The article, riddled with factual errors and omissions characteristic of a student and/or mainstream media, lays out a revisionist’s version of what happened behind the scenes of the scandal. During the interview, conducted by a journalism graduate student and admitted “close friend” of the former White House appointee, Sergant states that he was called to a meeting in the West Wing at the end of his four-month stint in the White House’s Office of Public Engagement. The White House, fully aware of his role as an art activist during Obama’s election campaign, offered Sergant two jobs. One was to continue at the White House, and the other was as the Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Sergant selected the NEA.

President Obama and Yosi Sergant

“I think [the West Wing] made a bad decision to put me in a job without giving me any kind of guidance, not providing me with any kind of mentorship,” said Sergant in the interview. He continued, “That was a bad decision. I’d never worked in government before.”

However the White House knew where Sergant’s expertise resided, and how he would potentially put it to use in an arts position. He was the promoter behind the now famous Obama Hope poster. Sergant indicated in the interview that he was given some direction by the White House in his new position at the NEA. “The idea was that Yosi would help pave the way for the new director’s arrival,” wrote Hillel Aron, referring to Rocco Landesman, incoming Chairman of the NEA. On paving the way, Sergant said, “I started working on things that I knew were happening, that I thought would be safe… and I was wrong.” 

And, frankly, why wouldn’t he have thought it to be safe – he was working with the White House at the time. The project that Sergant was referring to was United We Serve, a national service initiative orchestrated by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Among the many controversial comments during the call, Sergant stated, “I would encourage you 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 my ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table.”

It was this encouragement, at a time when town halls had gone nuclear over the issue of health care, which ultimately put Sergant in hot water.

Following a statement made in my first article regarding the invite coming from the NEA, the Washington Times reported that Sergant claimed he did not send out the invite. After revealing that the invite I received was in fact sent directly from Sergant, on September 1st the Washington Times published an article entitled “Official Dishonesty.” Aron reports that Sergant called the White House the next day asking if he should resign. Sergant stated, “They did not think that what I did merited the response of the media.”

However, at the time Sergant contacted the White House, they were unaware of exactly what the conference call revealed about their arts effort. In an email marked “Importance: High” and sent on September 11^th, Kalpen Modi, Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, asked, “Do either of you have a recording or transcript of the CNCS call you did with Yosi & NEA on 8/10.” The response from two federal officials at the Corporation was that they did not have a transcript or a recording of the call:

The full transcript was released on September 21st, revealing controversial conduct by not only Yosi Sergant, but Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Engagement, and Nell Abernathy of the Corporation for National and Community Service. In reaction to the conduct on the call, including comments I highlighted by a White House employee Buffy Wicks, the following day the administration backpedaled from an earlier claim that I had “misconstrued the purpose” of the call. The administration issued new guidelines, as reported by ABC News’ Jake Tapper, “to prevent such a call from ever happening again.” The memo, written by White House Counsel Gregory Craig, provided new guidelines to all federal agencies for public outreach meetings. “We regret any comments on the call that may have been misunderstood or troubled other participants,” said White House spokesman Bill Burton in an issued statement. “We are fully committed to the NEA’s historic mission, and we will take all steps necessary to ensure that there is no further cause for questions or concerns about that commitment.” This White House statement appeared to concede that the effort was outside of the NEA’s original purpose.

To date, Buffy Wicks and Nell Abernathy still remain in their positions while Sergant has been left with Michelin stains.

Sergant seems to disagree with the White House’s actions. “I don’t believe that what I did was wrong,” Sergant stated in his interview with Aron. “I believe that what I did came at a time when all the focus was on health care reform, and [that's] where they needed to put their time and energy… could they have stood up for me if they wanted to? Sure. Am I worth the political capital? They had just lost Van Jones.”

Why would Sergant feel as if he did something wrong – he was in fact working with the White House on this arts effort.

Writer Hillel Aron and Yosi Sergant

The writer and Sergant claim that there was no political advocacy on the call. However, both the NEA and the White House have released separate statements stating that some of the language was “not appropriate” and admitting that there were “appearance issues,” respectively. During the interview Sergant stated that he never mentioned “Public Option” in his encouragement, but rather offered “blood drive” posters as an example of the type of art that he hoped would come out of the meeting. But that does not pass the smell test for what actually happened. The example that Sergant and the other federal employees highlighted during the conference call was a Rock the Vote project designed to “engage young people, in particular, on the issue of a new environmental movement.” Given that the call participants were avid Obama supporters, the art that came out of the meeting was, unsurprisingly, highly political in nature – a fact that cannot be changed by a friend attempting to rewrite history. Also omitted from the story was the fact that after resigning, one of the first projects Sergant worked on with another activist call participant was called “Public Option Please” that attacked Joe Lieberman’s wife in hopes of getting his vote for the senate’s version of health care reform.

The writer also claims that Sergant “simply copy / pasted the text from a United We Serve e-mail.” However FOIA documents clearly show that Sergant helped develop and edit the invite with Nell Abernathy, a fact that Aron’s graduate journalism professors may like to know if he is being graded on accuracy. If Aron’s article was written for his fiction professors, I retract this criticism.

I’ve stated throughout my articles that the White House was ultimately to blame for this controversial arts effort. The administration was fully aware of Sergant’s activist affinity and placed him in a position to put that skill to work. Unfortunately, political activity at a federal agency, indirectly or otherwise, is prohibited. The fact that the NEA and the White House threw Sergant under the bus is not a fact lost on the person left smelling like rubber.  When asked by Aron if he thought someone from the White House was going to stick up for him, Sergant responded, “I knew they wouldn’t.”

It would appear through these new statements, Mr. Sergant, in part, agrees with me that the White House has mud on their hands – albeit for different reasons. The only question left for Sergant is, how much longer will he let the White House affect his integrity and blame him for actions he was appointed to perform.

In the first nationally televised interview with the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts since the infamous August 10th conference call, PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown got straight to the heart of the controversy that many of us at Big Hollywood have been so diligently covering – its involvement in propaganda. How did NewsHour broach this topic, you may ask – by actually participating in propaganda.

You see, in the almost 8.5 minute interview, Chairman Rocco Landesman was asked a total of ZERO times about the NEA’s involvement in the meeting. He was asked ZERO times about the resignation of his Communications Director. He was asked ZERO times about NEA grantee Americans for the Arts’ involvement in advocating for health care reform legislation after the call.  And he was asked ZERO times about “non-partisan” organization Rock The Vote’s launch of a universal health care campaign only days after the call.

Instead, what the PBS NewsHour chose to use as a theme of the segment was Rocco Landesman’s message that the NEA’s budget is “pathetic.”

“Why do you think the arts are so undervalued in our society,” asked NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown. Landesman answered with a list of governments that support the arts with far more taxpayer dollars, concluding, “We are, among all the developed world, the weakest supporter of the arts on a public basis.”

Now PBS will claim that they did their journalistic duty by asking Landesman about his “controversial” Peoria comment. But that whole controversy was nothing compared to the use of an agency to push legislation. It is just a safe way for a journalist to claim that the hard questions were asked.

“The great thing about this particular post, whatever the limitations of the budget, is that it’s a great bully pulpit,” said Chairman Landesman. And with that, the Chairman wraps into one statement what so many limited government types see as the problem with the NEA – it gives the government an opportunity to bloviate on the taxpayer’s dime.

The segment ended with PBS’ Gwen Ifill stating, “For the record, the National Endowment for the Arts is one of the funders of the NewsHour’s arts coverage.”

Wait – What did she just say?!?

A note to Mr. Brown and Ms. Ifill: The elitism witnessed in the Peoria statement is not controversial. Using a federal agency for propaganda, however, is. With your segment, PBS’ NewsHour can be added to the list of accomplices. Don’t you think we know that by making an NEA segment about the “pathetic” funding of the agency, PBS is also making a plea to the public for funding as well?

A taxpayer funded agency uses taxpayer airwaves to broadcast a request for more taxpayer dollars – it would actually be knee-slappingly funny if it weren’t so mind-numbingly infuriating.

Enter Howard Zinn – an author, professor and American historian – who, with the help of Hollywood and the History Channel, intends to change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history. His current curriculum suggestions, like introducing three-year-olds to the lynching of African-Americans, or quizzing seven-year-olds on which Presidents owned slaves, should be a red flag to parents.

Zinn has spent a lifetime teaching college students about the evils of capitalism, the promise of Marxism, and his version of American history – a history that has, in his view, been kept from students. His controversial 1980-book The People’s History of the United States paints traditional American history as a façade – one that has grotesquely immortalized flawed leaders and is based on principles that victimize the common man. In 2004, Zinn wrote a companion book entitled Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States, which includes speeches and writings from many of the people featured in The People’s History.

These two books have now become the basis for a new documentary, entitled The People Speak, to be aired December 13th at 8pm on the History Channel. The trailer portrays the documentary as a collage of compelling one-person readings, told through the words of “ordinary” people who have struggled throughout American history against oppression. Produced by Zinn, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Chris Moore, the documentary appears to be cloaked, ironically (given Zinn’s admitted socialist agenda), in many of the traditional ideas that were behind our founding. The verdict is still out on the doc, but it is not for the books that inspired the film as well as the educational initiative associated with it.

Perhaps due to their one-sided perspective of America’s past, Zinn’s history books have largely been limited to colleges and universities, until now. In the press release announcing the broadcast, HISTORY introduced a partnership with VOICES Of A People’s History Of The United States, a nonprofit led by Zinn that bares the same name as his companion book, to help get his special brand of history into classrooms.

Delving into Zinn’s nonprofit is where this story gets interesting, and the organization’s grade school educational ambitions concerning.

VOICES’ function is to provide live performances of readings from the book Voices of a People’s History as well as educational materials to schoolteachers. The nonprofit’s site provides teachers with resources, including a teaching guide that explains how to get students excited about Zinn’s history books. Their educational materials also includes the Zinn Education Project, a resource for teaching Zinn’s perspective of American history to – drum roll please – pre-Kindergarten through high school students! Included in the curriculum for pre-K students (that’s three and four year-olds) is “Rethinking Columbus,” which counters “the myth of Columbus.” In Zinn’s view, our pre-K children “need to hear from those whose lands and rights were taken away by those who ‘discovered’ them.”

Another teaching lesson for our three-year-old students is “One Country! One Language! One Flag!” that includes teaching ideas for “examining the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the political milieu in which it was written.” The teaching plan suggests introducing our pre-K-ers to the lynching of African-Americans in the 1880s, and introducing the history of violence and discrimination against minority groups. It also proposes a discussion on an old “One Language!” chant allegedly used in classrooms up until 1942, and poses teachers with the question, “Why not lead kids in the original Pledge to the Flag, including the ‘One Language!’ chant and the Nazi-like salute, and then lead a discussion about the politics of the Pledge?”

This discussion is proposed for kids age three to seven?

Zinn also includes a youngster version of his influential book entitled A Young People’s History of the United States as an introduction to his untold American History. The publisher of the book highlights a review by the magazine Socialist Review, who proclaimed “Howard Zinn has adapted his People’s History of the United States for younger readers, but in no way do these books pull their punches. Zinn feels the younger reader is entitled to look at US history honestly.”

The background of the board of directors and advisers of VOICES’ can only be described as jaw dropping and begins to show a clear motive behind teaching this predominantly anti-American history at such a young age.

Made up of several notables including Zinn, Kerry Washington, and Marisa Tomei, all of whom make appearances in the documentary, the VOICES board also includes radicals who play a role in our public schools. Brian Jones, a New York teacher and actor, is a board member of VOICES and has also played the lead in Zinn’s play Marx in SoHo. You can see Jones speaking about Zinn and the play below, recorded for a performance in Greece, where he extols the benefits of this one man play as a tool to introduce people to Marx’s ideas:

Jones is also a regular contributor to Socialist Worker, International Socialist Review, and speaks regularly on the beneficial principles of Marxism, including this year at the 2009 Socialism Conference. He recently gave a speech on the failure of capitalism, proclaiming that “Marx is back.”

Sarah Knopp, a Los Angeles high school teacher, is also on Zinn’s Teacher Advisory Board. Like Jones, Knopp is also a regular contributor to International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, is an active member in The International Socialist Organization, and was also a speaker at the 2009 Socialist Conference. Here is Knopp speaking about the benefits of socialism, how capitalism destroys lives, and how she advocates workers taking over their factories:

Is it becoming clearer why this group might want to teach children to think poorly of the American system?

Then there is Jesse Sharkey, a schoolteacher in Chicago. Sharkey is another of Zinn’s Teacher Advisory Board Members and, completely uncharacteristic of this group, is a contributor to… Socialist Worker.

This is the group that the History Channel is working with “to develop enhanced, co-branded curriculums for a countrywide educational initiative.” If readers choose to watch The People Speak, which we at BigHollywood encourage, keep in mind the context of the documentary’s creator and the pre-K to high school curriculum that the History Channel and VOICES could possibly create given the makeup of the board members.

I am not advocating that we spare our kids the harsh truths of American history, but I am suggesting, given Zinn’s far-left political affiliation, this project is designed to breakdown our vulnerable children’s views of American principles so that they can be built back up in a socialist vision.

Zinn’s one-man play Marx in SoHo provides an example of his attempt to reestablish the socialist ideology. The play, created in 1999, places Marx in New York after bargaining with the authorities of the after-life for a chance to come back to earth to clear his name. At the end of the cold war, Zinn felt that Marxism was unfairly discredited through being anchored to the fall of the Soviet Union. Through the play, Zinn wanted “the audience to see Marx defending his ideas against attack.” Those associated with the play have described it as an attempt to reestablish Marx’s philosophic and economic outlook – a philosophy that views capitalism as corrosive to the human condition. It doesn’t take a great leap to surmise that instilling in children a pessimistic view of the American experience could make his ideas more palatable.

Zinn’s socialist philosophy has definitely made its way into the documentary, including a speech by prominent socialist Eugene Debs. In his speech, which is a prose to the ills of the capitalist system, he speaks to a court that convicted him of sedition:

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man, who does absolutely nothing…to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

The promotional videos can be viewed here:

It is not surprising to me that there are groups sympathetic to Marx’s ideas throughout our country. What is surprising is that the most powerful persuasion machine in the world (Hollywood) and the History Channel would provide Zinn such a prominent soapbox to stealthily build a case for a destructive ideology to our children, and as a result mainstream his ideas with the magic of cool music, graphics, and celebrity. Groups that push Marx’s philosophy are like a virtual organism that will not die off even when stung by the undeniable historical evidence showing human behavior makes such a system unsustainable. If we let this virtual organism into our grade schools, it will take decades for our kids to unlearn the ideology.

And if there are any doubts of the intentions of Howard Zinn’s movement, I provide a quote of his in closing. When a reporter asked Zinn, “In writing A People’s History, what were you calling for? A quiet revolution?” Zinn responded:  “A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.”

It appears that Zinn’s ilk have started the institutional phase of their agenda.

Subtlety is necessary if a federal agency intends to incite activists to take action on the hot issues of the moment. This approach is what we see when we look at the most recent documents acquired by a Freedom of Information Act  (FOIA) request of the controversial August 10th conference call.

President Obama with Former NEA Communication Director Yosi Sergant

Readers of Big Hollywood may recall an article published in late August entitled “National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?” that described an August 10th conference call organized by the White House, the NEA, and the Corporation for National and Community Service. As stated during the conference call, the goal was to bring together a group of pro-Obama artists to push the President and his agenda, with United We Serve as the first proposed effort. During the call, Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director for the NEA, encouraged artists to create art on the vehemently debated issues of health care, energy, and the environment. 

In the newly obtained documents, Nell Abernathy, a representative of The Corporation, is shown providing the handpicked moderator a list of “concrete asks” to be emailed to the call participants following the conference call. The first concrete ask in the document [document 1] included volunteering on issues that were closely related to legislation being vehemently debated nationally:

“Serve in your community. You are probably already working to improve health care or green a neighborhood. Reach out to friends, colleagues and fans to serve with you. Ask five to pledge to serve with you.”  

Health Care Reform and Cap-and-Trade legislation were both being intensely debated in Congress in August, causing town hall meetings at the time to go nuclear over the proposed health-care legislation. Democrats were widely viewed as losing the debate. Asking a stacked group of pro-Obama art activists to address these issues could only lead to policy advocacy – and it did, as we have shown (here & here).

The new documents also show that other efforts were underway. In response [document 2] to the “concrete asks” document, an artist that participated in the call sent the following (emphasis added):

“We’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming about how we can add our skillset to this effort, and here are some of our thoughts…Making prints that subtly encourage the progressive agenda. Health care, Employee free choice, immigration, energy conservation, etc.”

This is the type of propaganda art that Big Hollywood helped stop by publishing the article. The response was sent by a talented print designer (Tugboat Printshops) prior to, but on the same day that, the article was published.

In addition to this email, other documents [documents 4] show that multiple events were in the planning phase leading up to the publication of the article – however all dialogue was abruptly halted the day after its publication. The events revealed in the FOIA documents include a Los Angeles event with hip-hop and indie-rock artists, and a film-screening event with on-air promotions led by Al Gore’s Current TV.

In addition to terminating discussions on these events, the article also halted the NEA’s involvement in another conference call scheduled for August 27th and moderated by Americans for the Arts, a NEA grant recipient. In an email [document 3] dated August 26th, Sergant stated:

“in light of the current situation…I am reviewing the current situation with my team and may or may not be able to participate in the upcoming [United We Serve] call. I will let you know shortly.”

The NEA ultimately did not participate on the conference call due to the article, a fact that was correctly guessed by Lee Rosenbaum, a participant on the August 27th call. One can only wonder how different that call may have been had the NEA participated.

Ultimately Sergant was forced to resign from his post at the NEA and the White House issued conduct guidelines to address the “appearance” issues of the call. However the White House and the NEA both claimed that no laws were violated in this effort.

The obvious question is – if the NEA, the Corporation, and the White House weren’t doing anything wrong, why did this activity abruptly stop?

The Health Reform Video Challenge, launched by Obama’s Organizing for America in September, is a contest “to make the best 30-second ad showing why the President’s plan for reform is so critical.” The winning video, selected by a list of Hollywood elites and Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, will be the basis for a new television ad that will air across the country delivering a clear message to viewers – children will die if health care reform is not passed. The secondary message is only one Defcon level lower on the fear-o-meter – the parents of sick or injured children will go bankrupt or lose their houses for even the simplest of injuries.

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Using children to pluck at the heartstrings of the electorate and further a political agenda is nothing new, but it shifts into the land of Disgustopia when our young are exploited to distort the truth or spread outright falsehoods. The winning video opens with a young boy stating, “A year from now I’ll break my leg and my parents will have to sell our house because we couldn’t afford health care.”

This statement is designed to instill broad fear and disseminate the idea that anyone, even a family faced with the common injury of a broken leg, is susceptible to being thrust from their homes as a consequence of being uninsured. The odds of needing to sell your home to pay for the cost of a broken leg are so remote that it borders on preposterous to use it as an example of why we need reform. House closing costs in almost every scenario would exceed the medical bill, yet this is the video that the President’s organization has selected to justify the need for reform. It’s much easier to sell health care reform if our system is so fractured that a broken leg can expel a family out from under the safety of their roof.

The power of fear to induce submission is one that few can avoid. In researching the twenty finalists for this piece I even found myself second-guessing my position on the health care reform debate. Such is the power of good propaganda.

We have an innate affinity towards altruism. It is a reality of the human condition that Big Government knows and exploits, without conscience, if the means justify its ends. Fear is Big Gov’s most useful tool for expansion. The mounting growth of entitlement programs provides clear evidence of our inability to tame this altruistic affinity.

The power of using children as propaganda tools can also be seen during the last “historic” health care reform debated in our country, a case study that also provides a clear example of the phenomenon of “mission creep” that the current reform bill will surely experience in the long run.

In the wake of their failed attempt to overhaul the health care system in 1993, the Clinton Administration looked for a smaller, targeted initiative that could get bipartisan support. After examining several options in separate efforts, both the First Lady Hillary Clinton and Senator Ted Kennedy came to the conclusion that expanding health care insurance to children of the “working poor” would be the most politically popular route. This insight gave rise to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, better known as SCHIP.

SCHIP was signed into law by President Clinton in August of 1997 with the goal of insuring up to 5 million kids whose parents made too much money for Medicaid but could still not afford health insurance. After the first year of the program nearly 1 million children were enrolled.

Flash forward to January of 2009. “Either you are for kids or not for kids,” was the rallying cry of Democratic Senator Max Baucus in the push to expand funding of SCHIP. Similar rhetoric brought 40 House and 9 Senate Republicans over to the majority, and the Democratic controlled Congress presented to President Obama a bill that increased SCHIP funding by over $30 billion – in essence doubling the budget of the program.

SCHIP, which was intended to provide health insurance to the 5 million children of the “working poor”, has the ring of a morally sound program. An argument using children as the beneficiaries is a powerful message that few politicians can counter. But here’s the kicker, the Obama Administration’s SCHIP funding expanded eligibility to children in families earning $84,800 – that’s almost 400% of the poverty income level for a family of four. In some states families with incomes over $100,000 become eligible due to “income disregards” that allow for deductions such as rent, mortgages, and heating bills among others.

The expansion also has the goal of insuring 11 million children by the year 2013. That is over double the goal of the initial bill. Its also been argued by Republican lawmakers that over half of the newly eligible children already have insurance, which means they will be driven away from private insurance into the government sponsored program, piling on more of a burden to our system. That is the textbook definition of mission creep, a program’s expanding well beyond its original intent.

Here’s the point that we must understand – we cannot let propaganda prey on man’s primitive altruistic instinct in such a way that we burden our system to the point of collapse. Our entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, already account for more than 40% of federal spending! If we keep on the path of endless entitlement expansion we will see a depression the likes of which we have never seen before. That is not a play on the emotion of fear – just an unavoidable law of nature.

Yes we need change to our health care system. The costs of private plans are growing and there are people falling through the cracks due to catastrophic ailments that are of no fault of their own. We need targeted reform that tackles these problems. But what we don’t need is President endorsed propaganda that exploits children and is designed to scare the electorate into submission with distorted information.

Next week NBC is entering their “Green Week” of programming, infusing environmental messages across many of their prime-time shows. But the campaign does not only include entertainment programs – the eco-messaging will also be spread through NBC News’ Nightly News, Meet the Press, and the Today Show.

My question for the NBC News organization is this – will you be discussing the biggest global warming story of the year?

Early this year a study from Oregon State University, entitled Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals, contained the single biggest decision that anyone could make to dramatically lower their carbon footprint. And that decision? Have fewer kids.

The results of the report are actually mind boggling for anyone somewhat informed on environmental policy. The study investigates how the reproductive choices of an individual affects their “carbon legacy”, or said differently, the CO2 emissions attributable to a person’s offspring. What they found was that a US citizen’s decision of having a child adds 5.7 times the expected CO2 emissions for that citizen. Yes, 5.7 times!! This is due to the domino effect of your kids having kids, which have kids, and so on. 

An even more astounding aspect of the report was a comparison of the addition of two children to, say, the standard practices that lower your carbon footprint. For example, if a woman adopted all of the six eco-friendly behaviors highlighted in the report, she would reduce her carbon footprint by 486 tons of CO2 over her lifetime. But if she were to have two children, this would eventually add nearly 40 times that amount of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere.

The decision of having fewer children decreases the carbon legacy of an individual by a staggering amount and is by far the single biggest decision an individual can make to affect the environment. This finding cannot be overstated. So it begs the question, why hasn’t the report affected global warming legislation?

As Al Gore has stated, “Our world faces a true planetary emergency.” If his apocalyptic vision is true, why has not one piece of legislation adopted an incentive for individuals to have fewer children?

I can think of only one possible answer…there is no emergency.

Around the time my beautiful daughter was born just a few years ago I noticed the increase in “stuff” attributed to her that went into our garbage on a daily basis. This rather obvious phenomenon sparked a question in my head that I shared with an eco-activist working on a “green” project of mine. “Why doesn’t the green movement encourage people to have less children as a solution to this global emergency,” I asked. “Well, we don’t talk about that because it isn’t politically correct,” he responded.

It was this answer, by someone spreading the message of apocalypse, that started my gradual transformation away from the alarmist position of global warming.

Having “fewer children” is not a policy that I am advocating here. I use it merely as a litmus test to the alarmist’s urgency. If China is any example, the “one-child” mandate has horrific social consequences. However, if we truly face the biggest crises we’ve ever encountered, the global warming proponents would surely have the political will to pass controversial legislation. Political correctness should not even remotely be the first concern for this group. In fact, it would hardly be considered controversial if the consequences were actually between life and extinction.

As recently as this past Monday, Senator John Kerry penned a Huffington Post article that read (emphasis added):

Now it’s time for a new generation of Americans to get in motion – because the very survival of our planet depends on them. Now is the time for young people who learned to flex their political muscle last November to shift into high-gear and get Washington to take on our historic legislation to combat global climate change.

For those that feel that our world will literally cease to exist, the findings in this report should have been viewed as the silver bullet to stop or, at the very least, dramatically slow the effects of global warming. But it wasn’t.

Why? Because companies like GE, the parent company of NBC News, doesn’t make a dime from a “solution” such as the one presented in the report. And Big Government can’t tax such a solution either. But both benefit from the “historic” cap-and-trade legislation pushed by Senator Kerry and the like. And if there is no emergency, why not take the money route.

Now of course there are sincere people that have a real concern for our environment and man-made pollution. I know many of them and include myself in that mainstream group. They create low toxicity products, encourage recycling and reuse, and are producing higher fuel efficient vehicles each year. We really do need to pay attention to our natural resources and protect against harmful effects on the environment. But after several years of working in the green movement, I’ve come to a rather cynical, yet I believe accurate, conclusion about global warming alarmism.

And that conclusion – global warming alarmism is a weapon, used by those wielding it, for personal gain.

Few would be surprised that MSNBC has aligned itself with this administration’s climate change legislation. But for non-opinion news organizations, studies like the “carbon legacy” report should provide ample fodder for questioning alarmist environmental policy. It shows just how far the hand of Big Green has reached into our lives when both NBC News and the heralded Meet The Press willfully agree to promote global warming legislation rather than turn a critical eye to alarmism.

Chairman Landesman’s claim that Yosi Sergant, the former NEA Communications Director, acted “unilaterally” on the controversial August 10th conference call is not only beginning to erode, but new documents obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act show that another federal employee thought the arts effort was entering murky legal waters.

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In an email dated July 30, 2009, Nellie Abernathy, a representative of the federal program United We Serve, sent an email to Sergant to inquire of his interest in attending a meeting regarding 9/11 events – the culmination day of the United We Serve campaign. In the email Abernathy states (emphasis added):

“Just got off the phone with [redacted]. They’re interested in helping produce some 9/11 events and will be in DC next week. Any chance you could join us for a meeting Tuesday morning? Or does this fall into that sketchy grey we might get arrested area?”

Sergant responded, “I’d love to.”

The subject of the email correspondence was entitled “rock the vote,” which presumably should have been redacted (blacked out) in the subject line given that the organization is a non-government group and the other subject lines in the email chain were redacted.

Readers following this story may recall that Rock the Vote was a presenter on the controversial August 10th conference call that encouraged an arts group that worked on Obama’s election campaign to create art on issues that were being vehemently debated nationally; including health care, energy, and the environment. As a presenter Bates stated the following, “We just wanted to give you one quick tangible example of things that can be done.” Bates then went on to explain how Rock the Vote was considering having an artist create an art installation from urban waste to engage young people “on the issue of a new environmental movement.”

Rock the Vote is a non-profit voter registration organization that is frequently involved in partisan political activity – a conflict that Abernathy appears to address in her email correspondence with Sergant. Eleven days after the August 10th conference call, Rock the Vote announced a health care design competition. The contest announcement read:

“We can’t stand by and listen to lies and deceit coming from those who are against reforming a broken system…We need designs that tell the country YES WE CARE! Young people demand health care now.”

The new FOIA documents also show that additional federal employees were aware of this arts effort, including another NEA employee by the name of Elizabeth Stark. Email correspondence between Abernathy, Sergant, and Stark show that a United We Serve meeting was arranged by Stark for Sergant.

Philip Martin, an outreach coordinator for United We Serve, also appears in the FOIA documents, showing that he was aware of Sergant’s efforts and was working with him on another arts outreach program in Philadelphia. The federal employees that were aware of this arts effort continue to grow and now include Yosi Sergant (NEA), Elizabeth Stark (NEA), Nellie Abernathy (United We Serve), Philip Martin (United We Serve), Buffy Wicks (White House Office of Public Engagement), and Kalpen Modi (White House Office of Public Engagement).

Chairman Landesman’s claim that Sergant acted “unilaterally” is becoming harder to swallow.

On August 28th, Josh Miller of Foxnews.com reported “Siobhan Dugan, a spokeswoman for [The Corporation for National and Community Service], said the call was organized by an ‘individual interested’ in the group…”

This statement does not correspond with the facts.

The FOIA documents clearly show that on July 29th at 3:39pm, Nell Abernathy, a representative of The Corporation, emailed Yosi Sergant, former Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts, indicating that she was the person behind the content of the meeting when she stated (emphasis added):

Thanks for chatting yesterday – I’m attaching a few docs and running through what I think are my next steps.

She goes on to discuss the “Art event coordination” and provides an invite and draft of the meeting agenda to Sergant. Abernathy also states, “What is a reasonable time frame for getting together a list and recruiting some of your friends to lead?” This is in direct contradiction to the above claim by Siobhan Dugan of The Corporation.

The FOIA documents also indicate that Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, was the point person at the White House for this project.  This is seen in an email from Kalpen Modi, formerly Kal Penn of Kumar fame and now Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. When asked by Sergant to sit in on the August 10th meeting, Modi replied, “I thought you’d said Buffy was the [Office of Public Engagement] point person…” This supports the claim that Wicks was involved in the offline discussions of this arts effort.

The intentions of the meeting were made clear by another Sergant email correspondence. While inviting one of the participants, Sergant stated:

This call is for the people who can come up with a good idea and get it done. Little and big. They are putting together a network of the ‘producers & promoters’ out there like you and me… to turn on to activate on arts issues.

Organizing the art community so that they could be activated to address issues was the point of this effort. This was stated during the August 10th conference call and coincides with previous comments made by the White House including Buffy Wicks in a May 12th White House Briefing. Per the Briefing Notes:

She asked briefing participants to think through how their networks and organizations can participate in areas such as the arts in education, healthcare and preventative care, energy and environment, or economic opportunity.

This administration intends to make an unprecedented shift in its relationship with the arts, and that shift is to use the arts to persuade. We’ve seen this in the Entertainment Industry Foundation memo that encourage TV networks to incorporate the issues of health, energy, and the environment into their show story plots, as well as the August 10th conference call and May 12th White House Briefing.

Has the White House, The Corporation, or the National Endowment for the Arts backed off from this approach due to this controversy?

No.

Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently stated during his keynote speech at the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference:

Whatever might be said on television, radio or blog sites, I have no intention of walking away from the compelling themes of this presidency and a historic opportunity in arts policy.

A wise man recently told me, “There is no better way to show you’ve done nothing wrong than to continue doing what you are doing.” It appears that Mr. Landesman intends to put this statement to the test.

Big Hollywood will continue to investigate this arts effort.

On Friday, during the “CNN Newsroom” hour, the network broadcast a story of the White House’s use of Hollywood to promote national service. Your humble Big Hollywood contributor was interviewed for this “news” segment. 

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Their conclusion: 1) promoting volunteerism is a pretty benign message, and 2) Presidents throughout history have also promoted volunteerism so this White House Hollywood effort is nothing new. 

After coming to these two conclusions, the host Rick Sanchez asked the reporter Brooke Anderson, “What is the threshold then…at what point do we get past that slippery slope when now we’re going to be taking orders from the Commander-in-Chief and we in Hollywood have to be the ones that deliver that order?” 

Anderson responded: “Glenn Beck compared it to Mao’s Communist China, so some do feel it has already slid on that slippery slope and gotten past the threshold. But I want to mention Rick that plenty of past American Presidents have encouraged community service and volunteerism.” Anderson then goes on to give examples of both Bush 41 and Bush 43 promoting service. 

The reporters, however, failed to highlight key information that I provided which takes this national service campaign out of the “benign” category. 

When I was interviewed by CNN, I too made the point that promoting volunteerism is a noble effort that has been undertaken by Presidents throughout history. However, when pressed by the reporter on the “threshold” question, I provided clear examples as to why Big Hollywood was troubled by the White House’s national service campaign. 

First, we were concerned that the White House, through the Entertainment Industry Foundation, was asking TV shows to infuse specific issues, including health, energy, and the environment, into their show story plots at a time when these issues are being vehemently debated nationally. 

At no time throughout the report did CNN make any mention of the EIF memo encouraging TV shows to “organically” include these issues into their show story plots. The inclusion of these issues within the memo was a very important fact and a big reason why we even decided to discuss our concerns about this volunteerism effort. We even gave CNN the example of “The New Adventures of Old Christine” a show that signed on to the EIF volunteerism campaign, which was an entire episode devoted to advocating for universal health insurance. Not including this policy advocacy example and the issues mentioned in the memo was irresponsible at best. 

The second concern that was mentioned during my interview was the partisan nature of the White House’s volunteerism effort. During the interview I mentioned that if you search the term “Republican” on Serve.gov, you receive a paltry 2 pages of opportunities, many of which are Democrat cause opportunities that have the word Republican somewhere in the text. However, if you search “Democrat” you receive 20 pages of opportunities, the maximum number of pages that will display for any search term (meaning there are probably many more than 20 pages). Any balanced reporting on the White House’s volunteerism effort would have shown that egregious disparity. 

They also did not include additional information tying the government to this iParticipate campaign. 

In the segment, CNN provided an unattributed statement from the White House as follows: “The iParticipate program is being run independently of the administration and isn’t asking Americans to participate in any one activity.” 

If iParticipate is run independently of the administration, how does the White House know what it is and is not asking of Americans? 

When I was asked by CNN to provide information linking the government to the iParticipate campaign, I gave them no shortage of connections. I provided the video of the First Lady announcing the iParticipate campaign, which they showed, but I also provided a link on Serve.gov (a government site) that has an entire section devoted to how to pitch iParticipate to the media as well as links to press releases (here and here) that indicated that the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency in charge of promoting national service, worked with the EIF on this campaign. The memo itself references President Obama’s call to service in the first sentence and asked the TV networks to address the same issues that the administration highlighted as the primary issues for the recovery effort. 

Did CNN follow up with the White House or the EIF, who also denied a collaborative effort, with any of the above evidence that shows the government’s role? If they did, it wasn’t included in the segment. 

Yes Mr. Sanchez and Ms. Anderson, promoting volunteerism is a pretty benign message that has been undertaken by Presidents of both parties. But asking the TV networks to infuse specific issues into their show story plots – issues that are being debated vehemently nationally – is not a benign activity. The EIF memo shows this specific encouragement and we have given the links tying this effort to our government. You showed no evidence of a connection between past government themed films that you gave viewers, yet you held them up as if they were the same as this effort. By not providing the above information you did not give the full story to your viewers. 

Lately, there has been much discussion of a certain network’s “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” I think it is fair to say that both Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck’s shows are completely in the open with their perspective. The same cannot be said regarding this CNN “Newsroom” report.

Well, when our government uses “service” as a mechanism to keep their volunteers active in government, it is not so noble. 

I claimed last week that the White House Office of Public Engagement’s rationale for promoting service was to keep Obama’s campaign volunteers active. I also claimed that the White House was using Serve.gov to manage those volunteers and as a mechanism to acquire new volunteers for their use. To support that claim I referenced a statement from Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, on the now infamous August 10th conference call. Wicks explained to the call participants, an arts group that worked on Obama’s 2008 election campaign, the White House’s rationale for using service: 

“…part of my role [at the White House] is working on service, and so when we were thinking about how do we take a lot of this energy that’s out there, how do we translate folks who have just been engaged in electoral politics and engage them in really the process of governing, of being part of this administration in a little bit of a different way because politics is one thing and governing is something totally separate, we really saw service as the platform by which we can do that.” 

Buffy Wicks didn’t state that national recovery was the rationale for encouraging service. She conveyed that the White House was interested in transitioning partisans from the election cycle into the administration, and using “service” as the mechanism for that transition. 

Glenn Beck picked up on the significance of this statement last night, but to further support this claim I went to Serve.gov and did a search for “Democrat.” What I found was 20 pages of volunteering opportunities that were related to Democratic causes (check here). There are probably far more than 20 pages of listings, however that is the maximum that any search term will display. In contrast, the search term “Republican” returns a paltry 2 pages, of which many are still Democratic cause listings that contain the word “Republican” somewhere in the description. 

If Serve.gov were a registered voter, my money would be on it wearing a donkey pin.