Jerry Brown Looks Back on the Last Election
What is most significant about the last election is not what was talked
about-vague statements about edu-cation, crime, anti-terrorism, and the
budget deficit, delivered to the backdrop of waving American flags, cheering
partisans, and the best scripting and orchestrating that campaign consultants
can create. It was all in the context of $800 million directed at pure persuasion,
propaganda, and repetition. The most significant point I can make is that
if you take that election as signifying anything other than sound and fury
and a totally meretricious pseudo democratic process, then look again.
Some things did get through. In California, a substantial vote increased
the minimum wage 50¢ an hour beyond the federal level. The other big
thing was Proposition 209, the so-called civil rights measure ending a lot
of affirmative action programs under state law. When you look at the context,
you start asking, how does it apply in practice, why is it on the ballot
now, who are the people putting it there, what are their real motives? Are
they doing anything about the endemic poverty, the racial gap in terms of
jobs and all the rest? Nobody says, "What about this system that in
the face of a very aggressive affirmative action program in California still
has a rising rate of inequality, an incredible number of poor people and
kids, a market design and government complicity which ensures a rising incarceration
rate and a totally unsustainable program of hyper-consumption that is going
to hit us in the face not too many years from now and make the fight over
affirmative action look like child's play!
The most important thing to understand is that the Republican Party spent
$2.5 million promoting Proposition 209. They used an African American as
a front man and promoted it as civil rights, as color blind. Republicans
don't give a damn about affirmative action one way or the other. What the
governor and a lot of these Republicans are really interested in is reelection
and holding power and delivering that power to those who put up the $2.5
million. You can go to the Democratic Party and find the same process. What
is needed is a frontal assault on a throughly corrupt, criminally negligent
Democrat and Republican party leadership. Reform it, destroy it, improve
it, create your own-but do not get caught up in the heavy games of these
silly propaganda exercises.
What is at issue here is the continuing stratification of millions of people
under an income regime that does not permit any kind of dignified living.
Whether 209 passed or didn't pass, the regime is based on a global economy
that puts downward pressure on wages, that will not let government provide
public service work when none else is available and where educational opportunities
are unequally available. There was no discussion of the mass incarceration
going on-200,000 people in prison in California; 1.6 million in prison or
jail throughout the United States, and the numbers keep going up. What are
the causes? How can it be changed? None of that was talked about. Congress
itself is almost a sidebar to a global economy running that requires a return
on investment irrespective of the impact on people, on communities, on the
gap between better privileged Americans and the others. That whole vision
of a world, a country, and a community working for respect and based on
caring and democratic participation is utterly irrelevant. What we are subjected
to is this grand spectacle of empty phraseology in the service of personal
ambition and party protectionism.
I don't take any discouragement from this. I believe that out of this paralysis
will come other voices and other leaders and new initiatives based on common
sense and the American genius for making things work for people. I see it
as a time for real change. There are many progressive mayors and environmental
activists, a labor party in its infancy, and a women's movement with 20
years of activism.The end of the millenium ought to be the end of an era,
an end of stalemate, of stagnation and hyperbole and evasion and slavish
conformity to a system that raises economics to a sacred level and utterly
abandons human responsibilities that flow from being a brother or sister
to those with whom we live. What is at stake is our future, our liberty,
our community.
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