Consortium Makes Most of Time with Clinton ‘Ear’

Last week, a group of industrialists from the San Fernando Valley’s atrophied aerospace establishment obtained what they hope will be a piece of President Bill Clinton’s ear.

Their conduit was Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the Washington think tank that shaped Clinton’s campaign message of economic change.

Marshall was in Los Angeles to deliver a report Thursday on the Los Angeles riots. It recommended an urban strategy using public resources to promote smaller, more regionally oriented businesses and encouraging the formation of industrial cooperatives.

The Valley entrepreneurs think that is exactly what they are already doing. They hoped to impress their need for public support on one of Washington’s “in” crowd.

The meeting was arranged by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City), the political powerbroker behind the Valley group. Berman’s office persuaded Marshall to swing through Burbank on Wednesday evening for a two-hour informal briefing at Calstart, a nonprofit consortium of firms that is adapting aerospace technologies to designing components for electric cars.

Calstart occupies the former Lockheed plant at Hollywood Way and Empire Avenue next to the Burbank Airport. Lockheed vacated the building when it moved production to Georgia and rents it to the consortium for $1 a year.

At the appointed hour, half a dozen men in business suits distributed themselves around a conference table made for 20. Besides Marshall and David Friedman, one of the economists who wrote the riot report, the group consisted of Joshua Newman, representing Calstart; Leiv H. Blad, a former Lockheed manager who quit to form his own composites company rather than move to Georgia; Rod D. Hanks, another former Lockheed employee now a vice president of H.R. Textron, a Valencia defense contractor; Lou Kiefer, Grand Lodge Representative of the International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and Michael Storper, a professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA.

They engaged in small talk for a few minutes until a woman with the presence of Hillary Clinton stepped into the room and took her place at the head of the table.

She was Janis Berman, the congressman’s wife. Like Hillary, Janis plays a strong role in her husband’s office as a policy emissary. She is also president of the California chapter of the Democratic Leadership Council, the moderate group that led the revival of the Democratic Party by embracing the middle class.

Over the next two hours, each person in the room made a sales pitch, telling Marshall what their companies do and how the federal government can help or hurt their chances of competing in world markets.

Their language was blunt, but often turgid. Blad extolled “total quality management” and “quality functional deployment” as the new paradigm of American manufacturing. Hanks grew animated over the civilian applications of electromagnetic actuators. Storper praised Europe’s “regional capital manufacturing consortiums” and gave high marks to keiretsu , Japan’s system of interlocked supplier organizations.

At one point, Marshall, with a self-satisfied look, pulled a red, white and blue book from his briefcase: “Mandate for Change,” a 1992 publication of the Progressive Policy Institute advocating sweeping changes in the federal government. What they were talking about was all in the book, he said.

Berman said that Valley firms had adopted the philosophy long before it became popular.

“We’re about two years ahead of the rest of the country,” she said.

The basic message was clear in spite of the jargon. America, Blad said, is the best in the world at developing new technologies and the worst at commercializing them. At fault, he contended, is the military procurement system that pumps limitless cash into the production of specific items.

They saw no hope for America’s giant manufacturers to adapt. If there isn’t help for small-to-medium regional companies like theirs, they said, the Japanese will snap up the technology and sell it back to us.

In fact, two people excused themselves to join another meeting with Howard Berman and some Japanese businessmen who are interested in buying into American technology.

“Howard says, ‘If it’s jobs, we don’t care who builds it,’ ” Janis Berman said.

Marshall seemed uncomfortable with the concept of building components for a car whose manufacturer is still unknown.

“Somebody’s got to come and be the manufacturer,” he said. “Is that right?”

Newman said that wasn’t his primary concern. What is needed he said, is federal support to stimulate both market and production: a commitment to buy tens of thousands of electric cars, a tax credit for purchasers and funds to prime the leap from prototype to production.

As the meeting adjourned, Marshall rushed on to other duties.

But later, by phone from an airport in Denver, he said he was impressed by the initiative of the Valley companies and the need to put the region’s industrial capacity back to work.

“It’s hauntingly symbolized by this Lockheed building that is idle,” he said. “There is really a need to pay attention to this.”