My View
Thank God for democracy.
We do not need to run to the streets to enforce fairness and justice. We issue an appeal to Congress; and we keep aware that the Congress of the United States is quite busy. It will listen, not to personal, but to popular demands. Hence my plea.
This is an appeal to the public to petition Congress to change an unjust and inefficient law, the Magnuson Law, formally known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. This law has surreptitiously become the Fisherman's Destroyer Act. This law must be changed.
Thanks to the relentless efforts of the Gloucester Daily Times and its dedicated staff in the reporting and editorial departments, very few people need to be told again the gory details of the arbitrariness and strong-arm tactics in the enforcement of this law by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Coast Guard. Cumulative evidence is available at www.gloucestertimes.com/fishing.
Any law that permits horrendous enforcement tactics cannot be just.
The general call so far has been to change the enforcement measures of this law. It is becoming increasingly evident however that even if this effort is successful, it will not be sufficient to meet the needs of the fisheries; we need to change the rules themselves.
We need to change the rules because the law is neither just nor efficient.
Implicitly, the need for change has been admitted by the same forces that enforce this unjust law, namely the administrators at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).
After 20 years of inflicting the most unconscionable hardship on the fishermen, they have recognized that it is necessary to change course. Yet, the change is for more of the same.
Rather than constraining individual fishermen, the bandwagon now is to fashion together fishermen into groups called "sectors." This is a bureaucratic change in the way the law is administered. Operating under the same rules, the sectors are going to obtain the same, if not worse, results.
One can expect that the sectors will shrink the pool of independent fishermen and fishing jobs; one can expect they will shrink the amount of catch landed — with no effect on discards; one can expect that imports of fish will increase and our nation will plunge into greater debt with foreigners.
Why? Because, to use a locally developed idiom, when a bus led by mad scientists is going toward the abyss, it does not matter if you are in front of the bus or inside the bus. You shall perish.
The drivers cannot be described as other than mad scientists. It is not only the linear science to which theory clings that is wrong; it is even the application of their linear science that is wrong.
Who can forget the "Trawl-gate?" Was that comedy of errors an individual case? No. The error is systemic. Much data is gathered through surveys — surveys! — on the immense deep ocean of fishermen trying to catch fish that are in constant movement depending on the time of the year, the currents, the water temperature, and an infinity of other moveable factors.
To the Trawl-gate disaster one must now add "Data-gate." Patricia Kurkul, regional administrator of NMFS, has openly admitted that "given the amount of data we receive and process each year, currently exceeding 1 million records, errors do occur on both the reporting side by the fishing industry and on processing the reports submitted."
These are the scientists who are driving the bus of unconscionable regulations restrictions of the fishing effort! And what is the direction of their proclaimed destination?
Their direction is the abyss of the ideology of privatization.
The New England Fishery Management Council, openly goaded by NOAA and a coalition of environmentalists, is privatizing the fisheries — the last commons on earth.
Astonishingly, the ideology of privatization of the commons has nothing to do with private ownership of property. It is its direct opposite.
Privatization of the commons through outright sale, through licenses, or through catch shares is government thievery that does not result in private property but in state monopolism, otherwise called socialism and Communism. And that explains the enforcement tactics.
When Dr. Jane Lubchenco, chief NOAA administrator, offers to spend millions of dollars to manage the sectors, she is not proposing to use her own money. She is not even proposing to use private fishing industry money.
For the implementation of this ideology, she is blatantly apportioning taxpayers' money, the pool of common financial resources that ought to be used to benefit all the members of the community, to set instead one group of fishermen against the other: the sectors — the little monopolies — exploiting the common pool of natural resources versus the "cesspool" of disorganized individual free Americans.
This reorganization is in process. Before we reach its bitter end, let us change the preamble of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. This law will have to be restructured in such a way as to favor, rather than destroy, the family fishing operation. The family fishing operation is private enterprise at its best.
The survival of the family fishing boat, just like the survival of the family farm, is the last best hope for the preservation of the polis, the preservation of community.
Please, go to www.Care2.com; search for Magnuson Act; find "A Petition to Amend Magnuson-Stevens Act"; study the evidence provided there; sign the petition to change this law; invite your friends and relatives to join you in this act of recovery of sanity, and freedom, and justice.
As Louis D. Brandeis would say, let us strike a blow for the living law; indeed, as the prophet Elijah might say, let us be transfigured into the likeness of the living God of justice and peace.
Excluded from their traditional fishing grounds, Somali fishermen have transformed themselves into pirates on the high seas.
Carmine Gorga, PhD, is president of Polis-tics Inc., based on Middle Street, Gloucester. His latest book is "To My Polis, With Love: May Gloucester Show the World the Ways of Frugality.
