Wait, let me get this straight.

An executive and a consultant of the Environmental Defense Fund — which was so instrumental in achieving the passage of the new catch shares system — appear before institutional and hedge fund managers to advise them to buy up the fishing permits to make 10 or 20 times their investment back?

So the wolves in the financial community can make a huge profit off the permits at the expense of the fishermen?

So, these lobby groups cajole and push catch shares into law, squeeze the fishermen almost to extinction, lower the price of the permits — and then hawk the permits to the sharkiest investors to make a killing when the catch limits rise? Does anyone else find that outrageous?

Environmental Defense Fund's David Festa — not to be confused with Fiesta, mind you — appears at the Michael Milken Institute Global Conference in late April in L.A. at the largest gathering of capital markets in America to urge them to dive in. (The Times, Tuesday, June 30).

"It's not telcom money, but it's real money," he said, sweet-talking the mutual and hedge fund managers, plus ENGO — environmental non-governmental organizations.

Wait a second, aren't these the same groups that lobbied the government to change the fishing laws with their cooked science and predictions that the oceans would be devoid of fish and left only to giant jellyfish by mid-century? Yes, and here they are now trying to profit from this new plan.

Is it any wonder that this travesty is unfolding at the Michael Milken Conference? Milken, you might recall, was the inventor of the junk bond in the 1970s and did time in jail for his high-profile crimes. He was the forerunner to Bernie Madoff in terms of sleight-of-hand financials and, like Bernie, he made off with dump trucks full of cash. So naturally his would be the poster boy conference to begin the final deconstruction of the fishing industry.

They will be milkin' somebody alright — that's their business. What I find unconscionable is that some of these Pew-led "do-gooder" groups have hammered the catch so low that the permit owners will take short money for permits that aren't worth much because they can't catch fish. Then these same groups attempt to engineer big money to snap up the permits for when the catch shares — which the "do-gooder's" influence — will rise.

Bang, their Big Money backers — like the Big Oil gang — make a windfall.

Will the Big Money winners then support the ENGOs with donations? Not unlike the railroad tactics of the 19th century where Big Money could drive down the land prices, snap it up, then bring in the railroad and make the land valuable. Or perhaps more accurately where a developer can drive down the value of a neighborhood by neglect of its properties, or worse, by lobbying government policy, only to buy the neighbors out cheap and then build luxury housing in five years.

Consider these comments of Gloucester's own Vito Giacolone:

"The process of inviting capital into the market always begins with artificially depressing the price. It's a conversion to share-cropping. It sets up a Wall Street approach. Now you handicap the product in the marketplace because people are skimming and renting a public resource. This is being orchestrated by people at the highest level of government and business."

Obviously. Festa explained to the investors at the Milken Conference that the plan to create catch shares and open the door for outside capitalization has been long-standing. " The Bush administration were good allies of ours. It laid the groundwork for us." Hey, birds of a feather flock together.

This is a huge story. Remember, folks, that the Sun Oil-financed Pew Trusts are behind so many of the efforts to squeeze out the family fishermen,

Now, apparently, they are seeking to make Big Money America the owners of the allowable catch, once it has risen back up again.

Is this not a macro-sized conflict of interest? Can our city's fleet ever hold out against the bad market to hold on to its permits?

The bad guys are controlling the quotas and pitching the possible permit buyers. Gloucester is being squeezed in a vise between government and business.

Between the Bush Gang and Lubchenko, with friends like these, who needs Bernie Madoff?

Gloucester resident Gordon Baird is founder of Billboard's Musician Magazine and producer of the "Gloucester Chicken Shack" cable-access TV show.