Chevron Up $9.5B in Ruling to Negate Ruling to Force it to Pay $9.5B to Ecuador
Prepare for a series of confusing negations of double and triple negatives. The case involves Chevron (NYSE:CVX) and Ecuador, generally in the news these days after the arrest of Julian Assange. This time they’re in the news for their attempt to annul the decision of an international arbitral tribunal that ordered Ecuador to prevent enforcement of a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. An order to prevent the annulment of an enforcement is three negatives, so it’s hard to figure out who gets the money and who doesn’t. There might be one too many negatives in here to make sense of this Reuters report, but essentially, an Ecaudorian court ordered that Chevron pay $9.5B for pollution in Ecuador between 1964 and 1992 by Texaco, and that award was annulled by an international court, which was upheld. So Chevron doesn’t have to pay, shareholders are happy, and Ecuadorians are pretty upset.
SEE: Cannabis Stock News Daily Roundup April 15
Bernie In the Lead, Ahoy Socialism
The Democratic presidential candidate field is bursting at the seams, but out of 20 candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders, who had praised the functionality of the Soviet Union up until just before its complete collapse, is way ahead of every other candidate. The only one who remotely challenges him is Joe Biden, hair fondler/sniffer and unwanted back massager of various women. Bernie has 29% of the vote, and Biden has 24%, according to the latest Emerson poll. If Sanders wins, the 2020 Presidential election will be between a record deficit spender (they all are) Republican who supports tariffs and aggravates trade disputes, and a socialist who supports record deficit spending just as well. Conclusion being, expect the national debt to keep rising faster and faster until the sum that it tallies becomes inherently meaningless, as does the monetary units that comprise it. Biden is in freefall, leading Sanders 27% to 17% in February, tying in March, and now that the media has brought attention to Hairsniffmassagegate, Biden looks pretty much finished.
Volkswagen CEO Facing Possibility of 10 Years on Prison For Emissions Cheating
German prosecutors have charged former Volkswagen (OTCMKTS:VWAGY) CEO Martin Winterkorn with fraud in connection with the company’s year effort to cheat on diesel emissions testing. Prosecutors said that Winterkorn knew about the deception since May 2014, and failed to stop it. In his defense, though it’s probably inadequate, he would have probably been forced out if he spoke up, and likely had no choice on the matter. He had said that he had no idea about the affair, which is all he really could have said anyway. Prosecutores say that the deception started in 2006. Basically, emissions controls were turned on when the cars were being tested, and turned off when they were on the road in an effort to reduce costs and enhance fuel efficiency while still passing government tests. In all, some 11 million cars worldwide were equipped with the illegal software.
Canadian Pot Growing Nicely, Failing to Deliver, Literally
Marijuana growers are growing up the wazoo, but are failing to get enough cannabis to market in ways that buyers want to consume it. The problem, amazingly, is a tax stamp. Literally, something that producers have to stick on to delivery quotas with glue, and the glue isn’t working. That’s what’s holding up the industry. Stamp glue. One company, Organigarm (OTCMKTS:OGRMF), has figured out how to automate and still manually apply the stamps, so they’re flying high. “Our pre-roll equipment puts [the tax stamp] on automatically, the oil line does it automatically, but the dry flower jar line, we just can’t get it automatic,” Engel said, adding that he hopes to have a fix in two weeks. Engel said that his company had nearly $30 million worth of dried cannabis at the end of its most recent quarter that it still needed to process. The company is working 24 hours a day, to perform extraction.
