QUESTION & ANSWER : Brown Sees National Need for Economic Reorientation

The following edited dialogue between former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Times staff writer Robert Scheer was drawn from two hours of interviews.

Scheer: How come after Watts and the governorships of Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson--all you guys ran the state--how did we end up having one of the worst riots in American history?

Brown: Because of the export of jobs, the lowering of wages in the community and the isolation level.

Q: That’s not enough of an answer, though, is it? Why wasn’t more done in that community in terms of education, the family, jobs and the rest?

Brown: Because it takes the type of economic planning that this country is not willing to accept. The global economy is pushing jobs to cheaper labor markets. The automobile factory in Southgate left, the tire factories along the Santa Ana Freeway have left. And there’s been a general flight of manufacturing jobs but no adequate replacement and no real economic strategy to do anything about it.

Q: But the old-fashioned liberals like Hubert Humphrey and your father (former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown) believed that government had a responsibility to find work for people. Then we went away from that with Ronald Reagan. We went away from it with you.

Brown: States don’t get into that. States provide infrastructure, but the national economy has to provide a framework. And the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) has undermined the ability of labor. So has deregulation. So has the increasing flow of capital and jobs across borders. Americans are in competition with low-wage people and low-wage countries. And that’s why undocumented immigrants come and take $2- and $4-an-hour jobs. Then a lot of people who are in the community realize that’s a dead end and they get into gangs and other underground kind of activity. To turn that around takes a national investment and commitment in politics that just doesn’t even appear on the horizon yet.

Q: What about those who say the way to deal with the riot is tougher law and order?

Brown: As governor, I signed more anti-crime bills than the last four governors combined--Reagan, my father, Deukmejian and Wilson. I’ll bet you we signed more tough anti-crime laws. We doubled the number of people going to prison. I started the prison building boom. And it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked because the problem is jobs and it’s international.

Q: You’re waging a campaign, as you say, for the soul of the Democratic Party. Do you claim that your opponent is part of an attempt to position the Democratic Party differently than Hubert Humphrey or your father?

Brown: Or even the Democrats in the ‘80s. It is to position the Democrats away from the unions and social justice issues, and I’d say minorities, but of course (Arkansas Gov. Bill) Clinton likes to talk about biracial harmony. But the language of personal responsibility and welfare reform is a way of getting at the fears of what we’ll call middle-class people because of crime, which they often identify with minorities. The whole thing on welfare reform is that people are totally hypocritical.

Q: Does this include Clinton because he has made welfare reform a major part of his program?

Brown: Well, I think welfare reform is a last vestige of political scoundrels. It’s been talked about for 20 years. When I was governor, there was a major effort to reform welfare in the Carter Administration. What everybody knows is that welfare is the cheapest buy-off of a group of citizens that the governing elite does not wish to invest in or welcome into their homes or into their communities. The real answer to the problem of poverty costs more money. The real answer is child care and education, allowing people to gradually work off welfare. That means assistance to the working poor who can build up assets and income without abruptly losing food stamps, Medi-Cal or other programs of assistance. It also means maintaining a full employment economy, which harkens back to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act and the Full Employment Act of 1946, which has never really been complied with.

Q: What can you really do to stop the loss of jobs overseas?

Brown: It would require a political critique of the increasing un-Americanization of American business through its globalizing involvements. And that ties right into the whole deregulation of trans-national enterprise that does not recognize the moral value of protecting community and the social costs of destroying communities as we see in Camden, Philadelphia, Akron, Youngstown, South-Central L.A. and dozens of other places in the country that still have burned-out buildings from over 20 years ago. Yet the majority of the Democratic Congress voted for a fast-track authority for Mr. Bush on the Mexico trade pact over the opposition of the environmentalists and the AFL-CIO.

Q: That suggests a more dynamic model of government intervention in the economy, which goes against the anti-government mood of the past decade. What is your model?

Brown: What we need is a social democratic model. We have a choice of two kinds of intervention: either intervene in the economy up front or intervene later, with military occupation of American cities to overcome and combat the crime and anarchy that is unleashed by the increasing pauperization of millions of Americans, many of whom have black or brown skin.

Q: The phrase “social democracy” sounds foreign; it’s not familiar to us. What does it mean, this social democracy? What is the model?

Brown: Well, the model is that you recognize social responsibility as a part of the economic structure. And that social responsibility is not left to the charity of the business executives, but it is embodied in law. And that law relates to working conditions, it relates to trade conditions and it relates to certain national priorities. America has been able to escape this by its heavy military spending, which for many years has equaled one out of every five factory jobs. Half the research done in computers and engineering is coming from the Pentagon. So we’ve had an engine of economic organization based on the Cold War. That’s over.

Q: And now?

Brown: We have to invest in something different. And that something different is going to be more like what they do in Germany or France. And we have to explicitly say we will cut energy in half in the next 20 years, and here’s the way we’re going to do it. Or we’re going to raise the minimum wage. And we’re going to affect the tax law and the trade law in such a way that we’re not going to see factories close down. You’re going to have to modernize it instead.

Q: Does this represent a serious ideological difference between you and Clinton?

Brown: Very definitely. I believe that the enshrining of the market beyond its competence is the central fallacy affecting America. It turns the marketplace into a closet dictator so that if a market says close down your automobile plant in Flint, Mich., and go to Mexico where you can save on wages and health care costs and environmental costs, you must do it because the closet dictator says you must do it. Even though you leave families broken up, suicides, absolute devastation whose total human, spiritual and financial costs, for the society, will exceed the savings that will occur.

Q: But Clinton has expressed similar concerns.

Brown: I think the whole Clinton program is a pattern of evasions. It’s little tiny programs that don’t challenge the existing paralysis or failed ideology. Training programs which often give more jobs to job trainers than job trainees. It’s my sense that where work is needed and financed, people will get trained to do it. I would cite World War II. I don’t think that people were too worried then about job training. They learned on the job what to do. Separate-and-apart training programs are often an avoidance of the more central problem of how do you encourage economic activity that will involve the members of the community in a way that is equal and just.

Q: What about the argument that the money just isn’t there?

Brown: Just within the last month Congress voted money for the B-2 and the Sea Wolf submarine and lots of other things that are of lower priority. They ignored the mayors marching and asking for $34 billion in their seven-point plan. Where is the pressure to force Congress into deferring other programs or at least linking those other programs, like foreign aid, S&L; bailouts, military procurement, to get funds for investment in the cities? And the argument against that is, well, the Republicans don’t want it because they represent the suburbs. Well, we don’t want it ‘cause we have a deficit. Those are all arguments, but a galvanized Democratic Party would make this a cause of the decade, and that’s not happening because of this corruption of seeing politics as basically fund raising and focus groups. . . .

Q: The Democrats, if they adopted your view, would be open to attacks from the Republicans, saying this represents a belief in the saving force of big government.

Brown: Reagan obviously believed that government can play a significant role because he invested seven, eight, nine hundred billion dollars over a 12-year period in military programs. And I believe there isn’t one person in a thousand can tell you whether or not they were needed.

There was a lot of hype, there was a certain amount of political enthusiasm if not hysteria generated in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, about the Panama Canal, later about the window of vulnerability, about the projection of power along the Horn of Africa. There were all sorts of statements about what the Soviet Union was doing and that formed the rationale for a major reallocation from investment in the cities. If we’d had the same concern about the crisis in the cities and allocated the same amount of capital, we’d have a much more viable society. We’d be much more competitive, and we’d be much better off.

Q: Your alternative has echoes of F.D.R. and the New Deal, which sounds kind of old-fashioned for Jerry Brown.

Brown: I always liked F.D.R. As governor I revived his idea of the Civilian Conservation Corps. I did create that thing. No one, no one was pushing CCC except out of my office. My current critique of coldhearted economic policy was present when I was governor, when I used to refer to (E.F.) Schumacher (author of “Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered”).

Q: What you’re talking about now sounds more growth-oriented than “Small Is Beautiful.”

Brown: No, but remember what he said in that theory is treat economics as if human beings matter. It was human values taking priority over economic ones.

Q: You were part of the old political system. When were you born again?

Brown: I always was rather skeptical of it from earliest days. That’s one of the reasons I went into the seminary because I didn’t see how political action could touch anything.

Q: But you came back to the political world.

Brown: I liked it. I’m drawn to it. A part of me has always seen its capacity to make a real impact. What I see now more than anything is the growing gap between what a lot of good people say is required--whether it’s Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson or David Brower from the environmental perspective--and the practical deal-makers and incumbents.

Q: Hasn’t it always been so?

Brown: There is something going on here in the country when we have more media exposure than ever and less political participation. New York had about 8% of their people who bothered to show up who were legally eligible to vote. That is an incredible disengagement despite all the noise. I think it is because the ideological cleavages in this country are being obscured systematically by entertainment, distortion and distraction. In that vacuum, or maybe it’s more accurately called the vortex, the trade unions have diminished, the political parties are shells of themselves, more Potemkin villages than actual institutions with any impact. The commercial advertising and the effort to titillate and excite and obscure what is really important to the society becomes the rule rather than the exception.

Q: You functioned fairly well in the midst of the noise. You went along.

Brown: You are mediated by the media. But it’s not so much a mediation as it is a meat grinding such that when you come out you don’t recognize yourself. The real issue of the role of multinational corporations, the decimation of American factories, the dying of cities, the despair that’s out there among so many young people--that hardly bubbles up to the surface of consciousness in the barrage of nonsense and gossip and docudrama, which the people are fed hourly over the television.

Q: But you have now run on three separate occasions in the Democratic primary toward what end?

Brown: What’s happening is that the Democratic Party as an opposition party has become so captured by its congressional wing and its own internal procedures that the only place of opposition is the presidential campaign. And that has become debased by endless fund raising from Wall Street and the interest groups that alone make early dominance in the primaries possible. So it’s a very tightly contained system that is preventing feedback from the suffering and hardship and the real anger that is out there. And this is what allows things to sail along in this incredibly failing and absurd way without hearing from anybody, because the mechanisms of feedback are frustrated, controlled or deadened.

Q: Is it really the fund raising at the $1,000 level, as you said throughout the campaign, that produces the corruption?

Brown: I’m saying that. I’m saying that the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly disconnected from any agenda because the party is increasingly dependent on the money from the top 1%.

Because its major intellectual and human resources are devoted to getting that money, the party is becoming more and more separated from millions and millions of people who would be its traditional constituency but they’re not contacted. They don’t hear a message and they don’t have any relationship or communication with the party. And that’s what is shriveling the party. We see that in California, where the gap between the Republican and Democratic registrations has shrunk since 1980.

Q: Presumably you tried to change this as (California state) party chair and failed. What will it take?

Brown: It is very much like it was in the ‘20s, where the Democrats were, in some cases, more conservative than the Republicans. It took a Depression to shake them out of the lethargy. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to shake this party out of its lethargy right now. But it’s very pathetic the way people are jumping on the Clinton bandwagon, not realizing they are probably buying the last ticket on the Titanic.

Q: After hearing your description of Clinton and how locked in he is into all this stuff . . .

Brown: He’s locked in because he has chosen to play in a certain arena by rules that have demonstrated their capacity to fail for the better part of 15 years.

Q: The $64 question people ask about you is, is it real? Is this guy seeing something? Is he changed, and where did the change come from?

Brown: There are very few people who have ever held positions like I have. I started out rejecting politics to go into a seminary. Then coming back and being in Berkeley seeing the whole emergence of the ‘60s right from the front row. Then to being elected secretary of state before the decade was up. Then being governor for eight years. Then taking almost a decade off, being out of politics.

I’ve had a lot of time to look at it. I came back as party chairman because I thought that what was missing was not something that you could do in government, but outside, to build the political organization to give support to what could be done by those in office. And what I found out is that in the party, most of your responsibility is to get money from the top 1%.

Q: Knowing all of this now, would you have been a different governor?

Brown: Well, I believe that our Administration was in terms of many issues--environment, affirmative action, farm workers, labor--probably the most progressive in the last 20 years of any state. No question about it. Part of it was California and part of it was the kind of people I brought into government. But there was more we could have done.

Q: One difference, apparently, is that you are driven by a sense of urgency now.

Brown: Well, there’s been a change in the economy, in the gap between the rich and the poor and the level of opportunity for so many people. When I went to Berkeley it cost 125 bucks a semester; now they’re raising the fees at 40% every year and cutting back on courses. I talked about the era of limits and everyone laughed in 1976, and it’s exactly where we are now. There’s a lot of pressure on people, but politics is more and more of a “Gong Show” of money and manipulation.

Q: So what else is new? What can you do about it?

Brown: You have to change the political dynamics, and those political dynamics now are based on an electorate skewed to older, more affluent voters. And the people who would be part of an opposition--a more progressive, liberal, more public-sector interventionist kind of constituency--don’t vote.

Q: Those who have voted tended to go for Clinton.

Brown: His is an insider campaign hatched by Washington lobbyists and the corporate interests of the Democratic Party to create a neoconservative Democratic candidacy. They feel the Democratic mistakes in the last 10 years have been liberal mistakes as opposed to conservative mistakes. But if you look at the fact that L.A. is burning up, the obvious failure here is to generate a constituency and the moral energy to work for social and economic justice. And that means jobs, that means prevailing wages, that means raise the minimum wage. It means public service jobs. It means a Civilian Conservation Corps. It means to really shape an economy based on moral, social principles of real opportunity, which have been utterly absent since the intensification of the Vietnam War.

Q: Faced with a choice of Clinton versus Bush, why shouldn’t one vote for Ross Perot? Do you think the media has been too quick to dismiss him in a way they dismiss any challenger because he hasn’t outlined specific proposals?

Brown: Well, it remains to be seen. Basically so many of these campaigns are contrived. I mean anybody who needs a proposal can hire any number of academics who like to play in the political arena. Details are easy to come by. I don’t know why journalists make such a big deal about that, because if you take Clinton’s proposals, most of them just come out of the National Governors Assn. or one of these tax-exempt think tanks of which there are dozens. The real questions are, what is the direction you want to take the country and how are you going to mobilize the support to get there? Those are the only two important questions.

Q: Speaking of such proposals, have you abandoned the flat tax?

Brown: No. I believe that the loopholes and the complexity of the tax code are a serious impediment to economic growth in this country.

Q: Shouldn’t the rich pay a higher percentage? That was what bothered some people about it.

Brown: The goal is to do precisely that. I mean the rich own 60% of business capital and putting in a business tax of 13% will increase the amount that upper income people pay, and also because of the way we cap the mortgage and rent deduction, the higher-income people will pay twice as much as lower-income people.

Q: Before I drop the Ross Perot thing, are you glad he’s going to be in the race? Do you think it mixes things up . . . ?

Brown: I don’t know enough about Perot to say that. I would just comment in this way: That the fact that Perot is leading even in one poll, or in places like California and Texas, makes the argument that initiated my campaign--the breakdown of the two-party system and the utter paralysis caused by the kind of politics that the incumbents practice. And I want to be very precise about that.

The fund raising, the targeting of the computer letters, the type of TV advertising, the endless quest for elite money and the hundreds of hours of schmoozing required in the presence of this relatively small number of people has contributed substantially to the failure to reach out and mobilize the millions of Americans who ought to be a part of the Democratic constituency and without whom it becomes increasingly improbable that the Democrats are going to successfully elect a President. And therefore, in this political void, a candidate like Perot can step forward.

He opposed the Gulf War, and he opposed it, I presume, because he sensed that there is a lack of balance in the nation’s priorities, and that the excitement generator on the Gulf War and the sense of triumph is very much out of phase with the failing cities, the rise of crime, the anarchy, the breakdown of competitiveness, the continued dependence on foreign oil.

All those more real and immediate problems are being glossed over, while all these side triumphs are trumpeted, really, in ways that are obscuring what needs to be done. And I think his sensing that is what is propelling him forward. I mean, it’s the same reason they got him out of General Motors.

Q: So why shouldn’t your supporters think after reading this, well, what’s wrong with this Ross Perot? After all, he’s not the traditional conservative, he’s not playing on the divisive social issues. He’s pro-choice. He’s not a racist. . . .

Brown: I’m not going to comment any further on Perot because we have to hear what Perot has to say. That’s all. And I do believe that the idea that the presidency is available to a private capitalist with his own money is an extraordinary development. It tells me that the health of a democracy needs immediate attention.

Q: OK, but there are two connected points: One is you’re an insurgent candidate; you described yourself that way last night. And Perot is an insurgent . . .

Brown: He’s not getting anointed by the collection of incumbent powers and their lawyers, lobbyists and investment bankers.

Q: He has a certain freedom as a result.

Brown: He does have a certain freedom.

Q: And this is attractive to people who were supporting you.

Brown: There is no question about it. People who were supporting me, a lot of them like winners, and they see the polls and they jump over there.

Q: But also, their fear about you is that you may be mired down in the Democratic Party.

Brown: We’re definitely sloughing through the quicksand.

Q: Yeah. And here’s a guy who says the hell with the Democratic Party, I’ll just go another way.

Brown: That’s what makes it intriguing.

Q: But not hopeful?

Brown: No. There’s a crisis in democracy because language now is barely listened to except for bloopers and goof-offs. People don’t listen. When you say democracy is in crisis, you’re saying the American nation is in danger of becoming something other than what it’s been for 200 years. Well that’s a very serious comment. And the reason for it is too many people are hurting while too many other people are doing so well. And that can only go on so long before the system is torn apart.