Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is imposing strict fishing limits, even where there is little or no evidence of an overfishing problem. Its controversial catch-shares program is destroying jobs in such fishing communities as Gloucester and New Bedford in Massachusetts, both of which are challenging the program's legality in federal court.
And the White House's new Ocean Policy Initiative would place more burdens on a US fishing industry that is already heavily regulated. Bonner Cohen, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, fears that this scheme "circumvents existing state and local decision-making bodies and replaces them with made-in-Washington zoning with the power to declare areas off limits to fishing."
There's a common thread among these and other beleaguered occupations: Environmentalists hate them. Green absolutists would be happy to see no oil or coal taken out of the ground or fish out of the sea and as many factories dismantled as possible, without any regard for the impact on jobs. Instead, they hype "green jobs" doing things like building wind turbines and solar panels, but these jobs are proving to be a mere trickle compared to those being lost.
Radical environmentalists have all but declared war on high-wage blue-collar jobs in this country, and the Obama administration has sided with them. The nation's stubbornly high unemployment rate is evidence they're winning.
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