FROM THE CROWE’S NEST

Time Is Not Money

The New England Fisheries Management Council has finally wrestled into place a management plan that replaces in part, the failed and dispised days at sea scheme.

Apart from those who remain on the days-at-sea plan, the common pool, fishermen will now be operating in a sector system. Unlike the days-at-sea system that is based on time, where fishermen are allotted so many days to fish, the sector plan is based on allowable catch, or pounds of fish.

Time at sea is not quantifiable in dollars, pounds of fish are. That is the problem for fishermen, and the solution for Wall Street. Fishermen have long feared being driven out of the business. Now that fear is more real, as news that the people who brought the economy crashing down around us last year, have had their eye on the fishing industry.

Financial managers can own the fish before their caught by owning the permits required to catch them. Why didn’t they think of this before? They did, but they had to first find a way to privatize what has always been public property, the ocean commons.

President Richard Nixon, for a fee, gave our non-profit hospital system to the insurance corporations. Automobile corporations paid congress to trash public (common) transportation. Senator Phil Graham, for a fee, got1930’s financial regulations tossed for the white collar criminals. Bush, W, pushed for privatization of the ocean. Whose country is this?

After a dozen generations there must be several million citizens with American Re- volutionary roots, roots back to a13-year effort where tens of thousands of families supported, and thousands fought and died to free themselves from corporate greed, and government corruption. Corruption that used the British government as a weapon against it’s people in the colonies.

Add to this the millions who have since come here from a place where privilege, and corruption also ruled. All these Americans, and a handful of Wall Street nobles -what to do?

Fishermen have said from the beginning that NMFS policies made no sense. They were right. It made no sense because they were delivered by the forked tongues of NMFS on one hand, with its consolidation agenda from on high, and the financial wolves in Muir suits, drooling over privatization, on the other.

Time may not be money, but it is time to let congress boldly know on which side it’s ballots are buttered.