The health care debate's misinformation campaigns reminds me of the tactics used in the fish 'privatization' efforts by NOAA. It's cavalier and dishonest on the part of journalists and is arguably an abuse of power by officials getting salaries from the public coffers. In the first case, my example is the TV journalist Glenn Beck, who had continuously and vociferously had derided the U.S. health care system for years, especially when his own surgery went badly.

Then Glenn Beck joined the conservative news network, FOX News. Now he suddenly maintains that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world. Without citing any support for this new-found religion, of course. Now the Brits are pissed about being dissed in the propaganda wars, because they, and even Cuba it seems, can prove they provide better health care, cheaper.

Then you have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has suddenly developed a penchant for manipulating the public. Now we have a Sustainable Fisheries sector in NOAA dedicated to forwarding the 'catch share'/privatization model of fisheries management.

Why call the new office, "Sustainable Fisheries ...." Isn't that what NOAA and it's National Marine Fisheries Service has always been about? I don't think there is any confusion in the public's mind about that. What is confusing, and downright dishonest and reckless, is linking the term 'sustainable fisheries' to privatization like this. It just doesn't follow and never has. Just look at the state of the Canadian fisheries. They are all but defunct, which is why they jumped into net cage fish farming in such a big way. Same thing in Norway, etc, etc.

The only problem fisheries management has is the lack of courage to do the right thing. Throw in a measure of inhumanity toward man, and a sprinkle of personal greedy grasping, and you have a recipe for run failure. Giving the fish away to a few, and locking out the many won't change the recipe. The stocks still cook up bad.

Open range vs all fenced in hasn't been the issue in sustainability - it's mostly been fishing practices; huge by-catches, destructive gear types, mortalities of all kinds, DOGFISH SHARKS, and pesticide and fertilizer run-off to name a few. Check it out: two thirds of the fish killed by fishermen in U.S. waters are dumped over as unwanted, at least by that fisherman at that moment, and dogfish eat the same amount of fish that fishermen catch on the East coast, yet are protected. Absolute madness, but no reason to panic and give the title to the farm to the Cossacks in a bid for appeasement.

Now, I'm not heaping all the blame on the head of NOAA by any means. The big players in the commercial fish business and their very well paid lobbyists, who have dominated the fisheries management councils, are no better. It's one happy mutual protection society, and the small family fishing operation owner, the crews, and the communities, are left holding the bag in all instances under a 'privatization' regime. I wouldn't want to be projecting this image to the rest of the world if I were Obama.

I'm sure I've beaten that dead horse to death by now. Like Glen Beck and a whole lot of Republican politicians, the fish 'privatizers' and 'Maritime Mad Men" use whatever tactic they can to win the brass ring of fish ownership and exclusivity. If that means pushing everyone else off their saddle, so be it. They have the reins of power and they just don't want to use alternative fisheries management tools to manage the fish, of which there are plenty, because that won't yield them the deed to the fish stocks.

The problem has been, to a large degree, that privatization yields mega-trawlers that vacuum up the seas indiscriminately. These things should be kicked off the high seas, not put in line to own the rest of the swimming fish they don't already own. When these factory vessels clean out their own bank accounts and go bust, then it's an easy squeezy deal to use taxpayer money to buy the boats, and with a few more laws, wha-la, now the federal government owns the fish that the public used to own. How's that for a conspiracy theory.

Seriously, the real issue is one of a polluted soul, not a polluted ocean. The rationale behind ocean reserves has to do with the system's inability to stop overfishing - the inability to get people to do the right thing. Then as the communities collapse, the family guys with boats and a sense of community will end up doing what the locals did on the Yukon River. They went fishing in closed waters "for the disabled, the old, the widows, and the orphans among us."

The tie-in to Southern Oregon is obvious. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has equally conspired to reduce the king salmon stocks in the rivers, especially the Rogue River. Of course they will argue that point, but the proof is in the pudding. There is a group of avid bank fishermen up by Shady Cove who fish for a couple of weeks or a month each year during the spring king run. Well, according to the Mail Tribune, and Mark Freeman who went there, the 'king of the camp' finally caught a salmon after three years of trying. How many casts is that?

An avid drift boat fisherman I know tried on 27 trips to the stretch below the Gold Rey dam before he caught a king. Another friend who had grown up fishing elsewhere, decided to take up fishing again on the Rogue. He tried for two years to catch something, to no avail, and hasn't fished since.

How bad does the fishing have to get before nobody shows up? Does it make any difference if there are any fish in the river? When you have a propaganda machine like the State tourism people, you just keep calling the Rogue River that 'famous king salmon stream.' The people will come and buy stuff and thrash around and think they just had bad luck. Their propaganda machine is bigger than the free press, so guess who wins? And why do we have to pay for their PR if it isn't true?

But another friend showed me a secret spot. I think if I go this November and get there before daylight, scan the neighborhood with infrared binoculars for the guy who says he owns the steps down the bank of the river, then call on my cell phone to wake up a fisheries biologist and also my lawyer, to see if I'm using the right gear. Barbless or barbs? What kind of scent is legal? Sinkers or no sinkers? Artificial or real bait? Any restrictions on line weight and leader length? Was there an emergency closure? Can you keep fin clipped fish? Non-fin clipped? How many? Which kind of fish can you keep? How long do they have to be? How short? Do you need a separate endorsement for each specie of fish on your license?

Naw, I think I'll just stay home and reminisce about the good fishing of my youth. I'll pretend I got cold and wet and have a hot toddy in the safety of my back porch and save myself the aggravation of getting yelled at by some stairway cop who you can't cuss out because your son is with you. Or some fish cop with a badge making sure you don't keep something a quarter of an inch too small, when hundreds of miles away, trawlers throw tens of thousands of king salmon of all sizes overboard dead.

A person can only take so much aggravation. You either use up your patience bucking city hall like I do, or you use up your patience trying to catch fish. Most people are in the latter category, whether they still get their line (or longlines) wet or have totally given up. And the ones who still fish fight each other for a bigger share. And discounting all the fish fighters who draw a salary from some special interest group, it's pretty lonely in the category of trying to get more fish, period. In fact, I think the Coastal Conservation Association has a monopoly on that.

Well, the good news is that they didn't find any serious contaminants in the mud behind Gold Rey dam. So just blowing the thing sky high seems likely. Those thirty pound carp will have to try survive without eating all those salmon fry. And it looks like the PNW Regional office of NMFS is moving out of the seat of fisheries consolidation, Seattle, and moving to hardscrabble Newport, OR. I look forward to making it harder on the big Seattle fish CEOs to twist arms in the NMFS offices from afar. And I hear the 'privatization candidate' to head up NMFS has chucked it in. We just hope the postponement of action to fill this slot is to find someone who knows the science of fish, and isn't the proverbial Lion in the Wizard of Oz. Having a heart AND mind in a candidate would be ideal, and is surely what is needed to get us and fish to where we want it all to go.

I wanted to make one more point about fish advocates and fishermen (recreational or commercial) being mainly mutually exclusive. Take my wife for example. She's a nurse in a critical care setting (Rogue Valley Hospital NICU) and focuses so much on others that she, and her co-workers, have health problems from not taking care of themselves. Or the old adage about plumbers having the worst plumbing in town. So you can see why someone with a little power in fish circles, with an agenda, can flummox everyone, because hardly anybody who knows the subject speaks up, and the rest don't have a clue what happened.