The law locks up both man and woman
Who steal the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
Anonymous ca. 1800
Deathwatch for Snake River Salmon
Bonneville Power Administration and Northwest offices of the Army Corps of Engineers and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration are committing an ecological crime against humanity.
This grotesque betrayal of the public trust has been in plain sight for 40 years since the 1980 Northwest Power Act’s “urgent priority” mandate to protect Snake River salmon from four fatally ill-designed Army Corps of Engineers pork barrel dams on the lower Snake River in SE Washington.
With reckless disregard for the law and the cost to society, these corrupt agencies, and affiliated pork barrel economic interests, for decades deliberately subverted every salmon protection law from the 1855 treaty-reserved rights of Native American Indians, through the sweeping “urgent priority” salmon restoration mandate of the 1980 Northwest Power Act.
They aggressively drove to the threshold of extinction Snake River salmon, one of the world’s unique, irreplaceable, perpetually renewable natural resources. Now they strive to subvert the law of last resort, the Endangered Species Act.
Loss of Snake River salmon also threatens salmon-dependent Southern Resident Orcas and other marine and freshwater animals for thousands of miles along the Pacific coast from northern California to southeast Alaska and more than 700 miles inland.
These corrupt incompetents spent billions of public dollars and failed to overcome the dams’ fatal design flaw. The dams cause billions of dollars in damage. Billions more spent to try to cover it up. Untold thousands of lives damaged. Untold numbers of small businesses destroyed; jobs lost.
Bureaucratic mediocrities and their political handlers gambled the reliability of the Federal Columbia River Power System on an illegal house of cards that requires them to perpetually subvert salmon protection laws and inflict economic, ecological and economic damage on the Northwest and Nation.
They are enabled in this egregious scofflaw betrayal of the public trust by a complaisant hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil Northwest congressional delegation, bribed state and tribal governments, ineffectual and / or complicit environmental NGOs and a purposely myopic mainstream news media.
The corrupt bureaucrats, elected officials and their accomplices and shills have never been held publicly accountable for their roles in this dirty business.
For them it’s the Northwest Big Short: “I’ll be gone; You’ll be gone” when what little is left of Snake River salmon, which once numbered in the millions, are functionally extinct and on Endangered Species Act perpetual life support.
They don’t think they ever will be held accountable.
They’re wrong.
The mission of the Last Salmon Ceremony is to publicly out the Snake River salmon killers, their shills and enablers. To expose their soul-rotting work. To put their faces on it and in it.
To create digital notes in a bottle that will endure and wash up in public consciousness forever so that they and the evil they do are never forgotten — never forgiven.
The Last Salmon Ceremony is a project of
Northwest Resource Information Center www.nwric.org
