Informant38

As the death toll mounted, Gale Norton, the grim boss of the Interior Department, acted befuddled and suggested that the die-off in these foul waters was a strange natural mystery.
But there's no need to call in a fish coroner. The slaughter in the Klamath River was a deliberate act, connived at by the White House, the Interior Department and the gang of Klamath River basin irrigators who have run riot down in southern Oregon for these many years.
"There are fish floating in every eddy," says Mike Belchick, a biologist with the Yurok Tribe. "Eyes popping out. Guts coming out. Scores of dead fish with moss on them. It makes me want to cry."
Now water is being released from the dams upstream near Klamath Lake. But it's far too late and will do little more than flush the stinking corpses downstream, along with the daily brew of pesticides, cowshit, and fertilizer that accounts for the normal effluent from the fields of the Klamath Basin.

Of course, it's the big fish kills that grab the headlines. And this was an unprecedented one: more than 30 percent of the entire salmon population of the Klamath wiped out in a single blow. Tribal leaders say there's no precedent for the death toll in history or myth.

But the salmon of the Klamath River, once one of the mightiest runs on earth, have been dying out for decades in a slow, steady slide toward extinction.

The gory frontpage photos of mass death send the wrong message, shocking, but oddly comforting to those responsible. They suggest a sudden catastrophic event, a singular tragic mistake. In fact, the salmon of the Klamath River, which flows some 200 miles from southern Oregon to the northern California coast, are the victim of a system that has conspired against them since the 1940s, at least.

"They played Russian roulette with our fish and our fish lost," says Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe.

It wasn't so much a game, as a gameplan. All along the irrigators had plotted the final doom of the salmon, which were a looming impediment to their increasingly frail economic condition. With the troublesome fish out of the way, they believe that their precious system of dams, pumps and irrigation ditches will be safe from the lawsuits of the environmentalists and the tribes.

Now the dead fish are being scooped up with bulldozers and trucked to a plant in Eureka, California where they will be rendered into fertilizer and no doubt end up back on some of the very fields that lead to their demise.


{ the nasty paranoid evil response is of course that the food chain that leads from the scumsucking turbo-hicks that are ripping off the water proceeds directly through scumsucking Archer-Daniels-Midland to scumsucking WalMart and Costco and Albertson's and on to the scumsucking swine that watch and believe scumsucking network TV, which same swine are also sucking up the aptly-named black gold world-wide, and thereby creating thug cartels whose transition from economic/environmental evil to purely Satanic evil will pass entirely unnoticed. watch and believe. watch and believe.}


Number of appearances made by corporate representatives on U.S. network nightly newscasts last year : 955


Number of appearances made by labor representatives : 31

harper's index september 2002