Recession Reflections
katy
Yesterday, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that the U.S. has been in an economic downturn for almost 12 months. And today, President-elect Obama assured those assembled at the National Governors Association in Philadelphia that he is committed to helping the states with their budget shortfalls when he gets into office.
The economic stimulus package (which is likely to be cooling its heels at his desk at the White House awaiting his signature when he arrives there on January 20th) is climbing up to somewhere between $500 and $700 billion. After the bailouts we’ve been witnessing in the last couple of months for the financial industries, numbers like this are no longer eye-popping.
But for those of us who care about the future of independent film and digital media, the economic recovery bill has more magic to it than any of these other big-ticket saves.
Sure, some of those billions are going to be in the form of tax breaks to large corporations, but a lot of it is going to pay for the creation of real new jobs, in a variety of different types of industries. And how about if some of those jobs were to train young people in the work of new media, online journalism, digital videomaking, you name it?
What if we were able to use some of these federal dollars to train a new generation to build the infrastructure for a new public media – which would mean making the US more competitive globally when it comes to technology – and to create meaningful content for a public who has mostly tired of broadcast news and reading the paper but who still craves accurate investigation and reporting of what shapes our world? Now that would be a new deal, not just a new New Deal, if you get my drift.
The National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), of which Arts Engine is a member, wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle long before Obama was the nominee, with some thoughts on how this could shape up. If we act quickly to make a case for it, we could make these good ideas a reality.
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| Posted on December 2, 2008
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