Jerry Brown's Radio Antithesis of Monicagate

In one of several reincarnations over the years since his two terms as governor of California, Jerry Brown turned up in 1994 as the host of a syndicated public radio call-in program, "We the People," heard in L.A. on KPFK-FM (90.7) and originating at Berkeley's KPFA-FM (94.1). I remember coming across the familiar Brown growl while playing with the radio dial in my car one afternoon and henceforth tuning in whenever I could. Here, one thought, was a politician who had left behind the political arena and, with nothing to lose, was free to speak truth to power. Here was the much-needed pinprick to the rhetorical helium balloons of Rush Limbaugh.

For a while Brown began the show with his own reflections on a chosen subject and then fielded calls from listeners across America. One was as heartened to hear these thoughtful voices, in turn, as one has been by the recent polls in the Monicagate filibuster. Indeed, the message of "Dialogues," a collection of 18 of Brown's later conversations on his show with guests ranging from Jonathan Kozol to Sister Helen Prejean, from Noam Chomsky to Alice Walker, might be that while Congress was tied up day after working day training a microscope on an act or two of consensual sex, the multinational corporations blithely went on with their routine of rape and pillage across the planet.

One's primary reservation about these broadcasts had to do with the variety of the perspectives explored, which, while they seemed to echo one another in many particulars, didn't readily coalesce into an overarching world view. Through careful selection, editing and ordering of the interviews, "Dialogues" achieves that and is as good a political and social primer for the millennium as I know.

One may give away the plot of the book, so to speak, without ruining it for the reader since the plot's ramifications are endless, and the exhilaration of reading "Dialogues" comes paradoxically in its often dispiriting details. To synopsize, then: The multinational corporation is an entity that, unlike our national one, America, for instance, is beholden to no constituency and is subject to no internal or (often) external limits on its activities, save its shareholders' wish to see "healthy" profits. While one has wondered in the past how corporations would go forward with activities that threaten the very conditions for life on the planet, the book helpfully reminds us that the CEO who is paid so outlandishly is also reviewed at half-year intervals and summarily let go when the profit margin doesn't measure up.