Citizen Culture EXCLUSIVE ::: Nancy Pelosi's "30-Somethings" on Young Professionals

The Dems Want Justice:
Interview with Members of U.S. House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi's "30-Something Working Group"

The "30-Something Working Group," run through House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, is a caucus of 13 Democratic Congressmen and Congresswomen--all of whom began their careers under 40 years of age--who represent those issues most pressing to Young Americans. Igor Finkel and Jonathon Scott Feit recently grilled three of the Working Group's most outspoken members--Kendrick Meek and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of South Florida, and Tim Ryan of Ohip--on issues pertaining to Young Professionals, including financial services reform, the environment, patriotic community service, and the oil racket.

Young Professionals are reputed among government and media to be apathetic, fickle. Women in particular don't have many publications that are geared toward their intellects. What do you feel is the government and media's responsibility, what actions should be taken to mobilize the up-and-coming demographic?

Ryan: They may be disengaged politically, but I don't think they're disengaged with what's going on. They volunteer, they play a part in school, community, their fraternity, their sorority, whatever it may be--they do a lot of community service stuff. I was with a group the other night, the Network of Catholic Progressives--they want to meet with young progressives, Catholic and non-Catholic. And you talk to a lawyer, a law student who's going to Georgetown--he's going to go to JAG [the Judge Advocate General, the military's legal division]. There is a group of young people out there who want to help and be a part of it; it may not always jive into politics.

Voting--as essential as it is--is not the only measure of civic engagement, and I believe that young people are simply engaged in other ways. Volunteering around their cities, advocating for a particular cause, joining the Peace Corps or Teach for America--these are important examples of selfless civic engagement.

Wasserman-Schultz: For the latter end of that demographic, which is also likely to have pretty young kids, that's absolutely not true; that's a misapplication of a description of our generation.

The young parents I know--they are totally engaged in public education, they go to their PTA meetings, they read the newspaper, especially now with the advent of email. That has enabled people who are 23 to 35 to engage far more than they ever had time for. Because, you know, you can zap out an email either to your Member of Congress or your State Representative or your School Board Member, where before, the time-consuming nature of being a parent (and I have three little ones, so believe me, I know)--they're so busy over the course of a whole day, getting their kids off to school, then going to their job, then coming home and making sure that their kids are showered and in bed and homework's done and extracurriculars are taken care of. They weren't going to sit down and break out their pen and write a handwritten letter. Now, they all are online at 12:30 at night and they get emails.

In Florida we have this group called "Save Our Summers," which is going national, and their big issue is that they've moved the school year back so early in the summer, and they've actually done that all over the country, that there's a whole email movement to communicate with elected officials to try to get the summer reinstated and school to start later. If you had not had the advent of electronic communication, most of those parents would not have been able to engage in that.

Meek: As someone who was first elected to public office at the age of 26, I understand how important it is that young people get involved in the political process. Now as I am growing older, I have translated this commitment to my involvement in Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi's "30 Something Working Group." This working group has been a great opportunity for Members of Congress to highlight issues that impact young people, and it has drawn attention to these issues not only in the Congress but in the media as well.

We talk about the problem of the national debt, but what about personal debt? A recent BusinessWeek Online article said that, "There are all kinds of ways to describe today's 30-year olds, but what may really come to distinguish them is that they could be the most indebted generation in modern history." How would the daunting nature of the national debt be affected if Young Professionals curtailed their own discretionary spending?

Ryan: One of the large numbers is the debt that kids carry out of college, which is seventeen or eighteen thousand dollars, and the Republican budget will increase that by--I don't know what the budget number looks like now that we'll vote on--but the proposals were saying it was going to cost another four or five thousand dollars over the course of the loan. So part of it is that, and I think three thousand of it is credit card debt for college students. One of the things that we have talked about is financial literacy in schools, and really doing more of a hands-on day-to-day teaching kids how to live in the world, and one of those things is financial literacy. So we want to make sure that's incorporated.

Our approach is like this: we want to try to fix the problem now, but we also want to go back and say, how do we fix things so the next generation does not have to deal with this problem? So part of it is talking about being fiscally responsible yourself, but part of it is also about teaching the next generation of kids about credit and about savings and about the stock market.

If there were more responsible spending on the part of Young Professionals, would they have more funds available personally to be less affected by the national debt?

Wasserman-Schultz: I'm on the Financial Services Committee, and what Tim [Ryan] said--I'm so glad that he mentioned financial literacy, because part of the reason that our generation, our age group, is in the financial situation that they're in is that no one really made an effort to talk to us about how you save.

We're so not the generation of savers--we got credit cards thrown at us the minute we stepped foot on a college campus, the credit card application process went from being restrictive to being free and open and anyone could get one, with incentives to basically get yourself so deep in debt. It was just so I-want-so-I-can-have-oriented that now we've realized that we've got to go in and adopt policies so that we can raise the next generation as a generation of savers.

In fact, I'm doing town halls and workshops with parents and teachers, and parents and their kids, on financial literacy, and using cute little savings banks that are compartmentalized with invest, save, donate, spend categories. But we've got to change the mindset of the next generation coming after us, because ours clearly didn't work.

Meek: Let me just say that we can't legislate morals and character. We just cannot legislate people into doing the right thing. I can tell you that after [September 11, 2001] the whole argument from the government was "Go shopping!" and you hear that a lot. There's not really an entity out there or an effort outside of financial literacy that many of the financial institutions are justifying--well, wearing a white hat on that issue. At the same time, telling people in that same age group, " Just sign here" for a high-interest credit card after six months. I don't think that we can legislate corporate America into being responsible in the way they market to that age group.

A pair of linked questions: First, are we addicted to oil? And what can we realistically do about cultivating alternative fuels while realizing that the prospect of flipping infrastructures is extremely expensive and time-consuming?

Ryan: I think addiction's an understatement. Oil-based products are not only just in the gas tank and all that, but it's also in the chemicals used to grow food, plastics, streets--I mean, it's everywhere.

I just finished a book called The Long Emergency, and it goes through our dependence on foreign oil. The main point is that we need to recognize that this is not a renewable resource, that at some point we are going to pull out all of the oil in the Earth, and what are we going to do then? Are we just going to wait until that day comes? And that's where the President [Bush] failed the country after September 11th: he had more political power than probably any President probably has ever had, since at least Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, and his response--his great challenge to the country--was to go shopping.

Now at that point--on September 12th, or 13th, or the week after--could have called all the oil executives in the country into the Oval Office and had a sit-down and said, "I don't care where you want to do, this is what the country needs to go, and we're going to cut you in on the deal. We still want you to make money, we still want you to be a profitable company in the United States, but it's got to go in another direction because: one is, it's not renewable, and two is, our national security depends upon it." You don't have many opportunities like that throughout the course of a country's history, and the President passed that up, which is one of the most frustrating points for us.

Wasserman-Schultz: It's the difference between leading on alternative energy sources and how we're going to break our addiction, and succumbing to political pressure, which is the only reason why the [Congressional] Committee called the oil executives in front of them. Because now they know, because their constituents are getting in their face when they go home, because they're sick to death of the price of gas, and the fact that there's no one on their side of the aisle proposing a solution to this problem other than "Drive less," which is what the President's solution to it was after Katrina. In a community like mine and Kendrick's, "Drive less," with no mass transit, is not an option. I mean, it is just preposterous. Building mass transit is an option, but they're [Republicans] certainly not supporting our appropriations request to get one kick-started. So there has to be some leadership, so if they aren't going to, then we'll try to provide it.

Is there outreach on the Democratic side of the aisle to industry, as opposed to antagonistic pointing of fingers?

Meek: We had an energy bill alternative to what the Republicans had, and it did talk about, heavily, alternative fuels, to put us in a new frame by 2010 or 2012, as relates to alternative fuels. That's going to have to happen. When Mr. Ryan spoke of the day that the Earth says, "Hey, I'm not giving you the oil that I used to because you pumped it all out." We're going to start getting into embracing hybrid vehicles more, we're going to get into embracing other ways of trying to fuel our vehicles. It's going to be a little bit more expensive. Everything is expensive in the beginning, but we will make a transition.

Ryan: As we try to make an agenda and move things forward and have an honest debate on these issues, this outfit just lies. The Administration, and the Republican Congress. I mean, it's just a lie after a lie after a lie after a lie, regardless of whether itÕs the CIA leak, or what the role of the oil companies were in the development of the energy policy. And I think the bottom line is, I think the target date for peak output for oil is Thanksgiving [2005]. We will have taken more oil out of the Earth than there is left, and that was just in the last hundred years or so. And that was before China, that was before India, that was before the industrialization of all these other countries, and that is a major issue. This is not something you just play games with because the end result could be tragic for the country.
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How much involvement should the U.S. have in world affairs, on the security side and also on the humanitarian side?

Wasserman-Schultz: That's a good question. I think that our moral indignation has been misplaced, in terms of where the President has decided to lead us. Nevermind the fact that we were misled, and that intelligence was manipulated to fit a set of facts around the case for war in Iraq. I would argue that there were many other places in the world where those numbers of casualties and crimes against humanity were much more significant. Darfur, for example, where if you're going to be engaged in world affairs, and be the humanitarian police-which I think we have a role in, in some cases, because I subscribe to the concept of "Never again." "Never again," to me, should be applicable whether it's Cuba or Darfur, and it shouldn't be a hollow and meaningless sentiment or statement. Iraq just simply isn't the first place where I think we belonged. ~ IF & JSF