Aaron Dolson knows the smell of money. It’s thick and sour, wafting in pale brown air. It’s the odor that has grown strong in Denton, Texas, over the past five years. Dolson counts three friends with cancer, and suspects a connection.

New chemical plants have opened on the I-35 highway, and in Denton itself, not far from a school, a company works with medical-grade radioactive material. Dolson’s neighbors all have their concerns, but the town is divided over the balance of corporate costs and benefits.

"It’s just not worth it," says Dolson. He’s talking about much more than the timeless argument of jobs vs. environment. He’s talking about the whole idea of globalization as we know it.

Denton is a "NAFTA town," a place defined by the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement. That deal, greeted by armed rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, when it came into effect in 1994, was considered a blueprint for global free trade. It was an early model for the current agenda of the World Trade Organization, now the focus of a surging rebellion against corporate power.

The effects of the WTO, though, can’t be felt in our own backyards. The organization’s advance is too new; the impacts have yet to trickle down to most of us global villagers. Towns like Denton, on the other hand, already live in the world of corporate free trade. They are well down the track in the race to the bottom. Along the way, Dolson says, he has watched local small businesses close while tax subsidies and lax rules attract multinational corporations and low-paying jobs.

The most controversial newcomer is a copper smelter near the Trinity River. "Because of NAFTA, it only has to meet Mexican pollution standards," says Dolson. "They don’t even have to meet our local air quality standards. The free trade idea is being manipulated."

So, Dolson is running for mayor. He’s 26, dreadlocked, pierced, gay, and admittedly far from the political norm in a state that sees presidential material in the chilling blandness of George W. Bush. Dolson is running on the long-shot Green Party ticket, but is finding unexpected support. The reason, he says, is that people in Denton can see that the global has gone local. And when it comes to resistance, there’s no place like home.

So far, the anti-corporate rebellion has been a road show. Five months ago, tens of thousands of people descended on Seattle to speak out, march, and shut down the WTO despite tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and arrests. A year earlier, international outreach on the Internet helped crush the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a master plan for corporate globalism. Protest tactics have intensified. Riots in Quebec. Student occupations in Mexico City. International teach-ins, marches, and direct action wherever the global economic elite chooses to meet.

The next front, though, may not be Geneva or Davos or Kuala Lumpur, but towns like Denton, Texas.

"Affecting John and Jane Doe in Akron, Ohio, is much more important than affecting [Congressman] John Kasich in Washington, D.C.," says Nick Penniman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy. "What we’re doing is encouraging people to connect the idea of corporate domination to the local level."

Penniman says the heat in the streets of Seattle last November 30 had an "eye-popping" effect on public awareness that global trade rules are usurping traditional democratic choice. The result has been a surge in local action against a global system based first and foremost on the needs of the multinational merchant class. Cities like Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; and Indianapolis, Indiana, have passed "precautionary declarations" on globalization – warnings to the architects of global trade that they must not pass regulations that override local choices.

"What we’re trying to do is to create an immune system against the WTO at a local level," says Penniman. It’s a sort of retroactive democracy. National governments never asked their citizens what way to go on trade, so citizens are telling them after the fact. Penniman argues that US trade negotiators won’t be able to push a corporate agenda if urban and rural centers across the country make clear statements of opposition. The effort is similar to the 1970s and ’80s effort to establish a worldwide network of self-declared nuclear-free zones. In that case, local action helped block American nuclear colonization, keeping atomic weapons off the soil of entire nations, such as New Zealand and Australia.

A growing number of democracy critics expect that a local government will be the first to stand up to a global trade body. Across the US, cities and towns are challenging corporate freedoms. There are proposals to ban big-box stores, kick out corporations that abuse regulatory law, and to block corporate ownership of farms, ranches, vineyards and woodlots. The Clinton administration is reportedly considering an "anti-scofflaw" act to bar federal bodies from doing business with corporate rule-breakers. In Arcata, California, the city council has committed to disobey any WTO ruling that interferes with local decision-making.

The inevitable result of all this local action is a corporate legal challenge – and an opportunity to put globalization on trial. "I don’t think the city would buckle very easily," says Arcata activist Paul Cienfuegos. "Both city council and the people in the street feel pretty strongly about this."

Already, citizens are smashing heads with the bodies that govern trade. In Canada, people are reeling from two decisions. First, the Canadian government canceled a ban on the gas additive MMT, a possible health hazard, after its corporate manufacturer threatened a lawsuit under NAFTA. More recently, the WTO found against Canada’s drug patent rules, which permit an unusually quick turnover from corporate ownership to generic drug production (the aim is to reduce pharmaceutical costs for both individuals and Canada’s universal-access medical system).

Still, the Canadian government continues to spearhead global trade rules that sap its own sovereignty. Early this year, Canada was among the minority that argued that governments should not be allowed to regulate against the import of genetically modified plants and animals. Developing nations – the countries that biotech advocates claim will benefit most from genetically modified foods – opposed the override rule and won the day. "Canada’s position was trounced. Trounced!" says Jo Dufay, campaigns coordinator for the leftist Council of Canadians. "After the abject failure of this government’s position in Seattle, and one year after the collapse of the MAI, one might hope they would say, ‘Oh, gee, maybe we should have a rethink.’"

Democractic action at the local level may be a simple case of self-preservation. Andrew Simms, head of the global economy program at the New Economics Foundation, has written that globalization’s greatest challenge is to regulate the economy to allow development at the local level. The fact that this is currently globalism’s most obvious failure is the result, Simms says, of nations "cowering before the jaws of US-dominated institutions."

The protesters in Seattle muzzled those jaws, but the WTO continues to march forward. The November 30 WTO collapse only halted the "millennium round" plan to expand the organization’s mandate. That still leaves the WTO with its original "built-in agenda" dealing with agriculture and services, including education and health care.

Talks have started again in Geneva. And now, the defenders of the pro-corporate agenda have begun to attack the activist groups – "non-governmental organizations" – that have been handing them such resounding defeats. "The delegates at the WTO are all appointed by 135 member governments, each of which is more or less democratically elected," said John Weekes, a Geneva trade consultant. "Who elected the NGOs?"

It’s a definition of democracy akin to Bill Clinton’s definition of sex: it’s only real when there’s a ballot being dropped in a ballot box. It’s also an argument doomed to fail as local democratic resistance builds. The Alliance for Democracy now has 57 chapters, says Nick Penniman, but lacks anything like the high-level access enjoyed by corporate lobbyists. For now, it’s still a gritty fight.

"We have every right to address our grievances in terms of what we believe to be the effects of corporate domination," says Penniman. "We paid the price for those beliefs in the streets of Seattle."

– James MacKinnon