Free Trade Isn't Fair

Name: Mike Dolan
Occupation: Deputy director, Public Citizens' Global Trade Watch
Aspiration: "We want trade agreements that make human rights and labor rights as important as copyrights. We want environmental and consumer standards to be enforceable by trade sanctions."

It doesn't look like a war room. In fact, it looks a lot more like a chaotic storage closet -- a tiny attic space with lousy ventilation in a building near Capitol Hill. Tucked away at the top of a long staircase, the room is crammed with so many files and is overflowing with so much paper that it's nearly impossible for a person to find a place to sit -- let alone think of this as a work space that is conducive to strategizing a massive campaign against the perils of global corporate expansion.

But this is just such a place. It is where Mike Dolan has spent the past five years waging an intellectual and political battle against an idea that, perhaps more than any other, defines the intellectual underpinnings of the new economy and unites this country's economic and political elite. It is the idea that global economic integration -- of countries, companies, currencies, and markets -- is both virtuous and inevitable. The consensus around this idea is genuinely remarkable: What other economic principle rallies old-line Republicans and new-style Democrats, Business Roundtable conservatives and dotcom upstarts, Ivy League professors and midwestern farmers?

Don't count Mike Dolan in that consensus. The 44-year-old Dolan is by temperament -- and by job description -- an old-fashioned organizer, a man who thrives on creating the kind of grassroots movement that exploded into public view last December, when some 50,000 protesters shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. The ferocity of those protests took pundits and politicians by surprise: The anti-globalization movement looked like an overnight sensation. Dolan knows better. He'd spent several months in Seattle, working seven days a week, to get ready for the WTO meeting. "People talk about Seattle as though it just suddenly happened," Dolan says. "But we'd been building toward a moment like this for years. Seattle brought together many different constituencies in a historic confrontation between corporate rule and civil society. And now we have the attention of the international media as well as the corporate and political elites."

If the diversity of new-economy believers has been a revelation, it is a mantra of the anti-globalization movement that there is not just one voice -- not just one spokesperson -- for its multifaceted coalition, which includes environmentalists and human-rights activists, college students and factory workers. And while it's true that this is an unruly, hydra-headed phenomenon, it's safe to say that Mike Dolan is the coalition's closest thing to a mastermind.

After all, he's been working in this field since 1995, when he entered the battle over the South American expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Dolan wears two hats in his battle against the forces of corporate trade. He is deputy director of Public Citizens' Global Trade Watch, founded by Ralph Nader, which tracks institutions like the WTO and the impact of international trade agreements, educates citizens, and tries to help shape public-policy debates to effect change. He is also the national field director of the Citizens' Trade Campaign, a coalition of groups fighting for fairer trade policies.

Raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he lived with his mother and his grandfather, a former admiral in the U.S. Navy (his father died when he was 5 years old), Dolan has always been a nonconformist. As a teenager, he was kicked out of some of the best private schools in the country. It took him years of dropping in and out of college before he finally graduated from the University of Maryland and then George Washington University's law school, going on to work in the Midwest as a labor lawyer. But it wasn't until he moved to California in the mid-1980s and was trained in grassroots organizing by the United Farm Workers that Dolan found his calling. "I loved it," he says. "I found that my particular talents were better-suited to organizing and empowering and movement building than to litigating."