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the insiders JULY 2013!

How America’s Greatest Failure Led Gerry Cassidy to DC 3

Back to the K Street Beat 9

The Acronym that Makes the Pentagon Shudder 13

10th and G 17

the insiders t h e o n l i n e m a g a z i n e o f C a s s i d y &

A s s o c i a t e s g i v e s r e a d e r s a n a u t h e n t i c l o o k a t W a s h i n g t o n , h o w i t w o r k s a n d

w h o m a k e s i t w o r k .

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How America’s Greatest Failure Led Gerry Cassidy to DC

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It is hard not to miss the recent attention one of America’s greatest failures is

getting from Washington and Hollywood alike. It is a trending issue now online, but

a struggle that was vividly detailed in black and white on televisions across the

United States in 1960 as Edward R. Murrow reported on ‘the forgotten people, the

undereducated, the underfed’ in the Harvest of Shame. That broadcast brought

national attention to hunger in America and helped push many to action including

Gerald S.J. Cassidy, who nine years later would walk along side a national leader,

surveying the growing problem among migrant farm workers in Florida and later

act as the catalyst for his move to Washington, D.C. and his work on Capitol Hill.

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In 1967, Gerry, and his wife Loretta, were shocked by what they saw and

experienced first hand as he opened the Fort Myers office of the South Florida

Migrant Legal Services with three other lawyers, the same area featured in the

Murrow broadcast. He described the conditions to The Washington Post, "It was

really a dangerous place, in terms of violence and disease. It was just terribly

poor… It was a lot like the coal-mining situation: The workers owed their life to the

company store. They were always in debt to the crew boss, or to the farm

account. They weren't welcome many places. Living conditions were terrible. They

wanted them out as fast as they could get them out of town, once the harvest was

finished."!

He told the Post how the workers were rejected and shunned by the local

communities where they worked, "They really weren't

welcome in the local schools, though they should

have been," Cassidy remembered. "They couldn't

get benefits that they were entitled to… There was

a federal feeding program, one of our lawsuits was

to get them into that. Labor standards were not

enforced, and we sued them about labor standards."

Three years later, Gerry and his colleagues’ work caught the attention of the late

U.S. Senator George McGovern who was Chairman of the now dismantled Senate

Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. He recently wrote about it in

the Mitchell Republic as he remembered his friend and former boss, “It was the end

of a long, warmer than average, March day, in the Florida sun and the cameras

and reporters had been gone for hours, though we remained with Senator George

McGovern as he wanted to talk individually with the hundreds of migrant farm

workers in the squalid labor camps of Immokalee, shunned by their communities,

living in rickety shacks with basic services that amounted to spigots about two feet

off the ground that passed for a shower and faucet.”

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“George afforded me the opportunity to witness history while I worked along side

him as we traveled the country in the early days of the Senate Select Committee

on Nutrition and Human Needs. We went to the South Bronx, East St. Louis, Chicago

and many other places in his effort to bring national attention to the plight of

hungry Americans in the midst of a wealthy nation. At every stop, every meeting

with reporters, every committee hearing as Chairman, or just meeting with those of

us on his staff, George would say, “A country that is powerful enough to rocket

men to the moon should be able to feed its own hungry people.”

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Gerry and Loretta moved to Washington and

began a life’s work to help the underprivileged

that started with helping Sen. McGovern establish

a national food stamp program or what is known

today as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance

Program (SNAP).

Sadly, the problem of Americans going hungry

has only grown in the fleeting nature of today’s

national attention span as Gerry wrote recently

as a guest observer for Roll Call, “Fifteen percent

of all Americans are using food stamps today just

to survive and for many, that’s not enough to

keep their children from going hungry at night.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of

Agriculture reported food-stamp use rose 1.8% in

the U.S. in January from a year earlier, that’s 47.3

million, or nearly one in seven Americans.”

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He concluded, “LBJ’s War on Poverty will never be won, but just because someone

is poor, does not mean they should ever go hungry. The purpose of food assistance

remains as true today as when the food stamp program started, acting as an

economic Band-Aid to help the injury of a lost job or other traumatic financial life

event. So it is critical SNAP remains fully operational while Washington looks to heal

the greater problem.”

Forty-five years later, Gerry Cassidy continues the work that brought him to DC and

his fight to keep “the one safety net that keeps many parents from falling into the

terrifying torment of not knowing whether they will be able to feed their children or

themselves.”

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Cassidy Vice Chairman Gregg Hartley recently caught up with Megan Wilson from

The Hill to talk about her new beat at the newspaper, what’s in her notebook and

the oddest thing she’s faced on the job.

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GH: You’re a Californian, what brought you to DC?

MW: I had a fellowship here while I was in college, and I fell in love with being a

reporter in this town – the culture, the architecture, the traditions.

The Scripps Howard Foundation gave us all congressional press passes, essentially

bestowing upon 21-year-olds an unfettered access to covering the federal

government. I had carte blanche to go wherever I wanted, which is sort of an

addictive feeling.

GH: What attracted you to journalism?

MW: I like talking to people, I like knowing things.

Covering the lobbying industry is just that – talking to people and getting people

(who talk to other people for a living) to talk to you. The idea that knowledge and

rapport can be monetized continues to fascinate me.

GH: How long have you been at The Hill, you’re taking on a new role at the paper?

MW: I’ve been with The Hill for about a year and a half. I’ve covered campaign

finance, lobbying and, most recently, federal regulations.

Now I’m digging back into the K Street world – but focusing on the industry in ways

that hasn’t really been done before. The “L” word can carry so much weight and

come with so many connotations, but these are real people with real stories to tell.

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JULY 2013 | the insiders 12

GH: Are the days of long form journalism over in Washington, in favor of social

media style reporting?

MW: There have always been and there always will be new ways that people

produce and consume journalism. Just as the desire for brief, quick-hitting reporting

exists, there will always be an appetite for longer, more in-depth features. Short-

form is good for a quick hit, but it can leave you wanting more.

GH: Is there a story you’d like to report on, but just haven’t had an opportunity?

MW: I have a notebook full of ideas and things that I’m keeping an eye on, in

addition to the day-to-day items that I write. It’s all a work in progress and. I look at

each smaller item as a puzzle piece in a larger overall opportunity.

GH: What is the oddest or strangest thing you’ve encountered while in DC?

MW: Being interviewed and answering questions rather than being the one asking

them.

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JULY 2013 | the insiders 14

THE ACRONYM THAT MAKES

THE PENTAGON SHUDDER

The Pentagon is under siege from a figurative, but formidable foe… the

congressional budget ax and whether it’s disguised as the Base Realignment and

Closure Commission (BRAC) or sequester, Cassidy President and former 1991 BRAC

Deputy General Counsel Barry Rhoads says modernization efforts, BRAC, and

defense infrastructure are all inextricably tied together. Barry recently sat down to

talk with Cassidy’s online video news series, The Insiders:

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Just strike BRAC from your lexicon, BRAC is irrelevant, we can get into all the

nuances about BRAC, but BRAC is going on right now, so forget about BRAC,

Congress does not have to legislate a BRAC.

Secretary Conger (Acting Deputy Under Secretary of Defense

Installations & Environment) has said ‘I’m going to use all the tools in my toolkit for

all intents and purposes to make the adjustments I need to make.’ So we know

that there are missions moving between bases, they’re trying to rightsize, they’re

trying to get to places that are more cost effective. So as long as they don’t come

in within the congressional notifications limits, they’re moving missions.

They’re looking at missions… there’s a mission recently that’s moving from Ft.

Benning and they were looking at four bases… we just saw the basing of the

tankers where they looked at all 300–plus Air Force bases in America, they really

did a BRAC. You can say whatever you want to, but they took data calls, they

knew what the bases were, they narrowed it down to five bases and picked one,

that’s a BRAC.

Force structure adjustments, force structure reductions require basing decisions.

Basing decisions, whether you call it a BRAC or not, affect the local community, so

local communities that are aggressive stand much better stead in receiving new

missions, and protecting missions from moving, with or without BRAC.

You get the feeling in the Pentagon right now, and I was there earlier this week,

that it’s almost a sense of giving up. When sequestration was first talked about,

they didn’t prepare for it because they really didn’t think Congress would force

them into it and now reality has struck and so the ripple effect from sequestration…

from the industrial base, from the platform base, from the force structure…

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! !it’s starting to hit home and they know that they’ve got to make a mends with

what’s being required from them and there’s really no easy way… everything

they’re going to do is going to be painful.

What you’re going to see, especially now that Congress appears that they’re not

going to give the Secretary of Defense what he wants which is a BRAC for 2015,

they’re going to have the same amount of infrastructure that they have with a

much reduced force structure. So what the word is from the Pentagon is, which is

going to be really painful for communities and quite frankly going to be very

painful for our fighting men and women, is the fact that they’re going to mothball.

They’re going to say close, shutter 20-percent of a base here, and shutter 20-

percent of a base there, because they’re not going to be given the ability to close

bases that are excess. What that results in is that marginalization of certain parts of

a base and is going to basically lead to a hollow infrastructure because It cost

money to keep stuff in mothball.

It’s going to be an ugly scenario.

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