Emperor Ted Stevens and the Kodiak Rebellion

Chapter One: Uncle Ted, the Great and Powerful

January 25th, 2006 - I felt the force was with us as my wife pulled away in the Jeep leaving Darius and I standing in the icy parking lot at the Kodiak airport. In our heavy fisherman hoods and jackets we looked like a couple of Jedi waiting for the next transport off the ice planet Hoth. Boarding the Dash 8 bound for Anchorage, I said to Darius, who represents the Jiggers Association, "We are the Kodiak Rebellion. We go to confront the Emperor."

Senator Ted Stevens, Emperor of Alaska.

"I'm Han Solo" I told Darius.

"More like Jar-Jar" he said whipping out his magic ring binder and a Bic pen.

It was just before Christmas, and we were going to the December meeting of Alaska's Fisheries Management Council. We are also hoping to catch the Senator in person at a party celebrating the thirty year anniversary of the passage of the Magnuson Stevens Act, the big book of fish laws for the whole United States that bears his name. It's like the opening of a new Death Star for him. Maybe we can ask him why he is giving away America's fish to a few big corporations. Maybe cameras and reporters will be there. The vast majority of Alaska's commercial fishers are mom and pop operations who are passionately opposed to the push to privatize America's fish. Our fight has been to alert the media to the Abramoff-style backroom deals that have dominated fish management policy, locking in the most destructive gear types and making a handful of big corporations very rich. Our patched together coalition is in favor of more selective gear types and opposed to the privatization of the ocean. We just want our kids to be able to fish too, if they want. We are sailing into uncharted waters against a corporate Armada.

But as we began our descent into Anchorage over the Cook Inlet's frozen Turnagain Arm I started to think about Captain Cook.

Captain Cook thought Alaska's Turnagain Arm was a river when he sailed into it on his third voyage of discovery. An ugly, cold, nasty, shallow river. Its name comes from the repeated command of the Captain as he tried to steer a course through its perverse currents and hidden sandbars. He was looking for the fabled Northwest Passage. He didn't find it. He bumped his way up Alaska's long coast, tortured by a parasitic infection in his lower intestine, snarling at the crew and forcing them to eat walrus. Finally giving up, he sailed south where he was the guest of honor and main course at a Hawaiian barbeque. They had mistaken him for a god, and were lethally disappointed to find him human.

Ah, Anchorage. Though it is surrounded by great beauty, there are few places in all of Alaska less appealing than the slab of frozen mud pudding where half of the state's people live and work. In an earthquake it shakes like a bowl full of jelly. Its beaches turn into deadly quicksand at high tide, if they are not frozen solid. The Turnagain's merciless grey waters do not attract yachtsmen. Mariners here are mostly white knuckled skippers of big bulk freighters and 800 foot RoRo ships. In the winter powerful tractor tugs snort steadily at their sides to keep them pushed up against the dock. The whining hawsers and relentless thumping and moaning of ice floes grinding against their hulls remind them how far they are from Long Beach or Elliott Bay. Still they come, because Anchorage is Alaska's Mecca. All roads lead to Anchor Town, which is why our Imperial Senate, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, gather here, at the Hilton.

The Anchorage Hilton is a pale concrete tower stuck into the mud where Ship Creek meets the Turnagain. In the hovering dark of the late afternoon the glowing "H" at its top looks like the red eye of Sauron. In 1915 a tent city sprouted up right around where the Hilton now stands on a patch of sand at the mouth of Ship Creek. It was picked as the place where the Alaska Railroad would pound its way through the wilderness to meet up with ships from the south. Today the Anchorage airport, perfectly positioned for over-the-top traffic, has become a major hub. But in its mercenary heart Anchorage remains a tent city. The place where trappers and miners and oilmen come to buy and sell Alaska. It's a town of frontier merchants. Where the cash register meets the wild.

So on Saturday night I was sitting with the rest of the revolutionaries in front of a soggy piece of halibut in the Hilton's big ballroom. Darius is there, along with Dorothy and Theresa from the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, Steve Branson of the Crewmen's Association and Tim Henkel of the Deep Sea Fisherman's Union, and Michelle Ridgeway, an eco-crusading marine biologist and long time member of the Councils Advisory Panel. Independent fishermen and thinkers are seated in the tables around us at the far end of the room, like the kids tables at Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately "Uncle Ted" as he is known in his home state, was held up in Washington D.C. jamming the reauthorized version of MSA down the necks of a lame duck Congress with the help of Darth Young, our Dark Lord in the House of Representatives. We would have to settle for a video version of our Senator. With a flash and a satellite beep the gigantic head of Uncle Ted filled the walls at both ends of the ballroom. Six hundred people gripped their chardonnay glasses a little tighter and look up at the man who has dominated Alaska for as long as most of us can remember.

He is as old as Fidel Castro. The creases in his twenty foot tall face look like a dry riverbed in the desert. But the eyes underneath the overhanging brow are sharp and flinty. Unlike Castro he is still firmly in control. His lips began to move but there was a glitch: no audio. Someone at our table started to fill in the words for him: "I am Oz, the great and powerful!" We all laughed. "Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair!" Chuckles gave way to beard scratching. What will Alaska look like when all that's left of Uncle Ted is a shattered visage? My head swoomed and I don't think it was the wine. Should I even be here? I wondered. Are we winning or losing? I felt like Captain Cook. We're going somewhere new and it feels exciting.I just hope we don't end up with torn flesh and burnt bones.

One day all the oil in Alaska will be pumped out. All the natural gas and veins of copper and fur bearing varmints will be gone, in time. There is only one thing in Alaska that could be called eternal. It is the thing that brought people to Kodiak over seven thousand years ago. It feeds the seals that feed the Eskimos.

When the land was lifeless, schools of fish flowed with the tide from the wide continental shelf and into the bays and back again. When the dinosaurs and saber tooth cats and mammoths wandered the wide plains of Alaska the fish flowed, and fed them. When all the caribou and moose and eagles and people are gone, the fish will still flow. And life will go on. Unless the rebellion loses, and they succeed in buying the sea. But we won't lose. We are stronger than they think. We are the Fremen. We are the Kodiak Rebellion.

The emerging Empire of Fish started with the American Fisheries Act. Ironically named, because it was really the last round of a vicious cage match between Japanese and Norwegian banks. After the original implementation of MSA pushed all the foreign trawlers back two hundred miles, Norwegian investors, armed with subsidies from their government, began pouring money into "American" factory trawlers. Often this meant taking as little as chunk of keel and a couple of steel plates from a U.S. flagged boat to a Norwegian shipyard and welding a floating factory the size of a cruise ship onto it. Then they would pat it on the stern and send it toddling off to Alaska. The Japanese tried another tactic. They built enormous shorebased processing plants. Since the Japanese couldn't legally own the catcher boats anymore they lent money to American operators, sometimes the plant's managers, to build huge midwater trawlers. Both targeted the biggest food fish resource on earth, Alaska pollock. The Norwegians value the tasty white fillets: perfect for fish and chips. Pollock spoils quickly though. That's why freezing them at sea is important for the fillet market. The Japanese value the roe above all else, often stripping the eggs and grinding the carcasses into fish meal. Freshness is not so essential for them. In fact at a certain uh, ripeness the fish release the roe more readily.

It might have ended there, with the two foreign powers duking it out offshore for the fish to feed their different markets. But then Mother Nature stepped in. The schools of pollock began hanging out farther and farther offshore. The run to the grounds and back got longer and longer for the shorebased boats. I'm sure the Norwegians barked a hearty har har as the Japanese watched them drive out and park on top of the fish. This advantage soon had the factory boats capturing seventy percent of the Total Allowable Catch By the early nineties the Japanese knew they had made the wrong move.

The shorebased processors were falling on their samurai swords. Without fish they had no roe to strip. But how could they stop the factory boats? They chose a champion, and they chose well. Senator Stevens of Alaska made the argument that shorebased meant Alaska jobs, although that is patently false- most of the workers are imported from all around the world, and do not make their homes in Alaska, or the United States. Then the shorebasers steered eco-groups, notably Greenpeace, at the factory trawlers. They are an easy target, big black sided monsters hauling up cod-ends the size of Godzilla. The truth is, as trawling goes, the midwater nets employed by the pollock boats are relatively benign. And the fact the shorebased plants were knocking out the eggs and tossing the rest of the fish into a grinder was apparently right over the heads of the Rainbow Warriors. The shorebasers float the concept that a law should be passed flipping the present day catch levels- sending seventy percent of the pollock to them. That got the attention of the floating factories.

So the off-shore boys got out their wallets and the fight was on. Both sides spent plenty of money: lobbying Senators, hiring lawyers, and getting their representatives placed on our North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, where the folding metal chairs really flew. In the end "Gorgeous" Ted Stevens took the match. His muscle as chair of the Appropriations committee let him get a headlock on the process that no one could break. By 1998 the factory boats realized they had to make a deal. In the end they agreed to let the shorebasers have sixty five percent of the quota. In return they got thirty five percent and ninety million dollars to buy out idled boats. But something sinister happened during the closed door negotiations. As people like John Iani, lawyer for the shorebasers, and Trevor McCabe, Ted Stevens fisheries aide (who scored a sweet job with the factory trawlers soon after) sat down and wrote the new law, they went ahead and gave permanent ownership of the fish to their clients. A vast resource, once owned by the people of the United States and capable of feeding millions, would be owned forever by a group of foreign investors. I wonder if they glanced over their shoulders to see who was looking.

And it looked like a slam dunk at the Council- after all, in the course of their battle royale they had stacked it with lobbyists from both sides. United they had an unbeatable voting bloc. But in October of 1998 as it passed through the Advisory Panel, whose members tend to wear more denim than tweed, the majority of that body voted for a motion saying that such a radical change- the giving away of a public resource- should be scrutinized by the entire Congress by means of public hearings. The next day Council Chair Richard Lauber, a lobbyist for the Pacific Seafoods Processors Association, abruptly announced that the "American" Fisheries Act would be pulled from the Council agenda and put into the hands of Ted Stevens in Washington D.C. Trevor and Ted, and Senator Slade Gorton of Washington state, quickly called the shoreside and at-sea processors to D.C. to sing in harmony to the Commerce Committee. Calling it a compromise among industry groups, a victory for Alaska and the environment, and failing to mention that it amounted to the privatization of a large portion of America's fish, Uncle Ted drove AFA through committee like an Israeli bulldozer through a Palestinian falafel stand. Kodiak fishermen, busy setting traps and baiting hooks, hardly noticed. We did not recognize the dust in the distance as an army of lobbyists marching our way.

Next: The Lobbyist Horde Attacks Bering Sea Crabbers