Southland, Not Seattle, Is the Place to See How World Trade Really Works

It’s both ironic and revealing that many of the protests and formal proceedings at the big world trade conference in Seattle this week are almost irrelevant to Southern California, home to the most international economy anywhere in the world.

Indeed, if World Trade Organization supporters and opponents really want to see global commerce in action, they should hop a plane to Los Angeles.

Here they would see how venture capital from Singapore helps a Pasadena company, Integrated Micro Machines, create extremely sensitive pressure gauges that can bring medical advances to developing countries.

They would see how Taiwanese communications computers and venture capital can combine with the ideas behind Medical Telecommunications Associates, a company founded by a Los Angeles physician, to develop inexpensive home monitoring for patient care.

They would see how Tatung Co., the Carson-based branch of the Taiwan company that produces those computers, has extended its business to Argentina with an assist from the World Trade Center of Long Beach.

And they would see how a 20-year-old South Gate company called Distribution Services is perfecting the freight system that takes merchandise from any of 19 countries in Asia and Latin America and delivers it to Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores across the United States.

In those examples and many more, they would see how dynamic is the global interchange of goods, services, ideas and investments in this region.

International commerce is Southern California’s No. 1 economic engine. More than $200 billion worth of merchandise will move through the airports and seaports of Los Angeles and Long Beach next year, according to a new forecast by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.

And the figures for exchanges of entertainment, business software and services are equally impressive, at well more than $100 billion annually.

By one estimate, international commerce accounts for more than 410,000 of the region’s 6.5 million jobs--more than either entertainment or high technology, which also are big components in this area’s mosaic of international business.

None of this is to say that Southern California should be indifferent to the issues such as child labor, low wages and poor working conditions that are being debated in Seattle.

As do the union delegates from this region who journeyed to Seattle, Southern California businesspeople should support the inclusion of labor issues in the proposed “Millennium” round of trade talks--even though the poor, developing countries themselves oppose it.

Call it enlightened self-interest. The aim of including labor issues is to foster economic development and raise living standards in countries everywhere. The emergence of labor rights is an integral part of economic development. And rising living standards in other countries will only increase the exchanges of advanced products and services--in electronics, engineering, education and entertainment--by which Southern California makes its living.

However, most of the protests and pro-trade speeches in Seattle are irrelevant, because they fail to address what is really going on in a world, as Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council puts it, “where vast sums of capital can be moved and products can be bought and sold at the click of a mouse.”

At the very least it’s a world where cultures are changing. Consider Mixx Entertainment, a new company that has created a Web site devoted to Japanese pop culture--comic books and pro wrestling.

Mixx was founded by Stuart Levy, a Los Angeles lawyer and entertainment entrepreneur who worked in Japan, collected roughly $500,000 of venture capital there and set up his company at USC’s EC2 Annenberg Center Incubator Project.

Mixx now has $3 million in revenue from ads sold on its Tokyopop.com Web site, and Levy hopes to create new sites devoted to Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese pop cultures.

“This area is a gateway,” says Lazaros Bountour, an entrepreneur who emigrated from Greece for his education, at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., and San Diego State, and two years ago founded Ariston Technologies in Huntington Beach. Bountour’s company, which is now up to $10 million in revenue and 14 employees, provides a new kind of data connection device for Taiwan-produced cameras and video machines.

Southern California led the economy of military aerospace, and as a result, because the skills are here, it leads the economy of space satellite communications. El Segundo-based Hughes Electronics’ Space & Communications division gets roughly half its $3.5 billion in annual revenue from satellite sales outside the U.S.

Hughes is working under intensified U.S. government oversight of satellite sales to countries such as China--an object of controversy in Seattle. But Hughes, with 15,000 employees, is holding its position as the world’s leading producer of satellites, which are essential tools of the global economy.

The global trade position of this region is only going to grow, says Cobb Grantham, co-founder of Distribution Services, which employs 1,500 in four locations in Southern California and is expanding.

This region has a “great future,” Grantham says, because it has the infrastructure of trade facilities, trade organizations and financing institutions that know what they’re doing. Grantham, a native of Oklahoma who traveled Asia two decades ago, saw the promise of people in developing countries seeking a better life. So he set up his integrated logistics company, now grown to $235 million in sales, in Southern California “because this is the great center of population.”

Is a future as the crossroads of world trade a good one for Southern California? Will it provide good livelihoods and living standards for our work force? Of course it will, if Southern California’s cities and counties educate the work force to keep up with the demands of changing times.

Education is the work this region must do. Curiously, none of the demonstrations in Seattle are speaking of education. Which is another reason the demonstrations are irrelevant.

*

James Flanigan can be reached by e-mail at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Global Crossroads

As U.S. economic growth continues and Asia’s economies recover, merchandise trade through the airports and seaports of Southern California will accelerate in 2000, the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. forecasts. The total value of area imports and exports, in billions of dollars:

2000

(projected):

$201.2 billion

Source: Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.