Noel
Bartlet considers raising the levels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (1). CJ determines that a woman fainted upon seeing a painting that was stolen from her family by the Nazis (2) and is now hanging in the White House. Josh meets with trauma specialists about recent events, including a possible suicide attempt (3).
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Strategic Petroleum Reserve (last modified December 30, 2001) (back to top)
Created in the wake of the 1973-74 oil embargo, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a complex of four federal sites that store about a half billion barrels of crude oil in deep underground salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. Such stockpiles help reduce the United States' vulnerability to interruptions in its oil supply.
Currently, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds about 540 million barrels of crude oil; its current storage capacity is 700 million barrels and its highest inventory was 592 million barrels in 1994. On November 13 2001, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush ordered the Secretary of Energy to increase the reserves to full capacity using principally royalty oil from federal offshore leases. Before Bush's order, the SPR's capacity had been maintained at levels around 550-600 million barrels since the late 1980s, but the cushion it provides has gone down as the United States has increased gas consumption and become more dependent on petroleum imports; the reserve's supplies could meet U.S. oil needs for 115 days in 1985, and just 53 days in 2000.
Oil can be withdrawn from the SPR for sales in the event of a national energy supply shortage or for test sales, and it can be exchanged with oil producers who will replace the supplies either simultaneously or at a later time. Such drawdowns take 15 days from presidential decision to entry into the marketplace, and up to 4.1 million barrels can be withdrawn a day for 90 days; the Reserve reportedly could release oil into the market continuously for nearly a year and a half.
There has been only one emergency drawdown of the SPR for the sale of crude oil. In January 1991, as the United States began attacks against Iraq in retaliation for its invasion of Kuwait five months earlier, President George H.W. Bush ordered the release of crude-oil supplies to help stabilize world oil prices. Ultimately, 17 million barrels were released.
Oil has also been released several times as exchanges with private companies. Most recently, in September 2000, President Clinton ordered the release of up to 30 million barrels of crude oil to relieve domestic shortages and stabilize heating costs. This move was criticized by some as a political move to help presidential candidate Al Gore. In any case, any oil released at this time was to be replaced by oil companies a year later when prices were expected to be lower.
Sources: The Department of Energy's Strategic Petroleum Reserve website, available here.
Nazi art (last modified August 2001) (back to top)
From 1939 to 1945, the Nazi government collected thousands of works of art from museums and private collections in occupied Europe. Inspired by Hitler's own interest in art and his own failed ambitions there (he had applied to study at the School of Fine Arts in Vienna and been rejected), the seizure was part of an overall plan to build an art museum in the Austrian city of Linz dedicated to Europe's old masters.
Perhaps the most famous seized work was Vermeer's the Astronomer. This painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter was seized from the Rothschild family in 1940 by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi government branch responsible for art confiscation, from the Rothschild family's collection. It was stored with thousands of other art pieces and returned after the war. It now is displayed in the Louvre.
Other paintings have given rise to legal battles over ownership or simply disappeared without a trace. Most notable was the protracted controversy over two paintings by Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele that had been on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1997, two families claimed that "Portrait of Wally" and "Dead City," which had been loaned with other paintings to MOMA by the Austrian-government financed Leopold Foundation, had once belonged to them. On their behalf, the Manhattan District Attorney's office stopped MOMA from returning the paintings to the Leopold Foundation while the claims were being resolved. In September 1999, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that New York state law barred any seizure of art loaned to New York institutions and thus allowed MOMA to return the paintings to the Leopold Foundation; the Manhattan District Attorney's office criticized the ruling as making New York a "safe haven for stolen art." Federal prosecutors then tried to forbid the return to Austria, but a federal judge finally ruled in July 2000 that the paintings could be returned to Austria.
Controversies over other paintings have been resolved more peacefully. In 1998, a Degas painting, "Landscape with Smokestacks," was resolved amicably in 1998; the Art Institute of Chicago agreed to reimburse the original owners for half the value of the painting and to continue to display the painting.. Similarly, a Monet waterlily that was part of the "Monet in the 20th Century" exhibition that had toured at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago was discovered in November 1998 to have been plundered by the Nazis in 1941. The painting was reportedly returned to the heirs of the original owners.
Thousands of works were recovered by the United States and French governments after World War II. Many were returned to the original owners or their heirs, but thousands of lesser works are still in storage with governments or various museums. Some people have called for the sale of these paintings to raise funds for Holocaust survivors.
Sources: Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi conspiracy to steal the world's greatest works of art (1997). Lynn H. Nichols, The Rape of Europa: The fate of Europe's treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994). Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). United States v. Portrait of Wally, 105 F.Supp.2d 288 (SDNY 2000), In the Matter of the Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum served on the Museum of Modern Art, 697 N.Y.S.2d 538 (N.Y. 1999).
Post-traumatic stress disorder (last modified August 2001) (back to top)
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a psychiatric disorder that can occur after experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event or violent personal assault. People with PTSD often relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, have trouble sleeping, and feel detached; they can also suffer biological changes and they often have related disorders such as substance abuse and depression.
PTSD has been widely recognized as a psychological disorder since 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association added it to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Trauma was originally considered some kind of event outside the range of usual human experience, such as the Holocaust, natural disasters, and airplane accidents, but the definition has expanded into events such as being in combat, raped, or physically abused.
According to the National Comorbidity Study conducted in the early 1990s, 60.7 percent of American men and 51.2 percent of women reported at least one traumatic event. Most do not go on to develop PTSD; of adult Americans, about 7.8 percent of Americans will experience post-traumatic stress disorder at some point in their lives, with women twice as likely as men to do so. About 30 percent of people who develop PTSD at some point go on to develop a chronic form that persists throughout their entire lives.
A study of Vietnam veterans, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey, found that about 30 percent of male and female veterans experienced PTSD, with another 20 percent having partial PTSD at some point in their lives.
Many states and private organizations provide post-trauma services to help people who have been through traumatic events. The federal government supports research into PTSD through the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which was created in 1989 within what is now the Department of Veterans Affairs; the agency has expanded its purview into civilian matters as well.
Sources: The National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, available on-line here.
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