Stop racing to the bottom.

The regime of corporate free trade is finally facing a serious challenge. Looking back, the Zapatista revolt marked the first assault. The ragtag peasant army rose up in the jungles of Mexico on January 1, 1994, the date the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. Among other things, the Zapatistas warned that NAFTA would throw poor Mexican farmers off their lands. The Zapatistas were right. One million Mexican peasant farmers lost their livelihoods. NAFTA allowed U.S. agribusiness companies to swamp Mexico with cheap corn, thus making it all but impossible for peasant farmers to eke out a living.

Then the Battle of Seattle in the fall of 1999 showed the whole world that corporate-dominated governments would no longer be able to set the terms of trade in secret or without a fight. Farmers, unionists, environmentalists, food activists, and human rights defenders insisted on making their views known. Ever since then, corporate free traders have faced organized popular resistance whenever and wherever they have met.

In Cancun in September, the WTO meeting fell apart because this resistance movement emboldened Third World governments to stand up to the bullies in Washington and London and Paris. With U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick in the lead, the industrial powers wanted to force developing countries to throw their economies open even more to foreign banks and corporations, while the United States, Britain, and France continued to subsidize their own farmers, who export corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton at below market rates. In the United States, these subsidies mostly go to giant agribusiness companies, not small farmers.

But the problems with the WTO--indeed, the problems with corporate free trade---extend far beyond the double standards of the powerful. The heart of the issue is whether such trade works for people. We are convinced it does not. NAFTA and the WTO put the right of multinational corporations to trade freely above all other rights and values, including protecting the environment, food safety, and public services, insisting on human rights, and guaranteeing workers the right to organize and to earn a living wage.

Without these protections, corporations simply play one country off against another in an endless search for cheaper wages and fewer regulations.

In Cancun, the nations of the Global South fought back. Forming themselves into the so-called Group of 21, these nations--with Brazil in the forefront--led the walkout.

Urging them on were activists and nongovernmental organizations from around the world. Lee Kyung Hae came all the way from South Korea to denounce the effects of corporate free trade. A farmer himself, Lee carried "a hand-lettered hunk of cardboard around his neck that read 'The WTO Kills Farmers,' " noted John Ross, a veteran Mexico reporter. Lee climbed a fence and then "plunged a dagger into his heart," Ross wrote. Lee's death galvanized the opposition in Cancun. His suicide was like that of the "Buddhist monks in Vietnam, setting themselves aflame to inform the world of the terrible repression in their land," Ross wrote.

The future of the WTO, as currently constructed, is now in doubt. Bush's strategy may simply be to bypass the WTO. "Zoellick said he would move ahead on free trade agreements with individual nations or regions," The New York Times reported. "Meanwhile, he said, he would wait for things to 'calm down' at the World Trade Organization." In these bilateral or regional deals, the United States can throw its weight around.

Chief among the regional agreements is the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It would force countries to privatize their economies and resources (including water), deregulate industry, and open their markets to huge corporations that would quickly displace local farms and firms. Peasants would lose their lands. Small businesses would go bankrupt. Public services would be crushed. The cost of living would skyrocket. Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Monsanto, and a whole array of other U.S. multinationals would get richer.

The FTAA would also "allow corporations to sue governments directly for the removal of standards or laws designed to protect public health and safety," Public Citizen notes. This has happened already under NAFTA. "The U.S.-based Ethyl Corporation forced Canada to pay $13 million in damages and drop its ban on the dangerous gasoline additive MMT, a known toxin that attacks the human nervous system," according to Public Citizen.

On top of that, the FTAA could force countries throughout the hemisphere to accept genetically modified foods. Leaving aside the health risks of such Frankenfoods, "these technologies will increase hunger in poor nations," Public Citizen argues. "Being forced to buy expensive patented seeds every season, rather than saving and planting their own, will force traditional subsistence farmers in the developing world into dependency on transnational corporations and closer to the brink of starvation."

To discuss the FTAA, trade ministers from all over the hemisphere will be coming to Miami on November 20. There they will face again the kind of energetic, mobilized opposition that they saw in Cancun. This revolt against free trade for corporations is one of the bright spots in the world today.

Fortunately, a few Democratic Party Presidential candidates are joining the revolt.

Dennis Kucinich has been the most outspoken, pledging to pull the United States out of NAFTA and the WTO as his first act of business if elected.

Howard Dean has taken all kinds of heat from the likes of Joe Lieberman and John Kerry for daring to suggest that the United States should trade only with countries that meet basic labor and human rights and environmental standards. Ultimately, says Dean, the United States should use its leverage to raise these foreign standards to levels comparable to those that exist in the United States.

Dick Gephardt, too, has a history of going to bat for workers' rights and for fair trade.

The pundits and pooh-bahs may denounce Dean and Kucinich and Gephardt as protectionists or know-nothings. They are neither. They understand that until workers everywhere have basic guarantees, the rights of workers anywhere are under fire. And the same goes for the environment and for human rights.

If Washington can use its leverage to meet Monsanto's needs, why can't it use that same leverage to meet basic human and environmental needs?

It's time to call off the race to the bottom.