NOAA's Catch Shares Fisheries Debacle

[Geee]

American Thinker:




Barrack Obama came to office with an agenda to fundamentally change America. An element of his agenda is a plan, known as catch shares, to restructure the nation's fishing industry. The author of his plan is Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the environmentalist Rock Star and former vice-chairperson of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). When it comes to the oceans, protection of fish, and punishment of the evil fishermen, Dr. Lubchenco is as extreme as Obama's former Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones.

Obama, with no managerial experience, didn't simply make Dr. Lubchenco one of his numerous Czars, he anointed her as the head of NOAA despite her complementary lack of managerial experience. Effectively, Obama has given EDF control of the $4B 13,000 person government agency that oversees the national fisheries.

EDF wrote the 184 page playbook titled "Catch Shares Design Manual" for the plan that Dr. Lubchenco passed on to President Obama. From page 2 of the manual:

A catch share program allocates a secure privilege to harvest a specified amount of a fishery's total catch to an individual or group (groups can be community-based). Under a catch share program, managers establish a fishery-wide catch limit, assign portions of the catch, or shares, to participants, and hold participants directly accountable to stay within the catch limit.