ZGram - July 20, 2003 - "Sharks at work"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

July 20, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I hate to spoil your Sunday - but take a look at this.

[START]

Shipwrecked
Swimming with sharks in a sea of arts funding
by Steven Leigh Morris 
The Art of a Sweetheart deal
(Photo by Ted Soqui) 

I've never seen the economic climate worse in 35 years of managing 
nonprofit arts organizations. In terms of arts funding, we're 
entering the perfect storm.
-Charles Dillingham
general manager of the Mark Taper Forum

Dark clouds loomed over the Arts Alive rally, staged on behalf of the 
California Arts Council (CAC) last Wednesday afternoon at Santa 
Monica's 18th Street Arts Complex. As part of an attempt to redress a 
state deficit estimated at $38 billion, Governor Gray Davis has 
proposed dismembering the arts council with a 73 percent funding cut. 
Davis' proposal is the latest in a series of surgical strikes on the 
CAC budget, which, at $19 million earlier this year, would be slashed 
to $5 million under the new proposal, according to CAC's Adam 
Gottlieb.

As an illustration of the climate change in arts funding, the entire 
proposed $5 million arts council budget equals the amount given to a 
single grant recipient in 1995: the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum 
of Tolerance.

Furthermore, in what's become a growing scandal, funds allocated for 
the museum's "Tools for Tolerance" program (which trains educators 
and police on "diversity issues") are a budget "line item," meaning 
that it's pre-allocated every year by the governor (with legislative 
approval) - bypassing the peer-review process of other grants. And 
though the museum's CAC grant has dwindled over the years, its 
portion of the state arts budget stands to be 30 percent ($1.5 
million) of the entire CAC allocation currently proposed by Davis. 
Besides the issue of fairness, this proposal begs the question of 
what a program educating kids and cops about diversity, however 
meritorious, is doing in an arts budget. (The governor has gone on 
record defending the museum's line item as an imperative after 9/11.)

The museum's good fortune is as much a testament to the lobbying 
power of the Wiesenthal Center's dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, as to the 
much larger social agenda of privatizing public services.

For more than a decade and a half, Hier has had powerful backers 
among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, from former Governor 
Pete Wilson and former Democratic leader Willie Brown, to President 
Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who invited Hier to 
briefings on the war in Iraq.

That one private museum should continue to receive such 
disproportionate public funding is particularly troubling in an era 
when federal tax cuts are driving many states toward bankruptcy and 
the public services they provide into oblivion. Meanwhile, according 
to 2001's Federal 990 Forms, filed on the center and its related 
activities, Hier draws an annual salary of more than $400,000 (not 
including pension benefits) - up from $225,000 in 1994. His wife, 
Marlene, serving as membership director, receives $244,000, while a 
son, Alan Heir, is paid $107,365 for fund-raising activities and 
another son, Rabbi Aron Hier, associate director, makes $76,018.

Obviously, a private institution can pay its staff what it pleases, 
but since the center can afford such extravagant revenues for its 
administrators, detractors question the need of the museum to 
singularly gobble up 30 percent of the state's already gutted arts 
budget when, last week across town, money problems compelled the 
county Natural History Museum to fire 23 full-time and part-time 
specialists and employees.



An ideological line was drawn in the asphalt of the 18th Street Arts 
Complex, amid towering papier-mâché puppets, sari-clad dancers, and 
children holding an emblematically endangered "goose that laid the 
golden egg."

Blase Bonpane, director of the Office of the Americas, told a handful 
of supporters that the arts was one of the few remaining answers to 
our society's "corporate-sponsored militarism" and that "militarism 
and the arts are incompatible" - referring not only to the militarism 
of war but to the prison industries of standardized testing and of 
private incarceration facilities, often built with public funds.

Expanding on that theme, Santa Monica arts commissioner Jan 
Williamson connected the proposed slashing of the arts budget to the 
attempted repeal of the federal estate tax (benefiting the wealthiest 
2 percent of the population while stripping hundreds of millions of 
dollars from public coffers) as interrelated examples of a 
neoconservative agenda, starting in Washington, to weaken local 
governments and privatize public services.

This leaves three possible explanations for Davis' proposal: the 
attempt to placate a ravenous Republican opposition; short-term 
stupidity stemming from desperation; or long-term strategy stemming 
from conservative Washington think tanks.

The stupidity is self-evident: Even at the pre-cut $19 million 
allocation, the arts budget is merely
.025 percent of the state budget. So what, in the state economy, does 
the governor think he's remedying by slicing an almost invisible 
crumb with a razor blade? And what exactly is being sacrificed? 
Basket-weaving frivolities? Hardly. The Washington, D.C.-based 
arts-advocacy group Americans for the Arts points to Davis' proposal 
further damaging the state's already sputtering financial engine: An 
estimated 1.5 million Californians would not see live performances 
they might otherwise have attended. The average audience member for a 
live cultural event spends $22 on non-ticket-related expenses. You 
add up the lost business revenues. More than 50 percent of the CAC 
budget goes to arts outreach, social service and educational programs 
that have been proven to reduce crime, salvage at-risk youth and 
improve academic performance. So the proposed cut, taken from 
resources you'd need a Geiger counter to find in the state budget, 
removes resources that have been proven to spur local economies by 
supporting small businesses while sparing at-risk
youth from prison.

The long-term strategy is best explained by Bill Moyers at a recent 
speech given at a "Take Back America" conference sponsored by the 
Campaign for America's Future.

"You have to respect the conservatives," Moyers said. "Their leading 
strategist, Grover Norquist, has famously said he wants to shrink the 
government down to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. 
But instead of shrinking down the government, [the White House is] 
filling the bathtub with so much debt that it floods the house, 
waterlogs the economy and washes away services for decades that have 
lifted millions of Americans out of destitution and into the middle 
class. And what happens once the public's property has been flooded? 
Privatize it. Sell it at a discounted rate to the corporations. It is 
the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, 
that has occurred in our lifetime. I'll be frank with you: I simply 
don't understand it - or the malice in which it is steeped."

[END]