# American Politics: A Mad Tea Party **URL:** **By** Justin Raimondo **Published:** January 1, 1980 --- “CED's campaign to swell the ranks of the New Class public sector.” In a whirlwind tour of fifty-two cities, the Jane Fonda/Tom Hayden road show managed to prolong their Campaign for Economic Democracy media event for thirty-two days. The tightly-scheduled $150,000 tour criss-crossed thirty-four college campuses, making stops along the way at anti-nuclear rallies, union conventions, and the TV talk show circuit. When Jane Fonda announced at the end of the tour that she was quitting political activism to devote her time to making a planned six movies, the media dutifully reported the event as though it had the weighty significance of a pronouncement by Henry Kissinger. But the October tour was not meant as a swan song for Jane Fonda, political activist, no matter how much that seemed to be the case by the time she made her announcement at the University of California at Davis. The tour was a well-publicized, organized attempt to use Fonda’s fame and cash to revive the fortunes of a flagging American Left and to catapult her husband, Tom Hayden, into a position of national prominence. As 1980 dawns, the Left in America is in a state of disarray. Wracked by dissension, internal squabbling which seems to be perpetual, and often savage conflicts between leaders, there is no consensus on anything in the Left today. Michael Harrington of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) is backing Kennedy for President, others (including Fonda and Hayden) appear to be backing Jerry Brown, still others, longing for a Progressive Alliance or a Citizens Party to lead them out of the wilderness and into some promised land. Faced with a widespread revolt against government and open disgust with taxes and regulations, its longtime dream of socialism seems to be receding into the distance, and the Left has been forced into some quick reshuffling of its programmatic chairs on the deck of the sinking ship of state. Tom Hayden’s Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED) has lately been getting the most publicity of all these attempts to shore up the Left, not the least of the reasons being the box office appeal and wealth of Jane Fonda herself. The Campaign for Economic Democracy is a full-fledged attempt to bring to the Left a new strategic vision reined in by lowered expectations. But what is “economic democracy?” Or, more precisely, what is it a euphemism for? Listening to Fonda and Hayden, and to their growing crew of supporters, the answer is not immediately clear. Nor is it intended to be. “Economic democracy” is not an ideology so much as a _style_; not a system, like Marxism, but a methodology, a strategic vision, the Americanization of Leninism. But to listen to these latter-day, largely white, middle-class graduates of the New Left, is to hear the faintest echo of Howard Jarvis’ somewhat cranky, raspy anti-statism. “We work toward radical ends by traditional means,” says one CED staff member. “Our critics on the left seem to prefer radical means toward traditional ends.” Those ends being “a massive bureaucratic apparatus.” Instead of calling for the outright nationalization of industries, CED calls for the current “decentralist” variety of statist chic. Instead of regulating life and commerce from Washington, they claim to want to regulate at the local level, with “equal” representation on corporate boards for “employees” (like union boss Doug Fraser!) and “consumers.” “If you’re for rent control you don’t have to be a lefty anymore,” said Hayden to the _Washington Post_ (7/5/79). “Populism is populism—it’s a question of whether it’s populism against the poor, or the government . . . or against large corporations.” Again and again, at every point in their fifty-two city tour, Hayden and Fonda made their anticorporate duet a sort of theme song. The message came through loud, although a little unclear: “the big corporations” are responsible for the ills not only in America, but throughout the world. Nuclear power—state subsidized and planned from the start—is CED’s favorite bogeyman, and audiences are not encouraged to remember that it wasn’t so long ago that the Left stood solidly in the pro-nuclear camp. Even Tom Hayden’s eloquent paean to nuclear power in the SDS Port Huron Statement seems forgotten. Those were the good old days, when technology was “in” with the Left, and earnest young revolutionaries discussed a socialism energized by nuclear power “too cheap to meter.” Now, the new energy god is solar power, which Hayden wants government to promote just as it did nuclear power two decades ago. “Hard” technology is now “out,” at least in certain circles, and “soft” technology is “in.” Now the same people who wanted a highly-centralized, high-tech, chrome-plated socialism, are pushing decentralized, solar-powered (and government subsidized) “economic democracy.” These are just the code-signals of what the _Village Voice_ calls “a new political culture in California and perhaps the nation.” So what’s “new”? The villain is still “Wall Street,” the egalitarian politics of envy can still score a few points—tainted though it might be by association with a multi-millionaire actress—and the goal is still the same: get “Big Business.” CED’s “ideology”—what there is of it—is clearly a defensive measure. As the _Village Voice_ put it, “Hayden’s politics have shifted sharply since the passage of Proposition 13 inspired his intuition that a major ‘realignment’ of political forces was about to take shape.” Backed into a corner by the tide of a militant anti-government _Zeitgeist_, the washed-out remains of yesterday’s “revolutionary vanguard” is now tailing after Howard Jarvis—and, yes, the libertarian movement—as fast as it can. The _Voice_ continues: Hayden’s uncomradely relationship with some radicals and liberals outside CED derive in part from his increasingly harsh attitude toward traditional liberal positions on issues ranging from federal and state budgets to inflation and school busing for integration. Old friends of his were astonished one night last March when Hayden, while visiting New York in preparation for the fall tour, told them he believed federal deficits were a major cause of inflation, and proceeded to quote the rightwing economic arguments—adopted by Jerry Brown—that tie inflation to increases in federal spending. The Welfare State, with its liberal failures, is about to consume itself, says Hayden, and he is not going to be exhausted politically in a fight to save those failures from conservative attack. Furthermore, in seeking to build a “majoritarian” movement against corporate power, it becomes necessary to avoid the appearance of defending unpopular liberal positions. . . “If people think as little of government as they do,” insists Hayden, “then the left has to rethink its traditional position.” How this timid attempt to echo the demands of a grassroots libertarian sentiment is to be reconciled with CED’s firm commitment to affirmative action, oil and natural gas controls, rent control, and socialized medicine, is unclear. But theoretical clarity has never been CED’s forte. In CED the New Left’s “action-divorced-from-theory” fetish has reached new heights of refined sophistication: “When you talk about machines, you think of Mayor Daley, about having the power to \[pick up\] people’s garbage. Well, we don’t have that power, but we’d like to get there,” said Fred Branfman, to the _Washington Post_. “We would like to help people with their needs, to make sure they get their Social Security checks—that’s what it’s all about.” Once the hated symbol of the “pigs,” Mayor Daley is now a role-model to be emulated. To paraphrase the Catholic liturgy: those who were exalted are now humbled, and those who were humbled are now exalted. ## The roots of CED The organizational roots and history of the Campaign for Economic Democracy can be traced in a concrete way from the Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies, first convened in the early 70s by New Leftists with social democratic urges. The conference looked to Canadian and “Eurocommunist” economic models for inspiration, and was fond of vague phrases like “worker’s control.” Conference member Derek Shearer, now critical of CED’s opportunism, helped write Hayden’s campaign platform for his unsuccessful 1976 run for U.S. Senate in California. Written by Shearer, along with Professor G. William Domhoff (author of _The Higher Circles_ and other works), Richard Flacks, and Hayden himself, the platform—called “Let’s Make the Future Ours”—is filled with panaceas such as advocacy of state banks, municipally-owned utilities, national health service, and “direct” workers’ control of industry. Now Shearer says that “terms like socialism and capitalism don’t have any currency in America. So economic democracy was, in one respect, a euphemism for democratic socialism. But it was also a way of going beyond the usual idea of socialism to one that included workers’ control and consumers on corporate boards” (_In These Times_, 5/9/79). Another of CED’s roots was the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC), organized by Hayden and Fonda in the early 1970s as a lobby against the war. As Shari Lawson—an IPC organizer back then, now head of CED’s Organizer Training Institute—says: “I was a ’60s radical. In 1972, I changed my political views. I realized protest could only go so far.” Saigon fell, in 1975, and the IPC cadre decided that it was time to dig in, to concentrate on economic issues, and to run candidates for office. These cadre make up a good proportion of the present-day CED leadership, and, according to _In These Times_: > Unlike Shearer, Domhoff or Flacks, they did not and do not see economic democracy as a euphemism for socialism. Instead, they see it as a transitional concept \[to what?\], a tactical slogan as much as a defined goal. . . They believed that the American revolution, like the Vietnamese revolution, would develop in stages with the struggle for economic democracy an early stage. They saw themselves as leadership cadre, with their own common, but private, blueprint for eventual revolution, who would provide guidance through the different stages. The Campaign for Economic Democracy was founded, by Hayden and Fonda, in 1977, after Hayden’s defeat in his attempt to win John Tunney’s Senate seat. The group is run by a steering committee elected from local chapters; no public convention has ever been held. Hayden claims that membership has doubled in two years, to a current total of 8000. Of these, approximately 500 to 1000 are activists who can be depended on to come to weekly meetings, integrate CED work into daily life, and travel for the organization if necessary. Founding members include leftwing Congressman Ron Dellums, and Cesar Chavez. It has a budget of about $300,000 per year—raised mostly by Fonda and her Hollywood connections—and a paid staff of twenty-one. The superstructure of affiliated organizations are all tax exempt. The California Public Policy Center researches issues like rent control and solar energy. The Organizer Training Institute does exactly what it says it does. There is even a ranch in the hills overlooking Santa Barbara for staff retreats and a children’s summer camp. A host of CED associates have been appointed by Governor Brown to various positions with the growing solar power bureaucracy; Hayden himself was appointed by Brown to the State SolarCal Council, a CED idea that Brown championed as California’s “soft technology” answer to the energy crisis. Presidential candidate Brown also made Hayden a “special counsel” to his administration, and appointed him to the Southwest Border Regional Commission. In recent months, Brown has appointed two CED members to county supervisor positions, one in Santa Cruz, and one in Orange County. But the measure of CED’s initial success is more than the measure of Brown’s trendy opportunism. Within the last 18 months, CED members and CED-backed initiatives and candidates for public office have won elections around the state; rural Yolo and Butte counties, Chico, Berkeley, Bakersfield, Santa Monica and Los Angeles are all scenes of CED victories. CED has been the backbone of the rent control movement in California, which Hayden initially saw as a losing issue, until the victory of Proposition 13 made landlords who did not pass along tax savings to renters an easy target. CED claims 17 electoral victories in California, so far— and the Democratic Party leadership is running scared. Hayden’s recent tour is an indication that soon the panic will achieve national proportions. Already, a loose coalition is beginning to take shape around the country; Massachusetts Fair Share, ACORN, International Association of Machinists’ president William Winpisinger with the Citizens/Labor Energy Coalition, the Progressive Alliance headed by UAW’s Douglas Fraser, as well as Michael Harrington’s DSOC and groups like the New American Movement, all share a somewhat common political perspective. All are committed to working within the confines of the Democratic Party—and, in the final analysis, the confines of State Capitalism—in order to hold their own against the anti-bureaucratic tidal wave which is sweeping the country. CED’s plan for the survival of the Left in the lean years is simple: co-opt the enemy. In order to achieve this, of course, CED must work overtime to blur the distinction between Big Government, Big Business, and “Bigness” _per se_—a job already half accomplished by the not-so-private “private sector” itself, segments of which obviously find themselves more comfortable with state-granted privileges and subsidies than with the rigors of competition in a truly free market. But even CED’s watery version of “small-is-beautiful” decentralization—occasionally spiced with tantalizingly anti-government rhetoric—has caused CED its share of internal dissension. The split in CED is only a superficial fissure, but it is deepening. The focal point of contention is California Governor and veteran opportunist Jerry Brown. Until now, says Joe Conason, in his _Village Voice_ article, > Hayden has been able to skirt the contradictions in his position against liberal programs and for economic democracy. When CED had to decide whether to support Brown’s call for a constitutional convention to consider a “balanced budget” amendment, the group arrived at an impasse. Half of the leadership was ready to support Brown, while half vehemently opposed him. Hayden fi-nessed the problem by proposing a balanced budget resolution that also required full employment. But it is not the politics of Jerry Brown which aggravates the growing conflict within CED—it is the politics of CED itself. Although _New West_ makes much of a Northern/Southern California split in CED over Brown’s Presidential race—with Hayden and the South pro-Jerry, and the North more traditionally leftist—the real roots of the dissension run deeper. The truth is that the American Left—which makes a habit of importing most of its ideas from places like Albania—is in ruins. After fifty years of socialism, social democracy, Eurocommunism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Pol-Potism— fifty years of abject failure—the Left isn’t taking any chances. If it looks to any particular state apparatus, it figures its best bet is the one closest to home. For the American Left to accept such an idea would amount to a fundamental reversal of faith—equivalent to the Roman Catholic Church denying the divinity of Christ. “A lot of people on the Left have been in opposition to the law for so long, taking drugs, opposing the government,” pontificates Hayden, “that they do tend to take an outlaw-type mentality.” What Hayden wants the Left to acknowledge is the obvious fact that it has lost its energy, its vitality, its claim to the mantle of radicalism. If you can’t beat ‘em, say Hayden and the CED, join ‘em! And CED’s “anti-bureaucratic” rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding—that is precisely what they have proceeded to do. ## Class warfare, ’80s style CED’s reponse to the growing rebellion against the hegemony of the public sector is to serve as a populist cover for the rising New Class bureaucracy. In order to protect and expand the ideological and electoral gains made by the Left in the last fifty years from what they see as an immediate threat —the threat of the tax revolt becoming the anti-tax revolution—CED has manned the walls of the bureaucratic fortress for the onslaught that is sure to come. Not only is CED, despite occasional anti-government rhetoric, committed to the expansion of state power, but CED is using the power of the state to spread its ideology and to achieve political objectives. CED’s admiration for the late Mayor Daley is not an unimportant detail. For some months now, many leftists around the country have been angered by the approach of Fonda and Hayden. They often come into an area, attract attention and crowds, skim off as much money from local sources as they can—and then they disappear, not to be heard from again. Many activists claim that’s the way Hayden and Fonda have operated from the beginning, much to the detriment of effective local organizing. One solar activist said of Hayden: “He’s just exploiting solar as an issue. It’s the same whether Hayden and CED . . . are in housing, tenants’ rights, or their most recent crusade against ‘the corporate causes of cancer.’ They’ll rip off all the action no matter what the issue is. They come in with the Jane Fonda dog and pony show, rip off all the money and you never see them again.” But now a new charge—involving the use of taxpayer’s money for Hayden’s own ends—has come from an unexpected corner (and the source of the above complaint)—the _Berkeley Barb_. In an investigative report, the _Barb_ has revealed that the Hayden political machine has: (1) “Channeled federal dollars from Western SUN (a federal solar energy project) into community action groups affiliated with Hayden’s CED”; (2) Put CED members on the payroll of Western SUN; (3). “Obtained federal funding from the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) program to pay wages to CED members for doing work for CED”; and (4) Used a local Santa Monica, government-funded group to promote rent control. The _Barb_ revealed that ever since California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Hayden to the board of Western SUN, affiliation with Hayden’s CED seems to be the sole criterion for Western SUN employees. Not only that, but affilia-tion with Hayden’s machine seems to be the sole criterion for dispensing Western SUN grants. The _Barb_ reports: Most of Hayden’s tax-supported operations revolve around the solar power movement, a movement which he has all but expropriated for his own political ends. The lynchpin of the entire program is a little-known outfit called Western SUN, a project of the U.S. Department of Energy, whose purpose is to ‘further the awareness and commercialization of solar energy’ in thirteen western states according to the official description. The California branch of Western SUN is Hayden’s baby, and by all indications, he’s the most active state Western SUN director in all the 13 states covered by the program. Hayden’s administrative budget for Western SUN in its first year of operations was $82,000—and that was really nothing more than start-up money. Apparently, Tom felt that the best way he could spend the money was by putting as many CED political allies as possible on Western SUN’s payroll. The _Barb_ investigation has revealed that Larry Levin, Western SUN’s field representative, is a CED member, and a former PR man for Hayden’s unsuccessful 1976 U.S. Senate race. Judy Corbett, another of Western SUN paid consultants, has allowed her showcase solar-powered home in Davis to be used for CED fundraiser house-parties. Kit Bricca, of Santa Clara County, and Keith Bray, in Sacramento, are both paid consultants to Western SUN and both are CED members. “Many of the people who have been hired and much of the subcontracting through Western SUN that has gone on has been to CED members or people with a strong allegiance to Tom,’ complains Allen Mirviss, a lobbyist for SUNRAE, a solar energy group headquartered in Santa Barbara. Another source says, “Some of them (Western SUN’s staffers and consultants) don’t necessarily have that much solar expertise, but they’re basically people that Tom feels will not stab him in the back. Tom has always been pretty straightforward, privately, that he comes first and CED comes first—that the issues are there to be used to organize around and it’s not the issues themselves that are important.” _(Berkeley Barb, 10/4/79)_ Others have claimed that Hayden’s choice of issues is totally opportunistic, and that once an issue appears to be fading in importance, Hayden will drop it like a hot potato. One environmentalist quoted by the _Barb_ claims: “Tom Hayden is the issue piranha of the Left!” Another has claimed that “Before Three Mile Island, Hayden had almost lost interest in the nuclear issue. He just jumped on the bandwagon again when he saw that it was getting hot. How long will he really be interested in solar or cancer or rent control, or any issue? Let’s face it, the guy’s an opportunist and always has been. The only difference is that now he has credibility and money—and these state and federal offices he holds are giving him more of both.” But the opportunism is in fact closely linked to what will help him build his machine. CED’s determination to build that machine linked to the government recently paid off in Santa Monica—where “Communitas,” a local “self-help” program operating with federal funds, served as a front for CED’s rent control campaign. The _Barb_ pointed out that Communistas originated in the Ocean Park Projects, a subsidiary of a leftist religious group in Santa Monica headed by a close ally of Tom Hayden, the Rev. Jim Conn. In April, 1978, Conn applied to the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration for a grant of more than $200,000. The grant was supposed to have been used to set up a network of block clubs and neighborhood councils “to provide comprehensive crime prevention services at the grassroots level.” While a minimal amount of money went into efforts aimed at preventing crime, even more effort, apparently, went into a somewhat unorthodox approach to “crime prevention”—rent control. Communistas co-hosted “information nights” on the CED-backed rent control measure in Santa Monica, working with a CED subsidiary, Santa Monicans for Renters rights, headed by two CED members serving on the Santa Monica City Council. The Right Rev. Conn is the Treasurer of this group, and with Communitas’ help, CED “managed to pass its rent measure and elect a handpicked slate of candidates to the rent control board,” says the _Barb_. The point of rent control, as far as CED is concerned, is _the rent control board_—the bureaucratic apparatus which is the real stuff and substance of “economic democracy.” It is the point of all their proposals and activities, really; it is the real motive behind calls for the quasi-nationalization of the energy industry. One glance at Hayden and CED’s activities in California answers the question of why they are pushing solar power: they mean to be the solar bureaucrats of an America powered by windmills and organic gardens, and because solar has all the earmarks of a fad whose time has come, CED domination of SolarCal and Western SUN is only the beginning. Hayden’s support for the nationalization of the oil companies, and the creation of a national energy company makes his “anti-bureaucratic” rhetoric the hypocrisy that it is. “What holds us back is that we’re as scared of government bureaucracy as we are of corporate bureaucracy,” says Hayden. We’re afraid that if we nationalize the oil industry, James Schlesinger will come back from retirement and be made the head of Exxon. So we have to be able to liberate government from the hands of the oil companies, and when we’re sure that we have a government we can trust, then and only then will we be able to take over the oil industry . . . If oil and energy are as crucial to our national security as all of us realize, it’s _absolutely insane_ to allow the key to our national security\[!\] to depend on the private profit of big oil. (cited by _Barron’s_, October 29, 1979) And so it appears that Hayden does not object to bureaucracy _per se_—only to the unfortunate fact that CED affiliation is not yet a requirement for work in the public sector. He is perfectly willing to hand the energy industry to the same people who brought us the farce known as “public education,” the U.S. Post Office, and the crime against humanity known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bureaucracy is bad, says Hayden, unless the bureaucracy is _his_ bureaucracy. If only we can get the “right” people in government, then we will have a government we can trust. This is the sort of illusion which has long blinded the Left to the realities of state power. CED’s campaign to swell the ranks of the “New Class” public sector is not limited to their potential effect on domestic policy. Hayden really means it when he talks about “national security,” and his linkage of control of “big oil” to a more nationalistic foreign policy sounds like something out of the neoconservatives. Writing in the independent socialist weekly _In These Times_, Ronald Radosh reported on an October 3 meeting at Temple Shaaray on Manhattan’s East Side, sponsored by the American Jewish Congress: The focus of their October 3 meeting was on Israel, the Mideast and American foreign policy. The U.S. has recently been forced to surrender its strategic oil reserves, Hayden informed his audience. The loss of this vital resource was forced on the U.S. by OPEC, Saudi Arabia in particular. Calling this a “national defeat and a national embarrassment,” Hayden concluded, “There is a new tilt in American foreign policy towards the Arab cause in general.” As evidence of big oil’s power, Hayden cited full page ads appearing in California papers, in which Standard Oil “appealed to the American people to become more sympathetic to the Arabs,” calling attention to what he termed a “strange coalition between big oil and the PLO,” one that included both liberal Democrats and reactionary Republicans. Hayden argued that the same oil companies who were always the first “to attack revolutionaries, to attack radicals on the American campuses, to attack the Chicago Seven . . . these same oil companies, this same establishment that is against radical change and violence from campus to campus and country to country suddenly finds itself in an interesting, unusual but nevertheless very real alliance with Yasser Arafat.” Hayden echoed the “blame OPEC” line usually handed out by the militarists, and conjured up visions of “economic strangulation” at the hands of the Arabs. Hayden stressed that “American security” depends on some 200 tankers passing through narrow straits which could be sabotaged by “Palestinian terrorists.” And so, as the U.S. builds up a 110,000-man “quick strike force,” to guard the “security” of access to oil in the Middle East, Hayden’s craven capitulations to the establishment’s Middle East scenarios and nationalizations for war preparations, his appeal to the grossest sort of jingoism, is utterly contemptible. Even _In These Times_ was forced to conclude that Hayden was “sounding much like Norman Podhoretz,” and there is more than a passing resemblance to Stuart Eizenstat’s famous memo to President Carter last summer: “We have a better opportunity than ever before,” wrote Eizenstat, “to assert leadership over an apparently unsolvable problem, and to shift the cause of inflation and energy problems to OPEC to gain credibility with the American people, to offer hope of an eventual solution to regain our political losses.” Hayden’s nationalism and abject demagoguery are even more apparent when he claims that “we should not allow the private oil companies to buy from Saudi Arabia or from OPEC. If anybody’s going to buy resources from abroad, it should be the federal government and not the secret, conspiratorial companies that now do it.” In the aftermath of Vietnam and of Watergate, of the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon White House transcripts, we are asked to believe that the “big oil companies” are “secret and conspiratorial,” while the government is, supposedly, open and “democratic.” We are told, by a veteran of the Left, that we cannot rely on a multiplicity of oil companies—instead we must create a state national energy monopoly. Oil companies, which find peaceful negotiations with OPEC more realistic and sober than threatening war to secure oil, are not to be trusted—instead we are asked to place our energy future in the hands of those who are prepared to go to war in the Middle East over Israel and oil. _This_, we are told, is going to lead us toward _peace_! The experience of two World Wars, plus the accumulated experience of more than thirty years of Cold War politics, in which the domestic economy is manipulated by the government in the service of an interventionist foreign policy, and an interventionist foreign policy manipulated in the service of a controlled domestic economy, counts for nothing. By adding his voice to the anti-OPEC chorus, by blithely dismissing, as he did speaking before the American Jewish Congress, the grievances of the Palestinians, and spreading the canard that they cannot even be considered without “dismantling the state of Israel,” by painting a sinister picture of “big oil” conspiring with the Arabs, Hayden’s politics are acquiring a nationalist tinge. Apparently, this is his true means of cashing-in on the alleged “right-wing” trend currently sweeping the country. The only question left is: how far to the right is Hayden willing to go? The answer, odd as it may seem, is probably to be found in an examination of the CED approach to “battling” the giant corporations. For despite their “anticorporate” rhetoric, Hayden and his followers do _not_ propose to eliminate the excessive political power of some large corporations, but rather to _control_ those corporations, to use corporate power for their own ends. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the case of the Chrysler bailout. On a recent trip to Detroit, Tom Hayden sided with UAW President Doug Fraser’s proposal that the U.S. bail out Chrysler by partially taking it over. The government should bail out the giant corporation, said Hayden, taking in exchange for its bestowal of taxpayers’ money some stock equity in the corporation. Like John Kenneth Galbraith, Hayden favors the bailout of large corporations—provided that government gets a larger share of decision-making in the corporation itself. Hayden has even endorsed UAW’s Doug Fraser’s latest ploy: to sell out the raises of Chrysler employees in exchange for Fraser’s _own seat on Chrysler’s board_. _This_ is the meaning of Hayden’s call for “consumer” and “labor” and “public” (i.e. government) representation on corporate boards. _This_ is the meaning of Hayden’s claim that “in terms of alternative energy development, our position in California is a mirror image of what I think would be appropriate nationally; that is, a partnership between competitive enterprise and government.” Shades of John Connally! Nothing could be more clear: what we are witnessing here is not any campaign against “giant corporations,” but a campaign to control them and harness their power in ways Hayden finds congenial. Like earlier groups in the 1920s and 1930s, Hayden began by attacking the corporations; and ends by envying them their power to shape the political and economic environment. So what the programs and proposals as they interlock and merge together: (1) The CED campaigns against “landlords,” in favor of rent control, which will produce massive housing shortages, stepped up scapegoating of private apartment owners, public outcries against inadequate housing, and a carefully orchestrated public clamor for greater “public”—i.e. government—investment in, planning for and control of, the housing market. (2) CED opposes a “runaway shop”—a plant or company which wants to relocate. They favor laws limiting plant shifts from one area to another, and requiring companies to pay communities which they “desert” what Hayden calls “reparations.” This literally feudalistic measure subjects companies to the totalitarian control of local governments, which can exploit them as they wish, until they are exhausted and, probably, taken over by “boards” representing “the public”—i.e. the CED. Liberalism once meant the free mobility of capital, both domestically and in the international arena, spreading jobs and wealth to the disadvantaged. The movement of capital to the south, providing job opportunities for the poor, is now denounced because it allegedly puts people out of work in the North. Investment overseas, which was a hallmark of the internationalism of classical liberalism, promoting free trade and growing standards of living throughout the world—this country itself was built on foreign capital—is now denounced by the CED’s Steven Rivers as “treason”! (3) CED favors state subsidies and planning to encourage and shape the development of solar power—under the control, wherever possible, of CED associates and those of a similar ideological orientation. (4) CED promotes the formation of a national energy corporation, to assume total responsibility for purchases of foreign oil and other energy-related raw materials. (5) CED builds a political machine for leader Tom Hayden—at taxpayers’ expense. (6) CED leaders shift opportunistically from issue to issue, all the while clinging tenaciously to the ultimate (and unnamed) goal, every step being perceived by activists as a “transition” to an unnamed end. (7) CED scapegoats other countries, prattles about “national security” and the need to further control the economy in order to deal with recalcitrant foreigners whose natural resources are needed for the “good of the nation.” (8) CED enlists selected “consumerists”—of a particular ideological stripe, favoring government “representation” of consumers. It recruits selected “environmentalists”—who share a fondness for state solutions to problems. It courts selected “labor leaders”—who then sell out their rank-and-file for a share in corporate power. It grooms selected representatives of “the public”—who share an elitist vision of what is in the “public interest.” All these are wound together under the aegis of an all-powerful state busily shaping (with populist rhetoric) a “business-government partnership.” Well, what does this amount to? Does it amount to “economic democracy,” or to something quite different? Perhaps it resembles nothing so much as an earlier form of “economic democracy,” which was touted, some years ago, as insuring that “within the Corporations, the interests of producers and consumers and employees, individuals and associations are interlocked and integrated in a unique and univocal way, while all types of interests are brought under the aegis of the state.” How far to the right is Tom Hayden willing to go? Will he approve of this quotation as an adequate description of his program? If so, perhaps he is willing to go all the way to the politics of that quotation’s author—Mario Palmieri, visionary prophet of the corporate state, and philosopher of Italian fascism. Justin Raimondo is editor of _Libertarian Vanguard_, and founder of the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus. He is the author of _In Praise of Oliflus: Rebuilding Gay Liberation_, published by Students for a Libertarian Society.