Follow the leaders: U.S. progressives need to support a global effort to halt neoliberalism in its tracks.

THIS YEAR, THE DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED U.S. legislature has an important opportunity--the kind that maybe comes once in a Ways and Means Committee member's political lifetime--to radically shift course in U.S. trade policy. It has a full plate of trade issues to consider: no less than four bilateral free-trade agreements (with Colombia, Peru, Panama and Korea), as well as the renewal of the Bush administration's "fast track" authority to negotiate trade deals and the fate of the failed WTO Doha round of negotiations. How our elected officials decide on these issues will determine the future of global trade relations and the fate of millions of people--predominantly people in formerly colonized nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as people of color in the industrialized nations--whose lives have come to depend on global trade.

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Around the world, vibrant and powerful people's struggles have been growing against the WTO and "free trade." But in the U.S., undoubtedly the most powerful nation in determining global trade policy, the people most impacted by neoliberal trade policies--low wage workers, immigrants, and Black communities in the South--have heard virtually nothing of these issues, and our voices are completely missing from the U.S. trade policy debate. Discussions about the future of U.S. trade policy and alternatives, garbled in technical trade jargon, are confined to a handful of trade lobbyists inside the beltway and never reach the thousands of small farmers and workers whose lives are fundamentally altered by the U.S. pursuit of "free trade" around the world. If we want fundamental change in this country's trade policy, we need to start at the grassroots by defining our own stakes in the global struggles.

Neoliberalism (popularly known as "globalization") is an economic and social system in which every aspect of society, including its culture and values, is ultimately determined by the market. Everything from shoes to exotic fruit and even tourist sites is produced for competition on the global market. For example, farmers no longer grow food to feed their villages but are forced to cultivate specialty crops that will sell for the greatest return on the global market. In a system where the role of government is to ensure maximum profits for corporations, privatization of everything--including healthcare and education--and deregulation of anything that stands in the way of corporate profits--such as rent control and environmental standards--have been the order of the day.

Many people understand neoliberalism as a "problem of the third world," but neoliberal policies right here at home are responsible for many of the struggles faced by ordinary people, particularly people of color. Government refusal to enact and enforce stronger labor laws has meant that irregular work--part-time, temporary and/or self-contract work with no benefits or security--has become the norm rather than the exception. Privatization of basic services has meant more than 45 million people in the U.S. have no access to healthcare, and deregulation of housing laws has made affordable housing unattainable for 42 million households.

According to Angaza Laughinghouse of Black Workers for Justice, southern states have a lot in common with the third world in their relationship to foreign investment. To attract northern and foreign investments, southern states use tax dollars to provide major financial incentives for corporations. The incentives used to attract industries to the South are financed by monies in state and local budgets that could have been slated for community development, particularly in the Black Belt. While corporations profit from this arrangement, southern Blacks live in some of the worst economic conditions in the country. It is estimated that about one million people residing in the Black Belt live in substandard housing that lacks complete indoor plumbing. The South accounts for 46 percent of all substandard rural housing. It has the highest rate of infant mortality, the largest number of uninsured people and the largest number of abandoned toxic waste dumps.

As for immigrants of color, neoliberal policies are the very reason that many immigrant workers are here in the United States. For example, after the passage of NAFTA in 1994, cheap corn produced by giant U.S. corporations and subsidized by the U.S. government flooded the Mexican market. Small corn producers could no longer compete, and many were forced into bankruptcy. Many migrated north in search of work, but upon arriving in the U.S. they found the same exploitation. In the agricultural industry, Mexican migrant workers work 10-12 hours a day for poverty wages and no benefits. According to Francisca Cortes of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, some are held and forced to work against their will, with armed guards watching them 24 hours a day. If they try to escape, they are often beaten as an example in front of the other workers.

With the failure of the WTO Doha round, which already has three strikes against it--derailed in Seattle, Cancun and then Hong Kong--and the "burial" of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (in the famous words of Hugo Chavez) at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina in 2005, bilateral trade agreements have now become the new U.S. instrument of choice for global economic expansion. Going head-to-head against a country like Panama, which has an economy one-thousandth the size of the U.S. economy and no real military to speak of, has been an effective way for the U.S. to get its way. In the past five years alone, the U.S. has negotiated FTAs with 14 countries. It is currently trying to push through a dozen more with countries such as Colombia, Peru and Korea, and has a long list of countries on deck for future deals.

Modeled after NAFTA, bilateral FTAs are a veritable death sentence for workers and small farmers on both sides of the negotiating table. In Colombia, heavily subsidized U.S. agricultural products flooding the market will decimate the agricultural sector and leave peasants with no other option but to turn to coca-farming. In Korea, an FTA with the U.S. is projected to increase the already growing number of irregular workers and intensify government repression against labor unions, which have been staunch opponents of the FTA. In the U.S., these race-to-the-bottom trade agreements mean more outsourced jobs, elimination of major industries and further depression of wages, while corporations are emboldened to undermine public laws meant to protect ordinary workers, farmers and the disadvantaged. And once again, those who suffer the greatest consequences will be low-wage workers and people of color already struggling at the margins of society.

Three decades of neoliberalism in the United States have made all of us desensitized even to its most absurd aspects. For example, in the wealthiest country in the world, clocking in 60-hour work weeks, even among white-collar professionals, is the norm rather than the exception. We don't think twice about spending money to buy drinking water, and who even knows anymore what kinds of food are native to where we live?

Do we want to live in a world where education is solely about grooming young people to acquire the most competitive skills for the job market? Do we want to raise the next generation in a world where the environment is devastated and the food we eat is genetically engineered by profit-hungry corporations?

How can we build a movement strong enough to force the U.S. to change course in its failed trade policy? We need to identify U.S. neoliberal policies as the root cause of our day-to-day struggles, such as the gutting of welfare, exploitation of immigrants and displacement due to gentrification. We need to articulate how war and neoliberalism are two sides of the same coin: as the U.S. imposes free trade agreements around the world to enable U.S. capital to move freely across borders, it is realigning its troops so that the military can also freely cross borders to secure corporate profits and ensure U.S. control in various regions. We need to make linkages between trade and migration, so that when we talk about immigrant rights, we are also talking about addressing the root causes of why people are forced to leave their homes in search of work.

We need to take the trade policy debate out of Washington and into the streets and the picket lines in the heartland, in the Black Belt, and across the country, and recast it entirely in a language that is accessible to workers and ordinary people. Trade jargon is way too technical to hold anyone's attention for long. Alienating lingo, such as "bound tariffs," "countervailing measures," "yarn-forward rules" and an alphabet soup of acronyms such as MAI, TRIPs and TRIMs all strung together in a disjointed sentence can turn off even the most dedicated among us from trying to decipher what it all means. Instead, we need to highlight the human aspects of global free trade by centralizing the struggles of queer youth of color, the campesinos-turned-day-laborers far away from home in search of work and the countless other people of color whose day-to-day lives are intricately linked with the global struggle against neoliberalism.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity created by the fight against free trade agreements is the possibility for meaningful cross-border solidarity building. For example, in the year-long fight against the eight rounds of FTA negotiations that took place between Korea and the U.S., a former campesina from Oaxaca marched side-by-side with Korean trade unionists; queer youth of color from Brooklyn pitched tents outside a ski resort in Montana with cattle ranchers from Korea and braved sub-freezing weather to maintain a week-long protest vigil; and a coffee farmer from Bogota, Colombia traveled to South Korea to take part in a national general strike against the FTA with tens of thousands gathered in Seoul.

We need to draw inspiration from these powerful moments of solidarity. It was the power of mass people's movements that derailed the WTO, founded just a decade ago amidst great fanfare, as well as putting into office Hugo Chavez, who boldly said "no thanks" to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and advocates a new model of Latin-American regional integration based on principles of economic cooperation and solidarity. It is time that the social justice movement in the U.S. draws strength from these victories and creates a populist movement that is serious about stopping the U.S. government from imposing neoliberalism around the globe. In the long run, only a broad, conscious movement of people's struggles standing together in solidarity can force the U.S. to change its course in trade policy and bring about an alternative based on respect for indigenous cultures and guaranteeing basic rights such as education, healthcare and housing for all.

Hyun Lee works with Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, a social justice organization in New York, and Korean Americans against War and Neoliberalism, a national network of U.S.-based progressive Koreans who have come together to stop the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and U.S. military base expansion in Pyeongtaek, Korea.