IS YOUR JOB SAFE? THINK AGAIN!

Its a sad state of affairs when you can't trust your own government. NAFTA (North American Free Trade) sent most business into foreign countries. To add insult to injury our government gave money to big corporations to move into foreign countries.

  

I have been sued the last ten years by people who have no reason to sue me other than they are mean and have no soul. They want to take everything we worked for all our lives and if that isn't enough they want to destroy our way to earn a living. I have had to spend more than $100,000 for lawyers.

I am 67 and thank God every day that he let me live this long. I have no job and no money. I get food from the food bank and my cloths from the Salvation Army. I am loosing my eyesight with age related AMD. For the last twenty years I have to take two kinds of blood pressure medication. My blood pressure still is in the heart attack zone. I had an appointment for a hip transplant last December 2010 with Dr. Cavanaugh in Anchorage but didn’t have the money to travel to Anchorage. I have an ongoing ear infection since 1990 that drives me crazy. If I don’t swab my ears out with hydrocortisone cream every day they start to hurt and itch and my head swells up. Then the pain really starts in. I also have a lot of back pain from lifting 650-pound crab pots and a lifetime of hard labor.

I fell off the dock onto the frozen beach severely injuring my back in 2001. It took me six months to walk again. I had to get a hernia operation in November 2009. Dr. King did the surgery implanting a four-inch piece of plastic over my right hip joint. They didn’t tell me I should do stretching exercises afterwards so now it is almost impossible for me to put the sock on my right foot.

Last September 2010 I developed a blood clot under my right knee and my leg swelled to twice its normal size. I went to the Soldotna Emergency and they injected blood thinners into my stomach. I had to administer two shots a day myself into my stomach for the next eight days. Now I take Warfarin every day in the hopes the swelling in my leg will go down. The stress of the lawsuits and not being able to earn a living caused eczema over several parts of my body. As I write this my foot is still swollen.

I have had my name in at the state job center for six years to work as equipment operator, mechanic or electrician without any result. Because of my age employers are not willing to hire me. If I had a job I would be able to pay my bills and you would not be reading this right now. The stress of lawsuits has shortened my lifespan by at least ten years. I have stomach pain which I think is the start of an ulcer.

 

In the 1970’s I used to earn well over $100,000 a year commercial fishing king crab and salmon in lower Cook Inlet. Some years I earned a lot more. What with the government stealing the value of our money through inflation that amount of money is equivalent to $200,000 today.

Empty oil tankers returning to Alaska must take on ballast water in order to run in the open ocean otherwise they could roll over. For twenty years the State of Alaska allowed over a hundred oil tankers a year to each dump about 20-million gallons of algae and sewage contaminated ballast water taken from the Los Angeles, Honolulu and Anacortes Washington harbors into lower Cook Inlet. The tankers start discharging ballast water when they reach the Barren Islands at the entrance of Cook Inlet. By the time they get to the oil storage facilities at Kenai and Drift River Terminal the ballast water has been discharged and they are ready to take on oil. The ballast water from 100 oil tankers a year totals about 2,000,000,000 –that’s two billion gallons a year.

It took twenty years to destroy the crab and shrimp fisheries. Twenty years of dumping this toxic waste, algae and crude oil plus the city of Anchorage dumping millions of gallons of sewage into upper Cook Inlet and twenty years of offshore oil wells dumping radioactive drill tailing and drilling mud, the shrimp, crab and clams were exterminated. It’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t trust your own government!

Shrimp, crab and clams are bivalves. After their eggs hatch the spat must swim to the surface in the spring to feed on the first plankton bloom. When the ecosystem had been altered by contaminates such as bacteria and algae that suck up all the oxygen the plankton dies. The entire ecosystem is poisoned by chemicals, plastics and heavy metals in solution. Add to this a layer of oil on the surface that suffocates zooplankton and you have a recipe for disaster. I believe our food supply was purposely poisoned for the purpose of getting rid of us commercial fishermen.  

Practically all the shrimp and crab were exterminated. To add insult to injury the state blamed the depletion of the resource on the fishermen. Many fishermen like myself, lost their boats, wives, houses and everything. My loss totals several million.  

The state wanted to get rid of commercial fisherman so they could sell billions of dollars in oil leases in lower Cook Inlet south of Kaligan Island and in Kachemak Bay. They had visions of making it look like the Gulf of Mexico will oil rigs in every direction from horizon to horizon. The oil companies weren’t interested in dealing with Alaska’s bureaucracy so very few oil leases were sold.

I addition the the tanker spills the municipality of Anchorage was steadily dumping more and more chloronated sewage into the upper inlet. While all this was going on twenty-three oil wells were dumping drilling mud, garbage, pallet boards, and plastic bags--not to mention blowouts that lasted months dumping untold millions of gallons.

Due to state greed the people living in the cities of Homer and Seldovia were cheated out of their livelihood and hundreds of millions of dollars. I was forced to fish further west out of Kodiak and King Cove in order to earn enough to support my family. Being away from home for months at a time and the stress of trying to make a living with an old 70-foot boat Mary M built in 1929 resulted in my divorce. I lost everything, my boat, three-hundred crab pots worth $500 apiece and my house in Halibut Cove. In addition we lost our family homestead in Tuxedni Bay appraised at one million dollars at the time. Judge Hansen who presided over my divorce stipulated that I put it in an irrevocable trust for my children. I paid Attorney Mike Hough $1,300 to draw up the trust and my ex-wife and I deeded it over to the trust.

A few years later I was besieged by 50 herring fishermen in Tuxedni Bay that belonged to the Church of Armstrong. They destroyed my nets, cut my nets, ran over my buoys, and rammed my skiff putting a hole in it. If the State of Alaska would have enforced its fish and Game regulations none of this would have happened. If the State Troopers would have defended our property rights at that time none of this would have happened. We called them repeatedly to do something but they didn’t respond.

I go sued by one of them. The same judge Hansen that presided over my divorce a few years earlier put judgments against my Children’s trust, me and my corporation. I had to file bankruptcy and we lost the homestead. A year after putting judgments on us Judge Hansen died of brain cancer. I appealed the case and Judge Cranston took over. I didn’t have any money and couldn’t travel to a court appointment. Judge Cranston who was a Boy Scout Leader got accused of molesting the boy Scouts and died of a heart attack.      

If the State had not destroyed the fisheries you would not be reading this right now. Thru incompetent resource management and insidious greed of this state has bankrupted me once before costing me several million dollars. What options do I have right now? You tell me! I am 67 and nobody will hire me and I have no money. Should I continue to push buttons on the antiquated computers down at the State Job Center? If I were to somehow land a minimum wage job how long would it take me to pay off my credit card debts? Will I live long enough to pay off my debts? Will you give me a job?

My brother Herb killed himself with a 357-magnum pistol after the state refused to grant him a limited entry salmon permit for his new boat, Penga. He fished salmon all his life. After the limited entry law was passed and the state refused to grant him a salmon permit he had no way to earn a living. He shot himself in the head because he didn’t want to be a burden on others. This state killed him. I now find myself in the same situation and think about killing myself--only if I were to do so, then, you, who are earning $200 an hour wouldn’t have a job. The only thing that stops me from killing myself is I want to know when and how this is going to end.