Obama Recruits National Endowment for the Arts
The Obama Administration is recruiting again with the hope of finding someone to help promote his unpopular agenda. This time, the administration’s target is the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This federally funded agency helped coordinate a conference call on August 10 which was hosted by several different agencies including NEA, the White House’s Office of Public Engagement, and United we Serve.
This conference call served one purpose: to promote Obama’s agenda through national public figures in the arts. Basically what happened here is art groups funded by government grants through the NEA were invited to this conference call where they were asked to use art as a means to advance Obama’s political agenda. The NEA is supposedly a non-partisan entity that is now picking up a partisan agenda funded by our tax dollars.
Who set up this phone call? I know what your thinking, it couldn’t have been the White House! Because if it were the White House, they would be breaking lobbying laws and creating propaganda to push its political agenda. Wrong, the White house was the source of this phone call.
The White House worked in conjunction with Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Sergant began the conference call with the greeting “Welcome to your government.” Welcome to your government? Last time I checked, the NEA isn’t a branch of our government. Instead they are supposed to be a non-partisan entity to promote arts in the community.
Sergant went on to stress the importance of this initiative of partnering with the President to make real change happen. During the conversation he said, “ I want to make the point very clear, we acknowledge the creativity, commitment and generosity that each and every single one of you puts in daily to shape the lives of those who surround you.” He then goes on to say that this is what they fought for during the campaign, to have a seat at the table and work with the President to promote his initiative.
Sergant, an administrator of the call,
encouraged those listening to “pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service” and then by using your “artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table.”
There were several main players here besides Sergant. One player was Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, who was contacted by the White House to set up the conference call. During the Call
Skolnick spoke saying that those on the conference call had been asked:
By folks in the White House and folks in the NEA [to follow up on] the role that we artists and thinkers and tastemakers and marketers and visionaries played during the campaign for the president and also during the his first 200 some odd days of his presidency. … I’m hoping that through this group … we can … get involved in things that we’re passionate about as we did during the campaign … to support some of the president’s initiatives … and push the president and push his administration.
Another voice on the call belonged to Buffy Wicks. Wicks was an Obama Campaign worker who is now the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. During the call, she identified those in attendance as pro-Obama arts groups collective. This collective was called on to use art to do one thing to promote the progressive agenda of President Obama.
The President is working to push his agenda in whatever form necessary. This time he is working to turn a supposedly non-partisan group, funded by taxpayers, into his own personal advocacy group for a progressive agenda. Where else will we see Obama working to corrupt groups to back an agenda the public doesn’t support?
The full transcript of the conference call can be read
here.
