Brown Aims Message at College Crowds During West Coast Stops

Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. stressed environmental protection and the “exploitation” of politics by big business and the Washington Establishment as he brought his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination back to the West Coast on Friday.

Campaigning at college campuses in Oregon and Northern California, Brown stressed the themes that he believes resonate best with youthful voters. “American technology is focused inordinately on killing. . . . In Washington, they’re not cutting the military budget in any significant way,” Brown told students at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland.

Noting that Congress recently voted to fund the production of two more Seawolf nuclear submarines, Brown, who favors cutting the defense budget in half, said: “They’re so out of touch in Washington that I just don’t have words for it.”

At UC Davis, he inveighed against the politicians in Washington who “prostitute” themselves for money and the “multinational corporations that are strangling the economy” by exporting jobs to cheaper labor markets in Mexico and Asia.

He also drew cheers from the students when he said that he favored term limits for lawmakers in Washington and said that nuclear power should be “phased out within 10 years.”