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Nominations open for the Doofus Awards
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 5-26-2021 Sparks Tribune / Expansions in blue

I are confused. I can no longer tell which Nevada elected body is the most madcap. Maybe we need an annual red carpet extravaganza. The Doofus Awards, perhaps?

Our Democratic-controlled legislature has been busily proving what everybody already knows. No matter who's in charge, big business is in charge. Witness bargain basement gambling taxes and non-existent mining taxes. Tenants' rights? Go back to California, pilgrim! Profits are at stake.

We love our guns and we love our money. In honor of Area 51, we keep our schools funded as 51st among the 50 states plus the oughtta-be state of DC. Public option health care? Whadda you, a commie?

I loved the cockamamie guest editorial in the Reno Kazoo-Journal a couple of weeks ago. It was co-authored by a Republican moonhowler and an otherwise sane but corporately sensitive Democrat. They decried a government takeover of health care. I guess research means never having to say you're sorry.

Larry Matheis, the longtime executive director of the Nevada State Medical Association, informed a luncheon meeting of union officials more than a decade ago that the government takeover had already happened. For over 10 years now, the feds have paid for more than half of all U.S. health care. Socialism means never having to say you're sorry.

How come so many moonhowlers say they hate socialism but love Social Security?

Back when the inchoate Trumpistas were demonstrating against passage of Obamacare, one woman actually growled "I'm here to keep government's hands out of my Medicare!" Welcome to Planet Doofus. Was Donald Trump born in Kenya?

As I warned last week, the local the overlords of the local mass transit plantation voted to hire strikebreakers should organized labor, led by Teamsters Union Local 533, strike for the first time in almost 20 years. A vaguely-worded item on last Friday's Regional Transportation Commission agenda modified their agreement with their foreign-owned, for-profit bus system contractor.

As Justice Clarence Thomas might say, it was Kafkaesque. The current mismanagers who ignore their duties with morally obtuse aplomb are Sparks Mayor Ed Lawson (R), Washoe County Commissioners Vaughn Hartung (R) and Bob Lucey (R); Reno City Councilmembers Oscar Delgado (more hereinbelow) and RTC Chair Neoma Jardon (R), plus Regional Transportation Commission Executive Director Bill Thomas (SeeNoEvil). Contact info at NevadaLabor.com/

At least Mr. Lucey didn't waste his time by attending. His peers voted 4-0 to allow France-based multinational Keolis Transit to make expenditures for "special services" for "unforeseen circumstances" like cleaning. Huh?

Perhaps at long last we have the reason that Keolis has never enforced President Biden and Gov. Sisolak's mask mandates. Unforeseen COVID-19 was merely predicted by no less than Bill Gates in 2015. And I'm sure the new blank check has nothing to do with the Teamsters Union contract expiring in June.

The board members praised their courageous bus operators, over two dozen of whom got COVID-19 with at least two hospitalized in ICUs. (Two Las Vegas drivers, African-American women, lie dead, so I guess we're lucky so far.)

RTC won't fess up with detailed numbers but Keolis admitted that 13 percent of their roughly 220 workers got the plague. That means about 30 got sick risking their lives for a paycheck.

Athena Duffy with Teamsters Local 533 Business Agent Ross Kinson

RTC overlords insisted that the contract modification had nothing to do with union members. They said it with a straight face for the US Keolis boss in attendance, direct from France. And they circumvented the spirit of the Nevada Open Meeting Law by allowing no public comment until AFTER the vote had been taken.

A bevy of e-mails and voicemails from the public were likewise ignored. With the room limited to 42 warm bodies, union members, joined by Reno City Councilmembers Jenny Brekhus and Devon Reese, demonstrated outside in the cold.

Marchers included driver Athena Duffy (see left), a young Latinx nursing mother illegally denied lactation breaks or sanitary facilities by sensitive Keolis management.

Does motherhood qualify as an unforeseen circumstance, I wonder?

SCHOOL DAZE. Just in at deadline: Two Washoe County School District trustees have resigned. Kurt Thigpen, elected last year, quit for undisclosed health reasons. Andrew Caudill, a Sharron Angle acolyte whose disdain for public education dripped from every pore, did what I expected.

Just after he was elected in 2018, I predicted that Caudill would not serve his full term because of his profession. He was then a 20-something graduate assistant in the University of Nevada-Reno athletic department.

To further a career in the jockocracy, one must hold a series of jobs in various educational venues. Mr. Caudill is on his way to exciting Wisconsin where voting is becoming increasingly illegal.

The remaining five members of the board will choose successors. Good luck with that.

School board and Washoe County Commission meetings are now reminiscent of banana republic parliaments with narcissistic and oft-seething Trump Cult werewolves presenting non-stop Republican talking points for the cameras.

Rather than fall back on Zoom, maybe the school board should just budget for garlic cloves to decorate their meeting hall. Now that would be fiscally conservative.

And it would make great spaghetti sauce for student lunches.

Take care of each other and be careful out there.

CWA 9413/AFL-CIO

Hot August Strike: Déjà vu all over again
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 5-19-2021 Sparks Tribune / Expansions in blue

This Friday, the overlords of the local mass transit plantation will vote to hire strikebreakers should organized labor, led by Teamsters Union Local 533, strike for the first time in almost 20 years.

Why? Me. The Barbwire never forgets. Not only does NevadaLabor.com have all you need to know about the current depredations of the Washoe bus system, but my archives are a Wayback Machine.

I've been fighting the various incarnations of the Regional Transportation Commission almost since its 1982 birth. Nothing ever changes, dammit. For exorbitant fees, they hire non-Nevada for-profit pillagers to run the system. Into the ground. The current contractor is a multi-national based in gay Paree. Whee.

Subcontractors allow politicians to pull a Pontius Pilate. They wash their hands of any crisis, blaming the furriners for futzing up.

The current mismanagers who ignore their duties with morally obtuse aplomb are Sparks Mayor Ed Lawson (R), Washoe County Commissioners Vaughn Hartung (R) and Bob Lucey (R); Reno City Councilmembers Oscar Delgado (more hereinbelow) and RTC Chair Neoma Jardon (R), plus Regional Transportation Commission Executive Director Bill Thomas (SeeNoEvil).

The Teamsters first struck the system in 2002 after coming close in 1999 and several times more over the years. The 1999 contractor, Ryder/ATE, imported strikebreakers without RTC authorization. Even though no walkout happened, they asked to be reimbursed by the taxpayers.

The late union driver and shop steward Eileen Wiley stated this in a Reno Gazette-Journal guest editorial on Sept. 6, 1999: "The employees of the Citifare bus system have asked the Regional Transportation Commission to restore unauthorized and unnecessary expenditures which we feel were deducted from our paychecks. Without notifying the commission, Ryder/ATE, Inc., the foreign-owned for-profit contractor which manages the system, committed $113,841.32 to import 36 Cincinnati strikebreakers for a work stoppage which never happened. Dividing $113,841.32 by 36 means each strikebreaker cost $3,162.26 for no work."

Imagine what the Parisian party animals will spend this time.

The late Teamsters CEO Lou Martino sent me to present the union's case before the elected officials. They voted to pay the blood money anyway.

Current for-profit contractor multi-national Keolis Transit of France is now asking for an upfront blank check. Item 4.13 on this Friday's RTC agenda does not mention strikebreakers at all, just "flexibility." Union busters always use that word, complaining that unions impair management "flexibility."

Keolis and RTC's Bill Thomas have been so flexible that drivers have been hospitalized in intensive care units and upwards of 20,000 passengers a day have been forced to board COVID-19 superspreaders.

The bus system serves the least among us: the young, the elderly, the disabled, low-wage workers, minorities — many of whom cannot drive or don't own cars.

RTC and Keolis have simply refused to enforce masking and safety orders. In a written order to drivers last Feb. 1, local Keolis boss Taquan Jackson reiterated "our drivers are not to enforce this (mask) policy whatsoever."

In the almost four decades of RTC existence, cause for a strike has never been more glaring or more in the public interest.

MICIAH LEE'S LAW KILLED. Assembly Bill 268, sponsored by Assemblymember Lisa Krasner, R-Reno, and Sen. Dina Neal, D-North Las Vegas, was killed last Friday by the Nevada State Senate Judiciary Committee.

Police officials and the Reno-Sparks NAACP stood in support of the mild measure which resulted from the killing of suicidal black teen Miciah Lee by Sparks police in January, 2020.

Washoe County already had a rapid response de-escalation structure in place but Sparks PD chose not to use it. This bill effectively said "ask questions first, shoot later."

So what message does this inaction convey?

LATE-BREAKING UPDATE 5-19-2021: Today came announcement of a sex workers rights initiative petition being kicked off in Oregon (semi-ironically on my birthday this summer). As a committed union man, I will of course support it. As the latter item demonstrates, us flaming Nevada liberals identify with sex workers because we long ago became desensitized to getting screwed by our friends.

GREAT WRITING, PART ONE. If you can afford six bucks, pick up the Sunday (May 16) New York Times at a news stand. If not, go to NYTimes.com and read reporter Susan Dominus' magnum opus about surviving high school during the plague.

She profiled an advanced placement class of sophomores in Columbia, Missouri, for the Times Sunday Magazine. It's not only superbly written, it will teach you a lot you may not know about how Donald Trump's negligence has affected so many families and will continue for a century to come. (I don't believe the lowlife's name was even mentioned in the piece, so I will mildly make up for it with the latter mild insult to the psycho who knowingly ignored the reaper.)

I will link Ms. Dominus' piece to the expanded web edition of this column at NevadaLabor.com/ I predict a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer.

GREAT WRITING, PART DEUX. The Nevada Press Association will hold its annual convention in Reno this fall. I have been successful in getting two great journalists elected to the NPA Hall of Fame, the Reno Gazette-Journal's Guy Richardson and former Tribunite (and longtime Reno News & Review News Editor) Dennis Myers. (See right.) Both stand ensconced in the much more exclusive Barbwire Molly Ivins Memorial Columniators Hall of Flames.

There are only two qualifications for the latter: You gotta be dead and your work must have had max impact.

I will renominate two of the Barbwire/Ivins Nefarious Nine for NPA honors this year: Longtime Trib columnist and University of Nevada-Reno journalism Prof. Jake Highton and high-hearted WW2 fighter pilot and world-class photographer Donald Dondero. Please send me your endorsements and personal memories of those two giants. I have built websites for all of the above and will add your comments so that the judges may see them.

Take care of each other and be careful out there.

CWA 9413/AFL-CIO

From the 5-12-2021 Barbwire: SPEAKING OF SILENCERS...AND SUPERSPREADERS: This just in from a guy figuratively and literally sitting shiva.

"District Board of Health Chair Oscar Delgado (stated) ' I appreciate the diligence of the Board of County Commissioners in approving the Washoe County COVID-19 Local Mitigation and Enforcement Plan today...This gradual approach of reopening for the month of May is reasonable, responsible and protects the health and safety of our community.' "

Mr. Delgado (D) is the CEO of the Community Health Alliance and in his capacity as a member of the Reno City Council, sits on the Regional Transportation Commission board.

He and his fellow RTC directors have lifted nary a finger after a year of complaints and legal actions regarding lax enforcement of COVID-19 safety standards on the RTC Ride bus system. Drivers have been hospitalized, some in ICU. Another Hot August Strike looms large while Oscar and his buds issue press releases.

Other morally obtuse RTC bosses include, but are not limited to, Sparks Mayor Ed Lawson (R), Washoe County Commissioners Vaughn Hartung (R) and Bob Lucey (R); Reno City Councilmember and RTC Chair Neoma Jardon (R), plus Regional Transportation Commission Executive Director Bill Thomas (SeeNoEvil).

I am disappointed but not surprised by Mr. Delgado's disingenuous statement advocating "reasonable, responsible" protection for "the health and safety of our community." (Perhaps he's a big fan of Queen Marie Antoinette. Who knew?)

Me, I prefer Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street. At least you always know where he stands.

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