production, I can start to answer some of these questions. You can come to this link on Tongass Low Down to find newly released information from NOAA or information a court orders NOAA to produce.

Before discussing the information I’ve obtained under FOIA from NOAA after long periods of time have passed, I want you to remember that the larger story involves the mainstream media was asleep at the wheel (or beholden to editors acting as gate keepers who have no appetite to dog a story that could jeopardize a sitting Alaska Senate seat).

This story arises in a federal agency in  disarray, subjected to  strong manipulation by US Senators and their lackeys within the agency, and so committed to promoting its Catch Shares Program (reducing fleet size as a way to manage fish catches and enrich the big boys) that its golden boy, Fuglvog, escaped prosecution for federal fisheries crimes he had committed for almost a decade. In the meantime, sold the program to policy makers and fishermen around the country.

On September 11th, 2015, I  posted a small but revealing part of the story— emails recently obtained from NOAA which show what NOAA did on August 4th, 2011, a few days after the US Attorney filed charges against Fuglvog.

Today on September 18th I am  adding the names of  Fuglvog’s supporters who sent  letters to the agency urging his appointment to the top job at the NMFS including the dates in 2009 when they did so.   These details that I am revealing have remained hidden in NOAA’s files, some for six years.
[Update September 18th, 2015. Today, NOAA released three FOIA Requests  I made near the start of the year. Documents were released about six weeks after I filed a lawsuit to get them and other FOIAs are still outstanding].

Background and Connections

In 2009, a clamor for Fuglvog to be prosecuted arose from among those who knew of his crimes and did not want him to be the head of the NMFS. Complaints to NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) began in May, 2009, but as well, and significantly, were also made  in 2007 when NOAA botched and buried investigations into the 2007 complaints. The 2009 complaints occurred around the same time that his supporters in the fishing industry and Congress were inundating  Jane Lubchenco, the new head of NOAA, with letters of recommendation to make him chief of the NMFS.

It is likely, Fuglvog who had no scientific background, was her first choice over a well regarded marine scientist, Professor Brian Rothschild. Many of my sources believe that the EDF which promoted Lubchenco’s career was a main force behind the push to make Fuglvog the administrator of our nation’s fishery research and resources.

In 2009, OLE itself was in hot water. Its Director, Dale Jones, would be caught by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) ordering  case files destroyed  while OIG investigated OLE. OLE, it appears, had totally botched the 2007 complaints against Fuglvog and some would say it covered them up. Two years latter n 2009 and sensing more inaction from OLE, the complainants contacted the FBI and the Inspector General.
By June, 2009 OLE agents in Alaska were conducting interviews concerning Fuglvog.

But over two years passed after 2009 before Fuglvog’s  prosecution became public and another half year elapsed before he went to jail. Meanwhile, he continued to work on fisheries issues while on Senator Lisa Murkowski’s staff, no news of his crimes leaked in 2010 to affect the tough reelection fight for the Alaska Senate seat, and NOAA escaped scrutiny for not prosecuting him for  years after the 2007 complaints were made.

Fuglvog did not get where he was because he was a ladies man or a nice guy— though he was both:
• Fuglvog was room mates with Alaska fisherman Bobby Thorstenson Jr. who supposedly inherited a lot of Icicle Seafood stock from his father, the founder of Icicle Seafoods.
• Fuglvog’s dad  held one of the largest blocks of stock in Icicle Seafoods.
• Fuglvog got appointed by Lisa Murkowski’s father, the Governor of Alaska,  to the North Pacific Management Council (NPFMC) which allocates  some of Alaska’s billion dollar a year stocks of  fish that are not salmon or herring.
• One of his votes on the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council was key to benefiting Icicle and a couple of other mega players in Alaska fisheries.
• Subsequently Icicle, which had been on the block for a long time, sold for about 80 million dollars, according to one of my sources.
• We’ll never know how much his votes raised the value of the company. He never disclosed to NOAA, nor was he required to disclose, his father’s interest in the company.
• His policy for promoting Catch Shares was in line with organizations funded by Sam Walton (the Wall Mart Sam) or Pew Trusts, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Eco Trust, and Sea • In 2008, EDF funded a seminar for members of the many regional Fishery Management Councils under NOAA by giving several hundred thousand dollars through Stanford University to the Woods Foundation. The latter two refuse to answer questions about the money which paid for Fishery Council Members to attend. A NOAA memo raised the question of whether bribery was involved. (I will examine this issue later).
• At the California event, Fuglvog, by then  Murkowski’s fisheries aide, conducted a day long explanation of Catch Shares that was the best attended of all the items on the agenda. Having passed his audition in California with flying colors, Fuglvog got a green light for his next career move—to take over NMFS.
• Lubchenco long favored The Aldo Leopold Leadership Project, while she was a long time EDF trustee, and it received $2.1 million in funding from the Packard Foundation of Palo Alto.
• After being confirmed by the Senate, in March, 2009, Lubchenco had to select a new leader for the NMFS. In April, Fuglvog applied for the job. She favored Fuglvog – who had no scientific background in fish management –  over an East Coast fisheries scientist of national stature, Dr Brian Rothschild, according to an inside source.

In May, 2009,Fuglvog  was on the brink of claiming the the NMFS prize position. Support peaked in late May just as  unfriendly forces were about to dash all his dreams, for as the Bard says, “false hope lingers in extremity.”

NOAA Stonewalled and Stalled 2007 Cover Up 2009 Political Cover

In 2007, NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) investigated and then dropped, some sources say covered up, several complaints about Fuglvog’s long standing illegal activities, but in 2009 when OLE again stalled a new investigation, the FBI, Inspector General, Congressmen, and finally the White House were contacted. Finally a vigorous investigation began in earnest.

Some political motives for stalling the investigation and stone-walling the release of information about his guilt for two years are obvious, others are obscure. Fuglvog was picked for the NMFS directorship for his skill in advocating for Catch Shares ⎯ an objective he shared with Jane Lubchenco ⎯ and also because, under Senator Murkowski,  he was a player in clearing the way for Shell Oil to drill in the Arctic.

Was NOAA’s stalling and lethargy in pursuing him politically motivated? A partial answer emerges by reviewing the sequence of political support he received during the spring of 2009.

• Fuglvog became a candidate for the NMFS directorship on April 9th, 2009 (weeks after the Senate confirmed Jane Lubchenco to be head of NOAA on March 19th). But no sooner did Fuglvog throw his hat in the ring than a former crewman complained to NOAA on April 27  about Fuglvog’s misdeeds as a fishing captain.

• April 9th,  letters of recommendation began pouring in from the EDF Senators, including Murkowski and Murray, and fishing companies

• May 6th David Benton of the Marine Conservation Alliance wrote a letter recommending Fuglvog addressed to Lubchenco (from # 80022772 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015 )

• May 8th Gregg Block, Wild Salmon Center, supported Fuglvog in his letter to Lubchenco (#80022849 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015 )

• May 8th, Ben Landry, Omega Protein, wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog  (#80022954 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015 )

• May 8th, Glen Brooks, Gulf Fisherman’s Association  wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog . (#80022957 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015 )

• May 11th,  Keith Criddle, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog ( # 80023002Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015 )

• May 11th, Shirley Marquardt, City of Unakleet, Alaska, wrote Lubchenco to support Fuglvog. ( # 80023003 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• May 18th,  CONGRESSIONAL Recommendations came from

▪ Representative Mike Thompson,

▪ President Bob Dickinson,

▪ Representatives Robert Wittman,

▪ Brian Baird,

▪ Chairman Don Young,

▪ Representative Frank LoBiondo,

▪ Co-Chair Representative Sam Farr,

▪ Representative Walter Jones,

▪ Representative Jay Inslee,

▪ Representative David Wu

(NOAA Congressional Correspondence Log #80023162, FOIA released September 18th, 2009

• May 18th,another letter of recommendation for Fuglvog arrived at NOAA signed by

▪ Senator Mel Martinez,

▪ Senator (Texas) Kay Bailey Hutchison,

▪ Chairman Mark Begich,

▪ Chair Senator Mary Landrieu,

▪ Senator Bill Nelson. (NOAA Congressional Correspondence Log # 80023163) FOIA released September 18th, 2009

• May 19th, Margaret Williams, World Wildlife Fund, wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog. ( #80023088 , Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• May 19th Ed Backus, EcoTrust,wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog. ( 80023092 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015 ) Page 7

• May 19th, Mark Vinsel and Joe Childers, United Fisherman of Alaska, wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog. ( 80023090 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• May, 19th TJ Tate, Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance, wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog.  (#80023080, Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015 )

• May 19th, Jack Stern Esq., and David Wilmon Ocean Champions  wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog. ( 80023081, Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• May 19th Kathy Hanson, Southeast Alaska Fisherman’s Association, wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog . ( 80023082, Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• May 19th, Don Giles, Icicle Seafoods,wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog . ( #80023084 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• May 19th, Dorthy Childers, Alaska Marine Conservation Council, wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog . ( #80023085 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• May 22nd, Dan Castle Southeast Seiners Association,wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog .  (#80022948 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• June 2nd, Chris Zimmer, Rivers without Borders, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog . (#80023303 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• June 3d, Julianne Curry, Petersburg Vessel Owners Association, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog.  (80023328 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• June 16th, Representative Dave Reichert, wrote Lubchenco to recommend Fuglvog. ( #80023519 80023328 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• July 9th, maybe the only one in Alaska’s fishing industry who did not now then know Fuglvog was being investigated, Alvin Birch, Alaska

Whitefish Trawlers Association, wrote Lubchenco to recommend  Fuglvog.  (#80023086 Lubchenco Correspondence Log FOIA release September 18th, 2015)

• Powerful forces at this point were backing Fuglvog for a variety of reasons, not least of which was  his  ability to sell national fish council members on the Catch Share concept of fish management— kinda like fencing in the range in the 1890s out West— demonstrated the year before at a retreat near Stanford University that was paid for with EDF money. Lubchenco, had been an EDF Board Member for ten years and a trustee https://www.edf.org/ news/environmental-defense-fund-honored-board-vice-chairreportedly-picked-noaa-administrator  https://www.edf.org/people/board-of-trustees

She has recently won EDF’s prestigious prize for her work on Catch Shares, while heading NOAA. https://www.edf.org/media/dr-janelubchenco-wins-tyler-prize-environmental-achievement ).

• On May 22nd, Lubchenco announced federal funding of almost $19 million to implement Catch Shares in New England. More importantly, she announced a National Catch Shares Task Force, comprised of many of NOAA’s top brass who, a year and half later, would be controlling information to the  press, Congress, and presumably the White House about Fuglvog’s criminal behavior.

• With his “friends” and, we believe, former wife, being interviewed in Alaska by OLE in June and July 2009 and a Grand Jury convened on July 21st.

• Fuglvog withdrew his name for consideration to be head of the NMFS on the last day of July, the day after he discovered someone had confiscated his vessel fish log. He knew his goose was cooked. So did NOAA.

• Months later, in December  2009, during his first interview with NOAA, Fuglvog admitted it was “common” practice to make misrepresentations in his log book.

• Between the July 2009 Grand Jury, when much evidence against Fuglvog was aired, and August, 2011 the public did not know of Fuglog’s guilt— though there were rumors aplenty in Alaska. Meanwhile, Fuglvog, though his dream took flight,  was scot free for two more years to advocate for Catch Shares, while still an aide to a powerful US Senator. Until of course…

The Fish Hits the Fan 2011

The following is but a sample of what you can expect to read about the Fuglvog Scandal and how it was integral to the Catch Share push from NOAA. To throw the cold light of truth onto this story, I  posted emails from high level managers in NOAA after the Fuglvog story broke which I obtained from NOAA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) after I had to file suit to get them.  (NOAA had 20 days to comply, it took them about eight months to produce. Some of my requests for information have languished for years).

On August 4th, 2011, Politico’s August 2nd headline read:,  Former Murkowski Aide Arne Fuglvog Admits To Breaking Fishing Laws

The following is but a sample of what you can expect to read about the Fuglvog Scandal and how it was integral to the Catch Share push from NOAA. To throw the cold light of truth onto this story, I  posted emails from high level managers in NOAA after the Fuglvog story broke which I obtained from NOAA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) after I had to file suit to get them.  (NOAA had 20 days to comply, it took them about eight months to produce. Some of my requests for information have languished for years).

On August 4th, 2011, Politico’s August 2nd headline read:,

Former Murkowski Aide Arne Fuglvog Admits To Breaking Fishing Laws !

Politico failed to ask the obvious question. What did NOAA know and when did they know it? Instead, Politico’s story downgraded the crime, calling it a misdemeanor, even though Fuglvog had agreed to pay $150,000 and go to jail for ten months. At a subsequent hearing, more facts became public. Fuglvog had broken the law multiple times but was being charged with only one instance. Because he was caught red handed, he copped a plea in exchanged for shorter jail time and a smaller fine and agreed to testify against others. Others had been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and required forfeiture of million dollar boats.
Politico made no mention of OLE’s Chief who ordered case files shredded, as revealed in a 2010 report by the Office of Inspector General. I have an outstanding FOIA to investigate if Fuglvog’s files were shredded. I was informed that after the Inspector General investigated OLE for this outrageous conduct, the computer containing information relevant to my FOIA request crashed. Sound familiar?
Still, NOAA was getting phone calls from reporters who were curious to know why a misdemeanor deserved a 150 grand fine and they caused NOAA’s upper management to scramble.
It is not yet clear if this apparent born again concern by upper management as reflected in the following emails was a ruse to conceal prior knowledge of the investigations or only decision making on what to release to the press. It is clear DC was controlling the flow of information carefully. Nor is it yet clear which members of the upper management team had  knowledge prior to August 4th. I have yet to get a full Response including all Lubchenco’s emails. I do have a document and sources have confirmed that in June of 2009 she was made aware about  allegations against Fuglvog. It is inconceivable that others on the email list of August 4th were ignorant of Fuglvog’s prior acts.

Here’s the  sequence of events that followed the filing of charges against Fuglvog:

• On August 1st, 2011, the US Attorney in Anchorage filed charges against Fuglvog and entered his plea deal into the record.

• August 2nd, Senator Murkowski issued a news release announcing his guilt and his resignation from her staff. It was the talk of Washington and fishing communities which were shocked, simply shocked–except those who knew all along.

• August 4th, back at NOAA headquarters where all the facts were becoming known ( some facts were not already known by Lubchenco), frenzied exchanges that occurred between alarmed officials, keeping Lubchenco out of the loop,, belie the “misdemeanor” story-line Politico was pushing.

Politico failed to ask the obvious question. What did NOAA know and when did they know it? Instead, Politico’s story downgraded the crime, calling it a misdemeanor, even though Fuglvog had agreed to pay $150,000 and go to jail for ten months. At a subsequent hearing, more facts became public. Fuglvog had broken the law multiple times but was being charged with only one instance.

Because he was caught red handed, he copped a plea in exchanged for shorter jail time and a smaller fine and agreed to testify against others. Others had been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and required forfeiture of million dollar boats.

Politico made no mention of OLE’s Chief who ordered case files shredded, as revealed in a 2010 report by the Office of Inspector General. I have an outstanding FOIA to investigate if Fuglvog’s files were shredded. I was informed that after the Inspector General investigated OLE for this outrageous conduct, the computer containing information relevant to my FOIA request crashed. Sound familiar?

Still, NOAA was getting phone calls from reporters who were curious to know why a misdemeanor deserved a 150 grand fine and they caused NOAA’s upper management to scramble.

It is not yet clear if this apparent born again concern by upper management as reflected in the following emails was a ruse to conceal prior knowledge of the investigations or only decision making on what to release to the press. It is clear DC was controlling the flow of information carefully. Nor is it yet clear which members of the upper management team had  knowledge prior to August 4th. I have yet to get a full Response including all Lubchenco’s emails. I do have a document and sources have confirmed that in June of 2009 she was made aware about  allegations against Fuglvog. It is inconceivable that others on the email list of August 4th were ignorant of Fuglvog’s prior acts.

Here’s the  sequence of events that followed the filing of charges against Fuglvog:

• On August 1st, 2011, the US Attorney in Anchorage filed charges against Fuglvog and entered his plea deal into the record.

• August 2nd, Senator Murkowski issued a news release announcing his guilt and his resignation from her staff. It was the talk of Washington and fishing communities which were shocked, simply shocked–except those who knew all along.

• August 4th, back at NOAA headquarters where all the facts were becoming known ( some facts were not already known by Lubchenco), frenzied exchanges that occurred between alarmed officials, keeping Lubchenco out of the loop,, belie the “misdemeanor” story-line Politico was pushing.

• August 5th, Murkowski announced though her Press Secretary, that she knew in late June of the plea deal. She knew he faced some violation, she claimed, back in December, 2010 ⎯ right after  her reelection. (We are researching to discover if the delay in Fuglvog’s firing qualified him for a pension from the Senate.)

The cast of Lubchenco’s top NOAA management team on August 4th, engaged in media containment included the following:

• Monica Medina, Principal Deputy Undersecretary for Oceans and Atmosphere of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration She led the Catch Share Task Force that Lubchenco announced in May and appointed in June 2009.   Her husband, Ron Klaine, was the Ebola Czar, who led the recount effort in Florida for Al Gore. He’s closely connected to the White House through Joe Biden.

• Lois J. Schiffer, NOAA General Counsel

• Margaret Spring, Chief of Staff, who is now with the Monterey Bay Aquarium near Palo Alto.

• John Oliver Deputy Assistant Administrator for Operations, NOAA’s Fisheries Service. He is also the Executive Director of the NPFMC He was a member of the Catch Share Task Force. He found the Office of Law Enforcement’s Dale Jones was blameless in 2006 even though an Inspector Generals Report four years latter found the head of OLE shredded case files for four hours while under investigation by the IG. NOAA has not yet turned over documents showing if Jones shred Fuglvog’s case files http://www.savingseafood.org/news/enforcement/nmfs-dep-admn-john-oliver-and-ex-admnhogarth-knew-of-ole-complaints-four-years-ago/

• John Gray, Director of Legislative Affairs

• Samuel Rauch, Fisheries Acting Assistant Administrator, now head. was the author of a 2010 policy paper distributed to all the      national fisheries councils called, “NOAA’s Catch Share Policy under Development” (2010)calling for 15 fisheries limited by 2011 and 31 in coming years. http://www.fisherycouncils.org/SSCpapers/ Catchshares abstract.pdf He administered national fisheries management councils and Fuglvog had sat on the NPFMC. He is a key player in catch shares within the agency. He was a member of the Catch Share Task Force

• Alan Risenhoover, Office of Sustainable Fisheries, was the author of a 2010 policy paper distributed to all the national fisheries councils called, “NOAA’s Catch Share Policy under Development” (2010), calling for 15 fisheries to be limited by 2011 and 31 more in coming years. http:// www.fisherycouncils.org/SSCpapers/Catchshares abstract.pdf He administered national fisheries management councils and Fuglvog had sat on the NPFMC. He is a key player in catch shares within the agency. He was a member of the Catch Share Task Force

• Justin Kenney Director, NOAA Office of Communications & External Affairs. He was an ex officio member of the Catch Share Task Force • Amanda Hallberg Office of Legislative Affairs and former Congressional Staffer

On August 4th, 2011 between noon and 4:30, a string of emails went out between the individuals on the above list under the subject head: CONFIDENTIAL FUGLVOG CASE.
The flow initially— from the limited records I obtained so far— went to John Oliver, a much over looked play maker, to Monica Medina, Lubchenco’s right hand gal whose husband was a key Biden and Gore player.
It is not clear if the first email was sent by Risenhoover prior to 12:08, since the content of that message was not provided to me and the sender is deleted, but the 12:08 email appears to have been sent to John Oliver who managed the day to day of NOAA. Oliver appears to have gotten “info” from Risenhoover.

Twenty minutes after Oliver got the “info,” Medina forwarded “very sensitive” materials to the following: • Schiffer, the General Council • Samuel Rauch, Fisheries Acting Assistant Administrator • Justin Kenney, Director of NOAA’s Office of Communications & External Affairs. • Amanda Hallberg, Office of Legislative Affairs and former Congressional Staffer • Justin Kenney, Director of NOAA’s Office of Communications & External Affairs
See the 2:23PM email below:

By about an hour and a half later, it became clear the information sent was “confidential,” because Rausch told the legislative affairs officer Halberg and the others it was so:

What was the confidential information? Why would someone in fisheries be the one to determine political and legal information was confidential?
NOAA’s FOIA Response did not include any of the “info” alluded to, several years after Fuglvog got of jail. NOAA may or may not provide it in the coming weeks. So who is NOAA protecting in 2015 by so far withholding this “info” and will a judge order them to release it? The facts suggest NOAA is stonewalling to protect itself from the prying eyes of the pesky public.

Did the “info” include the results of the criminal investigation or did the Management Team already know about that? Did the details inform them when and to what extent the agency knew Fuglvog was committing crimes say back to 2002? Did the “info” include facts showing Murkowski knew about Fuglvog long before she said she did? Did the White House know and do nothing? Was the 2009 email to Lubcheco about Fuglvog part of the “info” packet? Did other people in Congress know? All inferences can be drawn from a stonewalling agency.

While that exchange about “info” obtained about Fuglvog from John Oliver or the NPFMC was taking place, another exchange was occurring about him between Lubchenco’s Chief of Staff and Lois Schiffer, the General Counsel.

But the instruction goes far beyond the letters of recommendation for Fuglvog from US Senators et. al. that are on file. The following emails reflect the team’s “info” was everything  NOAA knew about Fuglvog.

The Counsel General of NOAA herself, Schiffer,  recommended stonewalling about what NOAA knew.

Ms. Schiffer’s instruction to the publicity officer, Kinney, and the Chief of Staff, Spring,  is most disturbing. Schiffer wrote that when talking to the press:

“I  WOULDN’T ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT WE KNEW OR DIDN’T KNOW [ABOUT FUGLVOG’S ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES]”.
(Email Schiffer to Spring et al 3:36PM EST):

After five years of effort using FOIA and the courts, NOAA has still not revealed all of what it knew or didn’t know and when it knew it. For if it did know Fuglvog was cheating between 2007 (when complaints were made to OLE) and 2011 when news broke of the prosecution, it was going to look like NOAA had held back information that could have changed the course of the 2010 election for

Senator in Alaska as well as added weight to the criticism Congress was making that OLE needed major reforms. Why would Lubchneco welcome that kind of news? Why would the White House be happy that its new appointee was in deep muck soon after Senate confirmation.

Burying a National Story

If NOAA had informed the public about the investigations it conducted on Fuglvog up through 2009—as I had requested before the 2010 vote—instead of dealing until  until January of the next year), the outcome for Alaska’s US Senate Race almost certainly would have been different that year.

For between July, 2009 and November, 2010, NOAA was sitting on enough evidence to throw the book at this aide to Senator Murkowski, including evidence presented to the 2009 Grand Jury and his own 2009 admission, for which he would later serve time in federal jail.

This is but a sampling of what you can expect to read about the Fuglvog Scandal and how it was integral to the catch share push from NOAA, a story essentially and potentially affecting tens of thousands of lives in fishing communities around the country ⎯ and the 2010 Senatorial campaign in Alaska.

It is a complicated story, one that any one of the national outlets could have explored had their budgets not been slashed, their reporters demoralised, and their editors cowered, as Sharyl Attkisson has recently shown in Stone Walled (2014).

Instead, except for a few right wing web sites, and one thorough story by Libby Casey in Alaska,  the story got buried. A few reporters had their FOIAs delayed or incompletely answered and then they were on to hotter topics. After all, Mitch McConnell’s gal won the Senate Race.
Page 18

Absent a vigilant press, I hope to unwind more of this story if NOAA produces more information requested under the FOIA and the Federal Court System. Stay tuned.
This material is copyrighted @ 2015 by Alan Stein. None of it may be reproduced in any form, in or on any platform or publication without permission which can be obtained by contacting this web site.

P.S. NOAA has still not released over 13,000 pages of the investigative files I requested years ago and to which I am entitled to under the FOIA. NOAA has turned over some interviews of witnesses, a few of which will be published for the first time on these pages.