OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2016
Britain’s Brexit leap in the dark
Founded in 1873
STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
Time to allow pot
to join real world
Federal regulations are less and less tenable
By ROGER COHEN
New York Times News Service
ONDON — The British
have given the world’s
political, inancial and business
establishment a massive kick in
the teeth by voting to leave the
European Union, a historic deci-
sion that will plunge Britain into
uncertainty for years to come and
reverses the integration on which
the continent’s stability has been
based.
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Warnings by President Barack
Obama, Britain’s political leaders
and the International Monetary Fund
about the dire consequences of a
British exit proved useless.
If anything, they goaded a mood of
deiant anger against these very elites.
This resentment has its roots in
many things but may be summed up
as a revolt against global capitalism.
To heck with the experts and politi-
cal correctness was the predominant
mood in the end. A majority of Brit-
ons had no time for the politicians
that brought the world a disastrous
war in Iraq, the 2008 inancial melt-
down, European austerity, stagnant
working-class wages, high immigra-
tion and tax havens for the super-rich.
That some of these issues have no
direct link to the European Union or
its much-maligned Brussels bureau-
crats did not matter. It was a conve-
nient target in this restive moment
that has also made Donald Trump
the presumptive Republican nomi-
nee — and may now take him further
still on a similar wave of nativism and
anti-establishment rage.
David Cameron, the British prime
minister prodded into holding the ref-
erendum by the right of his Conserva-
tive Party, said he would resign, stay-
ing on in a caretaker capacity for a
few months. This was the right call,
and an inevitable one. He has led the
country into a debacle.
The pound duly plunged some 10
percent to its lowest level since 1985.
Global markets were rattled. Main-
stream European politicians lamented
a sad day for Europe and Britain;
rightists like Marine Le Pen in France
exulted. The world has entered a
period of grave volatility.
Ever-greater unity was a founda-
tion stone since the 1950s not only of
peace in Europe, putting an end to the
repetitive wars that had ravaged gen-
erations of Europeans, but also of the
global political order. Now all bets are
off. A process of European unraveling
may have begun. A core assumption
of American foreign policy — that a
united Europe had overcomes its divi-
sions — has been undermined.
Geert Wilders, the right-wing
anti-immigrant Dutch politician,
promptly tweeted: “Hurrah for the
British! Now it is our turn. Time for
egal marijuana is big business in the Paciic Northwest,
quickly achieving a scale that belies its continuing
image as a commodity coaxed into life by aging hippies and
Millennial stoners. In fact, 21st century marijuana has about
as much in common with its cottage-industry antecedents as
Napa Valley vineyards have with French villagers stomping
grapes.
The realities of rapid indus- all this money locking to the
trialization of marijuana are product might seem to invite
constantly being driven home the possibility of a continu-
by news reports.
ing regulatory struggle with
As EO Media Group’s pot produced off the legal grid.
Capital Bureau reported last However, legal marijuana’s
week, newly available state ability to avoid tangling with
data based on tax receipts soon cops, its production economies
may prove the old contention of scale and other factors have
that marijuana is Oregon’s been driving retail prices down.
most valuable crop. With a Particularly in Oregon where
value approaching $1 billion it now is legal for grownups
last year, legal pot will surpass to grow their own, the days
cattle and calves ($922 million of black market dealers are
in 2014) as Oregon’s top agri- rapidly winding down. This
cultural product.
assumes, however, that a new
And this strength in the pot president continues the current
business is before the Oregon administration’s lack of inter-
Liquor Control Commission est in rehashing this lost ight.
implements new recreational
At the same time marijuana
production and retail licens- increasingly becomes a major
ing, which will spur creation of cash crop for legitimate busi-
even more pot stores and sales. ness, continuing inconsisten-
In Washington state, law cies with federal regulations
enforcement this week will become less and less tena-
cease turning a blind eye to ble. This results in silly and
a system of growers and dis- ineficient results, such as the
pensaries that developed state being unable to list mar-
when medical marijuana was ijuana in its annual crop statis-
legal but recreation marijuana tics due to federal policy. Water
wasn’t. As of July 1, the state from federal projects can’t
is folding the medical and rec- be used to irrigate marijuana,
reational markets into one nor are Natural Resources
regulatory system, but there Conservation Service pro-
By GAIL COLLINS
were 10 times more license grams available for pot crops.
New York Times News Service
applicants than there were
Looking all this, it should
et’s criticize cruise ships.
licenses. Beginning Friday, be obvious even to Congress
I know, I know. Things are bad
the Washington State Liquor that this isn’t Old McDonald’s
enough without going negative about
and Cannabis Board will begin Marijuana Farm anymore. It your summer vacation.
seizing marijuana from unli- is time to normalize marijua-
But we’ve got some problems here.
censed businesses, with own- na’s connection with bank- Plus, I promise there will be a penguin.
The cruise industry seems to be
ers facing civil penalties and ing, environmental, labor and exploding
— the newest generation of
additional actions from local other laws. At the same time, it ships can carry more than 5,000 passen-
law enforcement.
becomes increasingly import- gers. They make a great deal of proit
from the sale of alcohol, so imagine the
In December 2015, a report ant to monitor the pot industry’s equivalent of a small city whose inhabi-
put the size of Washington’s efforts to inluence elections tants are perpetually drunk.
Really, these things are so huge, it’s
marijuana market at $1.3 bil- and government decisions.
amazing they can stay aloat without
lion a year, with medical dis-
This is a big industry with toppling over. And when one is parked
pensaries providing 37 percent plentiful money; it must be outside, say, Venice, the effect is like one
of those alien-invasion movies, when
of the total.
held to at least the same legal people wake up and ind that a space-
With both states imposing standards as the rest of corpo- ship the size of Toledo has landed down-
town. (Venetians also claim the ships are
hefty tax rates on marijuana, rate America.
causing waves in their canals.) Environ-
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Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA via AP
A woman on a bicycle leaves a polling station near to the Royal Chel-
sea Hospital, London Thursday. Voters in Britain decide Thursday the
country should leave the European Union.
a Dutch referendum!” The
The English were also
European Union is more
prepared to risk some-
vulnerable than at any point
thing else: the breakup
since its inception. The
of the United Kingdom.
sacred images of old — like
Scotland voted to remain
French President François
in the European Union by
Mitterrand and German
a margin of 62 percent to
Chancellor Helmut Kohl
38 percent. Northern Ire-
hand-in-hand at Verdun —
land voted to remain by 56
have lost their resonance.
percent to 44 percent. The
The travails of the euro, the
Scots will now likely seek
Roger
tide of immigration (both
a second referendum on
Cohen
within the European
independence.
Union from poorer to
Divisions were not
The
richer members and
only national. Lon-
from outside), and high
voted overwhelm-
European don
unemployment have
ingly to remain. But
led to an eerie collec-
the countryside, small
Union
tive loss of patience,
towns and hard-hit
prudence and memory.
industrial provincial
is more
Anything but this has
industrial centers voted
vulnerable overwhelmingly to
become a widespread
sentiment; irrationality
leave and carried the
than at
is in the air.
day. A Britain issured
The colossal leap
a liberal, met-
any point between
in the dark that a tradi-
ropolitan class cen-
tionally cautious peo-
tered in London and
since its
ple — the British —
the rest was revealed.
inception.
were prepared to take
Europe’s failings
has to be taken seri-
— and they have been
ously. It suggests that other such leaps conspicuous over the past decade —
could occur elsewhere, perhaps in are simply not suficient to explain
Trump’s America. A Trump victory what Britain has done to itself. This
in November is more plausible now was a vote against the global eco-
because it has an immediate prece- nomic and social order that the irst
dent in a developed democracy ready 16 years of the 21st century have pro-
to trash the status quo for the high- duced. Where it leads is unclear. The
risk unknown.
worst is not inevitable but it is plau-
Fifty-two percent of the British sible. Britain will remain an import-
population was ready to face higher ant power. But it will punch beneath
unemployment, a weaker currency, its weight. It faces serious, long-term
possible recession, political turbu- political and economic risk.
lence, the loss of access to a market of
Anger was most focused on the
a half-billion people, a messy divorce hundreds of thousands of immigrants
that may take as long as two years coming into Britain each year, most
to complete, a very long subsequent from other European Union nations
negotiation of Britain’s relation- like Poland. Farage’s U.K. Indepen-
ship with Europe, and the tortuous dence Party, abetted by much of the
redrafting of laws and trade treaties press, was able to whip up a storm
and environmental regulations — all that conlated EU immigration with
for what the right-wing leader Nigel the trickle from the Middle East. Wild
Farage daftly called “Independence myths, like imminent Turkish mem-
Day.” Britain was a sovereign nation bership of the European Union, were
before this vote in every signiicant cultivated. Violence entered the cam-
sense. It remains so. Estrangement paign on a wave of xenophobia and
Day would be more apt.
take-our-country back rhetoric.
A look at tax dodging on the high seas
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FYI:
Clippings from the press of the
Paciic Northwest and the nation
NATO is the antidote to Brexit
he United States can best sup-
port Britain, and Europe, by
becoming a more active and vocal
leader of the NATO alliance, which
will retain Britain as a member. If
the European Union is weakening or
even in danger of crumbling, to the
T
delight of Vladi mir Putin, Mr. Xi and
other adversaries, then one antidote
is a reinforced transatlantic military
partnership that bridges the incip-
ient gap between London and the
continent.
— The Washington Post
Facts win out on abortion
lthough nearly one-third of
American women will have an
abortion in their lifetime, a goal of
abortion opponents has been to carve
out abortion practice from ordinary
health care, to ghettoize and delegit-
imize it. Those days are now over,
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too. Singling out abortion for regula-
tion that can’t be justiied on medical
grounds is unacceptable, as Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized in
a concurring opinion.
— Linda Greenhouse
in The New York Times
mentalists wring their hands over the air
pollution and sewage — a 3,000-pas-
senger ship, which today would rank
as medium-size, produces 21,000 gal-
lons of sewage a day, sometimes treated
and sometimes not so much. But always
pumped into the sea.
And, as long as we’re complaining,
let’s point out that noise from the ships
is messing with the whales. Michael
Jasny of the Natural Resources Defense
Council says cruises en route to Alaska
“routinely drown out the calls of the
endangered orcas” trying to communi-
cate. The NRDC has a new ilm, “Sonic
Sea,” that features audio of a whale
conversation being obliterated by an
approaching cruise ship. The effect is
sort of like what you’d experience if
you were having a meaningful chat with
friends on the patio and a trailer-trac-
tor full of disco dancers suddenly drove
into the backyard.
Thanks to global warming, cruise
lines will soon be able to sail the North-
west Passage, so the Arctic
He’s the sponsor of a bill
will have both more melting
that would increase con-
ice and more 13-deck ships.
sumer protection for cruise
Antarctica hosted 30,000
passengers. The bill, which
visitors last year. Doesn’t
can’t even get a committee
that seem like a lot for such
hearing, would also require
a fragile place? Also, an
the ships to have up-to-
opera singer who was enter-
date technology that detects
taining passengers on one
when passengers fall over-
cruise went ashore to sing
board. Now this would seem
“O Sole Mio” and caused a
like something you’d expect
Gail
penguin stampede. This is
them to have around.
Collins
not really a problem you
An average of about
need to worry about, but
20 people fall off cruise
Stop
it was a pretty interesting
ships every year, which
moment.
scaring the industry points out is
While many of the
only about one in a million
the
biggest cruise lines appear
travelers. But still, I sus-
to be headquartered in
pect that passengers work
Florida, they are, for tax penguins. under the assumption that
purposes, actually proud
if they do somehow wind
residents of … elsewhere.
up in the water, some-
“Carnival is a Panamanian corporation; one will notice. This spring, a 33-year-
Royal Caribbean is Liberian,” said Ross old U.S. woman disappeared during a
Klein, who tracks the industry through cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. No one
his Cruise Junkie website.
realized she was gone for 10 hours, and
Although, of course, if one of the by the time searchers could start look-
ships needs help, it will often be the U.S. ing for her, the area they needed to cover
taxpayer-funded Coast Guard that comes was more than 4,000 square miles.
to the rescue. The Coast Guard doesn’t While it’s the least thing anyone worries
charge for its services, a spokesman said, about when a person is missing at sea,
because “we don’t want people to hesi- let us point out once again that it was the
tate” to summon help when passengers taxpayer-funded Coast Guard doing the
are in danger. This attitude is commend- searching.
able. But the no-taxes part is not.
The cruise industry says the over-
“Cruise lines do pay taxes,” pro- board technology hasn’t been perfected.
tested a spokesman for the industry, Blumenthal says it’s been well tested.
counting off a number of levies for Seems like the sort of disagreement that
things like customs and examination of would be easy to resolve with … a com-
animals and plants being brought into mittee hearing.
the country. Not the same thing.
Most cruise vacationers seem to
We’re constantly hearing complaints enjoy their experience — the industry
in Congress about U.S. companies that says nearly 90 percent declare them-
relocate their headquarters overseas for selves satisied. It’s not our business to
tax avoidance. But when do you hear get in between anybody and an ocean
anybody mentioning the cruise indus- breeze. Our requests are modest, really:
try’s Panamanian connection? The Make the cruise ship companies that
cruise companies may not really live are, for all practical purposes, American
pay American taxes. Leave the whales
here, but they certainly can lobby here.
“Powerful is an understatement,” alone. Give that bill a committee hear-
said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. ing. And stop scaring the penguins.