ONE RECENT SUNNY DAY, Martin Lemke, a 28-year-old from San Francisco, stood in front of a Gap clothing store on busy Collins Avenue in South Beach, Miami, and shed all of his clothes, save for a pair of boxer briefs. Lemke’s striptease, you understand, was a political act–he’s a member of the “Gapatistas,” a San Francisco-based antiglobalization group–and he bared his soul, among other things, in order to protest the meeting in Miami this week of trade ministers from 34 different countries. (The “Gapatistas” normally conduct their strip-protests from the top of a 5 and 1/2 foot Redwood stump in California.) You’ve got to admire the gumption of people like Martin Lemke. And you’ve got to wonder what motivates them to make such fools of themselves. For his part, Lemke told the Miami Herald, he strips because “The Gap is a poster child for free trade, which really means corporate trade.” And, don’t forget, “What we really need is trade that’s free from exploitation, free from the degradation of the planet, people, and spirit.”

Lemke is only one of thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who traveled to Miami this week in order to protest the adoption of a Free Trade of the Americas agreement, which would create a free-trade zone stretching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra Del Fuego. But it’s worth remembering that the people on whose behalf the marchers claim to be speaking–those “exploited” and “degraded” as a result of an increasingly interconnected world–have voices of their own. Which, when asked, they use to give full-throated support for globalization.