Raj Patel

I Say Tomahto, You Say Exploitation

2013-03-20T17:00:49-04:00

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
bondage.

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
either.

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
answer 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

2010-10-31T17:26:04-04:00

Hundreds of thousands came. Theresa Floyd, a 19 year old student and poet, flew from California to try to make the world "marginally better". Wassim Shazad, a 36 year old brick shithouse of a former-Marine drove four hours from North Carolina, to take aim at racial stereotypes of Muslims in America. For nearly everyone I spoke to, this was their first rally.

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

2010-06-10T15:09:04-04:00

When the World Cup begins in South Africa on Friday, anyone who has ever kicked a ball will be able to follow along -- soccer is elegant, straightforward and simple to understand. The Beautiful Game does, however, have a regulation that stops play, reverses the game and routinely baffles neophytes: the off-side rule. To understand it, spectators need only look outside the billion dollar stadiums to the streets of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, for they are filled with off-side people, those whom the Rainbow Nation has yet to embrace.

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

2010-04-09T14:32:44-04:00

It was a seminal moment. For the first time, breaking all convention, Ronald turned to the TV cameras and addressed himself to his viewers directly. It had never been done before, and it set off a revolution the consequences of which we still struggle to fight. When Ronald Reagan ended his 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:

"Here I am kids. Hey, isn't watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald's hamburgers. I know we're going to be friends too cause I like to do everything boys and girls like to do. Especially when it comes to eating those delicious McDonald's hamburgers."

It's easy both to wince at how crass this sounds, and to overlook its audacity. With entire TV channels premised on direct marketing to children, it seems impossible that there might have been a time where kids were considered anything other than shorter, louder, more pestering versions of adult consumers. But it wasn't always thus. It took a canny cabal of admen to tap the pockets of a newly affluent generation of youngsters. They wanted to redefine the frontiers of what advertising in television age could be. And they succeeded.

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.

McDonald's and other fast food corporations shelter behind the fact that their advertising is 'free speech,' as protected by the First Amendment and that, in any case, the corporations clearly declare their commercial intentions. So, for instance, when children go to Ronald.com to play McD-themed games they'll see in small white letters on a pale background at the top right the words "Hey kids.This is advertising!" This isn't terribly helpful. Although children may know that something is advertising, they are unlikely to understand what, exactly that means.

Michele Simon, a lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit, tells it straight: "McDonald's knows that vulnerable children are the perfect advertising audience, since they don't even know they're being marketed to." She suspects that for the group brave enough, and with deep enough pockets, there's a huge and successful lawsuit to be brought against McDonald's (and against all advertising against children) for deceptive practices. She's backed up by the medical profession: the American Academy of Pediatrics says that "advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age." In other words, the very idea of advertising to children is a fraud. Children are simply unable to generate and entertain rational opinions about goods and services, which cuts away the argument that advertising is just a more entertaining version of truth-telling. When it comes to children, advertising is far closer to brainwashing.

Parents are being hoodwinked too. One of the reasons that kids are permitted by pestered parents to enter a McDonald's is the possibility that they might choose a healthy meal when they're there. As Wendi Gosliner, a Researcher at the Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley observes, "not one of the 24 Happy Meal combinations offered contains the foods and nutrients children need to meet the Dietary Guidelines. Now, they're promoting processed fresh apples dipped in caramel sauce and sweetened milk as 'healthy' choices. Well, these meals and these choices are hurting our children's health."

There's a bigger picture story here too. Ronald isn't just a clown. He's not just a pioneer in the marketing of food to children: he's also an architect. Without him, the food system we have today would look very different. Here and around the world, the way food is grown, subsidized, processed and eaten has been fashioned by the needs of the McDonald's corporation.

More sales for the clown mean bigger returns for Cargill and Tyson's factory farms, Archer Daniels Midland's high fructose corn syrup processing plants, and Monsanto's pesticide production facilities. And it's our tax dollars that go into everything from the cheap commodities that they depend on, to the small business loans and tax credits that allow fast food franchises to breed in and around our schools. For these subsidies, and for the lax regulations around health and advertising to children, the fast food industry has spent millions in lobbying fees, and aggressively courted political favour. Ronald McDonald may have a big smile, but his shoes are steel-tipped.

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.

There are alternatives, of course. The sustainable agriculture that thrives in farmers markets and cooperatives don't get the billions in subsidies that industrial agriculture does. Yet from the moment they are exposed to TV, our children are subject to the manipulations of Ronald and his friends. Corporations spend $17 billion a year turning children into consumers. Globally, for every dollar spent promoting food that's good for you, $500 is spent promoting junk. For a parent wanting their kids to eat well, those are tough odds. Especially for those parents on restricted income.

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.

This isn't some curmudgeonly attack on fun. For those who want to watch clowns, there'll always be circuses and cable news. And it's certainly the case that there are bigger questions here. Why is it that junk food is cheaper than healthy food? Why is there persistent poverty driving people into the arms of the junk food industry. Why isn't there real choice in the US diet?

But as a matter of public health, as a way to give parents the chance to get their children eating well, as a way of making it possible to have fun with food without spending scarce cash on unhealthy food, the clown's gotta go.

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

2010-02-08T16:05:14-05:00

Here's a top ten list of things that aren't as cheap as you think.

#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’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 – 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’s no moral high-ground for me – I’m a moral low-ground sort of person. But that doesn’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’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.)

But around the world, minimum wages fall far below what families need to survive.

#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’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.

Update

Here are some other links from groups involved in coltan, toxic waste, and food. Feel free to suggest others in comments.

This post originally appeared on Raj Patel's website.

Proud to Be An American

2010-01-08T19:05:55-05:00

"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,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
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).