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 Barbwire Archives |
Drill baby drill for jobs - maybe - jobs
Expanded from the 6-6-2010 Daily Sparks Tribune
Updated 6-8-2010
Barbwire wins second straight Nevada Press Association first-place award
SUING FOR SCHOOLS: Click here to view the new Barbwire show on your desktop
Currently rerunning on Boulder City cable. Go to bcnv.org and then go to the BCTV link.
If Reform Fails: Health Care, Jobs and Unions — new power to the people on the public airwavesThe program premiers 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 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 fileEvery politician in the country currently and consistently coos the chorus of jobs, jobs, jobs. Good. Times is tough.
However, sometimes we need to look at our world through the other end of the telescope. First, we get a better idea of how small we really are without the expense, hassle and danger of blasting off in somebody's private, for-profit space shuttle. It also forces us to look at facts, the effects of what we've done and are doing.
Our Big Blue Marble is nothing if not one big whirling, swirling job engine going in two circles at once but nonetheless managing to go forward at about 66,000 miles per hour. Pretty damned impressive and petroleum power has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Everything we do and don't do creates jobs. Take my pizza, please. We can go to the store to buy the ingredients, pick one up cooked or raw, or have someone deliver that ooey gooey steamy temptation hot to our lickable lips.
I get a kick out of narrow-minded moonhowlers who like to use somebody else's talking points like the one about no government ever having created a job and never will. A word game and a dumb one.
Let's say an economist from Mars looked through his end of the telescope at what we've been doing for the past 10,000 years or so. He/she/it would correctly observe that through application of increasingly sophisticated technology, we've expanded the population of the dominant life form on the planet. (Apologies to insects and microbes.)
To continue expansion, we have to work, baby, work at jobs, baby, jobs in order to spawn, baby, spawn. When work gets tight, births dwindle. The fabled 1946-64 post-war baby boom really wasn't. Families had the same number of kids they always had, but twenty-something moms of that era were joined by many thirty-somethings who had avoided pregnancy during the Great Depression I in the 1930's. Once the war went out with a bang, in came a bigger bang then the fabled boom.
The world today has little problem with food production to keep us on our merrily expansive way. We just have a problem with distribution. It's all a marketing challenge. Somebody call Harvard Business School.
Same thing with jobs. We're just creating the wrong kind –> destructive ones like soldiering, munitions manufacture and fomentation of revolution against whatever great Satan or closet Hitler somebody with a media platform or corporate sponsor doesn't like.
Many of our most popular jobs thrive only if someone else doesn't. Most of the medical, pharmaceutical and chemical industries trade on human misery. Automobiles and guns kill about one Vietnam War's worth of Americans every year. We can't do anything about our small, medium and large arms industries because it would kill jobs, baby, jobs.
Someday, Pakistan is gonna have the money to buy F-22 Flying Dinosaur state-of-the-art cold war fighter planes, even if we have to loan it to them. President Eisenhower was right about the depredations of the military-industrial complex. Non-productive war spending –> and we've been on a constant war footing since WWII –> eventually bankrupts any empire and we're next.
BP/ARCO: The root of our evils
The awful truth — Read it and weep, fellow suckersBritish Petroleum/ARCO and Massey Energy have been criminally negligent in their operations resulting in worker deaths this year. I'm the only guy I know calling for a corporate death penalty. Gulf coast residents still support offshore drill, baby, drilling notwithstanding that the tar baby has laid their land to waste.
Once the sea is dead, they gotta work somewhere, I guess.
If we could keep looking through the other end of the telescope at the destruction our jobs cause, we might be able to finally go to work at creating positive professional pursuits that enhance and enrich life, baby, life.
D-DAY. On June 6, 1944, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower gave the order to take the greatest military gamble in history and invade the west coast of France to displace Hitler's war machine. As Renoite Bryan Riches wrote to the Reno Gazette-Journal, "the Second World War was...probably the last war we should have fought."Learn, baby, learn.
THE 4,000-YEAR WAR. This Tuesday, June 8, Sierra Interfaith Action for Peace hosts a quiet vigil for the unholy land. "Meditations, prayers and songs for peace" happen at 6:15 p.m. on the West Street Plaza next to Java Jungle on the downtown Reno riverfront. Info: Lisa Stiller (775) 232-2823 or Pat Coia (775) 348-7847.Peace, baby, peace.
DOES DR. JACK KEVORKIAN KNOW ABOUT THIS? The Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty promises lively discussion about their favorite subject at 6:00 p.m. this Wednesday, June 9 at the Hug High little theater.
Panelists at the open forum include Rev. Chuck Durante, St. Teresa of Avila Church pastor; Lonnie Feemster, Reno-Sparks NAACP president; Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno; and Lee Rowland, American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada coordinator.The discussion will be moderated by Nancy Hart (775-233-9733), president of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
A short film, Too Flawed to Fix, will be shown to highlight U.S. death penalty systemic failures. Admission is free.
Wonder if they'd favor a corporate death penalty for killing workers?
Liquidate, baby, liquidate.
DEADLINE for mining tax petitions is also Wednesday. For info, call the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada at (775) 348-7557.Sign, baby, sign.
HELP WANTED. Regular readers know that I have been raising money to help Sierra Nevada Community Access Television fully benefit from a matching foundation grant of $40,000.If you can help with a tax-deductible donation, give me a holler at (775) 882-TALK or drop me a line.
Help, baby, help.
Be well. Raise hell.______
Andrew Barbano is a 41-year Nevadan, chair of the Nevada César Chávez Committee, producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration, second vice-president and political action chair of the Reno-Sparks NAACP, labor/consumer/civil rights advocate, 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...
TOLJASO LONG TIME AGO
BP/ARCO: The greasy root of our evils
Barbwire / Daily Sparks Tribune 9-10-2006
The awful truth — Read it and weep, fellow suckersNevada 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
Labor Day 2009: Rise of the Vampire Corpobots
Expanded from the 9-6-2009 Daily Sparks TribuneAngry Americans and Freudian fraud
Using war to market cigarettes
Expanded from the 8-23-2009 Daily Sparks TribuneBARBWIRE 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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