New Documents Tie NEA SCANDAL Directly to White House Policy

Four weeks ago, Big Hollywood posted audio of a conference call in which Obama administration officials asked "grant recipients to plug Barack Obama’s domestic agenda."

At least six federal laws and regulations were violated when then–NEA communications director Yosi Sergant and White House Office of Public Engagement deputy director Buffy Wicks tried twisting the arms of artists and arts groups interested in getting federal arts grants to produce government propaganda.

To protect the scandal from expanding further, the White House threw Sergant under the bus, denied that they were involved issued new guidelines for the NEA and promised that it will never, ever, cross my heart, ever happen again.

Judicial Watch, announced has obtained documents from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related to the NEA's controversial August 10 conference call, these documents seem to indicate that this event was not a minor screw-up but part of a purposeful White House policy

My one NEA abuse story:

I was hired to sing in an opera funded with an NEA grant in NYC. The librettist was the daughter of one of the NEA bigwigs. The composer was a Japanese national, not even an American citizen, who had obviously composed this unsingable and ugly mess on a computer. I took the job thinking these people were on the up and up, but eventually discovered that they were disgraceful frauds.

When the cast informed the downtown artsy group who put this thing together that the music was unsingable and unlearnable in the very short alloted time period, they decided to do the bare minimum to meet the NEA requirements and keep the grant.

In the final analysis, they videotaped a 7 minute unstaged excerpt and submitted it to the NEA. For this they were allowed to keep the grant which was tens of thousands of dollars. My pathetic fee was $500 - not much for weeks of working with these idiots. I vowed I would never work under this kind of circumstance again.

Although I had a 20 year career in the arts, I am completed opposed to government funding. There are many legitimate arts organizations that receive NEA funding, but there are also a lot of hacks and untalented members of politically popular minorities who get tax dollars in order to exercise their nonexistent talents or produce art that is nothing but political hate attacks on our country.

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