Last Call for Jerry Brown
Alexander Cockburn
The Nation: November 1, 2010
California's problems are well beyond the curative powers of any one
governor. If Jerry Brown wins in November, there's no need to nourish
foolish hopes.
The first time I laid eyes on Jerry Brown was in College Park, Maryland. The
newly elected governor of California had belatedly plunged into the race for
the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, in which Jimmy Carter was
marked as the favorite. With the help of the Baltimore political machine
built up by Nancy Pelosi's family, Brown stormed across Maryland. He was a
good stump speaker, a refreshing contrast to Carter, with his earnest
pledges about honesty and zero-based budgeting. Brown won the primary and
went on to victories in California and Nevada.
Amid this bracing challenge to the peanut broker, I wended my way to
Sacramento to view the governor in his local habitat. Whale song burst from
loudspeakers in the street outside his office, in front of which was parked
his demure official vehicle-a Plymouth Satellite. Stewart Brand, editor of
the New Agers' bible CoEvolution Quarterly, was at his elbow as an adviser.
Tom Hayden was on the line.
By the time of my late spring visit, California had already peaked as the
Golden State. Ahead lay accelerating destruction or misuse of the state's
natural assets, starting with water; the ruin of a marvelous system of
public education; creation of a vast gulag (twenty-three prisons built since
1984); phalanxes of absurdly overpaid public employees; and paralysis of the
legislature in Sacramento.
You can hang some of the blame around Brown's neck, though not the seeds of
legislative paralysis. Finger Earl Warren for that one. It was Warren's
Supreme Court that issued two decisions in the early 1960s-Baker v. Carr and
Reynolds v. Sims-ruling that legislators should be apportioned on a
"one-person, one-vote" basis. This required state legislatures to
reconstitute themselves entirely by the measure of population. Rural
counties lost their state senators. Los Angeles and San Francisco swelled in
power. The reconstituted California Senate of forty-coupled with the
two-thirds-majority requirement to pass the budget-permits a faction of
fourteen senators to shut down the state once a year, and that is precisely
what happens.
Nor can you blame Brown, who served as governor from 1975 to 1983, for the
economic earthquakes that began in the late '70s, when defense and aerospace
contracts started to slow (California had been getting one in every five
Pentagon dollars during the cold war boom); by the late '80s as many as 2
million well-paid blue-collar workers and their families had quit Southern
California.
The gulag is a different matter. Governor Brown didn't start the "lock 'em
up forever" boom-but he hopped on to the moving train nimbly enough. In 1977
the legislature passed a new sentencing law, which Brown swiftly signed. It
amended the state's penal code to declare that punishment, not
rehabilitation, was now the goal. The law ended "indeterminate
sentencing"-whereby convicts could win significantly shorter sentences by
dint of good behavior, self-improvement as assessed by boards including
guards and prisoners. Liberals thought this somewhat ad hoc procedure was
inherently unfair. Enter, across ensuing years, mandatory completion of
prison terms; shriveling of opportunities for convicts to improve
themselves; virtual extinction of parole; and open-ended "civil commitment,"
with endless extensions of prison time. The result was a swelling population
of cons, many of them now entering senility and the Alzheimer years, many of
them nonviolent offenders, crammed into tiny cells or using beds stacked
three tiers high in prison gyms, all maintained decade after decade at
staggering public expense.
Among them are those incarcerated for life under the state's "three strikes"
law, passed in 1994. In 2004 a state initiative to soften three strikes was
set to pass handily until Brown, along with several other former California
governors, did a last-minute ad blitz that reversed the poll numbers and
defeated the proposition. Brown appears to have been the most enthusiastic
participant; he flew to LA to do a series of ads with members of heavy metal
groups, including Orgy.
Brown failed to fight the Prop 13 initiative effectively, though this
prototypical Tea Party rebellion was probably unstoppable. When Prop 13
passed in 1978, the local governments that had already lost all power in the
State Senate also lost any ability to raise money by increasing property
taxes. Since then the only way to get dollars for education has been to go
to Sacramento and beg or dream up another bond issue to place on the ballot.
These bond issues can pass only with support from public
employees-especially police, prison guards and firemen, uniting with
teachers, nurses, etc.-and so the never-ending upward spiral of public
employee salaries and pensions has no discernible limits.
By that time Brown had the damaging Governor Moonbeam label stuck on him by
Mike Royko, though uncharacteristically this meanspirited Chicago columnist
later apologized, just like Green Party punk rocker Jello Biafra later said
he was wrong to call Brown a Nazi. It's hard to be absolute about Jerry,
though his stint as mayor of Oakland was very unattractive. His tilt at
Clinton in '92 was most enjoyable, not least for the fun I had with Andrew
Kopkind interviewing Brown for The Nation and with Robert Pollin when we
jointly defended Brown's flat-tax proposal in the Wall Street Journal,
bringing down the wrath of the liberal nonprofit tax reform groups, which
ardently defended the so-called "progressivity" of our existing tax code!
California's problems are well beyond the curative powers of any one
governor. Brown's slogan in the mid-'70s was "We are entering an era of
limits" (always excepting the prison population and the share of the very
rich in the national income). So if he wins in November, there's no need to
nourish foolish hopes. I guess it's Jerry's last hurrah. I give him a
decorous cheer, if only as homage to the '70s, when politics were a lot more
fun and more optimistic than they are now.
Alexander Cockburn
October 14, 2010 | This article appeared in the November 1, 2010
edition of The Nation
It's sad that the 70's should seem more optimistic than today. At the time, many of us were hiding out in the woods fearing famine, nuclear war and the collapse of the oil economy. Inflation made saving or even earning seem useless.
ReplyDeleteOur leaders have spread cynicism among the people--suspicion of politicians, journalists and scientists. If we don't run to the woods today it's because we have no hope that it would save us.