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 Barbwire Archives |
The New Tiger Woods-Nike-Budweiser UNR
Expanded from the 3-7-2010 Daily Sparks Tribune
Barbwire wins second straight Nevada Press Association first-place award
SUING FOR SCHOOLS: Click here to view the new Barbwire show on your desktop
If Reform Fails: Health Care, Jobs and Unions —new power to the people on the public airwaves
The programs were available to every television set in the region because of a high-mileage media hybrid.
The shows appeared on both commercial and community stations. The non-corporate entity produced the events, commercial TV greatly expanded distribution.
Thus began what an ongoing series of sane public interest programs which generate both entertaining heat and more than a little light.
Please spread the word and consider contributing to the cause online at ReSurge.TV.
You may also take the public option known as the U.S. Postal Service and send a check or money order to ReSurge.TV, P.O. Box 10034, Reno NV 89510.
Your contribution will help fund the distribution of the Dec. 6 and Feb. 21 programs as well as ongoing efforts at developing new media, including a regional, non-corporate community radio station.
You are present at the creation of what I hope can become a new media model where the programming accurately reflects what's happening on the ground and the media impact is powerful enough to forcefully pass the message upward.
Thanks.
Be well. Raise hell.
Andrew
Barbwire column on the depredations of Charter Communications and the Reno City Council wins 2009 Nevada Press Association first-place award
Past 12 months
Use the search tool you will find at page right at the above link. It will return the 19 newest TV programs. You may also search by date — M-F for the past year save holidays.Click here for on-demand re-runs
from the 2009 legislative sessionBarbwire.TV:
15-year overnight success
Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008The Barbwire's Greatest Hits
Highlights from radio days
mp3 fileOnce again, Republican deep thinkers have come to the rescue of Nevada.
Gov. Jim the Dim, university regent Ron Knecht and some guys who've organized a new front for the nuke dump have inadvertently brought forward the business model for the Nevada of the future.
Our Luv Guv started it all last week with his proposition — oops, perhaps that's not a good word to use where this guy is concerned. Let's start over.
Gov. Gibbons last week advanced a proposal to privatize the university system.You missed it?
Lemme 'splain.
Jim the Dim, a man shockingly inept for having several college degrees, came out with a plan to give the higher ed system more autonomy. It reminded me of the Doonesbury cartoon strip's definition of "compassionate conservative." Compassionate means we care, conservative means you're on your own.
The guv wants the university system to be more "self sufficient." He is willing to do his part, advocating for exemption of campus construction from supervision of the state public works board. Translation: Import all the unskilled labor you want from South Carolina and we'll look the other way.
RGJ editors loved the idea and they were not alone.
"Regent Ron Knecht of Carson City said taxpayers now pay from 70 to 80 percent of a student's education," the paper reported, quoting Knecht as stating it would "be appropriate to revisit and reset" that percentage and require that students and families pay more.
I can see the student rally now, channeling Pink Floyd with an endless chant of "we don't need no education."
I was fortunate enough to attend Fresno State before Ronald Reagan began grinding down the best university system the world had ever known. I believe education should be entirely taxpayer paid and college level or vocational learning should be available to any student who can do the work. Otherwise, society is just paving the path toward prison, which is why local NAACP leaders are serious about major legal action against the state. (See below.)
Once again, the free market offers the solution. A group of nuke industry shills wants to establish an "energy park" at the Yucca Mountain nuke dumpsite and devote it mainly to reprocessing spent fuel rods. (Horse-loving S. Carolina is suing us over the dump closure.) They don't mention that reprocessing leaves you with more glowing stuff than you started with and they apparently have never heard of transmutation.
They want to model it after the Alaska Permanent Fund, which sends an annual oil royalty check to every resident.Their idea is great but the target is wrong. I suggest doing so with our tax-exempt, foreign-owned mining industry.
Otherwise, get ready for the day when your local college changes its name to Tiger Woods-Nike-Budweiser-UNR because the likes of Jim the Dim and Ron the Rump have privatized everything.
SUING FOR SCHOOLS. My latest TV program is now available for viewing online. Go to the front page of NevadaLabor.com and click on the very obvious link.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT. Last Friday's concert by three UNR jazz professors proved that everything old is new again. In concert at Reno's Steinway Piano Gallery, saxy man Peter Epstein, trumpet player Larry Engstrom and pianist-composer David Ake performed some of the avant garde work from their new CD "The Dark."A few passages took me back to my younger years when I was a fan of jazz clarinetist/saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre, the point man for what was called jazz fusion back in the 1960's. I think it meant fusion between jazz techniques combined with classical intricacy but nobody was really sure other than listening to Giuffre was weirder than trying to take in sax aficionados Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane.
Mr. Giuffre, meet the three professors of new-new thing. Mr. Epstein wins the Roland Kirk Memorial Award for longest note without a breath ever witnessed. (Somebody call Guinness — not the beer, the record book. On second thought, get the beer, too.)
During the whole evening, I was the only guy who rose to applaud. I could not stay seated after the conclusion of a particularly rousing passage wherein all three virtuosos performed their own melody lines in what sounded like a mix of improv and tight orchestration.Somehow they held it together and soared, making this old horn man stand up and cheer.
The Origin Records CD is available via iTunes and Amazon.com or you can call the far out professors at Tiger-Nike-Bud-UNR.
JUST AROUND THE CORNER: The annual César Chávez Celebration at Circus Circus-Reno on Wednesday, March 31, the great labor organizer's birthday. This year's event will take place on Nevada's first official statewide César Chávez Day. For ticket or sponsorship information, see CesarChavezNevada.com or call me for more info. Sierra Nevada Community Access Television (SNCAT) will be the major non-profit beneficiary this year.
SUPPORT COMMUNITY MEDIA. Recent Barbwire Special programs on health care and education would not have been possible without community media. We originate in public access facilities and rebroadcast over public and commercial television. SNCAT needs your help with a critical foundation grant which matches public contributions dollar-for-dollar — all tax-deductible. My personal thanks to those who have anted into this very important game. Please consider doing so yourself and contact me for more info.If you don't think corporate conglomerate TV provides all the news you never knew you needed to know, this is important to you.
Be well. Raise hell.______
Andrew Barbano is a 41-year Nevadan, second vice-president of the Reno-Sparks NAACP, labor/consumer/civil rights advocate, producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration, member of Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO and editor of NevadaLabor.com. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. Check local listings for other Nevada cable systems. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Daily Sparks Tribune since 1988.
Smoking Guns...
Nevada Press Assn. annual award winners announced
And they wonder why the newspaper business is dying?
The Dean's List
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006
The 2009 first-place Nevada Press Association award winners
Tony the Tiger & the flaky NFL
Barbwire / 11-30-2008
Deregulation is never having to say you're sorry
Barbwire / 8-3-2008
Nevada: A good place to visit, but do you want to live here?
Barbwire / 6-15-2008
The price of a piece / 6-17-2007
Boxing Pandora /9-23-2007
The Lady in the Red Dress
10-28-2007
BARBWIRE Nevada Corporate Welfare Archive
Propaganda fuels gasoline price fixing
Barbwire 8-14-2005Donate to the cable ratepayer legal defense fund at our PayPal-enabled ReSurge.TV Consumer War Room
Phillips, Kevin; Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know
Harper's Magazine; May 2008; page 43
Phillips has authored numerous books on history and politics over the past 40 years. His most recent, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, was published by Viking on April 15, 2008.NAOMI WOLF: Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps
There are some things common to every state that's made the transition to fascism. Author Naomi Wolf argues that all of them are present in America today.
Alternet 5-20-2007Johnson, Chalmers; REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States; Harper's magazine; January, 2007. I love it when heavy hitters validate what I've been saying for years in the tiny Sparks Tribune.
Barlett, Donald L. and Steele, James B.; America: What Went Wrong? (1992); America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? (1994); America: Who Stole the Dream? (1996) ; Andrews & McMeel/Universal Press Syndicate.
Review of Alex Carey's Taking the Risk Out of Democracy:
Propaganda in the US and AustraliaThe Orwell Diversion by Alex Carey
Excerpted from the book available below
ORDER Taking the Risk Out of Democracy
Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty
By Alex Carey
Edited by Andrew Lohrey
Foreword by Noam Chomsky
University of Illinois Press
SEE ALSO: Lapham, Lewis H.; Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, A Brief History; Harper's Magazine cover article; September, 2004, page 32.
By one conservative estimate, the corporate right has spent about $3 billion over the past three decades manufacturing public opinion to suit big business goals. Lapham's number covered the early 1970's to the present day. Alex Carey noted that by 1948, anti- New Deal corporate propaganda expenditures had already reached $100 million per year, not adjusted for inflation, for advertising alone. (Carey, ibid; page 79)
Adjusted for inflation, that 1948 $100 million becomes $801,659,751.04 in 2005 dollars.
Conservatives Help Wal-Mart, and Vice Versa
As Wal-Mart struggles to rebut growing criticism, it has discovered a reliable ally: conservative research groups.
New York Times 9-8-2006; Free registration may be required.BARBWIRE: Labor Day '94: People vs. corporate con job, 9-4-94
Chilling forecasts from Alex CareyBARBWIRE: The Nevada Republican Party Becomes Communist, 3-30-97
A prescient Plato on the dangers of oligarchyThe sands of time do not cloud the long memories of the sheiks of Araby
Barbwire 9-10-2006
Rinfret, Pierre A.; Peace is Bullish; Look magazine, 5-31-1966
Copyright © 1982-2010
Andrew Barbano
Andrew Barbano is a 41-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and JoeNeal.org; and former chair of the City of Reno's Citizens Cable Compliance Committee, He is producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration and serves as second vice-president, political action chair and webmaster of the Reno-Sparks NAACP. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us.
Barbwire by Barbano premiered in the Daily Sparks (Nev.) Tribune on Aug. 12, 1988, and has originated in those parts ever since. Tempus fugit.
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