Obama Eyes Major Fishing Ban on Both Coasts

Barack Obama may soon enact even more regulations on our country’s limping economy, all to save a few fish in the sea.

American fishermen are deeply fearful that the Obama White House could cut them off as early as this week from major fishing areas of the U.S. continental shelf on both coasts, further restricting one of the most highly regulated fishing industries in the world.

At stake are millions of dollars in fishing revenue and hundreds of jobs — and in some parts of the country, the survival of an embattled way of life that has persisted for centuries but is facing environmentalist pressures unlike anything before — and without the chance for hearings and legislative back-and-forth that U.S. laws normally require.

“This totally affects us, but we don’t know what’s going on,” one fishing boat owner, who asked to remain anonymous, told Fox News. “We are just out of the loop. No one even wants to say what effect it will have.”

“They are throwing all fishermen under the bus, along with their supporting industries” declared Marty Scanlon, a fishing boat owner and member of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries advisory panel on highly migratory fish species in the Atlantic. “They’ve done everything they can to put us out of business.”

What the fishermen fear most is the kind of unilateral action by the White House that they have already seen elsewhere. As part of their ongoing environmental ambitions, the Obama administration’s Council on Environmental Quality, and the president himself, are aggressively interested in creating preservation zones that would ban fishing and other activities within large portions of the 200-mile U.S. “exclusive economic zone” of maritime influence, and just as interested in getting other nations to do so, in their own as well as international waters.

—

Just as in the administration’s 2014 action, the recent Pacific expansion announcement preceded an international meeting, this time with Pacific island leaders alongside the world congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one of the world’s most prestigious environmental organizations.

Obama attended the Honolulu session and told his audience at the start of the IUCN meeting that “Teddy Roosevelt gets the credit for starting the National Parks system, but when you include a big chunk of the Pacific Ocean, we now have actually done more acreage than any other president.”

What worries the fishermen is Obama’s Big Stick — the American Antiquities Act of 1906, a statute signed into law by Teddy Roosevelt that allows the president by decree to set aside “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.”

Obama isn’t alone in his fight for control over the world’s oceans. The United Nations is attempting a similar power-grab, as well. It seems, one way or another, American fisherman may be subject to even harsher regulations from a powerful government — if they still have their jobs.

Source: Fox News