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Southeast Alaska: Southeast Communities Will Receive a Share of $56 million in Alaska Fisheries Disaster Relief Funds By MARY KAUFFMAN - U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross on June 20th allocated $200 million in disaster funding appropriated by Congress to help fishermen and the businesses and communities that rely upon them to recover and rebuild following hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017. Funding has also been appropriated and allocated for the disasters that devastated the West Coast and Alaska fishermen from 2014 to 2017.

“Last year, American fishing communities across the Gulf and Caribbean were devastated by some of the most destructive hurricanes in recent memory, while Pacific fisheries have suffered from years of hardship,” said Secretary Ross. “This Administration stands shoulder to shoulder with these communities as they prove their strength and resilience in the face of adversity.”

Representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (D-Sitka) and Representative Dan Ortiz (I-Ketchikan) welcomed the news that Alaska, including Southeast, will receive a share of the $56 million in federal fisheries disaster relief funds allocated to Alaska.

The 2016 pink salmon fishery’s devastatingly low revenues were felt throughout the state, but the initial request for disaster relief funds was limited to Prince William Sound, Kodiak, Lower Cook Inlet, and Chignik. Rep. Kreiss-Tomkins and Rep. Ortiz, parallel to the work of Senator Bert Stedman (R-Sitka), advocated for the inclusion of Southeast communities in the governor’s disaster relief request in October 2016. (Kreiss-Tomkins & OrtizLetter of October 21, 2016)

"The investment from the federal disaster relief funds will help the fishing industry which is so vital to Southeast economies and communities, especially given the sobering run forecasts this year,” said Rep. Kreiss-Tomkins.

Kreiss-Tomkin said, “All this came about because fishermen contacted their legislators. We turned around and did our honest best to represent their interests and, fortunately, ensure that Southeast Alaska was included with the rest of Alaska and got its fair share.”

“We heard from fisherman here in Southeast who saw a more than 50% drop in revenue,” said Rep. Ortiz. “I’m glad to see that all of the communities affected by the 2016 pink salmon fishery disaster will be receiving compensation.”

According to NOAA, the funds can help commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, charter businesses, shore-side infrastructure, subsistence users, and the fishing ecosystem and environment. Activities that can be considered for funding include infrastructure projects, habitat restoration, state-run vessel and permit buybacks, job retraining, and other activities, as specified by the law and limits of the request.

NOAA Fisheries used commercial fishery revenue loss as the common metric to allocate funding among eligible disasters. In addition to revenue loss, NOAA also took subsistence uses and long-term impacts to the fishery into account to further ensure an equitable distribution of the $200 million funded.

Following Secretary of Commerce Ross' announcement this week, NOAA said they will be contacing the eligible applicants for both hurricane-affected states and territories and for states and tribes affected by fishery disasters on the West Coast and in Alaska.

Alaska will receive $56,361,332 in disaster relief for economic assistance for entities affected by the 2016 Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fishery failure. The money is part of the $200 million in disaster relief allocated by the Secretary of Commerce in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018.

Nine fisheries in Alaska, Washington, California and Oregon as well as fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico will receive funds. Alaska Governor Walker thanked Alaska’s Congressional delegation for their efforts to secure the funds through the Bipartisan Budget Act.

“This is a big deal. Alaska will get more than a quarter of the $200 million dollars allocated to help fishing communities across the country that have faced fisheries related disasters,” Governor Bill Walker said.

Walker said, “Coastal communities have been hurting, and $56 million dollars will go a long way to help the hard-working and resilient Alaskans whose livelihoods and lifestyles depend on fish.” 

According to a news release from the governor, the State of Alaska is working collaboratively with NOAA and stakeholders to develop criteria for disbursement of funds. NOAA fisheries will provide notification regarding how to apply for funds through non-competitive awards. The funds can cover a wide range of entities such as commercial fisheries, industries like processors and support facilities, as well as communities affected by the disaster.  

U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan, and Rep. Don Young, (all R-Alaska), also welcomed a funding allocation announcement by the Secretary of Commerce for states and territories affected by recent fishery disasters. Alaska's disaster funding of $56,361,332 will support compensation, recovery, and relief for fishermen, communities, and stakeholders affected by the 2016 Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fishery disaster. - More...
Saturday PM - June 23, 2018

Ketchikan: Coast Guard Cutter John McCormick transfers command in Ketchikan - Lt. Tim Ozimek relieved Lt. Mike Moyseowicz as commanding officer of the Coast Guard Cutter John McCormick in a change of command ceremony held on June 15th at Coast Guard Base Ketchikan.

Capt. Stephen White, commander of Coast Guard Sector Juneau, served as presiding official as the command of the ship passed from its inaugural skipper to a successor. 

The Coast Guard commissioned the Cutter John McCormick in Ketchikan April 12, 2017. Built under the Coast Guard’s Sentinel-class FRC program, the John McCormick is the first of two fast response cutters homeported in Ketchikan and the first to be homeported in the Pacific Area. Four more fast response cutters are scheduled to be homeported in Alaska. - More...
Saturday PM - June 23, 2018

Alaska: Coast Guard seizes 80 tons of salmon for suspected illegal fishing in the North Pacific Ocean - The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Alex Haley detained the fishing vessel Run Da suspected of illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing activity last Saturday in international waters 860 miles east of Hokkaido, Japan.

The crew of the Alex Haley, a 282-foot medium endurance cutter homeported in Kodiak, and People’s Republic of China Coast Guard officers conducted a joint international boarding on the high seas of the Chinese-flagged fishing vessel Run Da.

A U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak C-130 aircraft, forward deployed on a North Pacific Coast Guard Forum multi-national fisheries enforcement patrol supported by Canada, China, Japan, Russia and the Republic of Korea, sighted the suspected IUU fishing vessel.

Upon arriving on scene, the U.S. Coast Guard and PRC Coast Guard conducted a set of pre-boarding questions over VHF-FM radio to confirm fishing activity and nationality. After questioning was complete and clearance to board was obtained from both United States and China, the Alex Haley boarding team deployed to assist the PRC Coast Guard investigation and to document the suspected illegal fishing activity.

The fishing vessel is suspected of violating the worldwide driftnet moratorium called for by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/215. The captain of the Run Da admitted to fishing with driftnets up to 5.6 miles in length. The joint boarding team discovered one ton of squid and 80 tons of chum salmon on board. 

The Alex Haley crew transferred custody of the Run Da and its crew Thursday to PRC Coast Guard vessel 2301 in the Sea of Japan approximately 92 miles west of Japan. PRC Coast Guard vessel 2301 will escort the Run Da back to China for prosecution. The PRC has jurisdiction for any enforcement actions taken upon the vessel, master and owner.  - More...
Saturday PM - June 23, 2018

A few days ago, John Walsh gave a talk a few hundred steps from that parking lot. Walsh has spent 17 years in Fairbanks studying Arctic climate and learning about the latest physical changes in the far North. He is the chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Center, and an expert on global warming as it applies to the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Back in the parking lot, an engineer guiding the work watches the drillers hit clear discs of ice, about 7 feet below car level. The ice had been solid for centuries, maybe thousands of years, but the construction of a parking lot in the late 1990s is making it shrink. What used to be spruce trees and an insulating carpet of forest floor is now a layer of warm asphalt.

Human-assisted or not, thawing permafrost is a slow-motion disaster happening now in most of northern Alaska. Unlike a hurricane or a flood, the loss of permafrost is silent, rarely dramatic, and never fatal. In the back parking lot, university secretaries and grounds crew workers will steer into different parking spaces, and go on with their days.

Even though they are dramatic in scale, the northern changes Walsh described have the same subtlety. They happen far from where most people live and have not yet resulted in an emergency for most of the world’s billions.

For example, sea ice was just not there in the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean this spring.

“That was new territory for open water,” Walsh said.

In the recent history of Earth, blue water on the northern oceans in early spring was an event worthy of more than a few minutes of Twitter’s attention. But few people heard that ocean lapping outside Point Hope and Utqiagvik. Lack of reflective sea ice floating on the northern oceans might help nurture 30-inch rainfalls in Houston, Texas, but that connection is hard to prove. - More...
Saturday PM - June 23, 2018

PETER ROFF: SCOTUS Puts Internet Sales Tax in Play - Bloomberg Businessweek just did a feature piece about the demise of Toys R US that, complete with an illustration of a crying Geoffrey the Giraffe, really tugs at your heart strings. It's a clever take that puts the blame squarely on private equity investors and executives who, the magazine claims, kept the company alive for a decade or more by "living on borrowed money."

While that's true in part, there's much more to the story. Almost no where in its exposition of the company's failure does it examine the underlying problem: government policies that favor clicks over bricks by granting tax and regulatory preference to e-tailers over what's come to be known as main street retail.

Up to now, sales tax must be collected on an item purchased via the Internet when the seller has a physical presence in the state in which the buyer resides. The technical term for that is nexus and it meant, according to what the United States Supreme Court found in the case of Quill v. North Dakota, that a state could not mandate the collection of sales tax on goods sold to purchasers living out of state where no nexus existed.

To many, this differentiation became one of the loopholes creating essentially preferential tax treatment for Internet retailers at the expense of local stores like Toys R US, which once dotted the American landscape. It was the toy store of choice for many parents until it became apparent the same items you could by in the store could be bought cheaper on the Internet and delivered to your house already gift wrapped.

On Thursday, the court reversed itself. In a 5-4 decision the justices now found state concerns about revenue loss should take precedence over concerns about a physical nexus. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy opined, "Each year the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality and results in significant revenue losses to the States. These critiques underscore that the physical presence rule, both as first formulated and as applied today, is an incorrect interpretation of the Commerce Clause." - More...
Saturday PM - June 23, 2018

BLAIR BESS: This is Us - This is us, America. This is who we are at this precise moment in time. A nation that separates families. A nation that interns children and infants in detention camps far from their parents, farther still from those the Trump administration perceives to be his meddlesome enemies; those whose prying eyes, brimming with empathy, and voices of reason are a threat to his regime. 

This is us, America. This is who we are - or have become - in the eyes of the world.

This is exactly what other autocrats - among them, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Turkey's Recep Erdogan - would like their own people to believe. For them, this is the perfect "I told you so" moment. A time when they can accurately point to America and say "They are no better than us. They are not who they claim to be." 

The president's immigration policy is a disaster. To those true believers, those who continue to ride the Trumpian Trolley to hell, the president is a man of his word. In their eyes, he is fulfilling the promises he made while campaigning for office. He tells them what he wants them to hear and believe. 

President Trump and his apostle, Jeff Sessions, are, in the minds of their followers, guiding Americans toward security and salvation. Yet, the path these two men and others in the administration are forging leads us further into the wilderness, isolating us from those who remain free to speak the truth and true to their values.

As in previous authoritarian regimes throughout history, the president and his minions have sought and found a scapegoat. For the Romans, it was the Christians; for the Czars, it was the downtrodden who threatened their autocratic reign and personal fortunes; for the Third Reich, it was the Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and political opponents.  - More...
Saturday PM - Jun e 23, 2018

MICHAEL REAGAN: Congress is Broken... and Spineless - It's no surprise that Democrats and everyone in the liberal media are blaming President Trump personally for the crying immigrant children at the border.

He gets blamed for everything their hysterical minds can think of. 

But it's not up to him to fix what's wrong with our messed-up immigration policies. It's up to Congress.

The problem is, as Americans can see for themselves every day, Congress is broken â€' and crawling with spineless politicians.

Our senators and representatives can't or won't come up with an immigration reform bill and send it to the president's desk any time soon - just like they couldn't or wouldn't do so when Bush II and Obama were presidents.

Both parties are at fault.

For more than thirty years, no matter which party controlled Congress or the White House, they did nothing significant to fix our illegal immigration problem - which now should be more accurately described as "an illegal invasion problem."

House Republicans today can't even get their act together to pass an immigration bill and send it to the Senate, where they'd never get it passed anyway.

Meanwhile, cynical Democrats prefer to continue using footage of crying children as propaganda weapons in their 24/7 war against Trump and anyone bearing his name. - More...
Saturday PM - June 23, 2018