VICTORY! YOU HELD THEM OFF !!!!!! NO CORPORATE TAKEOVER OF MAINE'S LOBSTER INDUSTRY
LD 1579 the Wall Street rush attempt to take control of lobstering in the Dawn State has been stopped in its tracks. It will come up like a bad penny late this summer, but by that time the people of the Maine coast will have rewritten it in their own image.
Hooray!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS
DO THIS Please email or phone these legislators and ask them politely but in the strongest terms possible,to hold back on a final committee vote on LD 1579 An Act To Amend the Lobster Promotion Council until next year
CLICK HERE for cut & paste email addresses of the Marine Resources Committee members.
Reasons:
1. The bill needlessly, dangerously, allows Wall Street to plug directly into the economic heart of coastal Maine's most important industry, with virtually no controls in the bill strong enough to keep this fishery out of the claws of powerful financial speculators waiting in the wings.
2. Maine lobstering is a sustainable profitable, diverse, robust network of community-based businesses. As such it has had to time and again battle for its freedom. For its very life, against financial giants from Away, which have ceaselessly sought for ways to seize control of the industry, and reduce lobstermen to sharecroppers and minions.
3. LD 1579 allows big industry a way in once more. It breaks the communities' grip on the marketing of their lobsters. It diluting the coastal community representation on the Lobster Promotion Council, instead putting more non-lobster related interests on board, whose sole interest is in diverting as much of the cashflow from lobstering to absentee investor interests outside of our fishing communities. Outside our state and perhaps our nation.
4. LD 1579 requires frequent elections to the Lobster Promotional Council. This will break up the Council's community-based institutional memory on effective promotion of their target species and make for membership more open to the speculative wheeler dealing of the financial and investment communities. Their immediate short term goal will be: boost the catch to boost the cashflow.
5. Boosting the reveneu cannot be done without opening up either younger or older lobsters to exploitation in Maine waters. A fool's errand: the younger will be much more valuable when fully grown; the elder lobsters lay magnitudes more eggs than those of lesser ages. Yet LD 1579 if passed will let absentee speculators force open up one or both of those ends of Maine's natural lobster spectrum. With disastrous results ot the natural wild cornucopia that pours forth this critical resource.
6. While inland communities deserve to have their opinion heard on statewide seafood topics. But they have no more business being represented on the lobster promotion council, than lobstermen do advising the Katahdin Region Chamber of Commerce.
IN SUMMARY Maine legislators love our state's wonderful, well-managed community-supporting lobster industry. Please urge the legislators on the Marine Resources Committee RIGHT NOW to hold this bill LD 1579 over till next session, and have OPEGA or another independent analyst clarify the pluses and minuses of making these changes to the lobster promotional council. A grateful coast will bless an honor you for your foresight and prudent caution.
Please contact these legislators (below) right now and let them know they should hold back this bill and not risk Maine's most profitable most sustainble seafood industry, for the moentary gratification of Wall Streeters. You can cut and past the list into your email "To" or "CC" address list to reach the whole committee
CLICK HERE FOR LIST OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS EMAILS.
CUT AND PASTE TO YOUR MESSAGE'S ADDRESS BOX . WRITE TO THEM NOW!
The lobster you save may be your own.
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