U.S. Rep. Miller moves forward with arts hearings

Here’s an update on the Congressional-level arts hearings I mentioned back in February:

The economic role of the U.S. arts industry and the disproportionate job losses it may be suffering in the current recession will be examined by the House Education & Labor Committee in hearings starting Thursday, March 26.

Titled “The Economic and Employment  Impact of the Arts and Music Industry” and chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.),  the initial hearing will investigate how American communities are affected economically by arts activity. The committee will also examine the the arts and music industries in light of media reports about heavy job losses and endangered institutions, economic troubles reflected by a National Endowment for the Arts study that found unemployment in the arts to be substantially greater in 2008 than the national unemployment level for that year.

U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), who co-chairs the Congressional Arts Caucus, will provide testimony, as will Robert Lynch, head of Americans for the Arts; Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs; Michael Bahr, education director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival; and Tim Daly, co-president of the Creative Coalition, an arts, education and First-Amendment-rights advocacy organization co-founded by the late Ron Silver.

I expect to have more to report on this soon.

A prayer in time of recession

My geographic region has lost about 7,000 jobs since January. The nation has lost more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs alone in the same period. 

On behalf of those who are out of work or closing their businesses, I offer these few words:

 Done in, I throw me down to weep

My income’s small, my debt is deep

If from a ledge you find me pushed

You’ll know I fell ’cause I was Bushed

What kind of dough gets your vote?

Barack Obama had some words for me last night.

He said, “We measure the strength of our economy, not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business.”

A little later, he spoke to me even more directly. “And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business or making her way in the world, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman.”

He was speaking to you, too. For eight years now, we’ve all seen our economy turn into a feudal system where the resources and the future belong only to a tiny number of extremely wealthy, privileged people.  These people – the heads of major corporations, scions of rich families, big donors and personal friends of the politically powerful - have gotten richer and richer from insanely outsized salaries, golden parachutes, enormous bonuses, stock options and personal and corporate tax breaks while millions of ordinary people have tumbled into financial uncertainty or poverty.

To George W. Bush and his cadre, it has been more important to indulge the pathological greed of already moneyed people than to help the working poor and middle class keep their jobs and be able to afford food, heat, transportation, medical care and education.  This policy, if you can call it that, doesn’t make sense even for the rich – who will work in their industries and provide their services if everyone but them and their friends is too sick or unschooled or immobilized by gas prices to hold down what jobs remain? 

Obama has it right. The vitality and success of America come from its grassroots, from the creativity and initiative of its individual citizens. And all that has been largely ignored and neglected for eight years in which catastrophic wrongheadedness and decline have brought America to the brink of what, with all the home foreclosures and bank failures, has looked at times more like the coming of another Great Depression than a recession.       

So when Obama says he wants to eliminate the capital-gains taxes for small businesses and start-ups that create the high-paying, high-tech jobs that offer one of our nation’s best hopes for a prosperous future, I don’t just hear an idea that would help me keep Geniocity.com alive and growing. I hear a change in the wind, a hint that everyday Americans may once again, in time, be able to thrive and realize their best ideas and dreams through their own hard work, no matter who they are or how modest their circumstances.

For two terms now, Bush’s actions have said “let them eat cake.” John McCain wants to stay that course. But Obama wants to make it possible for each of us to make a better loaf of bread and own the bakery that produces it.

Can we afford to vote for anyone but him?