Daily Archives: May 2, 2017

Contrary to claims from President Trump and Fox News, N.E.A. grants also help rural, not-New York, not-wealthy, Trump-friendly districts.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY CLARK SCOTT / ALABAMA DANCE FESTIVAL

Last autumn, I had a mischievous fantasy that I would fudge my address as Bartley, Nebraska, or Piedmont, South Dakota, on some grant applications in the hope of boosting my odds for success. If every other writer applying to the Guggenheim or the National Endowment for the Arts lives in Brooklyn, or Silver Lake, wouldnt a rural Zip Code give my application a glimmer of geographic diversity? I offer this small confession because many writers, painters, musicians, and art teachers, suffering the proverbial Stockholm syndrome, have internalized the Republican dogma that established artists in coastal cities are hoarding public and private art funds, in a self-serving parochial loop.

The scholar-in-residence at Fox News, Tucker Carlson, spouts this widespread view. On a recent episode of his eponymous show, Carlson insisted that government agencies like the N.E.A. are welfare for rich, liberal lites, and wondered why taxpayers are subsidizing entertainment for rich people. And Paul Ryan has claimed that the art generated by N.E.A. grants is generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.

As has been widely reported, Trumps 2018 budget, America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again, would eliminate the N.E.A. and three other national cultural agencies: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The combined budgets of these operations make up a negligible part of the total budget: 0.02 per cent. If you are a rich, litist New Yorker posing as a family-values, heartland-loving, frugal populist, however, attacking the N.E.A. seems like just the right thing to do.

Trumps budget director recently punctuated this thinking for reporters. I put myself in the shoes of that steelworker in Ohio, the coal minerthe coal-mining family in West Virginia. The mother of two in Detroit, Mick Mulvaney said, and Im saying, O.K., I have to go ask these folks for money and I have to tell them where Im going to spend it. Can I really go to those folks, look them in the eye, and say, Look, I want to take money from you and I want to give it to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?

Mulvaney might want to ask his former constituents what they think of government arts money. Before Trump appointed him, Mulvaney represented South Carolinas Fifth Congressional District. Trump won this mostly rural and agricultural district by a margin of eighteen percentage points. Grants awarded to that district during Mulvaneys tenure sound rather necessary and impressive. The City of Rock Hill, population 64,555, was awarded fifty thousand dollars to incorporate locally inspired art, design, and installation in public infrastructure projects. Newberry College received nine thousand dollars so that middle- and high-school band students could attend intensive clinics led by college faculty. And the Arts Councils of Rock Hill and York Counties garnered ten thousand dollars for a touring performing-arts series. Theres more, but you get the idea.

In addition to broadsides coming from the right, some artists harbor a cool ambivalence for the N.E.A., too. If you were a Pakistani-American experimental filmmaker, say, completing a video exhibition pondering the digital optics of military surveillance and the U.S. drone program, would you necessarily want the N.E.A.s resources or imprimatur for your work? If you were a Latina painter from the Bronx, completing a triptych illustrating the boom of federal prison construction and mass incarceration, would you necessarily want the N.E.A.s stamp? But to say that the N.E.A. can be a disadvantage for more politicized artists is not to say that the agency is litist and not worth saving. The Alabama Blues project, which preserves blues as a musical art form through education, has been a recurrent N.E.A. grant recipient, much like the Alabama Dance Festival, which features residencies and performances by many troupes across the South, including Contra-Tiempo, a Latino dance theatre company. And the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project, also in Mulvaneys red district, received fifty thousand dollars last year to help Catawba Indian tribal artisans.

Killing the N.E.A. has, of course, long been a cause clbre for so-called budget hawks and social conservatives. But contrary to claims from Trump and Fox News, and to the insecurities of artists, the N.E.A. is not a federal spigot for decadent city lites. Rather, its grant-making effectively spans the country and helps rural, not-New York, not-wealthy, Trump-friendly districts. Despite the decades-long attempts on the right to paint the N.E.A. as rarefied snobbery welching off the state, forty per cent of N.E.A. activity happens in high-poverty areas. Thirty-six per cent of its institutional grants help groups working with disadvantaged populations. And a third of grants serve low-income audiences. The N.E.A. also helps military veterans, a decidedly non-urban lite population. The agency recently added four clinical sites to its existing seven; these sites provide creative-arts therapies for service members, veterans, and families dealing with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

On a per-person, proportional basis, smaller and more rural states, such as Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska, reap bigger benefits from N.E.A. funding than blue-state metropolises. Many rural, poorer areas would be the hardest hit by Trumps elimination of government arts programs. Mind you, that such a disproportionate number of N.E.A. grants per capita get rewarded in Trump-voting districts does not render the N.E.A. worthierof saving; the fact merely points to the conservatives demagoguery and indifference toward government-related successes in their own back yards. The N.E.A. enlivens this countrys theatres, music houses, libraries, veteran halls, and more. While Trump promises to resuscitate our physical infrastructureroads, airports, and bridgeshe angles to gut our cultural infrastructure, by nixing public arts programs.

The N.E.A. was saved in the budget agreement hammered out in Congress this week. But the arts were not on a budget chopping block as a matter of money, of course, but as a matter of faux populism, and as the next iteration of the culture wars. The proposed arts cuts are not an austerity measure; theyre a know-nothing strategy of dominance to undercut humanists, researchers, writers, artists, a thinking public. Removing government support from the arts belongs on a frightening logical continuum of perpetrating disinformation and fake news. The lifelong excuses offered by Trumps circle to cut funding for the arts vex a thinking mind. Before becoming Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions, as the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, fired off a letter explaining why he was preparing to slash the budget of the N.E.H., the sister institution ofthe N.E.A. How dare it, Sessions complained, fund the Bridging Cultures program, which distributes books related to Islam to over 900 libraries across the United States. The incensed senator attacked the appropriateness of N.E.H grants tackling big questions that he dismissed. But they are just the questions that anyone living in America, red state or blue, could benefit to ponder. What is belief? What is the meaning of life? Why are bad people bad? and Why do we study the past?

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The NEA Really Isn't Welfare for Rich, Liberal lites - The New Yorker

Im for making things better for everyone. And the main focus of my work is improving the lives of low-income Americans.

So why do I love the tax reform package President Trump has proposed?

Shouldnt my sympathies be with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who says these tax cuts makes life easier for the wealthy and special interests and harder for middle class and lower income Americans?

The answer is, I have been watching liberals for 25 years claim they are for the poor and then enact policies that hurt them.

Liberals think that you help Peter by taking from Paul. I think you help both Peter and Paul by creating the best possible conditions for opportunity for both of them.

How do you create the best possible conditions for opportunity for both Peter and Paul? Freedom.

Tons of data and studies show that countries that have the most economic freedom good laws that protect life and property, low taxes, nonintrusive regulation, limited government are the most prosperous. And even the poorest in these countries are far better off than the poorest in countries without economic freedom.

You dont need a Ph.D. in economics to understand that a country that punishes success is going to be less wealthy than a country that rewards it.

The last eight years under liberal control have been a disaster economically. From 1950 until 2000, on average the U.S. economy grew at 3.5 percent per year. Since 2008, it has grown barely 2 percent per year.

What does this mean? Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane points out that average American income, adjusted for inflation, grew from $16,000 in 1952 to $50,000 in 2008. If the economy over this period grew at 2 percent instead of 3.5 percent, average income in 2008 would have been $23,000 instead of $50,000.

Why the great economic slowdown after 2008? No, not because there was a recession when President Obama took over. Generally, economic recoveries have faster than usual growth, not slower. The great slowdown was because of the explosion of government, thanks to liberals. Explosion of spending, explosion of debt, explosion of regulations, explosion of taxation.

Economies, like people, thrive when they can breath, not when they are being strangled.

Why are liberals so uncomfortable with freedom? Why do they think the world needs them to control everybodys lives?

Maybe theyre just really confused. Maybe they love the power they get. Maybe, because most liberals dont accept traditional religious values, they think that they are the Creator of the Universe.

According to the Tax Foundation, the United States has the third-highest corporate tax rate out of 173 nations. Trump wants to cut the U.S. corporate tax from 35 percent to 15 percent. The result is simple. More business will come back to the U.S. and fewer will go abroad. More jobs here. Isnt that the idea?

Id like to see a business tax rate of zero in low-income urban areas.

In 2013, Obama did what liberals claim needs to be done. Tax the rich. Taxes were raised on the highest-income earners, and another new tax was levied on investment income of the highest-income earners. This was supposed to bring in $650 billion over 10 years in tax revenue. Instead, because of slower economic growth, estimates are, according to former Sen. Phil Gramm, that revenues will be five times lower than this.

Free people create and produce. Politicians and bureaucrats produce hot air.

Does Schumer really want to help the poor do better under freedom? I invite him to stop sending federal money to Planned Parenthood abortion clinics and to start talking about the importance of family and traditional values that the welfare state has wiped out in inner cities.

The Trump plan to cut business and personal taxes is great for Americans of all backgrounds.

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THE POWER TO DESTROY - WND.com

An opposition filibuster, launched in response to the Liberal government's moves on parliamentary reform, ended in profanity on Tuesday as Conservative MP Scott Reid loudly objected to the Liberal chairman's decision to adjourn a meeting of the procedure and House affairs committee.

The outburst, and Reid's pursuit of Liberal MP Larry Bagnell, the chair of the committee, after the meeting, was captured by House of Commons cameras.

WARNING GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: Conservative MP outraged after Liberal chair adjourns committee meeting1:11

Conservatives and New Democrats have been filibustering the committee's proceedings since March.

But the motion that was being stymiedLiberal MP Scott Simms' attempt to have the committee study the government's reform proposalsis set to be withdrawn in light of the Liberal government's decision to proceed through other means. The committee will also soon be charged with studying a complaint by two Conservative MPs that they were recently prevented by security officers on Parliament Hill from getting to a vote in the House.

Bagnell told reporters on Wednesday that "events had sort of surpassed our discussion on that motion" and so he adjourned the scheduled meeting.

"So I adjourned and Mr. Reid was not happy," Bagnell said. "He had a bit of an outburst about being unhappy."

Bagnell on Reid's outburst at House Affairs committee1:30

On Twitter, Reid argued that Bagnell's move to adjourn contradicted his previous handling of the committee.

"This is the most grotesque abuse of a chairman's authority I've seen, in 16 years around this place," Reid tweeted.

Meanwhile, opposition MPs were separately unhappy at the government's move to end debate in the House about the actions of Hill security.

That debate, in different iterations, has tied up the House for parts of five days this month. The Liberals seemed, at one point, to have ended the debate with a procedural manoeuvre, only for the Speaker to rule that move was a matter of privilege, causing the debate to restart.

Once debate is concluded on Wednesday, the matter will be sent to Bagnell's committee for further study.

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Opposition filibuster ends in profanity as Liberal chair adjourns meeting - CBC.ca

Ive lost count of the articles Ive read about Hulus adaptation of Margaret Atwoods 1985 novel The Handmaids Tale that used the word timely. Timely, that is, in the sense of the presidency of Donald Trump. Heres just a short list of print and online outlets where the T-word appears in connection with the re-creation of Atwoods fictional America turned into a grim theocracy called Gilead that treats women like breeding cattle: the Hollywood Reporter, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Mother Jones, Harpers Bazaar, the Daily Beast, Bustle, NPR, and CNN. The 77-year-old Atwood herself chimed in, telling the Los Angeles Times Patt Morrison: Were no longer making fiction were making a documentary.

The idea, in these mostly liberal media outlets, seems to be that under President Trump, America has become or will become terrifyingly soon a militant Bible-based patriarchy (hello Texas, hello Mike Pence) in which women have no rights, especially no reproductive rights, and are divided into rigidly stratified social classes whose very names give their status away: privileged, churchy Wives at the top, Econowives in the lower social orders, and cook-and-bottle-washer Marthas who do the housework for the Wives and their powerful husbands, the Commanders.

At the very bottom are Handmaids, political pariahs (wrong ideas, such as feminism) who become the literal property of the top-dog men and are forced to bear their children. (The Wives suffer from environmental pollution-related fertility problems.) As the New Republics Sarah Jones, one of the timely crowd, explains, Of course, we dont divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives; we call them the help, surrogates, the working class, and the one percent.

At first I scoffed. There couldnt be any more unlikely a theocrat than Trump, what with his misquotes from the Bible and speculation that he hasnt been in a church more than twice since the inauguration. But then I realized that the liberal paranoiacs were right. Except not in the way they think. Instead of seeing Atwoods fictional Gilead as a near-future militant fundamentalist Christian elite dystopia, we should see it as the mostly secularist elite dystopia we live in right now.

Take those elite-class Wives. Liberals typically assume the 1% consists of striped-pants tycoons off the Monopoly board who reliably vote Republican and want to cram retrograde religious ideas down peoples throats. In fact, as social scientists (Charles Murray in Coming Apart) and political analysts (Michael Barone, writing recently for the Capital Research Center) have observed, its the Democratic Party thats the party of the 1%: the tech and finance billionaires, the media and entertainment moguls who cluster in expensive ZIP Codes around metropolitan Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington.

Those folks arent known for their church-going, and they vote in favor of liberal social and economic causes from abortion and immigration rights to sustainable energy to higher taxes. They contribute heavily to political campaign, and with their upper-middle-class epigones they run the culture, deciding who gets banned on Twitter, which kinds of diversity are allowed on campuses, and what television programs well be allowed to see. Todays overclass Wives typically hold Ivy League degrees, lean in to high-status careers, and stand with Planned Parenthood.

We also have a rigidly defined caste of Marthas (and Marthos, their male counterparts), because the Wives and their high-earning husbands need them to mop their floors, care for their children, mow their lawns and trim their trees, all for bargain-basement wages. And so we have the irony of Malibu declaring itself a sanctuary city out of solidarity with its servant class, many of whom are in the country illegally, who cant afford to live anywhere near their wealthy and high-minded masters and mistresses.

Finally, the Handmaids. As in the fictional Gilead, real-life elite-class Wives have something of a fertility problem, although its related not to environmental degradation but delayed marriages and childbearing attempts of women who pursue high-power careers. Thanks to 30 years of advances in egg-transfer technology since Atwood published her novel, todays gestational surrogates dont have to get into embarrassing threesome sexual positions with the Commanders and their Wives in order to do their jobs. And they tend to be drawn not from the ranks of political dissidents, but from the financially strapped Econowife class (military bases are common surrogate-recruiting centers) who are willing to put up with a years worth of uncomfortable hormone treatments and possible pregnancy problems for the $40,000 or so that they receive.

Still, as in Gilead, there is definitely a class of female pariahs on whom the elites heap condescension, contempt and, when they can, punishment for holding views at variance with what the elites deem correct. Theyre not called Handmaids, of course. Theyre called Deplorables. Try telling the other people in your book club that you sent a check to the Donalds campaign. Or, if you need a misogyny fix, search for the phrase women who voted for Trump on Twitter. Read up on what theyre saying about Kellyanne Conway at Jezebel. Or Ann Coulter just about anywhere. Those ugly white bonnets the Handmaids of Gilead are required to wear in the Hulu miniseries look downright benign by comparison.

Yes, The Handmaids Tale is a documentary, all right. It just doesnt happen to be the documentary that the liberals think it is.

Washington-based Charlotte Allen writes about social and cultural issues.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

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Living 'The Handmaid's Tale' courtesy of the secular liberal elites of LA - Los Angeles Times

ByAmy Scott

May 02, 2017 | 6:46 AM

A few dozen professors are packed into a lecture hall at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Theyre here from schools all over the country to talk about how to bring the critical thinking and creativity associated with the liberal arts into their business programs.

Traditional business programs really tend to be taught from a single standpoint, usually a managerial standpoint, said Jeffrey Nesteruk, a professor of legal studies at Franklin & Marshall. What we strive to do is to teach these same subjects but from multiple standpoints.

Nesteruk is leading research to help colleges from the University of Pennsylvania to Mount Holyoke transform the traditional model of a business major.

So for instance in finance, the model says the role of the firm is the maximization of shareholder wealth, he said.

In a typical finance class, you might accept that at face value and move on to figuring out how firms maximize wealth. Not at F&M.

We linger over that assumption, he said. Why is that the purpose of the firm? Are there different purposes? What is served if you think of the firm that way? What is taken away?

And how's this for breaking the mold? An entrepreneurship professor has teamed up with an improvisational dance instructor to teach a course on creativity. Another class combines literature and sustainable food production.

Business is the most popular undergraduate major in the country, but employers often complain that todays graduates dont have enough critical thinking, writing, and communication skills the sort of skills you might develop by studying, say, literature or history.

The Business and Society Program of the Aspen Institute co-sponsored the workshop. The goal isnt only to produce more employable graduates, said associate director Claire Preisser, but more responsible business leaders.

One way we try to achieve that is by influencing what new and future business leaders learn in their formal education, she said.

Students also want their careers to have meaning and social impact, said Kendy Hess, an associate professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, and theyre increasingly discontent with government as the main driver of social change.

So people who want to fix things are more and more drawn to business as the place where you can get things done, she said.

At a time when all colleges are under pressure to launch their graduates into productive careers, business has a lot to offer the liberal arts, too, said Hess.

At the very least, internships and experiences and a chance to take all of this knowledge and information and understanding and dialogue, and try to use it, she said.

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College business programs look to the liberal arts model - Marketplace - Marketplace.org

United Steelworkers International President Leo Gerard speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016, to announce an effort to track jobs leaving the U.S. The international president of the United Steelworkers Union says claims by British Columbia Liberal Leader Christy Clark that he supports U.S. tariffs on Canadian softwood are lies. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Evan Vucci

VANCOUVER The international president of the United Steelworkers Union says claims by British Columbia Liberal Leader Christy Clark that he supports U.S. tariffs on Canadian softwood are lies.

Leo Gerard says his members know he's been fighting for them on both sides of the border.

Gerard says he questions if Clark really wants to protect B.C. jobs and calls her accusations dishonest and hypocritical.

He says Clark collected an extra $50,000 salary from the Liberal party and the money was coming from contributions made by the same timber companies that are pushing for a tariff on Canadian exports.

Gerard says he has no plans to come to B.C. before next Tuesday's election to campaign for the New Democrats because he believes forestry workers won't believe the Liberal attacks.

In an open letter sent to members of B.C.'s steelworkers union last week, Gerard says Clark falsely claimed that his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump was about softwood lumber.

In fact, it was about protecting union jobs in the steel industry in both the U.S. and Canada, the letter says.

"No matter what side of the border I work on, more and more I hear from right-wing politicians who don't really have any ideas of their own so they just make things up. Apparently this B.C. election is no different."

Clark and Liberal party advertisements have accused the New Democrats of taking campaign contributions from the same union that is trying to kill B.C. forestry jobs by supporting the tariff.

"The tariffs filed by Trump have nothing to do with protecting jobs in the U.S.; in fact it will cost Americans 8,000 jobs in the construction industry alone. It has more to do with U.S. lumber companies trying to drive up prices and increase their profits," Gerard's letter says.

(News1130)

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Labour boss defends himself over BC Liberal accusations - Times Colonist

New York Times

A Refuge for Liberal Values Beneath a Stern Victorian Gaze New York Times Four times prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone was first elected to Parliament in 1832, age 23, as a Tory, but he became leader of the Liberal party in 1867, expanding the voting franchise and championing Irish home rule. Whereas his archrival ...

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A Refuge for Liberal Values Beneath a Stern Victorian Gaze - New York Times