A stinging report was issued yesterday by Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  The report, titled “Analysis of the First Year of the Obama Administration: Public Relations and Propaganda Initiatives,” outlines a host of propaganda activities conducted by the Obama administration at the direct expense of the American taxpayers.  It notes in part,

“The Obama Administration frequently used federal resources to promote the President’s agenda. In many cases, the Administration relied on the reach and resources of federal agencies and their personnel to promote certain of the President’s favorite programs. The White House also leveraged ties to the arts and entertainment community to embed propaganda in the content of television programming and artwork. These propaganda efforts violated appropriations riders and federal law prohibiting the use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda purposes.”

“The White House also used its inherent visibility advantages to multiply the effectiveness of websites containing misleading and controversial information. The White House used its resources to push visitors to websites that urge grassroots activism based on false and misleading information. The President’s right to sell his policy recommendations to Congress and the public is not disputed; however, using the resources of the federal government to activate a sophisticated propaganda and lobbying campaign is an abuse of office and a betrayal of the President’s pledge to create “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

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Since first reporting that Serve.gov was listing activist positions with ACORN it seems now that all ACORN listings have been scrubbed from the taxpayer-funded site without any explanation as to why they were on it in the first place. The government was using our taxpayer dollars to advertise for volunteer opportunities to promote the president’s partisan agenda via a corrupt organization under investigation for voter registration fraud, among other things.

Initially you could type “ACORN” into the search field on Serve.gov and various listings from planting trees to volunteering to get out the vote in Ohio, for ACORN, would appear in the results. It’s important to note that several ACORN positions were listed directly on the federally-funded Serve.gov – not just on the AllforGood.org website.

The act of removing these listings indicates that Serve.gov knew it was a) wrong to use a federal website to funnel volunteers to campaign for the president and DNC and, 2) bad for them to be seen further associating with ACORN in light of the recently released videos combined with ongoing investigations. (more…)

At first glance, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) conference call of August 10th, 2009sounds innocent enough because it’s supposedly been organized by Michael Skolnik, political director for Russell Simmons and someone not officially associated with any government agency. Skolnik appears to be acting independently as a concerned citizen and to have taken it upon himself to gather together a group of artists and art organizations hoping to move them towards “national service.” And how nice of the White House, the federal government and the NEA to make the time to participate in the call and aid this group of American artists motivated to help their country and community.

But this is only how things appear.

All evidence points to the fact that the conference call was a ruse, a front for a White House using Skolnik as a kind of beard in order to put an innocent spin on their abuse of the NEA and two non-partisan volunteer organizations (United We Serve – an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service – a federal agency, and the White House’ Office of Public Engagement).

The goal: To motivate a group of hand-picked pro-Obama artists (grant recipients or those wanting grants) to push the President’s flagging agenda, especially health care — and to funnel this promotion through the ACORN related- Serve.gov website.

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Documentation gathered by Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche and the Washington Times, coupled with a newly revealed audio recording of the full conference call, points to eight troubling facts that put the full context of the call in a very disturbing light. (more…)

BigGovernment.com continues to wake-up America to Obama Administration relationships with ACORN and Big Labor.  BigGov’s  latest story highlights Presidential Advisor Valerie Jarrett’s crew member Buffy Wicks who is the former political director of forced union dues financed WakeupWalmart.com (Wakeup). In the conference call, Wicks highlighted the important role United We Serve (Serve.gov) has in President Obama’s Organizing America strategy. See Dana Loesch’s article about Serve.gov directing volunteers to ACORN.

The Obama campaign boastfully promoted Wick’s moniker, “Buffy the Wal-Mart Slayer” that highlights her community organizing experience with Wakeup’s efforts to increase costs for Wal-Mart and the prices for its customers.  However, the Obama White House press release tones down Wicks past position:

Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.  Wicks has a long history in grassroots organizing and civic engagement. Most recently she was the Director of the Renew America Together effort, the call to service issued by then President-elect Obama. She also served on the Obama for America campaign in a variety of roles, including California Field Director and Missouri State Director, and helped develop the national grassroots field strategy. She has also worked in the labor movement, fighting for better health care and wages for disenfranchised workers. She is originally from California and graduated with a double major in Political Science and History from the University of Washington.

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If you’ve ever wondered–and worried–about where government support of the arts leads, look no further than the full transcript of an August 10 telecon  between an official at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a group of “independent artists from around the country.” The short version: It leads to the use of taxpayer-funded culture as a means of propagandizing for specific, partisan political aims. Which corrupts not just art but artists.

As Patrick Courrelieche, an L.A.-based arts organizer who participated in the call, reported at Big Hollywood, the people running the call, including the NEA’s director of communications Yosi Sergant  and members of the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve, told the assembled crew of “thought leaders” that “we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here” (that’s a direct quote from Buffy Wicks of the Office of Public Engagement). 

Chief among the requests from Sergant (who was either “reassigned” from the agency or “reportedly resigned” after denying the full extent of his role in organizing the call) was “to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know… [and] apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities’ utilities and bring them to the table.” Beyond the specific policy issues above, the call organizers stressed the ideologically loaded concept of “service” as the animating principle of the Obama administration and wanted the artists to do whatever they could to promote that. As Wicks put it, “We really view [our efforts] as an onramp to a lifetime of service. We really want service to be incorporated into people’s daily lives.”

Given that the NEA prides itself on being the single largest funding source for the arts in the country, such arm-twisting by agency officials, however masked in fulsome compliments to creators’ genius, is disturbing on its face. It clearly sets a political agenda for the very people who are likely to be applying for, well, NEA and other government grants. Does anyone think that the organizers were fishing around for projects that might complicate the public option for health care?

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On August 25th 2009, Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche broke the story of a conference call he attended with other “rising artist and art community luminaries”:

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

The email invite came directly from Yosi Sergant, then-Director of Communications at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and it advised this hand-picked group that the call was about laying “a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Courrielche describes the call this way: (more…)