Civic Leaders Push for New U.S. Budget Priorities : Spending: Coalition that includes union members worries that defense spending will grow at expense of jobs, housing, education and health care.

Warning that America’s economy was already teetering before the Persian Gulf crisis, a coalition of Los Angeles community leaders and union officials this week appealed for a new national spending agenda to rescue jobs, housing and an array of domestic programs.

In a press conference outside the once-bustling Todd Shipyards in San Pedro, the coalition, organized by the Los Angeles chapter of Jobs with Peace, said that Pentagon budgets and Bush Administration policies must be challenged after two decades of Cold War spending on defense. Otherwise, they said, the nation’s employment and education, housing and health care, will continue their slide toward a crisis every bit as perilous as the Persian Gulf war.

“There are many different positions on the war from the various members of the coalition,” said Los Angeles Jobs with Peace Director Anthony Thigpenn. “But we all share a concern about what the war represents: the same old way of trying to deal with international conflict . . . the billions of dollars the war will cost at the same time we have devastation at home.”

Jackie Goldberg, president of the Los Angeles Unified School District board, added, “Regardless of what the views are on this war, all of us want to say: If there isn’t more attention to education, health care and housing, then the Persian Gulf will be the least of our problems.”

The event, one of 140 rallies held across the country on Tuesday, was timed not only to question the Gulf War’s costs but also to criticize President Bush’s proposed 1992 budget, which forecasts a $280-billion deficit even with new cuts in Medicare and other programs.

Based on congressional estimates that the war is costing $500 million a day, Goldberg said the conflict, in 38 hours, will cost more than the nation spends annually on public housing. And in only five days, she said, the war will cost more than a year’s federal spending for child nutrition programs.

“We can’t let that happen,” she said.

The war’s costs, she said, come on the heels of a decade of military spending during which California lost more than $12 billion in federal funds for education, housing, job training, health care and revenue sharing for new roads and highways.

“Before going to war, there were five months of sanctions against Iraq,” she said. “But there have been 10 years of sanctions against the people of California.”

Even veterans’ benefits, the coalition members complained, have not been spared in the budget cuts by Congress and the President. “What they’re saying is, ‘Go to war, and when you come back, you’re on your own.’ And that’s a hell of a message to be sending. And we oppose it,” said Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Los Angeles chapter.

Although they addressed a range of domestic programs and budget cuts, the coalition members focused most often--and most passionately--on jobs.

“Todd Shipyards is a perfect illustration of the economic dislocation going on in this country. Although military spending doubled from 1980 to 1990, military workers are losing their jobs by the thousands,” said Sharon Delugach of Jobs with Peace.

Standing outside the gates of his former employer, ship worker William Trejo said the nation’s military priorities must be balanced against long-term stability for defense contractors, such as Todd, which closed its sprawling shipyard in 1989. Five years before, the yard had employed 5,000 workers.

“The loss of these jobs has had a tremendous effect on the community, the local economy and people’s lives,” said Trejo, president of the local chapter of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America. “We’ve had suicides. We’ve had men who were left homeless,” he said.

Although a supporter of Operation Desert Storm and military spending, Trejo said the nation must do more to improve domestic programs and keep U.S. industries competitive in peacetime. “I support what we’re doing there,” he said of the Persian Gulf War. “But I also feel we have to make our industries more competitive” through job training and other programs that move manufacturing workers to new jobs, instead of unemployment lines.

In shipbuilding, for example, Trejo said the nation must recommit itself to building what the world wants to buy, such as double-hull tankers and other vessels. “We need to be building commercial ships,” he said. “We need plants like this to reopen.”

With other coalition members representing hotel and restaurant workers, hospital employees and other manufacturing workers, the event’s organizers said they already have a broad base of support among Americans hardest hit by the war and military spending.

“For years we were told that the deficit was the most serious economic challenge facing our country and that we all had to make sacrifices,” said Thigpenn. “Then we saw that when it was necessary to bail out the financial institutions (in) the savings and loan crisis, all of a sudden they could find billions of dollars.

“But when we talk about health care or the crime in our communities or education, the money isn’t there,” he said.

“Yes, we would be here (demonstrating) if there was not a war,” Thigpenn added. “But we are very concerned that whenever there is a war, emotions are whipped around patriotism. And we do not want the military to just wrap itself around the American flag and then write itself a blank check.”