The Juneau-based United Fishermen of Alaska has taken over Kodiak’s ComFish commemorative dinner celebrating 50 years of seafood harvesting and processing in Alaska. And UFA plans to give ex-senator Ted Stevens a lifetime achievement award anchored in the theme “Look How Far We’ve Come” since statehood.

That’s right, we’re right back to foreign and outside domination of Alaska’s fisheries, unreasonably low ex-vessel fish prices, and crashing crab crew settlement incomes; but for this UFA intends to celebrate the man who largely ushered in the massive privatization of the nation’s public commons causing those harms.

He’s the same man who allowed our North Pacific Fishery Management Council to represent the conflicted interests of a few kleptocrats, instead of serving the many — let alone obtaining the true value of our seafood for Alaskans. The man who brought a “resource curse” upon Alaska fisheries instead of protecting the value of that commonwealth for U.S. citizens and taxpayers — the very ones Stevens continues to bleed today for his fat government pension.

Kodiak’s most stalwart seafarers still working in boots and raingear find UFA’s nauseating stunt less welcome here than a net full of live man-eating sharks on deck. Or as one disenfranchised crab crewmember put it, “Ted is like jellyfish in my eye.” Another asks, “Why would any person of sound mind even want to receive an award from UFA, a conflicted group mostly controlled by processors and their shills?”

The trade show has moved to a building once occupied by a healthy business whose timely demise overlapped the recent implementation of Ted’s immoral crab and rockfish privatization and consolidation plans. And other Kodiak businesses remain at risk from rationalization harms.

Nonetheless, with the chamber’s blessing the Hulk of foreign-controlled privatization is being raised phoenix-style, using unjustifiable propaganda, by those who directly profiteered under his politically corrupt reign. There are those who now busy themselves remaking Ted in to Neptune Almighty, in shameless blasphemy — despite warnings that more federal indictments implicating him may soon be on the way. Welcome to CON-Fish.