Yes, out to destroy every industry we have left..that is what it is all about. Back in March, we posted: Obama readies executive orders on fishing and energy— so oil and fishing were in his sights long before the oil spill.
Jane Lubchenco, career environmental activist and author of a cap-and-trade plan for America’s fisheries, is the most controversial director ever to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In July, two Massachusetts Democratic congressmen, Barney Frank and John Tierney, called for Lubchenco to resign or be fired, not only for her treacherous hostility toward the American fishing industry, but also for harboring a culture of corrupt law enforcement agents that treated fishermen as criminals and systematically sped the culling of the fleet.
In New England alone, the commercial fishing industry includes more than 35,000 fishermen and boat operators, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. New Bedford, Mass., is the most active of 88 ports listed by NOAA as part of the industry, which caught an estimated $2.9 billion worth of fish in 2009
The lawmakers were furious at what Commerce Department Inspector General Todd Zinser revealed in a July 1 memo to Lubchenco — a $96 million “Asset Forfeiture Fund,” an account NOAA officers built from enormous fishing fines far out of proportion to the violations.
The fund was being handled like a slush fund to buy 202 vehicles for 172 officers, a $300,000 luxury “undercover” yacht (Lubchenco may not have known about this purchase), and a $109,000 trip to Norway for 15 agents to attend the weeklong Global Fisheries Enforcement Training Workshop, among 83 pages of other irregularities.
Lubchenco first came to Washington in 1997 as a board member of the Environmental Defense Fund (2008 income: $112 million), which has been the vanguard for a radical restructuring of the fishing industry, converting the ocean commons into commodities that EDF named “catch shares.”
That’s not “shares” as in splitting up the catch equitably, it’s “shares” as in paper permits for a preset catch, doled out to fishermen by the government in dribbles designed, according to Lubchenco, to remove “a significant fraction” of the industry’s operators.
A fisherman could sell or rent his shares to somebody seeking a bigger catch, but every geographical area and species has a government-mandated cap called a Total Allowable Catch that can’t be exceeded. Each catch share is a percentage of the Total Allowable Catch.
Read our earlier post: New England fishermen flotilla protest over Fed Regs
BUNKERVILLE | God, Guns and Guts Comrades! 