Once again, Team Berger panders to big donors while shivving small businesses
It’s not hard to imagine a PTSD epidemic sweeping across our state’s commercial fishing business. Organizations — like the CCA — have been stuffing Raleigh politician pockets with cash for more than a decade as part of the fight to end commercial fishing.
All of us have seen those small trawlers working the coastline during our beach vacations. Those boats are usually run by families and a few friends. Their catches go toward putting food on the table and revenue into the local economy.
Environmentalists and so-called sport-fishermen have been working to create more and more 
regulations to make it harder and harder for these small mom-and-pop operations to do their jobs.
The efforts of the fishing industry opponents are succeeding in putting North Carolinians out of work and forcing restaurants and resellers to rely on fish provided by sources like Red China. Reliance on foreign sources forces restaurants and markets raises prices for consumers.
Click here for a good refresher on this on-going saga.
The latest? It turns out the North Carolina Senate – home to Team Berger — has passed a ban on shrimping off the coast of North Carolina. (Of course, we al know that stuff like this happens in the North Carolina Senate when just the *right amount* of cash has been counted out and placed in just the *right campaign accounts.*)
You would think the GOP majority in the state Senate would be the defender of small businesses. (Not this time, amigo. No way, José Padilla.). This all sounds so much like something Republicans would have attacked Democrats for in the old days.
Four senators from the coast were the only brave souls to stand up to the chamber’s capo di tutti and his henchmen and say NO.
The ban moves on to the North Carolina House. The shrimping industry is already pleading its case to House leaders.
All Northeastern NC reps have come out STRONGLY against.
Unsure where Kidwell stands?
2 Brunswick Co reps ARE supporting?? How, why?
Kidwell is strongly opposed to this travesty. The Brunswick GOP is run by carpetbaggers from the North, so ‘nuf said about them.
Like usual, Team Berger is promoting the interests of Communist China against those of Americans and North Carolinians. I wonder how much special interest whore Berger is taking in from Beijing? Red China often funds Trojan Horse “environmentalist” groups here in the US to further its own business interests by attacking its US competitors.
Berger is working to wipe out our own North Carolina seafood industry by prohibiting shrimp trawling where the shrimp are, in the sounds and just off the coast. Who benefits? The massive shrimp farms in Red China, our main competitor. Those citizens who love seafood will no longer have our fresh local wild caught shrimp available. It will now all be frozen farn raised from China, of questionable quality.
This is just like what “China Phil” Berger did on the “green energy” scam with North Carolina’s Green New Deal. It was an attack on American energy, coal and gas, to promote the Chinese-dominated wind and solar.. Berger pulled another legislative cram-down with a last minute rewrite there to put our energy sources under Chinese control, as well as much more expensive to the North Carolina consumer.
Phil Berger is a special interest political prostitute, constantly turning tricks for the special interests in the legislature. He should mount a red light above his office door. Lately, he seems to be pushing Communist Chinese interests very hard. The question is what is he getting back from them? Are Chinese owned American companies shoveling the payola into his war chests? One also wonders how much money the Chinese interests are pumping into the CCA?
Also, as usual, Berger is spitting in the face of his own constituents, many of whom love fresh wild caught local seafood and don’t want to have to only have frozen Chinese seafood as their only option.
NEVER NEVER NEVER BERGER !!!! It is time to FLIP THE BERGER in the primary. Send Comrade Berger packing to Beijing.
As to the importance of God’s marine resources to mankind, catching killing cleaning and consuming far outways catching kissing and releasing.
The very worst thing about this is the underhanded way it was handled with a sneaky last minute committee amendment / substitute and then taken straight to the floor with limitations on debate. That way, there was no opportunity for those whose businesses would be destroyed to respond, to speak out, to contact legislators, or have a meaningful opportunity to save their business. This is highly unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong. That is why the platform of the North Carolina Republican Party objects to and condemns these heavyhanded legislative tactics.. A proper way to have handled this issue would have been for its proponents to have introduced a bill months ago and let it go through the normal legislative process with committee hearings and plenty of opportunity for those on both sides to be heard. This “wham, bam, thank you maam” process reminds me more of Tammany Hall. The process involved here puts a big black mark on our General Assembly. North Carolina businesses should NOT be treated this way. They deserve better from our legislature.
Note to conservatives: tired of being constantly defeated by Berger, Hall, Simmons and their NCGOP corruptocrats? You could join the NC Constitution Party en masse, and wreck them or force them to the bargaining table a la the NY GOP/NY Conservative Party arrangement. Or you can just go on complaining.
The experience of the Wild Rose Party, a conservative third party in the Canadian province of Alberta, is a cautionary tale on that strategy. Yes, they surpassed the Conservatives in the provincial legislature, but in splitting the right of center vote, they ended up with the socialist New Democrats running the province. Only a merger of the Wild Rose Party and the Conservative Party under the Conservative name but with Wild Rose’s leadership, restored conservative control of the province.
It is much more productive to try to right the ship within the GOP.
“It is much more productive to try to right the ship within the GOP.”
Really? How’s that been working out, the last fifteen years since the GOP took over in Raleigh, or for that matter, the last ten years since Hassan Harnett was railroaded out of office?
THEY. WILL. NEVER. LET. THAT. HAPPEN.
So typical of that dirtbag. Meanwhile, the Hayes Barton/Stein/Figure Eight/CCA/Grady White yacht owners cabal give not one F about the illegals SWARMING our coast, over shrimping, over fishing, trampling on our wetlands & leaving behind trash of epic proportions.
We have one option now besides keeping an eye of that sell-out: Open up your checkbooks and donate to Sheriff Sam Page. That Berger swine must go!
So typical of that dirtbag. Meanwhile, the Hayes Barton/Stein/Figure Eight/CCA/Grady White yacht owners cabal give not one F about the illegals SWARMING our coast, over shrimping, over fishing, trampling on our wetlands & leaving behind trash of epic proportions.
We have one option now besides keeping an eye of that sell-out: Open up your checkbooks and donate to Sheriff Sam Page. That Berger swine must go!
The County Compass newspaper in Pamlico County seems to have identified the special interest which is likely behind this dastardly attack on our NC fishing industry. A major importer of frozen seafood, imported mostly from Red China, has been undergoing a major expansion of their facilities to import seafood in the Norfolk area. They want to run their local competitors out of business and are incentivizing despicable political whores like “China Phil” Berger to help them do it.
We must eliminate China Phil from the Senate in his primary. Indeed, any traitor in the Senate who voted for this attack on our local industry in support of the ChiComs needs to be ousted in their primary. Throw the bums OUT.
FLIP THE BERGER, and his little puppets, too.