Aug-Sep 96Jerry Brown Speaks Out on:

Political Scandals

The Republicans are having a field day leveling charges at the President and his top aides for a variety of causes, some spanning more than a decade. What's it all about? Does President Clinton suffer from character defects greater than those of Bush or Reagan or Nixon or Carter? Or is the political process itself so flawed, so embedded in corporate dependency and financial temptation, that investigative action and convictions and charges occur regularly and inevitably?
One problem is the recent flap about the FBI files. The Clinton White House, under the direction of Craig Livingston, was looking at 400 different files, many of them on Republicans, James Baker among them. This is not just abuse of power by Clinton but rather the practice over many decades of the FBI supplying gossip, surveillance and investigative material on tens of thousands of people who might be considered for some White House appointment as trivial as a Washington, DC monument commission, or as important as Secretary of State.

There are millions of dossiers in the FBI's hands. That's a threat in itself. We were once a free society. We ought to ask: How many people, after the last 30 years of compiling all these millions of dossiers, have been a threat that amounted to something? Is it a fraction of 1%? Is the current government such that we need so many millions of dossiers on free people? Let's cut those investigations way back! Even with millions and millions of dossiers, we still have criminality in the White House; we still have illegal wars; we still have many people killed unnecessarily; and we still have avoidance of the important issues of our time-that so many people can't make a living wage, that the environment is getting wrecked, that people can't believe in their government. The level of belief in officialdom has never been lower, yet the snooping and dossier-keeping has never been greater. The people in government call in the FBI to investigate everybody's drinking, smoking, sleeping, sexual, and whatever habits, yet the result doesn't change government nor increase confidence. It merely enlarges the number of people in the FBI. Clinton just put a billion dollars into the FBI and related agencies in his so-called anti-terrorism bill. They need the anti-terrorism bill and the dossiers and the files on the Republicans because the state is out of control. The two-party scam and mass media press are protecting-as a kind of opaque screen- this horrible reality.

Nixon had his enemies list-his list of what he called the Jews who were attacking him-yes, there was a charge of anti-Semitism there. Now we have Clinton. I don't believe Clinton is different from Richard Nixon. At Nixon's funeral, Clinton called on all of us to pay homage to Richard Nixon, and all the other presidents were there embracing a certain standard of conduct. Now we have an example of that conduct, which went on with Republican connivance for many years. A bureaucratic paranoia is justifying a greater and greater invasion of our privacy, which will destroy us as a free country.

Clinton will deny that the FBI files are in the White House to be examined for political manipulation. His people will lie. The Republicans will act like their allies never did such things. But as members of Congress, they never objected. Don't let the evening news, or CNN, or the major networks frame this set of factoids for you. See it for what it is-the hi jinks of power, diverting attention from the structural corruption of the system.

A second story coming out of the White House is the naming of Mr. Clinton's most trusted adviser, Mr. Bruce Linsey, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the latest Whitewater trial, a participant in the movement of money that the government alleges Mr. Clinton didn't report. We're talking, in one case, of $13,000 and, in another case, of $30,000, moved around allegedly in violation of banking laws. What does it add up to? Another scandal, another firing of the latest political shot in the war between the two parties. They're not fighting about how to stop the poisoning of the environment, the water, the food we eat, the air; about the release of greenhouse gases; about opening up of the ozone layer; about creating conditions for a living family wage; about what is causing the continuing rise in inequality and what would reverse those socially destructive trends. No, those would require tough decisions and going against their corporate handlers.

These mini-scandals are brought forth in order to maintain the system, to create the illusion that there's something going on. We've got investigators, special independent prosecutors, FBI agents' testimony, juries, grand juries. It reminds me of the Latin phrase: "The mountain is in labor and has brought forth a mouse." It's the drama that occupies time between sports and advertising, between sex and violence, and it has enough details to engage the aficionados of politics. After it's over and someone is indicted, so what? The Republican report came to 800 pages after 13 months of hearings. The Democrats put in their 400 pages of dissent. That's 1200 pages. So what? They're not really getting at the real stuff! It's just another roll of the dice, another revolving of this wheel.
The indictment of the alleged Unabomber is another news item. But the text that he was talking about-the technological industrial pattern that is destroying freedom and turning us into domestic animals, the leftism that has become childish and infantile and ignores the critical threat to liberty from the way technology and the system of control is evolving-that is ignored. There hasn't been one article that has taken seriously what the Unabomber text has articulated.

The amendment to resume underground nuclear testing is something else that the infantilized Americans think they don't need to know about. I thought we were moving toward eliminating nuclear testing and cutting way back, if not abolishing, nuclear weapons-but here is a backdoor reversal big enough to totally reverse whatever progress we've made. This thing moves like a battleship in the water, and when you have a shift like that, it is a green light for the Pentagon and the Energy Department that conducts these tests to go ahead. Once that happens, there is no basis for the United States to complain about China or Pakistan or India or Iraq or any other country that is going to be developing nuclear weapons and wants tests. By the United States' own positions, we frustrate and make impossible the requests that our presidents keep making for other nations to cut out nuclear weapons, to stop testing them.

Money, media propaganda and disinterested public service aren't compatible. When you move a country toward greater inequality, you're going to get more crime; when you move it toward ecological destruction, ripping off of the land, things are going to cost more; therefore more anxiety, more fear, more hatred, more disruption; therefore more control, more authoritarian invasion of our liberty. If Dole is going in that direction at 30 miles an hour, Clinton is going in that direction at 25 miles an hour.

Clinton's little baby steps at progressive politics give enough sugar to keep us smiling and off the scent of what's really going on. He acts as a soporific. If Clinton didn't exist, the Trilateral Commission would have to invent him because he has deprived and drained the radical energy out of environmental movements, out of the African American civil rights community, by just being there and being not Bush, not Gingrich, not Dole. He gives you a warm fuzzy feeling so that you focus all your negative energy on the Republicans, never realizing that in cutting welfare, in lacking effort on fuel economy standards, on alternative energy, on a living family wage, on disarmament, on getting rid of nuclear weapons-Clinton and Dole are exactly the same!

Another issue of magnitude is the Intelligence Oversight Board Report, put out by the federal government, commissioned in the wake of allegations from Jennifer Harbury and Sister Ortiz and the widow of Michael Devine. It reviews the intelligence operations, the torture and murder and extra-judicial executions. The only really important question is: Why has the United States government under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton, paid money to a gang of criminal torturers-the government of Guatemala run by the military-who are carrying on mass genocide, particularly of the Mayan people, right in our own hemisphere, right under our own nose? Why? How come? How do we square who we are, with paying for such brutality and murder on a massive scale? That's what I want to know! That question wasn't answered!

The report delves into the murder and torture of Jennifer Harbury's husband, the murder of Michael Devine, the rape of Sister Ortiz, and the fate of several other people. Well over a hundred thousand people have been murdered, most of them civilians, almost all of them by agents of a state that has diplomatic relations with the United States and receives from us a funnel of money, some secret, some overt. Did any president of the United States ever protest seriously? Ronald Reagan compared Rios Montt to the patriots of the founding of America and pooh-poohed all these reports. The New York Times has reported a number of massacres, but the column inches are a lot fewer than those devoted to Whitewater or to the trivia of American life and discussion and political debate.
There has been a gross and continuing mass murder with the approval of the presidents of the United States, from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton, and there has yet to be an apology for the role that these presidents have played. We get pretty excited by drive-by shootings, street-level violence. But we don't hear indignation about suite-level violence-White House suite-level or corporate suite-level or CIA suite-level offenses. The whole law-and-order campaign, the whole indignation about worldwide terrorism, rings hollow and hypocritical because of the terrorism that has emanated from Guatemala with financial support from the United States and no condemnation, no national debate. It's just swept under the rug while the trivial discussion, the meaningless empty television barrage goes on and on. Can we sink our teeth into the moral fiber of this issue, or are we condemned to perpetual infantilization and impotence before a criminal massacre?

I'm not saying the President turned on the electric shock or inserted the cattle prod into the vaginas of the tied-down women in Honduras, perpetrated by our men on the CIA payroll, as reported by the Washington Post. But I am saying the President either knew about it or could have known about it because the material is at his fingertips. You and I let him get away with it because we do nothing about it, barely even think about it, while we get all excited about some trivial issue the corporate media has decided we've got to think about. It's not what morality demands or what's really important in terms of the power and might and money of the United States and where it's going and with what consequences.

There's an economic overlay to this. The coup d'etat of Eisenhower in 1954 against the Arbenz government, which was elected by the people of Guatemala, was fomented by the United Fruit Company. Mr. Dulles, who was Secretary of State, had legal connections with the law firm that represented the corporate interests that were being affected by the Arbenz government. Similarly, the Clinton administration under Ron Brown turned American embassies into protection operations and cheerleading sections for American corporations investing abroad. It's all tied together.

Up until last year, money was flowing to the tune of a million dollars to these same monsters in Guatemala. When money of that magnitude is given to groups that kill and torture, what does that make the people who give that money? We're talking about the president, about oversight people in Congress! Or are their hands so bloody that they can't talk about it? If this new report is allowed to drop out of sight, out of the presidential campaign, outside the scrutiny of Congress, while we spend all our time discussing whether Hillary talks to Eleanor Roosevelt, we lose a very important opportunity. The real issue here is the power of the citizenry to put an outrage like this on the agenda, to look at it, to open it up, and not to get bogged down asking what did Clinton know or not know. This institutional pattern is inconsistent with values of America, with what's right, with the international treaty on torture and all the rest.

At a fundamental level, letting Clinton and Dole, the New York Times, the three networks, and all the other little networks get away with this theater of delusion is to forfeit your power as a free person. Unless you reclaim your power as a free person, don't call yourself a citizen, don't call yourself serious-just accept the label of the Unabomber that you're a domestic animal for this controlling master system that is taking us to the brink. What is required is to bring laser-like clarity to the nature and extent of what is happening in politics today and then see what you can do where you are-local action-beginning with yourself, your neighbors, and what most concerns you. That's where power has to be restored-with clarity, unanimity, some kind of solidarity. Out of that, a real social movement can be the basis of a reinvigorated political process. The degenerate, pseudo substitute that now goes over television as the political process is nothing more than very dangerous obfuscations.

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