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JUNE 17, 2012 |
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I'm Fishing For
Freedom Across America |
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Today's guest: Chris McCaffity |
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SHOW APPEARANCES:
JUNE 19, 2011
NOVEMBER 20, 2011
JUNE 17,
2012 |
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Today's guest: Chris McCaffity |
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CHRIS MCCAFFITY |
I will be traveling the Country this year giving speeches, doing
interviews, and talking with anyone who will listen about America's
fisheries. My wife and I recently returned from a trip to California
where fishermen told me stories that sounded very similar to what we
are facing on the east coast. The fishery bureaucrats are attacking
one small group of fishermen at a time while denying consumers
access to American seafood. We need to unite our efforts and get
consumers to support a responsible harvest of this great Nation's
seafood by independent fishermen. |
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Chris visited Redding recently
and gave a speech to our 24 Hour Patriot audience.
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About McCaffity's
trip across America |
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Here is a summary of what my wife and I were blessed to see on the
trip cross country. |
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We saw colorful century old fishing boats with seasoned crews of old
salts along coastal California. We saw Sea Lions and Elephant Seals
sunning on rocky beaches with patches of sea fog obscuring the
bright blue sky. We saw the results of last year's tsunami that
unleashed its awesome power on Crescent City. We saw velvet antlered
Elk grazing among the majestic Redwoods. We saw winding mountain
roads with dark lighting storms in the distance as the setting sun
lit up the landscape with brilliant light. We saw California
mountain summits covered with freshly fallen snow in June. We saw
the salt flats in Nevada where an ancient ocean once flooded the
barren landscape. We saw graceful Antelope in Wyoming with their
young fawns. We saw fertile fields of grain and corn through the
heartland of Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. We saw the mighty
Mississippi River rushing south as we traveled east. We saw the lush
Appalachian Mountains rise from flat lands to peaks with every hue
of green blending seamlessly. We finally arrived on the east coast
at Baltimore Harbor where Francis Scott Key wrote our beautiful
National Anthem as he watched Old Glory flying high over Fort
McHenry during the war of 1812. God Bless America. |
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Here are a few links to songs that our trip reminded me of.
Louis Armstrong What A Wonderful World
America, the Beautiful
Star Spangled Banner Whitney Houston
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Common
Sense Solutions |
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This will explain some unintended consequences of what I hope are
well intentioned laws. I will give you a brief summary of what is
happening and offer some common sense solutions. Please keep an open
heart and mind as you read this. I love the sea and have decades of
on the water experience to offer. We should all have a common goal
of healthy and sustainable fisheries that can be responsibly
harvested indefinitely. We can reach the same end goal without all
of the unintended consequences that waste our resources, hurt our
families, destroy our businesses, and take our freedom. Commercial
fishermen are not numbers in some bureaucratic equation. We are real
people with families that depend on our income and care about our
safety at sea. We are powerless to stop the pain and suffering that
the mismanagement of our fisheries causes our loved ones. Commercial
fishermen are a minority group without the money, power, or numbers
to defend ourselves against the multi-billion dollar bureaucracies
that rule us with an iron fist and the full weight of the federal
government behind them. The bureaucrats get a gang mentality and
will collectively do terrible things to their fellow man. Things
that they would never dream of doing individually. We are their
fellow Americans and deserve to be treated like they would want us
to treat them if the roles were reversed. The whole world would be a
better place if everyone just followed the Golden Rule. |
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The reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) contains hard
deadlines and other well intentioned mandates that groups like Pew,
EDF, and Oceana lobbied Congress to include in it. The MSA is the
law that dictates how America's fisheries are managed. Hard
deadlines require the use of the Best Available Data (BAD) to
quickly do stock assessments. They have changed BAD to Best
Available Science (BAS). Now they can make up whatever they want and
that IS the BAS. I also think they did not like that people could
use BAD like this. The rushed BAD assessments show that the South
Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) and the National Marine
Fisheries Service (NMFS) have grossly mismanaged many of our fish
stocks to the point of collapse for decades. We have had no choice
but to follow their laws under threat of fines, seizures,and
imprisonment. We pay the price for our obedience with our blood,
treasure, and liberty. The bureaucratic incompetence is rewarded
with more money and power. The BAD assessments have led to
unreasonably low quotas that the SAFMC and NMFS refuse to wisely
manage with Trip Poundage Limits (TPLs). This creates derby
fisheries that require fishermen to stay at sea longer and in worse
weather to make enough money to survive during the closures that
will come when the quotas are met. We are forced by law to discard
the illegal fish during the closures even though many of them will
die slowly from stress, infection, and decompression damage. We then
have to stay longer and in worse weather to catch enough legal fish
to pay the bills. This is a waste of our resources and drastically
cuts our income. It also takes your freedom to access those illegal
fish. The void is filled with cheap imported seafood of questionable
quality. The market for our safe American seafood is greatly
diminished because there is not a dependable supply of it. Consumers
get used to the cheap imported seafood and this drives down demand
and prices for our local supply when it is available. This creates a
vicious cycle that will continue to get worse until the quotas are
wisely managed with TPLs. |
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I have pointed out some of the problems and these are my common
sense solutions that would follow all of the mandates in the
Magnuson-Stevens Act. The SAFMC has told me that the only mandate
they had to follow was the one to end overfishing. I asked them how
we were supposed to safely survive the rebuilding process if they
would not follow the mandates to limit By Catch, make efficient use
of the resource, and promote our safety at sea. They told me this in
their usual cold, arrogant, and condescending way. "THAT IS NOT OUR
CONCERN." |
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- All size limits
should be removed. We should not discard countless fish to die
and be wasted because they have not lived long enough to reach
some arbitrary size. We should make wise use of every fish
landed and count everything against the quota. The removal of
size limits along with TPLs would almost eliminate regulatory
discards.
- All targeted species
should have annual quotas. The existing quotas could be
increased by about a third if size limits were removed and we
stopped discarding tons of seafood every year.
- Trip Poundage Limits
should be used to manage every fish with a quota. The TPLs
should be set high for the first %75 of the quota and adjusted
to a level that will fill it without any long closures for the
remaining %25 of the quota. Some fish also need split seasons.
This would almost eliminate by catch, give you access to a
dependable supply of local seafood, and allow fishermen to
survive the rebuilding process in a safer way.
- Artificial Reefs
could be a long term solution that would be the perfect union of
aquaculture and commercially caught wild fish. We could greatly
increase the total biomass the US South Atlantic could support.
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This simple plan could allow
us to responsibly harvest America's seafood and support our families
by providing you with access to it. We could show other Nations by
example how you can wisely manage fisheries in a way that preserves
their heritage and way of life while making it easier and safer for
them. You can contact me at freefish7@hotmail.com if you have any
questions. Thank you for your time and support. |
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This is a link to a radio interview that I did
about fishery issues. |
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This video shows why we need a dependable
supply of safe American seafood. |
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This is a great song and video by a fellow
fisherman from Australia facing similar fishery mismanagement.
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This is an article about the
Environmental Defense Fund and catch shares. It is well written and
worth reading. Here come catch shares: |
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How NOAA and the Environmental Defense Fund
plan to destroy North Carolina’s working watermen
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This is a wonderful article about catch shares
in the American Thinker. |
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Rep. Barney Frank supports
commercial fishermen and seafood consumers.
Please read this op-ed and related article. |
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This best version of the Star Spangled Banner
I have ever heard. Whitney peaked with the bombs bursting in air. |
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Here are a couple of links to
information about Agenda 21. That is a plan that politicians and
environmentalist from around the globe came up with at the Earth
Summit back in the early 1990's. It contains guidelines for
governments to control land use, energy production, fisheries, and
almost every aspect of of our lives. It sounds like a conspiracy
because it is! |
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The Wizardry Behind Fishery Management |
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UN Agenda 21 - Coming to a Neighborhood near
You |
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Please consider donating a few
bucks to help me continue fighting for our freedom to fish and eat
safe American seafood. |
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www.FreeFish7.com
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Websites and
material mentioned on
today's program: |
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www.FreeFish7.com |
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