Rational or Ratz: what will history say?

Sometimes I just want to let an article stand on it's own in this blog. And be set down in these archives for people entering the discussion later. I take a lot of exception with the justification for crab resource privatization used in this article though. For example, not that many people "knew for years" this was coming. Maybe the owners of the big plants and boats, aka NPFMC, but not the folks who were putting in services for the crab boat fleet or the crews that could have been training for something else while they HAD a job. Like in "don't quit you day job."

And I don't think that those beautiful big Bristol Bay red king crab legs have hardly ANY competition on the world market. Just like Russian caviar. It's just "rationalizing" talk. Like in rationalizing your need to steal the tape deck from that car. Or should we call it "ration speak." Like in, "what a ration of ....." And I suppose ecomomic collapse of the region and "high-grading" comes from rational people? And nobody stopped for the weather like they were supposed to either. The Japanese want their king crab by Christmas or so, so it's always going to be a rush to catch them. The Council knew this, they are the processors.

Some excerpts: "When they went from 250 to 88 vessels in one year, that's not a reduction. That's a collapse. That's a wipe-out," said Kodiak Borough Mayor Jerome Selby.
"At King Cove, a fishing town of 760 people on the Alaska Peninsula, Mayor Henry Mack said crab rationalization has stripped 75 percent of income for local businesses, along with a number of skipper and crew jobs."

Well, without further ado, here's the article from the Kodiak Daily Mirror and Ms. Bauman.

When one of my readers wrote the following, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry: "To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, "When they take roll call at the North Pacific Fisheries Managment Council, they don't know whether to say present, or guilty"."

And I don't buy this business that the NPFMC is such a shining example of stewardship of the resources. It has been the circumstances of the North Pacific fisheries themselves that has protected the stocks: the vast expanses of ocean, the foul weather a lot of the year, no trawl fleet at all when the NPFMC took over. Where are all the pacific ocean perch, the pink shrimp, the king crab?

You scratch the surface and I'll bet the Chairman of the NPFMC, who is the big shore based processors lobbyist, is just making a grab for quotas before the RSDAs can come on line. This is the second time a PSPA lobbyist was Chairman. How many times has a representative for coastal communities been Chairman?

Here's another ratz article.