GLOBALIZATION IS BOTH AN ACTIVE PROCESS OF CORPORATE EXPANSION ACROSS BORDERS and a structure of cross-border facilities and economic linkages that has been steadily growing and changing as the process gathers steam. Like its conceptual partner, "free trade," globalization is also an ideology, whose function is to reduce any resistance to the process by making it seem both highly beneficent and unstoppable.

And as with free trade, while globalization may sometimes yield economic benefits, both the process and economic-political regime it is helping bring about threaten progressive ends, and should be recognized as such and fought at every level. Admittedly this is a formidable task, as the economic and political power of its beneficiaries, and its momentum, are great an contesting it seems an almost utopian undertaking. But globalization has its vulnerabilities, and attacking it intellectually, at the local level of plant abandonments and moves, as well as at the national political level, can help build understanding and support for a larger oppositional movement.

Globalization is just one of an array of concepts and arguing points that have been mobilized to advance the corporate agenda. Others have been deregulation and getting government off our backs, balancing the budget, cutting back entitlements (non-corporate), and free trade.

Like free trade, globalization has an aura of virtue. Just as "freedom" must be good, so globalization hints at internationalism and solidarity between countries, as opposed to nationalism and protectionism, which have negative connotations. The possibility that cross-border trade and investment might be economically damaging to the weaker party, or that they might erode democratic controls in both the stronger and weaker countries, is excluded from consideration by mainstream economists and pundits.1 It is also unthinkable in the mainstream that the contest between free trade and globalization, on the one hand, and "protectionism" on the other, might be reworded as a struggle between "protection"--of transnational corporate (TNC) rights--versus the "freedom" of democratic governments to regulate in the interests of domestic non-corporate constituencies.

As an ideology, globalization connotes not only freedom and internationalism, but, as it helps realize the benefits of free trade, and thus comparative advantage and the division of labor, it also supposedly enhances efficiency and productivity. Because of these virtues, and the alleged inability of governments to halt "progress," globalization is widely perceived as beyond human control, which further weakens resistance.

Hope this helps some...Take Care.