Apparently, I’m what’s wrong with the world.

I regularly drink Starbucks coffee.

I had Taco Bell for dinner last night.

And I’m wearing Gap pants.

In the real world (i.e., 30 miles in any direction from Bascom), buying fast food, over-priced coffee and new clothes is not shunned — it’s the norm.

But not in Madison. Earlier this week, 150 protesters besieged State Street’s Taco Bell under the pretense of demanding pay raises for Taco Bell’s tomato pickers. The Taco Bell protest came just days after a protest at Starbucks, the popular coffee shop down the block from Taco Bell.

In the past, other big businesses have received similar treatment, most notably the Gap, which suffered protests and vandalism after its State Street debut.

So what’s all the fuss about?

The protesters at Taco Bell this week demanded the Mexican fast-food restaurant give its tomato pickers pay hikes. Ironically, neither Taco Bell nor its parent company, Tricon, employs a single tomato picker. Rather, Taco Bell buys its delicious, juicy tomatoes from Six L’s Packing, Co., a three-generation family business based in southern Florida.

Six L’s tomato pickers are paid at least the federal minimum wage for their unskilled labor. Like all domestic farming, the labor-intensive planting and picking is performed mostly with high-tech farming equipment. By all objective measures, the workers are paid what they are worth — paying them any more would be akin to charity.

Down the block at Starbucks, environmental extremists are fired up over Starbucks’ purported use of genetically modified foods. Their arguments are grounded completely in fiction — the U.S. government can find no ill effects of genetically modified foods. In fact, GM foods are often safer and purer than organic foods, according to food-science experts. Nevertheless, the nation’s most popular coffee shop must contend with constant harassment.

Taco Bell and Starbucks patrons should not be blamed for the world’s problems.

Rather, both Taco Bell and Starbucks are the targets of a growing campaign to undermine the ideals of free trade and America. The movement, which recently manifested itself in bloody protests at world-trade meetings in Seattle and Italy, is the result of collusions between self-interested union leaders, environmentalists and college students with nothing better to do.

For union leaders, the anti-globalization protesters are a welcome addition to the fight against free trade. But when most protesters may be more concerned with the environmental impact of free trade, union bosses are more concerned with what free trade does to their constituencies.

This was crystal clear earlier this week, when President Bush caved into an all-out lobbying effort by America’s steel unions. Bush, who campaigned as a free-trader and promised to not raise taxes, voluntarily raised the import tax on steel to 30 percent.

The tax will be a severe setback for the American consumer, who will be paying higher prices for everything built with steel, but it could save the jobs of thousands of domestic steel workers, who may have otherwise switched into an industry where America has a comparative advantage.

Worst hit are workers in the world’s most troubled economies, including Russia, southeast Asia and South America, whose livelihoods are dependent on selling steel to America.

Meanwhile, environmental concerns are increasingly being used by special interests to legitimize tariffs and international government regulation. In the case of genetically modified foods, Europeans have fabricated the issue in hopes of avoiding having to import tariff-free American foods.

Elsewhere, multi-national corporations, including many American companies like Enron, are pushing for the American government to agree to stringent limits on economic growth under the pretenses of stopping global warming. This will allow international companies to expand (and pollute), while limiting Americans’ ability to expand.

College students are increasingly caught up in the fight. With a natural disposition against capitalism and seduced by tales of underpaid tomato pickers in Florida and “Franken-foods” in coffee shops, UW’s leftists are unwitting accomplices in an anti-capitalist movement that puts special interests before reality.

State Street’s protesters are incorrect. You don’t have to sell your soul to enjoy capitalism’s fruits — even Taco Bell’s tomatoes.