If grocery shopping were regulated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would anyone ever be able to eat?
What if grocery shopping were regulated by NOAA?
Try to imagine this. You go to the grocery store to buy some chicken. But once you get there you find out that they are sold out of chicken. Now imagine that the store is 100 miles away and your car can only go 9 miles per hour, and it burns 20 gallons of fuel per hour. You’re trying to cook a meal right? When you get to your car your best friend calls you and tells you that the store just down the road has rib eye steak on sale for $2.00 a pound! Great you say to yourself, we can have rib eye instead of chicken!
Then it hits you, you remember that the federal government has made a regulation that says in order for you to go to the other store you must first go home and call them to get permission to go. On top of that they tell you that they want a 48 hour advance notice so they can put an observer with you to make sure you only buy what you said you are going to buy. On top of all of this the government has made you purchase a satellite monitoring device that cost $6,000.00 so they can be sure you are going to the store you said you were going to.
Now after going through this 48 hour delay plus your ten hour 200 gallon ride to the store, you find out the rib eye has sold out but there are beautiful hams now on sale. Oh well at least we are going to have a nice meal finally. Not so fast pal, the observer, remember him, has now said you cannot get the ham because it is not on the approved list.
So back home you go, empty handed again.
On the way home you pass several stores with other sales on food items that will work for your meal but again the observer says if you stop to shop you will be in violation of the rules and subject to tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
Pretty scary huh? You say this could never happen. Well it already has. This is the reality commercial fishermen live with every day.
They must give advance notice to the regulators, and tell them what they are going to be fishing for before they can leave to go to work. And if the fish are not cooperating, (It happens more than I care to think about) we cannot switch over to another fishery without first going back to the dock and starting the process all over again. All this in spite of having the mandated satellite communications equipment that allows us to communicate with the regulators from anywhere at sea!
What is the sense of making us burn thousands of dollars worth of fuel when we can tell them of our change of plans right from the fishing grounds?
Also this satellite communications equipment tells them exactly where in the ocean we are, 24-7. You may ask why would the regulators make life so hard on an industry supplying the healthiest form of protein to the American public that they can possibly eat.
The answer is simply this, they want us gone.
After decades of watching and being involved with the regulatory system this is the only answer we can come up with.
The National Marine Fisheries Service used to work hand in hand with the fishermen. Today this agency has been taken over by eco-zealots with their own radical view of the way things should be.
Fishing communities all around the nation are dieing on the vine because of the plans being administered by this rogue government agency. We had better wake up before we become a nation that can no longer feed itself.