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Mea Culpas Will Not Cut It

‘Cautiously optimistic’ is the way one lawyer close to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) enforcement case described his feelings regarding the agency’s recently expressed intention to reform itself. Others might be as optimistic if this were an individual on the way to rehab, rather than a bureaucratic behemoth under the Commerce Department which is so clearly hardwired to Congress and all that can mean.

Decades of politicking in fisheries management, unleashing goons on fishermen and businesses, shredding documentation of illegal and unethical acts in a 2006 showdown, a U.S. District judge making official the agency’s guilt and calling for their action in April 2011, ended with four Massachusetts US Senators having to demand that the Secretary of Commerce demand that NOAA stop stalling on the that judge’s order.

The best NOAA could come up with was a sloppily thrown-together last-minute meeting with eight fishermen in Gloucester, a half-baked mandatory apology and remittances of pennies on the dollar.

Most everyone in the industry wants to move on to something better. But after the 5-year legal struggle New England fishermen have been through in this case, to end up with this as a settlement, cautious optimism is going out on a limb for many.

Granted government bureaucracy is government bureaucracy. Further proof of this, not that any civilian needs any, is in revelations about the Army Corps of Engineers’ doomed-to-fail levee system in New Orleans. For years, internal critics were shipped out to Siberia or literally declared enemies of the government. In rolls Katrina, what is now known to have been a category 1 (one) storm and undermines the levees. It is now believed that inadequate levees, and the bureaucracy that aggressively hid those inadequacies, flooded the city.

Close ranks, cover asses, declare enemies, secure retirements. But the federal government is running fisheries management. Maybe how it manages can be modified. Changing the nature of bureaucracy is a much larger problem. Today, changing who National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), NOAA and the Department of Commerce manage fisheries for is more important.

Consolidation, commodification, and expropriation is the mantra of the modern international corporate model. Agriculture, finance, and real estate are recent examples and the down side for the non-principals is clear. Real commons resource management for real fishermen is the kind of reform of agenda NOAA needs. Mea culpas and token gestures will not cut it.