Free Trade Isn't Fair

"Without its historical underpinning, the raison d'être for this slavish devotion to something called 'free trade' is no longer there," says Dolan. "It's time for us to turn our attention to other historical trends -- like global warming, like sustainable development. In the absence of a Cold War, economic globalization can be described according to a new value set. And that's why I'm out there.

"Who has a stake in the business of transnational corporations?" Dolan asks. "Well, it's clearly more than just the people who hold stock. It's the consumers who buy the product, it's the workers who toil, it's the community in which the corporation has its headquarters as well as its operations. You need to actually look a little wider than the very narrow sort of MBA-driven bottom lines of transnational corporations. We have to define our economic interests bigger. We have to describe interested parties in the success and operations of corporations larger than they are now."

Dolan even goes a step further. Free-trade policies are based on genuinely bad economics, he argues. The unfettered power to move operations around the world allows companies to externalize costs -- through the exploitation of cheap labor or through the exploitation of the environment -- often with devastating results. Social costs are not reflected in the price of goods, he says. "What they're doing is completely aberrant to market economics," he says. "It's wrong. When transnational corporations move a village in order to create a mine, there are all kinds of social costs -- relocating residents, uprooting the community, mercury and mining tailings left in the river -- that they don't have to pay for. You know why? Because the laws in those countries don't require it. Until you itemize, quantify, and pay those social costs, you've got bad economics. That's not a capitalist culture. It's colonialism. But it's colonialism by corporations, not by a country."

Nothing Is Inevitable

Mike Dolan is utterly undaunted by the suggestion that his perspective on global markets is wildly out of step with the march of the new economy. He's far more likely to tell you that he's in step with a growing public sentiment, both in the United States and around the world, that is increasingly skeptical of the globalist agenda. He points to the coalition that converged in a "historic moment" on the streets of Seattle, an unlikely band of protesters that included right-wing isolationists, organic farmers, and faith-based activists -- a group that he says is "greater than the sum of its parts."

"It is broad and wide, but it is also deep," Dolan argues. "All these different constituencies observe the costs [of globalization] in their own terms and among their own constituencies -- in their own communities, even. And we are all joined together in this shared critique of that system."

Dolan is aware that the very diversity of the movement could also tear it apart -- that environmentalists and union activists, for example, have historically found themselves on opposite sides of major issues. But he believes that the intensity of grassroots feelings against corporate-style globalization is so strong, and is building in so many communities, that the movement will not be stopped. The victories of the anti-globalization movement in recent years -- from the defeat of the expansion of NAFTA to the Seattle shutdown -- has bought the movement more "political space," he says.

"With each victory, we create momentum," Dolan says. "We are getting new partners nationally and internationally, getting new sectors, new constituencies, and new communities involved."

Dolan is also unfazed by the argument that everything he proposes is based on expecting the most powerful individuals in society -- and the powerful institutions that they run -- to respond to a social critique that challenges one of their most deeply held principles. He argues that history has known such moments. There was, for example, the decision by England's House of Lords in 1851, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, to give up its power to rule and to sit only as a consulting body. And social conscience won out in the United States in 1964, he says, when the Civil Rights Act was passed.

"There are moments in human history that optimistic organizers like me can point to, when the entrenched powers have given up that power in a democratic way and really on behalf of democratic values. Right now, I believe that we can create a critical mass of political energy on behalf of those values that we all share in civil society, to focus that energy on the United States Congress, and to say, 'You will cut no more deals that do not make labor rights and environmental standards enforceable by trade sanctions. What you have already done on behalf of the business community, you will now do on behalf of our interests and our values.' It's possible. I really believe it. If I didn't, then I wouldn't be doing this."

Sara Terry (saraterry@mindspring.com), a frequent contributor to Fast Company, also writes for The Christian Science Monitorand The Boston Globe. Contact Mike Dolan (mdolan@citizen.org) by email, or learn more about his work on the Web (www.tradewatch.org).