Despite cries of protectionism, the refusal to grant President Clinton "fast track" trading authority should be seen as a recognition that the global market now requires serious reforms. PNS associate editor Andrew Reding draws an analogy with the era of robber barons, and suggests some of the remedies applied then might have a role to play today. Reding directs the North America Project of the World Policy Institute in New York.

By refusing to give the president a blank check to negotiate international trade agreements, The House of Representatives has lived up to its role as the people's chamber in our Congress.

The majority's insistence on retaining Congressional oversight does not signal a retreat from internationalism. Far from it. It points to the need for a global market transformation comparable to the reforms that brought an end to the rule of the robber barons in the United States, and ushered in the golden era of the American economy.

Because the robber barons -- banished early in this century by the legislative reforms of the Progressive Era and kept at bay by the New Deal -- are back. Fortified by a new world order in which the ever-more-rapid movement of goods and capital defies the efforts of nation-states to set minimum labor, health, safety, and environmental standards, entrepreneurs are growing fabulously wealthy while real wages stagnate and entire economies collapse.

Just look at Mexico, our partner in NAFTA. It has more billionaires than ever, but real wages are dramatically down from what they were a decade ago. Its international balance sheets look great to foreign financiers -- but it is suffering an unprecedented crime wave as desperate segments of the population turn to robbery and kidnapping to make a living.

In making the case for NAFTA, President Clinton assured the country that side agreements would encourage the Mexican government to begin enforcing its own labor and environmental codes, thus helping spread the benefits -- and limiting the costs -- of economic growth.

Four years later, the administration cannot point to a single achievement on either front. Environmental destruction continues unabated, and Mexican workers are still denied the right to organize free trade unions. That is why the proposed fast-track authorization was opposed not only by organized labor, but by every major environmental organization, including those that originally supported NAFTA.

And it's not just Mexico. Look at Southeast Asia, until recently the darling of international investors. The burning tropical forests of Indonesia, set ablaze to provide more palm oil for international trade, have cast a pall over the entire region. The robber baron mentality has also afflicted the financial systems of countries in the region, setting off stock market crashes that are endangering the stability of the global economy as a whole.

There is only one way out of this chaos. Just as a similar situation in the United States led to the imposition of federal legislation and standards binding on all the states, it is time to adopt standards worldwide. At present, the only way to do this is through trade agreements.

That is why it is specious to argue that labor, health, safety, and environmental standards, to say nothing of banking and securities standards, do not belong in trade agreements. They are in fact essential to the proper functioning of the global economy. Without them, we will again face the scourges of the 1930s: global depression, followed inevitably by war.

President Clinton should see Congress' unwillingness to hand him a blank check on trade legislation as the wake-up call that it is, and as an opportunity to craft a new policy. As the world's only superpower, and with an economy the envy of the industrialized world, the U.S. is in an unprecedented position to exercise global leadership. The Japanese and the Europeans also have everything to gain by protecting their labor and environmental standards, while the emerging economies are completely dependent on exports to the developed economies.

The need for global reform has never been so obvious. All that is wanting is the vision to mobilize the considerable forces that are ready to back it.