Groundswell Thanks you for the comment – be sure to note the updates, as if you are a student of history the new Envoy post will interest you, while the new link to small processor file will tell readers how this fish ticket price-lowering ‘market powers’ situation was forewarned by competitors.

I am always open to learning more, thus why I have a lot of interest in reading your website. I apologize for not reading through it thoroughly. I’m not good with technical talk. I’m trying though.

The real question is, were you once part of the stupidity of when Washington State was selling a few hundreds of thousands of dollars of USA coho eggs for Chilean fish farms to create tens of millions of pounds of “glut” (a hoax PR term) competition against our wild stocks’ own market prices – harming regional economics? Or how about disclosing that the wfga.net site you now blog from is the Washington Fish Growers’ own? How much do you get paid for such harassments? Aren’t you still in the WA legislature? Isn’t there a rather negative conflict-of-interest therein?

If you check the federal records (NOAA hearings) re Aquaculture, you’ll find Groundswell’s primary issue is that of Accountability and Transparency and appropriate regulation of the ways illicit accounting is going to be used re new oil-rig platform connected fish farms and other scenarios, whereby foreign corporations (and even US lawbreakers) can export the majority of the profits intercompany, through Abusive Transfer Pricing, and avoid USA taxes while leaving us with costs and harms. Please step off the pathological political group-think and start doing the job of protecting United States citizen-taxpayers and our regional economy, de-colonize the USA fisheries, and end the economic terrorism of the kleptocrats.

By the time I finished, I cannot tell you what I called the morons on the other end of the line for total stupidity as I contacted from the RCMP to the Border Control and I forget who else. I cannot find my notes.

The result I ended off with was that he could enter Canada having pled and been found quilty. They could do nothing. They advised that he not having been sentenced yet, they could do nothing.

When I said WTF — it was not the ‘initials’ that I verbalized. I’m not one to tolerate ‘stunned and stupid’ — at all.

When the BP oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another covert foot soldier in the march to privatization was forced out of hiding. Back in May of last year the LA Times outed “the fishermen and the tax man” (5/30/10). “The BP guy wanted my tax statements, but how can I pay taxes when if everything I earned was in cash?’ The story isn’t that some bayou deck hands don’t pay taxes, the real story is that the IRS doesn’t enforce the tax laws in the fishing industry.

The same year that the Magnuson-Stevens Act put Regional Fishery Management Councils in charge of figuring out who was going to end up with all that newly acquired wealth swimming offshore, Congress graciously relieved boat owners of their employment tax obligation. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 allowed certain crew to be treated as “independent contractors,” despite a Supreme Court ruling to the contrary in 1970. The new law (IRC § 3121(b)(20) and § 6050A), burdened by rules, regulations, and reporting requirements, was never enforced. All crew became self-employed, paying the boat owners’ employment costs so owners would have more money to invest in vessels and management councilors whose main goal was to apportion the fisheries among their financial backers.

I stumbled into this law in 1988 when I saw a trip expense on a settlement sheet labeled “AOFA.” Turns out it was the boat owner’s payment to the Atlantic Offshore Fishermen’s Association to keep a New England regional management councilor afloat while he was working on privatizing the fisheries for his sponsors. After leaving the council he became a Pew fellow, and did a stint on the Sea Grant Review Panel.

Where are the scholarly articles on the effect of this payroll tax subsidy on investment and overcapitalization in the fisheries? There are none. Maine’s Portland Press Herald did a story on the “tax man and the fisherman” back in 1996, (4/7/96) pegging the 1976 law “the system that encourages the dodge,” and asked that same question. The reasons for ignoring the tax issue ranged from “too potentially explosive” from a National Marine Fisheries Service’s director to an “I wouldn’t dare!” from a university resource economist and Sea Grant researcher.

Even the IRS said they didn’t want to examine the law. Although they conceded that deductions for AOFA did appear to be beyond the scope of the 1976 law, the Northern Atlantic region of the IRS did not feel that reviewing the law was a “pressing” matter. At the same time, the Western Region of that astute government agency was engaged in the Compliance 2000 project to measure tax compliance in the Alaskan fisheries. They dubbed the law “a recipe for non-filing” and sought its repeal.

Obviously, the law is alive and ignored, as the gulf coast fishermen denied compensation for no documentation can attest.

What was the tax law a real recipe for? Shifting the boat owners’ costs unto the crew, attracting unsustainable investments in the fisheries, creating overfishing crisis after crisis, and claiming as a trip expense pay-offs to managers to steal the fish from its rightful owners – the American public. Not a conspiracy, just simple bold-faced corruption, government style.