Video by Liz Scheltens and Ian McKenna
Corporations discard millions of pounds of fish every year while people lose access to rivers, and the media is sleeping on the story. Now the working class is fighting back, and their rage could flip the U.S. Senate.
TRANSCRIPT
LIZ SCHELTENS, MORE PERFECT UNION: These ships have a secret.
BILL HILL, COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN AND INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS: This is hidden. You can’t see it because it’s underwater.
SCHELTENS: This is some of the first high-definition underwater footage of an industrial bottom-trawler at work, and ships like these have become the focus of intense political debate here in Alaska.
ALASKAN FISHERMAN TO SCHELTENS: Eventually, when there’s just no fish, what do they do?
ALASKAN BUSINESS OWNER: They’re raping the seas.
SCHELTENS: Over the last four decades, the corporate owners of these trawl ships built a political empire to help protect their profit margins. But in recent years, some of Alaska’s most important fish stocks have collapsed.
And people here are demanding answers and action.
ALEXUS KWACHKA, COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN: People are losing their way of life!
CHARLIE WRIGHT, ALASKA NATIVE FISHERMAN: It’s all for money, and it’s all political. Letting the trawlers take the fish and starving us along the river. I call it a modern-day genocide.
LOUIS KENDRICK, COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN: Who’s representing the common fisherman? No one! We don’t have any lobbyists.
SCHELTENS: I came to Alaska because I wanted to understand this anger. Was this just social media outrage spilling over into real life, as some critics have argued?
