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President Kevorkian and Harry Potter's Congress
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 7-17-2011 Daily Sparks Tribune
Updated 7-26-2011
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Corporate Propaganda Research Archive
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
That's how it goes. Everybody knows.
HAT TRICK: Barbwire wins 3rd straight Nevada Press Association First-Place Award
In 2011, we go for the SombreroBarbwire.TV
Watch NevadaLabor.com for show times. Help us get the word out.
Support the project at http://resurge.tv#donate
SUING FOR SCHOOLS
Updated 3-21-2011
Lawsuit gains supportIf Reform Fails: Health Care, Jobs and Unions — new power to the people on the public airwaves
The 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 as well as ongoing efforts at developing new media, including a regional, non-corporate community radio station and the return of community television to Reno-Sparks-Washoe.
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
Click here for on-demand re-runs from the 2009, 2010 and 2011 Barbwire TV archivesBarbwire.TV:
15-year overnight success
Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008The Barbwire's Greatest Hits
Highlights from radio days
mp3 file
HAT TRICK: Barbwire wins 3rd straight Nevada Press Association First-Place Award
In 2011, we go for the SombreroIt was necessary to destroy the country in order to save it.
So seems to be the song sung from Washington.
Another cliché also applies: He who does not learn from history is condemned to repeat it.
At least President Franklin Roosevelt waited until he was re-elected to return to the Mellonheaded and Hooverite thinking of the time. FDR starting cutting back on government spending and precipitated a recession in 1937.
Barack Carter Obama seems to be doing the same damned thing, only two years too early.
"Never play the other guy's game" — Damon Runyon via Orland T. Outland, Barbwire by Barbano / 4-24-2011
How dumb can we get?"Thanks largely to the tea party, today, more than at any time since Reagan's arrival 30 years ago, Washington debate is conducted in conservatism's vocabulary of government retrenchment." — Nationally syndicated column of former Reagan debate advisor George Will, Reno Gazette-Journal / 7-25-2011
Lord Rupert's Rupture and President Tiger Wuss, Barbwire by Barbano / 7-24-2011
His stimulus package was half a trillion too small.
As Daily Sparks Tribune reporter Joshua Silavent presciently put it in a column awhile back, prepare for The Postdated Recession.
Much of the 2009 federal stimulus money is running out. American business is sitting on more than a trillion in cash but won't spend on expansion and new workers.Somebody's got to prime the pump and Mr. Obama is apparently not ready for prime time.
As I have oft noted, his personality is that of a peacemaker when America needs an alpha dog. Every time he extends a hand across the aisle, the GOP Moonhowlers give him back a bloody stump.Maybe during some future full moon, he will grow fangs and tear some of these blackguards limb from limb from Limbaugh. But for now, he is selling out those who elected him, offering to cut Social Security and Medicare while paying the big banks first.
He put the foxes in charge of the chicken coop, expecting the guys who caused our meltdown to fix it. Fat chance.There is plenty of blame to go around. Both Democrats and Republicans have completely missed the message of the last three general elections (2006, 2008, 2010): We are hurting and need you to do something.
Germany got hit when we did but Chancellor Angela Merkel's government preserved employment first.
Starting with Dubya's treasury secretary, Goldman-Sachs CEO Henry Pat Paulson, we propped up Wall Street billionaire speculators first.
The GOP thus presented the only protest vote available in 2010 and the message has apparently yet to be received.If the current federal debt limit is not increased by August 2, the taxpayers will purportedly pay bondholders first and the people can go starve. Even the Soviet Union did better than that.
As filmmaker Michael Moore said a few years back, corporate America has two political parties. Can't we have just one?
Apparently not. If Obama cuts a deal with the devil to begin the destruction of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, he will have taken the next step toward joining Jimmy Carter building Habitat for Humanity houses in early 2013.
He and his handlers are apparently possessed of the cynical thinking that the center and left have nowhere to go, so he can run as a moderate Republican.Bill Clinton turned the trick in 1996, so why not?
But Clinton's tax increases turbocharged the economy and people always vote their stomachs and pocketbooks.
Republicans, including local GOP congressional nominee Mark Amodei, keep pimping the same siren song: Cut taxes on the rich, screw everyone else and all will be well.
"Although tax cuts 'have lowered government revenues,' they 'have not had any perceptible effect on the state's economic growth,' concluded an Arizona State University business school study, published last November, that examined the past three decades of fiscal policy."-- (Silverstein, Ken; Tea Party in the Sonora: For the future of GOP governance, look to Arizona; Harper's Magazine, July 2010, page 37.)
No less than King Ronald the Vague's budget director David Stockman has scoffed at his former colleagues who continue to sell this academically repackaged version of "You can have your cake at eat it, too."
Unless something changes, President Kevorkian is on his way to committing political and economic suicide while congress remains bewitched like Harry Potter, waving magic wands and hoping that all that bad karma will just go away.
AMODEI, PART DEUX. While Democrat Kate Marshall has raised more money, Amodei is running unanswered TV. Bad news for the state treasurer in a district gerrymandered to elect only Republicans for the past three decades.One of Dark Mark's spots calls for the elimination of labor unions, a curious position given that he supported collective bargaining for state workers while in the state senate.
Cut the man some cake.
JOIN THE PARTY. Sam Shad's Nevada Newsmakers soirée this Wednesday, July 20, features Glenn Cook, editorial writer at Nevada's largest newspaper, the Las Vegas WeSueYou-Journal.
I'll participate on the pundit panel with Mary Lau, President and CEO of the Retail Association of Nevada (aka Wal-Mart) and GOP brownshirt fashion consultant Robert Uithoven.I've got 'em surrounded.
The first airing goes at 12:30 p.m. PDT on KRNV TV-4 with reruns online and on statewide TV.
SHORT SHOTS. Check this column at NevadaLabor.com for the Barbwire.TV schedule locally and around Nevada. I have included in the current flight reruns of my TV special on the Employee Free Choice Act, a campaign promise the president and congressional Democrats seem to have long forgotten. You can also view on demand 24/7 by clicking here...Why nothing in the Reno paper about Mayor Bob Cashell's private investigation of downtown bars as drug dens?
BACK FROM THE ASHES DEPT. Support the return of community radio and television stations.The first step toward restoration has been taken.
After going dark for six months, Charter Channel 216 came back to life broadcasting live legislative hearings and floor sessions fed to Reno-Sparks-Washoe from AccessCarson. (An obscure East Reno newspaper columnist got it started.)
We have acquired new volunteers and we're going to have a working group meeting soon. Spread the word.
Go to Barbwire.TV for more information, to volunteer your time or treasure or both.
It's important.
Be well. Raise hell.
______
Andrew Barbano is a 42-year Nevadan, chair of the Nevada César Chávez Committee, producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration, first 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.
Nevada Press Assn. annual award winners announced 9-18-2010.
HAT TRICK: Barbwire takes first place for third year in a row.
This year, we go for the sombrero.The winning entries:
Suing for Schools: The 20-year shuck
Expanded from the 2-21-2010 Daily Sparks Tribune
Click here to view the show on your desktopRED flags flying low over Sparks
Expanded from the 1-10-2010 Daily Sparks TribuneThe wrath of self-righteous racism
Expanded from the 11-8-2009 Daily Sparks Tribune
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
Fact-free nation: Inside the lie machine
Mother Jones Magazine May-June 2011 / Cover story and in-depth analysis
Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Plutocracy
Money fights hard and it fights dirty
Speech delivered at Boston University on 29 Oct. 2010
Part of the Howard Zinn Lecture SeriesBarbwire Corporate Welfare Archive
Cabellyup.com
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 suckersLabor 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 © 1982-2011
Andrew Barbano
Andrew Barbano is a 42-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 first 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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