Originally Posted by
Anti Federalist
On the east coast:
Startline 1970.
Foreign trawlers fishing off the coast of the US/Canada threaten to wipe out groundfish stocks.
Congress passes 200 mile limit and kicks them all out in 1976.
Right around the same time, Congress passes laws prohibiting seal bounties and hunting.
Lack of cheap fish in great volume from the foreign flag vessels results in shortages and higher prices: fish brokers and restaurants cry foul.
Congress passes low interest loan guarantees under the Jones Act, basically passing out free money to anybody who wants to buy or build a fishing boat, in order to get seafood back on the market.
Hundreds, thousands of new hulls are built.
On the east coast, the new vessels, almost all run by corporate fleets and not owner-operators, push for the bottom line and fast buck.
On the gulf coast, newly arrived Vietnamese migrants use refugee status to put themselves and their kin at the front of the line to receive taxpayer funded vessel loans, displacing thousands of native US fishermen, leading to incidents of actual armed combat around the Gulf of Mexico.
In both areas fish stocks are hammered even harder by the new massive fleet, funded by tax dollars.
Ten years later, Uncle Sucker decides all these boats have to go, and starts a process of deliberately imposing onerous and burdensome regulations designed to put fishermen out of work. This ultimately affects the small owner-operator, the very best steward of marines resources, and leaves many of the corporate "fleet" vessels unscathed.
But it appears to be too little too late, groundfish (cod, haddock, hake, whiting, fluke, flounder, halibut) stocks continue to decline.
More burdensome regulations, bans, "buybacks" and the collapse of 300 year old fishing communities ensues.
Fast forward twenty years.
Just as the groundfish stocks start to look like they might recover, out of the blue comes an explosion in the seal population (the same ones that Uncle Sucker protected 40 years before, remember?) that begin to decimate the young and just barely recovering groundfish stocks. (Seals are notoriously wasteful, they will routinely kill a codfish to eat the belly flaps and discard the rest of the fish. They were hunted for a reason.)
And so many coastal communities, that readily and happily discarded dirty, stinking and filthy fish docks, for bright tourist based economies and yacht clubs and beaches, find themselves in a panic because with the seals, have come a huge increase in sharks and in shark attacks, casting a giant black cloud over "Shark Central" tourism.
Sharks having found protected status as well.
And somewhere, out by Davy Jones, Quint is laughing his ass off.
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