Raj Patel 2014-12-27T22:22:39-05:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=raj-patel Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Raj Patel Good old fashioned elbow grease. Recognize, Reward and Reduce McJobs This Thanksgiving tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.4347463 2013-11-27T10:17:36-05:00 2014-01-27T05:59:02-05:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/ "Name two national U.S. holidays." But I never managed to shake the feeling that I was doing it wrong. This year, though, I'll be getting the hang of it thanks to a lot of people who won't be at my table.

It's an almost universal experience that the best Thanksgivings are about a larger meal, sharing food with new and old friends, immigrants, those passing through, wastrels, wanderers, in short, the cast list of Howl. We grow, shop, cook, eat and drink. The cooking is always fun, even if someone loses a fingertip. The food's always all good, even when it not all of it is good. Then -- usually while intoxicated -- we do the washing up.

Thanksgiving is a rare moment in U.S. gastronomic life. It's a chance for everyone to connect with the work of preparing and serving food, and to recognize the labor that makes eating possible on every other day of the year. We are grateful to one another, to the planet, and to those whose work made our food possible, even if they are not at our table. But although recognizing this work is a start, it can't be the end. Otherwise, Thanksgiving isn't really giving much gratitude -- it's just a circle of hands held around a karmic tip-jar.

In no small part because of its history, Thanksgiving doesn't come with much of a call to action. My friend, and British feminist economist Diane Elson can help. She shared with me a maxim that helps think about what comes after saying 'thank you': recognize, reward, reduce.

These three words were first developed as a shorthand for thinking about women's unpaid labor: you know, the cooking, cleaning, housekeeping, caring that disproportionately is women's work. Here's how to use the slogan. Elson suggests we first remove all work from the cognitive shadows. We need to 'de-invisibilize' it. We need to recognize that this labor is actually work, and hard work at that. Then we need think about how to compensate workers for it. It needs to be rewarded, because in a capitalist society, that's how we value work. Then we think about reducing the drudgery involved in it.

Recognize, Reward, Reduce is a slogan that moves us to more substantial thanks at Thanksgiving. First, we need to recognize something that's often hidden: the fastest growing sector of the economy, with over 20 million low wage workers, is the food system. Eight out of ten of the lowest paid jobs in the country are in the food industry, as Saru Jayaraman has shown, and seventy percent of tipped restaurant workers are women. They've been stuck on the bottom wage rung for over two decades. The Food Chain Workers Alliance points out that the minimum wage for tipped workers was $2.13 when Kristen Stewart was born. It still is.



Few businesses that depend on poor workers will actually raise wages unless they're forced to. Luckily, the Fair Minimum Wage Act is currently being brought before Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour over the next three years, and increase the minimum wage for tipped workers to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage. It'll double food service workers wages, the vast majority of whom currently work under the poverty line. And the cost to consumers is trivial: just 10 cents a day.

This Thanksgiving, there's no good reason not to lend your thanks to this struggle. It's an easy click to recognize low-waged workers in the food industry, and support their efforts to be rewarded for their hard work. But let's be honest. Although the legislation that might emerge from supporting this campaign will matter a great deal to many people, $10.10 an hour isn't going to keep anyone in Bentleys.

Luckily the dinner table can be, even in the U.S., a place to talk about politics. This Thanksgiving, after recognizing the work, and acting to reward it, it'll be time to start talking about what 'reducing' McJobs might look like. A living wage? The end of Big Food? How about unalienated labor, now that socialism's making a comeback? Who knows? With the right conversation followed by the right kinds of action, we may have even more to be thankful for next year. And that, surely, is how to do Thanksgiving right.]]>
On Human Rights, Wendy's Isn't Old Fashioned -- Just Outdated tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3368380 2013-06-02T17:02:41-04:00 2013-08-02T05:12:01-04:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/
Above all, like every corporation, Wendy's exists for the sole purpose of bringing value to its shareholders. This is why shareholders at Wendy's Annual Meeting in New York last Thursday found themselves in the company of Kerry Kennedy of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, and Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International. Kennedy, Cox, and an interfaith group of clergy, joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to demand that the company join a program to eliminate the exploitation farmworkers in its supply chain.

One might imagine that Wendy's cares little about conditions in its supply chain because it is, after all, a burger company. But, visit Wendy's investor relations online and you'll see that they care enough about their suppliers to ensure that their packaging is somewhat compostable, and that their animals aren't treated too badly, before they're turned into square burgers. The farmworkers who supply Wendy's with the fresh tomato slices on those burgers appear, however, to be less important than the company's ground beef.

Wendy's might want to point to the other fast food companies, the number one and number two companies, for instance, and insist that it'll cost Wendy's too much to comply with decent treatment of farmworkers in their supply chain. Thing is, as Kerry Kennedy told the shareholders "The CIW has signed agreements with four of the five largest [fast] food corporations in America. All... except for Wendy's."

Wendy's might want to claim that this whole thing is overblown. But,
I'll say it again, things had been so extremely bad that multiple instances of modern-day slavery have been prosecuted in Florida's tomato fields in recent years.

Finally, Wendy's might sniff that there's nothing it can do, since it can't police hundreds of suppliers directly. But in the words of a major Presidential Advisory Report released last month concerning human trafficking, the CIW's Fair Food Program is "one of the most successful and innovative programs" in the country today for preventing forced labor.

Rather than join their competitors in respecting farmworkers rights, the company ended up doing something different. They chose to mislead their stockholders and customers. When human rights activists asked Wendy's CEO Emil Brolick why his company had refused to join the CIW's Fair Food program, he said that Wendy's was already purchasing its tomatoes from growers in the Fair Food Program. He also said that they were paying a premium for their tomatoes.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the CIW had this to say:

Wendy's is not participating in the Fair Food Program .... Wendy's has not signed a fair food agreement with the CIW. Wendy's is not paying a penny premium to increase workers' pay. And Wendy's has not committed to using its purchasing power to eradicate abuses in the fields together with growers and farmworkers. Wendy's refuses to commit to joining the Fair Food Program, undermining the concrete commitment and contributions of the eleven corporations that actually are participating and creates a misleading picture for its shareholders and customers.

So here's where the new Wendy's looks very much like the old-fashioned Wendy's. The company is ignoring a program that has demonstrably helped workers, which has been joined by the likes of McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King and Subway, and which has been embraced by people of all faiths, and recognized from the White House to the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights as the way of the future.

It can have all the make-overs it wants, but without joining the Food Program, its claims are as empty as a fast food calorie, and its old-fashioned approach looks increasingly outdated.]]>
I Say Tomahto, You Say Exploitation tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2918014 2013-03-20T17:00:49-04:00 2013-05-20T05:12:02-04:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/ What's the quickest way to get thrown out of a Publix supermarket? Is
it a) to run naked through the aisles, b) to point and yell
'horsemeat!' at the deli counter or c) to query the manager about
whether workers picking tomatoes are treated as well as she'd like. In
my case, it was option c). As soon as I broached the question, I was
told to leave immediately or security would be called. I was swiftly
ushered out.

I wondered whether, perhaps, I'd committed a faux-pas. I speak English
with a British accent, and feared that 'tom-ah-to' might mean
something horrible and offensive in Florida. Further investigation
suggests that I'd have been kicked to the curb whether I'd said
tomahto or tomayto. There are some things one just isn't allowed to do
in a Publix supermarket. Asking politely about tomato farmworker
justice is one of them.

Yet there's good reason to wonder. Farmworkers have long faced brutal
working conditions. Rampant violations of minimum wage laws,
below-poverty annual incomes, pesticide exposure, sexual harassment,
long days without overtime pay, and retaliation for reporting abuses
aren't just plot points from a Steinbeck novel. They're a common part
of agricultural labor today.

Agricultural and food corporations have successfully lobbied for
farmworkers to be stripped of the workplace laws that protect most
other Americans, and there's little enforcement of the few legal
protections that farmworkers are meant to enjoy. The result has led
to actual cases of 'modern-day slavery' in which farmworkers have been
threatened, chained, beaten, and held against their will in debt

There is, however, change in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee
Workers (CIW) is an internationally renowned farmworker organization
based in SW Florida -- where most of the winter U.S. tomato crop is
harvested. They've worked with some of Florida's growers to develop a
'Fair Food Program.' Workers and growers collaborate, under the eyes
of third-party monitors, to make sure that rights for everything from
overtime to bathroom breaks are respected. Buyers reward those growers
who uphold the rights with business and withhold business from the
growers who fail to.

Sound like some hippie plot? Hardly. Currently, 90 percent of the Florida
tomato industry and 11 major food corporations, including McDonald's,
Subway, and Whole Foods, are currently part of the Fair Food Program.
Few would consider McDonald's a refuge for the great unwashed.

Publix's polished advertisements laud their deep concern for their
community. But if you're a Floridian who picks tomatoes for a living,
you're clearly not part of that community. And if you're a customer
wanting to ask about this, it seems Publix don't want you around

Yet here's the irony. The Fair Food Program is all about building
community. It enshrines the rights of farmworkers never before seen in
the agricultural industry in partnership with buyers and grower.

Publix refuses to join the program, claiming that the Fair Food Program
is a "labor dispute" and that the company will not get involved. Yet
the Fair Food Program is a growing partnership that brings together
various levels of the supply chain to overturn decades of sub-poverty
wages and abuses that were, until recently, the norm. In fact, the
Washington Post recently dubbed the Fair Food Program, "one of the
great human rights success stories of our day."

Why then does Publix still refuse to join some of the leading food
retailers in making life better for the worst paid people in America?
Publix spokesperson Dwaine Stevens provided a surprisingly frank
after a protest at a Publix in Alabama saying, "If there
are some atrocities going on, it's not our business"

In other words, Publix maintains the ability to buy from farms even if
human rights abuses are rampant, no questions asked. It appears, the Publix
solution to human rights abuses is to plug their fingers firmly in
their ears. Workers rights will come second to a cheaper tomato, or
more accurately, are not part of the equation at all.

Since they couldn't ask for justice inside a Publix, 1,500 people
arrived in Lakeland, home of Publix corporate headquarters, after a
200 mile march through Florida this weekend. Farmworkers like the
CIW's Gerardo Reyes will be there to insist that "though we are indeed
poor, we too are human beings and we deserve respect and dignity."

They weren't asking for special treatment. They're only asking to be
treated like human beings. And surely that deserves our support. So,
please, voice out your support when you next visit a Publix. And, take
it from me, you can say tomahtoes or tomaytoes. Either way.

Polite Laughter on the Mall tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.776679 2010-10-31T17:26:04-04:00 2011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/
As rallies go, it was a little unrepresentative. It began, for instance, exactly on time, and just before the cameras went live, a little overture played over the sound system: Robbie Williams' Let Me Entertain You. Philadelphia funk ensemble The Roots kicked off for half an hour, followed by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, TV's Mythbusters, who performed a series of experiments on the crowd.

People were encouraged to stomp together to create a miniature earthquake (it worked, a little), or to propagate a crowd wave to the back of the assembled masses which took 54 seconds to travel the length of the Mall outside Congress. One of the oddest experiments, and I fear we'll have to watch the Discovery channel to find out the myth they were busting, involved getting everyone to make a range of sounds simultaneously, with noises ranging from 'laughing like a mad scientist' to cheek-popping, to polite laughter.

And then Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert took to the stage for a two hour show with a list of guests escalating from Ozzie Osbourne to R2D2. The proceedings ended with a serious bit, though, when Jon Stewart took a couple of swipes at the media. "We live in hard times, not end times. We can have animus and not be enemies. But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country's 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder."

There was a 'yes we can' moment too. Americans, Stewart pointed out to one of the loudest cheers of the afternoon, "work together to get things done every damn day". He used an unusual metaphor to explain what that cooperation looked like. The view on the jumbotron screens switched from the Mall to an overhead view of cars funneling from eight lanes to two. Although the people in their cars might be of different religions, political orientations, and intensities with which they love Oprah, Americans can somehow get along, letting each other in, and narrowing down in a civil, moderate and reasonable way. Yes, We Can.

Trouble is, as any game theorist will tell you, there's not much about road-traffic cooperation that rises to the level of reasonableness. Once folk have agreed on some foundational things like where they're going and what side of the road to drive on, the rest is just basic courtesy. It's a stretch to call it 'reasonable'.

Reasonableness is, however, genuinely under threat. The Tea Party understands the US Constitution as a divine document. In so doing, they pine for a pre-Enlightenment politics where God -- not reason -- is the ultimate arbiter of political life. To put it in Stewart's terms, they're arguing about which direction to drive and whether it's bad to run over pedestrians. That's a threat to the possibility of cooperation.

It took a lot of political work to make a world that could cradle the moderation everyone came to Washington to celebrate yesterday, yet there was palpable distaste for taking a political stand. In fact, the undercurrent wasn't one of defending the politics of reasonableness so much as of mourning its impotence. For instance: Jon Stewart invited Kid Rock to sing "an amazing" song that was "so apropos to this situation". The song was 'Care' and the lyrics went: "'Cause I can't stop the war/ Shed the homeless/ Feed the poor... /the least I can do/ Is care." So although Americans get things done every damn day, it's the small stuff. The bigger problems are just too, well, big.

But perhaps I'm asking too much. Perhaps the politics can and should come some other time, and not from Comedy Central. Two people who thought so were friends from Washington DC who held signs saying "Down with this sort of thing!" and "Careful now!", a reference from a British TV comedy called Father Ted that confused a few rally-goers. They didn't want their employers knowing they were at the rally, so let's call them Bill and Kylie.

"Some people were disappointed that Stewart didn't ask people to vote or that there wasn't more politics. But Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert recognize that they're entertainers," said Bill. "And that's pretty cool." This wasn't Bill and Kylie's first rally -- they've been to several this year, most recently the One Nation Working Together rally organized by the Democrats and large unions at the beginning of the month. And neither Bill nor Kylie are shy of politics. "I'm a socialist", said Bill. "I'm getting there," said Kylie.

I suspect that it's through Bill and Kylie's brand of political understanding, rather than Kid Rock's, that change will happen. Yes, the punditocracy is bad, but pointing out its failure is hardly going to change it. Yes, civility is important, but that's not the same as political engagement. Pining for 'sanity' during the rise of the Tea Party is like talking about who leaves the seat up when the house is on fire. What Comedy Central offered on the mall was laughter in the dark, but it was impotently polite laughter. Perhaps that's what the Mythbusters wanted to understand.
Off-Side at the World Cup tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.607951 2010-06-10T15:09:04-04:00 2011-05-25T16:45:26-04:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/
The complexities of the off-side rule are almost indescribable on paper -- it's best explained with pepper-pots or, these days, YouTube. But the regulation is essentially this: It's okay to loiter wherever you want on the football field, but if you find yourself behind your opponent's lines in the wrong place when a ball is kicked your way, you can watch it fall, but cannot play it. Behind the lines of rivals, seeing events unfold, but unable to join in the game: That happens all the time in South Africa.

In particular, such is the plight of more than ten million South Africans without proper housing, many living in legal limbo throughout South Africa's cities, under bridges, near trash dumps, on slopes and beyond the brows of hills. They'll be enjoying the World Cup, welcoming their foreign visitors, and the glare of the international media might provide some cover for them to tell their story of 20 years off-side in South Africa.

Under apartheid, blacks were often violently removed from city centers, expelled to rural areas or forcibly relocated to the townships. When apartheid crumbled, so did the restrictions on movement that had hemmed in a large rural population. On taking power in 1994, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) government demobilized the popular movements that brought them to power and swapped apartheid economic dogma for neoliberal doctrine.

The government deregulated the economy, shrank the state, and opened local markets to the winds of international competition. The result: Jobs left the cities at precisely the time that new people arrived to take them, and social safety nets were cut to tatters. South Africa's human development ranking fell from 95th in 1995 to 129th out of 158 countries in 2009

Through the 1990s and 2000s, temporary shacks became permanent homes for 1.8 million households. In cities, settlements blossomed in and around the middle class communities where a few residents found work as security guards, domestic workers, and day laborers. Work remains scarce, and formal unemployment rates in settlements routinely top 70%. When elections loom, shack communities are generally tolerated by local government officials because they offer a way to tuck wads of poor black ANC voters into wealthier and more conservative neighborhoods. Patronage pulses through the shacks during South Africa's electoral seasons, but dries up during incumbent years.

The ANC insists that the worst of apartheid is over, that the ruling party has led a massive construction program to house the homeless, and that development is coming. Under apartheid, though, township houses stretched over approximately 580 square feet. Today's shack dwellers are lucky to be relocated to homes with an interior space of 390 square feet, many miles from their work, schools and communities. Even then, tenure is insecure. As the World Cup opens, several Cape Town families face eviction because developers increased rents from $38 to $193 per month. Those who haven't been given housing yet are encouraged to be patient.

Rather than wait another decade, shack dwellers have organized, protested and petitioned. The Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, a group of over 30,000 shack dwellers from across the country (and whose website I manage), recently took the government to South Africa's highest court, and won. The Constitutional Court struck down a 'Slums Act' that would have effectively criminalized being so poor as to need a shack.

As Amnesty International has noted, though, the weight of these legal victories have been undercut by local violence against Abahlali's leaders. Over the past year, shack settlement leaders in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town have been chased from their homes by gangs, arrested, detained without hearing and assaulted. The police have done little to help, and much to hinder, investigations into these human rights abuses.

As the World Cup begins, Abahlali are mounting an 'Upside Down World Cup' campaign to draw attention to apartheid's unfinished business. In Cape Town, they will set up tin shacks outside the Green Point Stadium, positioning themselves off-side, to show how they live. Their greatest threat to the South African government is their visibility, and the activists fear violent arrest.

Yet their only demand is the chance to make the rules on the same terms as everyone else. In setting up their shacks in full view, shack dweller activists hope to turn the streams of passing fans not into spectators, but into team players who might, from their home countries, be able to hold the South African government to their rhetoric long after the Cup's final whistle blows.

Raj Patel is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, and administers the website of the Abahlali baseMjondolo shackdwellers organization at www.abahlali.org. He is also the author of the international bestseller, The Value of Nothing: How To Reshape Market Society and Reclaim Democracy (Picador). ]]>
Down on the Clown tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.532172 2010-04-09T14:32:44-04:00 2011-05-25T16:05:22-04:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/ presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in 1979 with "Are you better off than you were four years ago?", his media savvy changed mass politics forever.

But long before that, another Ronald messed with mass communications no less indelibly, paving the way for today's politicians and pundits. Appropriately, the first Ronald was a clown. In 1963, sixteen years before Reagan's fateful piece to camera, Ronald McDonald broke every rule in advertising when he turned to the lens and stunned children by speaking to them directly, saying:



Today, the McDonald's corporation boasts that their frontman is more recognizable than Santa Claus. He's the champion of a $32 billion brand. With a wink and a smile, Ronald has charged into neighbourhoods around and inside schools, targeting children with a range of unhealthy food, plumbing every depth to keep his parent company's arches golden and bright in the minds of impressionable young eaters.






Ultimately, McDonald's cheap food is cheat food. Ronald is more of a Hamburgler, dipping into our pockets with our children's fingers, and leaving us with bills for long afterward. We pay for it all in the end. The cost of diabetes in the US alone is $700 for every man, woman and child. For people of colour, diet related disease is incredibly important - one in two children of colour born in 2000 will develop diabetes.


Times are changing, though. Despite the millions that McDonald's spends in advertising, and despite most people having a favourable impression of Ronald as a consequence, a new survey shows that most parents who have kids under 18 want Ronald to go. The Corporate Accountability International, an organisation which I advise, has released a terrific report entitled Clowning with Kid's Health: The Case for Ronald McDonald's Retirement (PDF), in which the survey data on Ronald is presented, and some tight legal and epidemiological arguments against him are made.



There is a precedent: Joe Camel, once more widely recognized than Mickey Mouse, is now a symbol of shame for the cigarette industry. Sure, cigarettes are themselves bad, but worse was the conscious attempt by the industry behind them to hook kids on a lifetime of ill health. We're at a similar moment in the transformation of our food system. There's lots to do to transform how we eat, but along the way we all need to recognize that parents need the space to be able to feed their kids well, to give the next generation the freedom to choose to eat healthily, and to build a more sustainable food system. As part of that, and I'm talking to you here, it's time to retire Ronald.]]>
Cheaponomics tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.454057 2010-02-08T16:05:14-05:00 2011-05-25T15:25:21-04:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/

#10 Bottled Water - Bottled water sounds like it should be cheaper - it's 200 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. But in the US, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn&#8217;t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage for something that everyone needs to survive. Make a start: stop your local government from wasting your money on bottled water, as we did in San Francisco.

#9 Cellphones - We've all got them. The trouble is that one of the minerals inside our high tech toys - coltan - is bought very dear indeed. With around three quarters of the world's reserves of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo, our demand for gadgets fuels bloody conflict and vast human suffering. The No Blood on My Cellphone campaign shows how we can stop it.

#8 Double cheeseburger &#8211; A value meal is a great way to eat if you've neither time nor money but this cheap food turns out to be 'cheat food'. What if we had to pay the full environmental, labour and health costs of a burger? Some researchers think we'd end up paying over $200, and that doesn't include the modern day slavery in our North American sandwiches.

#7 Fish fingers - The world's oceans are being emptied. When I was a kid, our fish fingers were made of cod. Now the species is commercially extinct, and we're within a generation of killing everything in the seas. Yet the price of fish is still just a few dollars a kilo.

#6 A Free Lunch - Rudyard Kipling came across the free lunch in the nineteenth century in San Francisco, where he "paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt." But the freebie ends up being a way to reel you in to consume more. And, yes, my own book is being sold this way too, with a free chapter and video . There&#8217;s no moral high-ground for me &#8211; I&#8217;m a moral low-ground sort of person. But that doesn&#8217;t stop me from encouraging folk to get the book from a library.

#5 Googling - Would it shock you to know that two Google searches produces the equivalent greenhouse gases of making a cup of tea. The London Telegraph reported this last year , and while Google denies it, it's certainly true that global information technology is responsible for 2% of all greenhouse gases.

#4 Toxic waste - Larry Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, was once a senior economist at the World Bank. When he was there, he wrote in a confidential but since widely cited memo that "Just between you and me, shouldn&#8217;t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?" He argued that poor people valued a clean environment less than the rich, and so pollution should flow to them. And it has, with rich countries dumping their pollution on poor ones, undervaluing their lives and the damage it causes.

#3 Low income jobs. Part of the reason that food and energy are cheap is so that working peoples' wage demands are kept in check. In Canada, average real wages have increased by just 1% in two decades - and in the US similar long term trends for working class people (and severe declines in the value of minimum wages.)


#2 Gas - The way we live to day depends on our not paying the full costs of fossil fuel - with thousands already dying and many billions being lost right now. While figures of $65 trillion a year for the real cost of fossil fuel are almost certainly wrong, with 300 million people affected, it's already a disaster. We need to bring our governments to heel if we&#8217;re to leave a world worth living in to our children.

#1 Women's work - The world wouldn't turn without the work of raising children, and caring for family and community. But it's the work that is most often and quite literally taken for granted. If the work that women did were to be paid, how much would it cost? Researchers put it at $11 trillion in 1995, or half the world's total output. Movements demanding a basic income grant are laying the foundations for this new way of working and living. Valuing women's work would, more than any other single thing, transform the way we think about our economy and society.



This post originally appeared on Raj Patel's website.
Proud to Be An American tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.417009 2010-01-08T19:05:55-05:00 2011-05-25T15:10:21-04:00 Raj Patel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/ "I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak."

"Let America Be America Again" -- Langston Hughes

I've never actually attended a Moonie mass wedding, but I imagine it's much like the ritual of becoming a US citizen. In the Masonic Hall in San Francisco yesterday, I was one of 1,245 people from 103 countries who faced a stage, put our hands on our hearts, and with one voice betrothed ourselves not one another or the Reverend Moon, but to a flag. There was something faintly cultish about it all.

To become a US citizen is to be invited into a very exclusive cult, of course, one whose armed forces can now call on me to bear arms. And there was no shortage of military themes in the proceedings. In general, when people sign hymns to bombs bursting in air, I tend to run the other way. Don't get me wrong - it's still a step up from the rituals of my previous national anthem. In Britain we sing God Save the Queen, a song so interminable and with lyrics so ponderous and toe-curling - "Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us ... Thy choicest gifts in store, On her be pleased to pour" - that in the time it takes to go through it once, you can not only have memorized the Sex Pistols version, "God Save the Queen, The fascist regime, ... No future, No future for you, No future for me," but begin fervently to wish it to come true.

No Sex Pistols for us new US citizens, though. The ceremony closed with a video of Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to Be An American," which was accompanied by lots of breathtaking images of American pastoral beauty, intercut with images of armed men and women. It seems it's impossible to be a proud American without expensive military hardware. Like other nations, this one doesn't have an entirely glorious history, founded as it is on that hardware pointed at Native Americans, then slaves, then striking workers, civil rights activists, immigrants and global justice protesters.

Our Master of Citizenship ceremonies, a nice man from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services, put all that behind us. He reassured us that the US was better today for our membership in it. "But," he said, "we've got a lot of problems in this country. Now that you can vote, we're going to need your help to vote to help to make them better."

He's right: there are problems. More than one in six Americans are going hungry, there's record inequality, stagnant wages for middle and working class Americans, incarceration rates are high, health care levels low. If African American women's health care levels were counted as a country, they'd be doing worse than Uzbekistan.

The uncomfortable wobble in the middle of our official's sentence betrays a deeper truth, though. Voting isn't going to solve problems this big. It rarely has. But what he neglected to mention is that this is a country forged from struggle. The catalyst for the Boston Tea Party, at least as Pulitzer prize-winning historian Arthur Scheslinger tells it, came not because of 'taxation without representation' but, rather, a widespread opposition to the increasing monopoly of the East India Company. In other words, US history began with a people's fight against a corporation so powerful, it was the Wal-Mart of its day. Likewise, emancipation, universal suffrage and civil rights weren't won through voting, but through direct action for social change, involving protests for equality, democracy, and justice.

It's this America, where democracy isn't something you let other people take care of on your behalf but something that you're empowered to do yourself, which I joined yesterday. I didn't need a certificate from the government to do it, just as I didn't need a marriage certificate to love my wife. The citizenship certificate is a sign of commitment - and I want that commitment to be public. Not least because if in being democratic I am arrested, I won't get deported back to Britain.

In civic groups, churches, schools, unions and cooperatives, it's this democracy that's alive and thriving. It's invariably pitted against the power of large corporations and the state, against the most public embodiments of America.

There's a painful ambiguity here - I loathe the militarism, corruption and injustice that America represents, but I celebrate the genuine democracy, equality and freedom that can already be found growing in every corner of the country. It's this tension that Langston Hughes caught exactly in his beautiful poem, "Let America Be America Again." As the rock guitars blared over the hall of newly minted citizens and the video screens showed images of aircraft carriers and star-spangled banners, I kept this fragment of Hughes' poem in my heart.

O, yes,

I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Raj Patel is the author of "The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy" (Picador).]]>