"Lead or Leave is an entirely independent, post-partisan organization. It does
not and has never acted to advance the interests of any political
party or other organization." [Lead or Leave 1994 information packet]Nobody knows where they came from. From out of the TV sets of America, in the summer of 1992, a couple of goofy white guys in T-shirts rode down on the hearts and minds of a nation.
They came not with a message, but with a sound-bite. They carried cellular phones rather than revolvers. And their bandoleers were stuffed not with bullets -- but with money. Lots of money.
They called themselves "Lead...or Leave." The sum total of their wisdom could be reduced to a phrase or two. "Generation X has a problem," they said, "and that problem is the national debt. We gotta cut social spending... and cut it right quick. Or there'll be a revolution of angry young taxpayers. You Greedy Geezers better take notice. Your days are numbered."
They cut through Washington like Gingrich through a welfare program, spreading fear and terror among lawmakers and newspeople alike. They never explained themselves very well. And they never had to. No one asked them any hard questions. No one seemed to care. They said that they were spokesmen for a generation. And that was good enough for the media. They said that they had their fingers on the pulse of the young. And that was good enough for the lawmakers.
They said they had a solution to all the country's woes. Just cut off a hunk of Social Security here, a chunk of Medicaid there, trim the military budget just the tiniest bit, and voila! No more national debt. Everything would be beautiful again. Everyone would live in a magical fantasy land where we can all be millionaires.
Their names were Jon Cowan and Rob Nelson. They were everything a Nightline producer could ask for: wholesome, clean-cut young aristocrats. But with that rebel edge. That vague sense of barely restrained malice. That gleam of mental activity behind bright, beady eyes. That inkling of titanic egos seeking an outlet. They were the perfect leaders for a leaderless generation.
There was just one problem. Nobody ever bothered to ask the rest of us.
Brave Young Wonks
"Lead or Leave is an entirely independent, post-partisan organization. It does
not and has never acted to advance the interests of any political
party or other organization." [Lead or Leave 1994 information packet]
Lead or Leave is an undemocratic organization. It has no elected officers. It has constantly changing membership statistics that have no basis in reality. And it has no track record of doing anything to help improve the daily lives ofthe young people for whom it claims to speak.
Here, in a nutshell, are Lead or Leave's politics: convince young people that the national debt is a crisis that is affecting their future prosperity. Then convince them that the best way to pay off the debt is to loot "entitlements" like Social Security, which they claim are "robbing the young" anyway.
"America's Social Security system is in trouble. It has become an unfair, unsound program -- relying on younger, less affluent and less numerous workers to support an older, more affluent and larger segment of the population.
"Despite years of warnings, The Social Security Board of Trustees projects Social Security will go bankrupt as soon as 2020... And although Social Security is the largest expense in our national budget, it has become a political "untouchable" for reformers who fear angering older voters." [Cowan and Nelson, from the Gen X Reader, Rushkoff et al, pg. 81]
Lead or Leave did not invent these politics. They have had many mentors. Cowan and Nelson are not original thinkers, and they don't need to be. That's because their job is not to organize the young people of America into some kind of ersatz revolutionary crusade; their job is to convince young Americans that it is in their best interest to wreck their own future. And to convince the unconvinced in the halls of power in Washington that all young people in America really agree with what they say. They are a front group for powerful interests in this society.
Let us be clear about a few things. Jon Cowan and Rob Nelson are not grassroots organizers. They have held jobs very much inside the Washington power structure. They are therefore insiders, political "wonks" in the truest sense of the term.
Neither of them were activists, or even "rebels," at any point prior to the founding of Lead or Leave. Lead or Leave itself is in no way, shape or form a true activist organization. Like its founders, it has a very shadowy, very privileged history. From the beginning, it had an operating budget bigger than most youth activists could ever dream of working with. Despite this fact, the organization has had very little success in organizing young people to do anything at the grassroots level. What it has succeeded in doing is keeping itself and its founders in the media limelight from Day One.
That might explain why Lead or Leave's dealings with large student and youth groups like the United States Student Association (USSA) have been adversarial from the outset. While groups like USSA have spent years building up grassroots programs to help young people find real solutions to real problems that are facing them (problems like an environmental system in crisis, a public education system that is falling under the budget ax, rampant racism and sexism throughout our society, or, most ominously, the entire system of social insurance and public assistance that are in danger of being totally gutted and privatized), Lead or Leave's focus has been to side with large banks and corporations in an ever-widening campaign to take over and profit from heretofore public, nonprofit programs like Social Security. And also to play old and young off each other -- to help foment inter-generational warfare that will allow such privatization to take place more easily.
In point of fact, Lead or Leave is a right-wing organization, and a very particular kind of right-wing organization. They are neo-conservatives, much like Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts, who, not coincidentally, sits on the Lead or Leave board of advisors. A classic neo-conservative is someone who calls himself or herself "socially liberal but economically conservative."Lead or Leave's platform boils down that way quite handily, but they remain too dishonest to admit their real beliefs. They are consummate politicians.
What this dogma comes down to in practice is: tax breaks for the rich and for big corporations, tax increases (in the form of "consumption" taxes on food, alcohol, tobacco, goods and services) aimed at the poor, elimination of most regulation of corporations, destruction of much of the public sector (education, housing, health care, public works, welfare, parks, etc.) through privatization or outright defunding, expanded prison budgets, expanded police and military outlays, reduction of environmental controls, and a host of other anti-people policies. Those who can't swim in such a society, sink -- drop through shrinking societal safety nets to join the vast and growing underclass.
The "socially liberal" part of neo-conservative rhetoric is much more vague. While politicians like Bill Weld may claim "concern" over hot-potato issues like "the environment," "access to abortion," and "gay rights" to get themselves elected, they do little if anything to support these issues. Actually, many of their "economically conservative" ideas (which they DO act on) will make things much worse for women, gay people, and the planet.
This leaves us with a big question. Can a couple of well-off, white, neo- conservative guys claim to represent the hopes, dreams, politics, and beliefs of the 80 million people between 18 and 35 years old living in the U.S. today?
No. They can speak for themselves, they can speak for their friends, they can speak for the rather limited number of other young Americans of backgrounds similar to their own. But they have no right, nor have they earned the right, to speak for me, my friends, or most of the other young people in these United States. Given that, we must ask: who are Cowan and Nelson? Why did they start Lead or Leave? Who is backing them financially? Why is the media so nice to them? Is Lead or Leave a grassroots organization? How many members does it really have? What is the real purpose of Lead or Leave?
Second, no key Lead or Leave staffers (Jon Cowan particularly) agreed to speak to As We Are for this article. Many attempts were made by phone, e-mail, and direct intervention to get them to talk to us. Aside from the first call on Dec. 19, 1994, when I got through to Cowan directly and he agreed to call me back nine days later, then did not, all of our messages went unanswered. One of my assistants did manage a short discussion with one of their office workers, however [see Phone Interview, page 30].
Most of the times we called them, we heard only from their answering machine, which said chirpily that Lead or Leave is "The Largest Youth Advocacy Group In The Country." Such overstatement has been par for the course with Lead or Leave since its inception.
Lead or Leave burst onto the media scene in the summer of 1992 with its first "campaign," from which the name of the organization was derived. Cowan and Nelson created their "Pledge" for elected officials that election year. This Pledge asked politicians, particularly Congresspeople, to agree to "Lead" the country by helping to cut the deficit in half by 1996, or, failing that, to "Leave" office that same year.
It was not a very bright strategy. By November of that year, only about 100 prospective candidates for various government offices had signed the Pledge. Only 17 won. Most of the candidates who signed the Pledge were Republicans or conservative Democrats. And, ironically, none of the elected Pledge-signers have done much of anything to cut the deficit.
Yet things went very well for Cowan and Nelson in other respects. By September, they had a war chest of over 80,000 dollars. At least 40,000 dollars of this money came from Ross Perot -- an anti-deficit booster if there ever was one. Another 40,000 dollars came from Pete Peterson, former Nixon secretary of commerce, Wall Street investment banker, and founding member of former Massachusetts Senator (D) Paul Tsongas' Concord Coalition -- a major deficit- busting lobby group. More money came from Tsongas himself and from Warren Rudman, a former New Hampshire senator (R) and Concord Coalition founder. An unknown amount of money was also given by "Trade Hawk Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr. and Richard Dennis, a well-known Chicago commodities broker," according to the Sept. 28, 1992 Business Week. There are also ugly rumors that Perot gave them far more than 40,000 dollars in 1992, but, so far, there is no proof of that.
Regardless, we must ask a few questions about Lead or Leave's financing. If Cowan and Nelson were such unknowns, why did they get so much money from such rich powerful people? And if they were such outsiders, why did they go to the biggest of big insiders for money?
On the first count, they may have been unknown to the general public, but Cowan and Nelson were no strangers to Washington politics. On the second, it was only natural for them to get money from their natural allies -- other neo- conservatives.
It is very difficult to second-guess the political development of Jon Cowan and Rob Nelson. They do not consistently tell the same story about how the idea for Lead or Leave came about. I have found at least three separate versions of their "nativity" story during my research. In one version, they came up with the idea "while rock climbing" [Dallas Morning News, Nov. 7, 1994]. In another, it was "over beers" [LA Times, Dec. 27, 1994]. And in still another, it was "over coffee" [Boston Globe, July 15, 1993]. I have never seen a clear description of exactly how they got themselves off the ground, either.
They seem to have been in contact with Paul Tsongas as early as spring of 1992, when that worthy was still in the run for President. And in their book, Revolution X, they claim, "We decided to take a risk and combined 1000 dollars from our own pockets to begin Lead or Leave..." If they actually did that, they probably did not have to rely on that sum for more than a few weeks before all the money I mentioned previously came rolling in. But it remains unclear exactly how much money they got that first year, when they got it, who gave it to them, and when they first set up shop in Washington.
Jon Cowan and Rob Nelson seem to be children of privilege. Of the two, Nelson is by far the more difficult to track down. According to rumor, he is the "brains" of the operation while Cowan plays the "front man." As time goes by, it becomes increasingly rare to see Nelson quoted in the mass media. Cowan speaks for the group almost all the time now. For this reason, very little is known about Rob Nelson's background. That he is from money, or is at least upper-middle class, has been a consistent buzz from numerous sources who have come into contact with him in Washington. If he is not from money, he certainly acts like he is. He hails from Wisconsin. He is a graduate of Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. Principia's president described the school in a short phone interview as "a liberal arts college of 550 students, by and for Christian Scientists." He said the price tag these days is around 18,000 dollars a year. Not cheap for a midwestern school. Nelson studied political science and was involved in student government. He graduated in 1984. He worked for a large fundraising firm, Malchow and Co., in Washington prior to founding Lead or Leave. He is in his early 30s. According to Cowan, Nelson was preparing to go to Stanford Law
School when Lead or Leave got off the ground.
Jon Cowan, 29, was preparing to go to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is from Los Angeles. In a Dec. 11, 1994 LA Times article, freelancer Jon Buzbee had this to say:
"...Cowan says he is no revolutionary. After graduating from the Brentwood School in 1983 as president of his class, he went off to Dartmouth College to major in English."
The article went on to quote Jon's father, Bob Cowan, who was described as "president of Search West, a Century City executive recruiting firm." Cowan definitely comes from big bucks. He went to one of the most exclusive prep schools in LA, then to one of the most exclusive Ivy League schools in the country.
He claims he remained "politically apathetic" throughout his stay at Dartmouth. Yet Dartmouth was a battleground that year, and throughout the mid- and late 1980s. For Cowan to have been totally uninvolved on either the right or left sides of the divestment fight does not speak well of his commitment to campus activism, or indeed to activism in general.
The article continues, describing that Cowan "tried working for an advertising agency, but that didn't last long," and spent "a few years working at a think tank and as press secretary for former Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica)." Running media screen for a Congressman is not an outsider's job. Nor one generally available to recent college graduates. Unless they have connections. But what was that "think tank?"
I e-mailed Jon Buzbee and asked him if Cowan had told him which think tank he worked for. Buzbee responded that Cowan had said it was called "Rebuild America" and was based in Washington. He also said that if I wanted to interview Cowan I should just call him up. He felt sure that Cowan would be thrilled to talk to me. Apparently, he is thrilled to talk to everyone except critics.
As it turns out, Congressman Levine sat on the board of Rebuild America, which explains the connection between Cowan's two major pre-Lead or Leave jobs. This connection also goes a long way toward explaining the origins of Cowan's political beliefs, because Rebuild America, which we'll come back to in a bit, turns out to be yet another neo-conservative group in "bipartisan" clothing.
So. Two guys. Two guys who worked in Washington. Two guys who moved in some pretty powerful circles in Washington. These two guys just woke up one day and decided to found a "grassroots" organization? I don't think so.
What happened is a little more complex. But, for now, let's take a quick look at what these two guys actually did. And actually did not do.
"The Largest Youth Advocacy Group In The Country?"
Lead or Leave's "Pledge" was something less than an earth-shattering success. Since the end of the Pledge period in November 1992, Lead or Leave's activities have followed a very unusual pattern. Every few months, Cowan and Nelson hold a big press conference to announce their latest plans. They have catchy names for these plans, and usually have no trouble pulling a few luminaries of various sorts together to publicly "show support" for them. They ride the media wave they create as far as they can go... and then they announce their next grand scheme.
Cowan and Nelson don't seem very concerned about whether their plans ever accomplish anything concrete. All they seem to care about is whether or not they get media attention.
Anything they do or participate in gets trumpeted by their PR machine to the high heavens. And when I say PR machine, I mean machine. From the beginning, Lead or Leave retained the services of public relations firms. In the early days it was a company called Fenton Communications. Now it's a group called Millennium. These services are not cheap, which is why most actual grassroots organizations can rarely afford the price of such manipulators of the American conscience. Lead or Leave put them to good use. They have appeared all over the network media, radio, and print as "spokesmen" for young Americans. Anything they say, no matter how outlandish or unsubstantiated, has been faithfully reproduced from coast to coast.
From the moment of their first Good Morning America appearance in 1992, Cowan and Nelson have successfully cast themselves in the role of "generational leaders." Let's look at what they've done to deserve such a distinction:
After Tsongas finished his "juicing," Cowan and Nelson were invited up to speak. To a outdoor lunchtime crowd of about 400. Not to a crowd that actually showed up to Faneuil Hall just to hear them speak.
Nevertheless, a Lead or Leave information packet from February, 1993 describes the event like this: "September 20, 1992. 4000 people attend Lead or LeaveÕs first public rally at Faneuil Hall in Boston." That is not a typo. 400 people having lunch has magically become 4000 people who showed up to "attend Lead or Leave's first public rally at Faneuil Hall." Cowan and Nelson are obviously not strangers to classic propaganda techniques.
What's not true is Lead or Leave's spin on the event. It was reported in the Kansas City Star [June 9, 1994] as "the first-ever political gathering of Generation X" -- a phrase obviously fed to the Star by Lead or Leave. In their own literature, Lead or Leave called it "one of the largest youth conferences in the '90s." Odd, since small liberal arts colleges routinely hold larger events.
Just look at a few major progressive student political conferences in the last ten years: 1000 students at the Rutgers National Student Convention '88 at Rutgers University (February 1988), 7500 students at the Student Environmental Action Coalition's (SEAC's) epic Threshold Conference in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois (October 1990), 1500 students at SEAC's 1991 Boulder, Colorado conference, and many, many others. Lead or Leave's event seems more like a big frat party by comparison.
Following the conference, Lead or Leave's hyperbole went back into overdrive with their claim (in an October 13, 1994 press release) regarding Register Once that "At a Capitol Hill press conference with hundreds of America's student leaders, Lead or Leave launched the largest student campaign since the Vietnam War: a 350-school, 4-million student effort to knock down the barriers that prevent college students from registering and voting." " Lead or Leave claims to have "educated three million students in 6000 classrooms with an innovative curriculum on the U.S. Economy... which was Distributed by Disney & Scholastic Inc." Lead or Leave did produce a short packet on the deficit for high-school consumption, but it is certainly a mystery how they came up with their figures for this claim. Try dividing 3,000,000 students by 6000 classrooms. It works out to 5000 students per class. Curious.
In all likelihood, the 3,000,000 student figure refers to the potential audience of their spot on a Channel One show in 1993. Channel One, formerly produced by the financially troubled Whittle Communications, is a ten-minute infomercial that students in poor schools around America have been forced to watch daily for the last couple of years. Their schools get a modest amount of TV equipment in exchange for enforced viewing of corporate-produced "news" and at least two full minutes of corporate advertising [see "Unplugging Channel One," As We Are. Vol 1., No. 2]. A mere presence on Channel One, however, does not amount to "educating" anyone -- since it has been widely reported that the most common student reaction to the broadcasts has been to sleep through them.
For more information on Lead or Leave's "activism," please note the information above [see sidebar "False Prophecy SyndromeÓ].
Too many journalists are cookie-cutter products of college journalism courses. Very few of them are taught, or have the inclination, to be investigative reporters. Very few of them have much real world writing experience prior to getting their first staff jobs. When "Gen X" stories are being assigned, editors often turn, naturally, to their youngest staff members. These modern college-trained journalists are often very trusting souls. They don't ask many questions of their sources, like, "Why are Cowan and Nelson really so excited about the deficit? What do they stand to gain from doing what they do? And who are these special interests that are backing them anyway?" Even if they have time to find out more about their interviewees, they often don't. Why bother? Why shoot down a "grassroots student organizing group" like Lead or Leave? Why rain on their parade?
So, when Lead or Leave seems to be everywhere in the media saying that they are "leaders," why doubt them? Just take them at face value, get the quotes, write the piece, put it to bed, and collect your check.
This pattern may explain why, out of the over 30 clips I've collected on Lead or Leave from newspapers and magazines all over the country, only three even bother to quote young activist critics of Cowan and Nelson et al. Only three other pieces have said anything that could even be considered critical of Lead or Leave. The general trend is clear -- take whatever Lead or Leave says at face value.
There are many reasons why this is disturbing, but the worst is this: mainstream media is not holding young " leaders" to the same standards as their "adult" counterparts. Instead of analysis, we see uncritical admiration.
If Lead or Leave were an "adult" group like their mentors in the Concord Coalition, they would have a much more difficult time positioning themselves as a grassroots membership organization. Like the Concord Coalition, Lead or Leave would be considered a "network." They would still get their political message out in the media quite handily, but they would have much less populist cloth in which to drape themselves. And they would lose much of their effect in the Halls of Power.
The fact that Lead or Leave spins itself as a "youth" group gives them a certain freedom to say whatever they want to when speaking to the press.
Part of this relates to propaganda already put out in the media for some years about my generation being "apathetic" and "slackers." These days, anyone young doing anything vaguely "active" in society is supposed to be cause for extreme excitement -- just as long as such activism is not calling for any real change in the status quo. Never mind that thousands of young people were quite active on a variety of bread-and-butter issues throughout the last ten years. Since they tended to be anti-corporate in their outlook and critical of who held power in society and why, they were discounted as crackpots. When they turned a thousand out at Boston University against investment in South Africa, tens of thousands at massive rallies in Washington for abortion rights, or hundreds of thousands out on campuses across the U.S. against The Gulf War in 1991, they were being "reminiscent of the '60s." Never doing anything worth consistent coverage.
Having safely buried a very large, very recent legacy of progressive activism by young people by the simple expedient of ignoring them, the mass media portrays any young person saying or doing anything that has a happy (but harmless) "active" face on it in the most glowing of lights. Since young progressive activists never really existed in media to begin with, it's no trick for a well-positioned group like Lead or Leave to claim their record without doing any of the work. Lead or Leave's slogans fly far and fast in such a vacuum, and play well to an unquestioning media audience.Security -- to a vastly expanded audience.
"Largest demonstration since the Vietnam War?" Sure! "Largest student organization in America?" Why not? "Largest student conference in the Nineties?" Right On! It doesn't matter what the slogan is, as long as someone young and tame is saying it.
In the absence of much real political debate in the mass media, this sort of ageist "all young people think alike" mentality makes it far too easy for groups like Lead or Leave to say that they speak for all young Americans. If a) all young people think alike, and b) Cowan and Nelson are young, then c) all young people think like Cowan and Nelson, and d) Cowan and Nelson speak for all young people. Q.E.D.
What has changed is Lead or Leave's strategy. Students will not mobilize in any numbers around the deficit and its supposed links to Social Security. They might believe Lead or Leave's rhetoric, in part or in whole, but they are loath to actually do anything about their beliefs. The deficit is just too abstract. It doesn't really hit young people where they live. Despite repeated exhortations by Cowan and Nelson about the "huge tax burden on the young," most young people don't really pay much in taxes -- because most young people in this country don't earn much.
Lead or Leave woke up and smelled the coffee some time in 1993. They must have realized these simple truths about their less fortunate peers, and come up with an appropriate strategy. Cowan and Nelson began to talk about education issues. They began to cry for a halt to cuts in education. And then they called for attacks on Social Security by posing it as a situation in which those "greedy geezers" were responsible for "spending away young people's future." Education cuts were now held up as the primary example of how Social Security and other "entitlements" benefited the old at the expense of the young.
In this way, Lead or Leave sought to stifle the growing number of critics within the student activist community who were realizing that Cowan and Nelson could talk a blue streak but had nothing to show for their talk. And they could push their core issues--reducing the deficit and cutting Social Security--to a vastly expanded audience.
Cowan and Nelson's oft-stated political positions can be found in their book, Revolution X [Penguin Books, 1994]. It's a sort of "one-stop shopping mart" of their sound-bites. And it is filled with typical economic and political misstatements, blunders, and out-and-out falsehoods.
From the book: "Today the debt is $4.5 trillion, so large that if you paid a dollar for every seed on every Big Mac ever sold, you still wouldn't pay off the debt. You already owe $17,500 for your personal share -- and because the debt is rising a half-billion dollars a day, that personal stake will top $21,700 by the year 2000." [Revolution X, pg. 20]
The 4.5 trillion dollar figure for the national debt is very much a subject of debate these days by economists of all stripes. There is no firm number that has been agreed on by all concerned, nor will there likely ever be. That's because economists argue over whether investments and expenses should be considered equally or not. The figures used by Lead or Leave on economic matters tend to come from conservative organizations like the National Taxpayers Union, but you might have a different opinion.
Do you consider Amtrak an expense, or an investment in society with returns that can be quantified in terms of increased production and other factors? Conservatives generally consider it an expense. A progressive would consider it an investment. For this reason, progressive economists have pegged the figure for the national debt as low as 3 trillion dollars. That's still a lot of money, but even the high debt figures quoted by Lead or Leave account for no more than 4 percent of the Gross National Product (the total annual worth of the U.S. economy). Talking about the debt is meaningless in the absence of a comparison to the GNP, because the GNP/Debt ratio is the best single indicator of the country's economic health.
According to Andrew Cohen's article in the July 19, 1993 issue of The Nation, countries like France and Italy, with much bigger social spending programs than the U.S., carry debts of as much as 6-8% with no major problems. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with borrowing money for productive uses; Americans do this every day when they take out mortgages to buy houses. As John Hess, a retired New York Times reporter, put it on a recent broadcast on WBAI-FM (New York), "The debt is like a mortgage on a house; the house is the U.S." It is something that one can easily plan a payment schedule for. It doesn't have to be a disaster.
But no matter how you calculate the debt, the kicker is the way that Lead or Leave calculates each young American's "share" of the debt as 17,500 dollars -- going up to 21,700 dollars by the year 2000. This figure is derived simply by dividing all taxpaying Americans into the Lead or Leave figure for the debt, 4.5 trillion dollars. This is a very misleading way to put it to people, and typical of Lead or Leave scare tactics. It assumes that everybody in the U.S. makes the same amount of money, and, more importantly, that every taxpayer holds an equal responsibility for the debt.
It also assumes that every American holds an equal responsibility for paying off the deficit, which Lead or Leave puts at 300 billion dollars a year in their book and at 400 billion dollars a year in most of their other literature. Clearly, the entire deficit and the national debt itself could be paid off by raising taxes on the most wealthy sectors of society and by cutting the military budget. The other way to do it is by cutting social programs and increasing taxes on the poor. Before making this choice, however, we need to decided which problems caused the debt to begin with. Did the rich, large corporations and the military cause the debt? Or did social programs? Let's see how Lead or Leave addresses these problems:
"How Did We Spend Ourselves $4.5 Trillion Into Debt?
"Military Spending. Despite dramatic changes in the nature of military conflict and the diminishing threats facing the nation, the United States continued through the 1980s to spend over one-fourth of its national budget on military programs that did not best meet its defense need and that had limited spillover benefits to the civilian economy.
"Tax Breaks for the Rich. The U.S. Treasury lost billions in the 1980s by giving tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy. The recipients were intended to pass on the benefits by increasing the number of high-wage jobs available, but the expected economic benefits ultimately were not generated." [Revolution X, pg. 22]
These first two statements are true. Unusually candid, in fact, for Cowan and Nelson. Their last statement is false, contradicts the previous two and sets the stage for Lead or Leave's Social Security-bashing:
"Middle-Class Welfare. Uncle Sam continued to give away hundreds of billions in federal benefits to the middle and upper classes. In the early 1990s, $120 billion a year in federal benefits went to households earning over $50,000." [Revolution X, pg. 22]
What Cowan and Nelson must be talking about here is the small amount of Social Security benefits people earning over 50,000 dollars receive -- plus lots of social spending programs like Pell Grants for education, small business loans, Community Development Block Grants, and who knows what else... highway construction, maybe. All stuff that Lead or Leave makes noises about wanting to save. Except, of course, the Social Security part. (Social Security shouldn't even be considered, since it's not part of the congressional budget, and not part of the debt problem at all.)
The truth is, what we find in Cowan and Nelson's first two examples are the main causes of the huge rise in the national debt under Reagan and Bush -- an increase of 2 - 3 trillion dollars depending on who you ask. And in the very next sentence of Revolution X we find the biggest contradiction of all in Lead or Leave's logic:
"We didn't go $4.5 trillion into debt by borrowing to strengthen our social and economic prosperity -- to build a 21st-century infrastructure, lift every child out of poverty, make our streets safe, revolutionize our education system, or give U.S. companies incentives to compete with Asia and Europe. Just the opposite." [emphasis mine] [Revolution X, pgs. 22-23]
Wait a minute. "Give U.S. companies incentives?" They want to give big corporations more money?! Who was it precisely that was benefiting from the massive military spending Cowan and Nelson just said was responsible for the national debt? Many, many big U.S. companies. Many of whom are also multinational corporations whose very existence is due to over 40 years of huge military spending taken directly from the U.S. taxpayer.
Let's not forget the massive tax breaks many of these corporations are granted in "exchange" for agreeing to build factories in the U.S. And the lost tax revenue (and jobs) from the many large corporations who move their factories to "free trade zones" in countries like Mexico with dictatorial governments, low wages, and repressive labor practices. And the big cuts in taxes on the richest fifth of Americans, only partially brought back up again under Clinton, and now destined to go back down under a Gingrich Congress. And we certainly can't leave out the S&L crisis -- a trillion-dollar bailout of the banking industry.
All of this was paid for by the taxpayers, and benefited a few banks -- the same banks that had made obscene profits in the 1980s by pursuing risky investments that created the S&L crisis in the first place. The payments come in the form of the debt. Which brings us to the last piece of the debt puzzle. Who is this debt owed to, anyway? Well, it seems that the U.S. borrowed lots of money from a variety of rich bondholders (many from abroad), and from big multinational banks.
Banks are in business to make money. So, the U.S. with its big debt finds itself in a position formerly reserved for Third World countries who owed money to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. When you owe to the big boys of world finance, they expect a quick return on their investment. If you don't pay them fast enough, they get real upset and start raising your interest rates, which screws up your economy, or, worse still, they threaten to cut you off entirely and drive you into bankruptcy.
Our country is dancing to the tune of the world's bankers. When leaders of Third World countries are faced with this situation (being generally rich themselves, and friends to the rich), they don't empty their own coffers to service their debt. They take the money they need from the poor and from the working and middle classes of their country. They do something called "imposing austerity," which means cutting social spending, cutting all programs that benefit the bottom strata of society. The majority of their country's citizens.
Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor at MIT, persistent political and economic critic of the U.S. government, and a person one is not supposed to quote in "respectable" publications, puts it this way in his new book, The Prosperous Few and The Restless Many:
"The United States is so deeply in hock to the international finance community (because of the debt) that they have a lock on U.S. policy. If something happens here -- say increasing workers' salaries -- that the bondholders don't like and will cut down their short-term profit, they'll just start withdrawing from the U.S. bond market... So social policy, even in a country as rich and powerful as the United States (which is the richest and most powerful of them all), is mortgaged to the international wealthy sectors here and abroad."
The same sectors that got this nation into debt not only expect the rest of us to pay the tab, but expect us to give up our democratic system in favor of an oligarchy in which the banks call all the shots. This transition is already happening in many ways, and has been happening for well over 20 years.
It is for precisely that reason that Lead or Leave's assaults on Social Security, as the mechanism for paying off the debt, must be taken very seriously by all Americans of conscience, young and old alike.
Selling Out Our Future: Lead or Leave's Social
Security Scam
"We're doing this for you, Victoria." [Lead or Leave to a 5-year-old at a
For a group that claims it is not promoting generational warfare, Lead or Leave spends a great deal of its time doing exactly that. Much of its literature and much of the book, Revolution X, are filled with shrill rhetoric blaming the veconomic, political, and spiritual woes of young Americans on the "Boomers" (our parents) and on our grandparents. Why else would the book be called Revolution "X?" Rather than admit that large corporations, large banks, and demagogues like Ronald Reagan are responsible for the difficult economic future most Americans of all ages face, Cowan and Nelson and friends prefer to engage anyone willing to listen to them in a giant game of intellectual hide- and-seek. They point the finger at older Americans without owning up to the consequences of such behavior.
Lead or Leave is fueling the efforts of groups like The Concord Coalition to cripple, then finally eliminate, programs like Social Security. Thus, their "Social Security won't be there when you get older" comment is poised to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Here is how Cowan and Nelson frame the Social Security "crisis" in chapter six of Revolution X:
"Today's Social Security system is unfair and headed for collapse. While it worked for older generations, it is certain to penalize most in our generation (we'll be lucky to get any return on what we pay in)... Although many government programs give you benefits only if you need them -- including food stamps, child nutrition, and student loans -- this is not so for programs targeted at the elderly.
"No matter how rich you are, you are entitled to Social Security and Medicare. That means Johnny Carson and Leona Helmsley are both entitled to a federal check. Talk about welfare for the well-off.
"To fix this, we need an "affluence" test for all recipients of federal benefits, where everyone earning more than $40,000 a year -- working or retired -- would get fewer benefits." [Revolution X, pgs. 122-123]
Several stunning leaps in logic are being made here with virtually no explanation or backup facts and figures. The first statement is the largest of these. Lead or Leave claims that entitlements "make up half the federal budget" and are therefore unfair because many of them benefit older Americans. This supposedly leaves young people out in the cold. They say that "it's headed for financial collapse" based simply on an assertion that "the U.S. Social Security system projects that Social Security could be broke by 2020."
They then move on to insinuate that most older Americans are taking more than they really need from the government -- which also, we're led to believe, contributes to its insolvency.
Then they suggest that rich older people are taking a tremendous amount of Social Security benefits that they don't need -- which, they say, both contributes even more to Social Security insolvency and raises the deficit by increasing "unnecessary" government spending.
The "solution" to these problems must begin, they conclude, by means- testing Social Security (and other entitlements) and removing the rich from the system. This, they insist elsewhere, would lower the deficit by billions. Without hurting anybody, like, say, poor old people.
By way of refutation of these fantastical claims, let's consider the "means- testing solution" first, then work backwards to the crux of the matter. In his article "The False Messiah: Pete Peterson's Revelations Are Not Gospel" [The American Prospect, Summer 1994], Robert S. McIntyre addresses means-testing in the midst of his demolition of the anti-Social Security positions of Pete Peterson -- the Lead or Leave backer whose ideas on the subject are lifted almost word for word by Cowan and Nelson.
"But shouldn't the rich still forfeit most or all of their Social Security benefits, merely on principle? The Concord Coalition has gotten a lot of mileage out of its revelation that in 1990 retired people with annual incomes of more than $100,000 got $8 billion in gross Social Security benefits. It may sound like a lot, but after taxes (under current tax law) that amounts to less than $6 billion annually -- about 2 percent of total benefits."
So the rich are only getting a tiny amount of benefits from the program. But why should they get any benefits at all? Well, if Lead or Leave simply wanted to cut out all benefits paid to the richest few percent of citizens, that would be a positive thing. What Lead or Leave doesn't tell you is that they and their allies aren't just in favor of cutting benefits for the rich. They also want to allow the rich to stop paying into Social Security altogether.
This would be a catastrophic blow to the Social Security system. Quoting MacIntyre again:
"In an October 25, 1993 New Republic column praising parts of the Peterson plan, the usually estimable Michael Kinsley, echoing economist Milton Friedman, criticized Social Security for 'transferring money from poorer people to richer ones.' That's a harsh indictment if true. But it's not. Despite the cap on taxable wages, the best-off fifth of all families (incomes above $55,000) pays almost half the Social Security taxes. But the best-off fifth of Social Security recipients (incomes above $39,000) gets only about 20 percent of the after-tax benefits. In other words, taxes paid by the better off cover not only retirement benefits for higher-income people, but a large share of the benefits that go to lower-income people as well. That hardly looks like 'redistributing income upward.'"
Look closely at what Social Security really does. And who really benefits from its continued existence.
Social Security ain't just for the old anymore. There are five major categories of benefits: Retirement, Disability, Family Benefits, Survivors, and Medicare. Taken in total, Social Security takes a tremendous burden off younger members of this society. It helps care for not just older Americans, but the infirm, the disabled, the orphaned and the widowed.
Social Security is self-financing. It is currently running with a huge surplus. It is not part of the congressional budget. Everybody pays in via payroll taxes until retirement age. Those who need assistance then get benefits from the system based on their need. It is social insurance, not an "investment fund," as groups like Lead or Leave view it. It is an income transfer program between rich and poor in this society, not a "pyramid" scheme, as many conservatives are fond of calling it.
Social Security is the single most popular program in U.S. government history. It was founded with the view that all members of our society are deserving of, or "entitled" to, having their basic human needs met from cradle to grave. It was founded in the belief that if a democratic society is only as wealthy as the sum total of its citizenry, then creating a system that would ensure people's livelihoods (at least in part, at least in old age) would enrich the society as a whole.
It seems only logical to me that guaranteeing a basic income to our grandparents, far from hurting young people, takes a tremendous burden off us. If my parents had had to pay for my grandmother's years of infirmity themselves, then my brother and I probably would not have been able to go to college. If I had had to help take care of my grandmother as well, I would have had a much more difficult time getting out of the house and making my way in the world.
I took the liberty of going to the horse's mouth about Social Security. I did something virtually no other recent article about Lead or Leave (or about Social Security for that matter) has done. I interviewed someone from the Social Security Administration, and asked his opinion about the system's health and future.
I spoke to Principal Deputy Commissioner Lawrence Thompson, the number two person at Social Security. Here's some of what he had to say:
"The program, as I'm sure you know, has got a schedule of taxes and a schedule of benefits that are in the current law, and, if you look forward about 35 years up to the year 2029, the scheduled benefits begin to be more than the scheduled revenues. All right. Now, people talk about that as if it is bankruptcy, which is certainly a loaded word, since what it is, is 35 years from now there are going to have to be some adjustments to make sure that the receipts are enough to cover all of the scheduled benefit payments. If no adjustments were made, there would still be enough money to pay about 95 percent of the scheduled benefit payments. It's not as if, somehow, there's nothing there."
This is a vastly different scenario from the one that groups like Lead or Leave are currently painting. Thompson was also quick to point out that "there are very few other financial aspects in anybody's life which you can project 35 years into the future and get some sense of what the picture looks like." He noticed that the congressional budget is never held to the same high standards. Congress is lucky if it can project from year to year. I asked him what he thought about the claims being made that Social Security was "bankrupting the country":
"The fact of the matter is that Social Security has to finance itself. It's the one part of the federal budget that is never going to cause a big deficit, because it has to finance itself. That is the rules." I asked him more about financing: "Well, we do that through the payroll taxes, and then if we have a surplus, it is invested in government bonds. But basically the payroll tax then recedes, and any interest on the surplus has to be enough to cover the benefit payments. And the law says if they aren't, then the benefits get cut back. So you're never in a situation where you have to rob the rest of the budget in order to pay Social Security benefits. They are self-financed... regardless of what the rest of the budget is doing."
Thompson also made a point that not everyone reaches retirement age. Although people live longer these days, he said that 2 out of 10 people die before that point. Morbid thought, but it does tend to keep the budget down .
I asked him how Social Security employees think about the program: "Well, we think of it as social insurance. What is social insurance? It is an insurance program in which people, while they are working, make contributions, and then when events occur that require the earnings to be cut off, they are covered for partial replacement of lost earnings... Now it's a social program, too. And I think it's important for us to realize that, by design, this program helps proportionally those people with the lowest wages. And so, in addition... there is more adequate protection being given to the low-wage worker than to the high-wage worker."
Thompson gets angry that this point is often ignored by critics of Social Security. He feels that the criticisms come mostly from "high earners" like Pete Peterson, "who then talk about what a lousy deal Social Security is." But "if high earners all abandon the program, then the low earners are going to be the biggest losers." Finally, I asked him about his feelings on the security of the program's future:
"I think our program is at a very sustainable and defensible level. It's going to get a little bit more expensive to maintain the current benefit level when we look on 30 or 40 years from now. And we have to have a debate about whether we want to bear that higher cost or whether we want to make some adjustments... And we need to fine-tune some things. Parts of the disability program need to be rethought because of the evolution of new thinking about the relationship between the disabled population and the rest of the population. So there's some fine-tuning that needs to go on, but I think, as a general proposition, it's a pretty adequate program right now."
So do I. So do most Americans. But here is what Lead or Leave thinks about the future of Social Security:
"Ultimately, we will have to shift to a federally backed private pension system, which would let people opt out of Social Security and save privately for their retirement." [Revolution X, pg. 124]
Save in banks, that is. And instead of the overhead of less than 1 percent that Social Security runs at, private pension holders can look forward to 10, 20, or 30 percent of their money being taken off the top in overhead and profit for the bank. So, ultimately, Lead or Leave shows its true colors. Without offering any real explanation why, they say that Social Security will have to be privatized. And lest readers think this would be voluntary:
"Saving could not be optional; the government would have to mandate that a set portion of your paycheck was set aside and placed in a private retirement account." [Revolution X, pg. 125]
There would be absolutely no difference between that system and the current system, except that bankers like Pete Peterson, who hate Social Security because it's a fund they can't touch, would finally have their hands on all that lovely taxpayers' retirement money they've been dying to service the debt with.
This is why Lead or Leave is so concerned for our future. They're concerned to make sure that their backers get a big return on their investments.
Lead or Leave's central political theme of fiscal austerity is a hard sell to the intended audience. So, sometime in 1993, they adopted "education reform" as a new public platform. They began to preach saving the education budget from the budget ax, while continuing to raise hysteria about the deficit and continually bashing Social Security.
As they pursued this tack, they began to run into a big problem. That problem was the United States Student Association (USSA). USSA is the actual holder of the title "largest youth advocacy group in the country." USSA represents the student governments of about 340 mostly public colleges. They are the main student force in Washington defending the federal education budget from cuts.
USSA has been at it for over 20 years. With an small annual budget of about 330,000 dollars and a staff of 6 (2 field organizers, a field director, a legislative director, and an elected President and Vice-President running the show, plus one intern), they visit every one of their schools every year, run Grassroots Organizing Weekend seminars at 60 regional sites, run affirmative action programs, do such lobbying as they can manage, and produce background reports and positions on a myriad of student-related issues. They represent the needs of 3,000,000 students on Capitol Hill through their network of dozens of State Student Associations and member campuses. Their entire budget comes from their membership. They have hundreds of activists helping them around the country.
If Lead or Leave were going to work on educational access issues in this country, they had two choices -- work with USSA, or work against USSA. They have chosen the latter path.
At first, it seems Lead or Leave tried to work around USSA. They called many student governments and State Student Associations, trying to pull them into their sphere of influence as early as October, 1992 (during their Pledge period) -- only to be rebuffed on numerous occasions. The most common response Lead or Leave got was, "No thanks, never heard of you, we already work with USSA."
Jeanette Galanis, 25, vice president of USSA, remembers this period well. In 1991, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she led a slate of progressive activists to victory in student government elections on a platform of increasing access to education for poor and working students, increasing affirmative action for students of color, adding sexual orientation to the campus antidiscrimination clause, creating a sound campus environmental policy, and creating concrete strategies to make the campus safer for women students. At age 23, in 1992, she was a Tri-Exec (sharing leadership with two other people) of the largest independent student government in the country.
Galanis controlled an 18.3 million dollar budget, ran five campus buildings, hired and fired staff, and generally fought for the political and economic rights of the 27,000 CU students. When Lead or Leave first called her in 1992, Galanis says, "I told them that I wasn"t really interested and that we were a very strong member of USSA and the Student Environmental Action Coalition, and that we really didn't need any other national organizations around -- especially national organizations that didn't provide any services."
In the spring of 1994, during the last semester of her senior year, and as president emeritus, she heard from Lead or Leave again. They had begun aggressively calling the new Tri-Execs. She was in the student government office organizing for International Women's Week events on campus when a Tri-Exec, who was also a USSA national board member, came into the office laughing about having just gotten off the phone with Lead or Leave. Galanis remembers him being dismissive:
"He said ,"who are these two white men who are completely clueless and don't seem to know how to do anything but wear cowboy boots?" That's an almost verbatim quote... I didn't think evilly about them, but to be quite honest I didn't think much about them at all, even then. I said just don't call 'em back."
But as April came around, Lead or Leave had its first national conference. They began to find students, particularly from conservative southern campuses that had never been associated with USSA, who were in agreement with their anti-deficit platform and were willing to overlook their lack of a grassroots track record. The Florida and Texas Student Associations, unaffiliated with USSA, hooked up with Lead or Leave, following in the footsteps of the conservative Arizona Student Association, who had pulled out of USSA in 1993 and begun working with Lead or Leave.
By the summer, Lead or Leave had solidified its rhetoric for its "Register Once" campaign. This campaign called for students to fight for polling places on campuses, claiming (despite its name) that the lack of campus voting booths was the key element keeping students from actual participation in the U.S. political system.
USSA, meanwhile, was convinced that the problem was mostly due to a lack of student voter registration. To help solve the problem, USSA ran an extremely successful voter registration campaign called Students Are Voting Everywhere (SAVE). In the 1992 campaign year alone, USSA campuses registered 210,000 students. In 1994, they registered 85,000. Lead or Leave, lacking a grassroots base, chose a strategy in Register Once that would not require them, once again, to actually do anything. But it had the veneer of a "student empowerment" issue.
In fact, Lead or Leave chose a non-issue. Their contention was that many states purposely kept students out of the political process. "Thousands of young people live, work, and study on each of those campuses," said Lead or Leave's national field director, Tracy Newman, "...and these students have far less access to voting facilities than the rest of the community does." They released a study on youth voting in the U.S. in October, 1994, but, since they never stated their methodology for the study, it cannot be taken seriously. And the study did not help them prove that adding more campus polling sites was a substitute for voter registration drives.
Since Lead or Leave couldn't hope to compete with USSA's registration drives, Register Once was the best they could come up with. Throughout the summer of 1994, they made another round of calls to student government offices around the country. Again they called many strong USSA schools. And this time they seriously overstepped the tolerance levels of many student union leaders in their harried, almost desperate attempts to sign up student governments for Register Once.
April Waddy, 20, president of the Associated Students of Oregon State University and chair of the National People of Color Student Coalition (a USSA affiliate), was one of the student leaders they called:
"My first interaction with Lead or Leave was this summer after becoming student government president. USSA was having the SAVE campaign, and I was active on that campaign on this campus. Lead or Leave was having the Register Once campaign, and our State Affairs Director had been getting calls from them. And they were sending me this huge amount of junk mail, of just stuff. I looked it over and thought, 'OK, this is not the kind of thing we want to participate in.' And they were calling and calling and calling us, and I was like, 'no, this is not something we want to participate in.'"
The trouble began when John Issacs, Waddy's State Affairs director, agreed to have Lead or Leave send him a packet of information, "basically to get them off our backs," Waddy says. So they sent him a packet and they sent her a packet. On the front it said, "Thanks for joining us." Inside, it said, "Dear April, great to have you on board, please pass this on to your liaison." It was unsigned. Waddy still didn't think anything of it. Then the calls began:
"At this point I started getting calls from our fellow schools, some of the eight other schools in the Oregon system, saying they had been solicited by Lead or Leave. And part of the schpiel they gave them was "Hey, OSU is a member of Lead or Leave, you should be too." April lost it. "I said, we're not a member of anything but USSA and the Oregon Student Lobby, this is really ridiculous!"
Then she got a list of member schools from Lead or Leave. Her school was on it. She talked to her lawyers, then got on the phone to Lead or Leave. She spoke to intern Carlos Lopez.
"Carlos was pretty much like, 'Well, John Issacs joined Lead or Leave for you.' Well, see, that's what he was telling me. My State Affairs guy is sitting right there in front of me saying, 'hell, no, I didn't join anything!' So I said, 'Carlos, you're lying to me.' And he said 'Oh, no, I'm not. I swear.' I said, 'We never joined you. We asked you for more information.' And he was like, 'Well, technically, you don't really have to join our campaign. When people ask us for information we assume that they're really in favor of what we're doing.'" After a few more minutes of arguing. Waddy hung up.
Five minutes later, Lopez's boss, Tracy Newman, called Waddy.
"And she was like, 'What's your problem?!'" recalls Waddy. "Now, number one, I'd pretty much explained my problem pretty clearly, and was like, 'Why are you calling me? I don't want to talk to you people.'" The argument raged back and forth for a half an hour. Not much evidence of the organizer's acumen was being displayed by Lead or Leave's Newman. Rather than being properly apologetic from square one, she went right into attack mode with someone she had never met.
Waddy says that Newman kept mentioning USSA in a very "unprofessional" way. "Do you not like us because of USSA? Do you know how bad USSA is?" she remembers Newman asking. "And I'm like, "This has nothing to do with USSA. You know, this is like our personal feelings at this student government office. And why are you even bringing it up?' And she's like, 'We're suing USSA for libel!'"
Lead or Leave was apparently far more concerned about USSA than USSA was about Lead or Leave. Waddy concludes:
"At this point, I don't think they knew that I was a board member of USSA or anything like that. To them, I think I was just 'Joe Student,' you know? A student government president in a pretty small town in Oregon. As far as they should know, I might not even know about USSA, but they're like, 'Is this about USSA?! We're suing them, you know! We're gonna get them!' And just all this stuff."
By August 1994, Lead or Leave had chosen the low road. They had declared war on USSA.
USSA, unlike Lead or Leave, is a grassroots democratic organization. Every year, a new president, vice president, and 62-member board of directors are voted into office. The entire political platform for the coming year is also voted in. Every one of USSA's 340 schools sends delegates to their National Student Congress every year. These folks hold all the real power in the organization.
The board, according to Galanis, represents each of the 17 administrative regions, and all 25 caucuses -- which include women, gay/lesbian/bisexual, disabled, various people of color groups, and every possible constituency of students in the U.S. The board meets quarterly and has hire/fire power over the national staff.
In June, USSA had already gone through its annual National Student Congress without talking much about Lead or Leave. By the first meeting of the new board in fall of 1994, Lead or Leave was being taken very seriously. Incidents like the Oregon student experience had happened at numerous USSA campuses. The straw that broke the camel's back was the October 13, 1994 press release officially announcing the Register Once campaign. It listed schools like the State University of New York at Stony Brook, whose student government had specifically said that they did not want to participate as a member school.
Given the many problems numerous USSA schools like the University of Wisconsin at River Falls had with Lead or Leave's fast and loose membership requirement, one can only question Lead or Leave's boast that 450 campuses representing 4 million students were participating in their Register Once campaign. In fact, aside from the known allies in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and scattered schools in other states, it is hard to find any of the other schools claimed that are aware of their participation. Certainly most rank-and-file students are oblivious to their membership in Register Once. And when I had an assistant call a few listed schools, like the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and ask about Register Once, they didn't know what she was talking about.As We Are also recently learned that the student government of Cowan's alma mater, Dartmouth College, which is still listed as a Register Once member school, rejected participation in the campaign last summer.
Last October, Lead or Leave's second national conference launched the Register Once campaign and drew only 200 participants. That same month, Revolution X hit the stands claiming on its back cover that Lead or Leave was a "million-member grassroots organization." Inside, it listed numerous organizations and student groups as if they were allies, including USSA, Public Citizen, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the National Organization for Women (NOW), SEAC, and many, many others.
How Big is Lead...or Leave, REALLY?
"Lead or Leave... advocates only on issues which have strong support from our
grassroots base." [Lead or Leave 1994 information packet]
Lead or Leave has claimed that it has up to one million members. But where are these members? In the 1960s, student activist groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) tore up this country with around 100,000 members. One would think that a group of 1,000,000 would wield street power that would be inescapable. Why, indeed, they might actually be big enough to pull off this "Revolution X."
But there is simply no way Lead or Leave could have gotten that large, particularly since they haven't actually done anything concrete for anyone. As our quick tour of their "activist" track record should demonstrate, Lead or Leave exists primarily in the realm of the media. Why would average students, who are generally so swamped with school and work, work with any group that was not obviously involved in projects that were in their best interests? Lead or Leave's rhetoric might be enough to convince some, but their lack of a concrete track record won't leave anybody convinced for long.
The Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) is still, six years after its founding, probably the largest grassroots student activist group in the country. But even after tremendous growth during the Earth Day hype of 1990, they cannot claim much more than 35,000 paid members. And they are a group with a tremendously democratic process. They have won innumerable battles, small and large, on environmental issues, and have acted as a training ground for some of the most brilliant youth organizers in the country. They are everything a activist-minded student could want from a grassroots organization: smart, successful, inclusive, democratic, and ultimately very effective in dealing with issues that clearly relate to members' daily lives.
But even with all the selfless, tireless work that SEAC organizers and elected leaders have done over the years, they can only grow so large when most of their money comes from their activists. And their members are constantly debating whether they are getting too large to remain truly democratic -- which is certainly a tough call.
The lesson of groups like SEAC is that it is intellectually dishonest for a group to call itself "grassroots" unless most of its funding comes from its members. This money is paid with the understanding that the member will get something for his or her money.
If Lead or Leave were a grassroots organization, they'd be getting most of their funding from the grassroots. But their membership fee is only 1 dollar (In a December 1993 release, Lead or Leave actually said membership was free!). Even assuming, as their office said [see Phone Interview, page XX], that they have 23,000 names on their database this year, they could have only collected a maximum of 23,000 dollars over the last year.
This is not nearly enough to sustain a group that is actively trying to give its grassroots any power or services. It's certainly not enough to sustain 1,000,000 members, or even 23,000. But that's irrelevant, because we already know that their money is not coming from grassroots sources. And nowhere in Lead or Leave's literature can I find any mention of what being a member in the group entails, what services are available, or, most importantly, how Cowan and Nelson and their office staff are accountable to anyone.
Their latest literature makes it clear to whom they are ultimately accountable.
It describes their finances this way: "Lead or Leave's 1994 operating budget is approximately 500,000 dollars. Approximately 90 percent of our funding comes from individual donors. The other 10 percent comes from foundations and in-kind contributions. Recent support has come from the Esprit Foundation, Scholastic, Inc., Princeton Review and Arthur Anderson, as well as Robin Hood Foundation Chairman Paul Tudor Jones and Rockefeller Foundation President Peter Goldmark."
So their money is coming from a mix of well-heeled corporate heads like
Arthur Anderson (owner of the world's largest computer consulting organization), corporate-connected foundations like Rockefeller and Esprit, and perhaps a few well-meaning liberals, confused by Lead or Leave's rhetoric of activism. The "90 percent of funding from individual donors" may be far more important, however.
Notice they don't say "membership dues," but rather "individual donors." More than likely, some of these donors are the wealthy members of their advisory board. This board includes Robert W. Galvin of the Motorola Corporation and Lee Iacocca of the Chrysler Corporation. Plus all the Washington insiders and corporate big guns who gave them start-up money in 1992. And there may be other sources of big bucks for Lead or Leave. According to Jeanette Galanis, Lead or Leave office staff bragged on the phone to USSA last year that much of their funding came from Coca-Cola and other large companies, although this has yet to be substantiated.
Big money is floating all around Lead or Leave. Big money from corporations, not from young people. If most of the budget is not, ultimately, coming from the membership base, then it is very difficult to believe even the lower membership claims that Lead or Leave makes in the chart below [see "Leaders or Liars," page 57]. Galanis believes that Lead or Leave's real membership figures are much, much lower than they are claiming -- probably only a few hundred members. Of those, Galanis believes that less than 100 are actually activists. And in the absence of any demonstrable democratic internal organization, or any evidence of the accountability of the national office to its membership, they are lucky if they have that many.
Galanis believes that there is no way Lead or Leave could be accountable to other young people, even if it really had a big membership, "because they don't get money from you. And they don't get votes from you. And they don't see your participation in their organization as something crucial."
This ultimately explains why Lead or Leave has declared war on an actual grassroots student group with a platform that calls for "free government funded education for all -- at all levels." USSA is in the way of those forces that want to loot the public till. Until Lead or Leave can remove and replace USSA, they won't be able to use the cover of education issues to drive through their ultimate goal -- destroying Social Security and servicing the debt.
Lead or Leave is a front group for multinational banking interests. No more, no less. They do not have a significant grassroots base. They function loosely as a network. Despite a budget much larger than USSA's, they offer no concrete services to whatever membership they actually have. Their only consistent spokesmen remain Cowan and Nelson.
Lead or Leave's main ideas are not their own. They are part of a much larger and much more powerful coalition of organizations.
Many of the ideas that permeate Lead or Leave's literature can also be found in the literature of the Concord Coalition, to whom their direct ties are numerous. Concord members on their advisory board include Richard Dennis (who is a major funder of libertarian causes), Clyde V. Prestowitz, Jr., and Paul Tsongas. Pete Peterson, a Concord Coalition founder, though not a Lead or Leave board member, is doubtless much enamored of them. Cowan and Nelson certainly mention him and his organization constantly in their work. And the Concord Coalition's World Wide Web site on the Internet is linked directly to Lead or Leave's new site. It seems obvious that there is more than a casual connection between the two groups.
Searching for Lead or Leave's ideological antecedents also turns up some less obvious tutors. Cowan worked for a think tank called Rebuild America in the late 1980s. Rebuild America was composed, according to Business Week [March 28, 1988] and National Review [April 15, 1988] mostly of prominent Democratic party thinkers and politicians -- people like Robert Reich (now secretary of labor), Lester Thurow (dean of the MIT Sloan School of Economics), Michael Dukakis (former governor of Massachusetts), and Cowan-employer Rep. Mel Levine.
These particular Democrats' politics mirrored what is considered to be a neo-conservative platform: they called for a rise in regressive consumption taxes on goods and services that would hit poor and working people hardest. They wanted to use this money to pay off the deficit. Not exactly traditional Democratic behavior. This may also explain why Terry McAuliffe, finance chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is an honorary co-chair of Lead or Leave. The DNC, as anyone who worked on Jesse JacksonÕs last campaign will tell you, has been working to ensure that the party becomes more and more like the Republicans with each passing year.
Another major influence on Cowan and Nelson has been the writings of Neil Howe, a major-league entitlement basher who writes books like 13th Gen. Howe's works are meant to inflame tensions between the young and old by blaming all the young's problems on the old, with the goal being to convince people to cut the deficit and eviscerate Social Security. When the press asks which youth group they should quote, he unfailingly points them to Lead or Leave.
In 1988, Howe (a thinker often portrayed by the press as a liberal) wrote a book bashing Social Security for a think tank called the Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) in San Francisco. This group turns out to be the granddaddy of all neo-conservative think tanks -- and the one largely responsible for Ronald Reagan's rise to the Presidency. Their writers include Caspar Weinberger, a Reagan secretary of defense; R. James Woolsey, until just recently director of the CIA; and Lamar Alexander, former governor of Tennessee and secretary of education under Bush.
As early as 15 years ago, many ICS writers were talking about how to gut Social Security. They represent a nexus of Reagan-style Republican neo- conservatives, libertarians (who agree with neo-cons on debt issues), and many conservative Democrats (who are basically neo-cons anyway). Readers should remember that Reagan rode to power on the youth vote, and that neo- conservatism was concocted in large part to sell a right-wing agenda to the liberal young of the 1970s -- very similar to the what Lead or Leave is trying to do today. The ICS's overall mission seems to be to put the United States firmly in the hands of large corporations and banks. The ICS itself connects to a myriad of other think tanks, front groups, and scholars. All these folks seem to be engaged in the destruction of the Great American Democratic Experiment.
These groups represent the convergence of interests that Lead or Leave fronts for. These groups are the circles Cowan and Nelson move in and often quote or lift whole ideas from. These groups have more money than most Americans could ever imagine. And some of that money obviously flows to "youth" groups like Lead or Leave. According to the Nov. 7, 1994 Dallas Morning News, "So far, Lead or Leave has raised about $1 million."
They have used that money to wreak considerable havoc in student activist circles, and the media.
And that must stop.
Cowan and Nelson believe that they have a right to say whatever they wish in the name of my generation. They can behave that way because they are part of an elite. They are part of the top economic and political strata of this society. They have evidently been taught to believe that they are the cream of the crop. The best of the best. They do not earn this title, they buy it. Just as they now seek to buy the title of "leaders of our generation."
But who among my generation has voted for them? What have they done for the rest of us? Nothing. They have acted as young boosters of a very disturbing trend in our troubled democracy. They have worked hand in glove with the very forces in this country that are closing the political arena to the great majority of Americans. They have fronted for the "bipartisan" propagandists in both major political parties who are sacrificing the future livelihoods of millions of people on the altar of High Finance.
They have claimed that they are "above politics." Yet they espouse a right- wing political philosophy that will cause grave injury to the livelihoods of most working Americans in the coming decades.
They are not operating in a vacuum. Many Democrats and Republicans seem to be in the process of creating a single "Big Business" party. This is the logical outcome of "bipartisanism." If we don't have two separate major parties, than we will have only one. This party will not bend to the wishes of its electorate, but rather to the will of the banking industry. It will not be responsive to the needs of working Americans, but rather to the needs of the American elite.
When Cowan and Nelson say that they are "against politics as usual," they mean that they are "for business as usual." The needs of big business and the needs of working Americans are often at odds. If Lead or Leave does speaks for big business, then they do not speak for working Americans. And if they speak for big business, they do not speak for the bulk of my generation.
If my generation is willing to fight to make their voices heard, they must fight this trend toward a single-party state. We should look to groups like USSA. We should look to other grassroots youth groups like the Student Environmental Action Coalition and Campus NOW. We should join unions in our workplaces to protect our economic rights. We should help form new democratic unions where they don't yet exist. We should form our own new organizations in other arenas of life where appropriate and necessary. We should work in intergenerational organizations on issues we have in common with our parents and grandparents. We should start thinking -- as young organizers in the Greens, the New Party, and Labor Party Advocates already are -- about building a grassroots, progressive "third" party. A party that will stop electing those with the most money and business connections to represent us, and will start electing those citizens from our own ranks who will defend and advance democracy for the many over democracy for the few.
We should also work hard to stop the rollback of hard-won social programs that benefit millions of poor and working Americans. Where Social Security now stands, we should have cradle-to-grave "Family Security." Such a program would include innovations like a single-payer health care system, free federally funded higher education for all, fully funded and maintained public housing, sweeping mass transportation initiatives, mandated full employment for all -- in short, all the things that the past 40 years of tax money could have bought for us, if our representatives in Washington had not seen fit to feed the military-industrial complex instead.
In this era of Gingrich and Lead or Leave, it may seem like madness to call for such things. But the Women's Liberation Movement of 25 years ago had a slogan that I think still applies today: "Go for what you really want!" Why should I, or any young person, settle for crumbs? For whatever those in power care to mete out to us?
The best thing we can do to fight the Lead or Leaves of our generation is to figure out what we really, really want out of our society and our lives -- and go straight for that dream. We've got nothing to lose. It's either the crumbs of a broken democracy, or a much better world for ourselves and our children.
In the final analysis, young people should not look to Lead or Leave for leadership because they will only lead us to our undoing.
Research assistants: Simson Garfinkel, Charles Provenzano