Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
INTERVIEWER & NARRATOR:
Sanford Gottlieb, Senior Producer
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
MARKETING & OPERATIONS:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Marguerite Arnold
Nick Moore
Daniel Sagalyn
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Sanford Gottlieb
PROGRAM PRODUCER:
Nick Moore
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
548
INITIAL BROADCAST:
16 August 1992
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1992, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
Rep. HOWARD BERMAN, (D-CA)
House of Representatives
ANTHONY DOWNS
Urban Economist, Brookings Institution
Rep. SAM GEJDENSON, (D-CT)
House of Representatives
DAVID HACKWORTH, (USA, Ret.)
Special Correspondent, Newsweek
Rev. JESSE JACKSON
Rainbow Coalition
ANN MARKUSEN
Economist & Author, Rutgers University
Senator DAVID PRYOR, (D-AR)
Senate Democratic Task Force on Defense Transition
Mayor KURT SCHMOKE
Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland (D)
NARRATOR: In Groton, Connecticut Congress has temporarily saved the jobs of shipyard workers by paying for Seawolf sub-marines the Pentagon doesn't want.
In Los Angeles, citizens are looking for resources to rebuild from the ashes of fire and rage.
In post-cold war America, there's a big gap between efforts to preserve existing jobs in weapons plants and efforts to save our decaying, often violent cities.
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
Today in the United States we have a highly skilled workforce of about three million people building weapons. In many cases, we no longer need the weapons that are being built. These weapons are being built, to some extent, for the jobs that they provide and the profits they make for our industries.
The question before us today is whether or not we should continue to build weapons we no longer need or whether we should convert our industries to improve the quality of life in the United States. Our program is about that today.
NARRATOR: With the cold war over, the Defense Department proposes to stop building a few major weapons systems. The Seawolf attack submarine is one of them.
There already is a large and growing force of other attack submarines, almost 100 of them expected to be in commission by 1996. In other countries, more submarines are being taken out of service than are entering service.
The mission of the Seawolf when originally designed was, "To counter the rapidly increasing capabilities of the Soviet submarine and surface forces projected for the 21st Century."
But today the Soviet Union no longer exists. The US and Russian navies have conducted their first joint exercise. American war ships sail the oceans essentially free of threat. So, what is the need for a costly new 9000-ton US attack submarine?
Seven point four billion dollars has already been spent or approved for research, development and initial procurement for the Seawolf. Each one built will cost taxpayers and additional $2 billion. But Congress, confronting ten million Americans without jobs, has voted to continue the Seawolf program for a year.
Senator David Pryor, a member of the Democratic leadership team in the US Senate, is candid about the reason he and others supported the Seawolf.
Senator DAVID PRYOR (D-AR): I did vote for the Seawolf.
INTERVIEWER: On what grounds?
Senator PRYOR: I voted for the Seawolf on economic grounds and the fact that I did not believe that this area of our country could absorb that economic loss in that period of time. I also hope that I never have to vote for it again because I don't think I can support the Seawolf.
I also hope though that when the time rolls around, that when my military jobs get in trouble, if we have not made that transition, I hope that they will know that Arkansas, my home state, my hometown, is having economic transition problems and I hope the same people that asked me for my help will remember me.
NARRATOR: General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division operates the naval shipyard at Groton, Connecticut. Its submarine production force is 19,000 strong, with 13,500 working in Groton. These workers, understandably, want to keep their jobs.
General Dynamics lobbied hard to save the Seawolf. It hired the lobbying firm of Cassidy and Associates and its public relations affiliate, Powell Tate. Powell Tate launched a full-court press to bring General Dynamics' spokesmen before the media to defend the Seawolf.
General Dynamics and its supporters on Capitol Hill emphasized the threat of job loss and the need to keep the submarine industrial base. For now, the lobbying campaign has succeeded.
To build and service submarines, the Navy can draw upon two private shipyards -- General Dynamics' Electric Boat in Connecticut and Tenneco's at Newport News, Virginia -- plus six Navy-owned yards. Looking at the Navy's needs for the foreseeable future, that represents lots of excess capacity. Some of those yards will certainly face closure.
Sam Gejdenson is the vigorous congressman who represents the Electric Boat workers in Connecticut and fights hard for their jobs. He highlights one of the arguments that was effective in persuading his colleagues to keep funding the Seawolf: the estimated costs of shutting down production.
Rep. SAM GEJDENSON (D-CT): When the administration acted initially, it had not a clue as to what this would cost the tax-payers, and then their own people came back with costs that were very close to $2 billion. So, the choice for the Congress became whether or not we'd spend $2 billion and get a pile of parts or whether we'd spend slightly over $2 billion and have a system in place that would last for 30 years.
NARRATOR: Of course, the lifetime costs of operating, maintaining and overhauling a Seawolf would add several billion dollars on top of the building costs.
General Dynamics, which sold $7.4 billion worth of weapons to the Pentagon in 1991, has other means of persuasion at its disposal. The corporation contributed almost $307,000 to influential members of Congress in a recent 15-month period.
The General Dynamics board of directors includes a former secretary of defense, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the former Supreme Commander, Europe and a former secretary of state.
Senator PRYOR: It's hard to cut military spending because military spending is the basis of the -- or, let me call it the economic base of probably a 150 cities and communities in America. We are military-dependent. Seventy percent of all of the research and the federal research dollars are related to military.
NARRATOR: Representative Gejdenson says the administration is unprepared to offer incentives to military contractors to shift into civilian production. This encourages members of Congress to fight even harder to protect military-related jobs in their states and districts.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have any indication that General Dynamics is willing to look for other alternatives?
Rep. GEJDENSON: I know for a fact that they are working on other alternatives, some I hope to be able to announce in the very near future. But the real problem here again has been the administration. It's I think correct to say that defense companies have not been eager to seek out diversified industrial activity, but it hasn't simply been a neutral playing field.
NARRATOR: Congressman Gejdenson says the Defense Department has given the wrong signals to nuclear shipyards about moving into commercial markets.
Rep. GEJDENSON: They have been directed by the Pentagon that if they seek outside activity, they could be injured. And so, what they were basically told was if you try to diversify, we will not look at this as a favorable act and you might lose contracts as a result of this, which is a completely stupid thing for the government to do.
NARRATOR: Senator Pryor agrees. He chairs the Senate Democratic Task Force on Defense Transition.
Senator PRYOR: We first found that our government was doing nothing about it. Mr. Bush, the administration; zero. In fact, the one agency of our government over in the Department of Defense only has 17 people and they were trying to cut the staff in half or cut the appropriation in half.
INTERVIEWER: That's the Office of Economic Adjustment.
Senator PRYOR: Yes. And that's really to deal with all of the communities out there across America that are going to be affected by this. I was pretty shocked by that myself. I did not know it was that bad.
NARRATOR: The government has been slow to provide even temporary assistance. The administration delayed dispensing
$200 million voted by Congress in 1990 to help workers in military-dependent communities. But Congress, too, has been slow to respond.
For years, Congress ignored calls to encourage military contractors to prepare standby plans for civilian production. Today, as in the past, many members of Congress have succumbed to the pressures to keep the arms contracts flowing. Military spending is now the country's number one jobs program.
Secretary of Defense DICK CHENEY (before Senate Arms Services Committee): "Of greatest concern to me is what I would describe as pork. Congress has directed me to spend money on all kinds of things that are not related to defense but mostly related to politics back home in the district."
NARRATOR: Retired Colonel David Hackworth is the Army's most decorated living veteran.
DAVID HACKWORTH: It doesn't make sense to spend all of that money to build B-2s, and stealth fighters, and submarines, and cruisers, and all of this stuff that's basically redundant, that we don't need because the cold war is over just to hire somebody for a job when -- Then when we end up with the brand new equipment, a brand new aircraft carrier that you've just spent $4 billion putting it together, you need to spend another $6 billion putting airplanes on it, putting radars on it, training a crew, keeping it operational, and now we've got an aircraft carrier that we don't need.
Better not to build the carrier and better to build merchant ships and put America back in the maritime service or taking the tank factory and making it an ethanol factory and let us produce our own fuel.
NARRATOR: There's a growing consensus in the country that security begins at home and there's intense competition for the tax monies now being spent on the Seawolf, aircraft carriers and other military programs. Pressure is mounting for much more federal aid to America's suffering cities. Thousands of city dwellers joined a "Save Our Cities, Save Our Children " march on Washington endorsed by the United States Conference of Mayors.
WOMAN at MARCH: We need, our cities need money and it needs money for our youth, for our health care system, for our schools. And without that, then there's going to be a lot of violence because 50 percent of our youth are unemployed. There's nothing else for them to do.
NARRATOR: Urban economist Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution says a whole range of problems afflicts the cities.
ANTHONY DOWNS: It's a complex of many different problems that have come together in certain neighborhoods of many of our largest cities. I'd say there are at least five, maybe ten different problems revolving around such things as inadequate nutrition and care for young children, and high crime rates and drug abuse, lack of jobs, and inability of people to get transportation to other areas. All kinds of things, not just one or two things.
NARRATOR: Colonel Hackworth, now a special correspondent for Newsweek magazine, grew up poor in Los Angeles in the 1940s. We asked him to compare the situation there with today.
Col. HACKWORTH: Well, it's grown in terms of explosiveness. The problems were just starting in the forties. And the mates of mine, now it's their grandchildren that are being affected because of the jobless situation, the conditions of the inner cities, and so on. It's a problem that's never been attended to, looked after, solved.
NARRATOR: For Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, who spoke at the "Save Our Cities" rally, the main urban problem is neglect by the national government. The National League of Cities estimates that federal aid to cities fell about 60 percent during the 1980s.
Mayor KURT SCHMOKE: We just are trying to get a new partner-ship with the federal government; not a replay of the whole war on poverty, but a new partnership. And we would focus it on job creation and on investments like in housing and development of the infrastructure, things of that nature, so that it's not just make-work, it's real investments that also are labor-intensive.
NARRATOR: Even as private non-profit groups help some neighborhoods rebuild, cash-strapped mayors across the country have a thick pile of development projects on the shelf waiting to be funded.
Mayor SCHMOKE: The Conference of Mayors presented to the White House and the Congress a package of 7000 projects that are ready to go; that is, have been through all the permitting process and they just need some money. And these projects, if they were fully funded, would result in over 400,000 new jobs being created this year. So, we're not talking about pie in the sky or ill-defined projects or just throwing money at it.
NARRATOR: The Conference of Mayors has put a price tag on its proposals for urban recovery.
Mayor SCHMOKE: If they fully funded our entire economic stimulus package, that's $34.8 billion. Now people say that's a lot of money, but just last week the House of Representatives was talking about spending $44 billion on buying 20 B-2 bombers. And so, we know that the question isn't a matter of wallet, it's a question of will: What do you want to spend it on? And we think that the cities are as important to the national security as these B-2 bombers.
NARRATOR: Participants in the rally echoed Mayor Schmoke's sentiments.
MAN at RALLY: We need to have a government that'll focus on the problems of the cities, that'll focus on social programs instead of military programs.
MAN at RALLY: Education, health care. Because it's ridiculous to spend X amount of billions of dollars on a per capita basis more on the military than on social programs, than on individuals here in America.
NARRATOR: The battle to save the cities, says economist Anthony Downs, has to be fought on many fronts.
Mr. DOWNS: We need a sustained, long-term, complex, multi-faceted approach to this set of problems if we're going to solve them. It ranges from radically reforming our schools to changing the emphasis of how we're spending money in the anti-drug programs, from trying to stop the importing of drugs to try and rehabilitate people and to shift the criminal penalties away from the drug dealers to the drug users, who are the ones that really are responsible for the drug business; and changing the nurturing of children, changing all kinds of things.
NARRATOR: The Reverend Jesse Jackson, like Anthony Downs, advocates a long-term commitment to rebuild the cities. At the Mayor's March on Washington we asked him:
INTERVIEWER: Where would the money come from?
Rev. JESSE JACKSON: A combination. One, we can cut the military budget without cutting our defense. It does not make sense to be spending $150 billion a year defending ourselves from a Soviet threat or continually making weapons for a war that will not be fought because it simply is corruption for some politicians in their zones back home.
NARRATOR: Second, Reverend Jackson says, the wealthy must pay their fair share of taxes and public pension funds could be tapped to set-up development banks.
Rev. JACKSON: It is a way to work our way out of a recession and not welfare our way into despair.
NARRATOR: New jobs, lots of new jobs would ease the problems both of city dwellers and of the workers who will be laid off as military spending goes down. But where are these jobs going to come from?
Ann Markusen is an economics professor at Rutgers University and co-author of "Dismantling the Cold War Economy." She's a leading voice for shifting federal dollars from the military to civilian needs, with private companies and their employees doing the work.
ANN MARKUSEN: But the good news is that there really is a 150 billion dollar or more peace dividend to be had out there. And it is completely reasonable to say let's invest a good portion of that into rebuilding our basic industries, into rebuilding our infrastructure, including our educational system, and into creating a new set of industries that would help us achieve peaceful missions: the environment, education, health, transportation systems, things that we've put off that most people in this country know we need very badly. Why not really build some industries around those?
NARRATOR: Transportation could prove to be a source of many new jobs for those who now build weapons, those whose jobs have disappeared and those who have never had jobs.
Rep. GEJDENSON: What we need to do is take a look at what we need as a country. A mag-lev train from Boston to Florida? Fine, let the federal government provide the financing to attract these same welders, and sheet metal workers, and wiring people, and computer people into these new areas. It will retain the skills you need and it will help the economy.
Rev. JACKSON: The Japanese have a railroad that goes 400 miles per hour. If we made that same investment, you could go from L.A. to New York in eight hours. And we could lay the beds, and make the steel, and lay the rail, and drive the trains, connect small town and big town USA. That's how we have economic growth and that's how we take the pressure off of people who are now, in desperation, fighting each other.
Ms. MARKUSEN: Both in Los Angeles, where there's a small scale effort, through the newly formed Americon Company, to pro- duce an electric car, and also in Detroit, through a consortium of GM and some of the other companies with some interesting new subcontractors, there are efforts now to build an electric car. And that electric car would solve some of our pollution problems, be very attractive to cities, not only in the United States but in other parts of the world, and employ large numbers of people making components and batteries and all of the things that we would go into that electric car.
NARRATOR: The "Big Three" automakers, the Electric Power Research Institute and the Department of Energy are working together to find new technologies for an electric car.
The Ovonic Battery Company of Troy, Michigan, with only 60 employees, has won the first grant from this consortium to produce a promising new type of electric car battery. With its battery, says this cutting edge company, an electric car could travel 250 miles before needing a charge.
In Southern California, Congressman Howard Berman was one of those who helped put together the group working on an electric car.
Rep. BERMAN: Well, long ago we saw what was happening with our defense budgets and what that was going to mean for southern California. And we met with aerospace officials, people who were heavily involved in defense contracting, and we put together a consortium, an advanced transportation consortium, focusing initially on electric cars and on lightweight materials, with cooperation at the state and local government, a broad array of businesses, large companies, small suppliers, interconnected through computer networks.
NARRATOR: The leaders of this new partnership estimate that as many as 55,000 engineering and manufacturing jobs could be created in southern California.
Rep. BERMAN: We're very excited about it and we're getting a great deal of cooperation now from some of these defense con-tractors. Lockheed gave us the facility. We have companies like Garrett and Rocketdyne actively involved. There's interest in doing this when you give people a creative alternative.
One example: Tremendous work went into the development of lightweight composite materials for our stealth fighter and for the B-2 bomber. Now we're working in our consortium on how to manufacture those lightweight materials much more cheaply and much more economically so they can have massive benefits for civilian products.
NARRATOR: The partnerships that have formed in California and Michigan around the development of an electric car could serve as a model in other areas.
Ms. MARKUSEN: Think about that on a larger scale. Think about the problems in the environment with air pollution, but also solid waste management, a whole series of issues that we have -- industrial pollution, which we really still need to lower dramatically to get rid of the acid problem, and so on.
NARRATOR: Ann Markusen suggests that the federal government play a temporary but important role in jump-starting new industries.
Ms. MARKUSEN: Why not have some government procurement programs for five or six years that says we are going to fund research and development and we are going to buy the output of these industries for a certain period of time to really get them launched? And at the end of that period of time, they will be employing lots of people, they will have new technologies.
NARRATOR: Throughout the cold war, the federal government lavishly supported military industry.
Rep. GEJDENSON: We have essentially had one industrial policy for 50 years, and that's been defense spending and some space spending. But defense has been, by far, the most significant industrial policy this country has had.
Ms. MARKUSEN: The computer and semi-conductor industries, for instance, in the 1950s, small struggling industries that had large chunks of research and development and 70 to 90 percent of their output was absorbed by the Pentagon for that crucial decade. In the longer run, they were able to wean themselves to where now the computing industry is only about 3 percent defense-dependent.
NARRATOR: It's not just new industries and new technologies that could help the unemployed, people in the cities and workers in the weapons plants, it's also better training and education.
Senator Pryor's task force is supporting the efforts of the Senate Labor Committee to improve the workers retraining program and make it more relevant to those in the weapons plants. But that's only a small slice of the challenge ahead. For many Americans, the problems start early.
Mr. DOWNS: The issue of poverty in our large cities is not just an issue that affects the poor people who are living there. The future of our country depends upon our getting an adequate education, an adequate nurturing for those 20 percent of our children today who are poor. And if we don't do something about it, we are not going to be competitive in the world economy. No major country can allow 20 percent of its children to grow up with inadequate health, inadequate food, inadequate care and education and still expect to be competitive and keep up with the rest of the countries in the world.
NARRATOR: With ten million people out of work and the economy still sluggish, it's no surprise that Americans want to hold on to the jobs that they do have. But hard economic times and big deficits make it hard for the country to take full advantage of the end of the cold war.
If we're going to get the kind of economy that's not dependent on submarines and tanks for jobs and the kind of government that works to save our cities, it's going to take a lot of work by a lot of active citizens.
MAN at "Save Our Cities" Rally: You can vote, you can have a voice, you can come to a rally. You can get involved in local political issues. You can get involved with community groups. You can work on a grassroots level. But if nothing else, you can vote and you can raise your voice.
Ms. MARKUSEN: Let's imagine that right now in Groton, Connecticut, instead of just debating whether we should have another Seawolf submarine or not, we said, okay, immediately we're going to give you $100,000 for a quick three-month study of what are the skills of your workforce, what other things could you produce and what are the next steps you need to know how to make that commercially viable.
Senator PRYOR: The scientists, the engineers out here in all of the government laboratories, how do we take these people, take these very highly skilled and educated individuals and sort of move them into a new position of thinking, a new mentality? How do we create not only just jobs, but new jobs? We've got to keep the jobs we have, yes; we have to create new jobs.
Col. HACKWORTH: What we need is some leadership on the part of the White House, the Congress, and so on. We can't ask the Pentagon to come up with a conversion program. It's kind of like asking an alcoholic to lock-up the liquor cabinet every night. We need somebody else to draw up a conversion plan. We've been on a war footing since 1940 and now we need to get on a peace program.
Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, after watching this program, you might very well think that this whole process is really very complex. As a matter of fact, it is really very simple. Simple in the fact that the Congress can stop the funding for any weapons system anytime they choose. Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, the Congress has not stopped any major weapons system.
Now it has to be said, however, that the Congress is trying very hard to provide some assistance to communities, to the industries and to the defense workers to ease the transition to building commercial products. They're considering as much as a billion dollars in that direction. Common sense, however, suggests that we ought no longer continue to build weapons for which there is no military need.
Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1992, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
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