Politics & Power Quote by Jerry Brown

Brown’s syntax is built to feel like a drumbeat of inevitability: “They control” repeated until it stops sounding like an argument and starts sounding like a diagnosis. As a veteran politician, he’s not just railing against “big business” in the abstract; he’s aiming at a specific modern arrangement where corporate power isn’t primarily exercised through brute lawmaking, but through atmosphere. The list escalates from the obvious (politicians, media) to the intimate (consumption, entertainment, thinking), suggesting influence that seeps into choices people experience as personal preference.

The subtext is a warning about legitimacy. When corporations “control the pattern” of public life, elections become theater and journalism becomes a contested utility. Brown’s move is to connect soft power to hard consequences: ecological collapse on one end, “violent outbursts and racial division” on the other. That linkage is rhetorically savvy because it reframes climate harm as social harm, not a niche environmental concern. He’s saying the planet isn’t the only casualty; the civic fabric is.

Context matters: Brown built a reputation as a heterodox Democrat and climate-forward governor, often trying to treat environmental policy as governance rather than virtue signaling. This line reads like frustration from inside the machinery: a politician acknowledging that the true opposition isn’t merely a party or ideology, but an economic system that captures attention, incentives, and narratives. The sharpest implication is that polarization isn’t just cultural; it’s profitable, and profit has patrons.