By Luis Yerovi Jr.

In the Op/Ed pages of a recent edition of Quito's daily newspaper "El Comercio" the motivation behind the lawsuit against TexacoChevron is questioned. The editorial insinuates that the real reason behind the lawsuit is "money" and not environmental concerns.

Meanwhile in Iraq, President Bush's war is criticized for being more about petrodollars and global domination than about liberation and "freedom."

In the TexacoChevron lawsuit, I believe the plaintiff's motivations speak to the fact that the environment -- Pacha mama, our life support system -- has a monetary worth or value for humans. So the critique is right -- it is about money.

The motivation behind Bush's Iraqi adventure -- if indeed it is about "freedom"-- is analogous to that of an ideology farmer where the US military is the hoe, the Iraqi people the soil, "freedom" the seed and propaganda the fertilizer. The crop to be harvested is an expanding Western dominated corporate marketplace. The motivation is of course money through the neoliberal ideology of "free markets." The problem is that humans are not blank slates and rivers of blood do not always make good fertilizer for ideas...unless of course you are pursuing totalitarian ideologies such as Mao's or Stalin's.

Both examples bring to the surface interesting and complex questions of international law, jurisdiction and ultimate legitimacy. Further, they address questions of value and worth. These questions, which have bedeviled humanity for millennia, can be clarified by examining more closely the natural history of law and money.

Money = Value(s?)

How is the value of goods calculated in the modern, globalized world? According to economists, values or worth are based on rational "free" market principles of supply and demand. Let's look closely at these "rational" factors and see how well they apply to our tumultuous, history infested world.

In today's shrinking world, the "demand" part is based on the psychological permutations or "tastes" of a globalized pool of consumers who are constantly bombarded by propaganda and information (and, I might add, war). Unfortunately, the majority of these global consumers are either underfed, uneducated, uninterested, living under totalitarian rule or addicted to mind altering substances (i.e. legal or illegal drugs, television).

The "supply" part does not necessarily follow the "demand" as logically as water does to thirst. Many times, those with a product try to create demand to justify a "supply." This is done through not-so-subtle psychological manipulations otherwise known as advertisement. Other times the demand is created by force (as in Free Trade Agreements between strong subsidized countries and developing countries). A particularly nefarious example of this forced "demand" to justify a supply is the Opium War of the 19th Century where the British hooked the Chinese on opiates and then forced them to buy opium from them in exchange for Chinese goods.

Another irrational influence on "money" are the stock and commodity markets of Wall Street et al. These markets are dependent on the psychology of the "mob" and not just on rational numbers and equations. Fear (9-11), anxiety (11-M), taste, personality (Martha Stewart), hype (Pets.com) all weigh heavily on the value of goods traded on the global markets. And of course then there are the speculative currency markets where value is created out of thin air.

Finally, add to this mix partisan politics, corruption and human weaknesses and you have a volatile global economic situation reflecting the unpredictable nature of our modern world.

From this discussion it follows that the economist's so-called "invisible hand" is at best, in a chaotic world of "free" individuals, an irrational instrument whose direction is unpredictable and as likely to destroy economies as to buffer them. Tellingly, in a totalitarian society, where many of the subjective variables listed above can be controlled, this form of unfettered capitalism works perfectly. At worst, the "invisible hand" is really directional, guided "invisibly" by those with the most capital (i.e. corporations), with the aim being the centralization of money and power at the expense of the periphery (the developing world, the environment). Governments slowly cede sovereignty to the power of capital and citizens become less "free" as "ruling" corporations cannot be voted out.

Law of the Jungle?

This last point brings us to the question of should governments have influence on the value of money? Governments, in most places, are in charge of regulating trade, quality assurance and controlling the supply-demand equation (i.e. making marijuana illegal, 151 Rum legal). This control is done through laws and trade agreements and are generally made to benefit the citizens of the state.

But how do laws obtain their legitimacy? Broadly speaking, at least as far as Occidental thinking is concerned, there are two separate types of human law: religious and secular. Secular "laws" are social constructs intended to organize the relationship between individuals and society. Religious law takes into consideration the relationship of society and the individual to a higher being in direct response to human's inescapable existential angst (fear of the void). As recently as the monarchs of the 17 and 18th Century, secular law obtained it's legitimacy from religion--monarchs as ordained by God.

(Of note, Native American societies are organized under "traditional" law which does not differentiate the secular from the religious. Similarly, there is a trend amongst Muslim nations to institute Islamic teachings based on the Koran as the law of the land.)

Human secular laws are products of the evolving human mind. We create these laws based on current "environmental" conditions (including technological advancement, prevalent philosophy and ecological conditions) and past learning (for no truly original idea--or gene for that matter--catches on). In other words, laws have a natural history. For example, the US Constitution was influenced by great thinkers such as Plato, Locke and Machiavelli. Still, at the time it was written, the US Constitution did not count blacks and women among those "created equal." These discriminatory laws were abolished as more "evolved thinking" took place.

Ultimately, the evolution of laws depend on advantageous mutations (new ideas, though, as qualified above) for its "progress" with "advantageous" meaning favoring a momentum within an infinitely complex power dynamic (Quantum uncertainty) and "progress" meaning no more than what can be observed.