We’ve heard it often enough that it’s become a cliché, Nazi
propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ supposed advice that
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people
will eventually come to believe it. The
lie can only be maintained for such time as the State can shield people from
the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the
State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal
enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the
State.”
The
statement itself may be apocryphal; there is good reason to believe that Goebbels
never said it, and that it was actually a created out of a combination of
Hitler’s earlier writings and a Goebbels speech attacking English politics. Nevertheless, the chilling cynicism expressed
in those words transcends the question of when and by whom
they were first uttered.
The philosophy is alive and well in the
world today, and if you merely replace “military” with “ecological,” and “the
State” with “the angling and boating industry, and the anglers’ rights groups,”
you’ve got the H.R. 200/Modern
Fish Act debate in a nutshell.
From the very start, the Modern Fish Act proponents maintained, at
best, a distant, nodding acquaintance with the truth. Even though H.R.
2023, the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act—which was the
original “Modern Fish Act” bill—did not contain a single provision that would explicitly
deter overfishing or speed the rebuilding of overfished stocks, its proponents tried to sell
the bill by saying that it would
“promot[e] conservation of our natural marine resources.”
“alternative [to annual catch limit] management for
recreational fishing, reexamining fisheries allocation, smartly [i.e., more
slowly] rebuilding fishery stocks, establishing exemptions where annual catch
limits don’t fit and improving recreational data collection,”
none of which, except perhaps the latter, promote
conservation at all, although most could easily frustrate conservation efforts.
Ironically, one Modern Fish Act advocate, who
claimed to be
actually went so far as to say that
“Nothing in the Modern Fish Act undermines the fisheries
conservation or sustainability tenants [sic] of [the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act]. It
simply looks to strengthen MSA…”
At that point, the truth got up and walked out the door.
But, since we’ve already accepted the tenet (and not
the “tenant”) that “truth is the
greatest enemy of the lie, and thus is the greatest enemy of the” Modern Fish
Act supporters, that ought to be no surprise.
What the Modern Fish Act is intended to do is increase anglers’
landings, and if you ever get around to reading the fine print, you'll learn that Modern Fish Act folks are actually trying to sell the proposition that a
bigger recreational kill benefits conservation.
“Another victim of the system is conservation…A considerable
portion of the overall funding for the nation’s conservation efforts is in fact
generated by recreational fishing licenses and excise taxes. This should not be taken lightly. It would devastate our natural resources if
anglers and boaters—who contribute $1.5 billion annually to fisheries and
habitat conservation through excise taxes, donations and license fees—decided to
throw in the towel due to lack of access.”
“Lack of access” is how Modern Fish Act proponents say “inability
to overfish.”
So what the Center for Sportfishing policy is really saying
is
“We have to overfish our fish stocks in order to conserve
them.”
That doesn’t seem true to me, or even biologically feasible.
But if the repeat it often enough…
And, by the way, federal fisheries management, which is what
Magnuson-Stevens and, ultimately, the Modern Fish Act addresses, is not funded
by fishing license or excise tax revenues, so raising that issue in a Modern Fish Act context is more than a
little misleading, too.
But the really big lie told by Modern Fish
Act has only emerged in recent months, after the House of Representatives marked up H.R. 200,
the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries
Management Act, a bill so
bad that some conservation groups are referring to it as the “Empty Oceans Act” because of the effect it would have on our natural resources.
H.R. 200 is most definitely not the House version of
the Modern Fish Act; that’s H.R. 2023.
But because H.R. 2023 never made it out of Committee, and some of its
provisions were added to H.R. 200, the anglers' rights, tackle industry and boatbuilding groups trying to weaken
Magnuson-Stevens started calling H.R. 200 the Modern Fish
Act, in order to convince recreational fishermen to support the
legislation.
“There’s a similar bill working through the U.S. Senate. On July 11, 2017, the Modern Fish Act—S. 1520
was introduced…That bill was overwhelmingly approved on Feb. 28 by the U.S.
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. From that stage, the bill needs approval by
the Senate…It will then need to be reconciled with the House bill, approved
again by both chambers, and then signed by the president. [emphasis added]”
While the last sentence is a good and honest description of
the industry/anglers’ rights coalition’s strategy, the overall statement is
based on a big, blatant lie.
S. 1520, the Senate version of the Modern Fish Act, is not
at all similar to H.R. 200.
Let’s put it this way…
Depending on how you count the various titles, sections,
subsections, etc., S. 1520, the Modern Fish Act, has about 11 provisions in
common with H.R. 200. On the other hand,
H.R. 200 contains about 30 provisions which are not
in the Modern Fish Act.
Thus, to say that the so-called “Empty Oceans Act,” H.R.
200, is “a similar bill” to S. 1520, the Modern Fish Act, is clearly a lie.
S. 1520 is far from a perfect bill, but it’s more-or-less
innocuous, and actually includes a worthwhile provision or two. If it passed, it would impose a few seemingly
spiteful, nuisance provisions on the commercial fishing community, but it
wouldn’t do much, if any, real and lasting harm to fish stocks.
On the other hand, many of the provisions that are unique to
H.R. 200 would do some real harm. H.R.
would exempt both the recreational and commercial sectors from annual catch limits,
designed to prevent overfishing, in a number of fisheries. A far worse set of provisions would create
vaguely-worded exceptions to the deadlines for rebuilding overfished stocks, exceptions
so vaguely worded that they could arguably eliminate rebuilding deadlines for every
federally-managed stock.
Thus, when Mike
Leonard, the so-called “conservation director” for the American Sportfishing
Association, the primary trade organization for the fishing tackle industry,
tries to discredit H.R. 200’s critics—remember, if they want to sell the
big lie, it is “vitally important for the [industry and anglers’ rights groups]
to suppress dissent”—by saying
“It’s unfair and inaccurate to characterize attempts to
address the very legitimate problems with how the Magnuson-Stevens Act manages
recreational fishing as ‘anti-conservation,’”
he runs into a very real problem: Leonard and his fellow travelers have
enthusiastically embraced H.R. 200, and there’s just no other way to describe that
bill, which assaults many of the core conservation provisions of current law.
Trying to dismiss H.R. 200’s threat to the
fishery management process by saying
“most commercial and recreational fishing organizations
acknowledged that the bill wasn’t perfect (no legislation is, certainly nothing
so complicated and with competing interests such as this), but supported it on
the whole because it included provisions important to each constituency,”
is a less-than-forthright whitewash.
H.R. 200 is an anti-conservation bill. A person, or an organization, can be
pro-conservation or pro-H.R. 200, but can’t be both.
If Leonard and his confederates want to avoid the “anti-conservation”
label, they ought to stop supporting anti-conservation bills. And they need to stop trying to convince anglers and others that H.R. 200 is the “Modern Fish Act,” because that's a big lie.
To look at it from a different angle, of the roughly (again,
depending on how you count them) 41 provisions of H.R. 200, it shares 11—or about
27%--of those provisions with the Modern Fish Act.
On the other hand, the average baboon shares about 91%
of its DNA with humans.
Given those numbers, it becomes clear that an H.R. 200 supporter’s
resemblance to a baboon is three times greater than H.R. 200’s
resemblance to S. 1520, the real Modern Fish Act.
So don’t let the industry and anglers’ rights groups make a
monkey out of you. Don’t buy their Big
Lie.
Instead, contact both of your United States senators, and
let them know that you oppose S. 1520 because, as admitted in the quote above,
passing that bill will let H.R. 200 bypass the deliberative Senate process and
go straight to conference with all of its anti-conservation provisions
intact.
Magnuson-Stevens, our fish—and you--deserve better than that.
Tell folks that truth, and prevail.
sa
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