Martin Austermuhle and Justin Leto of STAR (ticket, April 5) have a laudably healthy concern for free speech on campus. However, comparing their putative goals — "to democratize economic globalization and to protect the rights of exploited workers to unionize" — to those of the anti-apartheid campaign of the 1980s is downright ridiculous.

Although STAR members and other misled Naderites may be sincerely and genuinely concerned about pressing labor and environmental issues, their proposed solutions are naive and would effect an exacerbation of the very problems they supposedly wish to eradicate. Far from eliminating poverty and injustice, attempts to impose American and European standards on less affluent countries would ensure the persistence of the current North/South economic gap.

Are there corporate slobs who get rich off indigent laborers? Yes. Are working conditions in the so-called Third World sometimes shocking? Definitely. But will we solve anything by refusing to buy products from other countries unless and until the workers make $20 an hour? Clearly not. The STAR ideology would choke all hope of improvement for the Third World and amounts to nothing more than a leftist mirroring of Pat Buchanan-brand protectionism. The only folks who would benefit are the fat-cat architects of this pseudo-humanitarian nonsense: U.S. labor unions.

Perhaps Austermuhle, Leto and other members of the arrogant, world-travelling, IMF-protesting jet set should realize that all they really want is a suitably jovian reason to riot just like all those in Beaver Canyon.