A way of life for centuries is gone, but look what is $prouting from the ashes:
"Gloucester looks to balance fishing with tourism" by Billy Baker | Globe Staff November 15, 2014
GLOUCESTER — On Monday, what was left of the fishing industry in Gloucester all but died. Again.
Come Friday, there was a groundbreaking for a controversial new upscale hotel and conference center on the city’s waterfront.
In between, a week of great tumult went by in Gloucester as outside forces and internal realities again pushed to the forefront a question that has nagged the city for decades: Does it make sense to bet Gloucester’s future on its past?
The drama began suddenly on Monday, when federal officials announced the latest blow to the fishing fleet: an emergency order that effectively bans cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine in an attempt to save the iconic fish from decimation.
There was a day, once, when I believed the federal government regarding the environment. That day is long, long gone.
Related:
"In an effort to halt dramatic declines in the cod population, federal officials overseeing the fishing industry on Monday announced unprecedented measures that effectively ban all commercial fishing of the region’s iconic species in the Gulf of Maine. The new rules, which fishermen say will be devastating for their livelihood, will take effect this week and last for at least the next six months. They expand areas where commercial fishing for cod was already banned and now also apply the ban to recreational fishermen. The temporary measures could be made permanent."
That means they are permanent.
Also see:
Future for fishermen bleak under cod ban
Cod restrictions will cost consumers who buy local
Baker questions federal findings on fishing limits
Globe has forgotten about his fish tale.
How do they count fish anyway?
"Scientists and environmentalists have offered broad rebuttals to Baker and the fishermen in the news media, often blaming the problem on decades of overfishing. But there has been little detailed discussion of how the federal government actually counts fish and how reliable its numbers are. The decades-old count, it turns out, is a sprawling effort, overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, based in Woods Hole.
OH NO, it's NOAA, meaning they are NOT RELIABLE AT ALL!!!
All the data go into a complex statistical model.
That is a fancy word for bullshit!!!
And every few months, NOAA produces a thick, peer-reviewed assessment of one of the species the agency studies — such as Atlantic striped bass, white hake, or cod. And aggrieved fishermen, an iconic species of their own, have argued that the abundant catch in their nets this year belies the government’s warnings of a species on the brink of collapse."
Government of the elites and Wall Street lying to starve you and keep food for themselves.
This IS the EndGame, folks -- unless the radioactive spew from Fukushima has finally made its way into the Atlantic.
The ban – which will last at least six months, if not indefinitely – has essentially grounded all but the largest fishing boats that are able to go far offshore, outside the restricted area.
Meaning the harvest will only be reaped by large corporate conglomerates. What a $hock!
Smaller day boats say the ban eliminates their ability to catch any bottom-dwelling fish – the basis of the industry – since they cannot do so without accidentally catching cod.
All around, there is bleak pessimism about the opportunity for the city’s famed fishing fleet to ever truly go back to work again. The cod ban is just the latest blow in decades of cutbacks and catch restrictions meant to restore fish populations the federal government says are alarmingly low.
“You used to be able to walk across the harbor, stepping from boat to boat,” said Enzo Russo, the owner of the Trish II, as he looked out at the mostly empty port. “Now it’s over. It’s all over.”
On the backs of cars around the city, there are bumper stickers that read: “Give a man a fish, he eats. Teach a man to fish, he starves.”
At Fisherman’s Wharf, the seafood auction house where boats unload their catch, Nick Giacalone pulled a sheet off the wall listing all the vessels the facility once served. “No longer in business. No longer in business,” he said as he went down the names. “He’s gone. He’s gone. It goes on and on.”
Of the 40 boats on the list, he said, only three or four still regularly fish. On Thursday, the first day of the cod ban, they unloaded zero boats.
And all around, there are stories just like that of Fisherman’s Wharf – large, underused facilities that were built to serve the fishing fleet.
Waterfront facilities. With scenic views.
Perfect for that 1% elite that we all exist to serve. That's how we are all being governed these days, and its why people all over the planet are angry and causing chaos.
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On Friday, after a seven-year battle that involved many contentious community meetings, officials broke ground on the Beauport Hotel Gloucester, a 96-room hotel and conference facility on the site of the long-vacant Birds Eye food packaging plant on Commercial Street. The hotel is being financed by Sheree Zizik, who runs Cruiseport Gloucester, and Jim Davis, the chairman of the New Balance shoe company, who has a home in Gloucester. Davis recently gave $500,000 for the naming rights to a new high school football stadium.
This stinks of the days of indulgences and idolatry, doesn't it?
The Gods of the ruling cla$$ with the criminal $cum name on everything.
The hotel is just steps outside the Designated Port Area, in a dense industrial and residential area locals call the Fort. Many fear the hotel will be a toehold, the beginning of a transition from a working waterfront to a tourist waterfront.
Fishermen have fiercely fought any tourist-related development for that reason, saying the industry has no chance to come back if there is no infrastructure to come back to. After this week’s cod fishing ban, fishermen from the state pier to the St. Peter’s Club, a longtime watering hole for the city’s mariners, wondered if it wasn’t time to face the inevitable reality of a Gloucester after fishing....
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Maybe I should stop fishing in the Globe pond.
"Mandarin Oriental to convert 25 units to luxury condos" by Casey Ross | Globe Staff November 13, 2014
In Boston’s luxury housing market, $17,000 a month buys a lot of bling.
Rent like that guarantees entree to the best neighborhoods, the finest restaurants and ceilings high enough to keep a pet elephant. But as prices soar to record levels, there is one thing that kind of money can no longer get you: An apartment at the ultra chic Mandarin Oriental.
The owners of the Back Bay complex are ending their leases with tenants in 25 apartments and converting those homes into condominiums. The one- and two-bedroom units are expected to command some of the highest prices in the condo sales market.
“The timing for this is impeccable,” said Kevin Ahearn, president of the real estate firm Otis & Ahearn, which is marketing the units. “There’s almost no inventory on the market at all, and demand is incredibly strong.”
A dramatic imbalance between supply and demand is driving condominium prices to record levels in Boston. Developers who have been constructing apartment buildings across the city are re-thinking their strategies. Some are beginning to produce condos for a city gobbling up units as soon as they hit the market.
In the Back Bay, the number of luxury condominiums available for sale has dwindled to about 30, an extremely low supply that is driving prices of the best units to obscene levels....
Even the Globe reporter admits it.
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Related: Movie theater to anchor Seaport complex
I thought Boston had a housing and homeless problem, but I gue$$ I was wrong.
"Child homelessness on the rise in nation" by David Crary, Associated Press November 17, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — The number of homeless children in the United States has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report.
Related: Incomes for the highest-earning 1 percent of Americans soared 31 percent from 2009 through 2012
That's strange since the wealthiest philanthropists did not give as much in 2013 as they gave before the Great Recession, even as a strong stock market and better business climate have continued to concentrate American wealth in the top 1 percent of earners.
The report by the National Center on Family Homelessness — a part of the private, nonprofit American Institutes for Research — blames the nation’s high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing, and the effects of pervasive domestic violence.
They never blame the private banking scheme or the $y$tem itself, notice that?
"nonprofits provide new ways for corporations and individuals to influence"
Oh, now my new$paper makes $en$e.
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The problem is particularly severe in California. Other states at the bottom of the list were Alabama and Mississippi. States with the best scores were Minnesota, Nebraska, and Massachusetts.
Really?
Even as “need has grown and services are overwhelmed?”
(Look who the prime example of need is, too! Tell it to the Hill, lady!)
Also see: Poverty rate in Mass. highest since 1960
I'm sure things have gotten much better in the last year.
Carmela DeCandia, director of the national center and a co-author of the report, noted that the federal government has made progress in reducing homelessness among veterans and chronically homeless adults....
Yeah, they are doing a great job!
The new report says remedies for child homelessness should include an expansion of affordable housing, education, and employment opportunities for homeless parents, and specialized services for the many mothers rendered homeless because of domestic violence.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development conducts an annual one-day count of homeless people. Its latest count tallied 610,042 homeless people, including 130,515 children.
Critics contend that HUD’s method grossly underestimates the extent of child homelessness and results in inadequate resources for local governments to combat it.
I'm sure that is true from a cash-grabbing, public relations ob$e$$ed government we have.
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HUD, btw, has long been notorious as a rat hole of corruption. It's another government agency that gets money poured into it which then somehow disappears.
And look what appeared on the front page of today's Globe:
"As global pharmaceutical companies build new labs, Internet giants Google and Twitter expand, and startups snap up office space at ever-higher rents, families living in the shadow of the innovation economy are flocking to the local food pantry at three times the rate of a decade ago. The waiting list for public housing is double what it was five years ago. The beds in the Salvation Army homeless shelter on Massachusetts Avenue are always full.
And this is in liberal, Democrat Massachusetts that is doing better than the nation, blah, blah, blah. Simply means the wealth inequality is soaring in this little one-party laboratory of liberal fa$ci$m.
Poor residents say the rush of new money and development has had one positive side-effect — the neighborhood is safer than it used to be. And business growth has flooded the city with tax dollars for social programs. But so far, this wave of prosperity has done little to lift up the low-income people living in its wake. And with every new shiny cube of glass and steel, the tension builds.
These worlds are unfolding side by side in this part of town, one with the kind of growth and opportunity that is the envy of the entire country, the other with a desperation that gets deeper by the day. The neighborhood reflects the disparities of Cambridge: Nearly a third of Area Four residents have graduate degrees, while just over a third of female-headed households live below the poverty line.
Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between haves and have-nots as stark....
Time to chart another course.
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UPDATE: US waters create potential for shellfish farming
