On February 17, 2014, 29-year-old Kristen Coutu injected herself for the last time.
Coutu was found dead in her car in Cranston, Rhode Island, around 11 p.m. What she apparently had thought was heroin turned out to be pure fentanyl, a much more powerful opioid. The man who sold her the drugs, Aaron Andrade, was charged with second-degree murder, pleaded guilty, and is now serving a 40-year sentence.
He could have had it even worse. Under a bill just passed by the Rhode Island state Senate, drug dealers could be sentenced to life in prison if drugs they sell are used in a fatal overdose. (A version of the bill is now being considered in the Rhode Island House.) “Kristen’s Law” has been backed by prosecutors and relatives of overdose victims, such as Coutu’s mother. The bill is supposed to deter drug dealers, but critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say it will do little to stem the flow of drugs and will likely end up hurting the drug users it is supposed to help.
“The criminalization of drug use over the last hundred plus years has not only failed to stem the tide of substance use and associated disorders, it’s led to mass incarceration disproportionately affecting communities of color and low income communities,” substance abuse expert Lisa Peterson told lawmakers during a hearing on the bill. The Drug Policy Alliance, which opposes the legislation, points out that it can be difficult to differentiate between drug users and drug dealers, who are often struggling to fund their own habit.
From Rhode Island’s Democrat-controlled state Senate to the White House—where President Donald Trump has floated the idea of giving drug dealers the death penalty—members of both major parties have tried to tackle the opioid problem with yet more enforcement and punishment. They should learn instead from the drug war’s failures. Cracking down on dealers does little to inhibit drug crime; it does much more to put a fiscal strain on taxpayers. Furthermore, while it’s difficult to measure precisely how many low-level drug dealers are also addicts, but as Kathryn Casteel points out it’s safe to assume a reasonable degree of overlap between these two groups. Legislation like Kristen’s Law will needlessly subject destitute addicts (who are often unaware of what they are selling) to expensive and harsh punishment instead of letting them get treatment they need.
Above all, officials need to realize that overdoses and murders are two completely different things. Treating them as the same doesn’t do anything to help anyone. Twenty states already have similar laws on the books and many others prosecute such cases through their standard homicide statutes, yet the opioid crisis rages on.
“She didn’t ask to die,” Kristen’s mother testified to the Rhode Island House. “She didn’t ask for a lethal dose of fentanyl that would have killed someone much bigger than her.”
She’s right. Kristen didn’t ask to die. And as long as drug users have no reliable way to tell what they’re putting into their bodies, more people are going to die this way. All the more reason to roll back the senseless rules preventing a fully above-ground market in legal, accurately labeled opioids.
In the four weeks since Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano began erupting, over 80 homes and other structures have been destroyed, and it appears by warnings from local authorities, that the eruption is moving to a more dangerous phase.
Somewhat remarkably, only one person has been hurt by the lava since the eruptions began. Civil Defense Administrator Talmadge Magno told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that a man sustained a “serious” injury on his leg two weeks ago when he was “lava-bombed” by splatter that hit him while he was sitting on the porch of a home near the Lanipuna Garden subdivision.
The incident reportedly shattered the victim’s leg from his shin to his foot and he was taken to a hospital to be treated, ABC News reported.
The lava flow from fissure 8 is wide and feeding multiple flow lobes that are slowly moving downhill. The flow is advancing about 50 yards per hour…
This image shows the flow margin on Kahukai. The lava in this area is about 3 to 10 feet tall.
Fissure heights are continuing to reach 230 to 260 ft above ground level. The fountaining feeds a lava flow that is moving to the northeast.
And as Fox News reports, as that molten lava continued spewing, Hawaii County ordered all residents of a designated portion of the hard-hit Leilani Estates development to evacuate by Friday morning or face possible arrest.
Big Island Mayor Harry Kim declared a roughly 17-block swath of the estates “off limits indefinitely” and gave residents 24 hours to get out by 12:06 p.m. local time Friday, Reuters reported.
Those remaining in the mandatory evacuation area beyond the deadline “do so at their own risk, with the knowledge that emergency responders may not respond,” the Hawaii County Civil Defense Agency said in a statement.
The county agency also said anyone in violation of the order will be liable for any costs associated with rescue operations.
“There are no plans to go into the restricted area after 12:06 p.m. Friday and search for anyone who might still be there,” he said. “But anyone found in the area after that time could be subject to arrest.”
“Refusing to evacuate may put you, your family and first responders in danger,” the county agency added. “Heed warnings from Civil Defense officials and stay alert.”
Meanwhile, Leilani Estates residents west of the mandatory zone were “strongly encouraged to evacuate,” the county said.
“You are at risk of being isolated due to possible lava inundation,” the civil defense agency warned earlier this week.
Additionally, CNN reports that the Hawaii volcano, in addition to spewing ash, fountaining lava and bursting lava bombs from the Earth, is even creating its own weather.
The United States Geological Survey, or USGS, posted a photo to Facebook from earlier this week that shows building pyrocumulus clouds over fissure 8.
“Hawaii Volcano Observatory Scientists are beginning to observe these ‘pyrocumulus’ clouds forming over the Leilani Estates fissure system,” stated the USGS.
Pyrocumulus clouds are rare mushroom-like cloud formations that can tower above lava and gases spattering from a volcano.
They are often also referred to as “flammagenitus” or “fire clouds,” the USGS said in the post.
Meanwhile, it’s not just the lava that is running hot, as CBS News reports, residents too are reaching their boiling point. A man was arrested after pulling a gun on a neighbor and shooting it during an argument.
Sixty-one-year-old John Hubbard is now under arrest, accused of opening fire and allegedly assaulting a neighbor who came to check on his property. The victim was injured, but was not shot.
Finally, Wendy Stovall, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey has some bad news…
“There’s no sign we’re getting that anything is going to slow down at the moment,” Stovall told reporters, according to Reuters.
For Roseanne Barr, star of ABC’s hit show “Roseanne,” there would be no appeal. When her tweet hit, she was gone.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement, is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” declaimed Channing Dungey, the black president of ABC Entertainment.
Targeting Valerie Jarrett, a confidante and aide of President Barack Obama, Roseanne had tweeted: If the “muslim brotherhood & the planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
Offensive, juvenile, crude, but was that not pretty much the job description ABC had in mind for the role of Roseanne in the show?
Roseanne also tweeted that George Soros, 87-year-old radical-liberal billionaire, had been a Nazi “who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps and stole their wealth.”
The Soros slur seems far more savage than the dumb racial joke about Jarrett, but it was the latter that got Roseanne canned.
Her firing came the same day that 175,000 employees of 8,000 Starbucks’s stores were undergoing four hours of instruction to heighten their racial sensitivities.
These training sessions, said The Washington Post, “marked the start of Starbucks’ years-long commitment to new diversity and sensitivity programs after two African-Americans were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on April 12.”
The Philly Starbucks manager, a woman, had called the cops when the two black men she took to be loiterers refused to leave.
Rachel Siegel of the Post describes the four-hour session:
“At first the employees are prompted to find differences. They watched a video in which (Starbucks head) Howard Schultz talks about his vision for a more inclusive company and country. They reflected what a place of belonging means to them. And they examine their own biases.
“Each group viewed a documentary underwritten by Starbucks and directed by Stanley Nelson. In the film people of color talk about experiences of being followed in stores. Footage from the civil rights movement quickly progresses to 21st-century cellphone videos capturing people being dragged off a plane, threatened in a New York deli and choked at a North Carolina Waffle House.”
On reading this, the terms “Orwellian” and “re-education camp” come to mind.
Earlier in May, the NFL issued a rule saying players who refuse to stand for the national anthem must remain in the locker room. If they take a knee on the field this coming season, they can be punished and the team fined.
Great was the outrage when this ruling came. The First Amendment rights of black players were being brutally trampled upon.
Yet the NFL has always had restrictions on behavior, from evicting players from the game for unsportsmanlike conduct to curtailing end-zone dances.
What is the common thread that runs through these social clashes from just this last month?
It is race. Each episode fits neatly into the great media narrative of an irredeemably racist America of white oppressors and black victims.
Had it been two white guys hanging out in that Philly Starbucks, who were told by the manager to buy a cup of coffee or get out, the spat would never have become a national story.
These incidents, coming as they do 50 years after the historic advances in civil rights, induce a deep pessimism that this country will ever escape from the endlessly boiling cauldron of racial conflict.
Today, because of cellphone videos, social media, 24-hour cable and the subsequent nationalization of even the most trivial incidents, our national conversation is more suffused than ever with matters of race.
For many, race has become a constant preoccupation.
And in each of these incidents and disputes, the country divides along the familiar fault lines, and the accusations and arguments go on and on until a new incident engenders a new argument.
The America of the 1960s, with its civil rights clashes and “long hot summers,” was a far more segregated society than today. Yet the toxic charge of “racist” is far more common now.
And how much do these conversations correspond to the real crisis of black America? Here is a sentence culled from another Post story this week: “Three fatal shootings …over the Memorial Day weekend brought the (Ward 8 total) to 30 homicides so far this year.”
Are white cops really the problem in Ward 8, Anacostia, when 30 people in that black community have been shot or stabbed to death in the first five months of 2018?
Washington, D.C., spends more per student than almost any other school district. Yet the test scores of vast numbers of black kids have already fallen below “proficiency” levels by the time they reach fourth and eighth grade, and the high school truancies have reached scandalous levels.
How does ABC’s cashiering of “Roseanne,” or apologies to the two guys at Starbucks, or restrictions on the rights of millionaire NFL players to kneel during our national anthem address the real crisis?
Is white America really black America’s biggest problem?
One day after Brazil’s oil workers went on strike, further slowing Latin America’s biggest economy shortly after the country’s truckers paralyzed the nation by refusing to work, the CEO of the state energy giant, Petrobras, Pedro Parente unexpectedly resigned on Friday stepping down as chief of the state-controlled oil company he helped to revive in the aftermath of the Carwash scandal as a nationwide strike against fuel prices unleashes criticism against his free-market policies.
President Michel Temer and President of Petrobras, Pedro Parente; Source: O Globo
Parente, 65, has become the highest-profile victim of the ongoing truckers strike against fuel prices, now in its 11-th day, that grounded flights, shuttered sugar mills, caused shortages of products from food to gasoline and is expected to lead to a sharp drop in Brazilian GDP. As Bloomberg adds, “his departure marks the downfall of an executive credited with turning around a state-controlled oil company that had been shackled with debt, corruption and mismanagement.”
The news sent Petrobras stock crashing, down 12% on the day, wiping out all of the years gains…
… with even the Brazilian real sliding on the news,
Pointing out the obvious, the President of the Lower House Rodrigo Maia told Bloomberg that “It’s not a good sign that he’s leaving” adding that Pedro Parente “has a lot of credibility and was doing a great job” something traders, suddenly panicking about what is really going on in Brazil, were clearly aware of.
Parente became CEO of Petrobras in May, 2016, vowing to shift company strategy away from government interests and toward a business-oriented strategy. The former engineer was also tasked with cleaning up the image of the company that was at the center of the Brazil’s biggest corruption probe in modern history, Operation Carwash.
As Bloomberg recounts, Parente gained praise in financial markets for plans to sell assets to cut debt, reducing costs, recovering cash flow and implementing a new and profitable fuel price policy. Under Parente’s watch, Petrobras posted its best quarterly financial results in five years, and the company’s stock price doubled.
Ironically, it was exactly that fuel policy, which consisted in matching local fuel prices to international rates, that came under fire during a massive truckers strike that wreaked havoc on Latin America’s largest economy. And, as global oil prices rose this year, the cost of fuel in Brazil also increased, spurring discontent among consumers, led by truck drivers who depend on fuel to make their living.
And so, less than two weeks after the strike which was launched as a result of Parente’s policies, one of Brazil’s most respected capitalists is out, leaving traders with the great unknown of what happens next to one of the world’s export powerhouses.
It is deeply ironic that just when Ireland, a Catholic nation, is handing women more control over their bodies, the United States is taking it away. States all around the country are imposing new restrictions on abortion. And now on the pretext of preventing taxpayer dollars from going to fund abortions, President Trump is going after Planned Parenthood’s Title X dollars.
But notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia that if Trump wanted to defund Planned Parenthood it would be one thing. But he is using Title X funding to try and control how the outfit spends its private funds.
Politicians and journalists often tell a story about greedy pharmaceutical companies that turned doctors into dealers and patients into addicts. And now, we’re told, tens of thousands of Americans are dying of overdoses every year because of government inaction.
If this is truly an epidemic, the diagnosis is wrong in a few major ways. And the cure prescribed by the government is making the disease worse.
Pain and Suffering
Dr. Forest Tennant is one of the last doctors in America willing to treat pain patients using high doses of opioid painkillers. He operates out of a strip mall in West Covina, California. And he’s contacted by patients from all over the country on a daily basis, pleading with him to treat them because nobody else will.
But in a matter of months, thanks in part to increased pressure in the government’s war on opioids, he may be closing his clinic’s doors, which have been open since 1975.
When Reason did a story on Tennant’s clinic in 2017, his patients spoke of how government restrictions on opioid use were causing legitimate pain patients to suffer needlessly. Four months after we ran that story, the DEA raided Tennant’s clinic and home. The search warrant accused him of overprescribing medication and accepting payoffs from the pharmaceutical company INSYS. Tennant has earned speaking fees from the company as recently as 2015, which he says is standard practice. And his nonprofit clinic regularly operates at a loss, according to financial statements submitted to the Department of Justice.
“I think the government is trying to kill me and every one of [Tennant’s] patients,” said Gary Snuk, a resident of Montana, when asked about the raid on Tennant’s clinic. Snuk, who suffers from chronic pain resulting from back surgery complications, turned to Tennant when he couldn’t find adequate pain treatment from a local physician.
“We have no place to run,” says Snuk.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control recommended new opioid prescription guidelines, with a maximum dosage of 90 morphine-milligram equivalents (MME) a day. Although the guidelines were supposed to be voluntary, Tennant says most physicians have begun to treat them as mandatory. Several states have adopted legislation that mirrors the federal recommendations.
“I do not know of physicians who will be willing to prescribe high-dose opioids anymore,” says Tennant.
This situation has put a target on the back of doctors who don’t follow the guidelines, and Tennant says the pressure that the guidelines have put on him are a major reason that he’s decided to wind down his practice and focus on tapering his patients down below 90 MME so that they can find other doctors to treat them once he retires.
But he maintains that some patients exhibit genetic variations that require them to take unusually high doses of opioids to achieve pain relief.
“I don’t know how those people are going to get down to 90,” says Tennant. “There has been propaganda—and it’s pure propaganda—that you can just stop opioids. No need to taper them. Just stop. And we’re going to have some patients commit suicide.”
Prohibition, Then and Now
Government officials like Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who heads the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, have repeatedly blamed the problem on doctors overprescribing opioids to their patients and turning them into addicts.
“It’s not starting on our street corners. It’s starting in our doctors’ offices and hospitals,” Christie told CNN’s Jake Tapper in July 2017.
But the story isn’t quite so straightforward. Several studies, including a recent one out of Harvard, pegs opioid abuse among postsurgical patients at less than one percent. Estimates about abuse among chronic pain patients vary, with the high end being a little less than eight percent.
“Most policy makers have bought into this idea that we doctors prescribe opioids to our patients, who then rapidly become drug addicts,” says Jeffrey Singer, a Phoenix-based general surgeon and policy analyst (and a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website). “All of the evidence suggests that this is not the case.”
Singer says it’s a myth that most nonmedical users start on pills prescribed to them by a doctor. Instead, they more often borrow, buy, or take them from a friend or family member with leftover pills. The DEA calls it “diversion.” A 2014 analysis of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) confirms that most nonmedical pain pill users obtain their pills via diversion, not directly from a physician.
In many ways, the story of the opioid overdose crisis begins with the introduction of OxyContin to the US market in 1995. It promptly became the pill of choice for nonmedical street users of opioids.
Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, was aware of its popularity as a street drug, which it allegedly worked to conceal. Yet the company also created abuse-resistant formulations (ADFs), which are uncrushable and can’t be liquefied. By doing so, the company was able to extend the drug’s patent. With encouragement from the Food and Drug Administration, Purdue soon made all OxyContin pills uncrushable. Singer says policies of this sort have profound unintended consequences.
“The only thing [ADFs] have done is to make nonmedical users switch over to something other than [pain pills], and most of the time it’s been heroin,” says Singer.
Singer compares ADFs to attempts by the federal government to control alcohol consumption during Prohibition. The government ordered the “denaturing” of industrial alcohol through the addition of unpalatable chemicals. But it’s hard to stop determined consumers from getting what they want, and people kept drinking the denatured alcohol. So the government went a step further by adding poison to the alcohol, a move that likely resulted in thousands of deaths.
Seymour Lowman, the assistant U.S. treasury secretary partially responsible for overseeing alcohol prohibition, even said that if drunks were “dying off fast from poison ‘hooch'” then “a good job will have been done” if it meant a more sober America. Singer doesn’t think that modern government officials have the same attitude but argues that the effects are quite similar.
“If [policy makers] step back and think about what they’re doing by promoting abuse-deterrent formulations of opioids, they’re in effect doing to same thing that alcohol prohibition people did. They’re driving people to much more deadly, dangerous substances,” says Singer.
A June 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that “there appears to have been one-for-one substitution of heroin deaths for opioid deaths. Thus it appears that the intent behind the abuse-deterrent reformulation of OxyContin was completely undone by changes in consumer behavior.”
The Nature of Addiction
“The focus on prescription pain killers is especially misguided now that the vast majority of opioid-related deaths actually involve illegally produced drugs,” says Reason‘s Jacob Sullum.
Sullum been writing about the suffering caused by restricting access to pain medication for 21 years. His April cover feature for Reason magazine examines the myths underlying the government’s response to the opioid overdose problem. He says the misguided focus on the supply of opioids is a proven failure but that politicians continue to do it because it’s much simpler than dealing with the complicated nature of addiction.
Jillian Monda is an Ohio-based bartender and photographer who struggled with and overcame an addiction to heroin several years ago. She says her boyfriend introduced her to heroin and that she took to it because it allowed her to turn off her mind and forget about a recent sexual assault she experienced and keep her obsessive-compulsive disorder under control.
“Heroin is really good at making you not feel anything at all,” says Monda. “The big unifying factor [among users I knew] was that everyone had some kind of mental problem or thing they were trying to avoid…and rather than getting proper psychiatric care for that, they were doing heroin.”
Victims of trauma like Monda, or people with mental illnesses who are self-medicating, are far more likely to develop an opioid addiction than are pain patients. To deal with these complex psychological and social problems, Sullum says a more nuanced approach than supply-side prohibition is needed.
Harm Reduction
Cities like San Francisco and Oakland, California are at the forefront of what’s called the “harm reduction” movement in America.
“Harm reduction is, at its core, a pragmatic way of looking at all risk-taking behavior,” says Eliza Wheeler of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which funds and oversees several needle exchange programs in the Bay Area. These exchanges allow heroin users to turn in dirty needles and obtain clean ones to prevent the spread of diseases. They also offer medications like naloxone, which can save lives by reversing the effects of an opioid overdose.
And now San Francisco’s Department of Public Health is preparing to convert some needle exchanges into “safe consumption sites,” where drug users can shoot up, snort, or smoke their drugs under supervision.
San Francisco would be the first American city to allow safe consumption sites, but Vancouver has already allowed the practice for years and the U.S. Surgeon General recently announced support for the idea in the United States.
“The problem with implementation [of harm reduction measures] is not lack of evidence that it works,” says Wheeler. “What we’re battling is a moral discomfort.”
There’s an even more radical approach than harm reduction. In response to its own overdose crisis, Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001. The country saw rates of overdose deaths, disease transmission, and overall use fall. Portugal’s drug overdose rates are now approximately six deaths per million people. In the U.S., it’s 312 per million.
Meanwhile, the DEA investigation of Dr. Tennant is still ongoing. He hopes to find another doctor to take over his clinic. If not, he’ll close its doors by the end of June, and his patients—already turned away by their hometown doctors—will need to find someone else to care for them.
“When people get hopeless is when they think about suicide,” says Tennant. “And so we need to give people some hope. If nothing else, let them know that somebody cares.”
Sullum says that if the government doesn’t change its approach to opioids soon, we can expect more of the same results.
“The strategy the government seems to be pursuing is one of harm maximization,” says Sullum. “If it continues to do that, at the expense of harm reduction policies, you’re not going to see a decrease in opioid-related deaths—and in fact, they may continue to go up.”
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Alex Manning, Jim Epstein, Lexy Garcia, and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Brett Raney. Additional color correction by Todd Krainin.
“Slum Canto,” by Kai Engel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://ift.tt/1bFo3O7)
After years of monthly payroll reports padded with excessive minimum wage waiter, bartender, educator or retail worker jobs, today’s May jobs report was not only impressive in its top-line beat (which Trump strongly hinted an hour ahead of the release) and which was the record 92nd straight month of US job growth, coupled with the strong wage growth, which at 2.7% came in higher than expectations, not to mention the record surge in full-time jobs, it also showed surprising strength in most components even if some negative surprises were also present.
Of note: while last month’s jobs report was truly impressive in terms of job gains by industry, with the highest paying adding the most workers, in May we saw a continuation of many of the trends observed last month:
Continued strength in Goods Production: Mining (+5.5K), Construction (+25K) & Manufacturing (+18K).
Trade & Transportation Rebounded: Wholesale (+4.2 after a big drop last month), Retail (+31.1K), and Truck Transportation (+6.6K).
Here the surprise was that just 6.6K trucking jobs were added, following complaints from the major trucking employers, all of whom have noted they can’t find enough people to hire, which suggests there may be an upward revision next month.
Some other highlights:
Professional Services were especially strong, driven by White collar demand (Technical services +22.6K). The offset: Temp workers came in soft declining by 7.8K.
Manufacturing also very strong at +18K: machinery added +5.8K jobs and fabricated metal products was up +2.4K
Education rebounded from last month’s weakness at +39K:
Healthcare was steady: +31.73K: Employment rose in ambulatory health care services (+17,900) and hospitals (+6,200).
Leisure & Hospitality another strong month: +21K
Mining +4K withmost of the gain coming from support activities for mining (+3,100).
Visually:
Looking over the past year, the following charts from Bloomberg show the industries with the highest and lowest rates of employment growth for the prior year. The latest month’s figures are highlighted.
We noted that Italian yields had started to fade wider earlier, but 2Y BTPs are now 50bps higher than the open after headlines that EU lawmakers from the two parties forming Italy’s new government coalition voted this week to set up EU funds to help countries quit the euro.
Reuters reports that the vote came as the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and far-right League were finalizing a deal to form an executive in Rome, under pledges that leaving the euro was not in their government program.
Despite the declared intentions to stay in the euro, Cyprus Mail details that all six EU lawmakers from the League and all but one of the 14 5-Star Members of the European Parliament voted on Wednesday for a document that called for the establishment of programmes of financial support “for member states that plan to negotiate their exit from the euro.”
The document voted on by their EU lawmakers called for compensation for “the social and economic damages caused by the euro zone membership.”
The document was an amendment to a European Parliament resolution on the EU budget for the 2021-2027 period. The proposal was backed by 90 lawmakers, but was rejected by a majority of the 750 MEPs.
Hurricane season starts today. If any dangerous storms roll into the United States this summer, President Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Canadian timber will make them more costly.
Last year’s hurricane season was the costliest in American history, with three major storms—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—making landfall in the United States. Each of those storms caused more than $50 billion in damage, a threshold that had previously been surpassed by only two storms (2005’s Katrina and 2012’s Sandy).
Even if we avoid a repeat of last year’s weather, the tariffs are creating problems for anyone who wants to be prepared. Hurricane shutters, used to protect windows from being shattered by storms, are often made out of steel or aluminum. Shutter manufacturers are charging higher prices this year to make up for the higher costs and uncertainty created by the tariffs.
Sam Zaz, owner of Just Shutter It in Port St. Lucie, Florida, tells WPTV that supplies that cost $11 or $12 per square foot a year ago now cost him $14 or more. If prices keep going up, he’ll have little choice but to pass it on to his customers.
And if a major storm does hit, driving up demand for home building materials, there are already worries that shortages could occur as tariffs disrupt international suppliers. Developers are careful to downplay the potential costs of products they are trying to sell, but some tellThe Real Deal, a South Florida real estate trade publication, that tariffs could increase the price of housing by “only” 1 to 2 percent.
That may not sound like much, until you realize that it means paying around $3,000 more for a home in Miami-Dade County (median home value: $288,000)—or, worse, paying that much more to rebuild your home after it’s been blown away and all your worldly possessions have been lost. Every family has an extra $3,000 stashed away in their survival kit, right?
Protectionism has already proven costly in the wake of major storms. As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi noted last year, Trump’s tariffs on Canadian lumber (approved in early 2017 with far less fanfare than the current round of steel and aluminum tariffs) had a direct impact on the rebuilding process around Houston after Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding in August.
“It was a significant hike at the time. It was a 20 percent increase,” Patrick Mayhan, vice president of purchasing for the Houston-area company Westin Homes, told Britschgi. “We had no choice but to pass that along to our retail pricing for the home. And that’s a significant amount, because lumber is a big part of the cost of building a home.”
Framing lumber accounts for about 18 percent of a house’s final cost, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Bloombergreported earlier this year that Trump’s lumber tariff has increased the price of single-family dwellings by an average of $1,300 as “builders have started to raise their prices to keep profit margins stable.”
In April 2017, the month Trump issued his tariff on Canadian timber, prices for framing lumber shot up to 20 percent higher then they had been in January of the same year. This wasn’t just a temporary shock to the system or a result of speculators reacting to the tariff announcement. By March of this year, the price of framing lumber had jumped by another 16 percent, according to a price index published by the trade publication Random Lengths.
Most homes along the Gulf Coast and in other hurricane-prone regions are built with concrete and rebar in order to withstand storms. That still requires steel, but it demands far less lumber than the average American home. But last year’s hurricane season demonstrates that powerful tropical storms don’t always stay where they are supposed to.
Meanwhile, nearly half of America’s steel imports are used for construction, and an ongoing jump in steel prices started in early March, when the Trump administration first announced its plans to lay tariffs. That spike occured despite the fact that several of America’s top sources for steel were exempt from the tariff until June 1, so another leap could be coming in the near future—just in time for hurricane season.
Denmark becomes the sixth European country to enact such a ban, after France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Austria.
“The face is your passport. When you refuse me to see you, I am a victim.” — Jacques Myard, a former conservative MP who supported the ban in France.
“[S]ome people do not want to be a part of Danish society and want to create parallel societies with their own norms and rules.” — Danish Justice Minister Søren Pape Poulsen.
The Danish Parliament has passed a ban on Islamic full-face veils in public spaces. The new law, sponsored by Denmark’s center-right government, and backed by the Social Democrats and the Danish People’s Party, was passed on May 31 by 75 votes to 30.
As of August 1, anyone found wearing a burka (which covers the entire face) or a niqab (which covers the entire face except for the eyes) in public in Denmark will be subject to a fine of 1,000 Danish kroner (€135; $157); repeat offenders could be fined 10,000 Danish kroner.
In addition, anyone found to be requiring a person through force or threats to wear garments that cover the face could be fined or face up to two years in prison.
(Copenhagen photo by Pixabay)
Denmark becomes the sixth European country to enact such a ban, after France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Austria. Bavaria in Germany, Catalonia in Spain and Ticino in Switzerland also have imposed regional burka bans, while Norway has tabled a law to ban burkas in public schools. The bans seemingly seek to restrict the proliferating expression of political Islam in Europe.
The Danish burka ban was first proposed by the Danish People’s Party in 2009. MP Martin Henriksen said that burkas and niqabs “are incompatible with Danish culture.” He added:
“It has taken almost ten years to convince a majority in the parliament that we should ban burka and niqab in public spaces. Now that the ban has been approved, Parliament should, in the opinion of the Danish People’s Party, continue to work on additional measures against the Islamization of Denmark.”
In a statement, Justice Minister Søren Pape Poulsen said:
“To keep one’s face hidden when meeting each other in public spaces is incompatible with the values in Danish society and disrespectful to the community. We must take care to show respect for our community and the values that bind us together. With a ban on covering the face we are drawing a line in the sand and underlining that in Denmark we show each other trust and respect by meeting face to face.”
Amnesty International said the new law was a “discriminatory violation of women’s rights. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), however, twice has ruled that burka bans are legal.
In July 2017, for example, the ECHR unanimously upheld a Belgian ban on wearing the burka in public spaces. It said that the government had been responding “to a practice that it considered to be incompatible, in Belgian society, with social communication and more generally the establishment of human relations, which were indispensable for life in society…essential to ensure the functioning of a democratic society.”
In October 2010, France became the first European country to ban Islamic veils in public. The then Prime Minister François Fillon said that the ban was aimed at “solemnly reaffirming the values of the republic” and argued that “concealing the face…places the people involved in a position of exclusion and inferiority incompatible with the principles of liberty, equality and human dignity affirmed by the French Republic.”
The president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, said that the burqa is “a new form of enslavement that will not be welcome in the French Republic.” Jacques Myard, a former conservative MP who supported the ban, said the burqa was a “shock” to French culture: “The face is a dignity of a person. The face is your passport. When you refuse me to see you, I am a victim.”
An unnamed 24-year-old French citizen of Pakistani origin challenged the new law. In July 2014, however, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheldFrance’s burqa ban, accepting the French government’s argument that it encouraged citizens to “live together.”
In November 2016, the parliament of the Netherlands voted overwhelmingly in favor of a partial ban on face-covering Islamic veils in some public spaces, including schools, hospitals, government buildings and on public transport.
In October 2016, Bulgaria’s parliament banned face veils in public. Those who fail to comply with the ban face fines of up to 1,500 levs (€770; $900), as well as suspension of social welfare benefits.
In October 2017, a burka ban entered into effect in Austria. The so-called Anti-Face-Veiling Act (Anti-Gesichtsverhüllungsgesetz) also prohibits the face from being covered in public by scarves, masks and face paint. Those found violating the law are subject to a fine of €150 ($175).
Back in Denmark, Muslims greeted the new law with defiance: A dozen women dressed in burkas and niqabs sat in the visitor’s gallery at the parliament in Copenhagen. “Under no circumstances will I compromise my own principles,” said one of them.
Justice Minister Søren Pape Poulsen said that “some people do not want to be a part of Danish society and want to create parallel societies with their own norms and rules.” This, he said, proved the need for a burka ban: “We want to live in a society where we can see each other in the eyes. Where we see each other’s faces in an open democracy. As Danes, this is the way we must be together.”
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