In an interview on CNN, investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, who has just exposed an on-going $400 million covert military/intelligence operation being prosecuted by the Bush Administration against Iran, had this to say: "And by the way, it's the Democrats in Congress who basically looked the other way and said, 'Take the money and run'..."

All those who think the Democrats are the "party of change," the Sucker Land Express to Obamaville is now boarding.

God Almighty, people. The Democratic leadership in Congress has authorized the Bush Administration's reassignment of military funds to a program of state-sponsored terrorism against a sovereign nation. The rank-and-file Democrats, now fully aware of this, are not taking even the first step to strip the President of the authority to conduct this project. The putative heir to Empire being anointed by the Democrats has not even so much as hinted at condemnation of this abomination and those who 'looked the other way' after approving it.

What is it going to take to shut down this corrupted government all the way from its unaccountable President to its appeasing Congress to its rubber-stamp judiciary?

Another war? Apparently not: the opposition party is paying the way for that.

Another 9/11? Not likely: the opposition party jumped right on the bandwagon to hand Bush our civil liberties as payment for his last catastrophic failure to protect the homeland from a handful of crazed religious criminals.

Your future? Sure: an addled, corrupted corporate shill versus a vacuous babe-in-the-woods with a cult following that features gyrating sex-pots on YouTube.

There's your future.


The Dark Wraith wonders when, exactly, it was that the term "false hope" replaced "unrelenting fury."

John McCain is calling former President Jimmy Carter a "lousy" commander-in-chief.

That is just plain harsh.

Maybe if Mr. Carter's abortive attempt to rescue the American hostages from the embassy in Iran in October of 1980 had not been disrupted by the back-door dealings of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan and his running mate, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, history would have worked out a whole lot differently.

At the very least, President Carter never illegally sold the theocratic loons in Tehran weaponry that, to this very day, might be in the Iranian arsenal our current President claims is being handed to insurgents in Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers.

Neither was Mr. Carter in command when 241 U.S. Marines, sequestered in their barracks in Beirut, were slaughtered in 1983 by jihadist suicide bombers.

Talk about a "lousy" commander-in-chief.

Oh, wait a minute. Wasn't George W. Bush the commander-in-chief when a handful of crazed jihadists with nothing more than box cutters managed to circumvent the entirety of our NORAD air defense system with four commercial jetliners and blast two giant skyscrapers and the very nexus of our Department of Defense at the Pentagon?

Mr. McCain, the word "lousy" doesn't even begin to describe Republican commanders-in-chief of recent American history.

For many years, American conservatives have criticized judicial activists — judges who read into the United States Constitution that which is not in the plain language of the document. This criticism extends to judicial interpretations of statutory law, as well.

In many ways, condemnation of interpretive rulings is disingenuous and simplistic: the Constitution and laws must be understood in the context of how words, phrases, and sentences were used at the time a law was written. Terminology and even word arrangements used in written law are often the product of a highly specialized dialect known only to those with appropriate training; and even the most ardent of strict constructionists cannot ignore the historical legislative, political, and social backdrops against which laws have been written, enacted, and enforced.

Moreover, because the United States legal system is based upon a complex hybrid of statutory law and common law, it is the duty of the judiciary in the United States to ensure the survival of the common law component (established through court precedents) by demanding the privilege of judicial review, as first advanced in the 1803 Supreme Court case, Marbury v. Madison, the practical effect of which was to bind judicial decisions, and subsequent respect by courts for those decisions by stare decisis, to the concept of "constitutional law." It is to the purpose of anchoring court decisions in gravity that, while the Congress may write laws that the President then enforces, the judiciary constructs law as a body through affirmation of its interpretations of the Constitution and the several laws crafted by Congresses from term to term and time to time.

Returning to the matter of simply reading the plain language of the Constitution, this has as much to do with the history of the language as it does with the history of law. The Second Amendment is an excellent case in point:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Late 18th Century writers had the annoying habit of using a comma to separate the subject of a sentence from the predicate, but even setting aside that curious artifact (along with the same penchant as High German for capitalizing nouns), the above sentence is an abomination. It begins with what appears to be the subject:

A well regulated Militia...

Then, a comma shows up, meaning that either the 18th Century scribe is moving on to the predicate, or he is preparing to insert a so-called "non-restrictive" phrase or clause, a string of words modifying the subject but not necessary to the sentence meaning. The second possibility seems to be applicable:

...being necessary to the security of a free State...

Yes, that would modify an immediately preceding subject:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...

Okay, we're in business; here comes the predicate:

...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms...

Oh, my. That looks like a subject; but the sentence already delivered the subject way back there at the beginning! Worse, a comma follows this little phrase, and that could be interpreted in one of at least three ways: it could be a comma splice; it could be one of those abominable commas 18th Century writers used to separate subject from predicate; or (and this one is really maddening), it could mean that the entire phrase from the last comma had been a non-restrictive adjective clause modifying a prior subject!

...shall not be infringed.

Well, thank God for the occasional period to end the suffering of a mangled sentence.

Years ago, when I taught English grammar and paralegal courses, I complained to a historian on the faculty about the Second Amendment. He said that, were I to have confronted Thomas Jefferson, himself, with my fussing, he would have casually and quite absently dismissed me with a slow wave of the hand and something to the effect, "You know what I mean."

Well, yes, I suppose so: revolutionaries can be obtuse.

Moving along, the Constitution has plenty more interesting language in store for the unprepared, but it also has extraordinary context invisible to the unknowing. When I tell my students that the Constitution of the United States is a "treaty between the federal government and the several states that form the union of those states," they are entirely perplexed. They have never before heard the Constitution described as a treaty. A treaty?

From there, the situation deteriorates because they have no idea of what I mean by ius naturalis (or ius naturale to remove the masculine aspect).

I explain by beginning with this declaration: "The Constitution grants you NOTHING!"

That seems to fly in the face of everything they know (what little it is the typical American college student knows) about the Constitution. Surely, the Bill of Rights begins by laying out essential rights we are given.

In fact, it does nothing of the kind, and the framers did not intend to "give" us rights via the Constitution or any other document; but to understand why this is the case, we must go all the way back to ancient Greece and then to the Roman political theorists who picked up and ran with an amazing observation Greek philosophers before them had made.

When Greek armies were rocking the known world, communiques sent back to the homeland included documents of peoples encountered. Translating the laws of foreigners was no easy task, but the fruits of such labors revealed something rather interesting about the laws of various peoples: although great variety and variation could be found in laws from place to place, some laws seemed to be just about everywhere. Although it would be the Romans and later scholars who would put a solid conceptual and political framework around the idea, it was quite apparent that a core of principles, embodied in a set of seemingly universal laws showing up from one place to the next, existed.

The Romans would come to call this ius gentium, the law of nations, or, as constructed in statutes, the law that applies to the people regardless of whether they be citizens of Empire or foreigners. St. Thomas Aquinas would later take it one step further and postulate that ius gentium is, essentially, an addendum to ius naturalis, the "natural law" that transcends the vicissitudes of this society or that tribe, positivistically inhering to the collective of humanity and to each within that body.

Truth be told, much of this apparently universal law that had begun to emerge by the Middle Ages in high-minded, grueling complex thinking had begun with those observations of a seemingly universal set of observed laws from nation to nation, and this observation led to what the Romans would later refer to as lex ratio, or rational law. Unknown to the Greeks and their successors, the Romans, that common set of laws that seemed for all the world to point to something transcendent and universal—a ius naturalis—was actually nothing more than the result of many of the peoples being encountered all being bound historically and linguistically to tribes that had long before lived around the Black Sea whose members, in their waves of migration perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 years previously, had gone in every direction, carrying not just their earlier ways, but also a common root language, what modern linguists refer to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a hypothetical language upon which a huge number of later languages came to be built in layers as the Black Sea tribes fanned out. Latin and its derivatives, Germanic tongues, Greek, and even Sanskrit have their common roots in PIE. In fact, a regular set of rules about how sounds in one Indo-European language relate to sounds in another language of the super-family was first discovered by none other than Jacob Grimm of the Grimm Brothers of fairy tale fame.

That's interesting in and of itself, but what is more interesting is that the Black Sea tribes were quite aware of the importance of social bindings, and we know this because a large group of words across PIE languages still carry the fossil root of important words that begin with the letter "l": lock, line, ligature, lokk, loc, uslok, Loche, loquet, lineage, and lygos, for example. That last one, lygos, is Greek and suspiciously conflatable with logos, the "logic" used in forensics, which derives from the Latin forensis, meaning (among other things) "legal." The Greeks dearly loved word play, especially to the effect of connecting concepts through devices of letter replacements and rearrangements (what is called "metathesis") in words, as in "Hercules" deriving from "Heracles," he who is anointed of the goddess Hera.)

Law is a binding of people, and the 18th Century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, consolidating thoughts of some of his contemporaries, went so far as to postulate a "social contract," an implicit instrument that, unlike a common contract binding one person to another, binds a people to their common state. Each performs duties for the other and anticipates reciprocal benefit in return. In more modern legal terminology, each party to this contract suffers "legal detriment" and contractually enjoys "consideration" as a result. Rousseau used the concept of this social contract to replace with somewhat greater substance in codifiable law the less tangible political reliance upon natural law, itself, that was on the mind of John Locke, his predecessor in political philosophy.

The Founding Fathers of this country were well-versed in the thinking of both the ancients and their contemporaries in Europe. They knew very well that ius gentium as nothing more than a class of laws had conceptually evolved, and certainly not coincidentally, with lex ratio into a firm belief in ius naturalis, law that is timeless. St. Thomas Aquinas was certainly favorable to this idea, and several influential thinkers of the 15th and 16th Centuries—among them, Huig de Grotius in Holland and Francisco de Vitoria in Spain—were advancing a "law of reason" inherent in ius naturalis. Vitoria built the case and criteria for what would constitute just war, deeply troubled as he was by the violence being committed by the Conquistadors against natives of the New World. Grotius dismissed the confinement of ius naturalis to trivial, animalistic rules of behavior like producing and caring for the young; if it exists (and these are most decidedly not Grotius' words, but rather my own), then natural law is undoubtedly neither probative in construct nor utilitarian in ontological valence, although by the later part of the 18th Century, it would be about the only deep anchor in law and theoretical reasoning for justifying all-out, separatist rebellion.

The rebels in the British Colonies of North America gladly took hold of natural law: it flows neither from sovereignty nor from its stewards. For purposes of historical, if maybe unconscious, continuity, natural law comported for the restive but intellectual colonists with the earlier rebellion of Protestantism and its predecessors like Lollardism in that the Word and, hence, the will of God may be revealed to the common man without intercession by putative, and necessarily mortal, representatives of God in the stations of the church. To this admittedly speculative argument, it did not hurt one bit that the Founding Fathers were almost to the last man affiliated with Freemasonry, a secretive society in open ideological, religious, and political war with the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

In the Virginia Declaration of Rights dated May 15, 1776, George Mason got quite explicit about ius naturalis with this clause: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights..." [emphasis added].

The Declaration of Independence subsequently riveted the source of rights accorded men not to the state, but to higher authority:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

There, in the first paragraph, is the invocation of "Nature"; then, in the second paragraph, comes the odd adjective "unalienable" used to describe the rights endowed to men by their Creator: unalienable, not inalienable. The rights accorded men may, indeed, be taken away, but they cannot be extinguished. The extent to which a government separates itself from the recognition of the rights men have by natural law is the equivalence of that government's descent into tyranny, and only the consent of the governed, feeble as that consent might be, serves to promote those unalienable rights owned by the governed.

The Constitution—in its Articles, its Bill of Rights, and its subsequent Amendments—is, then, not a document granting rights because no government, no document, indeed, no person or thing on Earth may grant that which is by natural law unalienable. The state as a rightful and legitimate authority may only circumstantially and parsimoniously circumscribe rights from natural law, and it is to that purpose that the United States Constitution may exist as an express treaty between the several states and the separate and supreme sovereign they form in union. The Constitution, then, expressly defines the circumstances, situations, and extents in which the federal government may arrogate to itself the ability to diminish—not to extinguish, not to repudiate, not to abolish, but only to diminish as necessary for the common good—the rights of the governed as citizens both of their respective states and of their common nation as a federation of those several states.

With all that as backdrop, in some places seemingly disconnected and summary, this article concludes with the full text of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Amendment is clear: the Constitution is recognizing a right, then clearly describing, first, the procedural circumstances ('Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing' what is to be searched and seized and against whom an arrest is to be made) and, second, the substantive reason ('probable cause') by which that right may circumscribed as necessary by the state.

The plain language—capturing as it does phenomenally complex, interwoven threads of history, linguistics, and philosophy—is available for all, even politicians and judges of the 21st Century, to read and understand.

Natural law does not hide from the just; neither does it vanish at the will of tyrants.


The Dark Wraith rests his case against the New American Century.

Dark Wraith Publishing presents The Dark Wraith Lecture Series, specially edited, streaming audio versions of academic lectures in economics and business offered as a public service to visitors at this Website.

Lecture 4: "Industry Structure"
Duration: 1:11:47
Size: 65.7 Mb

This past weekend, officials of Saudi Arabia, citing concerns about global economic and political instabilities resulting from high fuel prices, unofficially indicated that the country will increase oil production by as much as 500 thousand barrels per day, which would lift its daily output to about 10 million barrels. Vague assurance was given that the production increase would be confirmed by the Saudi oil minister on Sunday, June 15, but as of the time of publication of this article, a clear, official announcement has not been made, although it might come after a June 22 meeting of representatives from oil producing and consuming countries, who will discuss the recent, rapid run-up in oil prices. By early afternoon on Monday, June 16, 2008, world oil markets were still anticipating tight supplies, with the price of oil probing record-breaking territory in the $140 per barrel range. Moreover, regardless of any increase in output level by Saudi Arabia, the trend in oil prices will remain upward.

Notwithstanding claims by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Jr., that soaring energy costs are in part due to "minimal investment" by oil producing nations in new oil wells and refineries, the near-certain prospect of continuing increases in oil prices is not entirely the result of surging demand for hydrocarbon products by fast-growing countries like India and China, although the underlying supply and demand dynamics do link the surging growth of those two economies to what is happening to fuel prices right here in the United States. However, considerably more of the reason oil prices are skyrocketing is the collapse of the value of the dollar against major foreign currencies: this is driving the cost of all imports upward.

A weakening U.S. dollar makes imports from foreign nations more expensive and makes domestic exports to the rest of the world cheaper. Entirely aside from what are undoubtedly somewhat tight supply conditions and escalating global demand, the literal collapse of the greenback against currencies like the euro and the yen is greatly magnifying any increases in the price of all foreign-produced products save for those from China, a country still manipulating the exchange rate of its currency to the dollar, notwithstanding assurances to the contrary by both the Bush Administration and the rulers in Beijing.

Even the representatives of the G-8, meeting this past week in Osaka, conceded that the precipitous decline of the greenback was a primary cause of the rising price of oil (after the august body of ministers ritualistically laid some of the blame at the doorstep of unnamed, shadowy, altogether evil "oil speculators").


The graphic below, created from data available at the Energy Information Administration, shows the monthly spot price for Brent Crude from January 2000 to June 13, 2008, along with the exchange rate of the euro against the dollar.



The inverse relationship is striking, as is the recent increase in the steepness of the rise in the spot price of oil. The mirror image part of the visual relationship in the graphic above is the result of the collapse of the dollar; the acceleration of the trend is largely the result of the rising demand in emerging economies like China and India. Neither of those two causes are likely to vanish in the foreseeable future, so the cost of oil and products derived therefrom has virtually no prospect of going anywhere but further upward for a long time to come.

Furthermore, domestic equivalents of those imports will also become more expensive, too, by virtue of the substitution effect. That means those calling for bio-fuels, wind energy, solar power, nuclear power, coal, natural gas, continental or shelf oil, geothermal power, and any other source of energy as alternatives to imported hydrocarbon products will ultimately be wildly disappointed by the emerging economic reality that the cost of energy, regardless of its source, will be absorbing a greater and greater share of household and business income from now on.

The President of the United States cannot fix that; neither can the Saudis, who have little long-run incentive to do so, considering that their country and other OPEC nations will exit the 21st Century without their stores of wealth in oil reserves. It is in their best interest to convert those reservoirs into usable wealth at the highest possible price and at the swiftest possible pace consistent with maintaining firm prices that are not so high that they overwhelm the consuming world's ability to continue industrial growth.

Complicating the matter is that a positive correlation will become stronger between the price of oil and industrialized nations' rate of technological conversion away from energy extracted from fossil fuels: as oil becomes more expensive, the price-relative of alternatives will fall, which means that a price of oil that is too high will induce the research and development for, implementation of, and widespread industrial adaptations to alternative sources of energy. Hence, the oil producing and exporting nations must control the price rise to the extent possible to accelerate the conversion of their wealth from raw oil to other, more liquid assets, but at the same time keep the price from rising so quickly that substitutes become so widely and quickly adopted that remaining oil reserves become less valuable through globally lower demand.

The good news for the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries is that many nations that are net consumers of fossil fuels will, for the time being, anyway, find that domestic exploration for oil and gas and wars to secure oil and gas fields and distribution routes will remain cost effective. The domestic exploration will necessarily entail conversion and occasional destruction of environmentally sensitive ecosystems, and the wars will necessarily construct, shift, and reconfigure at least some historical alliances, as explained in the article "Hydrocarbon Battlefields," published nearly two years ago here at The Dark Wraith Forums, and result in combatant and civilian casualties. On the plus side, both exploration and fighting will lead to technological innovations in both beneficiary civilian and war-making industries, as explained in the series "The 21st Century," published here at The Dark Wraith Forums more than three years ago. On the negative side, the need for access to more domestic areas of exploration and the requirements of managing states of conflict will entail an acceleration of global trends toward more authoritarian societies, as explained in "The 21st Century, Epilogue," published last year here at The Dark Wraith Forums, whether the degradations of human and civil rights are open or hidden from common view.

Is the emerging world and its economic, military, and political dynamics complicated? Yes.

Must the world of tomorrow happen with persistently rising energy prices, wars, environmental degradation, and authoritarian management schema? Again, yes. The American people as a body politic seems to learn best through direct application of pain consequential to prior bad choices in leaders and their policies.

Sometimes, learning requires multiple applications of pain-inducing consequences. Presently, the follow-up pain therapy will be delivered by the continued corrosive incompetence in the presidency of the corporatist John McCain, or it will be delivered in the refreshing alternative economic incompetence of the liberal Barack Obama. Mr. McCain is surrounded by the same failure-prone neo-conservatives and corporate lobbyists that crafted foreign policy and its attendant economic policy necessities under the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush; Mr. Obama is surrounded by fawning yes-men and neo-Keynesian globalists so enamored of "free trade" that they blissfully allowed the Chinese to maintain a peg of the yuan against the dollar so out of line with purchasing power parity that the result was a literal gutting of American industry over the past decade-and-a-half.

Thus, in the event of either McCain or Obama ascending to the throne of Empire, the American people will be the beneficiaries of yet another round of economic, social, and spiritual pain that will progressively and inevitably feel a lot like genuine agony.

The good news is this: although the dosage is pretty much out of their control, the voters are, at the very least, free to choose their preferred delivery system. Whether it be the iron fist of neo-conservative authoritarianism or the velvet choke-hold of its neo-liberalist brother, this time, those who do not like the outcome will have no one at all to blame but themselves.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

This is the first video lecture in the reconstituted Dark Wraith Video Lecture Series.



Title: Economics Defined
Album: Dark Wraith Video Lecture Series
Track: 01
Publisher: Dark Wraith Publishing
Duration: 75 minutes
Size: 280 Mb


The Dark Wraith hopes that you enjoy this video presentation.