Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here's How to Fix It

By Noam Chomsky, The Noam Chomsky Website

29 May 15

n a few months, we will be commemorating the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta—commemorating, but not celebrating; rather, mourning the blows it has suffered.

The first authoritative scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone in 1759. It was no easy task. As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats”—a comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished.

Blackstone’s edition actually includes two charters: the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest. The former is generally regarded as the foundation of Anglo-American law—in Winston Churchill’s words, referring to its reaffirmation by Parliament in 1628, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.” The Great Charter held that “No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned,” or otherwise harmed, “except by the lawful judgment of his equals and according to the law of the land,” the essential sense of the doctrine of “presumption of innocence.”

To be sure, the reach of the charter was limited. Nevertheless, as Eric Kasper observes in a scholarly review, “What began as a relatively small check on the arbitrary power of King John eventually led to succeeding generations finding ever more rights in Magna Carta and Article 39. In this sense, Magna Carta is a key point in a long development of the protection of rights against arbitrary executive power.”

Crossing the Atlantic, the Great Charter was enshrined in the US Constitution as the promise that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.”

The wording seems expansive, but that is misleading. Excluded were “unpeople” (to borrow Orwell’s useful concept), among them Native Americans, slaves and women, who under the British common law adopted by the founders were the property of their fathers, handed over to husbands. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1975 that women gained the right to serve on juries in all fifty states.

The Fourteenth Amendment applied the “due process” provisions to states. The intent was to include freed slaves in the category of persons, but the effect was different. Within a few years, slaves who had technically been freed were delivered to a regime of criminalization of black life that amounted to “slavery by another name,” to quote the title of Douglas Blackmon’s evocative account of this crime, which is being re-enacted today. Instead, almost all of the actual court cases invoking the Fourteenth Amendment had to do with the rights of corporations. Today, these legal fictions—created and sustained by state power—have rights well beyond those of flesh-and-blood persons, not only by virtue of their wealth, immortality and limited liability, but also thanks to the mislabeled “free-trade” agreements, which grant them unprecedented rights unavailable to humans.

The constitutional lawyer in the White House has introduced further modifications. His Justice Department explained that “due process of law”—at least where “terrorism offenses” are concerned—is satisfied by internal deliberations within the executive branch. King John would have nodded in approval. The term “guilty” has also been given a refined interpretation: it now means “targeted for assassination by the White House.” Furthermore, the burden of proof has been shifted to those already assassinated by executive whim. As The New York Times reported, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties [that] in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” The guiding principles are clear: force reigns supreme; “law” and “justice” and other frivolities can be left to sentimentalists.

Problems do arise, however, when a candidate for genuine personhood is targeted. The issue arose after the murder of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was accused of inciting jihad in speech and writing as well as unspecified actions. A New York Times headline captured the general elite reaction when he was assassinated: As the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death, the Mideast Shrugs. Some eyebrows were raised because Awlaki was an American citizen. But even these doubts were quickly stilled.

Let us now put the sad relics of the Great Charter aside and turn to the Magna Carta’s companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was issued in 1217. Its significance is perhaps even more pertinent today. As explained by Peter Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating history of Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest called for protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population: food, fuel, construction materials, a form of welfare, whatever was essential for life.

In thirteenth-century England, the forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully nurtured by its users over generations, its riches available to all. The great British social historian R. H. Tawney wrote that the commons were used by country people who lacked arable land. The maintenance of this “open field system of agriculture…reposed upon a common custom and tradition, not upon documentary records capable of precise construction. Its boundaries were often rather a question of the degree of conviction with which ancient inhabitants could be induced to affirm them, than visible to the mere eye of sense”—features of traditional societies worldwide to the present day.

By the eighteenth century, the charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and moral culture. As Linebaugh puts it, “The Forest Charter was forgotten or consigned to the gothic past.” With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized—a category that continues to shrink, to virtual invisibility.

Capitalist development brought with it a radical revision not only of how the commons are treated, but also of how they are conceived. The prevailing view today is captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential argument that “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” This is the famous “tragedy of the commons”: that what is not owned will be destroyed by individual avarice. A more technical formulation is given in economist Mancur Olson’s conclusion that “unless the number of individuals is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.” Accordingly, unless the commons are handed over to private ownership, brutal state power must be invoked to save them from destruction. This conclusion is plausible—if we understand “rationality” to entail a fanatic dedication to the individual maximization of short-term material gain.

These forecasts have received some challenge. The late Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her work showing the superiority of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins. The historical review in her study, Governing the Commons, ignores the Charter of the Forest and the practice over centuries of nurturing the commons, but Ostrom did conclude that the success stories she’d investigated might at least “shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve [common-pool resource] problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation.”

As we now understand all too well, it is what is privately owned, not what is held in common, that faces destruction by avarice, bringing the rest of us down with it. Hardly a day passes without more confirmation of this fact. As hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets of Manhattan on September 21 to warn of the dire threat of the ongoing ecological destruction of the commons, The New York Times reported that “global emissions of greenhouse gases jumped 2.3 percent in 2013 to record levels,” while in the United States, emissions rose 2.9 percent, reversing a recent decline. August 2014 was reported to be the hottest on record, and JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association predicted that the number of 90-degree-plus days in New York could triple in three decades, with much more severe effects in warmer climates.

It is well understood that most of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves must remain in the ground if an environmental disaster for humankind is to be averted, but under the logic of state-supported capitalist institutions, the private owners of those reserves are racing to exploit them to the fullest. Chevron abandoned a small renewable-energy program because its profits are far greater from fossil fuels. And as Bloomberg Businessweek reports, ExxonMobil announced “that its laserlike focus on fossil fuels is a sound strategy, regardless of climate change.” This is all in accord with the capitalist doctrine of “rationality.”

A small part of the remaining commons is federal land. Despite the complaints of the energy lobbies, the amount of crude oil produced from onshore federal lands in 2013 was the highest in over a decade, according to the Interior Department, and it has expanded steadily under the Obama administration. The business pages of newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post are exultant about “the boom in American energy production,” which shows “no signs of slowing down, keeping the market flush with crude and gasoline prices low.” Predictions are that the United States will “add a million more barrels of oil in daily production over the next year,” while also “expanding its exports of refined products like gasoline and diesel.” One dark cloud is perceived, however: maximizing production “might have a catastrophic effect” in “the creation of a major glut.” And with climate-change denier James Inhofe now chairing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and others like him in positions of power, we can expect even more wonderful news for our grandchildren.

Despite these long odds, the participants in the People’s Climate March are not alone. There is no slight irony in the fact that their major allies throughout the world are the surviving indigenous communities that have upheld their own versions of the Charter of the Forest. In Canada, the Gitxaala First Nation is filing a lawsuit opposing a tar-sands pipeline passing through its territory, relying on recent high-court rulings on indigenous rights. In Ecuador, the large indigenous community played an essential part in the government’s offer to keep some of its oil in the ground, where it should be, if the rich countries would compensate Ecuador for a fraction of the lost profits. (The offer was refused.) The one country governed by an indigenous majority, Bolivia, held a World People’s Conference in 2010, with 35,000 participants from 140 countries. It produced a People’s Agreement calling for sharp reductions in emissions, as well as a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. These are key demands of indigenous communities all over the world.

So, as we commemorate the two charters after 800 years, all of this gives us ample reason for serious reflection—and for determined action.

The Dangerous Militarization of US "Aid"

By Rafia Zakaria, Al Jazeera America

29 May 15

How war makes USAID a dirty word

n April 30, 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Gayle Smith, a senior director of the National Security Council, as the new head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Critics saw her nomination as yet another example of the deepening of links between U.S. military interventions and development aid.

Most of the initial criticism focused on Smith’s close relationships with various African despots and her belief that aid is the vehicle for obtaining foreign policy concessions. If confirmed, Smith will no doubt solidify the idea that development is subservient to American security interests. Over the last decade, USAID has emerged as Washington’s key instrument within which it couches counterterrorism efforts and military interventions. Her national security background ensures that she will continue this legacy.

The American public should be concerned about this mixing of war strategy with development aid, not least because U.S. misadventures are funded by taxpayer dollars. The cover of aid hampers the public from critically evaluating the wars waged in its name. As those on the receiving end, the intertwining of military intervention and development assistance has meant a de-legitimization of the premises of development. Education and healthcare are universal rights that should not depend on U.S. national security interests.

This intermingling of defense and aid dollars also leads to a lot of graft. On Jan. 25, barely a month after the U.S. mission in Afghanistan officially came to an end, USAID suspended International Relief and Development (IRD), one of its biggest non-profit contractors that run projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2007, IRD was granted nearly $2.4 billion in USAID contracts and co-operative agreements. In just over a year, the budget of a mom-and-pop operation run by a minister and his wife ballooned from a paltry $1.2 million to $706 million, according to the Washington Post. IRD’s revenue went up even more as President George W. Bush bolstered the aid budget, and projects as diverse as road building and boosting wheat production fell magically in its lap.

By the time it was suspended, IRD had racked up over $2 billion in government contracts, more than any relief and non-profit organization in the United States and 83 percent of it went to projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. USAID provided little or no oversight. The minister and his wife received $4.4 million in salary and bonuses in 2008 and 2012. They hired an all-star cast of humanitarian workers, all of them making hefty salaries. A sum of $1.1 million was billed to the U.S. government to fund “staff parties and retreats,” including one at a fancy resort in Pennsylvania. Attendees were given gift certificates for clothing, jewelry and massages.

The waste and lack of accountability was not limited to subcontractors. In February, USAID’s Inspector General warned that the agency’s employees in Afghanistan might be taking millions of dollars in unauthorized overtime pay because there was no one to monitor them. The cost of this unauthorized overtime is estimated to be at least $16.3 million, small change compared to the whopping $850.5 million that USAID spent in collusion with the State Department. The funds were supposed to go to 17 projects, but when audited neither the State nor USAID could say whether any of the money had actually reached the Afghan women it was earmarked for.

As it was for the British colonists, women’s education and empowerment are particular USAID favorites, and hundreds of “gender experts” arrived with U.S. troops with the ennobling goal of “liberating” women. The eager USAID administrators and bureaucrats appeared to care little about the consequences of mixing aid with war or whether the goals were achievable or sustainable.

As the U.S. begins its troop drawdown, Afghan women, who may be perceived as collaborators with an occupying force, must bear the burden of suspicion. They have their schools, but such aid came at the cost of innocent lives lost and villages bombed by U.S. forces. The backlash against women is undeniable: while USAID claims to have spent hundreds of millions on improving the welfare of Afghan women, violence against them increased 25 percent from 2012 to 2013.

That is not all. The reconstruction on which $104 billion was spent is hard to see amid the general dilapidation in Afghanistan. The economy is in free fall, with only slightly more than 1 percent GDP growth last year. And as the U.S. war machine and USAID look for new countries to transform, the lack of coordination and monitoring mean that $484 million in projects left behind are unlikely to achieve their goals.

Across the border in Pakistan, where USAID also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on women’s education, the taint of intervention-laced aid remains. In the years since the U.S.-led war on terrorism began, girls schools have become the primary target of terrorist attacks. With hundreds bombed every year, Pakistan ranks first for attacks on schools and last in female literacy. Even more damning, public support for girls’ education has fallen from 71 percent in 2001 to 47 percent in 2014. In effect, the intertwining of development and education with U.S. counterterrorism not only made schools targets for terrorists but it also prevented progress on women’s education.

Meanwhile, the USAID’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq reinforced a perception that U.S. wars are actually benevolent endeavors. Its violence is rendered “good” and “permissible” with the outpouring of aid dollars, which masks the twin realities of U.S. intervention — first that the money rarely reaches or helps the distant others, and that it does not render forgettable the killing of 1.2 million Iraqis and Afghans.

If development is made a handmaiden to war and security interests, it is transnational collaboration for human progress that ultimately suffers. To prevent this, USAID must be separated from Washington’s strategic and security interests. Humanitarian aid must not bear hidden agendas and accepting assistance should not come at the cost of cowing to imperialism. Smith’s ascent to the head of USAID sends the wrong message and raises the concern that the very progress that the agency so often hopes for but rarely achieves will remain elusive.