Written by Janet
Some of the money went to the National Endowment of the Arts, and they are spending it on nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night “pervert” revues and the airing of pornographic horror films at art houses in San Francisco. The NEA received $80 million of the governments’s $787 billion stimulus bill, to spread to “needy” artists nationwide, and most of the money is being spent to help preserve jobs in museums, orchestras, theaters and dance troupes that have been hit hard by the recession.
Although some of the NEA money is spicing up more than the economy. Some of this money which amounts to $50, 000, was infused for the Frameline film house, which recently screened Thundercrack, “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla.”
David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, says, – When you spend so much money in a short amount of time … you’re going to have nonsense like this, and that’s why the stimulus should never have been done in the first place. When taxpayers see this, they realize that’s just a bunch of hot air.
But no one thinks Obama meant to have stimulus money to help fund the weekly production of “Perverts Put Out” at San Francisco’s CounterPULSE, whose “long-running pansexual performance series” invites guests to “join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun. CounterPULSE received a $25,000 grant in the “Dance” category. The director of Frameline, the gay and lesbian film house, said that their $50,000 grant was not to support any program in particular.
An NEA spokeswoman defended the agency’s choices and said its grants would help “preserve jobs in danger of going away or that had gone away because of the economic downturn.”
Though the process was sped up, the NEA’s 109 panelist reviewers handled the compressed schedule by giving their $50 million in direct grants only to individuals and groups that have received funding in the past and have already passed muster. An additional $30 million was given to state agencies to parcel out to local artists during this year. One project to receive an additional boost of $25,000, as they received past NEA funds is “The Symmetry Project,” a dance piece by choreographer Jess Curtis.
The rather vulgar show depicts “the sharing of a central axis, [as] spine, mouth, genitals, face, and anus reveal their interconnectedness and centrality in embodied experience,” according to a description offered on Curtis’ Web site. A much waste of money that could be used elsewhere instead of this smut. Here’s more of what the show entails….In the flesh — and there’s a lot of it — it amounts to two people writhing naked on the floor, a government-funded tango in the altogether.
Curtis said that diminished support from regular funders like San Francisco Grants for the Arts “would mean lots less work and less ability to organize … to get the work out in front of people.” He said the NEA funding will help keep his art afloat.
San Francisco’s economy is driven by the arts, which provided nearly 30,000 jobs in the city last year, according to Luis R. Cancel, director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Council. The city’s non-profit arts and cultural sector generates $1.03 billion in local economic activity annually. With these stimulus funds San Francisco arts organizations will be able to weather the storm and continue to provide jobs and to generate revenue while enriching people’s lives through innovative, high quality programming. These sorts of programs really do need to be funded by the patrons that go to the performances — not by the federal government.
newsdeskinternational
/ 12/18/2009Democratic Districts Won Twice as Much Stimulus as GOP Districts, Study Shows
Democratic districts have received nearly twice as much stimulus money as Republican districts and the cash has been awarded without regard to how badly an area was suffering from job losses, according to a new study.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University reviewed the distribution of $157 billion in stimulus dollars based on publicly available reports and found that there was “no statistical correlation” between the amount of money a district got and its income or unemployment rate.
“You would think, right, that if the administration believes in its theory that government money can create jobs, they would spend a lot of money in districts that have high unemployment,” study co-author Veronique de Rugy said. “We found absolutely no relationship. It just kind of shows that the money is spent kind of randomly.”
Rather, the study found that Democratic congressional districts received 1.89 times more money than GOP districts. The average award for Democratic districts was $439 million, while the average award for Republican ones was $232 million.
On average, Democratic districts also got 152 awards, while Republican ones got 94.
The data is sure to fuel skepticism about the $787 billion stimulus bill passed in February that only garnered three Republican votes. While the administration claims it has created 640,000 jobs, critics point to the still-soaring 10 percent unemployment rate in arguing that the stimulus has had a nominal effect.
Oddly, the Mercatus study found far more stimulus money went to higher-income areas than lower-income areas.
“We found no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no effect of unemployment, median income, or mean income on stimulus funds allocation.