Democrats Encourage Obama To Release Oil From The Strategic Oil Reserve

Gasoline Prices are on a dramatic rise, and everybody’s got advice for the White House.

No surprise, Republicans are reviving their “Drill, Baby Drill” catcalls from 2008, but liberals in Washington are getting nervous and asking President Barack Obama to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a potential panacea for escalating gasoline prices.

Picking up on the themes of a speech he gave Thursday at the University of Miami, Obama used his weekly radio address Saturday to remind Americans of his view that if prices at the pump rise as expected in the coming months, “there are no quick fixes to this problem, and you know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”

He also warned that rising gas prices could hurt any economic recovery. While there is “no silver bullet that will bring down gas prices or reduce our dependence on foreign oil overnight … what we can do is get our priorities straight, and make a sustained, serious effort to tackle this problem,” Obama said.

The potential danger to the economy — and the president’s reelection chances — have liberals urging the White House to unleash the SPR now, before it’s too late. The national average for a gallon of unleaded gasoline was $3.65 on Friday, according to AAA.

“Selling reserve oil on the open market is the one step that we know will reduce oil and gasoline prices in the immediate term,” said Daniel Weiss of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Every time we sold reserve oil it has lowered oil and gasoline prices. We know it works.”

Three House Democrats — Reps. Ed Markey, Peter Welch and Rosa DeLauro — also are urging Obama to open up the spigots.

“This most recent run-up in prices is primarily the result of fear driving oil markets, not an actual loss of supply,” they wrote in a letter to Obama, adding that it would “send a message to Iran that we are ready, willing and able to deploy our oil reserves.”

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner suggested the SPR is a possibility. “There’s a case for the use of the (reserves) in some circumstances, and we’ll continue to look at that and evaluate that carefully,” he told CNBC Friday morning.

Obama himself has been mum on the SPR; the president didn’t mention the reserve during his energy speech Thursday in Florida or in Saturday’s radio address.

President George H.W. Bush tapped the reserve during the first Gulf War; Congress ordered sell-offs during the 1990s for budgetary reasons; George W. Bush used the SPR after Hurricane Katrina; and most recently, Obama in June sold 30 million barrels from the reserve to address concern of the loss of Libyan oil on the global market. By then, roughly 140 million barrels had been lost to the market since disruptions began. By comparison, there was a shortage of 38 million barrels after Hurricane Katrina struck, the last time the SPR was tapped.

When Obama tapped the SPR last June, administration officials made a point of distancing the connection to gas prices — underscored by the fact that by the time of the announcement, gas prices had declined 45 of the previous 49 days. Critics pounced at the time, saying it was politically motivated and that there was not a global emergency that warranted the sale.

 The current rise in oil prices are pegged to tensions with Iran, which is threatening to block off supply from being ferried along the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow channel of waters between Iran and Oman where about one third of all global seaborne oil passes through.

The U.S. also faces potential domestic gas price spikes tied to refinery closings in the Northeast due to their use of global Brent crude, which pushed to a nine-month high of more than $125 a barrel Friday.
(Refineries in the Midwest use West Texas Intermediate crude, stored in Cushing, Okla., which reached more than $109 a barrel Friday.)

Charles Ebinger, who was a foreign affairs officer at the Federal Energy Administration, the precursor to the Energy Department, when the reserve was created in 1975, predicts Obama will tap the SPR.

“Yeah, it will happen because I think they’re in panic mode in the White House; they have to show that they’re doing something,” Ebinger said.

Tapping the reserve “might psychologically help the market a little bit,” said Jay Hakes, former head of the Energy Information Administration under President Bill Clinton and Interior Department official under President Jimmy Carter. “The market should be reassured that the reserve is there available to be used, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be used.”

Ebinger — now a senior fellow and director of the energy security initiative at the Brookings Institution — said the reserve needs to be maintained to be used in case of a major calamity, such as any attacks on major Saudi refineries or liquefied natural gas facilities in Qatar.

“I have always thought that using the reserve except for what it was originally intended for, a major supply crisis, is ill-advised,” Ebinger said.

Avery Ash — manager of regulatory affairs at AAA — agrees that there is not a supply disruption that yet warrants the use of the reserve but said the Obama administration is right to keep the threat of its use out there.

“To tap the SPR just to lower prices, we don’t think that that’s appropriate,” Ash said. “The real power, if you’re looking to remove some of that speculation on the market, is really that threat of a release causing some pause for speculators. We’re likely to hear that the president’s not taking that off the table for good reason.”

Obama has a right to be cautious about using the reserve.

Hakes said under the current statute, written when the U.S. was implementing price controls in the mid-1970s, the administration has to clearly state that there is a supply interruption. The statute says a drawdown and sale cannot occur unless the president deems it “required by a severe energy supply interruption or by obligations of the United States under the international energy program.”

Last year’s sale, in fact, came as part of a larger commitment by the International Energy Agency — of which the U.S. is a member — to add 60 million barrels of oil to the global market. At the same time, Saudi Arabia pledged to increase its production.

But the law says the SPR can also be tapped if “a severe increase in the price of petroleum products has resulted” from an emergency and “such price increase is likely to cause a major adverse impact on the national economy.”

“So it seems very clear to me that President Obama can use existing statutory authority in anticipation of a Persian Gulf supply disruption,” Weiss said.

Can Corporations Be Sued For Human Rights Violations

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Supreme Court will weigh next week whether corporations can be sued in the United States for suspected complicity in human rights abuses abroad, in a case being closely watched by businesses concerned about long and costly litigation.

The high court on Tuesday will consider the reach of a 1789 U.S. law that had been largely dormant until 1980, when human rights lawyers started using it, at first to sue foreign government officials. Then, over the next 20 years, the lawyers used the law to targetmultinational corporations.

The case before the court pits the Obama administration andhuman rights advocates against large companies and foreign governments over allegations that Royal Dutch Shell Plc helped Nigeria crush oil exploration protests in the 1990s.

Administration attorneys and lawyers for the plaintiffs contend corporations can be held accountable in U.S. courts for committing or assisting foreign governments in torture, executions or other human rights abuses.

Attorneys for corporations argue that only individuals, such as company employees or managers involved in the abuse, can be sued, a position adopted by a U.S. appeals court in New York. Other courts ruled corporations can be held liable.

The justices will hear an appeal by a group of Nigerians who argue they should be allowed to proceed with a lawsuit accusing Shell of aiding the Nigerian government in human rights violations between 1992 and 1995.

California attorney Paul Hoffman, who will argue on behalf of the plaintiffs, said corporations, under the 1789 law, were permissible defendants and that corporate civil liability was a general principle ofinternational law.

“Businesses involved in genocide, crimes against humanity or other serious human rights violations deserve no exemption from tort liability,” he said in a brief filed with the court.

NO EXEMPTION FOR GENOCIDE

The Obama administration supported the corporate liability argument, as did international human rights organizations and Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Representing Shell at the arguments, Kathleen Sullivan, a former dean of the Stanford Law School in California, said U.S. and international law do not allow corporate liability for the alleged offenses. She said the post-World War Two Nuremberg tribunals covered prosecutions of individuals, not corporations.

She warned of the consequences of allowing such lawsuits.

“Even a meritless … suit against a corporation can take years to resolve,” she said in a brief, adding that corporations may reduce their operations in less-developed nations where such abuses tend to arise.

The British, Dutch and German governments supported Shell and said it violates international law to apply a U.S. law from more than 200 years ago to acts that take place in other countries and have no connection to the United States.

Also backing Shell are various multinational corporations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce business lobby. Robin Conrad, head of the group’s legal arm, said that if the Supreme Court upholds corporate liability, “the global business community will face yet another wave of frivolous and expensive litigation.”

In the past two decades, more than 120 lawsuits have been filed in U.S. courts against 59 corporations for alleged wrongful acts in 60 foreign countries, lawyers in the case said.

Many of the lawsuits have been unsuccessful, though there have been a handful of settlements, the lawyers said. Many of the cases, having dragged on for years, are still pending.

Among the cases: Indonesia villagers accused Exxon Mobil Corp’s security forces of murder, torture and other abuses in 1999-2001; Firestone tire company was accused of using child labor in Liberia; and Ford Motor Co and other firms were accused of aiding South Africa’s apartheid system.

The Alien Tort Statute from 1789 states that U.S. courts shall have jurisdiction over any civil lawsuit “by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

In its first substantive look at the law in 2004, the Supreme Court ruled it can be used for certain well-established international law violations, but did not determine who may be held liable.

A ruling in the case is expected by the end of June.

The Supreme Court case is Esther Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co, No. 10-1491.

500 Elephants Dead in 60 Days in ONE African Park in Cameroon

Nearly 500 elephants have been killed in a Cameroon national park in less than two months by poachers from Sudan and Chad, a park official told AFP on Thursday.

“As of today we estimate that 480 elephants have been slaughtered in our park,” said Mathieu Fometa of the Bouba Ndjida National Park in northern Cameroon, near the border with Chad, where the animals roam freely.

“Formally, we did count 458 carcasses,” he said, but he cautioned that “these figures may be an underestimate because the park covers 220,000 hectares (540,000 acres) and it isn’t easy to travel to get accurate information.”

On Thursday an AFP reporter saw 12 elephant carcasses at three sites in the park, some of them having been shot Tuesday according to sources.

Between Sunday and Tuesday “our teams counted at least 20 elephants killed” in those three days, said Fometa, who added that the killers were still in the park, having said in January they would stay for three months.

The government has taken no visible steps to secure the park.

The killers are “dozens of Sudanese and Chadian poachers armed with machine guns and operating in gangs on horseback,” said International Fund for Animal Welfare official Celine Sissler-Bienvenu on the IFAW website.

“Nothing seems to be able to stop their reckless pursuit of ivory that began in mid-November in the Central African Republic, carried on in Chad in December, and ended in Cameroon in January.”

Poaching in Cameroon wildlife parks has been on the rise in recent months, sources say, with the ivory mainly bound for Asia.

The IFAW said earlier that many orphaned elephant calves had been spotted abandoned following the shootings and concerns were high the babies may soon die of hunger and thirst.

While Most Housing Markets Continue to Decline Rents Rise

The housing market remains a potent drag on the economy as home prices continue to slip, foreclosed homes fill some neighborhoods and millions of construction workers scramble for jobs.

Charles Griffith and his family are renting a two-bedroom apartment in Orlando, Fla.

But one group is sitting pretty: landlords.

Unlike home prices, rents have been rising, up 2.4 percent in January from a year earlier, according to recent data, not adjusted for inflation, released by the Labor Department.

With few rental buildings erected over the last few years, available units are going fast. Nationwide, the apartment vacancy rate is down to 5.2 percent, its lowest level in more than a decade, according to the research firm Reis Inc.

Rent increases are greatest in places like San Francisco, Austin, Tex., and Boston, where technology companies in particular are hiring, as well as in New York City and the District of Columbia. But cities like Chicago and Seattle, where house prices are still declining quite sharply, have had rental increases, too.

“We are more of a renter nation than we have been for a while,” said Christopher J. Mayer, a professor of real estate at the Columbia University Business School.

Economists suggest favorable conditions for landlords will continue for at least a year, with employment gradually rising and construction of new apartments remaining constrained.

As job growth has begun to accelerate in recent months, young people are starting to move out of their parents’ homes or away from shared rooms and into their own rentals.

Families who might previously have bought homes are also staying in rentals longer. They may be waiting for the housing market to hit bottom or finding it difficult to qualify for a mortgage. Many others remain uncertain about their job prospects and wary of the obligations of ownership.

When Charles Griffith moved with his wife and two children to Orlando, Fla., last fall, they chose a new two-bedroom apartment for $1,140 a month. They left a four-bedroom house they had bought a decade ago in Antioch, Calif. His brother-in-law has moved in and taken over the mortgage payments.

Mr. Griffith, who works as a supervisor for Southwest Airlines, and his wife, a customer service representative for the airline, are enjoying the flexibility and convenience of renting, as well as amenities like a pool. “We kind of like the situation now of not having to be under so much pressure,” said Mr. Griffith, 40, adding that the family may eventually buy in Orlando. But “with the economy and the airline industry, that factors into us thinking maybe we should hold off for a while.”

The home ownership rate has been falling from its peak of 69.4 percent in 2004, according to census data. By the fourth quarter of 2011, it was down to 66 percent. That means about two million more households are renting, said Kenneth Rosen, an economist and professor of real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Not all those people are choosing apartments, of course. Some are moving into single-family homes left vacant by foreclosures. Eager to capitalize on the trend, investors are scooping up some houses at a deep discount and leasing them to tenants who have lost their own homes.

Several prominent hedge funds and private equity firms have recently announced plans to invest in distressed properties and convert them to rentals. And earlier this month, the government solicited applications from investors interested in buying pools of foreclosed properties held by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.

Still, it is in apartments, not houses, where renters are feeling the most competition.

Although many families crushed by the recession have doubled up and plenty of underemployed 20-somethings are living with their parents, some young people are finally getting their own space. Nearly 60 percent of job gains in the last two years have gone to people who are 20 to 34, a crucial rental group, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by G. Ronald Witten, a consultant to apartment companies.

During the economic downturn, apartment developers retrenched. The number of new apartments completed fell from 284,200 in 2006 to less than half that number in 2011, according to census data.

The limited supply is pushing up prices in some markets. In San Francisco, rents jumped close to 5 percent last year, according to Reis, and increases averaged 3 percent in Austin and New York. Landlords have also been withdrawing incentives like a free month’s rent.

Liz Brent and Matt Mochizuki moved into a studio apartment a year ago in the Mission District in San Francisco for $1,395 a month. Now they want more space.

Ms. Brent, 26, makes costumes and is working as a barista at a cafe where customers leave big tips. Mr. Mochizuki, 27, has a steady job making custom metal work for a design studio. They are budgeting $1,800 a month in rent.

But at an open house for an apartment billed as a one-bedroom, they found a studio with an awkward layout and bad light. More than 40 people were in line, many ready to hand over a check.

“That’s what the market is like now,” Ms. Brent said of their fruitless search. “That’s how many people showed up for this tiny apartment with no windows.”

Some rental markets remain soft, like Atlanta and Las Vegas, the epicenter of the housing bust. Orlando, too, might seem an unlikely place for rental strength. The unemployment rate, at 9.7 percent, is higher than the national average, and home prices slipped 4.6 percent last year, according to theStandard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home price index.

Yet Ric Campo, chief executive of Camden Properties, a real estate investment trust that owns apartment buildings, said rental business was brisk at its LaVina development. Since the office for the 420-unit complex opened last summer, more than half the apartments have rented.

That’s “a faster rate than we’ve ever seen in Orlando,” Mr. Campo said. The company has raised the base rent on a two-bedroom apartment to $1,080, from $995 a month.

Many now wonder about a more profound shift among future buyers. Matt Byford, a 24-year-old litigation consultant in Chicago, acknowledges that low interest rates and low prices favor buying. But he says he is renting and in no hurry to buy, because he doesn’t expect much to change soon.

Brad Forrester, chief executive of the ConAm Group, which manages about 50,000 apartments in the western United States, says, “I think it’s going to be interesting to see whether there’s been a fundamental sociological shift in that 20- to 35-year-old cohort, where they literally say ‘this American dream just doesn’t work for me.’ ”

Nelson Mandela Admitted to the Hospital Again Today

Nelson Mandela is one of the most interesting men I have met in my life. Once you get him off politics and onto the issues of Humanity he is a human being with great concern for people’s from all over the world. On issues of family he came close to tears in one conversation we had…. but quickly recovered from his personal grief and joys and changed the conversation to a more global perspective. Every time I read something about his health I  wonder if I will ever  get to say I know him as opposed to I knew him…. Even though the people say this was a planned admission and not an emergency, I still have concerns for his health …. I wish him well

HERE is the most recent news on his heath situation: 

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Former South African president Nelson Mandela was admitted to hospital on Saturday to be treated for a “long-standing abdominal complaint”, intensifying concerns about the health of the 93-year-old anti-apartheid leader.

The government said Mandela needed specialist medical treatment although the ruling African National Congress (ANC) said his admission was not an emergency and did not involve surgery.

“There’s no need for panic,” ANC spokesman Keith Khoza told South Africa’s e-News channel. “It was not an emergency admission. It was planned.”

An ANC source told Reuters that Mandela, who is popularly known by his clan name, Madiba, was “not looking serious”.

Mandela has been in poor health since spending nearly a week in Johannesburg’s Milpark hospital just over a year ago with respiratory problems, and has not appeared in public since then.

He has spent the last year between his home in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs and his ancestral village of Qunu in the impoverished Eastern Cape.

As South Africa’s first black president, Mandela occupies a central position in the psyche of a country that was ruled by the 10 percent white minority until the first all-race elections in 1994.

Earlier this month, President Jacob Zuma and the central bank issued a new set of bank notes bearing his image.

Mandela has long since withdrawn from active participation in politics and public life in Africa’s biggest economy, having stood down at the end of his first term in office in 1999.

His last major public appearance was in July 2010 at the final of the World Cup in Johannesburg’s Soccer City stadium.