That Los Angeles has an African American population has its foundation with the 300,000 black workers brought from the American South to work in the LA munitions factories during World War II.
Both Lockheed and Martin, later to merge and form Lockheed Martin, the world's largest arms manufacturer, were started in LA. The world's second largest arms manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, is based in LA.
Lockheed Martin, a sponsor of the "NZ Defence Industry Association Conference," in Auckland last week, employs 125,000 (security cleared) workers worldwide, and in New Zealand Lockheed Martin has 200 staff embedded in NZ military bases, undertaking prosaic work such as the $446 million upgrade on Te Mana and Te Kaha frigates and weapon and instrument repair; as well as wiring us into the "five eyes" cyber-surveillance infrastructure run out of the NSA facility at Pearl Harbour.
Excluding China, the world's arms producers' total sales in 2013 were over US$400 billion, with six American companies in the top 10; American arms sales account for over half of the world total.
Arms manufacture has been described as state-sponsored research and development and a Keynesian stimulus to the wider economy, this is certainly true of the US and it's what helped build Los Angeles.
One theory on the development of the Chinese economy links its rise to the Vietnam War in the 70s. The shipping container was in its infancy until the US Defence Department sponsored the 8ftx8ftx10ft ISO model for a trial run from Los Angeles to Saigon to supply the American forces fighting in Vietnam. Within a decade this standardised shipping container had gone global, in turn distributing Chinese manufactured goods to a global market.
In 2015 Long Beach and Los Angeles were America's largest container ports, but globally they are only 16th and 18th respectively; most of the bigger ones are in Asia, with Shanghai number one.
The idea of warfare driving cultural development is not new. That the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe in the 17th century and not somewhere else was, some have suggested, because of Europe's peculiar geography of competing warring states.
These days globalisation has produced so many shared interests in trade and finance that states prefer to go to arbitration than to war. There are now remarkably few wars between states. Conflicts are now mostly civil wars and these conflicts within states kill fewer people than wars between states.
In 2011 the world's three deadliest conflicts were in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, but deaths in those conflicts were far fewer than the murders carried out in Mexico's drug wars, with America being the main buyer of the drugs and the seller of the arms. The street gangs of LA are a legend in that "plaza".
The arms industry continues to move with the times; now there is growth to be had with the state policing of its own citizens in an increasingly militarised, American way.
Just as we got used to helicopters and black-clad, paramilitary NZ police with all the latest equipment swooping on the Kim Dotcom mansion in Auckland (on behalf of Hollywood) they were doing the same (minus the helicopters) to our local criminal family in Abbot St, Gonville.
"High intensity policing" and "low intensity warfare" are threatening to merge, at least in LA. The US Army Medical Corps has its training hospital in South LA because of the disproportionately high numbers of people with gunshot wounds presenting there. All the while Hollywood, once again based in LA, presents a constant stream of propaganda to the world, a summary of which is: The gun solves all problems. For an excellent account of the developmental history of Los Angeles, read The Ecology of Fear by UCLA lecturer Mike Davis.
