Although Senator Tom Coburn was the architect of the amendment that sliced attempted to slice the arts out of the economic stimulus package, it is fair to remember that 72 additional senators fell in line to support a bad idea inspired by flawed reasoning. Apparently, Coburn didn’t feel the same sort of moral conviction to craft an amendment preventing the largest US banks from distributing executive bonuses after sidestepping the issue by renaming them “Performance Awards.” Consequently, I think the arts should adopt the same policy, instead of calling venues “Arts Centers” we should rename them “Expressive Discipline Assembly Facilities” which are part of the larger multi-billion (and certainly not wasteful) “Fundamental Fulfillment Industry.” If you can’t beat ’em…
Year: 2009
Amendment No. 175 Voting Results
Thanks to Adaptistration reader Geo, we now have the official Senate roll call votes for the “Limitation on Funds Amendment No. 175,” otherwise known as “Coburn Amendment No. 309.” You can find text results at the senate.gov website but since a picture really is worth a thousand words, I took a moment to arrange the results as a color-coded map (tip: anything red isn’t good for the arts)…
Burn, Baby, Burn.
After watching Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) – a politician so evil even his own lawyer wants nothing to do with him – lead the charge to eviscerate the .0000588 percent of the economic stimulus package directed toward the arts, I can’t help but think of a passage from John Schaefer’s 1/15/2009 blog post:
At times like this, I think of the famous anecdote of Winston Churchill, at the height of the Blitz…being confronted by politicians who wanted him to throw all the resources normally devoted to the theater and the arts to the war effort instead. “Good God,” he replied; “then what are we fighting for?”
Post Inauguration Cultural Confidence Levels
As we slide past the second full week of the new administration and observe boisterous debate about economic recovery plans every day, the overall impact of these events have had mixed effects on cultural confidence levels. On one hand, respondents feel better about current economic conditions (although the prevailing sentiment is “negative”) but the outlook toward economic conditions at the end of the season remained firmly pessimistic…
Madison’s Red Herring Special
When considering historical reasons behind work stoppages in the orchestra business, what comes to mind are intense disagreements on financial compensation and/or work rules, impending financial impasse, entrenched positions among stakeholders, attempts to implement sizeable budget cuts, etc. After the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra (WCO) announced they were cancelling their 2/27/2009 Masterworks concert due to what the organization defined as the musicians rejecting their latest contract offer, it seemed the two sides must have these sorts of disagreements. However, the reality may be very different…