GOP front groups like USANext (the folks now working to uncover the AARP-homosexual world conspiracy) usually change their names every couple years or hive off other outfits just to keep everyone guessing. So USANext is actually part of the United Seniors Association, or as they put it: “USA United Generations and USA NEXT are grassroots projects of United Seniors Association (USA) which is celebrating its 13th anniversary as the non-partisan, 1.5 million-plus nationwide grassroots network Uniting the Generations for Americaâs Future.”
They share the same website now. So really it’s all the same outfit.
In any case, despite claiming this vast membership, this article from last year in The Washington Monthtly makes clear that United Seniors Association is basically a slush fund through which pharmaceutical companies make huge donations to the Republican party.
Says the article …
Then there’s the benignly-named United Seniors Association (USA), which serves as a soft-money slush fund for a single GOP-friendly industry: pharmaceuticals. USA claims a nationwide network of more than one million activists, but, just like Progress for America, listed zero income from membership dues in its most recent available tax return. USA does, however, have plenty of money on its hands. During the 2002 elections, with an “unrestricted educational grant” from the drug industry burning a hole in its pocket, the group spent roughly $14 million–the lion’s share of its budget–on ads defending Republican members of Congress for their votes on a Medicare prescription-drug bill.
You can pick up the story on the United Seniors money mill from this July 2003 consumer bulletin from, of all places, the dreaded AARP.
One thing we learn from the AARP bulletin is that they apparently picked up USANext chief Charlie Jarvis from that notorious Spongebob-basher radical cleric James Dobson. Before he got the USANext gig, Jarvis was an executive vice president of Dobson’s group Focus on the Family. And in the interests of bringing you all the information, it seems that it is not 100% accurate to say that USANext is a slush fund purely for the drug industry, seeing as how Jarvis was willing to bring the group out in favor of the rights of seniors to drill in ANWR after an Anchorage-based company called Arctic Power cut a check for $181,000. And if all that weren’t enough, it seems that as of the summer of 2003 the Social Security Administration itself had secured a ‘cease and desist’ order against Jarvis’s group for sending out mailings that “mislead the public into believing the mail is officially sent or approved by the Social Security Administration.”
Charlie Jarvis, quite a piece a’ work.
