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California Politics Environmental Extremism Jane Fonda Occupy Wall street Tom Hayden Water

Origins: Environmentalism, Big Green, Corporate Capitalism, Occupy Wall Street

Toxic Politics of Big Green Initiative: Hayden and Fonda, 1989-90.

The origins of the President Obama’s green agenda now cutting across many federal agencies can be found in substantial part in California from 1990 to the present, e.g. Big Green Initiative and its successors.

Similarly, the sentiments of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 can also be found in the toxic politics of socialist and Communist critics of corporations and capitalism. Tom Hayden and friends led the way.

The Great Apple Scare: The Science and the Nonsense of Environmental Politics; Cancer in Children

The political scene is best set with the great apple scare of 1989.

In February and March 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council, helped by Academy Award actress Meryl Streep,
Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits, and a credulous national media,
claimed dangers of cancer from eating apples sprayed with Alar –a hormone used
to maintain the redness and firmness of eating apples.  Actress Streep in an Ed Bradley story on
CBS’s 60 Minutes claimed Alar in apples caused cancer in children.

This despite warnings to CBS of deficiencies in the Alar story six weeks before it aired.

Steve Wood, a leading promoter of low pesticide use, told CBS that banning Alar would lead to the use
of stronger chemicals.  Wood also pointed out that Streep’s and “60 Minutes”s principal source, Natural
Resources Defense Council, NRDC, had used a frequently discredited twelve year
old study showing cancer in rats — fed 266,000 times the normal human
ingestion of Alar.[1] Slightly more than the “apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

The CBS show went on to protect children from cancer no matter what the actual science showed and informed opinion said.

Both the World Health Organization and the National Academy of Sciences had claimed that Alar presented no health risk.[2]

Two food research scientists argued that the EPA’s risk assumptions had overstated actual measures of pesticides in apples by 2,600 times.[3]

Lots of Assumptions, Little Science

The key was the word assumption.  Ronald Hart, director of the National Center
on Toxicological Research, later said, “Our risk models are based on at
least 50 assumptions, none of which have been scientifically
demonstrated.”  The most-shaky assumptions involved using rodents, 1 billion times more cancer-prone than
humans, and then feeding them high caloric doses of substances.  High caloric doses are carcinogenic whatever
the substance ingested.  “The public thinks these animal risk estimates are based on real science, but that simply
isn’t true,” said Assistant Surgeon General Vernon Houk.[4]

One mother called a food trade group asking whether she ought to wash her dangerous apple sauce down her kitchen sink or
take the deadly sauce to a toxic dump.[5]

Apparently responding to mothers and not the others, the EPA banned Alar.

Although 14 scientific societies representing 100,000 microbiologists, toxicologists, and food scientists said
the risk of Alar and other chemicals was effectively zero, Uniroyal Chemical Company took Alar off the market.[6]

Where the Political Possibilies [Are] Greater

Liberal columnist Peter Schrag said the whole
affair was a “wave of sheer unreason, … a growing lack of public
confidence in government controls and inspections … and [a] shift … into
areas where the dangers are much lower, but the political possibilities greater.”[7]

During February 1989, speaking before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Robert Scheuplein of the
Food and Drug Administration said that while carcinogens found naturally in
foods might account for 38,0000 cancer deaths per year out of 500,000, manmade
pesticides probably accounted for 40 deaths per year[8] — a miniscule risk irrelevant to forming the nation’s health policies.

Nonetheless, fear of the food supply was politically powerful overiding science and even common sense.

The greatest risk of eating is bacteriological — natural microbes –salmonella, camppyobacter, etc in meat
and fish.  Microbes are ubiquitous — only chemicals combined with cooking could solve this genuine health
issue.  Cancer from food is a very remote danger.  Cancer of all kinds, except
those associated with smoking had remained the same or declined for
decades.  92 per cent of all cancers has nothing to do with what one eats.  98 per
cent of this small (8 per cent) cancer risk in foods is natural toxins, not from man-made pesticides.

Nutritional Terrorists

Bruce Ames had shown in 1987 that natural sources of chemical carcinogens were 1,500 times
greater than man-made synthetic chemicals.
Natural plant pesticides ingested by humans are 99.9 per cent of all
chemical carcinogens.  Some called NRDC “nutritional terrorists.”

Yet in March 1989, the EPA moved toward a ban on EDBC’s -widely used fungicides — even though the risk of a cancerous
dose was than one in a million and naturally occurring fungicides, such as
aflatoxins, and molds, were 1,000 times more toxic than EDBC’s.  One mushroom has 167 times the carcinogenic
effects as the daily intake of EDB’s and PCB’s.[9] The loss of EDBC’s caused apple growers to
use stronger mite killers later in the season with higher residuals on the
fruit than the EDBC’s.[10] The estimated cost of the EDBC ban was $2
billion a year.[11] By 1991, California would find only 10 wells
out of 2,761 tested with traces of EDB’s and be offering $190,000 for studies
of alternatives to EDB’s.[12] The British avoided all such costs by simply believing their scientists.

Angry over its massive economic losses from the ALAR affair, Washington state apple growers sued the Natural Resources
Defense Council and CBS.  NRDC’s Alan Meyerhoff, a Tom Hayden ally, said the suit was a “strategic lawsuit against
public participation,” a SLAPP.[13]

No Significant Cancer Risk

After the Alar ban, a National Academy of Sciences report, Issues in Science and Technology, based on 6,000
studies, concluded that there was “no evidence that pesticides or natural
toxins in food contribute significantly to cancer risk in the United
States” and urged that Americans double their diet of fruits and vegetables.[14]

The worst case — seventy years of excess ingestation of pesticides by the entire U.S. population — would predict 20,000
cases of cancer per year.  This totally imaginary horror story has to be compared to 956,000 real and proven cases of
cancer deaths per year from more certain causes.  Even attributing two per cent of all cancers
to pesticides requires extraordinary assumptions of guilt for pesticides and
their users with little or no hard physical evidence.  To receive cancerous doses of food, one would
have to eat 20 pounds of fruits and vegetables every day according to Sanford
Miller, a biomedical scientist at the University of Texas.  If the FDA’s “zero risk” were
applied to all foods, “we would have to ban all foods … ,” according to Miller.[15]

“Most of the risks are people’s choices.  They are not imposed … by
corporations. … [Yet] people want to blame someone,” said Robert J.
Scheuplein, FDA’s director of toxicological sciences.[16] Farmers often considering themselves
conservationists, “are shocked to see themselves painted as the
enemy,” said Herb Manig of the American Farm Bureau Federation.  Putting “an inspector behind every
cornstalk … (may) drive up the cost of agriculture” and food, said columnist Alastair Chase.[17]

Environmental Politics, a Leftist Agenda

“Friends of the people” were self designated.  During April 1989, Norman
Lear hired yet another old Hayden hand, Andy Spahn, to head up Lear’s
Environmental Media Association to raise Hollywood consciousness of
environmental issues.

Lear had been inspired by Jamaican Noel Brown’s concerns about global pollution and praise
for Soviet cooperation in the clean up of the world’s pollution.[18] Apparently the dead — (fish) in Lake Baikal,
(whales) in the Pacific, and (humans) at Chernobl — told no tales about Soviet plunder of the environment. [Chinese now leading in green technolopgy]

Corporate Capitalism’s Assault on the Environment

The range of green political possibilities for the left was greatly expanded as was their list of alleged global
environmental disasters that were all attributed to American corporate capitalism —
ocean pollution, off shore drilling (tankers worse), global warming, ozone
depletion, acid rain, pesticides, deforestation, redwoods etc., etc.,.

Bill Bradley, a long time confidant of Tom
Hayden wrote in late July 1989 that Hayden, Assemblyman Lloyd Connelly, and
others saw environmental pollution as a “hot button” issue useful for
defining the public debate for the 1990 elections.[19] Four days later, Karl Ory, a Hayden spokesman
for Campaign California said, “We’re now looking at options for a major
environmental initiative for the November 1990 ballot.  The “we” was almost incestuously
Haydenista — Hayden’s lover since the Dukaksis campaign, Vicki Rideout, was
also an advisor to attorney General John Van de Kamp.  Van de Kamp’s campaign consultant (until
January) was a former Cesar Chavez organizer and Willie Brown aide, Richie
Ross.  Appropriately quoting Tom Hayden, the Campaign California press release said toxics was a “progressive”
cause.  “We hope to announce our plans in a few weeks,” said Ory.

Pay to Play

In the meantime various draft proposals landed among members of environmentalist industries, lawyers, and politicians
around the state who might provide substantive input — including cash contributions.  The Pete Wilson for governor
campaign had received a copy and was given only a few days to read it, comment
on it and endorse it.  By various accounts the Wilson campaign had either “wanted very badly” to
endorse it or found that it was “not good public policy … .”  Later both the Democrat and Republican
candidates for Governor, Dianne Feinstein and Pete Wilson, would independently
claim to have easily refused to contribute $100,000 each for the opportunity to
provide input on the draft initiative and to incidentally help John Van de Kamp’s gobernatorial campaign
against both of them.

Proponents denied these financial demands were ever made.[20] The practice, sometimes claimed – always
denied, was common in financing California’s expensive multi-million dollar
statewide ballot campaigns.  Private environmentalist attorneys had also reviewed the sloppily produced draft, but
local district attorneys who would have to prosecute under the proposed law were not invited to participate.

In August Hayden and state attorney general
John Van de Kamp formally announced that a “coalition” was working to
finalize the initiative.[21] “The entire environmental community …
[would] … put before the people the most far-reaching environmental clean-up
initiative in the history of this state,” said Van de Kamp.[22] There was no doubt, however, that Hayden was
the one “spearheading the Big Green initiative.”

Big Green Is Red

Bill Bradley had named the effort[23] after some discussions with Hayden who “initially loved” Big
Green.  Later Hayden “asked me to stop pushing the name.  It sounded, he
said, like … a big dog … like ‘Big Red’ or ‘Ole Yeller’… And he had his
own name … — EPIC for Environmental Protection Initiative of California.  As it happened, EPIC … was
also … Epton Sinclair’s 1934 Socialist campaign for governor.”[24] Some opponents would privately call the
initiative Big Red or Little Red or compare it to a watermelon — green on the outside, red on the inside.

To gauge the possible negative political impact of Hayden’s leadership role in Big Green, the initiative’s coalition
took a poll in late September.  Stating that it “was put together by Tom Hayden and John Van de Kamp to further
their political agendas,” only 18 per cent said that was reason enough to vote against the initiative.”[25] Several months later, Mervyn Field’s
California poll showed that Hayden’s favorable to unfavorable ratings by voters
was bad compared to other California politicians, 39 per cent to 38 per cent, but not as low as some thought.[26]

The coalition was working on many fronts and venues.  On September 28, Lear’s
Environmental Media Association, EMA, directed by Hayden hand Andy Spahn,
hosted a reception of ten leading environmental organizations.  Also in the fall, a statewide group of local
elected officials of the “think globally, act locally” variety, Local
Government Commission, met in Monterey — its theme being a renewal of the environmental ethos.[27]

On October 11th, Hayden and Van de Kamp announced the details of the coalition’s plan, an Environmental Protection
Act.  EPA aimed to “end a decade of environmental neglect …,” said Hayden.
Van de Kamp said it was a “bill of rights” that “… puts the right to clean beaches and oceans ahead of the right to drill for oil and
dump waste … .”  Its “Findings and Declarations” stated, “neither the state nor
federal government has adequately protected the People of the State of
California from hazardous pesticides … placing adults and especially children in serious jeopardy.”

“On Land, Air, and Sea.”

Environmental Protection Act would enact:

  • a phased ban of any use of cancer-causing pesticides in any amount;
  • a tough “more sensitive” children’s standard of chemical safety for those chemicals missing the outright ban;
  • a phased ban of the most common air conditioner/refrigerant chemicals (chlorofluorocarbons) in seven years anda 40 per cent reduction of carbon dioxide [auto, factory] emissions in twenty years
    since both CFC’s and CO were ozone-depleting chemicals;
  • “health based” limits on corporate discharges into the ocean;
  • an outright ban of off shore oil drilling;
  • homebuilders requirements to plant one tree for every 500 square foot lot developed [6 trees
    per modest single family dwelling];
  • tough federal quantitative standards for local sewage treatment discharges of toxic pollutants;
  • a $200 million budget to acquire ancient redwoods and $100 million to fund nonprofit and government
    planting of trees in “urban forestry” projects;
  • a tax on private oil transport of $500 million to fund public oil spill responses;
  • and, a first time in the nation, statewide elected post of environmental advocate costing
    $750,000 a year with an annual research budget of $40 million.[28]

It took 13,000 words to describe Big Green’s comprehensive plan for clean air, water, soil and food.

Hayden pledged an “all out fight,” which one wag compared to the Marine Corp — “on land, air,
and sea.”  Others said Hayden intended to be the Corp’s Commander as California’s elected Environmental
advocate on land, air and sea.  Hayden denied that this “great office” had been created for him.  The environmental advocate had been variously
described called a “czar” or cop who would have broad authority (exceeding the state’s Attorney General and overriding local District
Attorneys) to conduct investigations, control $40 million in research per year,
and to intervene in pending civil and criminal cases in local courts.[29] John Van de Kamp also hoped to get a
jump-start on his campaign for Governor by supporting the popular initiative.

Political Hot Buttons

Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters said, “Big Green seems to be … more inspired by political
strategy than any rational approach to environmental protection … .  [It] touches all the right emotional buttons,
but ignores many of the underlying issues that would be more unpalatable to
voters.”  Walters said California’s population growth required “housing construction, oil, and food at affordable
prices.”[30] Someone with the Western Agricultural Chemicals Association said, “It forfeits science for emotions.”[31]

Hayden’s friend, Bob Mulholland said, “In a political debate, science doesn’t matter much.  It’s really how you feel about the issue.”[32]

Indeed, politics driven emotion, not science, drove most discussions of ozone depletion and global warming as well as pesticides.

Who’s Who of Radical Environmentalists

In official papers filed in late November the proponents of Big Green were a Who’s Who of Haydenistas:

  • Assemblyman Lloyd Connelly, a Hayden intimate on environmental and Central American issues;
  • Attorney General John Van de Kamp, who had hired Dukasis aide and Hayden lover, Vicki Rideout, for his campaign for Governor of California;
  • Bob Mulholland, political director of Campaign California;
  • Michael Picker, long time CED member and CED fundraiser, a leading member of CED’s Cancer Project and its Valley Oak
    voter registration project, an activist in Proposition 65, and a spokesman for the Hayden influenced National Toxic Campaign[33];
  • Albert Meyerhoff, Hayden ally in anti-nuclear and Proposition 65 efforts and in the Natural Resources Defense Council; and
  • Carl Pope, Hayden ally from the Sierra Club.

Later joining the campaign would be the Planning and Conservation League whose president and vice-president, Gary Patton and Michael Remy, had ties to Hayden’s CED as a member and
its attorney respectively.  PCL was a coalition of groups that included Friends of the Earth, Californians Against Waste, Friends of the River, the Audubon Society, Greenpeace Pacific Southwest,
the Wilderness Society and others.

The League of Conservation Voters came on board and it was another coalition consisting of the Sierra Club, the Planning and Conservation League, Defenders
of Wildlife, Californians Against Waste, and Ralph Nader’s western arm CalPIRG.  Many had previously worked with Hayden.  And the California Democratic
Party also supported Big Green, not surprisingly since two of the party’s subsequent executive directors, Cathy Calfo and Bob Mulholland, would come off
Hayden’s payroll to run the day to day operations of the state party and Hayden
would donate $58,000 to the Democrat Party State Central Committee in the coming
election year.[34]

A Tom Hayden Operation

Still, Los Angeles Times, “analyst” Rich Paddock would later write that Tom Hayden was only “one of seven” sponsors.[35] And Picker and others would deny parts of
their associations and claim other more mainstream activities whatever the public record.[36] Indeed Big Green had gone to the top, recruiting Michael Landon of TV’s “Highway to Heaven” as a spokesman.[37]

The “Big Green” campaign would be managed by Bob Mulholland on Hayden’s payroll for 15 years.  Bill Bradley who was a long time associate of
Hayden since the Hayden campaign for U.S. Senate and afterwards as a CED
activist/contributor/consultant (in Santa Monica, Chico, and Sacramento) wrote politically insightful columns about Big Green.[38]

After denying the author’s detailed claims that he was a “confidant” of Hayden, Bradley finally appeared to
relent sending the author a $100 check for “rendering public relations services.  The author returned the check saying Bradley couldn’t really afford the advertising rates for the many column inches
published about him in the author’s column in the Sacramento Union.[39]

Going Global…into Hollywood

As a frequent Hayden publicist working for a newspaper staffed with Haydenistas, Bill Bradley wrote that Hayden’s
“Big Green” represented an “Eco-globalism” recognizing that “solutions to environmental problems … transcend the traditional
political boundaries of city, county, state, and nation.”  He noted that “Hollywood figures are
becoming increasingly involved in the new eco-globalism, producing public service
messages, inserting ‘green’ messages in TV shows and movies, making public appearances, and raising money.”[40]

At the grassroots level the “think globally, act locally” contingent came out.  In Hollywood Andy Spahn, a former Hayden
spokesman, headed up Norman Lear’s Environmental Media Association, EMA, which
successfully led environmental reprogramming of upcoming TV series and movies.  One EMA meeting co-sponsored by
Norman Lear and Fonda’s $250 million business partner, Lorimar, refused to stop
an evening meeting being conducted just as San Francisco’s Loma Pietra
Earthquake struck on October 17th.  As nearly 300 people died by the Bay, an owner of a fifty car garage, Norman Lear,
held forth on the dangers of strofoam cups to the environment and worried about
automobiles and air conditioners depleting the ozone layer.[41] Bradley wrote that the Bay area quake
“reminds us of our peril in ignoring natural systems.”[42]

Jane Fonda who had divorced Tom, was raising funds for his “Big Green” initiative.

Californian’s Scared of Chemicals

A December survey showed that 77 per cent of Californians in 15 of the states 58 counties were worried about food safety
— 48 per cent of them citing pesticides.  Bob Mulholland explained it: “Baby-boomers start out with
suspicions of government because of the Vietnam War and Watergate…. In the
past few years every institution in America has proven it can’t be trusted.  We’ve had scandals in
government, Wall Street and even among religious leaders.”  Merlin Fagen, a spokesman for the California
Farm Bureau said, “We’re scared, and we’re in a hard spot” while
working on an alternative initiative dubbed “CAREFUL.”  A gleeful Mulholland said, “We’ll just
use that as proof that much of the agriculture community agrees with us.”[43]

Some shopping malls attempted to stop David Cameron’s signature gathering on their property, but a judge ruled, with the
assistance of Campaign California attorney J. Allen Eisen, in favor of free speech.[44]

“We’re not dumb enough to poison ourselves”

California agriculture unveiled its “responsible, scientific” alternative to the Hayden initiative in
late December.  Instead of banning pesticides, it would double testing and research.  “We’re trying to take the hysteria out
of the issue … .  We are consumers [too],” said Stan Lester, a Yolo county farmer.  Bob Vice of the California Farm Bureau said,
“People know we’re not dumb enough to poison ourselves.”[45] Farmers hoped that a public in an
environmentalist mood might just accept their measure because it might appear less controversial.[46]

Opposition Divides

In response Mulholland said the agricultural initiative “divides the opposition.  It spreads their money out, and it reinforces
our message that there are some problems with pesticides that can be solved.”[47] Mulholland said, “Any industry that
tries to regulate itself is going to create suspicion in the minds of the public.”[48] Environmentalists tried to paint the farmers’ initiative “Big Brown.”

Oil

Al Greenstein, a spokesman for ARCO, said banning offshore drilling would only increase oil imports, leak prone tankers,
and gasoline prices — later calculated at 25 to 50 cents per gallon.  Governor Deukmejian suggested a loss of $2
billion to $5 billion in tidelands oil revenues to the state if offshore oil drilling were ended.  After new oil
spills off Alaska and the California coast, the governor noted that banning
offshore drilling meant more tankers and more oil spills.

Timber

By mid-January 1990, following the lead of
agriculture, the timber industry also presented an alternative to “Big
Green” — a $300 million bond to plant trees and to ban clear cutting in
old growth forests.  Kevin Eckerly, a timber
spokesman said that “The 90’s are the decade of the environment” and
“We’d like to have a hand in designing environmental reforms.”  Mulholland responded that the timber
initiative “… helps us because it gives us a clear contrast between
industry initiatives and environmental initiatives” and that having timber
interests protect forests was “like putting prisoners in charge of the
jail.”[49] Leroy McElroy of Forests Forever asked,
“Who do you trust? … industry or … consumer groups?”[50]

The Hayden Initiative

By February 1990, agricultural, refrigeration, pesticide, timber, and oil interests had hired Woodward-McDowell
to conduct a campaign in direct opposition to “Big Green.”  The firm opened an office whose phones were answered
indicating it opposed “the Hayden Initiative.”  Would Hayden be an “albatross” or a
“millstone” borne by the initiative?  The Sierra Club’s Michael Paparian said, “The opponents are
grasping for something to oppose. … [T]hey know the public wants the positive
measures that are in the initiative.”

Clark Briggs a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau agreed with the
Sierra Club’s assessment.  He said that voters will “read the label … and if it sounds good, they’ll vote for
it.”  Paparian said Hayden had been “a very consistent and reliable advocate for environmental
issues….”  Bob Mulholland, “Tom Hayden’s right-hand political operative for more than a decade,”
said “I hope they attack Hayden. … It will make him a better environmental leader.”

Even political consultants and pollsters who
had used Hayden as a campaign issue in the past warned that running against
Hayden might raise money and recruit foot soldiers, but it wouldn’t be enough
to persuade voters to go against “a powerful issue” like “Big Green.”  Indeed September polling
had already revealed only an 18 percent drop off caused by Hayden’s name.[51] Whatever Hayden’s negatives they didn’t
stick.  Was “Big Green” the teflon initiative?  It seemed so.

Corporate Polluters

In early March, 1990 Ralph Nader’s CALPIRG,
California Public Interest Research Group, made its independent contribution to
“Big Green,” releasing its annual report on California’s worst
polluters.  All were large corporations (steel, oil, paper, chemical).  No public
agency was listed despite being some of the biggest polluters.  Three companies who had reduced their
pollutants refused to talk to the Naderites.[52] Nader a self avowed “consumer
activist” as far as can be known did not object to the high costs to the
consumer of implementing Big Green.

Meanwhile Hayden made a shotgun attack upon his enemies.  “We’re up against some
of the most powerful interests there are — Oil, pesticides, … developers….
They are like gorillas in a candy store.  And they’re irritated,” said Hayden.[53] Opponents of Big Green foresaw that they
might have to spend $16 million to defeat it.

Left Mobilizes Troops

Yet by early March, the “most powerful … gorillas” hadn’t stopped the Big Green machine.  Out of the 600,000 signature target, some
500,000 had been collected six weeks before the deadline by a “citizen’s
army” made up of “an enormous pool of volunteers” and not a few
paid collectors both from numerous organizations such as Campaign California,
the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters.  Though by March the “Big Green”
campaign had so far raised only $225,000 in reported funds and had an official
staff of only four, Mulholland would later brag that Campaign California had a $13 million endowment[54]
(capable of producing an annual income of $1.3 million at a 10 per cent rate of return from investments).

Some of the initiative’s zealous volunteers and supporters, the “vanguard,” were calling it the “most
controversial initiative in California history” intending “to do
nothing less than save the Earth” and proclaiming themselves to be part of
an international movement likely to dominate the next decade.[55] Mary Nichols of a Hayden coalition member
organization, NRDC, said, “I think this is going to be the direction
pursued in other parts of the county.”
Christian Science Monitor story said California was “in the
forefront of testing how far the public wants to go in … environmental
concerns … .”[56] How far would California’s mainstream voters
be willing to go to clean up the environment?

Mainstream or Radical?

So in early April Bill Bradley wrote a piece trying to separate “Big Green” from “environmental
leftists” and “deep ecologists” and Earth Firsters.  It was necessary.  Earth Firsters planned a “Redwood
Summer” confronting timber-harvesting operations and that might generate
negative publicity about the environmental movement.

Earth First, California Wilderness Coalition, Sierra Club and Heal the Bay Stung by Bikers.

One secret Earth Firster, Jim Eaton, executive director of the California Wilderness Coalition (an umbrella
organization whose membership includes the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, the
Wilderness Society, Friends of the River, Defenders of Wildlife etc.) donated
$100 to a sting operation alleging to be able to (illegally) insert Earth First
literature into an Exxon oil company mailer. “Frannie” at the Sierra Club in San Francisco, and
“Corey” at Heal the Bay in Santa Monica had expressed interest in the
Exxon project.

The Sahara Club an antiSierra Club organizatiion of motorcycle and off-road vehicle enthusiasts ran sting operation

Th sting tape recorded Eaton promising and delivering money for the scam.[57]

Earth First’s Dave Foreman, arrested for conspiring to blow up a power transmission tower had become a secret hero of
the movement.  David Brower, founder of the Earth Island Institute said, “I would love to introduce him. I would
hate to follow him.  He’s a terrific performer.”  Forman said about Earth
First, “It could be sort of secretly controlled by the mainstream and trotted
out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or the Wilderness Society look moderate.”[58]

Extremists Among Moderates

So this was the context of cooperation among mainstream and extremist groups that explained why Bradley tried to
identify the initiative with the concerns of moderate voters.  Bradley said, “Big Green’ is far
reaching, radical even, but it’s not destructive.  It manages to avoid most of the anti-tech,
anti-capitalist junk that some of its backers desired.”  Soon an official co-sponsor, Michael Picker
of the National Toxics campaign, would appear as a media contact for Greenpeace
Action, surely one of the groups that Bradley would have liked to be, at least
publicly, disassociated from Big Green.[59] And Earth First!ers Darryl Cherney and Judi
Bari narrowly escaped death when a bomb blew up in the car outside of San Francisco.

Big Green was really just what “we
white, middle class, environmentalists” want said Bradley.  It was all rather “doable.” All
“we” wanted was: solar and wind power, efficient cars, mass transit,
new settlement patterns, cleaner technologies and management policies,
recycling, regulate or ban toxic discharges, reduce agricultural use of water,
pest resistant crops, improved worker health and safety, preventive medicine,
medical care for children.  Not much really very much[60], exceptwhen added up.

Big Green a Costly Jobs Killer

Opponents commissioned an April study that claimed Big green would increase gasoline prices 25-50 cents per gallon,
utility rates by 20 per cent, and food prices by 30-50 per cent.  And 1.4 million Californians might lose their
jobs.

Still a cautious Kirk West of the California Chamber of Commerce, didn’t want to appear to be “against environmental quality.”

Jack McDowell of Woodward & McDowell, the firm hired to run the campaign against the initiative, said simply that it
was “too drastic,” signaling his new political strategy to defeat Big Green.  Bob Mulholland reacted saying,
“They are just crying wolf and being extreme.”[61]

Who is Chicken Little?

Later one Big Green supporter, NRDC’s Albert
Meyerhoff, would say its critics were like Chicken Little crying that “the
sky is falling,” — a curious accusation since proponents were the ones
making planetary warnings about global warming, green house effects, and ozone
layers disappearing.[62] The green message of impending environmental
disasters appeared to be working better than their opponent’s message of high
costs for consumers.  By mid-April about 650,000 signatures had been gathered — only 375,000 valid signatures were
required.

April 1990 contained a weeklong celebration of the 20th anniversary of Earth Day with California’s Big Green being the
flagship for the movement.  Columnist Warren Brookes was one of the few national journalists sounding a warning of
the ill winds ahead.  He said Big Green would “cut food production by 15 per cent to 20 per cent and raise prices
30 per cent to 40 per cent on the best cancer-fighting foods we eat …”[63] meaning fruits and vegetables. According to Agricultural Secretary Clayton
Yuetter the impact would be national since California grew half the nation’s fruits and vegetables.[64] Brookes cited the science and concluded that
“big Green’s’ phobia over trivial environmental risks looks suspiciously like witch-hunting.”[65]

Toxic Chemical Soup, Poison for Profits

Earth Day April 22nd turned up the heat.

Speaking in the heart of California agriculture in Fresno, John Van de Kamp said, “The people of this
community live and drink and breathe in a toxic chemical soup like few places
on Earth,” a exaggerated and hysterical remark not well received in the
farm dependant local economy.[66] After word leaked that President Bush might
approve some off shore drilling in California, Tom Hayden took an Earth Day
stage in Santa Monica urging the crowd to “Stand up and say ‘No
Drilling.  No Drilling.”  He predicted “a thunderstorm of
résistance.”[67]

Things looked good for Big Green. Polls showed only 17 per cent considered the economy a major concern and 40 per cent
of the voters described themselves as an “environmentalist.”

Feinstein Endorses Big Green

Within the Democratic Party primary contest for Governor things got stormy.  In San
Jose Van de Kamp attacked those “growers who poison their crops for
profit,” and said that his Democrat opponent and former San Francisco
Mayor Dianne Feinstein was “ducking the issue” of Big Green.  Feinstein promised to “rid the Central
Valley of that pesticide curse.”[68] Then the next day, Feinstein endorsed the
“progressive, state-of-the art” Big Green in Tom Hayden’s hometown of
Santa Monica.  She had piggybacked her campaign upon Van de Kamp’s expensive initiative at its peak of popularity at
no cost to herself.  Republican and former mayor of San Diego Pete Wilson had still taken no position on the
initiative except to object to the Balkanization created by the environmental “Czar.”[69]

On April 26th, a day after Feinstein had caught a free ride in the “thunderstorm,” Hayden and Van de Kamp
conducted anticlimactic day long series of press conferences throughout
California as they turned in nearly 800,000 signatures to qualify the measure
for the November ballot.  They had only needed 372,000 valid signatures.

On June 5th, Feinstein defeated Van de Kamp for the Democrat nomination for governor.
Van de Kamp had spent $1.6 million in campaign funds to qualify Big
Green and two other initiatives dealing with crime and political ethics.  He graciously endorsed Feinstein and said
that qualifying the initiatives had been worth it despite his defeat at the polls.

DDT Suit

In mid-June officials of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and state agencies sued Montrose
Chemical Corporation for “tens of millions” to pay for dumping DDT
into the ocean 29 years previously and for discharging DDT tainted water into
the ocean 19 years previously.  The guilty facility no longer existed, but DDT doses were being found in sea lions,
dolphins, bald eagles, brown pelicans.  A Big Green coalition member, Joel Reynolds of NRDC said, “It’s the first
attempt to place a value on damages done to natural resources and to compel companies to pay them.”[70]

Grassroots v. Chemical Companies

In mid-July, Michael Paparian of the Sierra Club said, “Big Green is a fight … for our children’s future as well as
our environmental future.”  While the initiatives supporters were running a grassroots campaign, the opponents
were funded 93 per cent by chemical companies.
Hayden elected Sacramento city council woman Kim Mueller said, “This is a tough and comprehensive measure one that is absolutely
necessary to … tackle the problems of environmental pollution in California.”  A Larouche backed
group responded that Big Green was a “a Soviet plot to destroy this country’s timber and agricultural industry” — backed by “Hollywood Paganists.”[71]

In late July, Lloyd Connelly announced that Big Green would begin running half-hour long TV commercials late night and on
cheaper cable channels.  The commercial were intended to raise funds by being used nationwide and in home
showings.  They were narrated by movie stars and contained testimonials of children, seniors, fishermen, and
farmworkers expressing their fears for the environment.[72]

Legislature Suppresses Science

Contrary information about the economic effects of Big Green’s pesticide provisions was suppressed by a veiled threat
from two of Proposition 128’s supporters, state Senator Nick Petris and
Assemblyman Robert Campbell both of whom were chairmen of legislative
subcommittees handling University of California budget requests.  In August they wrote, “… we urge you
not to risk the University’s standing by publishing research involving such highly charged political issues.”
It was a time of “austerity” when “… various institutions will be asked to eliminate programs.”[73]

California Manufacturers

Expecting a “knock down drag out battle,” former state senator and president of the California Manufacturers Association, Bill Campbell, claimed the Big Green
would “devastate the economy” and was an “out and out war on the poor, women, the young and the last hired.”  Campbell cited a privately funded Spectrum
Economics study claiming the initiative would cost $ 8 billion to $12 billion in lost tax revenues, cause a 30 per cent increase in the price of food, result
in a 70 cent per gallon rise in the price of gasoline, and destroy 1 million to 5 million jobs.  Campbell said the environmental czar would have “unbelievable, unchecked power.”

Big Green claimed savings in health care.[74]

Since many of Campbell’s companies represented by his CMA were funding the opposition, the strategy to beat Big Green was not
merely to call it the “Hayden Initiative.”  That only said “Hayden wants to clean up the environment,” according to Mickey Conroy[75]
who had been trying to remove Hayden from office because of his treason during the Vietnam War and his lying about it throughout his pursuit of power in
electoral politics.  The two-step strategy was to use Hayden to get voters to listen to the details about adverse economic impacts.

Big Green supporters tried to raise funds using the usual cast of Hayden characters — in Sacramento Connelly, Mueller,
Ory, Paparian, and Picker with a labor leader Pat Henning and a local Assemblyman, Phil Isenberg, thrown in for a thin cover.[76]

Money Laundering

Thicker cover, very green camouflage, came
from indirect and independent contributions to the environmental cause through public employee contributions to the United Way which had designated the
“non-affiliated” Environmental Federation of California as a possible check-off for tax deductible contributions.
According Nancy Snow, the federation’s executive director, it received approximating $1 million per year in 1989 and 1990 from 100 employer-employee
campaigns in California.  Snow, official of a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, endorsed environmental
initiatives.  Not surprising, the federation’s members included Big Green supporters like the NRDC, Sierra Club,
and others.  Sacramento revealed the politics behind at least one agency seeking contributions for the federation.  Two directors of the Sacramento Municipal
Utility District, Ed Smeloff and Peter Keat, had long time ties to Hayden’s CED and were part of the ruling majority of public utility’s governing board that
approved check offs for the Environmental Federation.[77] And “Environmentalists for Smeloff” — Lloyd Connelly, Bea Cooley of the American River Coalition, Jerry Meral of
the Planning and Conservation League, Mike Paparian of the Sierra Club –backed his reelection to the SMUD board.[78]

In mid-September, Assemblyman Jim Costa representing a farm district and chairman of the Democratic caucus in the Assembly said, Big Green “was written in a
closet by Assemblyman Tom Hayden and a group of his friends.”[79] Perhaps thinking of Costa’s colleagues, Roger
Ramsier, president of Aerojet, accused the legislature of “pandering to radical environmental no-growth, and anti-business forces.”[80] And without Hollywood stars, local farm
groups were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to oppose the Hayden and his friends.

Zero Risks, Zero Food, Zero Jobs

Joe Smith, the writer of one farm commodity newsletter quipped that “Proposition 128 … promises the voter an
environment with zero risk from pesticide residues … . Zero risks, though eventually means zero chemicals, then zero crops, then zero jobs, the zero
environmentalists.”  And “ethyl alcohol will be one of the items we won’t be able to allow to touch our
food.  You can drink it, but you can’t spray it.  We’re not sure wine sauces will be allowed.”  The September
issue of Science noted that 27 of 52 naturally occurring chemicals in foods showed up as carcinogen in animal tests.
These natural, not manmade, chemicals in 57 foods appeared in concentrations thousands of times greater than synthetic chemicals like
pesticides[81] –virtually zero risk already existed.

In early October, it seemed like one private corporation, Southern California Edison, might have decide to switch
rather than fight — it appointed a co-founder of the NRDC as its Chief Executive officer — John Bryson.[82]

South Coast Air Quality Tyrant

Then the South Coast (Southern California)
Air Quality Management District voted to impose tough emission standards against charcoal lighter, self-starting charcoal briquettes, bread bakery
emissions, deodorants.  AQMD’s James Lent,”one of the most powerful people in Southern California,” had a staff
of 900 and a budget of $80 million per year funded by fines, penalties and permits levied against business.  Peter
Hidalgo of the Commuter Transportation Services of Los Angeles suggested that more workers ought to walk to work — a daunting idea in the sprawling
auto-dependant megalopolis.  Out in the Central Valley, 80 year old Bill Huffman, a thirty year operator of a dioxin
generating smelting plant, wasn’t worried about the effects on children saying “if it’s going to kill me, it had better hurry, or I’ll die of old
age.”[83] Meanwhile oriental fruit flies had landed in San Diego — it had a voracious appetite for some 236 varieties of fruits, nuts and vegetables.

In the October issue of the NRDC Newsline, Al Meyerhoff said, “We believe that Big Green accurately represents … how the public translates its will
into change.  The environmental community needs a big win, Meyerhoff said. “We can’t be a paper tiger. Big Green is our best shot.”

Hollywood Cancer Experts

Big Green added Hollywood macho to its support list — Sylvester Stallone.  A “Big Green” ad asserted, “scientists are unable to find
uncontaminated fish in California waters. Cancer in children is up 20 per cent since 1950. … 20,000 Americans
will develop cancer and 3,000 will die because of pesticide exposure this year.”  Other sources of wisdom came
from Oliver Stone, director of anti-Vietnam war films like “Platoon” and “Born on The Fourth of July,” who said Americans were
“choking to death.”  Actor Jack Lemmon, a California regular for liberal political commercials, said California
swimmers were getting “mysterious diseases.”  Other stars spoke of “deadly fruit.”[84]

Exploiting Dying Children

In late October Big Green was running 30 second ads featuring 4-year-old Collette Chuda dying of cancer — a heart
rending message.  After the election, Los Angeles Timesman William Kahrl wrote, “Exploiting a child’s sickness for
political purposes is bad enough.  What makes the Chuda case worse is the fact that she’s suffering from a form of
kidney cancer, Wilms’ tumor, that ‘seems unrelated to environmental exposure’ according to the National Cancer Institution.”[85] Actress Tracey Nelson, a cancer survivor,
struck similar themes.[86] Big Green’s ads and literature proclaimed, “major funding by environmental groups.”

Public Support Collapses

As the election approached, something was happening on the way to the latest revolution against capitalism.  Ads opposing “Big Green” said it
did too much.  Various sources said it would might reduce crop production by 40 per cent, increase prices 50 per cent,
and cost local government $6 billion a year. The often environmentally crusading Sacramento Bee urged a
“no” vote because it was poorly conceived and might hurt agriculture.  Similarly, the environmentalist City Council
of Sacramento refused to take stand and the County Board of Supervisors narrowly opposed the Proposition.

And some voters were listening.  By mid-October top political consultants on
both sides with access to private polling, told the author that support for
Big Green had plummeted from an original 70 per cent to 40-50 per cent.  Voters were moving away from a
“Yes” vote because the initiative was tried to do too much, was complex, and its identification with Tom Hayden.[87]

Voter Slates for Hire

Also intentionally adding to voter confusion was a phony “Democratic Voter Check off” created by
Democrat political consultant Clint Reilly which opposed proposition 128,
despite the official endorsement of the official state Democrat Party.  Opponents of Hayden had paid Reilly $75,000
to get on his slate.  Reilly often worked with well-heeled clients.  He lived in a San Francisco mansion political insiders called the “House that Insurance
Built” even though Reilly had lost in his efforts to protect the insurance industry from a radical insurance “reform” initiative in 1988.

Reilly had his critics.  The Planning and Conservation League — which in June had taken Southern Pacific Railway money to link highway and public
transit construction to a $900 million “mountain lion” habitat purchase on a single slate — was now protesting Reilly’s deceit.[88]

More Money Laundering

Meanwhile Tom Hayden was conducting his own “ultimate stealth campaign,” said attorney “Chip” Nielsen
in a letter to Bob Mulholland.  Some $1.5 million dollars had been contributed to Big Green through a welter of interlocking
committees.  Hayden controlled seven committees — all used Lloyd Connelly’s law firm (Olsen & Connelly),
Mulholland managed four, Campaign California and Connelly’s law firm provided
them office addresses.  These seven committees reported contributions totaling $689,680 — but none reported their
own sources of funds.  If they had reported their sources of funds, Big Green’s ads might have been required by
law to be tagged “Major Funding by Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Ted Turner, and
the entertainment industry” instead of being deceitfully labeled “major funding by environmental groups.”  Environmental groups in the coalition — the
Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Pesticide Watch, the National Toxics Campaign, and National Toxics Fund — contributed another
$260,000 to the measure and also failed to reveal their major contributors.  Only the League of
Conservation Voters filed a report listing its sources of funds.[89] Secret donors, laundered money?  Where was the “grassroots” support
for saving the planet? Had contributors to United Way unwittingly given to Big Green through the Environmental Federation of California?

Big Green Defeated, Public Unimpressed with Hollywood

While the voters picked up little of this pre-election sleaze, 64 per cent of voters resoundingly rejected Big Green.

Indeed, after the election it appeared voters had not been much impressed with Hollywood glitter.  Joe Scott’s California Eye reported on Chuck
Rund’s Charlton Research survey showing that only 13 per cent of voters would admit relying upon Hollywood celebrities as a compelling source of
information.  Eighty-six said that celebrity endorsements were unimportant.  Some 39 per cent were moved by TV ads.
An amazing 70 per cent rated newspaper analyses and the pro-con arguments in their voter pamphlets as extremely or somewhat important.

Economic and environmental concerns drove about the same percentage of voters — 30-29 per cent.  That had been a doubling of concern about
economic issues from 17 per cent rating among voters in June.  The NRDC tried to explain the loss of Big
Green to a massive pattern of “No” votes in the November ballot.  Yet the Rund survey showed that only 5 per
cent of voters voted “No” on all measures. The voters didn’t like Big Green.

Republican Pete Wilson Adopts much of Big Green

Curiously that really didn’t matter, because the newly elected Republican governor Pete Wilson appeared to adopting
many of Haydenista-like personnel and ideas.  Wilson appointed environmentalist Douglas Wheeler as his secretary of
the Resource Agency, formed a Growth Management Task Force, created a new Environmental
Protection Agency, held “bioregional” conferences, had an open door
policy toward environmentalists, made deals on environmental issues in
negotiations with environmentalists, etc.

About Governor Wilson’s formation of a California EPA, in particular the movement of state authority on pesticides from Food and Agriculture to the new
EPA, Farm Bureau president Jay Schneider, “We are concerned that farm families will not understand why our governor … would … embrace the desires
of Tom Hayden.”  Hayden praised the governor for his actions “in the face of extraordinary opposition from the agricultural chemical interests.”[90]

By mid-1991, Tom Hayden, who no longer had Jane Fonda, had a new self described religion — environmentalism — in classes
on “Spirituality and the Environment” that he taught at Santa Monica City College and in interviews he granted to the media, Tom said, “We need
to see nature as having a sacred quality … that forms a barrier to greed and exploitation.  It’s God’s will,” said Tom. Politics hadn’t worked — Big Green.
What was needed was an “earth centered” religion.  And he seemed to find Judaism, Christianity,
Shintoism, Hinduism etc lacking or maybe he would create a new religion out of the rest.  A bit ambitious perhaps, but
then the president of Santa Monica City College thought Tom had “one of the best minds on the planet.”  Tom
said, we are “on the brink of a new religion that embraces nature (and) identifies with the earth.”[91] Environmentalism as a powerful political
issue was not new to Tom and the American left. Only the religion was new.

After all, Hayden’s environmental politics had been devastated after the big loss of his “Big Green” in
1990.  This after a long string of successes in ecopolitics as an assault upon the real enemy — corporate capitalism.

Maybe the real enemy had been Judeo-Christian civilization.

The red tinge of Hayden’s Big Green of 1990 had not been an accident of temporary political alignment.

The fact that Big Green did “too much” was also intentional.

With California leading the way nation would adopt much of the Big Green initiative. Barak Obama and Occupy Wall Street bludgened  corporations, Wall Steet and capitalism with big green hammers and nails.


[1] Warren Brookes, “How the EPA Launched Nationwide ‘Alar-mania,” Sacramento Union, February 26, 1990.

[2] Elizabeth M. Whalen, “Cancer Scares And Our Inverted Health Priorities,” Imprimis, June 1991, Volume 20, No. 6.

[3] Warren Brookes, Sacramento Union, March 5, 1990, p. 13.

[4] Warren Brookes, Sacramento Union, April 16, 1990.

[5] Whalen, Imprimis, June 1991.

[6] Sacramento Union, March 5, 1990; AP, Sacramento Bee, October 25, 1989.

[7] Peter Schrag, Sacramento Bee, April 12, 1989.

[8] Warren Brookes, Sacramento Union, April 16, 1990.

[9] Whalen, Imprimis, June 1991.

[10] Warren Brookes, Sacramento Union, April 16, 1990.

[11] Warren Brookes, Sacramento Union, March 5, 1990, p. 13.

[12] California Department of Food and Africulture, news releases of February 21st and March
26th, 1991.

[13] “Revenge of the Apples,” Wall Street Journal,

[14] Cited in Whalen, Imprimis, June, 1991.

[15] Warren Brookes, Sacramento Union, March 5, 1990.

[16] Sacramento Union, February 20, 1990.

[17] Alistair Chase, Sacramento Union, January 23, 1989, p. 17.

[18] Joseph Farah, Between the Lines, November 7, 1989, p. 4.

[19] Bill Bradley, “Hot Button’ Voting,” Sacramento News & Review, July 27, 1989.

[20] Roger Canfield, “Wilson: Little Green?” Sacramento Union, January 29, 1991, p. A-2.  Otto Bos, Wilson advisor, to Canfield on January 28, 1991.
Doug Willis, Sacramento Union, January 20, 1991.  See also: Joe Scott, “Feinstein upstages Van de Kamp on ‘Big Green drive,” Sacramento Union, April 25, 1990, p. A-9.

[21] Campaign California Report, third quarter, 1989.

[22] “New Initiative Launched,” Campaign California Report, Volume 4, No. 1, (Third Quarter 1989), p. 1.

[23] Bill Bradley, Sacramento News & Review, August 1, 1989.

[24] Bill Bradley, “Big, Green And Good For You,” Sacramento News & Review, April 5, [or 12], 1990.

[25] Bud Lembke, “Hayden’s Name Being Used to Beat Initiative,” Sacramento Union, February 14, 1990.

[26] Cited by Bud Lembke, Sacramento Union, February 14, 1990.

[27] Bill Bradley, “The Growth of Big Green,” Sacramento News and Review, November 30, 1990.

[28] John Rofe, “Tough Environmental Rules Proposed As Ballot Initiative,” Los
Angeles Daily News
and Sacramento Bee, October 11, 1989, p. A-3.

[29] Joe Scott, “DA’s May Oppose Plan For Conservation Cop,” Sacramento Union, January 16, 1990, p. 6.

[30] Dan Walters, “Big Green, A Big Bust,” Sacramento Bee, October 23, 1990, p.A-3.

[31] Cited in George Thurlow, “GET READY FOR THE BIG GREEN,” Sacramento News & Review, March 15, 1990, p. 21.

[32] Whalen, Imprimis, June, 1991.

[33] Known Hayden affiliated persons, besides Picker, appearing on the letterhead of the National
Toxic Campaign in 1991 were; Ed Begley, Jr., Lloyd Connelly, Patricia Duff-Medavoy, Tom Epstein, Mike Farrell, Kim Mueller, Gary Patton, Andy Spahn,Marge Tabankin.

[34] Roger Canfield, “Proposition loophole,” Sacramento Union, October 19, 1990, p. A-2.

[35] Roger Canfield, “Big Green’ or ‘Hayden Initiative,” Sacramento Union, August 22, 1990, p. A-2.

[36] Roger Canfield, “Why Big Green is truly the ‘Hayden Initiative,” Sacramento Union, September 10, 1990, p. A-2.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Roger Canfield, “Hayden confidant? You decide,” Sacramento Union, September 12, 1990, p. A-2.

[39] Roger Canfield, “Bradley’s bill,” Sacramento Union, September 28, 1990, p. A-2.

[40] Bill Bradley, “The Growth of Green,” Sacramento News & Review, November 30, 1989.

[41] Joseph Farah, Between the Lines, November 20, 1989, pp. 1, 8.

[42] Bill Bradley, Sacramento News & Review, November 30, 1989.

[43] Bill Ainsworth, “U.C. Research Shows Consumers Fear Pesticide Use,” Sacramento Union, December 17, 1989.

[44] Sacramento Unoin, December 19, 1989, p. 8.

[45] Sacramento Union, February 4, 1990, p. 17.

[46] An “internal pesticide industry” memo cited by Bob Mulholland in George Thurlow, “GET READY FOR THE BIG GREEN,” Sacramento News &
Review
, March 15, 1990, p. 21.

[47] Bill Ainsworth, “Growers Sponsor Counter-Measure,” Sacramento Union, December 22, 1989.

[48] Bill Ainsworth, “Ballot Box New Battleground For Industry, Environmentalists,” Sacramento Union, February 4, 1990, p. 17.

[49] Sacramento Union, January 18, 1990.

[50] Sacramento Union, February 4, 1990, p. 17.

[51] Bud Lembke, “Hayden’s Name Being Used to Beat Initiative,” Sacramento Union, February 14, 1990. See also: George Thurlow, “GET REDY FOR THE BIG
GREEN,” Sacramento News & Review, March 15, 1990, pp. 20-21.

[52] AP, “Report Targets Worst Polluters,” Sacramento Union, March 2, 1990, p. 16.

[53] John Balzar, “Initiatives: Time For Reform,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1990.

[54] Bob Mulholland in a KCRA, channel 3 (Sacramento), interview in the fall of 1990.

55] George Thurlow, “GET REDY FOR THE BIG GREEN,” Sacramento News & Review, March 15, 1990, pp. 20-21.

[56] Scott Armstrong, “The ‘greening of California politics,” Christian Science Moniter in the Sacramento Union of April 19, 1990, p. A-3.

[57] Roger Canfield, “Over-zealous environmentalist stung,” Sacramento Union, October 16, 1990, p. A-2.

[58]Michael Parfit, “Earth First!ers wield a mean wrwench,” Smithsonian, April, 1990, pp. 184-189.

[59] Roger Canfield, “Green connections,” Sacramento Union, November 2, 1990, p. A-2.

[60] Bill Bradley, “Big, Green And Good For You,” Sacramento News & Review, April 5 [or 12th], 1990.

[61] Scott Armstrong of the Christian Science Moniter in “The ‘greening’ of California politics,”  Sacramento Union, April 19, 1990, p. A-3.

[62] Roger Canfield, “Who is Chicken Little?” Sacrmento Union, October 11, 1990, p. A-2.

[63] Warren Brookes, “Hayden’s ‘Big Green’Initiative is Witch-hunting,” Sacramento Union, April 16, 1990, p. A-9.

[64] Brookes, Sacramento Union, April 16, 1990.

[65] Brookes, Sacramento Union, April 16, 1990.

[66] Jim Boren, “Lots of green will be spent on ‘Big Green,” Fresno Bee, April 22, 1990, p. B-1.

[67] James Gerstenzang, “Bush Likely to Allow Drilling Off California,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1990, p. A-3.

[68] John Howard, “Feinstein supports Van de Kamp initiative,” Sacramento Union, April 22, 1990, pp. B-4.

[69] Joe Scott, “Feinstein win upstages Van de Kamp on ‘Big Green’ drive,” Sacramento Union, April 25, 1990, p. A-9.

[70] Gale Holland, “8 polluters sued over marine life,” Sacramento Union, June 19, 1990, p. A-7.

[71] J.P. Tremblay, “Backers, opponents set to square off over Big Green,” Sacramento Union, July 18, 1990, p. C-3.
[72] UPI, “Big Green’ officials hope to make waves with 1/2 hour TV ad,” Sacramento
Union
, July 26, 1990, p. A-3.

[73] Memo in possession of this writer and cited in Roger Canfield, “Red-faced greens?” Sacramento Union, November 2, 1990, p. A-2.

[74] Trinda Pasquet, “Big battle over ‘Big Green’ grows louder,” Sacramento Union, August 11, 1990.

[75] Roger Canfield, “Green good, Hayden bad?” Sacramento Union, August 23, 1990, p. A-2.

[76] Roger Canfield, “The green party,” Sacramento Union, August 24, 1990, p. A-2.

[77] See: Roger Canfield’s “Under the Dome” columns in the Sacramento Union,
of October 2, December 14th and 18th, 1990, p. A-2.

[78] Roger Canfield, “Ed’s certainly their ‘dear friend,” Sacramento Union, October 17, 1990, p. A-2.

[79] Roger Canfield, “In the closet,” Sacramento Union, September 24, 1990, p. A-2.

[80] Roger Canfield, “Corporate Courage I,” Sacramento Union, October 17, 1990, p. A-2.

[81] Whalen, Imprimis, June, 1991.

[82] Roger Canfield, “Greens in power,” Sacramento Union, October 8, 1990, p. A-2.  My column misspelled the man’s name.

[83] Roger Canfield, “Dioxin plus,” Sacramento Union, October 19, 1990, p. A-2.

[84] Whalen, Imprimis, June, 1991.

[85] William Kahrl, Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1990.

[86] Roger Canfield, “Red-faced greens,” Sacramento Union, November 2, 1990, p. A-2.

[87] Roger Canfield, “Most admit Big Green in trouble,” Sacramento Union, October 29, 1990, p. A-2.

[88] These dollar contributions are reported to the Secretary of State.  See: Roger Canfield, “This time the
Demos are deceived,” Sacramento Union, October 31, 1990, p.A-2.  PCL had previously accepted contributions
and written initiative language that benefitted its contributors in a tobacco tax measure — generating widespread criticism from columnist Dan Walters and
others.  Some said PCL’s massive office space negated its claim to be a “grassroots” organization.

[89] Roger Canfield, “Identities of contributors hidden,” Sacramento Union, Novenber 16, 1990, p. A-2.

[90] Michael Otten, “California EPA closer to reality,” Sacramento Union, July 14, 1991, p. A-2.[91] Roger Canfield, “Hayden marches on,” Sacramento Union, August 6, 1991, p. A-2.

Categories
Auburn Dam California Politics Comrades in Arms Environmental Extremism Jane Fonda Jerry Brown Tom Hayden Water

Power from the Sun: Big Red, Little Green; Jerry Brown, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda

Excerpts from an unpublished political biography of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.

Copyright Roger Canfield 2011

Solyndra, the Prequal,

After decades (1984-2010) in the wilderness of National
Public Radio and Oakland California, in 2010 Jerry Brown, 72, was reelected,
really resurrected, as Governor of California where the past is often prologue. The more things change the more they are the same

It was the return of the living dead and the prequal of all solar power scandals.

The former Governor Jerry Brown with the active assistance and
inspiration of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda is the creator, the originator of
California’s decline from the Fifth largest economy in the world to the Eighth.

Brown nurtured delusions of power from the sun and presided over “public investment” paid to political cronies.

Jerry Brown’s California has led the way in banning DDT and nuclear
power and inspiring the elimination of incandescent light bulb and the
criminalization of carbon, one of God’s own elements. Moreover, Brown’s legacy
as Governor from 1975 through 1984 thrived thereafter during the administrations of
Governors George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Republican governors, the courts and Democrat legislatures extended the
Brown-Hayden-Fonda legacy to the present day’s high unemployment, high taxes,
nanny state regulations and whacko environmental regulations.

Through his former chief of staff, Governor
Gray Davis, and RINO Governors Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, these
policies of the Brown era have been extended down to today where California’s
first in the nation effort to alter the planet’s climate (green house gas
regulations, AB32) and to build a $100 billion bullet train to nowhere. Though intended to benefit the entire planet they will
continue to impoverish California. This is both the legacy of Jerry, Tom and Jane
and the future of California under Brown 2.0.

Across the decades Brown’s successors have vigorously
sought alternatives to the internal combustion engine, cheap nuclear and
hydroelectric power. These have been demonized in pursuit of fantasies such as
cheap solar power and zero emission (electric) cars.

These ambitions are totalitarian. They require changing human nature, establishing utopian
socialism and altering the very climate of planet earth itself. What is
necessary is absolute power to achieve these absolute goods. The failure to
achieve astonishing environmental goals is really quite irrelevant.

The real game is absolute power.

Command and control of everyone and everything under the sun.
While environmentalists gain power and profits from public funds, they
claim politicians are conspiring with corporations to poison the public and its air and water for
political power and corporate profits.

In early 2011 many of the same faces have return for an encore under Jerry Brown. Early
Brown appointments Mary Nichols, Gerald Meral, John Laird, and Nancy Ryan
promised a renaissance of green energy and red (leftist) politics.

Meanwhile there have been decades of bad consequences in the seeking of impossible dreams.

A No Growth Economy

Beginning with Jerry Brown,
California stopped building roads, bridges, dams, canals, power plants,
refineries, mines, lumber mills, auto painting, independent gasoline stations, factories and yes, gold mines and gravel pits. The Hayden,
Fonda and Brown policies of radical no growth environmentalism, continued
thereafter, turned California’s abundance of natural resources into a scarcity
of water, energy, roads, bridges, timber and housing.

California blessed with a cornucopia of natural resources, sunshine, yes plentiful water, and fertile soils today
imports sand, gravel, timber, gold, oranges and garlic. In the Central Valley, food
basket of planet earth, California feeds its water deprived and unemployed farm
workers surplus canned mandarin oranges from China.

In a cosmic understatement of the problem, Sacramento Bee columnist
Dan Walters recently said, “It’s entirely
possible that California with its high taxes, dense regulatory underbrush,
poorly performing schools, congested and crumbling highways and water supply
issues, may have become noncompetitive in a global economy.”[1] Duh.

California’s decline toward a third world economy, culture and
government began with the first term of Governor Jerry Brown (1975-1983). Doonesbury’s and Mike Royko’s image of him as
“Governor Moonbeam”[2] obscures the true Jerry Brown.

As Rep. Tom McClintock and Gubernatorial candidate reminded us in the
2003 recall of Jerry Brown’s former chief of staff Gray Davis, the once golden
California has been bleeding businesses, people and opportunities to the desert
landscapes of Arizona and Nevada ever since Brown et al. Whole industries have been decimated (timber, tourism,
gold mining, automobiles, auto painting, furniture, independent gas stations)

Jack Stewart, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology
Association recently told CalWatchdog that California’s 12 percent of US
population is only producing only 1.5 percent of the nation’s manufacturing.
Jobs that left the state paying $69,000 are being replaced by new jobs at
$43,000. Stewart says green jobs are likely to be illusionary replacements for
those lost.[3] Jobs installing insulation and double pane windows are not replacing jobs lost in
other vanishing industries. In early 2011 some 175,000 green jobs were being proudly
claimed in California out of a workforce of 6 million. 3% green jobs do not an
economic recovery make.

Immaculate Hearts.

It all began in 1971 when Jerry Brown, drop out from a Catholic seminary and son of master builder
Governor Pat Brown, met Tom Hayden at Immaculate
Heart College in Los Angeles. Serially negligent in adherence to Catholic vows
the school invited Tom Hayden to lecture on the Vietnam War.

Who was the Tom Hayden
Jerry Brown met in 1971? Hayden was an early leader of Students for a
Democratic Society, SDS, and author of the seminal work on  “participatory democracy” the Port Huron
Statement. Hayden since 1965 had visited the Vietnamese Communists at war with
the United States and Hayden used Hanoi’s slides and numbers, the enemy’s
propaganda, in his lectures at Immaculate Heart. Like Hanoi, Hayden said, the
Vietnam War was illegal, immoral and unwinnable. Hayden sought a communist
victory in Vietnam and a socialist America by revolution if necessary.
Revolutionary Acts

After meetings with Communist Vietnam leaders in Hanoi, Bratislava and Paris in 1967 Hayden, Dave
Dellinger and Rennie Davis organized riots at the Democrat Convention in
Chicago 1968. An SDS friend of the underground weathermen, Bill Ayers and
Bernadine Dohrn, in Berkeley Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer founded their
revolutionary cell the “Red Family” and operated their International Liberation
School in firearms and combat medicine.

In the spring of 1969, Tom Hayden wrote a manifesto for the Berkeley Liberation
Movement: “We will break the power of the landlords … We will create a
soulful socialism.”[4] In the July 1970 issue of Ramparts,
Hayden wrote of liberated territories (i.e., Berkeley) where private property
would be abolished and tenant organizations would transform local housing into
communal shelters.[5] In mid 1969, Tom Hayden co-sponsored a
revolutionary shindig called the National Revolutionary Conference for a United
Front to Combat Fascism with the Rev. Cecil Williams, one of the prime sponsors
Rev. Jim Jones’ People’s Temple.

Enter Jane Fonda

Meanwhile, Hayden met Jane Fonda in Detroit at a Howard Johnson Motel in early 1971 at the Winter
Soldier “war crimes” show trials sponsored by John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, which Fonda helped fund. Hayden and Fonda shared their slides
and beds, married and had a son who they named “Troi” after Nguyen Van Troi, a
Viet Cong terrorist who had attempted to assassinate Secretary of State Robert
McNamara.

In 1972 Hayden and Fonda’s
Indochina Peace Campaign, IPC, and the staff of Indochina Resource Center, IRC,
formed the leadership of the Coalition to Stop Funding the War (and successor
orgs.) which successfully targeted key legislators to cut funds for the war in 1973-75.[6]

Hanoi Jane and POW Edison Miller

In June 1972, Hayden
helped arrange Fonda’s infamous July tour of North Vietnam headlined by her
many radio broadcasts and her girlish glee at a Communist gun battery posing
shooting down American pilots and their aircraft. She among many others would receive
a ring made from a downed American plane, which she was photographed wearing on
her necklace.  She called America the
common enemy and, along with Tom, was honored as a “comrade-in-arms “ of Hanoi.

During Fonda’s visit of Hanoi on
July 18, 1972 Fonda met with seven American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton, two of
whom, Edison Miller and Walter Wilber were collaborators with the Vietnamese
enemy, who received special treatment and who had voluntarily made broadcasts
over Radio Hanoi. Over Radio Hanoi, Fonda
said the POWs “all assured me that they have been well cared for. … They
are in good health.”[7]

According to AP: “I was looking carefully in their eyes and they were not
glazed” she said, they were not brainwashed.[8]
Edison Miller according to Thomas Elias, “made war tapes for the North Vietnamese;
allegedly in return for better treatment than was given other POWs.”[9] Miller admitted he had made his broadcasts over
Radio Hanoi voluntarily, but that was only after resisting torture for 4-5
years and turning against the war.[10] Yet fellow POWs “claimed that … he received
special treatment, eggs, bread, bananas, and fruit, that the rest of them did
not get.”[11] Edison Miller had an open window, an exercise
area, books, an aquarium, and a bed.[12] Further,
POWs claimed that Miller was an open, active, and voluntary collaborator.  He had gone over to the enemy. Miller made a
broadcast the first, not the fourth or fifth, year of his captivity.[13]

In 1970 on Mother’s Day, Miller broadcast saying,

Mothers have been suffering loss and injury of
sons in time of war since time began. … This war is different … Their sons
are killing fellow human beings and destroying foreign countries for an unjust
cause, making our actions not only illegal, but immoral … Immorality is the
rottenness which is consuming us.  We are
a militaristic nation of the first order. … My country’s immoral and illegal
actions, which are, now culminated in the tragedy of Vietnam is America’s shame
and blight on the world’s conscience.[14]

Navy Captain, POW, and future U.S. Senator, John McCain said that Miller and another
POW made an hour long broadcast. POW McCain overheard Miller making
tapes “not only condemning U.S. participation in the war, but also the
United States as a government.”  Other
POWs said that Miller “praised Socialist systems as superior to our own.”[15]

Coming home on February 12, 1973 Edison Miller arrived at Camp Pendleton to a hero’s
welcome and wild applause.  200 Marines
stood quietly at attention in his honor. Showing his gratitude, Miller mocked
the USMC welcome– “He stopped, held up a clenched fist, and turned full
circle.” His POW commanding officer James Stockdale filed charges against
Miller, but the Secretary of Navy John W. Warner issued a letter of censure and
dismissed the charges. Miller’s public career and involvement with Tom and Jane
was far from over.

During 1972, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda formed the Indochina Peace Campaign. Among IPC
members, besides Edison Miller, were other POW collaborators such as POW Bob
Chenoweth of the POWs “Peace Committee,” and early release POW George Smith.[16]

Fonda calls Tortured POWs, “Hypocrites, Liars and
Pawn” Jerry Brown Defend Hanoi Jane

In 1973 when POWs returned en mass telling of their torture, Jane Fonda
called the POWs “hypocrites, liars and pawns.” Resolutions from the legislatures
of Colorado, Indiana, and California excoriated Fonda. The California Senate
resolution condemned Jane Fonda who “spread the lies of enemy.”

Brown Helps Fonda and Hollywood Elects Brown Governor, 1974

A politically ambitious Jerry Brown was now California’s Secretary of State. Hayden and Fonda met Jane
Bay, an aide of Secretary of State Jerry Brown, who persuaded Tom Quinn to
prevail upon Senator George Moscone to kill the anti-Fonda resolution in the
Senate Rules Committee.[17] The deed was done, the resolution failed and
the Jerry Brown and Hayden/ Fonda friendship was sealed.

During 1974, Hayden wrote a positive
article in Rolling Stone about Jerry Brown and this Watergate year Jerry
Brown had the support of Jane’s Hollywood friends for his successful
November campaign for governor against a moderate Pomona college professor,
Houston Flournoy.

Brown, Hayden and Fonda Antagonistic to Indochina Refugees, 1975

During the spring of 1975 while thousands of civilians fled North
Vietnamese heavy artillery and Soviet tanks and some desperately sought refuge
in America.  Tom and Jane led the way
opposing assistance to refugees and favoring forced repatriation. And Governor
Jerry Brown complained, “We want to dump Vietnamese” on California “which is
suffering a high rate of unemployment.”[18]

As late as April 31, 1988 Tom Hayden was
confronting Vietnamese protesters outside his house carrying a baseball bat. He
screamed expletives at the Vietnamese who objected to Hayden saying the San
Jose Vietnamese were mostly members of criminal gangs.[19]

In 1975, Hayden joined with Institute
for Policy Studies in establishing the National Conference on Alternative State
and Local Policies. Hayden “guided a group decision… to speak to issues
of [among others] …corporate crimes against the environment.”[20] Environmental issues moved up on the leftist
agenda as the Vietnam concluded.

Jerry Brown’s Staff Comes Out of Tom Hayden’s U.S. Senate Campaign, 1976

By January of 1975, as 17 divisions of North Vietnamese troops with Soviet tanks moved toward
Saigon, John Holum, a member of George McGovern’s staff, suggested that Tom
Hayden run for U.S. Senate against liberal Democrat incumbent John Tunney in
1976. No longer the revolutionary befriended by Jerry Brown, Tom Hayden now
claimed to be an ordinary liberal Democrat who had voted for Brown, McGovern
and President Lyndon B. Johnson (unlikely). Liberal Democrat and Senate Pro
Temp James Mills later condemned Hayden’s “ferocious [1976] campaign of
character assassination” against Tunney.[21]

Out of Hayden’s 1976 Senate campaign, Derek Shearer, Larry Levin, Lu Haas, Edison Miller and
Fred Branfman would receive appointments from Governor Jerry Brown. Branfman
would work on Jerry Brown’s 1980 Presidential Campaign.

Who were these future appointees of Governor Brown? Derek
Shearer, co-authored Hayden’s 1976 U.S. Senate platform and a book Economic
Democracy; IPC’s
Larry Levin lobbied Congress to cut off aid to South
Vietnam and spent the last days of the war with the enemy in Hanoi became
Hayden’s campaign manager; Lucien
“Lu” Haas was a Hayden Senate campaign worker as well as a
spokesman for prior Governors and Senators; POW Edison Miller collaborator
voluntarily made broadcasts from Hanoi; Fred Branfman, Policy Director for the
campaign, had headed Project Air War a Hanoi favored attack upon US air power
after US troops left Vietnam, was an Editorial Board Member of Philip Agee’s Counter
Spy
which exposed CIA agents and became a cheerleader for the Sandinista
Regime in Nicaragua[22]

During Hayden’s campaign for the U.S.
Senate against Democrat incumbent John Tunney in 1975-76, Hayden’s platform
condemned “crimes in the suites”[23] one of which was “environmental
destruction.”[24]

Campaign For Economic Democracy

In 1976 Hayden lost his run for the
US Senate, but built the organization that became Campaign for Economic Democracy, CED.

Tom Hayden and Derek Shearer, Institute for Policy
Studies admitted that CED’s “economic democracy” was a very thinly veiled front
for socialism. Hayden saw it as a “transition to socialism.”[25] It sought “to create public control over
the crucial economic decisions…”[26] including “public control of offshore drilling, land use and
water decisions.” CED had a new dream of new industries creating new jobs in
solar, transit and environmental industries. “This dream has a name:  Economic Democracy … controlling giant
corporations, … directing investments…. Ownership and control … spread
among a wide variety of public bodies…” Hayden thought, “An
honest socialist knows the image of socialism is tarnished.” [27] Hence, Economic Democracy was a useful “euphemism
for Democratic Socialism.”

Capitalism and private property were the enemy. CED
promotional brochure was titled the “Stagnant Thing in Our Midst . . .
Corporate Capitalism.” Hayden said, “… a rising demand for a
voice in the decisions controlling our lives — will spread…particularly to the
corporate world where…power is concentrated and in so few hands.”[28] CED was, said Senator Pro Tempore James Mills, a program of “public control
and ownership of the great corporations,” and that made Hayden a Marxist.[29] Corporations did great evil. A Hayden flyer
entitled “Stop the Poisoning of California” said,  “Overuse of pesticides profit only the
petrochemical industry … It’s time to put tougher controls on the excesses of
chemical age.”[30] Fueled demagoguery and public fears, Governor
Jerry Brown and his successors enacted a regulatory apparatus against chemistry
in every setting.

Hayden and Fonda also formed
the Laurel Springs Institute to indoctrinate children and adults in socialist
ideas. Heather Booth, wife of former SDS president and Hayden friend, Paul
Booth formed the Midwest Academy to perform the same functions. Hayden demanded that
landlords return their Proposition 13 property tax cut “windfall” to
renters.[31]

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda brought the Campaign for Economic Democracy, CED, a
stalking horse for socialism and radical environmentalism into the Governor’s
Office.

Jerry Brown Welcomes Tom Hayden and Economic
Democracy into the Governor’s Office.

Governor Jerry Brown had appointed
Tom Hayden his “special counsel.”[32] In 1977, Esquire’s
Joel Kotkin met Tom sitting at a typewriter in the Governor’s office in the
state Capitol.  It was not an occasional acquaintance with power.

By 1977 Hayden had become an accessory to the governor’s core of advisors. … One
day … I ran into Hayden sitting at a typewriter in the governor’s
offices.  Hayden said, ‘I’m doing a
little work for Jerry … Now it’s the governor and the CED against everyone
else.”[33]

Hayden told Kotkin that Jerry Brown was “the only person around who can give us
power and legitimacy.”[34] Radical
Jeffrey Klein of Mother Jones put it less charitably. Brown would
“hand a curtain of legitimacy that will blur his [Hayden’s] radical
past.”[35]

Gray Davis, governor Brown’s chief of staff, future State Controller, and recalled
Governor said, “Hayden can be very helpful to us…This is not fun and games
with Tom and Jane.  It is as simple as this:  he has the troops, and he has the
funds.  You ignore him at your own peril.”[36] Indeed,
some said the Hayden’s influence meant “Jane and Tom say jump and Jerry
says ‘how high?”[37]

Hayden and Brown also appeared together at rallies dealing with rent control,
anti-nuclear and South African issues.
Fonda biographer Christopher Andersen says:

“Yet much of the Haydens’ influence was unseen.
Brown attended CED meetings closed to the press, and with [songstress
Linda] Ronstadt tagging along, spent weekends at the Hayden’s Santa Monica home
or the Laurel Springs ranch.  There they
conferred on all the important issues facing the state and nation — from solar
power and disarmament to Mexican farm workers and secretaries’ rights. They
talked about what Brown would do if elected president, and who would he would
appoint to the cabinet.  Jane, Brown
agreed, would make an excellent secretary of state.”[38]

“Behind the democratic veneer,
Tom’s very autocratic,” said a Brown official.  “With the governor behind him, he
bullies any bureaucrat he wants.” And in a whisper, “Everything he does is a way station to
power.”[39] And in an ironic development for Hayden who had planned and incited street fights against
the Daley machine in Chicago in 1968, Jerry Brown provided “a network of
patronage jobs for CED supporters, a classic throwback to the Daley-style
political machines”[40]

Brown Appoints Minions of Hayden-Fonda

In addition to “special counsel,” Brown appointed Hayden director, Solar Cal; governor’s
representative, Southwest Regional Border Commission; and member, Governor’s
Public Investment Task Force. Some 60 POWs presented Jerry Brown the
“Benedict Arnold Citizenship Award,” for Brown’s naming a former antiwar
activist Tom Hayden to a federally funded solar energy firm.”[41]

Brown Appointments of Friends of Tom and Jane, 1975-1983

The most infamous appointment of Jerry Brown was of his chauffer and a
traffic court judge, Rose Bird, to Chief Justice of the California Supreme. Tom Hayden and CED had supported Bird. After
nearly 60 decisions against the death penalty, Californians voted Rose Bird out of office in November 1986.

However, the most disastrous of
Browns’s appointments were radical environmentalist pals of Tom Hayden and Jane
Fonda, including Adrianna Gianturco.
Hayden and Fonda’s CED platform favored heavily taxing the “privilege of … private transportation” to pay
for heavily subsidized public transit with low and no fares. CED urged
disincentives for automobile usage and favored car pools.[42] Brown
appointee Adrianna Gianturco
implemented the CED platform, halted road and bridge construction, sold off
rights of way for future highway construction, created car pools and promoted
public transit in the sprawling, low density population of California.  Freeways once the wonder of the world
devolved into the roads of Bangla Desh and the traffic of Cairo.

Brown appointed many other friends of Tom and Jane to major departments
and policy positions. Some, like Fred Branfman and Lu Haas, sat in the Governor’s office along with
Tom Hayden.

Fred Branfman became director of Planning and Research, the major
policy making unit in the governor’s office. Branfman had visited Laos as a key
figure in Hanoi friendly Indochina Resource Center and headed Project Air War
using enemy propaganda, film and numbers. After the war Branfman had stayed in
the Hayden-Fonda home and became a CED founder and developer of “Jobs From
The Sun” for the California Public Policy Center. Lucien “Lu” Haas became Brown’s chief media advisor in a very media astute administration.
Haas, an opponent of the Cold War including the Vietnam War had been spokesman
for Senator Alan Cranston and worked for the George McGovern and CED and
Hayden.

Brown appointed Ruth Yanatta
Goldway (Shearer) to the Department of Consumer Affairs, the state’s
major agency for the regulation of every business and profession. Derek Shearer worked at the renamed Employment Development Department,
EDD, which developed no jobs, but handed out checks for the unemployed and the
disabled. Shearer was co-author of Economic Democracy, wrote Hayden’s
1976 U.S. Senate platform and the working papers for CED’s Santa Barbara
founding conference. He was board member of Hayden-Fonda’s radical training academy,
Laurel Springs Institute, the California Public Policy Center, and the New
School of Democratic Management. He was associate fellow of the Institute for
Policy Studies and an economic advisor to Bill Clinton Shearer who has been an
Occidental College professor since 1981. Shearer might have been one of Barak
Obama’s “Marxist professors” at Occidental where Barak Obama was a member and a
speaker for Students for Economic Democracy, a creation of Hayden and
Fonda.

John Geesman was appointed executive director of the California Energy
Commission (1979-83). Geesman had participated in CED’s founding conference in
Santa Barbara, board member of the Solar Center (an offshoot of the Foundation
for National Progress), and CED contributor. The California Energy Commission
led decades long opposition to nuclear and hydroelectric power, new power
plants and refineries pushing a conservation and alternative energy
agenda.  The Commission supported high
cost, publicly subsidized solar and wind projects. Over time the cost of energy
in California became twice the national average. Geesman returned to the
commission 2003-2008 and 2010.

Stanley Sheinbaum became a regent for the University of California. Husband of Betty
Warner of Hollywood’s Warner Brothers family he came into great wealth.
Sheinbaum financed Hayden’s revolutionary “Red Family” and “International Liberation School” in Berkeley as well as
Daniel Ellsberg and Yasser Arafat.

Gov. Brown appointed still other Hayden/CED people.
Jane Dolan, “CED member”[43], wife of Bob Mulholland and Butte county
supervisor (until 2010) was appointed to the Office of Economic Opportunity.       Brown
appointed Nathaniel Gardels to head the Governor’s Public Investment
Task Force. Gardels was the official CED contact in the Santa Monica area and
today writes for the Huffington Post and with billionaire Nicholas
Berggruen’s Think Long foundations plans to reform California. To the task
force Brown also appointed CED activists Patti Lightstone and Robin Schneider.  Also Cary Lowe.

“Affordable” Housing

Cary Lowe was also appointed
chairman of the Governor’s Affordable Housing Task Force. Lowe was a CED
tenants rights activist, member of the National Lawyers Guild, board member of
the California Policy Center, founding board member of the Liberty Hill
Foundation, board Member of the California Housing Action and Information
Network, CHAIN.[44] The CED platform for housing was to provide
affordable housing as a right through:
rent control; land as a public utility; reduced residential property
taxes; tax speculative profits; pension fund financing, cooperative/non-profit
ownership. In short, expropriation of
private property in stages. In December 1978, Governor Jerry Brown joined Tom
Hayden at a Los Angeles town hall meeting with 500 renters.  A February 1, 1979 article in the Los Angeles
Times
reported that Hayden’s CED and the Coalition for Economic Survival,
headed by Reverend Al Dortch did “the bulk of the tenant political
organization” in Los Angeles and Santa Monica.  Dortch, a former IPC activist, was very aggressive and said his group
was “an organization which challenges political and economic power
structure…” The Coalition was thrown out of meetings of the Los Angeles
County Board of Supervisors.[45] They had better luck with the City of Los
Angeles.  Dortch, Cary Lowe, Hayden, and
Governor Jerry Brown literally harassed the Los Angeles City Council into a
rent moratorium and eventually a rent control ordinance[46] reducing the rental
housing supply and increasing rents in unregulated market.

In a 1988 “Dear Member” letter, CED’s
Executive Director, Cathy Calfo, claimed that CED had “successfully fought
for affordable housing.” CED’s leadership in rent control, no growth and
slow growth in every community where it had power contradicted this claim and
led to housing shortages and inflated housing prices.

Tom Sowell observes, “After the environmentalists and others pushed for
heavy-handed government restrictions on building anything anywhere, San
Francisco housing prices rose to become more than triple the national average.”
The impoverished housing supply has created a great market for government bonds
(1C, 2006) and redevelopment agencies to build a symbolic few affordable
housing units for a few with great fanfare. California’s post WWII building of
cheap housing for returning veterans and a booming economy, was killed.

Today Cary Lowe is a land use attorney and planning consultant
recommending that housing be made green, keeping it very expensive and very
unaffordable. Jerry Brown’s legacy was making housing unaffordable for millions
of Californians.

Larry Levin, became staff
director of Western Sun. Levin had been the top IPC lobbyist and visitor to
Hanoi while the people of South Vietnam fled Soviet tanks in April 1975. By
2010, Levin returned as a spokesman for Berkeley’s far left State Senator Loni
Hancock. Margaret Gardels, wife of Nathan Gardels and a CED contributor, was
appointed regional director of the federally funded Western Sun.

Jimmy Carter Competes with Brown for Hayden-Fonda’s Favors.

In December 1977 Tom Hayden showed up as Gov. Brown’s California delegate to the
White House Conference on Balanced National Growth and Economic Growth. CED’s
impending endorsement of Jerry Brown likely led to a Carter invitation for
Fonda and Hayden to the White House the following February. Carter’s generous
federal appointees out of the ranks of SDS, VVAW, IPS and NACLA had also eased
the way for the Tom and Jane.[47] Carter
was very receptive to Hayden and Fonda’s anti-war sentiments having pardoned
all 10,000 draft dodgers and offered those opportunities to some deserters —
the first day after his inauguration — on January 21, 1977.  One of Carter’s top aides and a close
political and personal friend was Peter Bourne who was an admirer of Fidel Castro
active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War whose Winter Soldier war crimes
conference Jane Fonda had helped finance.

In February 1978 Carter, who could not find time to meet the wives of troops
Missing In Action in Vietnam [48] met privately with Tom Hayden accompanied by
Peter Bourne in the Oval Office of the White House. According to Max Lerner in
the New York Post of February 10, 1978, the visit was stimulated by
Carter’s dislike of Jerry Brown. Carter wanted Hayden’s independence from
Brown.  In return, a Carter aide said
“Tom and Carter are dedicated to the same thing — making the system more
responsive,” making Hayden “an inside-the-system Democrat.”

Hayden gave president Carter a copy of Working Papers on Economic Democracy produced
for CED by the California Public Policy Center.[49]

Hayden:  “We would like our Economic Democracy
considered as a legitimate part of the national debate and we would like a way
to plug our ideas, … into [the president’s] office”

Carter:  “That would be fine.”

Through friendships with both Jerry
Brown and Jimmy Carter, taxpayer funds flowed into Hayden’s CED and his allies.

Carter Patronage to Hayden and Fonda

President Carter had placed 60’s activists, most known to Hayden and Fonda, into his
administration and funded 60’s activists outside of government.  He appointed Sam Browne, antiwar activist, to
head up ACTION with the assistance of Lee Weiner of the Chicago Eight.  Marge Tabankin, led VISTA She had been a
Hayden recruit in his Newark community organizing before riots there in 1967.
Tabankin was a national Student Association leader who signed Hanoi’s People’s
Peace Treaty in Hanoi.  John Froines of
the Chicago Eight worked for OSHA.  CED’s
housing expert, Ed Kirschner handled government loans for the National Consumer
Cooperative Bank for Jimmy Carter and economic democrat Derek Shearer was put
on the bank’s board of directors. The banks provided loans to cooperatives and
nonprofit organizations serving the low income and homeless.

ACTION funded staff for the San
Diego CED (via the Youth Project labor)[50];
Tom and Jane’s CED training arm, the Laurel Springs Institute (VISTA Volunteer
training); Western Sun (Hayden, Director); Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition
(Hayden, Co-Director); and the CED research arm, the Center for New Corporate
Priorities (Derek Shearer’s wife’s organization).  VISTA’s
National Director, Marge Tabankin had first met Hayden in Newark, joined SDS,
and signed the Peoples Peace Treaty in Hanoi, etc. VISTA’s Regional Director,
Loni Hancock, also knew Hayden from his Berkeley days and Larry Levin later
joined her Senate staff.

In 1978, a CED training and research arm, the Center for New Corporate Priorities
(CNCP), received $126,000 from the Department of Labor, under the Comprehensive
Employment and Training Act, CETA.  The
CETA funds were used to covered the salaries of (CNCP’s) director Ruth Yanatta
Goldway (wife of Derek Shearer), and of CETA laborers used by CED affiliated
groups — California Public Policy Center, California Housing Research Council
(successor to CHAIN), and the Coalition for Economic Survival.[51]

Power From the Sun. SolarCal, 1977-78

Back in California Jerry Brown appointed Hayden-Fonda friends to SOLARCAL. SolarCal was Hayden’s creation. The April 17,
1977 issue of the San Diego Union described Hayden’s “public solar
energy corporation.”  Fred Branfman
said Solarcal was a Hayden originated “solar development bank” in the
June 18, 1977 issue of The Nation. The June-July 1977 issue of CED
News
proclaimed CED “leadership … in the development of a state
owned solar industry.”  The December
1, 1977 issue of the Daily Californian said SolarCal was a product of
research by CED and the California Public Policy Center.

Stanley Sheinbaum, the Stern Fund,
Abelard Foundation, New York Community Trust, Pacific Alliance, Foundation
financed Fred Branfman’s study Jobs From the Sun released in February 1978, for
National Progress, DJB Foundation, Daniel Ellsberg and Stewart Mott.[52] IPS funded California Public Policy Center (Fred
Branfman) and the Pacific Alliance (Alvin Duskin)[53] lobbying assistance for “a public solar
energy corporation.” Hayden, Branfman, and antinuclear activist Alvin
Duskin testified before the state legislature and local CED members worked on
key legislators. CED activists and friends of Tom and Jane had endorsed
Solarcal: Rep. Ron Dellums, Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally, and Daniel Ellsberg.[54] SolarCal was officially established on “Sun
Day” 1978 with a four-day CED sponsored celebration in Berkeley.

Many CED-affiliated persons were appointed members of the Solar Cal Local Government
Commission. The most noteworthy were:
Supervisor Barbara Boxer, Marin County …… elected to Congress in 1982 and US Senate in 1992; gay activist and
future member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Harry Britt; Supervisor
Wesley Chesbro, Humboldt County, elected to the State Senate in 1998 and
Assembly to the present; Supervisor Rod Diridon, Santa Clara County; Supervisor
Jane Dolan, Butte County; Supervisor Dan McCorquodale, Santa Clara County
elected to the state Senate in 1982; Councilman John Means, City of Bakersfield
– later candidate for the state Assembly; Supervisor Gary Patton, Santa Cruz
County, later Planning and Conservation League; Councilman Wilson Riles, Jr.,
City of Oakland and later California Superintendent of Public Instruction.

CED Supports Brown’s Political Ambitions

It was certainly no wonder that Hayden and CED
endorsed Governor Brown’s upcoming Gubernatorial re-election in 1978.  Endorsing Brown ensured that Tom had not
completely alienated the Democratic Party establishment from his future
political options.[55] And Fonda
promised to raise $3 million to Brown’s impending run for president in 1980.[56]
The solar and other patronage did go forever unnoticed.

Political Patronage Scandals

Bill Wallace wrote articles in October 1979 in the radical Berkeley Barb.  Wallace said, Hayden’s

political machine … put CED members on the payroll of Western Sun, … obtained federal
funding from CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) … to pay wages
to CED members for doing CED work, (and)…. used [another federally funded]
… Santa Monica crime control program called Communitas, … a quarter of a
million dollars, … to promote rent control … dear to CED’s heart, but
completely unconnected to crime control.

Wallace said Brown’s appointments were using taxpayers’ monies to build Hayden’s
personal political machine, his “community action groups”.

Border Commission

Brown’s appointment of Hayden to the Southwest
Regional Border Commission also added Hayden’s political ally Richard Ybarra
and CED’s San Diego founder and Laurel Springs director, Shari Lawson to the
public payroll.  By 1979-80 the Democrat
controlled California Senate and Assembly, Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy and
Senate Pro Tempore James Mills, fought
Jerry Brown’s prior appointment of Hayden to the Southwest Border Regional
Commission alleging cost over runs[57]
making future funding of the Commission dependent upon Senate confirmation of
Hayden.[58]
By December 1980, Hayden resigned to “rebuild progressive grassroots
forces.”[59]

Western Sun

Brown had also made Hayden the Director of Western Sun, a federal solar project
funded by the Department of Energy.  The Barb’s
Wallace said Hayden “many political allies…on Western Sun’s [Federal]
payroll.”  Mark Vandervelen,
lobbyist of Friends of the Earth, said, “It’s just a big solar pork
barrel. … Tom would … scream if some right-wing Republican put … his
cronies on the payroll … (and) then used them to do precinct work for his own
re-election campaign.”

Wallace reported that Larry Levin, a CED member, a Hayden campaign manager in 1976 and
now the Western Sun field representative met to discuss federal grants with CED
allied officials in Berkeley and Oakland in 1979.[60] Levin had
spoken to CED activists in Berkeley on the subject of “The Battle Against
Corporate Power.”  Judy Corbett, a
Western Sun consultant, and her husband Michael, a Davis political activist and
future mayor, were CED fundraisers.  Two
other CED members also were paid consultants for Western Sun — Kit Bricca of
Santa Clara and Keith Bray of Sacramento. Hayden had received $82,000 from the
Department of Energy for Western Sun as start up monies — well spent.  Others noticed that it was used “to hire
his leftist cronies.  All the people
hired and all the sub-contracting has been to CED members,” according to
SUNRAE, a Santa Barbara solar power group.[61] Other
solar-power groups felt “frozen out.”
If you were not with CED, “you can just go fish.”  And one environmentalist told the Barb’s Wallace
that Tom Hayden was simply a “Piranha of the Left.”  Another told Wallace, “This is really a
no-win situation for the left … the fallout will go to discredit the
movements …anti-nuke, solar power, the whole schmear.”[62]

CETA

In 1979, the Center for New Corporate
Priorities, which had been founded in 1970, returned what remained of its CETA
grant and closed its doors. Later the Los Angeles Times reported that
the Center had “ . . . at least three participants engaged in political lobbying
activities on CETA paid time…”[63] Closing the Center may have headed off the
Department of Labor’s impending investigations of CNCP’s alleged misuse of
public funds.[64]

Overall, from 1978-1980, Hayden’s CED received $743,000 in federal funds.[65]

Hayden used appointments
to wield power within the Brown administration.

Preventing Crimes …of the Landlords

The CED affiliated Comunitas in Santa Monica, headed by Hayden ally Rev. Jim Conn,
received $334,761 in grants from the Department of Justice (DOJ) for crime
prevention efforts — “safe houses, block clubs, and neighborhood
councils” — among women, seniors and minorities to provide
“grassroots” crime prevention services such as neighborhood alert and
target hardening against burglars, muggers, rapists and such.  In fact, Conn’s Communitas focused on block
organization, precinct work and information night meetings on Santa Monica’s
Rent Control initiative. Jim Conn was treasurer of Santa Monicans for Renter’s
Rights headed by CED and Santa Monica City Council members Ruth Yanatta and
Bill Jennings.[66]

A Communitas publication, “A Short History of Ocean Park,” described
its “crime prevention” activities:
land use regulation to reduce development; forced relocation of
businesses; eviction protection for nonpayment of rent; and stricter rent
control.  Communitas wanted to prevent
economic “crimes” that might be committed by capitalists — apartment
owners, small businessmen, and homebuilders — those obvious class enemies of
the people identified at CED’s founding convention.

Thus two grants to Communitas and the soon defunct Center for New Corporate
Priorities helped fund community organization — house to house, among seniors
and low income people, in Santa Monica for the benefit of a CED affiliate Santa
Monicans for Renters Rights, SMRR, which succeeded in 1979– passing one of the
strictest rent control measures in America, electing a majority of the rent
control board in 1979 and in electing a majority of the City Council of Santa
Monica in 1981.  Mayor Goldway appointed
her husband and Hayden’s intellectual mentor, Derek Shearer, to the City
Planning Commission.  She may have placed
CETA employees into CED positions as well.
About the misuse of funds we have a sympathetic George Cornell interview
of Hayden: Noting that no investigations have resulted in prosecutions, Hayden
said, ‘The whole thing is totally made up so it’s got you in a position where
you have to write there’s been no prosecution — which makes it seem like,
well, he must have used his influence with the governor to squelch that.’[67]

Brown’s Continuing Political Favors

Besides subsidizing their far left payroll,
Hayden and Fonda called upon Jerry Brown for many controversial political favors

Dennis Banks.

In 1978 Hayden persuaded Brown to block
the extradition of Indian activist Dennis Banks for sentencing in South Dakota
for his actions in the 1973 Custer County Courthouse riot. At Wounded Knee
Banks and/or his compatriots occupied a courthouse, firebombed a building,
burned two police cars, and injured seven police officers. A South Dakota jury
convicted Banks of assault with a deadly weapon, but he fled to political
sanctuary in California. Governor Brown refused to extradite Banks back to
South Dakota for sentencing.  Banks was also on the lam for firearms possession charges in Oregon.[68] In March
1976, Hayden had called Banks a “political and philosophical leader of
great importance. …  Both claimed Banks
faced death if Banks was returned to South Dakota.”[69] Brown granted Dennis Banks political asylum in
the sovereign state of California on April 20, 1978.

People’s Temple, December 1978

Jane Fonda said, “The church I
relate to most is called the People’s Temple” as it offers “a sense
of what life should be about.” Many of Tom and Jane’s friends were great
admirers of Jones’ community of socialism, peace and justice. Joining the Black
Panthers Governor Jerry Brown attended Jim Jones services at the People’s
Temple in San Francisco as did his Lt. Governor, Mervyn Dymally.  Hayden’s memoirs Reunion, is
dismissive the exotic “religious” cults of many of his old friends in
the New Left, but he does not mention Jim Jones. Attorney Charles Garry said of
Jonestown, Guyana “For the first time, I saw a world where there was no
racism, sexism, ageism, elitism no poverty.”

On November 21, 1978 Leo Ryan, D-San Mateo, and 933 Americans died at the hands of
Jim Jones at an airport outside Jonestown, Guyana. The Congressman and his
entourage traveled to Guyana to investigate constituent complaints of mistreatment
and found the classic Marxist cult of personality and oppression. Jones used
public humiliation, purges, radio Havana, informers, beatings, sex and drugs to
control commune members and to make his socialist revolution.  Back at the commune 933 died in a mass
murder-suicide ritual, drinking cyanide laced grape Kool-Aid.  Subsequent investigation showed that the
“Reverend” Jim Jones planned to move his commune to the Soviet Union
and that $7 million expropriated from his parishioners was to be given to the
Communist Party – of the Soviet Union. One of Jones’ agents, Mike Prokes and
two others left Jonestown with $500,000 in cash earmarked for the Soviet
Embassy where Jonestown leaders had had weekly meetings.

Lt. Gov. Dymally had intervened with
the government of Guyana to help Jones establish his slave colony. Ignoring
Jones’ long-term infatuation with Marxism and his decision to “infiltrate
the church,” the California left had successfully protected Jones from his
critics — Temple defectors and an occasional journalist.[70]

Joan Baez Confronts Jane Fonda et al, 1978-79

In the fall of 1978 in Berkeley,
site of Ho Chi Minh Park, Doan Van Toai spoke to a cool audience about
Communist oppression. Doan was a former Viet Cong agent who had toured American
college, been arrested six times by the Theiu-Ky government, welcomed the North
Vietnamese liberation of Saigon and taken a position confiscating private
property. Disillusioned Doan had a meeting with folk singer and pacifist Joan
Baez who spent $200,000 investigating the Vietnamese human rights record.[71] On May 30th,
1979 Baez, published an “Open Letter to the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam,” condemning human rights violations in Vietnam in a full-page
newspaper ad in five major metropolitan newspapers. Baez’s asked the North
Vietnamese to stop the imprisonment, torture and clearing of mine field with
political prisoners.

A grim mosaic

The jails are overflowing…

People disappear and never return.

People are shipped to reeducation centers, fed a
starvation diet …

Forced to squat bound wrist to ankle, suffocated
in “conex” boxes.

People are used as human mine detectors, clearing live mine fields with their hands and feet.

For many, life is hell and death is prayed for.[72]

Prior to publication Tom Hayden and
Jane Fonda “led the charge on the West Coast”[73] to suppress the publication.[74] Fonda mailed members of the anti-war movement —
including 25 of the Baez signators.
Fonda said, “The repression was not
as bad as the predicted bloodbath…” Baez says, “whoever wrote the
letter…was extremely careless and wrote,
‘I don’t know if we can expect the Vietnamese to turn free millions
of people overnight.”[75]

Jane Fonda called the Vietnamese
refugees, “misfits”[76] Tom Hayden railed against corporate oil
dictators. “It’s the yacht people who caused the boat people’, he said.[77] Similarly, Jim Wallis, frequent war
protester, SDS leader at Michigan State, friend of Daniel Berrigan, editor of Sojourners,
an advocate of Marxist-Leninist social justice and a cheerleader of the Viet
Cong said “Many of today’s
[Vietnamese] refugees… are fleeing to support their consumer habits in other
lands.”[78] Wallis would become President Barack
Obama’s spiritual advisor on matters of morality.

Fonda told Baez she was aligned
“with the most narrow and negative elements in our country who continue to
believe that Communism is worse than death.”[79] Officially, Tom Hayden “endorsed”
Jane’s letter.  He probably wrote it. [80] Jane Fonda said, “We never criticize
revolutionary regimes, don’t you know?”[81] By late
July, a backtracking Jane Fonda said, these “attacks … imply that I am
unwilling to be critical of the new government in Vietnam.”[82]

Baez remembered, “A campaign
was launched to stop me…. The phone rang off the hook with ultimatums and
suggestions that I was naive, that … Toai was … CIA.” Hayden pals Fred
Branfman, William Kunstler, and Gareth Porter of the Indochina Resource Center
were particularly vehement. Baez says, “all hell broke loose…I was a CIA
rat.  ‘It’s an honor to be called both a
CIA rat and a KGB agent,’ I responded. ‘I must be doing something
right.”  Kunstler said Baez was
“cruel and wonton” adding “I do not believe in public attacks on
Socialist countries, even where violations of human rights occur.”  Dave Dellinger wrote, “You have to [be]
naive to [think] that a Leninist revolution will allow any independent
thought.”[83]

Peter Collier says, “Tom and Jane … were opposed to Baez.  So …
was the coalition of old-line communists, neo-fellow travelers, and
unreconstructed sixties radicals… There were no enemies on the left.”[84] These
were clearly friends of Hanoi and Moscow in the United States. The official
party line was published in the New York Times of June 24, 1979.
“The Truth About Vietnam,” said, in part, said, “we are appalled
at you recent attack on Vietnam and embarrassed by the ignorance it displays.
…”

The Baez charges were “Outrageous … without
foundation …without a scintilla of documentation. …Some 400,000 servants of
the former barbaric regimes were sent to re-education camps … agents of the
former repressive regimes.  …  Vietnam now enjoys human rights as it has
never known …  the right to a job and
safe, healthy working conditions … education, medicine and health care …
[which] we in the United States have yet to achieve.”[85]

The ad had provided two clip-out coupons:
One demanding billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Vietnam and
the other seeking volunteers or money for a Soviet front — the U. S. Peace
Council. Really. The Soviets cared about the Baez attack on Jane Fonda. A Los
Angeles Times article, “Soviet Press Backs Miss Hayden” in the
August 15, 1979 issue, had a few words Joan Baez and Jane Fonda.  About Baez, the Soviet press said, “She
must have been ‘singing with someone else’s voice … Recently she sang in
Seattle … where a strong crowd … [confronting her] holding up signs
[saying] ‘The CIA likes Joan Baez’ and ‘Joan Baez likes the CIA.’ Thus sayeth Sovietskaya
Kultura
about Joan Baez.

About Jane Fonda, the Komsomolskaya Pravda said she is “a symbol of
American freedom fighters like Angela Davis, … The name of Fonda is today on
all the blacklists of America… .  She
is like Joan of Arc and they are threatening her with the same fate.”  Yet “Even the strong of the world are afraid
of her.”

Other American friends included the
American Friends Service Committee, whose letterhead was used to denounce Doan
Van Toai as a “CIA lackey.”[86]
Philadelphia SANE Nuclear Policy Committee honored Tom and Jane with
their 1979 SANE Peace Award.[87]

In early August millionaire Fonda
held a $25 fundraiser for an airlift of supplies to Vietnam, Operation
California, attended by hundreds including Robert Vaughn, Mike Farrell,
Governor Jerry Brown’s first sister and future state Treasurer and later
gubernatorial aspirant Kathleen Brown Rice, Brown aide Tom Quinn, CED activist
and POW-collaborator Edison Miller. Fonda hadn’t changed her mind about Vietnam
— the refugee problem could be attributed to American “government
bureaucracy and red tape get in the way of helping those in dire
straits…”[88] Peter Collier observed, “Tens of thousands
of people are mired in unspeakable tragedy while Hayden and Fonda mince words
to avoid offending the Stalinist Gerontocracy that runs Hanoi.”
Collier described Tom and Jane holding a Hollywood gala to raise funds for the
boat people, as if their problems were caused by a natural disaster, “a
potato famine,” rather than political repression.[89]

Jerry Brown Stands By Hayden and Fonda

On October 8th, Governor Jerry Brown honored Jane Fonda at a “Salute to
Women” breakfast in Los Angeles.

Even before the Baez problem
would run its course, another ghost of Hanoi past would appear.  In 1979 at the urging of Jane Fonda and Tom
Hayden Governor Jerry Brown appointed Miller Supervisor of Orange County.

Edison Miller

Tom and Jane recommended that Brown CED activist[90]
and former POW and Hanoi collaborator, Edison Miller, to a vacancy on the
Orange County Board of Supervisors.
Miller’s credentials looked especially fine to the Haydens. As a POW
Edison Miller had met Jane Fonda in Hanoi in July 1972[91]
At a minimum, Edison Miller had been a cooperative prisoner when talking to
antiwar activists and back home Miller worked on Tom’s Senate campaign and
served on CED’s steering committee.[92]

Organized opposition to Miller mounted:  The
California Democratic Party Chairman (Richard O’Neil); the two local Democratic
Assemblymen (Dennis Mangers, Richard Robinson); a top U.A.W. official (Bruce
Lee);[93] and, of course, the Republicans opposed the
Miller appointment.  The Republican
Lieutenant Governor, Mike Curb threatened to appoint someone else if Brown
traveled outside of California.[94] The odds
of Edison Miller being elected in his own right in 1980 appeared low in
conservative Orange County.[95]

Governor Brown was still wanted “to shore up the left” and to gain access to
Hayden’s political machine and Fonda’s money.
The perception was that “Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden could call 50
actors and 50 rock stars and easily raise millions.”[96] Why the
money?  Jerry Brown was running for president.[97] Jane may
have already made her promise of $3 million, though denials of any fundraising
promises would continue for months.[98]

On July 13, 1979, Jerry Brown finally appointed Edison Miller to the Orange County
Board of Supervisors as “the first ex-POW from the Vietnam War to hold
elective political office anywhere in the nation.”[99] Tom
chuckled when he told a crowd of 40 CED activists, “We’re invading their
most privileged strongholds. … It has terrified the political
establishment.”[100]

Once appointed Miller hired five CED members for his conservative Orange county
staff.[101] One, Fred Branfman,  telephoned the good news to
his friends across the country.  Miller fired Branfman.  Not to worry — Branfman
found work with Governor Jerry Brown.
Still another Miller hiree, Pamela Bigelow, had been accused of misusing
CETA funds while at the Women’s Law Center of Southern California.

Edison Miller lost to Bruce Nestande in his first election in June 1980 and blamed
his friendship with Tom and Jane.[102]

Meantime, Jerry Brown appointed yet another Hayden choice to the Santa Cruz Board of
Supervisors —  Chris Mathews.  As the appointed supervisor, Mathews
appointed a “pesticide protester” to the County Agricultural Advisory
Board who had been convicted for planting bombs on a crop duster.[103] Mathews would be defeated at the polls in
1981, but Gary Patton an ally of the Hayden’s would serve there into the
nineties on environmental and other issues.

Jane Fonda on Arts Council

In 1979 Governor Jerry Brown made
still another appointment that caused him even more trouble than Edison Miller
and Chris Mathews — Jane Fonda to the California Arts Council.  Brown appointed Fonda in March, but the
appointment required confirmation by the liberal Democrat led State Senate.
Curiously, Brown had actually pursued the likely controversy. Jane said,
“Drop a bomb in there, blow it up, get people talking about it.  He liked the idea.  I’m hot and there is this controversy surrounding
me.”[104]

After the Baez affair, Hanoi Jane
really didn’t have a chance before the State Senate, which resoundingly
rejected her (28-5) on a bipartisan vote. Democrat Ruben Ayala said, “She
waived her right to serve…. when she went to North Vietnam and did her little
thing.”[105] Governor Jerry Brown defended Jane, “If these senators were as tough and big as
they like to think, why didn’t they invite Jane Fonda to be heard and call her
to her face the names they called her like a bunch of little kids?”[106]

While Jane later said she was
surprised by the Senate’s rejection, Fonda was well prepared with a four and
one half page speech — “hold for release 10:00 a.m., Friday, July 27,
1979” — and an op ed prepared for the Los Angeles Times.  She said it was “a witch hunt … the
spirit of McCarthyism …”

That was the script — tears, anger, and shouts of “McCarthyism.”

In her Arts Council Statement, Fonda said,

“It saddens me … Art can bring people
and nations together, heal their differences, create understanding and respect
where conflict exists,” said America’s greatest film propagandist of class
conflict.  She, artista politica,
opposed injecting “politics into what should have been a discussion of my
merits as an artist to represent the arts community in California.”[107] And “They excoriated my name and reputation
in the most vicious terms. … These Senators appeared to have forgotten the
meaning of Democracy.”  It was “… paranoia, narrow mindedness, … tactics of McCarthy and Nixon …
,” said Jane.

And as for her six years supporting
the enemy in war, “I became a patriot … out of concern for what was
happening to my country and to help end the needless suffering of the
Vietnamese people and the American servicemen who were ordered to fight.
…” The clincher, the campaign theme to come.  “Never again must the spirit of
McCarthyism intimidate us.”[108]

Baez?  “I have spoken with Joan Baez about the
boat people.  We have a common concern
… .”  Another misunderstanding.  “I am perfectly prepared to criticize
brutality, torture or violations of human rights anywhere, regardless of the
ideology of the government involved. …”

The Los Angeles Times dutifully printed a slightly revised version of her original prepared statement
for the Arts Council.[109]

Nearly 300 Hollywood luminaries signed[110] an ad on August 8th defending Fonda from the
fearsome California State Senate:

“THE CALIFORNIA STATE SENATE HAS SAID JANE
FONDA IS NOT A QUALIFIED REPRESENTATIVE
OF THE ARTS.

THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY DISAGREES.

“The leaders of the fight against Jane Fonda, a two time Academy award winning actress, have
characterized her as a traitor. This tactic is all too reminiscent of … when…
Joe McCarthy labeled hundreds of prominent members of the arts community as
communists in order to deny them work. …. We affirm that we will fight any
resurrection of the specter of McCarthyism in California or our nation.”
(McCarthy had nothing to do with the Hollywood’s homegrown black list).

Tom said that it was an example of
the “poisons of history, that are passed on unless they are
expunged.”[111]

A week after the Hollywood ad, State Senator Paul Carpenter, D-Cypress, responded with a paid ad in the Los Angeles Times
on August 15, 1979:

McCarthyism.  Telling lies about people

and then persecuting them on the basis of those lies.

When Jane Fonda accused the State Senate of McCarthyism.

SHE became the McCarthyite.

The State Senate never once lied about Jane Fonda.

She DID travel to Hanoi and make anti-American tapes …

American prisoners of war WERE severely punished because of her visit.

It is Jane Fonda — not the California State Senate — who

is guilty of McCarthyism.

Free speech. … Jane Fonda has free speech. …

In America she is free to say what she thinks. …

The people of California — and their State Senate — are also free. …

[T]hey have decided they want no part of Jane Fonda as their representative.[112]

Though only 12.5 per cent of the liberal Democrat dominated State Senate had voted in her favor, by late August
the people of Californian narrowly split 49-45 per cent in favor of Fonda and
by 54-39 per cent they supported her appointment to the Arts Council.[113]

Tom Still a Revolutionary?

James R. Mills, a liberal Democrat and President Pro Tempore of the California Senate said, “Not only was
[Hayden] a Communist, he was a Stalinist…He lies to us now… He say’s he’s a
Democrat”[114] Mills said, “He denied ever having advocated
violence, revolution and public ownership of business in America.” Yet “his advocacy”
was in “public print” [115] In an interview with Larry Liebert published in
the August 27, 1979 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Tom said:  “I never believed that there could be a
successful violent revolution in the United States.”  Hayden also denied he had ever been a
Socialist or a Marxist.[116] Columnist Joe Scott  described “confessions,
not nearly as complete as … St. Augustine.”  Scott cited then quoted Hayden in CED’s
September 1979 newsletter: at “the actual moment of showdown” between
two major political forces, “… power is to be won by either by an
overthrow of the existing government or a peaceful transfer at the polls.”[117] Old Ramparts friend, Peter Collier mocked
Hayden “unequivocally disclaiming any past connection with Marx or revolution … that he was always a liberal Democrat …”[118] Collier
said Hayden “… gives something like a broad wink…We’ll have to take him on faith as our Manchurian candidate.”[119]

Brown for President, 1979-1980

Hayden and the CED’s statewide
steering committee endorsed Brown for president in December 1979 promising full
organizational and fundraising support.[120] As leader of “a political machine in a
gentle sense,” Hayden was forced to visit local CED chapters to
“explain” the Brown endorsement.
Despite a $3 million commitment from Fonda, Hayden said that CED’s
support was limited to the New Hampshire primary.  Hayden said CED owed Brown since he had
raised the nuclear issue when other presidential candidates had not.[121] Brown’s
alignment with Hayden’s anti-nuclear and pro-solar agenda had gained him
notoriety as Doonesbury’s and Mike Royko’s “Governor Moonbeam.”[122] Democrat state Senator Paul Carpenter, ran paid
newspaper ads in New Hampshire in January 1980 — tarring presidential
candidate Jerry Brown with the red brush of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.[123] Brown did
poorly in New Hampshire.  Tom Quinn,
Brown’s campaign director said that Hayden “simply couldn’t produce. …
Hayden … clearly hurt Jerry … .”[124] In late May 1980, Tom Hayden endorsed
Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.[125]

Jerry Brown remained loyal to CED. A 1981 CED fundraiser at the Beverly Hilton
featured Jerry Brown’s father and former governor Pat Brown as well as CED
member and farm worker organizer Caesar Chavez. Entertainment notables included
Ed Asner, Mike Farrell, Robert Blake, Margot Kidder, Fonda, and Gloria Steinem.[126] Margot
Kidder[127] made a fundraising tour of northern California
for CED in late 1981.  Fonda’s films “Julia” and “Nine to Five” were used as draw for CED
fundraising in 1981.

Medfly

In 1981 led by CED member Bob Brownstein, CED opposed aerial spraying of a
pesticide, Malathion, against the Mediterranean fruit fly then threatening to
ravish hundreds of California crops. Governor Brown delayed a decision until
his chief of staff, B. T. Collins — subsequently a leader to create a Vietnam
veterans memorial, a state Assemblyman, and a critic of Hayden — broke the
policy crisis by ridiculing CED. Collins drank a glass of the stuff before TV
cameras.[128] In 1990 Tom Hayden appeared on Ted Koppel’s
“Nightline” still opposing the spraying to stop the Medfly.

Hayden Given Assembly Seat, 1981-1982

In 1981 Hayden-Fonda political allies Governor Jerry
Brown and Speaker Willie Brown paved the way for Tom Hayden by intervening to
prevent an anti-Hayden gerrymander[129] in the California Assembly. Cleared to run in
1982 Hayden’s campaign “brochure” was a
slick 24-page book.  Signed by Jerry
Brown’s father, former Governor Pat Brown. It showed Hayden, “… is a normal
human being who is just like everybody else:  He has a family, he’s     a father, he fishes, he plays softball.”[130] The Los
Angeles Times
got the picture, “[H]e is a regular guy that just happens to
be an exceptional fighter for progressive causes.”[131] Hayden
also loved dogs and children. Perversely, there was great enthusiasm for Hayden
among Republican politicians who felt Hayden hurt the entire Democrat ticket.[132] Lu Haas,
a CED activist and the Governor Brown’s media advisor, said “ [R]ight
wingers…won’t let it die.  It’s a form of Red scare.”[133] Thereafter Hayden’s long political career in
Assembly and the Senate[134] was halted only by term limits and unsuccessful
campaigns for other offices.

Brown’s Political Legacy

As late as February 1989, Hayden put his whole machine, including his top political operatives, Bob
Mulholland and Cathy Calfo, behind electing former Governor Jerry Brown to the
Chairmanship of the state Democratic Party. CED leaders Bob Mulholland and
Cathy Calfo became political director and executive director of the state
party. This continued into 1991-1992, when the new chairman, Phil Angelides,
selected Bob Mulholland as his own political director.  Mulholland had been on Hayden’s payroll for
15 years since his 1976 campaign for U.S. Senate and today remains a major
spokesman for Democrat party apparatus in California.

Brown leaving office in January 1983 did not end his legacy.

Governor George Deukmejian 1983-1990.

A law and order and fiscal conservative former Attorney General George Deukmejian
gave little attention to environmental matters which had their own growth
momentum in the state bureaucracy, the Democrat legislature and in public
opinion. Short of abolishing an Adrianna Gianturco construct, the Caltrans
Office of Bicycle Facilities and the Office of Appropriate Technology,
Deukmejian’s 1985 budget increased spending on environmental projects.

During the Deukmejian administration the state bureaucracy and the Legislature
aggressively moved against high public perceptions of dirty air and water and
toxic chemicals. Governor Deukmejian renewed the broad mandate of the
Environmental Affairs Agency over the Air Resources Board, Solid Waste
Management Board, State Water Resources Control Board, and the Regional Water
Quality Control Boards, Outer Continental Shelf, Office of Offshore
Development, offshore oil and gas mitigation. Thus the bureaucracy plodded
forward on the Brown-Hayden-Fonda environmental jihad against corporate
poisoning of air, water and life, both human and wild. In an atmoshere of
sustained hysteria, the State Legislature enacted new legislation: the
California Clean Air Act, Integrated Waste Management Act, Beverage Container
Recycling and Litter Reduction Act, Oil Spill Prevention and Response Act,
Proposition 65, Drinking Water Well Protection Act, Underground Storage Tank
Laws of 1983, Toxic Pits Cleanup Act, Hazardous Waste Management Act and
Hazardous Waste Source Reduction and Management Review Act. The regulatory
apparatus and ambitions grew unchecked[135]
year after year.

In his closing hours Governor Deukmejian vetoed a property tax exemption bill for
Solar Electric Generating Stations built by Luz Limited International. Without
this subsidy LUZ went bankrupt and the construction of large solar power
projects were halted for years thereafter.

The Transition: Wilson to Davis to Schwarzenegger

When he was elected Governor in 1990, Pete Wilson appointed Sierra Club Director Doug Wheeler to
run California’s Resources Agency overseeing departments regulating
California’s water, forests, fish and games. Despite Wilson’s tied to corporate
California, it was the reign of the spotted owl, kangaroo rat and suckerfish,
the decimation of the forest products industry, manufacturing, and an assault
upon agriculture and rural communities dependant upon the development of
natural resources.

After Wilson, Governor Gray Davis carried the Brown legacy forward. Brown’s former chief of
Staff, Gray Davis appointed Mary Nichols as Secretary of the California Resources Agency and
former Assemblyman Tom Hannigan to direct the Department of Water Resources and
Jonas Minton, a rafter from Planning and Conservation League as Deputy Director
of DWR. Minton a fierce opponent of water storage continued Jerry Brown and
Gerald Meral’s animosity toward dam construction[136]
and obcession with water conservation including toilet to tap recycling of
water.

Davis signed a California-only law demanding the manufacture of more efficient vehicles to cut greenhouse gas
emissions. This measure charged the California Air Resources Board with achieving
“maximum feasible” cuts in greenhouse gases. In one irony MTBE was
added to gas to reduce emissions, but by early Davis made an executive order to
eliminate MTBE as a gas additive. It polluted water.[137]

Davis signed  an environmental justice statute to ensure
the “fair treatment of all races, cultures, and incomes” in environmental
laws and regulations. After rolling blackouts of electrical power, caused by an
electrical restucturing law creating loopholes for market manupulation,[138]
Davis declared an  emergency and ordered
the California Energy Commission to speedup the backlogged application process
for 38 new power plants, the first in decades. Gray Davis would be recalled, in
part, because his slow respose to the energy crisis.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Bonnie Reiss, a Hollywood friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger became a
principal advisor on environmental issues. As a member of Norman Lear’s
Environmental Media Association, Reiss was a leader among Hollywood’s
environmentalists. [Lear owns a 26-car garage and tells everyone else to get
out of their cars] Yet it was Fonda-Hayden’s
Hollywood “brat pack” Network: Jeff Bridges, Tom Cruise, Morgan Fairchild,
and Daphne Zuniga[139] which formed the Earth Communications Office,
ECO, and made Bonnie Reiss its executive director.

Broadly promoting an anti-market, anti-private property agenda, Reiss’s ECO helped
rewrite Hollywood scripts to deliver environmental ideas such as global warming, green house effect, deforestation,
and cloth diapers. Reiss’s ECO mounted hysterical and anti-business plots about
toxic waste, animal rights, recycling. In the late eighties Reiss said, “We
have only ten years left to do something.” Reiss opposed reforms of
environmental regulations blocking the restoration of California’s roads, water
and electric supplies. Hollywood’s own Arnold Schwarznegger, advised by Bonnie
Reiss, counts as his own legacy California’s law against carbon and climate change.

Jerry Brown replaced Schwarzenegger as Governor returning to same game with many of
the same players. His legacy was waiting for him. Brown had campaigned, in
part, on producing 20,000 megawatts of solar energy by 2020. Awaiting him in
the legislature were bills to: toughen regulation of toxic chemicals in
consumer products; make 30% of California Energy renewable (sans
hydroelectric); and require automakers to build lower emission vehicles.

Despite the distraction of a $25 billion budget deficit, Brown’s early appointments
indicated Moonbeam had returned.

2010 Brown Appointments, 2010

Governor Brown reappointed Mary Nichols to the California Air Resources
Board, spearheading California’s effort to clean the air of planet earth all by
itself. This is to be done by criminalizing and imprisoning carbon, a natural
element in our cells and the air we breathe. Whatever. The earth’s climate will
be changed for the better and lots of people will get jobs, government and
government subsidized jobs. This measure, AB 32, and Mary Nichols herself, are
proud legacies of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet Nichols has her own continuing
provenance. As part of a Toxic Network in 1986 Mary Nichols helped the
Hayden-Fonda team pass Proposition 65,[140] the Safe Drinking Water Act. Producers and
users of chemicals were engaged in the “manufacturing of death” according
to spokesmen for the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund.[141]

Hence Prop 65 required the regulation of any chemical at any detectable level —
“zero emissions” that are “less than detectable” — in the
water supply for anything that might cause cancer or birth defects. Proposition
65 covered virtually every economic enterprise in California and every commonly
used product –aspirin, beer, cola, paint, vitamins, peanut butter, paper, nail
polish, table salt, white out, soap, gasoline, spot removers, paint and varnish
removers.
Tom, Jane, and CED on their own had contributed and loaned over three
quarters of a million dollars — $766,000 to enact Prop 65.[142] By 2010 the State of
California listed some 800 chemicals as cancer causing and a like number as
having reproductive toxicity, causing birth defects. Only a dozen or so
chemicals, e.g. Saccharine, have been delisted. Experts set “safe harbor’
levels for cancer causing chemicals and “maximum allowable doses” for
reproductive toxicity. A massive bureaucracy holds forth.

Nichols, affiliated with the Natural Resources Defense Council (of Alar apple panic) also supported the
Hayden-Fonda’s “Big Green” initiative in 1990. It took 13,000 words to describe
Big Green’s comprehensive plan for clean air, water, soil and food.[143] As a package that effort failed at the ballot
box defeated by claims it didn’t go far enough. Not to worry it came back in legislation.

In 2011 Jerry Brown appointed river rafting and dam-busting Gerald Meral
as Deputy Secretary of the Natural Resources Agency charged with saving Delta
Smelt to the detriment of the human users of water, see Chinese oranges above.
Meral, wildlife biologist formerly with the Environmental Defense Foundation
opposing all dam projects except their destruction and opposing pesticides used
to kill weeds hiding burrowing animals weakening flood controlling levees.
After serving the first term of Jerry Brown Meral worked for the Planning and
Conservation League, PCL, a coalition of groups that included Friends of the
Earth, Californians Against Waste, Friends of the River, the Audubon Society,
Greenpeace Pacific Southwest, the Wilderness Society. PCL supported a $900
million “mountain lion” habitat[144] and CED candidates for office.[145] PCL also helped Hayden and Fonda in closing down
the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant outside Sacramento.

In 2011 Brown appointed John Laird Secretary of Natural Resources. A former
Assemblyman and a self-described gay progressive, [146] Laird was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing
Committee[147] with which Tom Hayden was also affiliated. CED supported his run for
the Santa Cruz City Council where he and most of his colleagues were
self-described socialists pushing for rent control and aligning themselves with leftists in Central America.[148]

Brown has appointed lesbian Nancy
Ryan as executive director of California Public Utilities Commission. She is an
advocate of alternative fueled vehicles, renewable energy resources and reduction of greenhouse gas
emissions. She served previously as Senior Economist and Deputy
California Director at Environmental Defense Fund, concentrating on reducing
greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and power plants, curbing air pollution
from diesel engines and restoring rivers and watersheds.

Déjà vu all over again?


[1] http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/16/3327302/dan-walters-even-browns-5-year.html#ixzz1BDg1Z26d

[2] Joel Kotkin and ———– Grabowicz, California, 104.

[3] John Seiler, “AB32′s echoes failed policy,” CalWatchDog, JUNE 16, 2010.

[4]Collier & Horowitz, Destructive Generation…, p. 194.

[5]”Tom Hayden, Trial,” Ramparts (July, 1970).

[6] Others in the organization formed at Germantown, Ohio in October 1973 were America Friends Service Committee, Clergy And
Laity Concerned, Women Strike for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom, War Resisters League, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, People’s
Coalition for Peace and Justice, Fellowship of Reconciliation, SANE, Episcopal
Peace Fellowship. Medical Aid to Indochina, Indochina Resource Center, Don
Luce’s Indochina Mobile [tiger cage] Education Project.

[7] Radio Hanoi, August 15, 1972; See also:  San Francisco Chronicle, July 26,
1972; Thomas E. Elias, Santa Barbara News Press, April 3, 1979; Steven
Denny, 14-15; Andersen, 256.

[8] AP, San Francisco Chronicle, (July 26, 1972) and (August 1,
1972).

[9]  Thomas D. Elias, “Vietnam Controversy Perils Hayden’s ‘Populist’ Image,” Santa Barbara News Press,
April 3, 1979.

[10]  Los Angeles Herald Examiner, July 30, 1979. On Tom’s own “five year” explanation of Miller’s
“anti-war statements” see: Davis-Woodland Daily Democrat, August 15, 1979.

[11]  Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1979.

[12]  Herald Examiner, July 30, 1979.

[13]  Los Angeles Herald Examiner, July 30, 1979.

[14]  John Kendall, “Edison Miller: From Marine Pilot to Censured POW to Supervisor,” Los Angeles
Times
, August 6, 1979, p. II-1.

[15]  John Kendall, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1979; Herald Examiner, July 30, 1979.

[16] Chicago Tribune, September 28, 1973, 8. See also: Black Panther, June 16, 1975, 15.

[17] W. B. Rood, “Hayden and Fonda: Who Has the Clout,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1979, p. D-1.

[18] Kissinger taped telephone conversations, TELCON April 26, 1975 10:15 a.m. Ambassador Dean
Brown/The Secretary.

[19] Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 2, 1988

[20] Kotkin, Esquire, p. 46].

[21] James R. Mills Says Hayden Has No Credibility as a Democrat,” Los
Angeles Times
, January 19, 1980.

[22] Branfman was the first Director of the Center for Development Policy created by the
Commission of U.S.-Central American Relations, an organization with close ties
to the Sandinistas. Powell, Cadre, pp. 237-238, N 67-68.  Also John Feliz,  Network of Networks.

[23] “Issues ’76; Crime Prevention,” Tom Hayden for U.S. Senate, Santa Monica,
[January, 1976], p. 1.

[24] “Hayden Outlines Stand In 86 Page Platform,” Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1976.

[25] Ron Ridenour, Seven Days, (April 11, 1977).  Also cited in Bennett and Dilorenzo, p .  Ridenour came back from Viet Nam and while a
student at Claremont Men’s College blew the whistle on the My Lai massacre which journalist Seymour Hersh made the biggest story of the Viet Nam war.

[26] John Judis, “Perhaps A Great Notion,” In These Times, (May 9-15, 1979), p. 14 cited in Bunzel, p. 45 N 12.

[27] Davis-Woodland Daily Democrat, August 15, 1979.

[28]  Tom Hayden, “America and the Populist Impulse: The New Left’s Legacy,” Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1978.

[29] “James R. Mills Says Hayden Has No Credibility as a Democrat,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1980.

[30] A flyer in the possession of the author.

[31]  Los Angeles Times, September, 21, 1978.

[32] William J. Poole, “Campaign for Economic Democracy Part I: The New Left in Politics,”  Institutional
Analysis #13, Heritage Foundation, September 19, 1980. 2.

[33] Joel Kotkin, Esquire, May 1980, p. 48.

[34] Kotkin, Esquire, May, 1980, p. 48.

[35] Jeffrey Klein, Mother Jones, February/March, 1980, p. 49.

[36]  Kotkin, Washington Post, July 5, 1979 and Esquire, p. 46.

[37] Christopher Andersen, Citizen Jane. 293.

[38] Christopher Andersen, Citizen Jane, p. 294.

[39] Kotkin, p.

[40] Joel Kotkin, Washington Post, July 5, 1979.

[41] Washington Post, May 30, 1978 cited by Dornan in Cong. Record, June 13, 1978, p. 17516.

[42] “Specific Objectives Decided upon at the Santa Barbara Conference on Economic Democracy.” February 16-18, 1977.

[43] CED News, February, 1978.

[44] CHAIN was headed by CED activist Cary Lowe.  It’s Board of Directors included CED members
Bill Bradley, Richard Purkey, Mike Lawson, and Steve Mabs.  CHAIN’s Sacramento lobbyist was Stephen
Hopcraft.  See:  Network, p. 59; CHAIN’s November, 1979
Board in Southern California would include the following:  Mabs, Bradley, Lowe, and Gwen Davis of San
Diego; and Mike Jacobs of the Santa Barbara Rent Control Alliance.  See:  CHAIN, Action Project Narrative Report (November 11, 1979).

[45]Los Angeles Times (November 26, 1979).

[46]Tom Bourne, “The Prop. 13 Boost to the Hayden-Fonda Team,” California
Journal
(August, 1979),  269-270; and Kenneth Reich, Los Angeles Times (April 26, 1979).

[47] Out of the anti-war movement Carter appointed close political friends
like VVAW’s Peter Bourne and his wife Mary King.  besides King at ACTION he would also add
National Moritorium’s Sam Browne, Newark SDSer Marge Tabankin. Also IPS
scholars like Robert Pastor, Guy Erb, and Mark Schneider; NACLA associates like
Brady Tyson. See; Powell, Covert Cadre…, 224-225; William J. Poole, “Campaign
for Economic Democracy Part I: The New Left in Politics,”  Institutional Analysis #13, Heritage
Foundation, September 19, 1980, 10.

[48] Dornan, Cong. Record, May 12, 1978.

[49] Bunzel, 16. Also: William J. Poole, “Campaign for Economic
Democracy Part I: The New Left in Politics,”
Institutional Analysis #13, Heritage Foundation, September 19, 198010.

[50] Youth project annual report for 1978 cited by William J. Poole, “Campaign
for Economic Democracy Part I: The New Left in Politics,”  Institutional Analysis #13, Heritage
Foundation, September 19, 1980 38.

[51] Santa Monica Evening Outlook, February 16, 1980.

[52]  Daily Californian,
December 1, 1977.

[53] San Diego Union, April 16, 1977. Fred Branfman, The Nation,
June 16, 1977. CED News, February, 1978. See also; William J. Poole, “Campaign
for Economic Democracy Part I: The New Left in Politics,”  Institutional Analysis #13, Heritage
Foundation, September 19, 1980, 22-25.

[54] CED, paid ad, Sacramento Bee, February 9, 1978.

[55] See: Jerry Rankin, “Hayden Takes First Step Toward an Elective
Office, Santa Barbara News Press, (December 25, 1977).

[56] Andersen, p. 293.

[57]  .

[58] Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1980, p. 3; Los Angeles Times,
July 9, 1980, p. 22

[59]  Lee Framstad, “Hayden
Forces Jockey for Democratic Party Control,” Sacramento Bee,
December 10, 1980, p. A-9; Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1979, p. 3.

[60] Bill Wallace, Berkeley Barb, October 4-17, 1979. See also,
William J. Poole, “Campaign for Economic Democracy Part I: The New Left in
Politics,”  Institutional Analysis #13,
Heritage Foundation, September 19, 1980, unpaginated
executive summary, [ 2-3].

[61] National Inquirer, October 16, 1979.

[62] William J. Poole, “Campaign for Economic Democracy Part I:
The New Left in Politics,” Institutional Analysis #13, Heritage Foundation,
September 19, 1980 40 cites Wallace, Barb, October 4-17, 1979.

[63]  Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1980.

[64] Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1980.

[65] Bennett & DeLorenzo.

[66] Bill Wallace, Berkeley Barb, October 4-17, 1979. See also;
William J. Poole, “Campaign for Economic Democracy Part I: The New Left in
Politics,”  Institutional Analysis #13, Heritage Foundation, September 19, 198044.

[67]  George Cornell, San Diego Union, Feb. 9, 1981.

[68] On Banks and Brown see: Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1977; Sacramento
Union
, March 30, 1978 and April 20, 1980.

[69]  “Hayden Seeks Aid for AIM Leader,” Sacramento Bee, (March 4, 1976).

[70]  See: Richard Grenier, “Jane Fonda and Other Political Thinkers,” Commentary, June
1979; Midge Decter, “The Politics of Jonestown,” Commentary,
May 1979, pp. 29-34; Don Feder, Boston Herald, March 3, 1984; Don Feder,
“Jonestown and Dallas: The Red Link,” Sacramento Union,
November 17, 1988; Eric Brazil, “Dead Preacher Keeps His Hold on Former
Followers,” Sacramento Union, November 16, 1988, pp. 14, 16.

[71] See: Doan Van Toai, “Vietnam:  How We Deceived
Ourselves,” Commentary, March 1986, pp. 40-43; also Doan Van Toai, Vietnam Gulag.

[72] http://www.phoeniciatimes.com/archivesPT/PT.8.16.2007/pov.html

[73] Peter Collier, Second Thoughts, 63.

[74] They also sought to suppress a Sacramento showing of the “Hanoi Hilton.”

[75] Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With, New York: Summit Books, 1987, 275-276.

[76] Joseph Farah, Between the Lines, August 1988, 3.

[77] Antioch Leader, September 30, 1979.

[78] Ronald H. Nash, Why The Left Is Not Right, Zondervan, 1996, 59.

[79] Denney, 16.

[80] Jeffrey Klein, Mother Jones, February/March 1980, p. 42.

[81] Don Feder, Boston Herald,
March 3, 1984.

[82] Jane Fonda, “Statement by Jane Fonda Before the California Arts Council,” July 27, 1979. See
also: Jane Fonda, “Jane Fonda on McCarthyism, Boat People,” Los
Angeles Times
, (undated clipping), late July or early August 1979.

[83] Baez, 1987, p. 280.

[84] Collier, in C & H, Second Thoughts, 274; Among those showing
solidarity with communist Vietnam: Karen Ackerman, Mobilization for Survival;
Phyllis Bennis, National Lawyers Guild; Carl Bloice, Editor of People’s
World
and former campaigner for Red Family founder Robert Scheer; Marjorie
Boehm and Vivien Myerson, Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom;
Susan Borenstein, National Chile Center and Venceremos Brigadeer; Harry
Bridges, President Emeritus of ILWU and long time Soviet agent; Benjamin
Chavis, and Charlene Mitchell, National Alliance Against Racism and Political
Repression; Marilyn Clement, Center for Constitutional Rights; Joseph H. Crown,
Chairman, Lawyers Committee on American Policy Toward Vietnam; William H.
Eisman, U.S. Vietnam Friendship Association (SF); Joan Elbert and Fr. William
Hogan, CPUSA presidential electors in Illinois in 1976[84] and leaders of Clergy & Laity Concerned,
Chicago; Terrence and Vincent Hallinan, Attorneys and fellow travelers; Joshua
Kunitz, writer; Corliss Lamont, Chair, National Emergency Civil Liberties
Committee which had honored Hayden in 1974 and was an apologist for the Stalin
show trials and the Katyn forest massacre; Joseph Miller, Philadelphia SANE,
which soon gave Fonda a humanitarian award.[84]; Michael Myerson, CPUSA and U.S. Peace Council;
Davis Sales, New York Coalition for Peace and Justice; Doris Streiter, Chicano
Committee to Save Lives in Chile.

[85] New York Times, June 24, 1979, cited in Toai, Vietnam Gulag, p. 341-342.

[86] Pat Morrison, “Ex-Vietnam Prisoner in Middle of Feud,” Los Angeles Times,
September 9, 1979; see also: Doan Van Toai, Vietnam Gulag.

[87] Philadelphia News, October 7, 1979.

[88] “Fonda Raises Money for ‘Boat People,” San Francisco Chronicle, (undated clip) early
August 1979.

[89] Peter Collier, “I Remember Fonda,” New West, September 24, 1979, 19.

[90] George Thurlow, “Barnstorming Hayden Has to Cope With His
Success,” The Daily-Democrat, Davis-Woodland, California, August 15, 1979.

[91] Thomas E. Elias, Santa Barbara News Press, April 3, 1979.

[92] Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1979 cited in Network, p. 48.

[93]  San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1979; California Journal, November, 1979.

[94]  Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1979.

[95]  Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1979; California Journal, November, 1979.

[96]  W. B. Rood, “Hayden & Fonda: Who Has the Clout,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979.

[97]  San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1979.

[98] See denial as late as the end of August in Larry Liebert, San
Francisco Chronicle,
August 27, 1979, p. 1.

[99] Qualls and Gulotta, “How POW’s Remember Miller,” Los
Angeles Herald
, July 30, 1979.

[100] Davis-Woodland Daily Democrat, August 15, 1979.

[101] Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1979 cited in Network, p. 48.

[102] Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1981, p. II-1.

[103] Who’s Who in CED, Cypress Institute.

[104]  W. B. Rood, Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1979.

[105]  “Notes on People – Legacy
of Vietnam,” New York Times, (undated) late July, 1979.

[106] Andersen, p. 296.

[107] Andersen, p. 296.

[108] “Statement of Jane Fonda Before the California Arts
Council,” July 27, 1979.  “Hold for release 10 a.m., Friday, July 27, 1979.” pp. 1-5 in possession of the
author;

[109] Jane Fonda, “Jane Fonda on New McCarthyism, Boat People,
‘Witch-hunt Spirit Lives on in State Senate,” Los Angeles Times,
(undated clip) early August 1979.

[110] Alan Alda, Edward Asner, Tony Bill, Cher, Francis
Cappola, Mike Farrell, Bruce Gilbert, Hugh Hefner, Alan Ladd, Jr., Norman Lear,
Jack Lemmon, Albert Maltz, Mike Medavoy, Holly Near, Mike Nichols, Michael
Ovitz, Gregory Peck, David and Nessa Picker, Helen Reddy, Burt Schneider,
Stanley Sheinbaum, Donald Sutherland, Lily Tomlin, Jon Voight, Haskell Wexler,
Robin Williams and many more, not previously or at least publicly associated
with Jane Fonda’s radical politics.
Asner, Lear, Nichols and Tomlin had signed the Baez letter against
Vietnam’s human rights violations despite Jane’s disapproval.

[111] Davis-Woodland Daily Democrat, August 15, 1979.

[112]  Los Angeles Times,
August 15, 1979.

[113] Mervyn Field’s California Poll cited in the San Francisco Chronicle,
September 1, 1979, p. 6.

[114] [Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times
of December 14, 1979; also: A.P. December 15, 1979; also Los Angeles Times,
January 19, 1980. Mills would reconfirm his allegations in February 1981, San
Diego Union
, February 1, 1981].

[115] “James R. Mills Says Hayden Has No Credibility as a
Democrat,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1980.

[116] Larry Liebert, San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 1979, p. 6.

[117] Joe Scott, “Fonda-Hayden Balloon Launched,” Sacramento Union, October 8, 1979.

[118] Peter Collier, New West, September 24, 1979.

[119]  Peter Collier, New West, September 24, 1979.

[120] Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1979.

[121] See Barbara Evans, “Tom Hayden and the Campaign for Economic
Democracy,” Santa Barbara News Review, Feb. 21, 1980.

[122] Joel Kotkin and ———– Grabowicz, California, p. 104.

[123] California Journal, March 1980; Los Angeles Times,
September 10, 1979.

[124] Kotkin and Grabowicz, p. 104; California Journal, March 1980, p. 121.

[125]  Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1980, p. 14.

[126] William Endicott, Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1981.

[127] Randi Eldredge, “No Kiddin’ Actress supports couty
candidate,” Davis Enterprise, December 7, 1981, p. 3.

[128]

[129] Michele Willens, “The Democrat’s Dilemma:  How to Stop Hating Tom Hayden,” California
Journal
, January 19, 1982, p. 14; San Diego Union, May 10, 1982; See also:  Jack W. Germond and Jules
Witcover, “Tom Hayden, Whipping Boy,” Sacramento Bee, undated clip, (March 1983).

[130] David Holley, Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1982.

[131] Los AngelesTimes, April 26, 1982.

[132] Claudia Luther, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1982.

[133] Michele Willens, California Journal, January 1982.

[134] Disclosure the author conducted opposition research for his opponent Rosenthal
in Hayden’s first Senate race.

[135] The Author was Chief of Staff to Ernie Konnyu, the GOP vice chairman of the Toxics Committee which uncritically
charged forward to protect the public from all imaginary and a few dangers of  any and all “chemicals” anywhere.

[136] The author received an award for flacking for this flawed DWR policy.

[137] The author worked on research exposed by WorldNetDaily on MTBE.

[138] AB 1190 in which the author sounded an incomplete and ineffective alarm as a consultant on the
Utility and Commerce Committee of the Assembly.

[139] Joseph Farah, Between the Lines, November 7, 1989, 4 and February 26, 1990, p. 2.

[140] Paul Jacobs, “Political Ploys Seen in Debate on Toxics Law,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1986, 3, 17; Richard
C. Paddock, “Clean Water Plan Wins Ballot Spot,” Los Angeles Times,
June 27, 1986, pp. 3, 26; Economic Democrat, June 1986.

[141] UPI, “Groups Say Firms Violate Label Law,” Sacramento Union, July 6, 1990, p. C-2.

[142] Santa Monica Evening Outlook, August 1, 1988.

[143] Environmental Protection Act would enact: a
phased ban of any use of cancer causing pesticides in any amount; a tough
“more sensitive” children’s standard of chemical safety for those
chemicals missing the outright ban; a phased ban of the most common air
conditioner/refrigerant chemicals (chlorofluorocarbons) in seven years and a 40
per cent reduction of carbon dioxide [auto, factory] emissions in twenty years
since both CFC’s and CO were ozone-depleting chemicals; “health
based” limits on corporate discharges into the ocean; an outright ban of
off shore oil drilling;  homebuilders
requirements to plant one tree for every 500 square foot lot developed [6 trees
per modest single family dwelling]; tough federal quantitative standards for
local sewage treatment discharges of toxic pollutants; a $200 million budget to
acquire ancient redwoods and $100 million to fund nonprofit and government
planting of trees in “urban forestry” projects; a tax on private oil
transport of $500 million to fund public oil spill responses; and, a first time
in the nation, statewide elected post of environmental advocate costing
$750,000 a year with an annual research budget of $40 million.[143]

[144] These dollar contributions are reported to the Secretary of State.  See: Roger Canfield, “This time the
Demos are deceived,” Sacramento Union, October 31, 1990, p. A-2.  PCL had previously accepted
contributions and written initiative language that benefitted its contributors
in a tobacco tax measure — generating widespread criticism from columnist Dan
Walters and others.  Some said PCL’s massive office space negated its claim to be a “grassroots” organization.

[145] Roger Canfield, “Ed’s certainly their ‘dear friend,” Sacramento Union, October 17, 1990, p. A-2.

[146] Donald Miller, “SCAN tradition Or Machine? Progressives build at grass
roots,” (Santa Cruz) Sentinel, November 3, 1988, p. A1, 8.

[147]Lee Frenstad, “Left Moves to Change Santa Cruz,” Sacramento Bee (Februaru
15, 1982), pp. A-1, A-3.

[148]Bill Neubauer, “Voters Against Rent Control Ralley Draws Large Crowd in Santa Cruz,”
(Santa Cruz) Sentinel (April 15, 1982); Lee Fremstad, “Left Moves
to Change Santa Cruz,” Sacramento Bee, February 15, 1982; Phil
Kerby, “Prodigal Son Returns to Angry House of His Fathers,” Los
Angeles Times
, March 18, 1982; “CED Focus,” Economic Democrat,
March 1982, p. 2; See also: Campaign for Economic Democracy reports filed with
California’s secretary of state from 1979 through 1981.

Categories
Auburn Dam California Politics Environmental Extremism Water

Dam Busters in California: Manmade Droughts, Unemployment

California Has Water, Water Everywhere…

[This is a shameful collection and rewrite of Tom McClintock’s thoughts on water. All errors of fact and imprudent language are mineI am Roger Canfield, a former campaign
aide, a former public information officer for the California Department of Water Resources and a volunteer for the Auburn Dam Council. .]

Tom McClintock has aptly observed that World
War II, millions of American migrants, and the election of Earl Warren in 1942 stimulated
the completion of depression era plans from the 30s for expansion of
California’s public works. Under Governor Warren and Goodwin Knight California was prepared for a population explosion and an economic boom that lasted for
decades. Their vision of expanded infrastructure, including water works, was implemented
by Gov. Pat Brown, and continued by Ronald Reagan.

By May 1957 the final engineering studies
were completed, in 1959 the Burns-Porter Act was adopted, and construction
began on what McClintock calls “the most extensive system for water
distribution since the golden age of Rome.” State of California engineers and the
Federal Bureau of Reclamation built the State Water Project and the Central
Valley Project. These along with the Colorado Aqueduct and other projects of
the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California are “among the greatest
engineering wonders of the 20th Century.” Indeed the amount of digging
and the engineering far surpassed the legendary path between the seas known as
the Panama Canal.

Through never completed the State Water
Project constructed 32 storage facilities, reservoirs and lakes and 660 miles
of open canals and pipelines. Some 20 pumping plants move — millions of acre
feet of water from Northern California and pumped it from the Central Valley
floor below sea level to elevations of 3,500 feet in the high deserts of
Southern California. Along the way aqueducts branched south and west carrying
water to urban coastal areas in Napa, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo, and Santa
Barbara, to Central Valley farms, to the Inland Empire of Riverside- San
Bernardino and the great metropolis of Los Angeles-Orange. The State Water
Project alone supplements local water supplies for approximately 20 million of 40million
Californians and about 660,000 acres of irrigated farmland.

The flood and drought cycle that tormented
Northern California, the inland sea was tamed, and year-round water flows
stabilized the wild swings between fresh water and ocean tides within the Sacramento
Delta. That generation of leaders recognized that it was possible to tame the
inland sea and drain the swamps of the Central Valley. They had the vision and
the political will to provide for the greening of all California from the
resources possessed within California. No longer did a growing population and
economy need to live in dread of California’s predictable and devastating
droughts.

Nor did Sacramento and environs face catastrophic
floods in near every wet year.  And
substantial progress was made against the great floods of Sacramento River and
its tributaries.

As McClintock reminds us with this cornucopia
of water came the construction of 5 large hydroelectric power plants delivering
plentiful, cheap, and absolutely clean electricity. This electricity pumped
water over mountains and across deserts and provided energy to California’s
growing urban population, agriculture, and industry. 

In 1965 California’s water storage was such
that so vast that many communities didn’t bother with water meters.

But during the Sixties, change was “blowing in the wind.” And an ill wind at that. Jerry Brown did not inherit the virtues
of his father.

Elected in 1974 Jerry Brown adopted a radical policy agenda which San Francisco Chronicle’s Greg
Lucas described as the “kumbaya über alles environmental movement.”

Jerry Brown called it an “era of limits” on growth under the “new age nonsense” of “small is
beautiful.” McClintock observes, “It is…a radical and retrograde ideology…with
the simplistic notion that if we stop building things, people won’t come.”

So in 1974 we stopped building things—and people came anyway. [Save for illegal immigration by the 2000s economically devastating taxation and regulations driven thousands of jobs and families out of California.]

Jerry Brown, elected again in 2010, found his policies largely unchanged through two Democratic and two Republican administrations.

McClintock: “The same ideology devastated the water delivery system of the state. We abandoned
dams in mid-construction. We shelved the visionary plans for the aqueducts and
the conveyance facilities necessary to complete the greening of California.

Through 2000 since the mid-1970s California’s population had grown about 60 percent. Water storage
capacity grew only 12 percent. From the 90s to 2000, this disparity got worse–
the population increased 15 percent, water storage capacity has increased by
two percent. “We’ve now reached a day when the state can store less than one
year’s water consumption in its entire system. The Department of Water
Resources has a year-round drought preparedness program in wet years and dry.”

Meanwhile, California lost its ability to overdraft its legal share of Colorado River
water. Stopping dam construction squelched the opportunity for abundant, cheap
and clean hydroelectric power. While population increased  60 percent since 1975, hydroelectric
production increased just seven percent. California’s cost of electricity has
skyrocketed due to high peak generation costs using expensive hydro power. Electricity
imports from out of state have doubled. Californians now pay the highest
electricity prices in the entire United States, save Hawaii. [Tom McClintock, Claremont
Institute, Huntington Beach, May 2, 2003]. Californians pay no less 50% more
than most states.

Environmental laws and regulations have taken, usually without compensation, millions of acre feet
in water rights, particular from agriculture in the name of endangered species
of fish – salmon and smelt-, weeds, water foul. Even the most minor project or
operational decision routinely takes water away from current holders of water
rights. In the relicensing of federal hydro projects 7-10 percent of water is
diverested to private rafting companies and to species of fish and foul—without
compensation. Farmers have rightfully called this a “manmade drought.”

In the past twenty years, no dam, aqueduct or
power plant of any significance has been constructed. Whatever the frantic demand
for water and whatever the level of unemployment in farming communities (the
highest in the nation in 2011), intentional bureaucratic and environmental processes
openly delay and veto projects. Even the most minor project faces death by a thousand cuts.

The drought of the mid 2000s seemed to find relief
in the heavy rains of 2009-2011. There was plenty of water, but most was dumped
into the sea and/or allocated for salmon and smelt at the expense of farmring communities.
In the summer of 2011 nine of the ten communities with the highest unemployment
in the United States were in California. And all of it could be attributed to a
manmade drought.

With some lesser local exception, everywhere California relies upon the water system of the 1960’s.

With the administration of Governor Jerry Brown’s former Chief of
Staff, Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzennegger things did not get better.

At the state and federal levels it was still said that no more dams would
be  And indeed many dams were targeted for
destruction, e.g. Klamath. Dams offend environmentalists. Yet dams and water
projects have stopped the environmental devastation of flooding the Delta and
Sacramento.  Dams and  aqueducts keep rivers flowing through years of
droughts.

Some say there are no more dam sites. That is
not exactly true. While the Colorado River is the principal source of water for
seven western states, the Sacramento River is 20 percent more than on the
Colorado.

Indeed, the flood flows of the Sacramento and American Rivers at the Delta can reach one million cubic feet per second. And
there is far, far more water that escapes to the Pacific every year in the
undeveloped mighty rivers of California’s wilderness, the northwestern coast.
On this coast where only the Klamath and the Trinity have developed water
supplies, the Eel, Smith and other rivers have gargantuan floods that have in
living memory swept away whole towns on the isolated north coast.

There is a vital difference. Some 70 million-acre feet of water are stored on the Colorado. Only 10 million-acre
feet of water is stored on the Sacramento and next to none is stored on the
mighty rivers of the Northwest.

It’s storage stupid.

Water experts have identified a large number
of possible projects. Constructing the Auburn Dam has the added advantage of
protecting the lives and property of nearly a million people downstream. Water
supplies could be increased by raising dams at Shasta, Folsom, Los Vaqueros,
and Friant, and others or by storing water on sunken Delta islands, at Sites,
and at other off stream locations. Virtually every water district in California
has projects filed in its archives, mired in bureaucratic processes, or facing
well organized environmental opposition.

And ALL that is lacking is the political will.

Governor Davis concocted a $2 billion “water” bond – without a dime for surface water storage let alone new hydroelectric
power. “Small, it seems, is still beautiful – except for the price.”

Indeed in recent years other billions of dollars have been raised on three “water” bonds (Propositions, 204,
13, and 50) that improve water quality and give more water to fish and
wildlife, but at best and infrequently, only “study” new water supplies for
humans in California’s great cities and for world’s most productive
agriculture. Finally, CALFED, a state and federal conglomerate of
bureaucracies, has spent billions on environmental improvements, but is still
studying water supply projects, long ago engineered and promised, but never
delivered.

Besides building pretty much
nothing, today’s state “water” bonds serve no statewide purpose at all. They
have become a political grab bag for local politicians eager for photo
opportunities in the hometown newspaper. A water bond in 2001, for example,
added not a drop of surface water storage, despite the fact that California
stores less than one year’s water consumption throughout the entire state
system. Bond funds are rather squandered over hundreds of local projects, like
waste treatment plant repairs, paid for not by the local communities that
benefit, but by all of the taxpayers of the state.

Today, 30-year bonds also are
being used for maintenance, clean-up, grants to community organizations and
administrative overhead. This spending vanishes leaving nothing tangible
behind. Our children will still be paying for this a generation from now.

California continues like Greece, to spend increasing percentages of person than
at any time in the history. There has not been a 40 percent increase in water
storage.

The answer to where the water money goes is into the bureaucracies at the Resource Agency,
California Department of Water Resources, State Water Resources Control Board,
Department of Fish and Game, and at CALFED a ponderous conglomerate of a score
of state and federal agencies. And what little those bureaucracies are
accomplishing using billions of dollars is mind-boggling.

Over $2.0 billion (state,
fed, local) was spent by
CALFED, largely for ecosystem restoration, water
quality, conservation. CALFED
has
completed no new water storage project and there is no date-certain plans for
the design or construction of any project in the near future. CALFED merely
studies possible surface water projects while it plunges ahead on
environmentally correct projects.

A $200 million nine year process to relicense Oroville
Hydroelectric Facilities.
This pays
for meetings and over 75 studies even though the decision is pro forma —
otherwise the whole State Water Project must be shut down. California
bureaucrats want this convoluted process — FERC wants to simplify. The process
reduces actual deliveries of water to cities and farms.

A $30 million Comprehensive Study of flood control needs in northern and central California ordered by
Congress and the Legislature after the devastating floods of 1997 produced
computer models of questionable accuracy and a final report with no flood control
projects in it. None. Zero.

The $20-25 million California Water Plan
(Bulletin 162- 2003) took six years of meetings and hundreds of pages of
documents to recommend no new surface water supply projects.  It has been alleged that water conservation numbers were doctored to quask new surface storage projects.

(Estimated) over $ 5 BILLIONS in three “water” bonds
(204, 13, 50) – virtually no water supplies in any of them.

$ X millions in computer and consulting
contracts (a reliable source) in CERS energy buying unit and in DWR accounting.
CERS software for power purchasing and other transactions is obscenely and
suspiciously expensive. DWR’s internal SAP accounting software is so bad that
water billings to SWP’s 29 contractors (water wholesalers) are based on best
guesses. Coming to a water bill near you?

CALFED. In nearly a decade of spending over $2.0 billion CALFED has completed no new water
storage project and as of 2003 has no date-certain plans for the design or
construction of any project in the near future. CALFED, a consortium of 11
state and 13 federal agencies, which was created to balance environmental,
urban, and agricultural water interests, has instead since 1995 spent a
disproportionate share of its funds on environmental projects at the expense of
vital new water supplies for a growing population.

In recent years CALFED spent over $300 million out of which less than 9 percent was to study new water
storage. Fully $250 million was spent instead on ecosystem restoration – bring
back the swamps, plant vegetation in the flood plain – often at the expense of
flood control and human uses of water. Merely $27 million was spent to study –
not build – three storage projects. By the end of 2004 environmental impact
statements are expected on Sites Reservoir and to raise Shasta Dam and Los
Vaqueros reservoir.

For example, in the 1999-2000
state budget a very modest $10 million was funded for water resources
investigations by CALFED. Yet budget
language severely restricted the use of those funds to $4.2 million for
off-stream storage investigations and only $1.2 million of that could be used
for engineering and economic studies north of the Delta needs – where all the
water is. $ 2 million of $5.8 million storage investigations was earmarked for
a groundwater-conjunctive use study. Hence, there was no support for new water
supply and storage projects.

Overall, CALFED spent a
little more than 1% in the last three years on continuing studies of surface
water storage and plans to spend about 3.5 % for such studies over the next
three years.

A Schwarzenegger endorsed water bond from the legislature in 2010 has been tabled in bad economic times, but it too has no water in it.
A new delta entity claims it will be different. It might build a new canal/tunnel, but framers are reluctant to pay for water they do not get.

Relicensing Oroville Hydroelectric Facilities.

A nine-year and $ 1 billion process of meetings of committees, special interests, and
state and federal bureaucrats and of over 75 studies is working to relicense
the Oroville Dam under federal law before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
FERC. This expensive process driven by California environmental enthusiasts is
making decisions that will significantly reduce water available for human use
on the entire State Water Project.

And — except to buy off with water and/or cash a plethora of special interest groups – is totally
unnecessary. The decision is simple. Relicense the facility that produces the
electricity that pumps the water of the State Water Project. The only other
choice is stark — shut down the State Water Project and forcefully march 20
million or so people out of California. Kymer Rouge environmentalism replaces
Kumbaya uber alles environmentalism? FERC, a federal commission actually would
like a simplified process. It is the Governor Davis appointees in California
who have constructed a monstrous bureaucracy they dearly love.

Flood Control. Similarly,
a comprehensive study of flood control
needs in northern and central California ordered by Congress and the
Legislature after the devastating floods of 1997 came within an hour of
flooding the City of Sacramento completed its work in 2002. The final report
made no recommendations for flood control projects despite a cost of $30
million. All of this despite state and local governments losing flood damage
lawsuits caused by negligent maintenance and over zealous environmental
protection risking life and property. The “comp” study did create elaborate
computer models of river systems which some local citizens in public hearings
roundly criticized as both inaccurate and putting their lives and property in
danger in the name of environmental correctness.

The California Water Plan – A Year Late and Water
Short. DWR’s
Bulletin 162 was once a
visionary document produced every five years by Department of Water Resources
at the request of the Legislature to outline plans and prospects for
California’s water future. In 2003 DWR released a draft document for public
review a year late. The draft was loaded with environmental dogma such as
conservation and global warming, but lacking a “consensus” – an
environmentalist veto, the report did not recommend a single new state surface
water supply project for California despite a population increase to 50 million
by 2030. It deferred to the CALFED studies of surface facilities unlikely to
avoid its own environmentalist veto. The $20-25 million report waxes eloquently
about six years of feel good meetings of a 65-member Advisory Committee,
stakeholders, subcommittees, and environmental improvements. The “kumbaya
über alles environmental movement” is alive and well.

However, “There is a
consensus that that strategies such as increased conservation, conjunctive
management, recycling, desalination, water quality protection, and ecosystem
restoration should all be implemented.” No surface water storage, but all the
above!

Environmentalists in Power

Largely intimidated by radical environmentalist extremists in power, cowed and timid representatives
of farm, business, and urban water users attend hundreds of water policy
meetings and say next to nothing about the need for new fresh water supplies.
Their predecessors completed most of the necessary planning and engineering in
1957 for all the water California will ever need. Those projects were long ago
stopped and forgotten.

Months of meetings go by
without the utterance of the word “dam” or “storage.” Whole days pass
discussing “collaborative” processes and procedures without the word “water”
except as the proper name of a bureaucracy or of a special interest group.
There is talk about fish, public trust, environmental justice, ecosystem
restoration, and unmet environmental water requirements.

The environmental extremists
dominate discussions talking endlessly about economically unfeasible
desalination of seawater, environmentally correct conservation, and politically
unacceptable recycling of sewer water to tap water.

Operating at DWR’s sister
agency, the Water Resources Control Board, environmentalists use every means to
take water rights from farmers and give water to fish and to salt sinks like
the Salton Sea. Legislation enacted late in 2003 gives the regional boards of
the Water Resources Control Board the power to halt timber harvests on private
property and allocate still more water to fish. The Board took away water rights from the federal Bureau of Reclamation timidly defended for building the Auburn Dam.

McClintock excoriated the Board for its lack of vision in taking water right away from one of the most water and power rich projects.

The bureaucracies are growing at the expense of the freedom that produces
prosperity — and in the case of flood control — at the expense of the very
lives and properties of citizens.  In
recent years the largest cuts in the budget of the Department of Water
Resources were in public safety – flood control and dam safety, but not a
single DWR employee has been laid off during the budget crisis. (Most of DWR
budget is paid out of SWP water sales and NOT taxes.)

There is a hopeful note in the instance of Governor Gray Davis exercising political
will against environmentalist roadblocks – DWR drilling emergency wells along
the Klamath during a few weeks in 2001.

During the Spring and Summer of ’01 a political storm raged throughout the 200-mile
long Klamath River Basin. Farmers lost their fifty-year water rights to sucker
fish. Communities in California and Oregon rose up in revolt – actually forcefully taking over federal pumps on July 4, 2002.

Meanwhile, on May 4th Governor
Davis exercising his emergency powers ordered the Department of Water Resources
to find emergency water. The mission objectives were urgent and clear — find
new water to save topsoil in 2001 and discover new groundwater for agriculture
and wildlife to supplement scarce surface water in dry future years. With a
modest $5 million and within six weeks of the Governor’s declaration of a
drought emergency in Tulelake in Siskiyou and Modoc counties, the first water
was gushing onto once dry dirt. DWR supervised private contractors who punched
wells down thousands of feet –past stingy dry sediments and impermeable clays
–into water friendly, fractured rock. Soon nine wells surrendered generous
quantities of water –some trapped in hundreds of feet of broken rocks nearly
half a mile below caramelized high desert landscapes. Many wells produced
10,000 gallons per minute, 3,000 acre-feet in 70 days of pumping.

It was a practical solution based on DWR’s long dormant
technical genius. Like the civil service heroes in a Tom Clancy novel, DWR
people proved that in a crisis a professionally run bureaucracy is not fiction.
DWR’s groundwater specialists indeed had long prepared for a “disaster in the
making” years before.

All that is needed is political will.

Sources: Closing the Era of Limits, McClintock, Speech to the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, May 18, 2001.

Tom McClintock, A Tale of Two Generations, December 1, 1999.

Tom McClintock, Delta Improvements…CALFED testimony before Assembly October 28, 2003.

Tom McClintock, A Citizens’ Guide to the State Budget Mess: A Menu of 217 Proposals to Reduce State Government Spending, May 31,1995.

Categories
Environmental Extremism Water

Bring Water to Klamath

DWR’s Northern District
Helps Bring Water To Drought Stricken Klamath Basin

Klamath Mission Accomp DWR news 8 17 01

By Roger Canfield
Six weeks after the Governor’s May 4, 2001 declaration of a drought emergency in the Upper Klamath River Basin, wells drilled under the supervision of the Department of Water Resources were bringing some relief to parched areas of Siskiyou and Modoc counties.

Working with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES), DWR mobilized equipment and personnel to drill thousands of feet into the earth, past stingy dry sediments and impermeable clays, into water-friendly fractured rock. Some of the water was found in hundreds of feet of broken rock nearly a half mile below the high desert surface.

With most of the 10 wells producing 9,000-10,000 gallons per minute (gpm), and one well yielding 12,000 gpm, it was realized that bigger pipes and special-order pumps would be needed. “You don’t get 10,000 gpm pumps off the shelf,” said DWR engineering geologist Noel Eaves.
The 10 wells, including pumps, collectively have cost $5 million. The money came from State Natural Disaster Assistance Funds administered by the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Title 19 of the California Code of Regulations.

In a broader program, the Department is working with other agencies researching the groundwater resource in the Klamath Basin in order to supplement scarce surface water supplies for agriculture and wildlife in the future. For DWR’s Northern District, this is an effort that began years ago.

“It took an emergency to draw attention to it, but we’ve been working 15 years on this,” said Bill Mendenhall, Chief of the Northern District’s Resource Assessment Branch.

How DWR Brought Water to the Party
Three weeks after Governor Davis issued a drought emergency proclamation at the request of Modoc and Siskiyou counties, DWR groundwater specialists began coordinating the drilling of wells. A well siting committee staffed by DWR, the Tulelake Irrigation District (TID) and OES identified 14 promising well sites and DWR engineered the basic well designs and expedited environmental and archaeological reviews.

“I was amazed at how fast things got done,” said DWR Research Analyst Pat Parsons.

Using the Standardized Emergency Management System (SEMS), which instantly provides a command structure to meet logistical and other needs, DWR’s Northern District moved quickly in response to the Governor’s emergency proclamation. “This was not an eight – to – five job,” said Northern District Chief Dwight Russell. “Our team put themselves out day after day, working months on end at peak energy levels.”

Skills
Russell praised the skills of his staff geologists, engineers, and others who helped choose the well sites and watched over environmental, cultural, water quality, aquifer stability, and other issues.

“We had the skills on the spot where they were needed,” Russell said.

Among those at the center of the action were Noel Eaves and Mike Ward of Northern District’s Groundwater Section. Technical staff members of the groundwater section that logged long days, including weekends, in the Tulelakearea included Associate Engineering Geologists Dan McManus, Kelly Staton, and Debbie Spangler; Engineering Geologist Bill Ehorn; Junior Engineering Technician April Scholzen; Civil Engineer Seth Lawrence; Water Resources Engineer Sean Dunbar; Graduate Student Assistant Greg Dwyer; and Engineering Student Assistant John Ayres. The field staff collected geologic and hydrologic data from well sites, oversaw compliance with government regulations, monitored groundwater levels in grids around each new well to measure any impacts on existing wells, and worked with local well owners to mitigate any impacts.

DWR provided technical advice while the Lang Drilling Company, working under contract with TID, completed wells ranging in depth from 571 to 2,380 feet. Nimbus Engineering provided project management around the clock.

DWR moved one well site to protect a Native American cultural site, and at another site relocated a mud pit to protect bank swallows that had taken up residence in a freshly dug pit.

“It was really good to work with DWR,” said Earl Danosky, Executive Director of TID. “DWR was looking out for our interests on environmental, cultural, and other issues.”

Jessica Salinas, a Northern District Associate Land and Water Use Analyst who served as an Information Officer under the SEMS process, responded to media inquiries from throughout the United States, as well as to the concerns of Klamath Basin residents.

“It ‘really hits home’ to read and answer mail from people who in some cases are losing their family farm,” Salinas said. Yet, she said, “DWR received incredibly positive comments…no negatives.”

DWR’s well drilling “brought the first light of hope” to some people in the drought-stricken area, said Mike Ward. “There is immense appreciation for DWR. We gained trust.”

Graduate student John Ayres said there was “a steady stream of local residents watching us log samples on the ground. The local network seemed to know everything about every well.”

DWR’s entire Northern District staff, whether posted to the field or at District headquarters in Red Bluff, pitched in to support the Department’s response to the Klamath Basin water shortage. Toccoy Dudley, a Senior Engineering Geologist and Chief of the Groundwater Section, kept his shop open for regular business while most of his staff was concentrating on the Klamath Basin project. Pat Parsons created the crucial Klamath Basin groundwater maps, assisted by GIS Student Assistant Dorothy Watkins. Engineering Student Assistant Nicole Martin organized the mass of data collected at the well sites. Environmental Specialists Dave Boegner and Perry LeBeouf worked in Tulelake. Earl Hansen, a retired annuitant and Water Resources Engineer, provided technical assistance.

The Payoff
Water was first struck at Well #1 located at Hill and Kandra roads in Tulelake. The first well, and those that followed, exceeded initial yield estimates.

The original goal of 30,000 gpm from 14 wells was achieved with four wells. With the 10th well, the estimated annual production jumped to 70,000-80,000 gpm, calculated at almost 10 percent of the Klamath Project’s annual production. Further, the well production suggests that the Tulelake area has one or more deep aquifers that could provide a long-term supplemental groundwater source to provide water for agriculture, wildlife and emergency topsoil protection during future droughts.

While bringing home the water, DWR also ensured that the wells would be monitored for possible impacts on neighboring wells, aquifer levels, and water quality.
For details of progress on well drilling and groundwater studies, please see the DWR Northern District Web page at
http://www.dpla.water.ca.gov/nd/KlamathDrought/index.html


Klamath a short story
By Roger Canfield

Water has always been precious in this high desert. The federal water projects, begun in 1907, were preceded by 25 years of private ditch companies watering thousands of acres. The Klamath area is rich in frontier and water history. Here the Hudson’s Bay Company trapped beavers, John C. Fremont explored, and the Modoc Indian war captured the nation’s attention. Only five years after the Modoc War ended with the U.S. Army execution of Modoc leaders Captain Jack and Boston Charley, in 1882 a private company, Linkville Ditch Company, dug a two-mile ditch from the Link River to town lots. Private digging for irrigation, and power continued apace from 1882 through 1904.
____________________________________________________

Categories
Auburn Dam Auburn Dam California Politics Water

Auburn Dam: History & Consequences

Auburn Dam: Our Future,

Roger Canfield, Auburn Dam Council,

S AC R A M E N T O  H I S T O R Y : J OU R N A L  of T H E  S A C R A M E N T O  C O U N T Y  H I S T O R I C A L  S O C I E T Y, VOL. VI , NO. 1-4 2006, 311.

“. . . [S]ome were drowned in their beds . . .”

Diary of Dr. John F. Morse, 1850 Sacramento Flood1

History: Battling the Inland Sea

The inhabitants of the Sacramento-American River region have battled an inland sea2 for a century-and-a-half. At times they’ve been forced to evacuate,
at others to live surrounded by rising waters. In 1862 Governor Leland Stanford was even rowed to his swearing-in ceremony at the State Capitol. Repairing levee breaks, which happens
eventually to all levees, was a constant task. Will Green, a newspaperman from Colusa, saw that building higher levees and dredging3 narrow river channels would never be enough to stop the next
flood. Finally, the State of California and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) built bypasses to divert the deluges and dams to regulate river flows. A dam at Auburn was planned from the
1920s through 1998.4

The history of the Sacramento region is flooding and close calls.5 Every ten years or so Sacramento flirts with catastrophe. Farms and rural areas go under, but Sacramento escapes by
days, hoursand inches. Thank to the bypasses and yes, the dams. Folsom, Shasta, and Oroville Dams averted major floods in 1956, 1964, 1986, 1995 and 1997.6

Therefore, the question is not if, but when the next great flood strikes the region.

E D I T O R ’S I N T R O D U C T I O N

The Sacramento County Historical Society, through its membership, programs, and SACRAMENTO HISTORY JOURNAL, strives to raise public awareness of local history. Vital issues regularly emerge requiring discussion, and sometimes, debate. The purpose of the following forum is to provide a place for dialogue, in an unedited commentary format for our reader’s consideration.

The Society takes no position on this issue, but rather serves as a conduit of ideas and opinions. We invited representatives of the Auburn Dam Council and Protect American River Canyons to articulate why a dam built on the North Fork of the American River would or would not serve the best interests in the region.

The Present: Worst Flood Protection in America

Today Sacramento has the worst flood protection of any metropolis in the nation – less protection than a one-in-100 risk of flooding every year. Every major Mississippi River city, except New Orleans, and those on the Ohio River have 500-year or better flood protection. The Big Easy had 250-year protection before Hurricane Katrina.7 The Netherlands and Japan design theirflood protection for 10,000-years. Gen. Gerald E. Galloway, former Executive Director of the Interagency Floodplain Management Review Committee, who led a Clinton White House study in 1993, recommended a 500-year standard for major urban areas.
At 60, 78, or 100-year protection, Sacramento has no standard whatsoever.

Near Future: Half Measures To Disaster

So what is to be done? Buy flood insurance to “replace the irreplaceable” and prepare to evacuate?8 Katrina redux? The raising of Folsom Dam9 and fortifying miles of forever-leaking levees just might provide one-in-200 protection. Since New Orleans had 250-year protection, these are less than half-measures, to be completed ten years from now. Certainly levee repairs, flood insurance and evacuation plans are prudent and necessary, but ultimately insufficient.

We face an “absolute certainty of eventual catastrophic flooding.”10

313

Legacy: Catastrophe for Posterity?

In Sacramento, a one-in-200-year flood – a Katrina Lite – would submerge 104,000 homes; 3,820 commercial buildings; 573 industrial sites and 212,000 acres of land. It would cost $14 billion in damages. At risk are $47 billion in ever
increasing property values, including billions of dollars in new downtown office buildings being constructed and planned. How deep will the water be in Natomas, the Pocket, Campus Commons, downtown, midtown? What about in Land Park, Curtis Park, east Sacramento, Del Paso Heights, and homes along the American River to the east? Try 102 square miles under eleven feet of water, with 157,000 people facing six feet and an additional 118,000 people dealing with ten
feet of unwanted water. Some 63,800 structures within eighty-five square miles would be destroyed. In 2000 the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency (SAFCA) estimated 300,000 jobless for a year, losing $10 billion in income.11 About five hundred people would drown, all from Katrina Lite.

Auburn Dam: Solution That May Not Be Spoken

The controversial Auburn Dam would provide about a one-in-500 risk according to the Corps,12 the California Department of Water Resources (Water Resources),13 and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation).14 It is indisputable that an Auburn Dam solves the risk of a 250-to 500-year flood.15 The Auburn Dam is vital for the safety of our families. Decades of studies have also shown Auburn’s other benefits – water supplies, pollution-free electricity, environmental enhancements, and expanded recreation.

The People’s Choice: Auburn Dam

The voters support the building of a dam. In 1990, 59 percent favored Measure T directing the Sacramento Board of Supervisors to finance a multipurpose dam and 82 percent supported taxes on themselves to improve flood protection. The voters got neither.16 The American River Authority (ARA), a joint powers agency of San Joaquin, El Dorado and Placer County agencies,17 polled Sacramento voters in December 2005. Told that the dam would provide 500-year flood protection and water for drinking, wildlife, electricity and recreation, 62 percent supported an Auburn Dam. Only 25 percent opposed.18 The Auburn Dam Council19 conducted surveys of voters in El Dorado, Placer and Sacramento with 58, 59, and 62 percent supporting it respectively.20

Many elected officials at the state and federal level and their predecessors have supported the Auburn Dam: U.S. Congressmen Ose, Lungren, Engle, Johnson, Pombo, Herger, and Doolittle; California State Assemblymen Niello, Leslie, Richter, Nakanishi, Gaines, Bowler, Oller, Knowles, LaMalfa, Pescetti; and California State Senators Cox, Leslie, Doolittle. U.S. Congressman John T. Doolittle has led the cause in good times and bad. Anthony Pescetti chairs the Auburn Dam Council.

However, a passionate minority has vetoed public safety due to their concerns about the environment, earthquakes, costs and water.21

314

Environment: Fish, Foul and Human

The 2005 ARA poll determined respondents’ top issue to be “protecting our water supply from pollution and other contamination,” at 65 percent. Hurricane Katrina’s waters reeked with toxic chemicals, raw sewage and carcasses, all while
washing away wildlife habitat.22

“Katrina caused . . . the largest single devastation of fish and wildlife since the Exxon Valdez.”23

This is environmental destruction, all preventable. In 1982, New Orleans rejected a $757 million Lake Pontchartrain hurricane barrier. The barrier would have saved New Orleans and its environment.24 Environmentally, the Auburn Dam
would flood a canyon, but it builds a beautiful mountain lake, 150 miles of trails and up to 200 campsites. All oak, chaparral, pine forest and riverine habitat lost under the lake will be replaced. The American River Parkway Preservation Society (ARPPS) reports that Auburn Dam’s controlled water flows and temperature will benefit fall run salmon and the human beings who recreate in the parkway. Retaining up to 2.7 million25 acre-feet of run-off annually in the watershed provides adequate flow of high quality water for the salmon and protects the physical integrity of the American River Parkway for migratory and resident wildlife and diverse natural vegetation.26

315

Earthquakes: A Fear that Does Not Go Away

After the Oroville Dam area experienced a 5.7 magnitude quake in 1975, construction was halted and exhaustive earthquake fault studies begun. Oroville had recent quakes nearby, but Auburn had not. Michael Shaeffer, a retired Reclamation engineer, recently reviewed the many quake studies.27 He admitted that a computer model, a fantasy game, did project a horrible, disappearing dam inundating Sacramento. Scary. Wendel Carlson, a retired
Reclamation geologist, who wrote a summary report on all these studies, told the author that the U.S. Geological Survey team, oft cited by dam opponents, based their analysis on drive-by observations. They did not use the real world data in the complete studies. Their computer model generated its own “data,” which was not based on empirical observations. Therefore, Shaeffer calls the computer model unrealistic. In contrast, Reclamation’s studies conducted at the actual
dam site, found in more than twenty volumes, are based upon 19,807 feet of core samples and twenty miles of trenches. The results from real data found the chances of an earthquake at the site are infinitely small, perhaps as little as one-in-100-million years, an event less probable than falling out of your bed in the morning.

As we have seen, the odds of a devastating flood in the next ten years are far, far greater.28 Cecil Andrus, President Carter’s Secretary of Interior agreed that a safe dam could be built.29 On January 30, 2007, the latest Reclamation report said there was a “high degree of certainty that a dam . . . can safely be constructed.”30

Dam-induced earthquakes? Studies of all of California’s dam sites found that no quakes could be exclusively attributed to dams. It is wiser to plan for a virtual certainty than a scary computer game.
Still planning for the worst, a one hundred million year quake, Shaeffer reminds us that the Auburn dam is designed for a “maximum probable event,” a magnitude 6.5 on the logarithmic Richter scale. The Oroville quake was 5.7. A 6.5 quake is eighty times the magnitude of the Oroville quake.

Cost: What’s a Dam Worth?

An Auburn Dam costing $10 billion31 because of a thirty year delay will surely not get any cheaper, nor will the price of clean water and pollution-free electricity. The sale of water and electricity, both in short supply in California, will pay
for the Auburn Dam numerous times over. Oroville and Folsom dams were once said to be too costly; they are now long paid off. Water and electricity sales will keep on giving. Reclamation estimates that the hydropower alone will produce $53 to $113 million annually.32 Moreover, the private Auburn Dam Council has for years discussed local cost/bond/revenue sharing to build and manage the dam. In September 1988 the ARA informed Reclamation that it could contribute $700 million to cost-share water and power costs for the 2.3 million acre-feet multipurpose dam.33 The alternative flood solutions, raising Folsom Dam and fixing levees, have costs not of $3 billion or $5 billion, but of $6 billion to $12 billion. Building Auburn Dam will reduce the frequency of levee repairs, avoid costs of $14 to $30 billion in actual flood damages, and protect against hundred-million-dollar lawsuits.34 Therefore, the costs of these half-measures are tens of billions more than building a dam at Auburn.

316

Water: The Great Thirst in Our Future

We have droughts, too. Auburn would hold 2.3 million acre-feet of water storage and allow Folsom to hold no less than 800,000 acre-feet most of the year. The annual yields35 will be 750,000 acre-feet 80 percent of the time and 300,000
acre-feet in the driest years. Auburn’s capacity and yield is far larger than any other surface storage project in California, including the proposed Sites (1.8 and 250-350,000) and Temperance (1.3 and 165,000) reservoirs, and raising Shasta (636,000). Every study that includes Auburn shows it has the highest level of surface water storage. It is said that Auburn water will be expensive. It will be cheap compared to desalination or recycled water, the oft-proffered
alternatives.

Conservation? Recycling? The entire Water Resource’s urban conservation plan might save 1.2 million to 3.1 million acre-feet of water.36 Of course, driving agriculture out of rural California does provide large yields of water, in much the same way that bank robbery has high short-term yields.

Electricity: Summer in the City

Auburn’s 800 megawatts37 of pollution-free hydroelectric power will be more reliable than solar and wind, which work only when the sun shines or the wind blows. That’s why the Sacramento Municipal Utility District is quietly expanding its own extensive hydro capacity by building a brand new 400-megawatt hydro project at Iowa Hill along the American River. That’s only a few miles from where Auburn Dam generators might be built and where the Middle Fork project has been delivering electricity and revenues for nearly fifty years.

People and growth are not going away. Every federal census and estimate of the California Department of Finance proves it. Do not build it, and they will still come.

Auburn Dam: Build it Now or Build it Later

Governor Schwarzenegger has declared a levee emergency; Governor Davis oversaw power blackouts. Some future governor will have a water supply emergency. The answer is Auburn Dam. Even levee patches, which force grout down eighty feet, provide only a fraction of Auburn’s 500-year flood protection, none of its 2.3 million acre-feet of water, and none of its 800 megawatthours of electricity.38

Public officials have a moral obligation to protect the public’s safety from floods, droughts and blackouts. That is the mandate. Our elected representatives will move forward on an Auburn Dam, or expect their legacy to be the Great Flood,
the Great Thirst, and the Great Blackout.

The Auburn Dam Council has worked for nearly fifty years to support the Auburn Dam. It meets every first Monday morning of the month at 7:00 A.M. at Coco’s at Madison and Sunrise in Fair Oaks. For more information, please visit
www.auburndamcouncil.org.

317

E N D N O T E S

1. Peter J. Hayes, ed., The Lower American River: Prehistory to Parkway (Carmichael, CA: American River Natural History Association, 2005), 63.

2. Robert Kelly, Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Sacramento
Valley
, 1850-1986, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).

3. In recent times the Sacramento River has not been
adequately dredged, allowing silt, brush, trees and debris to clog up channels.
This benefits wildlife and backs up floodwaters.

4.  See the California Department of Water Resources’ Bulletin 160-98,
the last update to the California Water Plan, recommending the Auburn Dam and
the latest Bulletin 160-05, which does not. Both are accessible at
www.waterplan.water.ca.gov/previous/b160-98/TOC.cfm and www.waterplan.water.ca.gov/cwpu2005/index.cfm.
5. 1850, 1852, 1853, 1861,1862, 1867, 1875, 1878, 1902,
1907, 1908, 1909, 1951, 1956, 1964, 1986, 1997; Hayes, 63-74; Kelly; Sacramento
Area Flood Control Agency, www.safca.org/floodRisk/index.html.

6. www.safca.org

7. U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) website,
http://landrieu.senate.gov/hrt/index.cfm.

8. David H. Lukenbill, “The American River Parkway:
Protecting its Integrity and Providing Water for the River Running Through It,
A Report on the Auburn Dam Policy Environment” (Sacramento, CA: American River
Parkway Preservation Society, September 24, 2006), 18. Report is accessible at
www.arpps.org/docs/ARPPS%20Water%20Report%20September%202006.pdf.

9. Shasta Dam was engineered to be raised later, Folsom Dam
was not. Folsom was engineered to be protected by a dam at Auburn.

10. Lukenbill, 18.

11. Mike McCarthy, “Natomas residents challenge Greenbrier:
Want levee fixed before 3,450 homes built,” Sacramento
Business Journal
, September 1, 2006. Article is accessible at http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2006/
09/04/story2.html.

12. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Sacramento District,
“American River Watershed Project, California. Part 1: Main Report. Part 2:
Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement/Environmental Impact Report.
Supplemental Information Report,” March 1996. The 250-foot earth-filled
cofferdam at the shuttered construction site gave way to the rapidly rising
North Fork of the American River during the flood of February 1986, as captured
by Sacramento Bee photographer Morgan Ong. SACRAMENTO ARCHIVES & MUSEUM
COLLECTION CENTER Sacramento Bee Collection Morgan Ong 2-18-1986

13. California Department of Water Resources, “Summary Paper
for American River Watershed Project and the American River Water Resources
Investigation,” (Sacramento: March 1996), 5, 18, 24.

14. The design criteria for Water Resources is the “Maximum
Probable Flood,” while the Corps is the “Standard Project Flood.” Recently
released information shows Auburn Dam protection varying by means of operations
from 385-500 year protection. It is only 195 year protection if the dam is NOT
operated as a flood control facility. See U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, “The
Auburn-Folsom South Unit, Special Report, Benefit and Cost Estimate,” December
2006, TS-6.

15. Interviews with Stein Buer, Executive Director,
Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency; Ricardo Pineda, Chief of California Department
of Water Resource’s Floodplain Management Branch; and Peter D. Rabbon, General
Manager, California State Reclamation Board.

16. Californians voted for “water” bonds delivering mostly
environmental and local pork; CALFED, a state-federal consortium, has never
delivered on its promises of surface water storage.

17. www.americanriverauthority.org.

18. Poll results accessible at
www.americanriverauthority.org/admin/upload/ARA05%20Survey%20News%20Release.doc.

19. www.auburndamcouncil.org.

20. Poll results accessible at
www.auburndamcouncil.org/pages/pdf-files/AD-Survey-Summary.pdf.

21. At the Sacramento Water Forum, CALFED, and the
California Department of Water Resources, the Auburn Dam is verboten, or
off-limits. The pressure exerted on public officials by the threats of
environmental lawsuits related to the dam makes even discussions on the topic
taboo.

22. CNN, “Officials: Chemicals bigger concern than cholera,”
September 7, 2005. Article is accessible at www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/09/06/katrina.water/index.html.

23. James L. Cummings, Mississippi Fish and Wildlife
Foundation, October 7, 2005, House, Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health.
Testimony accessible at
www.bipac.net/afpa/HouseResourcesCommitteeTestimony-Cummins.pdf.

24. Ralph Vartabedian and Peter Pae, “A Barrier That Could
Have Been,” Los Angeles Times September 9, 2005, A1 (quoting former U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers chief counsel Joseph Towers). See also Michael Tremoglie,
“New Orleans: A Green Genocide,” Frontpagemag.com September 8, 2005 (quoting
Gregory Stone, the Director of the Coastal Studies Institute of Louisiana State
University), accessible at
www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19418.

25. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, “The Auburn-Folsom South
Unit, Special Report, Benefit and Cost Estimate,” December 2006, TS-4. The
report cites an average of 1,363,000 acre feet. Report accessible at
www.usbr.gov/mp/ccao/docs/auburn_rpt/index.html.

26. Lukenbill, 43.

27. Lukenbill, 52-55.

28. Dirt, determined to be 100 million year old, was found
undisturbed at nearby fault lines; see the previous footnote for sources of
geologic studies.

29. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and California Department of
Water Resources, “Options for the Auburn-Folsom South Unit, Joint State-Federal
Auburn Dam Task Force,” June 1984, 10.

30. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, “The Auburn-Folsom South
Unit, Special Report, Benefit and Cost Estimate,” December 2006, TS-4.

31. Ibid, TS-10-11. The report calculates $5.4 billion to
construct the dam, power plant, transmission lines and roads, but adds $3.95 billion
for environmental mitigation because “[e]nvironmental compliance requirements
are substantially different today.”

32. Ibid, TS-5.

33. According to the Sacramento Taxpayers League and the
National Tax Limitation Committee, the revenues from water, electricity, and
recreation will pay off the Auburn Dam’s bonds, as they did the Shasta,
Oroville and Folsom dams. Similarly, along the Middle Fork of the American
River sales of hydroelectric power are paying off bonds and will provide $30-100
million in revenues years after bond payoff in 2013. The ARA’s joint powers
authority, subject to oversight, has the combined full faith, credit, bonding
authority, and resources of its creators – the counties of San Joaquin, El
Dorado and Placer and the water agencies of Placer and El Dorado.

34. In the summer of 2006, the State of California paid $428
million to 3,000 Yuba County residents whose property was damaged after levees
failed during the 1986 flood in northern California. The courts determined the
State was ultimately responsible for the damages caused by broken and neglected
levees.

35. U.S. Representative John T. Doolittle (R-CA) website,
http://doolittle.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=2082.

36. California Department of Water Resources, California
Water Plan Update, Bulletin 160-05, volume 2 chapter 22; available at
www.waterplan.water.ca.gov/cwpu2005/index.cfm. There is every reason to believe
that these figures were inflated by political pressure to justify not building
any more dams in California. The author sat through two and half years of
meetings of the advisory board for the water plan.

37. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, “The Auburn-Folsom South
Unit, Special Report, Benefit and Cost Estimate,” December 2006, TS-4.

38. Up until 1998, the Auburn Dam was an integral part of
every five year California Water Plan. Bulletin 160-98 touted its flood, water,
electric, and recreation benefits.