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GAS PAINS? Union strike could spell end of $2 gas

Just when gas prices began slipping below $2 a gallon, a new issue is threatening to bring back pain at the pump.
Members of the United Steelworkers Union at refineries that produce nearly 10 percent of U.S. gasoline, diesel and other fuels, were on strike for a second day on Monday as they pushed for a new national contract with oil companies covering laborers at 63 plants, The Wall Street Journal reported. If a new deal isn't reached and the strikes continue, drivers at the pump could take a hard hit.
"You can forget about $2 gasoline," Carl Larry, director of oil and gas at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, told the newspaper. "It’s going to be a big deal. People are going to be freaked out."

"You can forget about $2 gasoline."- Carl Larry, director of oil and gas at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan

After contract negotiations broke down over salaries and safety, USW told its members at nine refineries and chemical plants to walk out until a new deal is settled, according to the newspaper. The strike, which affects 3,800 workers, began on Sunday.
Reuters reported that the walkouts were the first in support of a nationwide pact since 1980 and targeted plants with a combined 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity. 
Companies affected by the strike, including Royal Dutch Shell, Tesoro, Marathon and LyondellBasell Industries, vowed to keep plants operating under contingency plans such as using nonunion labor, according to The Journal.
One refinery, however, was being shut down. Tesoro's Martinez, Calif., refinery, was being closed during the strikes because of planned maintenance work, Reuters reported.
Gas prices had been falling for more than six months, as the price of a barrel of oil plunged from more than $100 to about $40. A variety of factors were credited for the price drop, including a huge rise in U.S. production and Saudi Arabia's refusal to lower production to boost prices.
Bloomberg reported that oil was poised to rise again Monday, after surging more than 8 percent on Friday. It had previously fallen to its lowest point in almost six years.

Obama budget includes $2T in tax hikes

President Obama has packed more than 20 new tax increases into his proposed 2016 budget, which Republicans roundly blasted Monday as a tax-and-spend agenda that won't get their support. 
Together, the tax increases total more than $2 trillion over the next decade. The president plans to use much of that to fund new middle-class tax cuts, as well as ambitious spending programs for highway construction, education benefits and more. 
The biggest money-maker for the federal government would be a change allowing top earners to take tax deductions at the 28 percent rate, even if their income is taxed at the top 39.6 percent rate. This is projected to bring in $603.2 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. 
In addition, top earners would see an increase in capital gains rates -- to 28 percent, up from the current 24.2 percent rate. The change would raise nearly $208 billion. 
Some of the biggest tax hikes in the budget also include a 14 percent, one-time tax on previously untaxed foreign income (raising $268.1 billion); a 19 percent minimum tax on foreign income (raising $206 billion); and a fraction-of-a-percent fee on the 100 financial firms with assets of over $50 billion (raising $111.8 billion). 
The budget plan, while gearing tax hikes toward the wealthy and tax benefits toward the middle class, wouldn't exclusively hit the top tier. It would also hit smokers of all kinds, who under the president's plan would see the per-pack tax rise from $1.01 to $1.95, bringing in an additional $95 billion in revenue. 
In a message accompanying the massive budget books, Obama said his proposals are "practical, not partisan." But even before the books were delivered, Republicans found plenty to criticize. 
"The president is advocating more spending, more taxes and more debt," said House Speaker John Boehner. "A proposal that never balances is not a serious plan for America's fiscal future." 
Boehner and other GOP leaders said that the budget they produce this spring will achieve balance within 10 years, curb the explosive growth of government benefit programs and reform the loophole-cluttered tax code. 
Of Obama's $4 trillion proposal, Boehner said: "Like the president's previous budgets, this plan never balances -- ever." 
The budget shows a $474 billion deficit for fiscal 2016. Obama's budget plan never reaches balance over the next decade and projects the deficit would rise to $687 billion in 2025. Administration officials say their goal is to hold the deficit to a small percentage of the total U.S. economy -- but not necessarily to eliminate it. 
"President Obama promised in the State of the Union to deliver a budget filled with 'ideas that are practical, not partisan.' Unfortunately, what we saw this morning was another top-down, backward-looking document that caters to powerful political bosses on the Left and never balances-ever," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. "We're asking the President to abandon the tax-and-spend ways of yesterday and join us in this practical and future-oriented approach." 
As part of his budget, Obama is proposing a six-year, $478 billion public-works program for highway, bridge and transit upgrades, with half of it to be financed with the one-time, 14 percent tax on U.S. companies' overseas profits. 
The tax would be due immediately. Under current law, those profits are subject only to federal taxes if they are returned, or repatriated, to the U.S., where they face a top rate of 35 percent. Many companies avoid U.S. taxes on those earnings by simply leaving them overseas. 
The tax is part of a broader administration plan to cut corporate tax breaks and increase taxes on the country's highest wage-earners to pay for projects to help the middle class. 
Members of the GOP-controlled Congress and other fiscal conservatives have dismissed the overall plan since elements of it were announced several weeks ago. 
The administration contends that various spending cuts and tax increases would trim the deficits by about $1.8 trillion over the next decade, leaving the red ink at manageable levels. Congressional Republicans say the budgets they produce will achieve balance and will attack costly benefit program like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. 
Obama's budget emphasizes the same themes as his State of the Union address last month, when he challenged Congress to work with him on narrowing the income gap between the very wealthy and everyone else. 
Higher taxes on top earners and on fees paid by the largest financial institutions would help raise $320 billion over 10 years which Obama would use to provide low- and middle-class tax breaks. 
His proposals: a credit of up to $500 for two-income families, a boost in the child care tax credit to up to $3,000 per child under age 5, and overhauling breaks that help pay for college. Obama also is calling for a $60 billion program for free community college for an estimated 9 million students if all states participate. It also proposes expanding child care to more than 1.1 million additional children under the age of 4 by 2025 and seeks to implement universal pre-school. 
Obama's budget also proposes easing painful, automatic "sequester" cuts to the Pentagon and domestic agencies with a 7 percent increase in annual appropriations, providing an additional $74 billion in 2016, divided between the military and domestic programs. 
Many Republicans support the extra military spending but oppose increased domestic spending.

UN official says North Korean regime must be 'dismantled' for human rights to thrive

A campaign within the United Nations to haul North Korean leader Kim Jong Un before an international court for crimes against humanity has touched off a defensive fury in Pyongyang, where it's being treated like a diplomatic declaration of war -- an aggressive act aimed not only at shutting down prison camps but also at removing Kim and dismantling his family's three-generation cult of personality.
More paranoia?
Actually, according to the U.N.'s point man on human rights in North Korea, that is not too far off the mark, though he stressed no one is advocating a military option to force regime change.
"It would be, I think, the first order of the day to get these 80,000 to 100,000 (prisoners) immediately released and these camps disbanded," Marzuki Darusman, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "But that can only happen if this cult leadership system is completely dismantled. And the only way to do that is if the Kim family is effectively displaced, is effectively removed from the scene, and a new leadership comes into place."
Such blunt words from a high-ranking U.N. official are unusual, although common among American officials.
Darusman said previous proposals submitted to the U.N. trying to persuade or force North Korea to improve its human rights record were mostly "rhetorical" exercises.
But he said this resolution, passed by the General Assembly in December, is more significant because it holds Kim responsible based on a 372-page report of findings presented last year by the U.N.-backed Commission of Inquiry that detailed arbitrary detention, torture, executions and political prison camps.
"This is a sea change in the position of the international community," Darusman said during a recent visit to Tokyo. The North Koreans "are in their most vulnerable position at this stage, whenever the culpability and responsibility of the supreme leader is brought out in full glare of the international public scrutiny."
North Korea's intense response has included threats of more nuclear tests, mass rallies across the country, a bitter smear campaign against defectors who cooperated in the U.N. report and repeated allegations that Washington orchestrated the whole thing in an attempt at speeding a regime change. Its state media last week railed yet again against the U.N. findings, saying "those who cooked up the `report' are all bribed political swindlers and despicable human scum." It called Darusman, the former attorney general of Indonesia, an "opportunist."
In a rare flurry of talks, North Korean diplomats at the U.N. lobbied frenetically to get Kim's culpability out of the resolution without success. The proposal is now on the agenda of the Security Council, which is expected this year to make a decision on whether the issue should be referred to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
Just before the resolution passed the General Assembly, the North Korean diplomatic mission to the U.N. sought a meeting with Darusman to get the wording deleted. During the meeting with Ri Hung Sik, North Korea's ambassador-at-large, the North Koreans indicated their future was at stake, Darusman said.
"They said that other people will take over, and the hardliners will be taking over," Darusman said, suggesting a schism may already be forming between factions scrambling to prove themselves more loyal and more effective in protecting the leadership. "They wouldn't have to mention that to us, but I don't know. I'm taking it at face value."
But here's the reality check about the resolution: The likelihood of criminal proceedings against Kim is minuscule. It would likely be shot down by China or Russia, which have veto power on the Security Council. Also, while more than 120 countries support the International Criminal Court, the United States isn't one of them, so it is somewhat awkward for Washington to push that option too hard.
But even without bringing Kim to court, Darusman said, the placement of North Korean human rights on the Security Council agenda means Pyongyang will face increasing scrutiny from the international community. He said ally China will be under pressure to either distance itself from Pyongyang or lose credibility.
"It may seem remote, but at some stage it is conceivable that China cannot afford to be continuously associated with a regime that is universally sanctioned by the international community," he said. "Something will give."
Washington, meanwhile, is turning up the heat following the massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures.
"We are under no illusions about the DPRK's willingness to abandon its illicit weapons, provocations, and human rights abuses on its own. We will apply pressure both multilaterally and unilaterally," Sung Kim, Washington's special representative for North Korea policy, testified in Congress last month. "The leadership in Pyongyang faces ever-sharper choices."
North Korea's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Extricating North Korea from the personality cult of the Kim family would be a genuine challenge under any circumstances.
The country's founder, Kim Il Sung, and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, permeate every facet of daily life. Citizens wear Kim lapel pins everywhere they go. Portraits and statuary of the father and son are everywhere. In Pyongyang at midnight every night, a ghostly dirge commemorating the elder Kim blares from loudspeakers through the darkness.
According to the U.N. commission's findings and the testimony of many defectors, North Koreans who dare criticize the Kim family are punished severely and face horrific treatment in prison camps around the country. North Korea says that isn't true, and routinely accuses defectors of being "human scum" and criminals.
Officials vociferously deny speculation of disunity within their ranks.
In an interview with the AP in Pyongyang in October, two North Korean legal experts attempted to discredit the U.N. campaign and its findings -- which they called an "anti-DPRK plot" -- and defended the prison system that has long been the core area of concern.
"In a word, the political camps do not exist in our country," said Ri Kyong Chol, director of the international law department at Pyongyang's Academy of Social Sciences. "The difference between the common and the anti-state criminals is that the anti-state criminals get more severe punishment than the common criminals."
But Ri said common and anti-state inmates are not segregated.
"I think every country has prisons to imprison those criminals who have committed crimes against the state," he said. But in North Korea, "there are no different prisons for that."

Chris Christie, Rand Paul under fire for vaccine remarks

Two potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 came under heavy criticism late Monday for stating that parents should have input about whether to vaccinate their children.
The remarks by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul were not a departure from previously stated positions, but drew widespread attention as public health officials try to cope with a major measles outbreak that has infected over 100 people in several states.
Christie, who spoke Monday after making a tour of a biomedical research lab in Cambridge, England, said that he and his wife had vaccinated their children. However, the governor added, "I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well. So that's the balance that the government has to decide."
Later Monday, Paul said in a radio interview that he believed most vaccines should be voluntary. 
"I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines," Paul, an eye doctor, said in a subsequent interview while suggesting vaccines were "a good thing." ''But I think the parents should have some input. The state doesn't own your children."
Both men's staffs later sent out statements clarifying their remarks. Christie's spokesman said the governor believed that "with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated." The statement from Paul's office pointed out that the senator's children have all been vaccinated and added that Paul "believes that vaccines have saved lives, and should be administered to children.
Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic contender for the party nomination in 2016, couldn't resist taking a dig at the GOP hopefuls on Twitter.
"The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let's protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest."
Medical experts and political consultants from both sides joined in the criticism.
"When you see educated people or elected officials giving credence to things that have been completely debunked, an idea that’s been shown to be responsible for multiple measles and pertussis outbreaks in recent years, it’s very concerning," Amesh Adalja, an an infectious-disease physician at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh, told The Washington Post.
GOP operative Rick Wilson told the paper that he thought Christie's remarks could have been a clumsy play to win over conservative voters suspicious of government mandates.
"There’s only one of two options," Wilson said of Christie. "Either he’s so tone-deaf that he doesn’t understand why saying this is bad for him, or this is a considered political strategy. And that would be even more troubling."
In fact, Christie pledged to fight for greater parental involvement in vaccination decisions during his first campaign for New Jersey governor in 2009. 
All states now require children to get certain vaccinations to enroll in school, although California and New Jersey are among 20 states that let parents opt out by obtaining a waiver. Parents in New Jersey seeking such a waiver for medical reasons must submit a written statement from their doctor or registered nurse.
The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly urges parents to get their children vaccinated against measles and other childhood diseases. The New Jersey health department's guidelines on vaccines say that objections "based on grounds which are not medical or religious in nature and which are of a philosophical, moral, secular, or more general nature continue to be unacceptable."
Concerns about autism and vaccinations are often traced to a 1998 study in the British journal Lancet. While the research was later discredited and retracted by the journal, legions of parents abandoned the vaccine, leading to a resurgence of measles in Western countries where it had been mostly stamped out. Last year, there were more than 4,100 cases in Europe, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Measles is a highly contagious disease that spreads through the air, with symptoms that include fever, runny nose and a blotchy rash. The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is 97 percent effective at preventing measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Choosing not to vaccinate your child could also endanger the health of other children in your community," CDC director Tom Frieden said Monday.
New Jersey requires the vaccine for children between 12 months and 15 months old, and then a second dose between ages 4 and 6. Such mandated vaccinations are a point of irritation among some conservatives, notable in the early voting state of Iowa, where Christian home-school advocates constitute an influential bloc of voters who take part in the Republican presidential caucuses.
Barb Heki, a leader in Iowa's home-school advocacy network, said such parents "adhere to the idea that it's the parents' right to make the decision on vaccinations.
"More important than a candidate's stance on vaccinations, I'm more concerned for parents' rights to make decisions about their own children, period," she said. "That's paramount."
Louise Kuo Habakus, a radio host who runs a nonprofit group opposed to state-required vaccinations, said she helped arrange a meeting between parents and Christie on the issue in 2009 and saluted him for standing up for the "rights of parents to direct the health, welfare and upbringing of their children."
"He's been absolutely constant and I believe courageous and principled on this issue," she said.