Thursday, April 21, 2016

Oilfluenza, Affluenza, and Disgorgement

Life Magazine Ad (1962)
Oilfluenza is the Affluenza of the oil industry (The Greatest Murder Mystery in Human History).

On the heels of a recent Dredd Blog post about who should administer the process of dealing with mass-murder, I wanted to mention that in addition to imprisonment or execution, there are additional remedies which address potential financial repercussions, in addition to criminal repercussions, in the wake of depraved-heart-murder (Will This Float Your Boat - 12).

For example:
"Disgorgement ... A remedy requiring a party who profits from illegal or wrongful acts to give up any profits he or she made as a result of his or her illegal or wrongful conduct. The purpose of this remedy is to prevent unjust enrichment."
(Legal Information Institute). Remember that, in addition to charging exorbitant prices for their Earth poisoning product, the oil industry receives 'freebees' from the people's treasury:
Most Americans should know by now that Republicans despise ‘entitlements’ that they errantly consider is anything Americans receive; even if it is theirs to begin with. They hate the idea of retired Americans receiving their Social Security and Medicare after paying into them their entire working lives, and they hate Americans working at slave-wage jobs receiving nutrition assistance because they earn too little to survive. What they do not hate, and indeed fight ferociously for, are taxpayer-funded entitlements that go to corporations in the form of tax loopholes and particularly entitlements for the oil industry in the form of subsidies.
(Oil Industry Benefits From $5.3 Trillion in Subsidies Annually, emphasis added; cf. this and this). The court would decide, during disgorgement remedy proceedings, what the actual dollar value of subsidies and entitlements ends up being.

Here is some additional detail:
As noted by the FCPA Blog earlier this week, disgorgement has quietly become a potent and heavily relied on aspect of the SEC's FCPA enforcement strategy in recent years. So what is disgorgement exactly and how is it calculated?

Disgorgement is an equitable remedy authorized by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that is used to deprive wrong-doers of their ill-gotten gains and deter violations of federal securities law. The Act gives the SEC the authority to enter an order “requiring accounting and disgorgement,” including reasonable interest, as part of administrative or cease and desist proceedings (SEA of 1934).

As an equitable remedy, disgorgement is technically not intended as a tool to punish, but instead as a vehicle for preventing unjust enrichment. The SEC is therefore only permitted to recover the approximate amount earned from the alleged illicit activities (disgorging anything more would be considered punitive).

In calculating disgorgement, the SEC is required to distinguish between legally and illegally obtained profits. The first step in such calculations is to identify the causal link between the unlawful activity and the profit to be disgorged. Once this causal link is established, the SEC may assert its right to disgorge illicit profits that stem from this wrong-doing. Because calculations like these often prove difficult, courts tend to give the SEC considerable discretion in determining what constitutes an ill-gotten gain by requiring only a “reasonable approximation of the profits which are causally connected to the violation” (SEC v. Happ). Once the SEC satisfies this relatively low threshold, the burden shifts to the defendant, who must rebut the causal connection.

Rebutting an SEC calculation can prove difficult in practice where a violation leads seamlessly to the formation of a contract or a long-term business deal. For example, if a defendant who secured a series of lucrative contracts after an improper payment to a foreign official is unable to break the causal chain between the improper payment and the ongoing contracts it secured, it may be possible for the SEC to disgorge future, as yet unrealized, profits. Courts have recognized, however, that the disgorgement of such gains cannot be without limit and that, at some point, the continuum between a violation and profits becomes too attenuated to be feasible.
(What Exactly is Disgorgement?, emphasis added). In other words, the cost of bringing Oil-Qaeda to justice would be covered in a just case, which leaves out the Fifth Circuit (A Case of Big Oil vs. Climate Change, 2).

Just sayin' ...

The next post in this series is here.



Wednesday, April 20, 2016

The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises - 5

Fig. 1 Escapism in a nutshell.
I. Introduction

What happens when there is a mass murder, caused by polluting a planet, and the "detectives" chosen to describe and stop the problem are scientists?

"This is the Anthropocene Epoch."

Or, the "detectives" chosen to describe and stop the problem are economists?

"A carbon tax is needed."

Or, the "detectives" chosen to describe and stop the problem are elected politicians whose campaigns are supported by the criminals involved in the mass murder?
Fig. 2

"What pollution? ... Oh ... well ... the other party did it!"

Or, the "detectives" chosen to describe and stop the problem are members of a just judicial system?

"The perpetrators shall be arrested, indicted, tried, and punished according to the degree of their criminal guilt" (see e.g.The Greatest Murder Mystery in Human History).

I think it is safe to say that the proper authorities to fully handle mass murders are not economists, journalists, pundits, politicians, or scientists.

That must be done, in sane civilizations, by a fair criminal jurisprudence system that acts quickly when scientists and others observe the activity constituting an existential danger to that civilization (Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

In the case of our current civilization, that time to act would have been practically a lifetime ago (The Exceptional American Denial, cf. When Accountability Is A Plague, 2, 3).

II. In Other Words

Fig. 3
In other words, current civilization has no homogeneous, comprehensive, or globally agreed-to mechanism for analyzing, processing, and solving the predicament.

There are two Dredd Blog series that have sought to argue that this predicament is not a sign of a sane civilization (The Peak of Sanity, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises, 2, 3, 4).

The pollution of the Earth and the result of that pollution has more of a local impact in some areas, but it also has more of a global impact in other cases.

III. Oh No ... More Seaport Graphs

Today's graphs are behind the curve, because I have not reviewed the report a NOAA
Fig. 4
official mentioned: "Margaret Davidson, NOAA’s senior advisor for coastal inundation and resilience science and services ... said recent data that has been collected but has yet to be made official indicates sea levels could rise by roughly 3 meters or 9 feet by 2050-2060 ..." (Will This Float Your Boat - 12).

Fig. 5
To bring the future projections, shown in today's graphs, up to that degree of sea level rise, I would have to increase the acceleration shown in today's graphs.

For example, Fig. 4 shows two East Coast seaports, one of which was displayed in an increasing acceleration scenario some time ago (The Extinction of Charleston).

Nevertheless, today's graphs indicate way more acceleration of sea level change than the IPCC estimates did.

Furthermore, today's graphs show that major seaports in major nations are an endangered species.

But more than that, they show that the extinction process is happening to all of the major seaports at about the same time all around the globe.

IV. How The Graphs Are Constructed

First, I download data from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).
Fig. 6

I then write software modules in the C++ programming language to process that text-format data, then place the data into various tables in an SQL database (SQL Wikipedia).

Next, I write additional software modules to analyze and process the SQL data into CSV files (CSV Wikipedia).

That file format is used because many graphing programs handle CSV file format as a matter of course.

Finally, graphic displays generated by graph-generating programs are made then loaded into the Dredd Blog post editor (from Googledom) for your viewing pleasure.

V. Conclusion

The scary time frame for the ongoing extinction of seaports around the globe is brought to us by a criminal mindset within the epigovernment (Epigovernment: The New Model - 5).

We don't know exactly when our demise will be exacted, but it will happen well before the minions of the criminal enterprise I call Epigovernment tell us it will.

Meanwhile, "move along folks, nothing to see here" is evolving into "worse than previously thought."

The previous post in this series is here.

"No time for ... lovey dovey ..." (lyrics here).



Monday, April 18, 2016

The Greatest Murder Mystery in Human History

Who are we to find?
Regular readers know that I have fingered Oil-Qaeda, for some time now, as the murderer in a mass murder-suicide.

Yet, I have been presenting the hypothesis in terms of scientific principles.

So, I thought I might or would do a series that presents the issue as a Murder Mystery.

Naturally, I looked for some guidance concerning how to do a literary work rather than a science fair project.

One site suggests: 1) Read as many murder mysteries as you can as it will expand your knowledge (yech, I don't like them), 2) Get a notebook dedicated for your story/novel (this blog will do for that), then write down those notes to wit:
  • Who are the detectives?
  • Why were they murdered?
  • Who will be murdered? How was the person's life? Does anyone else gets murdered too?
  • What will they be murdered with?
  • Does anyone discover about the murderer? Is information about the case released by the police, or is it kept a secret? How the victim's friends and family reacted to the news?
  • Who are the suspects? Did they have a relationship with the victim, the murderer or another suspect? What are their life stories?
  • Lastly, who was the murderer? What was his or her sentence after trial? How was their relationship with other existing character like? Do not make the murderer too obvious.
(How to Write Murder Mysteries). Of course these suggestions or guidelines tend to apply to the murder of individuals in a first-degree murder context.

I have generally presented the murder of current civilization as a second-degree murder case having the characteristics of a depraved heart mass murder-suicide.

That is a different type of murder mystery case, because the suicide aspect of this type of case leaves no one alive to prosecute.

Nevertheless, the application of those suggestions or guidelines above can still be addressed:
  • Who are the detectives? [the press and the citizenry]
  • Why were they murdered? [criminal insanity brought on by a polluting culture]
  • Who will be murdered? [everyone except MOMCOM and OIl-Qaeda who will die by suicide] How was the person's [victim's] life? [depends on who you ask] Does anyone else get murdered too? [yes, no one is left out]
  • What will they be murdered with? [fossil fuel (oil, gas, coal) forced addiction & overdose]
  • Does anyone discover about the murderer? [yes] Is information about the case released by the police, or is it kept a secret? [a few release the info, but most is kept secret] How the victim's friends and family reacted to the news? [The five stages of denial]
  • Who are the suspects? [Oil-Qaeda & MOMCOM] Did they have a relationship with the victim, the murderer or another suspect? [yes] What are their life stories? [lost in space]
  • Lastly, who was the murderer? What was his or her sentence after trial? [exonerated by oilfluenza, affluenza (cf this), and Stockholm Syndrome; glorified as hero] How was their relationship with other existing character like? [deceptive] Do not make the murderer too obvious. [too late]
Anyway, you get my drift:

Will This Float Your Boat - 12

Oil-Qaeda & MOMCOM Conspire To Commit Depraved-Heart Murder - 5

The Extinction of Robust Sea Ports - 4

The 1.14% vs. The 100%

(those are recent Dredd Blog posts, with links to others). This type of thing is difficult to grasp.

Even smaller cases can be difficult to grasp too (Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill).

But try by using the following story as a metaphor for an oilfluenza-affluenza induced mass-murder suicide.

The gist of the metaphor scenario is that The Bush Administration murdered a country that had nothing to do with 911 (Iraq), and now The Obama Administration wants to protect the nation (Saudi Arabia) that did have something to do with 911 (Fighting Terrorism For 200 Years - 3).

"It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." - Voltaire

"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic." - Stalin

The bottom line is that Oil-Qaeda takes care of its own, but not us.