Mr. Terry Goes to Town

By Terry Haines

One morning about a month ago I was on a cod longliner about thirty miles off the Alaska Peninsula. We had broken up the deck ice with plastic sledgehammers and were pushing it overboard through the scuppers with big snow shovels. As I looked up over the rail I had a vision. The setting sun was burning like a bonfire between the sharp white teeth of the mountains. Ice fog was rising from the water making the image shimmer. Clicking hooks in the setting chute sounded like far off swordfalls with a chill I imagined a battle on the shore. An epic struggle. The flaming eye of Uncle Ted Stevens was in retreat. The sword with which he had marked so many ears lay broken. His mighty son, cast down from his throne in the state senate, was wandering the land, lost. FBI agents with quivers full of subpoenas galloping around the countryside at will, like crusaders in sunglasses. His dark ally Don "Corleone" Young caught with his coconuts out, and pursued across the land by fund sucking lawyers.

And on the side of Change rides Governor Sarah Palin, dressed in Joan of Arc maternity armor, pen of justice in hand, leading the valley trash and motley crewmen of Alaska in a revolution against the Corrupt Bastards. At her back her lieutenant Sir Sean of Parnell, who would leap to battle against the Don, joining the Lady Gabrielle LeDoux (an elf of some type), sharp axed Ethan of Berkowitz (a cousin of Gimli), Diane the Benson (a raven haired sorceress), and Jake of the Metcalf Clan, who strode in from the Far North, shaking snow from his fur clad shoulders. Meanwhile the King of Anchorage, Begich II, gathers his armies to assault the mighty Uncle Ted, joining the wandering wizard Raymetcalf, who has weakened the Dark Uncle with his Spell of the Uncovering. A wave splashed my face. The vision sputtered.

I shoved the unwanted ice into the sea and steeled myself for a quest, a journey that would take me far from the lonely northern Gulf, to the hidden city of Juneau and then on to the beating heart of the American Empire: Washington DC.

Yes, just a few days later I joined a merry band of Kodiak City Council members and our intrepid mayor and traveled to Alaska's capitol. Juneau is our Xanadu, shrouded in fog and walled off by high mountains; accessible only by plane, boat or llama and sometimes not at all. It's an old mining town whose ore now walks ashore, down the gangplanks of tall white cruise ships. Like Skagway, Ketchikan and other southeast Alaska towns Juneau is blessed with the Princess Curse. Every summer cruise ships belch thousands of eager customers onto a quaint mile of Hollywood set cartoon Alaska waterfront designed to lure them into themed shops to buy generic T shirts, expensive lunches and Korean made Tlingit trinkets. It's a boost to local economies and the sales tax revenue has meant improved roads and services for the towns. But blinking herds of "boat people" now dominate their summers, driving up the price of french fries, blocking traffic and lining up for the line to stand in line at your downtown store when all you want to do is buy AA batteries and a roll of duct tape, which cost more like everything else does now thank you very much, so step aside boat person you've taken over the entire culture of my town and I have learned to deeply resent you. In Kodiak the boat people are relatively rare and treated as an oddity. The average disembarking tourist must dodge semi trucks and fork lifts as he walks past a half mile of banging, steaming canneries to get to a working boat harbor where everyone will ignore him except to ask "A cruise ship huh? What's that like?"

I do have a story about this.

A cruise ship comes into Kodiak and three of the passengers walk the boat harbor looking at the fishing boats. They see a man in an open skiff packing beer into an ice chest. He has gear onboard and is obviously going out fishing.

"We're off the cruise ship." says one of the tourists "How about a hundred dollars to take us fishing for the day?'

"Sure" says the Kodiak man, "I was going out anyway." They have a fine day of fishing but when they start back to town the outboard motor quits.

"Oh yeah." says the Kodiak guy "This happens sometimes. I'll just have to rebuild it real quick." And he pulls a toolkit from under the bench seat. "You fellas might as well bait the gear up again. This is going to take a little while" Whistling a tune he begins to fill the plastic engine cover with a pile of small greasy parts.

A fog starts to roll in and the sun is soon blotted out. The tourists start to get a little worried. They have to be back to the ship in a few hours. They drift into a patch of seaweed. In the middle of the kelp is a silver pot all crusted with barnacles. One of the tourists starts to clean it up and when he does a genie pops out.

"Okay" he says "I see four people. I'll give you four wishes, one each."

"Right on." says the first tourist "send me back to the boat."

Poof, he's gone.

"I've had it with this cruise" says the second "send me back to Wisconsin."

Poof, he's gone.

"Me too." says the third "But don't send me home. Send me to Amsterdam."

Poof.

"Okay buddy." the Genie says to the Kodiak guy "Make a wish, already. I was in the middle of a card game."

"Hmmm?" says the Kodiak guy "Well, let's see." He looks around him. The rebuild is going pretty well. One of the fishing poles starts to twitch. Looks like a halibut, probably. He checks the ice chest. Plenty of beer. His drift is toward town. He'll be in by midnight even if he can't fix the outboard. "Well, I don't know. I can't think of anything offhand."

"Come on, buddy. Nothing? Bag of Cheetos?"

"Well, it is kind of lonely around here now. I kind of wish those other fellas were back."

This is my constituency. Last year I was just another one of those local crackpots who show up at City Council meetings: ignoring the flashing red light on the public comment podium, waving my arms like a conductor, working my way up to a rhetorical crescendo, usually ending with "I thought this was America!" or "This shall not stand!". Of course I ran for City Council. I'd run for the US Senate if I could take the time off. Much to my surprise the voters wished me into the skiff, along with another veteran of the comment gallery, my friend Jack, a local businessman recently retired from the Coast Guard.

So we went to see the wizard- the Kodiak Council's yearly visit to the state capitol. The trip is timed so we arrive just as they are having their Snake Pliskin arena fights over the state budget. We are there to cheer on our pet projects. We want help with a new jail, a ballpark and a fresh water zapper. I am also there to talk about my favorite subject: the secret privatization of the ocean's fishes in front of our faces, another creature from the cauldron of Uncle Ted.

He did it in 2003 when he was at the height of his powers. His son was President of the Alaska Senate, he President Pro Tempore of the United States Senate. He was chair of the mighty Senate Appropriations Committee, where they hand out the money. In government this is the place to be. In my short time as a public servant, I've come to find out its much easier to pass a law than it is to get the money for it. Plenty of nice shiny laws and programs get passed but never get funded. Without the money to make them happen they get crated up and packed away forever in that Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse.

Here is where the power of earmarks come in. An earmark is specific funding. For a Congressman it's like stapling a check to the ear of every cute little piglet law that you really want to see make it out of the barn. So even though the process of getting the law passed is public, the process of funding has become a lunchtime earmark trading game, like third graders playing with Pokemon cards. It's easy to do a power rating on Capitol Hill. Just count the earmarks. Uncle Ted and the Don have held key chairmanships that have allowed them to staple checks onto the ears of many little piggies. In return they allowed ears to be marked for pet projects of their peers, in accordance with the power of the peer. Of course this has led to the creation of a secondary power structure on the Hill. The laws are passed in public, but the process of deciding which of them to bring to life with funding is far less transparent.

Often a Congressman's effectiveness is measured less by what he can get passed than what he can get funded. Every one of them has different amounts of Pokemon earmark cards. How do they decide which piglets to mark? Well for one thing, just staying in office is expensive these days. Finding and reaching into big pockets takes up an increasing amount of our Congressman's time. If a lobbyist representing a big donor wants a specific law funded, well what's the harm? He's a member of the "community". It's his right to ask for an earmark. Likewise if a lobbyist wants to pay a relative to be a consultant, why not staple a check to his pet project? That last one may be the final undoing of Uncle Ted. He had been earmarking away for years, maintaining healthy campaign funds and PACs. But when his son Ben began to make his living as a "consultant" for various cash rich entities with interests in specific legislation, his goose started to slide into the oven. The one that burned my rockfish was fish privatization.

Ben Stevens was hired to grease the wheels under a law that would give ownership of all the wild crab in the Bering Sea to a select group of individuals and big corporations. Uncle Ted stuck "The Crab Rider" onto a gigantic omnibus spending bill using his unique power as Chair of Appropriations. The Justice Department, the Government Accountability Office, Senators McCain and Snowe and a flood of editorials all argued against it. The process failed to follow national standards or accepted protocols.

But it flew any way, and here's why. The omnibus spending bill was the result of a furious session of Pokemon trading. Everyone's earmarked piglets were packed onto the 'bus, and Uncle Chairman had his Hulk tie on. He threatened to smash everyone's piglets if his were questioned. The Crab Rider stayed onboard. The crabs it privatized are the same you see harvested on "The Deadliest Catch". The Discovery Channel edits out the real human story that boils all around while camera crews wait for someone to fall overboard. A thousand of my fisherman brothers had their jobs legislated away in Uncle Ted's Cauldron. The rest now work for one quarter share.

Fishermen. Gypsy cowboys of the sea. Last of the earth's free people. Commercial fishermen are the latest in a long line of ocean wayfarers who go to sea for a share. The Viking marauder, the Basque cod fisherman and New Bedford whaler all went to sea for nothing more than the promise of a fair share at the end of the trip. To this day owners, skippers and deckhands work for their share of a vessel's profits, if any. The Crab Rider changed the share system by pre-awarding uncaught crab. This flies in the face of the "Loose Fish-Fast Fish" rule. Melville spells out this universal rule of wild capture in Moby Dick. It says One, "The Fast- Fish belongs to the party fast to it." and Two, "The Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it." Of course they didn't have Uncle Ted. Just imagine the New Bedford whaler Admiral Scrooge at the public house, sipping Sam Adams with Uncle Ted, Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold.

"By my beard it has grown most vexing to me that my ship, the Sea Manger, takes ever the longer to fill with the sweet oil of the western whales. Witness ye my distress Uncle Theodore!"

"By my rats and badgers it sorely pains me to see you pained so sorely, my friend. I am, as you know, a Senior Senator. Is there no law that I could nail to yon spending bill that would be a soothing balm to this pox upon your pocketbook?"

"Verily it would simplify matters greatly if the bother of catching the great fish could be avoided entirely."

"Verily. But how?"

"Pass ye a law that giveth me to own all the whales that swim. Whoshallsoever catch a whale thereforward be then stealing from me then unless he payeth me a hefty ransom."

"Fetch me a scribe! Let it be so written!"

Admiral Scrooge runs to the docks where he tells Captain Cratchet to fire two thirds of the crew. The working whalers that remain must give seven out of every ten whales they catch to the Admiral, as a "lease fee". The town of New Bedford now finds it has one very rich citizen, five hundred at subsistence level and a thousand newly unemployed. Talk about shades of Medieval England! The King-Uncle Ted- gives away the means of wealth to a nobleman, Admiral Scrooge, who then turns everyone else into a sharecropper. Of course folks wouldn't have stood for it back then.

Next: I actually arrive in Juneau

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Posted April 10, 2008