Fishery Fascism Under Schwarzenegger's MLPA Process

Right now, if you go out on a boat anywhere on the North Coast and catch a fish for your table, out of an ocean that is teeming with life, you will be arrested. And now, due to mass hysteria and total misinformation, you are being brainwashed into giving away the ocean - permanently - to corporate interests, who will industrialize the once pure natural resource you are unwittingly turning over to them.


So, what do we have? All the makings of a comic opera. We have three privileged teenaged Mendocino high school students, under the tutelage of their stern, thin-lipped proctor-like high school instructors, advising a team of college educated scientists - the "SAT" - who for the most part have never gotten their hands dirty with any kind of real work like commercial fishing -- who will then be advising a "Blue Ribbon Task Force," comprised mostly of hand picked representatives of big money special interests.

These special interests will seek to develop and industrialize our coast in what will be their newly privatized "ocean protected zones." This corrupt group - the BRTF - will then be sending their recommendations to the California Fish and Game Commission -- comprised of good old boy duck hunters.

This tiny group are same white males who have have over the years so grossly mismanaged the resources of our ocean that now, a local person living on the ocean can no longer go out and catch a fish! They have purposefully destroyed the California fishing industry to the point that it now no longer even exists. This corrupt commission will then make the ultimate decision on how much of the ocean will be taken away forever. The public trust - our ocean - will be turned over to private corporate interests.

The MLPAI will spell the doom of an already endangered species -- the Californicus Fisherendus - those elusive creatures once known as a California fisherfolk - the people who know and love the ocean from long firsthand experience, and who are not being adequately consulted in this outrageously unwise and unjust give-away. And the real perils to the ocean - pollution, acidification and global warming - are not even being addressed. In fact, we are so cowed as a public we are not even able to call global warming what it is, as the rest of world discusses the fate of the planet in Copenhagen. No, here in fascist America you must call it "climate change." Talk about denial.

The MLPAI, funded and financed by the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, will soon take control of what was once our legacy -- the ability to feed ourselves from the ocean. As economic conditions worsen, as the ocean rises to take back the land from our stupid, greedy, consumptive culture, those remaining will look out in dismay at a food filled resource they are unable to touch, starving in the face of fascism, as they watch the oil derrick's, wave and wind energy machines, and fish farms fill the sea that was once theirs.

The sea, and the food she provided will be will be lost and poisoned forever. This is the legacy that this corrupt foundation is buying, in this underhanded and illegal takeover of our ocean. And we are not only letting it happen, we are helping to make it happen - collaborating in our own demise - to lose forever our once public trust - the ocean.

Nice work, nice going and thanks a lot, suckers. The fabulously wealthy sponsors of the MLPAI will be laughing all the way to the bank, as they watch their oil stocks rise at the prospect of more drilling off California.

You will have stupidly gotten rid of ocean fishing and food harvesting in California. The price? The ocean itself.