Of Guns, Butter and Pols

The most interesting and intense politics in the Southland these days are the politics of the defense business.

Politicians are moving into action because of the possibility that the Cold War’s end will mean cutbacks in defense plants from Long Beach to Palmdale. If peace has a price, a good part of it will be paid by city council members whose constituencies include unemployed defense workers. They now find themselves grappling with something they have little obvious power to affect--a massive change in the national economy, the so-called peace dividend. As hard as these lawmakers may work to improve the lives of residents, they know it can all be wiped out by a couple of plant closures.

The intensity was evident last week in North Hollywood, where the Los Angeles City Council held a special meeting to discuss Lockheed Corp.’s decision to close its 9,500-employee Burbank plant, one of the San Fernando Valley’s largest industrial facilities. Some of its work will be shifted to Palmdale, but much will go to Georgia.

A young man from Lockheed, full of corporate sincerity, tried to explain: There’s not enough business to support the Burbank plant. California’s environmental laws are too strict. And workmen’s compensation benefits are too generous. Nonsense, snapped City Council President John Ferraro. Lockheed’s moving, he said, because the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn, is from Georgia.

You don’t always lose. That may be the case in Pico Rivera, where Northrop Corp. makes the B-2 Stealth bomber in a plant employing 10,500. The expensive B-2 was under heavy attack early this year by some powerful House leaders. The end of the Cold War strengthened their hand.

Then, just as the anti-B-2 campaign was peaking, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and we jumped in. Stealth lovers said it showed the nation needed a new high-tech bomber.

But that won’t be enough to save the B-2. The Stealth still needs political support.

Northrop is trying to build it with commercials starring retired Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound. And it’s urging employees to write their congressional representatives to support the plane.

The Pico Rivera City Council took a more direct approach, pressuring its congressman, Estaban E. Torres.

Liberal Democrat Torres was a worry to city government. He’s not a Pentagon yes man. He voted for cutting President Reagan’s defense budget. And he’s cast votes against the MX missile and the B-1 bomber. Because his district is strongly Democratic, those votes would seem to suit his constituents. But council members knew Pico Rivera is more complicated than that.

Pico Rivera is a city of 60,000, located several miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. These flatlands once were filled with walnut, orange and avocado groves. But the orchards gave way to residential subdivisions and industry after World War II, and became a suburban haven for working-class homeowners, heavily Latino, who had moved out of East Los Angeles. Three of the five City Council members are Latino.

These blue-collar and white-collar suburbanites have a strong conservative streak. The Democratic presidential nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, barely carried the area in 1988. Ronald Reagan was an easy winner there in 1984, as was GOP Gov. George Deukmejian in 1986.

So when Torres met with the Pico Rivera City Council last month to discuss the B-2, he wasn’t talking to a delegation of doves. “All our council members were in the service,” said City Manager Dennis Courtemarch. “They believe a strong defense is important.”

The council members also reminded Torres of the project’s impact on the community. Between 200 and 300 Pico Rivera residents are among Northrop’s plant employees. And because of its big cafeteria and large employee store, the company is Pico Rivera’s largest sales tax payer.

Torres understood. He also knew that there were many businesses in and around Pico Rivera that sold goods to Northrop or were B-2 subcontractors. And he saw the value of the B-2, although not the 175 sought by President Bush. “We should complete the first 15 in the next few years,” he told me later. “We need the defense system in place.”

Stealth may have been saved. If so, it’ll be recorded in the national press as a victory for the President, and as evidence of how the Iraqi invasion transformed public opinion about defense spending.

That’ll all true. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that part of the credit goes to the little-known politicians of Pico Rivera, who played their small part in the politics of the defense business.