Mission Statement

People of Color Against Globalization is an alliance of individuals and supporting organizations from oppressed communities of color in Southern California. We are working to build a movement for global justice through the education, organization, and mobilization of our communities. We focus our efforts on workers, who are the overwhelming majority of our communities and suffer the most from corporate globalization, but seek to build our movement among all sectors. We also build alliances with other progressive allies in the US, and with the national liberation struggles and social movements of the global South.

Why Oppressed Communities of Color Must Oppose Corporate Globalization

The specter of corporate globalization threatens the entire world. We live in an era where 500 billionaires control more wealth than 40% of the people of the world. Corporate globalization means the concentrated power of capital expressed through national governments, transnational institutions such as the World Bank, and a complex network of international laws and trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The wealth and power of corporate globalization is concentrated in the global North, with the United States as the dominant superpower. Ultimately, this power is enforced through military force and aggression, as witnessed by the countless wars, interventions, “police actions,” and subversions waged by the United States in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If unchecked, the corporate drive for maximum profits and continuing destruction of the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and natural ecology literally threatens the survival of the plant.

Oppressed people of color in the US and in the global South are the number one victims of corporate globalization. In fact, we have been “globalized for more than 500 years by the racism and national oppression that have been central to the development of capitalism in the United States. The economic foundation and the very territorial boundaries of this country have been established through the genocide and theft of the lands of the Native American nations, the enslavement and trade of Africans, the annexation and colonization of the Chicano-Mexicano people of the Southwest, the brutal exploitation of Asian immigrants, the annexation of Hawai’ii, and the (continued) colonization of Puerto Rico. The lives and history of our peoples mirrors that of the oppressed peoples and nations of the global South.

Modern-era globalization, (neo-liberalism), led by the United States, has only made our lives worse. It is our communities that suffer most from structural poverty, unemployment, sweatshop labor in the factories and fields, the worst housing, the poorest education, the poorest health and social services. Our communities feel it first when factories close and move to the Third World. We feel it first when school budgets are slashed. We feel it first when public hospitals and clinics are shut down. We feel it first when the federal government strips away civil liberties under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Many of us are immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America - driven here by the corporate globalization that destroys the native industries of our home countries, while stealing our raw materials and natural resources, exploiting our labor for a dollar a day, and destroying our rain forests, our rivers, and the very air we breathe. Our immigrant status gives an added dimension to the racist exploitation and oppression we suffer in the US. In a restructured US economy dependent on low-wage, non-unionized labor, immigrant workers have become the backbone of the system. California, with the largest economy of any state in the US, and the sixth largest in the world, would face economic disaster without immigrant labor to produce profits for the agribusiness, manufacturing, construction, and service sectors.

For our communities, “neo-liberalism” means that nearly one third of African Americans, and Latinos in Southern California live in poverty, and 28% of Latinos, 13% of Asian Pacific Islanders, and 10% of African Americans lack any type of health care. While folks like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Kenneth Lay jet set around the world, build new mansions and live lives of unbelievable luxury, more than 500,000 people in Los Angeles (almost all oppressed people of color) work full time AND STILL live in poverty. For our communities, corporate globalization means massive unemployment - at least 1.2 million in California alone. California is the domestic model for neo-liberalism, with a huge sector of low wage immigrant workers, and a massive prison system to control the African American, Latino, Pilipino, and Southeast Asian workers who have not been “lucky” enough to find work in a sweat shop or to serve as cannon fodder for the US military.

Domestic neo-liberalism also means the massive growth of military and police forces. Our communities suffer the most from this development because we the first victims of police brutality, government harassment, and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. While we are being pushed out of the few places we had in the colleges and universities, we are filling up the country’s jails and prisons.

The political and academic advocates and media mouthpieces of globalization claim that it brings economic development and democracy to the entire world. Some of them even claim that “there is no alternative” to such a system. But the daily lives of our people expose what a horrible lie this is.

Because of our history and the suffering endured by our people, and because many of us are immigrants from the global South, we recognize our solidarity with the struggles in that region, from the struggle of the landless people of Brazil, the Indigenous peoples of Bolivia, from the guerilla fighters of Nepal, to the resistance movements in Palestine, from the National Democratic Movement in the Philippines, to the Re-Unification Movement of Korea, from the fight of the Uw’a people of Nigeria against the oil corporations, to the struggle of the peoples of South Africa for affordable AIDs medicines - we are your allies. We understand very well the meaning of the words of the great African revolutionary Samora Machel that “internationalism is strategy, not charity.”

On a world scale corporate globalization means the drive for empire by the wealthy industrialized nations, led by the United States, for control of the markets, resources, and labor supply of the nations of the global South and other poorer nations of the world. This drive has recently been accelerated by the tremendous growth of information technology which has made possible global economic integration on an unprecedented scale and by the end of the Cold War, which has made the US corporate system more aggressive and predatory than ever. Empire development has also been facilitated through international institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund as well as through so-called “free trade” treaties such as NAFTA, or proposed treaties such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), or the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
Global neo-liberalism also means the growth of comprador elites in the Third World, displacing “productive” capital.

These”transnatioanalized capitalists” more and more identify with, and owe their allegiance to, the corporate centers of US, Europe, and Japan than to their own countries. In return, the US provides extensive support for repressive governments that safeguard profits for the transnational corporations through privatization, cutting health and social programs, crushing domestic dissent, and the violation of human rights. Globalization also means a quantitative and qualitative growth in spying, covert operations and subversion against governments - like Venezuela and Cuba - that try to act independently of the US.

The war in Iraq represents the openly brutal face of neo-liberal globalization. It differs from past imperialist wars such as against Korea, and Viet Nam only in the fact that it is the test for a new policy of “pre-emptive and preventative wars,” that is, wars that require no more justification than that US leaders “feel” threatened.

Building the US Global Justice Movement

The US global justice movement is an important part of a worldwide movement against the domination of the transnational corporations of the US, Europe, and Japan. But despite its strength, the US global justice movement cannot reach its full potential without the participation and leadership of oppressed people of color.

People of Color Against Globalization represents an effort to build that participation and leadership through the education, mobilization, and organization of our communities. At the center of our struggle is the fight against racism and national oppression and the development of unity among oppressed people of color. Our educational work will include developing analysis of the impact of corporate globalization on Los Angeles’ oppressed communities, especially the working class of those communities. It will also include the utilization of our peoples’ art and music to promote our ideas and to help build a culture of resistance.

We will mobilize around campaigns, such as the campaign to defeat the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The focus of our mobilization will be among working people, but will include other sectors of our communities.

Our organizing work will include leadership development, base building, and the building of alliances at home and abroad.
We seek to build unity with other sectors of the US global justice movement based on reciprocity and mutual respect and a recognition that the fight for racial justice as a critical component of the anti-corporate globalization struggle.

People of Color Against Globalization is confident that we can ultimately defeat the empire builders, the gun bearers, and the wealthy elites that now control the world. Our belief is grounded in our own histories of struggle for freedom, equality and self-determination. It is grounded in our understanding and respect for the struggles of the billions of oppressed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Together we are the majority. Together we represent the future.

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