Jerry Brown
Kupfer, David
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Jerry Brown 'If we don't have morality at the top, how do you expect morality at street level!9 BY DAVID KUPFER Jerry Brown has been called everything from an ascetic...
...As a radio talk-show host, Brown has gone noncommercial...
...Brown: True spiritual practice teaches you to overcome your conditioning, your programming...
...They drew the conclusion that, well, the Panthers were wacky, and now the militias are wacky...
...At the end, Jerry sped up and sprinted...
...Does he have a right to kill innocent people to send a message to Saddam Hussein...
...It is austere on the outside and generous on the inside, with a radio studio, offices, a conference room (currently used as a meditation space), auditorium, apartments, and guest rooms for residents and volunteers...
...If you really look at it, the United States has certainly been submerged in a transnational system where one-person-one-vote or the checks-and-balances as envisioned by the founders in the Federalist Papers barely exist...
...Do you care more about your poll ratings, or do you care more about those people whom you never met before...
...They get student loans to pay for their cars...
...We can look to the Bible, we can look to our experience...
...Brown: Yes...
...That's the analysis that's missing...
...So The New York Times did a piece comparing the militias to the Black Panthers, not ever drawing the conclusion that they both were talking about excess oppressive practices by the government...
...So through a whole variety of topics I've had the opportunity to talk to very thoughtful people and to communicate my views over the air...
...They're just quiet and passive...
...You have the ACLU and the NRA, two groups that are not viewed by the establishment very seriously...
...A free society can only exist if there's a sufficient degree of material equality...
...After one of his final national radio broadcasts, we toured at a good pace through the industrial district of West Oakland where he now lives...
...So what is that all about...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Jerry Brown 'If we don't have morality at the top, how do you expect morality at street level!9 BY DAVID KUPFER Jerry Brown has been called everything from an ascetic anti-politician to a New Age Huey Long...
...Brown: The radio show has been an opportunity for me every day, because it's two hours a day, five days a week, to study, in some depth, a topic, from the effect of air pollution on health, to toxic-waste incinerators, to natural-rate-of-unemployment theory, to the diagnosis of prostate cancer and how that can be abused by the medical industry, to Jennifer Harbury...
...People are willing to live under discipline...
...Bill Clinton and I had a debate in New York City with Mayor Dinkins and the entire couch-potato press corps there...
...I don't know when they're going to find out...
...Today, the stateless multinationals have a lot more influence on what the Senate does than the people...
...Brown: 100,000 people, actively engaged...
...It doesn't appear to be coming from the minority communities...
...A lot of the Senators will think they're having a debate, but where's the agenda to reduce the corporate irresponsibility, to reduce their capacity to poison the environment, to reduce the capacity to defraud, to reduce the capacity to exploit labor...
...At the University of California Law School, it costs $10,000 in tuition...
...Q: Have you been enjoying your role as a talk-show host...
...Brown: Personally affected me...
...Brown: I'm way surprised...
...I've pursued it for many years of my life and I've also neglected it for many years of my life...
...Certainly there is a revolving door and there is a connection to the private interests that propelled them forward and will receive them into their welcoming arms when they've finished...
...We need a few people to die, just to make an example of them...
...Turning his back on traditional party politics, he denounced the Democrats for relying on special interests...
...Most Senators stay in Washington after they've finished...
...In the religious context, they call it your attachments...
...If he sells some crack and is put in prison, he will generate double that, $24,000, to the measured gross domestic product...
...The system is rewarding things that shouldn't be rewarded...
...Q: How many people were in "We the People," the organization that grew out of your Presidential campaign, at its height...
...And out of that context, to speak to people, and engage others in the conversation of self-governance...
...In fact, I started the prison building...
...In seventh grade if you want to play on the football team, you have to stand in front of the urinal with a guy fifteen feet behind you to make sure you're really urinating into the jar and then they take your urine to make sure it's hot so you didn't have any in your pocket from another time so they can check out whether you're using a drug...
...He returned, he says, energized and determined to build a grassroots Democratic Party for California...
...If your consciousness is broadened and if you increase your awareness, then your action should follow, because action and consciousness are linked together...
...Q: Have you been surprised about the growth of the prisons since you were governor...
...It appears to be a deeply corrupted form of activity that cannot be good for the American government, is not right morally, it is not good for the country, and it's kept a secret...
...Brown: Yeah...
...Brown: Because it's all based on bribery...
...The reason I'm doing that is that I want to be in the Bay Area, because that's where I'm located and that's the concrete focus of my work...
...The most significant part of this is again the tilt toward authority, toward subservience, toward obedience, toward a nation of sheep...
...If you say castrating somebody, putting a balloon full of water down their throat, or cutting their arms off with electric saws—what they did in El Salvador and Guatemala—horrible, horrible things, cutting heads off, putting them on platters, that was reported by the Jesuit magazine America...
...Clinton goes up to New Hampshire and talks with Gingrich about political reform...
...To get the money, you must commit common-law bribery, which is defined as "a receipt of anything of value where the intent is to influence you in your official capacity...
...Where would the institutional base come from...
...Democracy needs some face-to-face and local give-and-take, not soundbites and manipulation...
...Saint Ignatius, which I studied as a Jesuit novice, said you have to free yourself from inordinate attachment...
...And outlawing the bribe means fundamentally restructuring the American political system...
...So this anti-terrorism bill is a perfect example of the absolute terminal state of the Democratic Party, and possibly even the democratic experiment...
...Q: You've said that President Clinton is indictable...
...So I feel that I have a deeper understanding of the politics, the economics, the culture of our society...
...Inordinate attachment, that means you crave, you need, you are dependent on desires for material things that distort your capacity for wisdom...
...Nor did he respond to my personal appeal that I made in a meeting with him in the Mayflower Hotel before the convention to raise the minimum wage $1 and index it...
...That was an eye-opener to read...
...I broke ground on it...
...Radio is a non-visual medium, so you have to communicate feeling...
...His 1992 Presidential campaign focused on bashing incumbents...
...Brown: And so are all politicians...
...Q: Do you think folks who have led the national party such as Robert Strauss, Ron Brown, and Charles Manatt really think they're serving the interests of the people of the country...
...Because the power of these financial flows is what is pushing the agenda...
...So Washington is a virtual reality...
...Q: Give me your thoughts on the Supreme Court decision that you just referred to...
...I thought, well, we'll build some new prisons and then close the old ones down...
...There was no war, there was no judicial order—not even a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution...
...Every one of these guys—Dole, Gramm—they're playing football, and in the football game of politics, you have to have the big bucks and the 1 percent who own 39 percent of all the assets...
...It's there, certainly among younger people, among a lot of people who voted for Perot, among people who didn't vote, among working-class people, there's a skepticism...
...Q: Is there anyone you respect in politics today...
...Either you're from the 1 percent or you borrow money, borrow money, borrow money...
...Clinton had a drive-by shooting in Baghdad...
...The only action is on the right...
...They've just bought into this stuff...
...The symbolic fallout of drug testing is that the child learns without even being able to debate it that his job is to follow orders even to the point of yielding up bodily fluids to the state to be evaluated by a process that he or she can't understand...
...Q: Yet we're spending less and less on public education...
...Brown: Well, I think that's a good place to start: with great doubt [laughs...
...Q: Do you think the anti-terrorism bill now before Congress takes away a significant portion of our civil rights...
...The militias are going in there and calling attention to the dangerous power-grab of the state...
...Q: And students have become, what did you say, "New Age serfs...
...That power is the reality, unless you have an agenda for changing that reality, disrupting it, coming up with an alternative for the people to consider...
...The entire story of Haiti...
...It's underscoring again that these people are betraying the public trust, seemingly whenever they get a chance...
...While governor of California, he railed against nuclear power, started a cancer registry linking pollution to its consequences, and bolstered farmworkers' rights...
...I believe a half dozen or more landed and eight people were killed...
...People who live selfish lives or spend their time building little private empires of greed are missing something...
...Brown: No...
...That's what the Buddhists call nonattachment and the Jesuits call detachment...
...Brown: Not only does it take away rights, but it sets precedent for unlimited detention, for roving wiretaps, for trials based on secret evidence, for eliminating the capacity to confront witnesses, for blacklisting organizations, for punishing people based on guilt by association, restricting habeas corpus, which is the fundamental remedy to unlawful detention by state authorities...
...What's the moral label that you affix to that...
...Brown had just finished a bowl of rice when we spoke...
...A man earning $6 an hour who works 2,000 hours a year adds $12,000 to the gross domestic product...
...Q: Do you have any heroes...
...Even when we do dumb things, it's because we have a dumb idea in the back of our head...
...He got himself elected as chair of the California Democratic Party, but, he says, "I had to promise to do fundraising to get all the incumbents reelected," so he quit in frustration...
...They're too busy posturing...
...It's not going to come from the environmentalists...
...From Zen, I learned how conditioned I was...
...Q: Do you think that anyone to the left of Clinton will run in the primaries...
...Poor people are being fed into the system as raw material for prisons...
...Which is to say there's a vacuum...
...That is bribery, per se...
...There's no reason why the President's polling should go up fifteen points...
...Q: How does the plight of cities like Oakland relate to national politics...
...So that got me started...
...It's the survival agenda of the incumbents that I'm most concerned about...
...Nothing happening because the bill goes nowhere, the name and the number of the bill goes out, the funds are raised, the conferences are held, but in terms of things happening in the world, nothing...
...Brown: The experience of the $100 limit in the campaign, making fundraising no longer the key to the campaign, gave me a detachment and a separation to observe the incredible dependency of the politician, and therefore the government, on this very narrow band of people at the highest strata of the society...
...But it's just growing and growing and growing...
...Q: How did you become a reformed politician...
...It's almost Like burning a witch...
...That kind of maldistribution is ripping the democracy apart, so that's worth some anger if you care about a free society...
...Now what's that...
...The Democratic Party has been taken over in a leveraged buyout by these powerful interests...
...Clinton won...
...Q: What do you think the price is we're paying for all the murder and mayhem committed by the United States abroad...
...This is a new phenomenon...
...It will give a voice to where I am, as opposed to this scattered broadcast across the nation...
...He left politics in 1993 and went on a spiritual journey, which took him to a Zen center in Japan and to India, where he worked with Mother Teresa and the dying in Calcutta...
...And all these militia people are marching around because they think the state has been taken over...
...They're too busy raising money...
...They were not the ones who were killed...
...Q: What are the greatest threats to democracy in America...
...You can either unselfconsciously follow your program or you can work to transcend it...
...Q: Do you envision a national plan of action through "We the People" in terms of leadership on things such as boycotts or other campaigns...
...Brown: I certainly envision a growing and widening scope of activity, but right now the key is to plant "We the People" on a firm footing and that means this building, and then the next block, and then the next block after that...
...Q: What was the turning point...
...I have no idea...
...What is the money going for...
...It's a major restriction of American liberty that is now being cheerleaded by Teddy Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, and every other liberal and conservative—with eight exceptions in the Senate, maybe more exceptions in the House...
...The FBI trots out its wish list and you get several hundred more agents and all the other agents combined are up to 1,000...
...Oakland...
...It was supposed to be about the alleged plot against Bush...
...Brown: I don't know about the far-right agenda...
...Then as I read more about covert action, what the intelligence agencies are doing, and what really went on in Vietnam, in Grenada, in Reagan's bombing of Qaddafi, Clinton's bombing in Baghdad, or Bush's intervention in Panama, I realized that there is an immoral, inhuman kind of formula that is being pursued by the government...
...He didn't respond to my appeal to support a $100 limit in the Democratic platform...
...As we become more enlightened, we're going to have to outlaw the bribe...
...I see these amazing rip-offs by those in power, and experience how turned-off people are...
...All three working together.* David Kupfer is an environmentalist, writes, and is working on his surfing technique on the northwest edge of California...
...As the party chairman, I could experience more clearly the unreality of contemporary politics...
...Brown: It depends on what I'm talking about...
...Brown: I would say I'm certainly aware of the world of spiritual practice...
...What happened to the alleged plotters...
...Brown* I don't know...
...He appointed more women than any other governor during his time in office...
...I believe we have to look into our collective condition and we have to say, "Does this square with what we know to be right...
...His interview with Amory Lovins appeared in the May 1995 issue of The Progressive...
...Brown: This is the post-heroic period...
...Q: Do you fear the far-right agenda...
...It is both his home and the headquarters of "We the People," the nonprofit organization that grew out of his 1992 Presidential campaign...
...Q: Tell me about the path...
...Q: You frequently sound angry on the radio...
...So we are focused in the neighborhood, locally, but the issues are justice and sustainability...
...And, to quote Ross Perot, "when you lift the hood, it ain't pretty in there...
...Q: Because...
...Well, it's like going to graduate school every day, because I'm really looking at the day's events—history as it's being created—and I analyze it and make sense of it in a way that the newspapers don't...
...So I believe we need to do something very specific and that's why this project is committed to working locally: public-interest law firm, community gardens, cooperative organic grocery store, other initiatives, like, if possible, a child-care center, or a restaurant for homeless people, and activities in the community which could have an organizing significance...
...I dedicated the first prison in twenty-five years...
...The people who were involved with the murders of Haiti were receiving American intelligence payments...
...You know Reagan as governor didn't lock that many people up...
...Why is the money and prestige of America playing into that...
...This is the way the state builds totalitarian consciousness...
...That is dangerous...
...He ran the most daring and provocative campaign of any of the candidates, only accepting campaign contributions of $100 or less...
...What do you have...
...They buy cars, they buy insurance on their cars...
...The Panthers committed crimes, but that doesn't mean that they weren't speaking from an authentic community and speaking heroically in many, many instances...
...Son of two-term California Governor Pat Brown, Edmund G. Brown Jr...
...You won't see it, but you will know, you can believe, that the results will tell us whether you're clean or not...
...It's going to replace state school support, which has been channeled into the prisons...
...Brown: I don't know about prices...
...You take the child's mind at a vulnerable age and you embed deeply in the consciousness of that child the idea that taking orders is what it's about to be an American...
...He remains a maverick in the political world today...
...Brown moved to Oakland from San Francisco last year in order to be closer to the site of his radio broadcast and his community-development efforts...
...Brown: The utter dependency of the politicians on the growing concentration of economic wealth and their growing isolation from ordinary people...
...Brown: I don't know what they think...
...Brown: I never expected it...
...He admitted he was down from ten cups to three ounces of coffee a day, and was three days into a rice-only diet for physical and mental cleansing...
...It was just, "Let's send twenty-five Tomahawk missiles toward Baghdad...
...Eventually, other public stations will pick up the program...
...The precondition is to free yourself from, as they say, your addictions...
...What is it they say—to achieve enlightenment you need great faith, great perseverance, and great doubt...
...I wouldn't be surprised if most Senators hadn't read the bill...
...This is like some Foucauldian nightmare...
...Brown: It's hard to tell...
...Q: Do you feel that the millions of people who voted for you in the 1992 Presidential primary have been cheated, considering the fact that the agenda that you put forth has been barely scratched by the Clinton Administration...
...How do we treat friends...
...And I want to be very clear that I don't exempt myself from the process...
...Those people didn't do anything...
...And I can say categorically that campaign contributions are meant to influence public officials in their public capacity...
...He looked fit and rested, and was clad in denim and cowboy boots...
...Things have shifted...
...If you say human-rights violation, that's an abstract word...
...You know, you'd have to ask their psychiatrists...
...It reminds me of the short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery, in which the town picks one person to be stoned every year...
...So in terms of the perverse economy, people are worth more in prison than on the street unless they are earning $12 an hour...
...Now during the 1980s and the 1990s, massive incarceration is a major element in the overall economic management of the society...
...The complex that he helped design is located across the street from an Amtrak train station and right next to the Oakland harbor...
...And there was a promise made to the seven-point urban agenda of the mayors of America, the Mayors' Conference, which required a $35 billion commitment to the cities...
...I believe people who are experiencing in their lives a deterioration in a material sense, there has to be a great sense of the hollowness to the Democratic Party rhetoric...
...And Clinton never responded to the Platform in Progress...
...He took pilgrimages to Zen centers and passed up use of the official limousine for a plain, blue Plymouth for eight years...
...They're so locked into the system...
...Brown: I'm becoming one...
...Brown: Its principal force is to speak truth to power, to become engaged in the life of Oakland...
...That's where we've got to have a firm footing...
...I've also been looking forward to the FM kind of listener, the kind of activist who often may not even know that there's an AM discussion going on...
...And without the money, you don't exist...
...I guess it's just proving my point...
...What they think in their heads has some interest, but I believe their behavior is the only thing we can measure...
...Cities don't count...
...He pilloried Congressional pay raises and demanded term limits...
...Q: Are you surprised by the amount of support it's gotten...
...I'm surprised by the supine quality of the elected officials...
...A former Jesuit seminary student, he graduated from the University of California-Berkeley, was twice elected governor of California, and was a three-time Presidential candidate, challenging Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, and Bill Clinton in 1992...
...Brown: Urban America is a huge piece of America, and it's a totally neglected piece...
...They're too busy doing photo ops...
...And if we don't do that in some collective way, we're going to see the country continue to move in a fascistic direction...
...I thought people would say enough is enough already...
...I interviewed him in the shaded courtyard of his newly completed building in West Oakland...
...From Mother Teresa, what it is like to observe the poorest of the poor, and how generous human beings can be...
...Q: And now what is its principal force...
...That's what enlightenment is...
...So it becomes painfully obvious that money and taking credit and looking good is all there is...
...Take your pants down and pee in that little jar and we will send it to a certified laboratory...
...Nixon kept a low prison population in the 1960s and the 1970s...
...Q: Tell me about your radio show and the changes you are making in it...
...Ten years ago, there was no tuition...
...It's not going to work...
...Brown: By becoming chair of the Democratic Party, I became the custodian of the machine...
...Q: What did you learn from the time you spent in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and on spiritual retreat in Japan...
...It's what Ivan Illich calls the "symbolic fallout" of the use of technology...
...If your approval ratings go up fifteen points after Oklahoma City where 168 people are killed, how do you think you react to that as a President...
...And they get new powers of surveillance and infiltration...
...Otherwise, what we have in so-called progressive politics is a number of people with all the good will in the world running around, getting a bill introduced, getting an amendment passed, and nothing happening...
...He stopped broadcasting his national show, which over eighteen months grew to span fifty stations and twenty-five states, and, on August 1, he began broadcasting on Pacifica's KPFA from his warehouse complex in Oakland...
...And what you have at the national level or the international level is a very, very perverted form of democracy, which is submerged in the multinational market...
...Brown is no longer running for office, but he is jogging to keep fit...
...Q: How has your experience with broadcast radio changed you...
...Q: What would you say to those people who doubt your sincerity based upon your background...
...Brown: Right...
...That goes contrary to the notion of a middle-class, almost classless society, that the American political class likes to pretend we have...
...has been in the public eye as a politician since 1970, when he was elected as California's secretary of state...
...From that I went to the $100 limit on campaign contributions...
...That's true disempowerment...
...You must obtain money to buy media...
...I'm trying to wake people up, trying to wake myself up...
...Q: How widespread do you perceive the disenchantment with the Democratic Party to be...
...It's wrong for the people who suffer...
...Brown: The Supreme Court voted 6-3, with two of Clinton's appointees forming the majority, that if you want to play sports, the school can drug-test you, the state can drug-test you...
...Just the measurement of that is perverse...
...If you think about it, you take a story from The New York Times that's a one-day story: 1 percent of the people have 39 percent of the assets of the country and over the last ten to fifteen years have acquired 65 percent of the newly produced wealth, whereas 60 percent of the people have received 1 percent of the newly acquired wealth...
...In effect, student loans are going to pay for increased incarceration...
...By the time they graduate, they're screwed...
...I'm talking about stuff that's important, so that requires indignation...
...Not from the unions...
...To contact "We the People," e-mail wtp@serius.com or call 1-800-426-1112...
...People are so scared on campus, they can't move...
...Brown: After a year and a half on AM radio, broadcasting over medium to fairly small stations in about twenty-five states, I'm now moving to KPFA in Berkeley and its sister station in Fresno...
...And the magnitude of the injustice appears to be increasing...
...Q: Do you consider yourself a spiritual person...
...That is perverse...
...So that's on one level, the political...
...Is this the standard that we're seeing applied...
...That was totally forgotten about, which is to me emblematic of politics and the neglect of the cities...
...Still anti-establishment, still full of genuine rage, he's now revamped his focus and is concentrating on becoming a positive force for community development in his own neighborhood...
...I don't think they care...
...It might as well be a node on the Internet...
...How will they pay for it...
...Well, that's a lie...
...Brown: No...
...Q: Did you used to trust the federal government more...
...He still hasn't come to that, three years later: $4.25 is less now than when we met in 1992 in July...
Vol. 59 • September 1995 • No. 9
