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Commentary: Has the NEA sold out to the political agenda of the Obama administration?
No newspaper, Internet site, radio or television station or magazine has written more or advocated as vigorously in favor of funding for the arts as OperaOnline.us.
When the Obama administration laid out its funding priorities for the so-called stimulus package and cut billion dollar checks to dubious political lobby groups such as ACORN and United We Stand we urged the arts community to speak out and make a case for more than the $50 million made available to the arts.
We urged the arts community, particularly the NEA, to make the case that the arts community creates thousands of real jobs for everyone from seamstresses to singers. We even cited past NEA studies that showed the bang for the buck that accrued in cities when arts flourished.
We now learn that even the small amount of funding that the arts received in the stimulus bill was apparently enough to put some at the NEA in the back pocket of some in the Obama administration and transform an organization whose primary focus was supposed to be promoting the arts, to an organization that is committed to promoting the lopsided political agenda of health care reform, education, energy policy and the environment. These were the four areas outlined in the conversations and e-mails that recently came to public attention.
In an organizing telephone call and a series of e-mails with a White House advisor and various artists and arts organizations we learned that the NEA was not only “advising” the arts community to support the Obama political agenda, but asking them to promote it through the arts. I heard the conversation; I read some of the e-mails and blogs and viewed them as veilded threats. The participants were led by the NEA's Director of Communications, Yosi Sergant, the White House Office of Public Engagement’s Deputy Director, Buffy Wicks and Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Stand, the President's $5.2 billion community service initiative. The purpose, according to one of the participants, Patrick Courrielche, was clear:
“Discussed throughout the conference call was a hope that this group would be one that would carry on past the United We Serve campaign to support the President's initiatives and those issues for which the group was passionate. . . A machine that the NEA helped to create could potentially be wielded by the state to push policy.”
Worse, we learn that in those August 10 telephone conversations and subsequent e-mails the NEA apparently agreed to the plan and is advising others to sign onto it as well.
All this became known when broadcast on the Glenn Beck television show, Tuesday, September 1, 2009.
Yes, we are aware that Glenn Beck is on the political “right.” So what! And we also know that this is not the first time the arts community has been asked to use its power and influence to promote an agenda advocated so closely by the White House. But the only times we are aware of that this happened was during World War II when the movie industry led the way to promote patriotism to further the war effort and sell Bonds to fund the war effort, and earlier when the government asked artists to promote the work of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration.
What we learn from the latest disclosure here is that the Obama administration is attempting to rally the arts community as it would lobby community activists, and apparently succeeding, in promoting a questionable and highly controversial and transformative political agenda that many believe is designed to transform a free market American society into a fascist state where the government pays the bills and calls the shots and where, willing or unwilling, private businesses and arts organizations are told to get on board or else.
This is more than disturbing; it is an outrage. We are stunned that the NEA has apparently bought into this scheme and is doing exactly what it has been “asked” to do.
This publication takes no stand on whether the Obama agenda is a good or bad thing for America; that’s the voting public’s choice. What we do take umbrage to is the concerted effort by those close to the president to use funding to steer the arts community along a political path and to use the arts for a purpose that it was never intended to follow, namely to actively promote the government’s controversial political agenda to the public.
It is our hope that the Obama administration, now aware of the heavy hand being used, will order those responsible for this scheme to withdraw and get off the backs of organizations and artists and leave politics to politicians and the public.
As for the NEA, it is this publication’s view that the NEA has betrayed its members and purpose and has shown a troubling weakness that must be addressed. If the reports are accurate, and we believe they are, the NEA has betrayed artists and organizations which, although they apply to the NEA to promote their own art, may find, instead, that when it comes to the NEA, it is the government message and agenda they had better promote. The very fairness and integrity of the grant system has been shaken.
The NEA must answer for this. If all we heard is true, the NEA has betrayed us. It has shown a side of activism and complicity with government that is unhealthy and unwise. It has shown itself all too willing to sidle up to fascism and do the government’s bidding for a buck. Here at OperaOnline.us, we will never view that organization the same again, not until those who are responsible for this disreputable betrayal are rooted out of the organization.
This betrayal cannot stand!
