I came to America with my wife, Lucy, with nothing more than the shirts on their backs in order to escape the military dictatorship that ruled South Korea in the 1970’s with its doctrine of Yushin. I took graduate level courses at Cal State Northridge and worked menial jobs until landing a job with the Los Angeles County Department of Data Processing. After three years with the Department in which I advanced from computer operator to assistant manager (a career progression that normally takes 10 years), I made the determination that my career with Los Angeles County has hit a glass ceiling, so I quit and started my own realty business. The business I founded was the first Korean owned business in Cerritos, and it was highly successful. I became a millionaire, and a Korean television program profiled me for a new series about successful Koreans abroad called ”Global Koreans”. The show for which I was profiled never aired due to unrest in South Korea in May 1980, in what became known as the Kwangju Massacre. 

The Kwangju Massacre in which the military dictatorship in South Korea murdered over a thousand protesters in the southern city of Kwangju impacted our lives more than just because it preempted a television show which profiled my success. It made me and my wife re-examine our purpose in life. We subsequently decided to leave our successful business and start a news magazine to report on the activities of the South Korean dictatorship. Operating under the freedom of the press afforded us by living in the United States, we were able to report on things that the news media in South Korea could not. Naturally, the South Korean dictatorship did not appreciate it, and fought us at every step of the way, driving us into bankruptcy. However, they kept on going.

After Democracy was installed in South Korea, we closed our news magazine and started a new venture in our lives, with the purpose of rebuilding the fortune that we had lost fighting the dictatorship in South Korea. The business we founded, a printing company, was also highly successful, and after only a few years we were able to sell it and comfortably retire just before celebrating our 60th birthdays.

After retiring, Joseph turned my attention from the country of my birth to my new homeland. I noticed that Korean Americans make up the largest ethnic group in my then hometown of Cerritos, yet Korean Americans were lagging other ethnic groups in political representation on the city council. I therefore mobilized the Korean American community in order to field a candidate to run in the 2003 city council elections. Not finding anybody from the Korean American community willing to make the necessary sacrifices, I decided to throw my own hat into the ring. I lost the first time he ran, but was undeterred, and the second time I ran he lost by less than 300 votes. I finally won on his third try. In between the three campaigns, I also went back and fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting a Ph.D.

Now, as a retired councilmember, I have been focusing my attention on bringing peace to Korea. I founded the non-profit foundation KUSPI, which is an abbreviation for Korea-US Peace Institute. The goal of the foundation is to educate both the American and Korean public about the origins of the conflict in Korea and offer solutions to peacefully resolve the conflict. I have written five books on the topic of the conflict in Korea and the nuclear crisis inflicting the Peninsula. As part of my work with KUSPI, I am in the process of writing a new comprehensive book, this one in English, about the conflict. I expect to have this book completed after the June 5 elections.

Download my full biography from http://www.josephcho4senate.com/images/My%20Calling%20Joseph%20Cho.pdf

I have spent the majority of my life fighting for Democracy, Social Justice, and Equality. Those are the most important roles of government. Having lived under the military dictatorship that used to rule South Korea, I have a good appreciation and deeply cherish those concepts.

I don’t have a fancy bio like my opponents. But I also don’t owe favors to an intricate web of special interest connections like my opponents either. I don’t have credentials like the bureaucratic class that runs more and more of our lives. But I’m also not arrogant enough to think I know what’s best for you without your input.

I’m a husband and a father who wants to help make sure the California I enjoyed survives for all of our children and their children to enjoy.

We don’t have an easy life with money to burn on a campaign. We live in a rental house. We’d rather spend our time with our kids and rescue-animal pets. We have bills and stress and all of the things that everyday Californians like you deal with day to day.

I believe in a limited and accountable govenrment. I do not ascribe to either modern party as I do not care what initial is behind your name if you're not holding up the values you espouse. If I had to fashion my political ideology around previous candidates I would say perhaps Grover Cleveland on the (D) side and Calvin Coolidge on the (R).

I believe that the government cannot do anything for you without first doing something to somebody else and as such we've grown government to the point of being completely unnacountable. This needs to end and we need to start to remember that our political leaders work for us and not the other way around. I'm tired of so many of my CA friends becoming online friends because Sacramento and local politican are more interested in cronyism than what is best for the people as a whole.