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But before you do so, please read this note. —AB

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SITE NAVIGATION TIPS: When all else fails, read the instructions (A favorite John Hanks aphorism I've been using for decades)

Je Suis Charlie
"Our republic and its press will rise or fall together." — Joseph Pulitzer

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' daily Poor Denny's Almanac [PDA]. Items highlighted in blue are of interest to labor in particular and seekers of justice in general. Red means war. Occasionally but not surprisingly, magenta will mean both. Copyright © 2007-2019 Dennis Myers. More Myers.]

2018-19 Breaking News, Bulletins & Almanac Archive—>

Happy High Holly Days to all
Merry Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus/Chanukah
Hope you and yours enjoyed enthralling Thanksgibleting.
Feliz Navidad, próspero año y felicidad
HAPPY NEW YEAR / Feliz Año Nuevo / Felice Anno Nuovo
Frohe Weihnachten und beste Wuensche fuer 2020

BREAKING NEWS AND THEN SOME —>

Requiescat in pace
Dennis C. Myers
12-28-1948/8-25-2019

Nevada's Greatest Of All-Time journalist, would have been 71 years old today. The GOAT was a goat —
a Capricorn. As Voltaire once opined, "God is a comedian playing to an audience afraid to laugh."

Requiescat in pace
Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

The Sermon on Mount Barbwire
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-25-2019 Sparks Tribune

Typhoid Mary infects Sparks Addams Family
In the spirit of true democracy which provides that your rights don't allow you to sneeze on mine
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-18-2019 Sparks Tribune

A fake news fable for our times
Typhoid Mary, quite contrary
In the spirit of true democracy which provides that your rights don't allow you to sneeze on mine
Barbwire Confidential by Andrew Barbáno / 12-11-2019 Online Edition

Red-flag warnings — Ignoring history at our peril
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-11-2019 Sparks Tribune

Requiescat in pace
Breaking News (Friday 6 Dec 2019 3:43 p.m. PST) — NevadaLabor.com has been informed of the passing of former Teamsters Local 533 Principal Officer Paul Tea, 51. He worked for Yellow Freight and left three children. Monitor this website for details as they become available. May our brother Paul rest in peace.

Major rent raunch and a big book launch
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-4-2019 Sparks Tribune

11-30-2019: Happy St. Andrew's Day in Scotland and my house.
Hoist ye holy spirits. Alleluia!

Billionaire Tom Steyer owes me $5
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 11-27-2019 Sparks Tribune

145 years ago
Barbed wire was patented (11-24-1874), ensuring full employment for doctors and lawyers in perpetuity.
On 18 Jan. 1813, Joseph Glidden, inventor of barbed wire, was born.
The west was never the same. Likewise here.
Stick with The Barbwire to sharply point out the awful truth. Always here.
Get ahead of corporate-influenced news—>Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential
For all the news you never knew you needed to know 'til now—>TOP SECRET, HUSH HUSH!

Requiescant in pace
John F. Kennedy
May 29, 1917 — November 22, 1963

C.S. Lewis: November 29, 1898 — November 22, 1963
Aldous Huxley: July 26, 1894 — November 22, 1963

Back to the future down Amnesia Lane
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 11-20-2019 Sparks Tribune

We Don't Need No Education Part XCII—>
People get ready, that train's a comin'
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Special Barbwire Confidential Internet Edition 11-12-2019 / Updated 11-14 & 11-15-2019
A version of this column appeared in the Wednesday 11-13-2019 Sparks Tribune
An excerpt of the following was included in Andrew Barbano's address to the school board on Nov. 12.
SPECIAL REPORT FROM THE SCENE OF THE CRIME:
Clever maneuvering prevents vote after 4 of 7 trustees announced support for Dolores Feemster.

We Don't Need No Education Part XCI—>
DO NOT risk your kids at Golden Eagle Park
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 11-6-2019 Sparks Tribune

Tale of 2 city halls: Cancer kids & brain damage
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 10-30-2019 Sparks Tribune

We Don't Need No Education Part XC—>
Written in the stars: UNR football for racial justice
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-23-2019 Sparks Tribune

Northern Nevada's first union printer in more than a decade


Tale of 2 city halls: Cancer kids & brain damage
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 10-30-2019 Sparks Tribune

Teamsters win unanimous vote at Bell Limo

Reno, Nev. (25 October 2019) — Drivers at Bell Limousine in Reno, Nevada, have voted overwhelmingly to become members
of Teamsters Local 533.

“I applaud the efforts of our newest members and I’m excited to have them as our proud Teamster brothers and sisters,” said Teamsters Local 533 Secretary-Treasurer Debbie Calkins.

Drivers began organizing themselves in an effort to improve their working conditions by becoming union members.

“We’re standing up for workers in our profession so all drivers can have a voice in every matter that affects us,” said Kim Jenkins, a full-time driver at Bell Limo. “At Bell Limo, high turnover from wage issues, benefits and scheduling have caused good drivers to leave.”

At one time, drivers were proud to work at Bell Limousine, considering it the “premier limousine provider”. However, after the company was sold, their hourly rate of pay was taken away and a varying commission-based pay structure was introduced.

Drivers lost over $3 an hour in pay and many were forced to take second jobs to provide for their families. In many cases, their second job actually became their primary source of income.

Sparked by the belief that one job should be enough and that all workers deserve a living wage, the drivers began a campaign to become members of Teamsters Local 533. Their organizing campaign culminated in a 100% yes vote on October 23, 2019.

“I urge others to vote to unionize because when workers vote, workers win,” said Jenkins.

Now, Bell Limo Drivers look forward to negotiating with the company to improve their wages and benefits. And for the drivers, these improvements will be important for their families, but they will also ensure Bell Limo is once again the premier limousine service company by putting the company in a better position to retain long-term, dedicated employees.

“In an effort to grow Teamster density, Teamsters Local 533 and Teamsters Local 856 have partnered together to share organizing resources and raise industry standards for all workers in the Reno area,” said Peter Finn, Secretary-Treasurer/Principal Officer of Teamsters Local 856.

“This partnership is the first victory of many to come for the Teamster Organizing Network, which is a network of locals whose aim is to further Teamster organizing and help workers unionize,” said Chris Rosell, Director of Organizing for Local 856.

_______________________
TEAMSTERS 533
1190 Selmi Dr., #100, Reno, NV 89512 • Teamsters533.org • Phone (775) 348-6060 Fax: 775-348-1501
For immediate release / Contact: Chris Rosell <crosell@ibt856.org> or 202-528-3775

Part of the union: Bell Limo Teamsters
By Jeri Davis / Reno News & Review 11-7-2019
Teamsters boycott of Grand Sierra-Reno announced at NAACP awards dinner
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 10-23-2019 Sparks Tribune


-30-
1

Boffo reviews!
74th Annual Reno-Sparks NAACP
Freedom Fund Awards Banquet Saturday Oct. 19, 2019
Written in the stars: UNR football for racial justice
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 10-23-2019 Sparks Tribune

Goodbye, Columbus: A mirror for America
How Italians Became "White"
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 10-16-2019 Sparks Tribune

Déjà vu all over again: Bernie turns 2020 into 1968
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 10-9-2019 Sparks Tribune

City of Reno turns W. Plumb Lane into horny street
BREAKING NEWS— >Sen. Bernie Sanders was released from Desert Springs Hospital on Friday 10-4
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from 10-2-2019 Sparks Tribune / Updated 10-3, 10-4 & 10-5

Hip-hopping mad over molesters and Mad Kings
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 9-25-2019 Sparks Tribune


PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS ON THE STREETS OF STEAD —> Activist/philanthropist/business tycoon Tom Steyer and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg joined the UAW/GM strikers last week. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., hit the picket line at 10:45 a.m. PDT on Thursday, Oct. 3.

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 19:10:21 -0700
Subject: UAW Rally in Stead, Saturday, September 28th, 11:00a.m.
The AFL-CIO is going to be out with the striking UAW workers tomorrow, 11:00a.m. PDT

MORE INFO


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / MEDIA ADVISORY
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
Lance Pringle, President
United Auto Workers Local 2162/AFL-CIO
(248) 935-8660

Rally in support of striking auto workers today in Reno

RENO, NV (20 Sept. 2019) — Nevada unions and community residents will join striking auto workers on the picket line this afternoon at 5:30.
     The Northern Nevada Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO is marshalling its member unions, their families and friends to rally at the western states General Motors parts distribution center at 6565 Echo Ave. (Reno NV 89506) near the Reno Stead Airport.
     Attendees may take US 395/I-580 north to Red Rock Road. A right turn from Red Rock onto Moya Blvd. will lead to Echo Avenue.
Nevada United Auto Workers Union members joined more than 50,000 of their sisters and brothers at more than 50 facilities across the United States who went on strike at midnight last Sunday. UAW Local 2162 members began picketing the Reno-Stead warehouse at 6:00 a.m. Monday and have continued daily through both daytime and swing shifts.
     GM earned $35 billion in profits in North America in just the last three years while closing plants in the United States.
     "We literally gave up a lot during the bankruptcy and the American taxpayer gave up a lot," Hamtramck, Michigan, striker Ashley Scales, 32, told The New York Times.
     "We gave up twice because we pay taxes and we gave up in the contractual agreement," she added, "and now the corporation is making more profit than ever and they still want to play games."
     In order to keep GM from total collapse during the Great Recession, the union agreed to a two-tiered wage scale. New-hires (about 35 percent of GM's workforce) earn about half the pay of longer-tenured employees. Temps (about 7 percent of the workforce) make even less and some have been on the job for years despite the label. (NY Times Sept. 17)
     The union wants the two-tiered system eliminated so that all workers get a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.
UAW members from California have joined the locals all week as well as union workers from a wide range of other Nevada and western states labor organizations.
     About 60 are employed at the Reno-Stead distribution warehouse which was moved from eastern Sparks several years ago. UAW Local 2162 was established in northern Nevada when General Motors first opened a parts facility here in the 1980s.

Trade the Confederacy straight across for Greenland
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 9-18-2019 Sparks Tribune

Adios to a Nevada giant on the Ides of September

A surprise bit of charming post-script to Dennis' life

REPORT FROM THE MEMORIAL GATHERING (9-15-2019) — About 200 people from as far away as the Philippines, Australia and Ireland gathered to honor Dennis on the banks of the Truckee River on Sunday, Sept. 15. His ashes will be scattered at Pyramid Lake, the termination of the Truckee on the Paiute Reservation. Details in the Sept. 18 Sparks Tribune.

Dennis Myers: Enroute to the universe next door
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-11-2019 Sparks Tribune

Philippines to Burning Man to Ireland: Adios GOAT
Dennis Myers Memorial 9-15-2019
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 9-4-2019 Sparks Tribune

Nevadian Dennis Myers: The Greatest Of All Time
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 8-28-2019 Sparks Tribune

Dennis Myers, 1948-2019
OBITUARY: Veteran Nevada reporter removed from life support
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Special Internet Edition 8-25 and 8-26 -2019
[En Español — La Voz Hispana En Nevada 9-18-2019]

On March 31, 2020, Nevada César Chávez Day XVIII, Dennis Myers will become the first journalist ever installed in the César Chávez NevadaLabor.com Hall of Fame.

From: Lisa Ruggerio
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:51:23 a.m. PDT
Re: On behalf of Dennis Myers' family

Dear friends:

Dennis suffered a stroke last week. Dennis’ family is honoring his wishes to support the lives of others through organ donation. The hospital has been keeping his body alive for organ viability. A donor recipient has just been located for his liver. There will be an honor walk for our beloved Dennis today Monday, August 27, 2019 at Renown at 1:30 pm in the Sierra Tower ICU waiting room. Those who loved Dennis are welcome to attend.
Lisa


...The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
   Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
   For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

...And then
the windows failed
   And I could not see
to see.
— Emily Dickinson   


25 August 2019
2:34 p.m. PDT

Dear Friends:

The following arrived this morning from former Washoe County School District Trustee Lisa Ruggerio. At least this won't turn into another Karen Ann Quinlan case. Our dear Dennis is gone but his song will survive in so many ways. — AB

At 9:12 a.m PDT 8/25/19, Lisa Ruggerio wrote:

Dennis suffered a massive stroke. Dennis’ family is honoring his wishes to support the lives of others through organ donation. The hospital is keeping his body alive for organ viability.

 

The best that ever was lies brain dead

UPDATE (11:43 p.m PDT Saturday 8-24-2019) — Journalist Dennis Myers, the best reporter in Nevada, is on his way away from us. There have been many conflicting stories circulating among his legion of heartbroken friends. I heard from people across North America today.

Cut in twain
(His favorite photo)

While I was writing this update, Renown Regional Medical Center's patient information operator told me "he's been discharged." She then flipped me to Sierra Meadows ICU. A nurse thereat said he's still in Renown Sierra Tower Room 136. The attending nurse then informed me that Dennis remains there and that he would pass my phone number to one of those holding vigil. The nurse could give me no further information. (Damn the beastly HIPAA* hipaapotamus.) I begged for a call ASAP "but it may not be until tomorrow." Witnesses who have been with Dennis say Renown ER found no brain activity when he was admitted.

After he missed a dinner engagement and then did not show up at his newspaper, concerned friends went to his Sparks apartment, banged on his door, and later broke it down.They found him on the floor, broken chair nearby. He had broken ribs which punctured a lung. They got him to ER where his lung was re-inflated. Doctors then discovered he had suffered a brain stem stroke and technicians could detect no brain activity. The stroke had cut off oxygen to his brain. A credible source informed me Saturday morning that Dennis would have his ventilator removed Saturday afternoon, August 24. Apparently not. Someone who saw him earlier said he had been declared "brain dead." Communications all day have been in past tense and about memorial services.

A formal statement from someone onsite is needed immediately. More sooner than later, some well-intentioned someone is going to call the Reno Gazette-Journal and/or several TV stations and give them incomplete information. Witness Saturday's ping-ponging. I submit that someone could both lie in some state in a hospital room and yet be officially discharged. It's all in the regulatory semantics and paperwork trail delay. It is also quite possible that no blood relative is yet in Reno and thus no one has any authority to do the unthinkable.

My nomination of Dennis for the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame stands notwithstanding his inchoate adios. All testimonials, remembrances and updated information will be most welcome.

More as details arrive. E me at <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Phone (775) 747-0544. Texts are a crapshoot thru my five phone line jumps. So voice or e, please.

To put it in Spanglish, this Sabado morphed into endless black sabbath. Thank you all for your caring and concern.

I weep the tears of transfiguration for you, old friend. — Barbano

_______
* HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) is United States legislation that provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information.

CWA 9413/AFL-CIO

-30-


Intensive care

Join St. Mary's nurses on the picket line Wednesday September 18, 2019


Tender, loving dissent

  • Nurses started negotiations with Saint Mary’s in February, and since that time RNs have presented proposals to improve safe patient staffing, professional development to improve nursing practice, and conditions to maintain low RN turnover.

  • Nurses met with management earlier this month expecting to reach an agreement. Management came to the table and took back some of their own proposals including proposals that would enable nurses to improve their practice and refused to ensure proper coverage during RN breaks.

  • Nurses have called for a picket to hold Prime accountable and to ensure patients receive the quality healthcare they need and deserve.
  • Tamara Erickson, NNOC Chief Nurse Representative and a Saint Mary’s RN for over 29 years, said “Nurses came prepared to reach an agreement to ensure safe patient staffing. Prime came to the negotiating table to withdraw their own proposals. Nurses have no other choice. We need to take action for our patients.”

  • NNOC represents over 150,000 RNs across the country, including nearly 600 RNs at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center.

NNOC Contact: Henry Soria, Labor Representative, CNA/NNU/NNOC*
(702) 496-0922

 

In 1981, California college student Roseann DeMoro sent an obscure first-time Montpelier, VT, mayoral candidate named Bernie Sanders $20. Four decades later, she was the leader of National Nurses United and Bernie...aw, you know.
How Medicare for All went mainstream
By Robert Draper / The New York Times Magazine / Labor Day weekend 9-1-2019
* California Nurses Association, National Nurses United, National Nurses Organizing Committee

The Trump Whisperer and a $40,000 baseball ticket
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 8-21-2019 Sparks Tribune

Perfectly Nevadian: Joe Conforte, 1925-2019
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 8-14-2019 Sparks Tribune

Guns and roses, traitors and political poses
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 8-7-2019 Sparks Tribune

TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM
— New York Times front page headline 8-6-2019
BARBWIRE TRANSLATION: "You provide the unity, I'll provide the racism"
Coming in Wednesday's Sparks Tribune: Guns and roses, traitors and political poses

The Sting, spike heels, green eggs & ham
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 7-31-2019 Sparks Tribune

July 28: Happy Birthday to Senator Joe Neal.

BREAKING NEWS AND THEN SOME—>

A cuckoo coup and a president, too
Barbwire exclusive: Secret 2017 meeting set the setup in motion
"The firing of Traci Davis was nothing short of a long-term, well-orchestrated coup."
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 7-24-2019 Sparks Tribune

Reno City Council passes rent control
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 7-17-2019 Sparks Tribune


Broken Promises in Boomtown —>

Drug Addiction: Nevada's Chronic Corporate Welfare Tax Giveaways

Nevada corporate welfare queens rip off megabux from dumb hick taxpayers
By James De Haven / rgj.com 7-22 / Reno Gazette-Journal 7-28-2019

Corporate welfare ripoffs — Nevada business as usual
By Former Sen. Sheila Leslie, D-Reno / Reno News & Review 7-25-2019

TURNING TRICKS QUESTION: Is Nevada’s corporate welfare paying off?
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 7-18-2019

Assemblymember Skip Daly, D-Sparks, has criticized Gov. Steve Sisolak for vetoing Assembly Bill 444 which would have created a legislative committee to review Nevada's epidemic of corporate tax breaks.
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 7-3-2019 Sparks Tribune

Corporate Welfare War Rooms: Cabellyup with Cabela's & Scheel's et al + Nevada Corporate Welfare Archives

Racism Comes Out of the Closet
By Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman / nytimes.com 7-15 / The New York Times 7-16-2019

We Don't Need No Education Part LXXXIX—>


Washoe County School Board fires superintendent after 6-1 vote
By Kayla Anderson / Sparks Tribune 7-3-2019

[July 1, 2019] — Reno Sparks NAACP President Lonnie Feemster observes Traci Davis speaking to reporters after her termination. [Photo: John Byrne, Sparks Tribune]

 

 

 

Reno News & Review Traci Davis Trilogy
Reno's alternative weekly newspaper makes criticism unanimous among major local print media

Board of Bunglers: School board fails to make case against Davis
Reno News & Review Editorial / 7-11-2019

No one came off looking good in l'Affaire Davis Telenovela
Censoring and barring outstanding N. Valleys High School valedictorian subsumed by board bickering
Former State Sen. Sheila Leslie / Reno News & Review 7-11-2019

Now what? Interview with interim school board boss
Sparks Tribune Barbwire and This is Reno website decry Davis debacle
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 7-11-2019

 

Alfred E. Neuman for Washoe school superintendent
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 7-10-2019 Sparks Tribune

Witness at the execution
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 7-3-2019 Sparks Tribune

Gang banging on 9th Street
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Special Barbwire Confidential Extra Edition / 7-1-2019

SUMMER SCHOOL HEAT: Showdown looms July 1 as Reno-Sparks school district attempts to fire superintendent Traci Davis
BARBWIRE "WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION" ARCHIVE

Veni, Vidi, Jockocracy?
Locker room rules: Caesars goes commando, union vows resistance to Eldorado empire
By Bryan Horwath / Las Vegas Sun 6-28-2019 / Reno Gazette-Journal 7-8-2019

Eldorado-Caesars merger means labor union battles far beyond Reno & Las Vegas
Culinary Union leader D. Taylor: "Where are they going to cut?"
Building trade union campaigns continue
By Ed Komenda / Reno Gazette-Journal / 6-27-2019

The divine right of kings, casino gods & dingbat heirs
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 6-26-2019 Sparks Tribune

The Barbwire Presidential Dirtiest Dozen
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 6-19-2019 Sparks Tribune

Carson City, Transylvania County, Nevada USA
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 6-12-2019 Sparks Tribune

ON THIS DATE IN HISTORY:
NAACP LEADER SLAIN IN JACKSON — PROTESTS MOUNT

13 June 1963 (The New York Times) — A day after President Kennedy asked all citizens to take up the cause of civil rights, Medgar Evers, Mississippi Field Secretary for the NAACP, was assassinated in front of his home. Myrlie Evers, his wife, told protestors that night that "her husband had spoken of death last Sunday and said he was ready to go," The Times reported. Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted of the murder three decades later.

Trumpeting tragedy as Great Depression2 descends
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 6-5-2019 Sparks Tribune

Nevada: Righteous results, wrongheaded reasons
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 5-29-2019 Sparks Tribune

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Washington, DC (5-22-2019) — Tsar Donaldov nukes infrastructure bill until Democrats stop "witch hunt" investigations. To Trump, that's negotiation. To criminal lawyers, that's called a
PLEA BARGAIN.

Nevada Business Opportunity: Abortion Tourism
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 5-22-2019 Sparks Tribune

May 15: The Ides of Uncle Walter Cronkite
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 5-15-2019 Sparks Tribune

What if they gave a murder and nobody came?
BARBWIRE CONFIDENTIAL: Sheriff Balaam's icy hot patch
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the Wednesday 5-8-2019 Sparks Tribune / Updated 5-9 & 5-10-2019

MayDay for renters, movie fans and avengers
 1982 Reno homicide—>Cold case gets hot
Alas, another Barbwire Peerless Predixion Prevails—>Caudill cavorts with Sharron Angle's acolytes
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 5-1-2019 Sparks Tribune

Sen. Ira Hansen announces his pregnancy
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-24-2019 Sparks Tribune

Priorities for butt-, rent-, birth- and gun-control
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-17-2019 Sparks Tribune

DAY OF THE DEAD
Relieve Rent & Pillage: Save SB398 & AB399
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Special Online Legislative Edition / 4-12-2019
Fairness for tenants dies 4-12 unless lawmakers throw it a lifeline

Politics does not reward the shy
Rent justification and a death penalty for corporate depredation
UPDATE: Fairness for tenants dies 4-12 unless lawmakers throw it a lifeline
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-10-2019 Sparks Tribune

ON THIS DATE IN HISTORY: On April 9, 1939, world-renowned contralto Marian Anderson performed before an audience of 75,000 in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. She had been banned from Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because of her skin color. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt promptly quit the DAR (many others followed) and arranged for her to sing in front of the statue of President Lincoln. U.S. Dept. of Interior Secretary Harold Ickx addressed the crowd. Her performance included "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria." Legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini called her voice "one that comes along every hundred years." A film of the event was circulated to U.S. public schools in the early 1950's...On April 9, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was laid to rest in Atlanta, Georgia. Per King's request, his good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord."

A liberal case for a new, brutal death penalty
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-3-2019 Sparks Tribune

4-1-2019

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

On April 1, 1976, Andrew Barbano met Betty Joyce Luffman Donlevy, manager of Pauline's Sportswear in Carson City. Be still my foolish heart.

Breaking News —>

¡Viva Chávez!

Thanks to everyone who helped make César XVII a record-breaking success despite the rain and snow.
Mark your calendar now for César XVIII on March 31, 2020.

50 years in Nevada: Trying to outlive them all
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-27-2019 Sparks Tribune

HISTORY IN THE MAKING
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak will deliver the keynote address at César Chávez Celebration XVII 3-27-2019
¡Sí se puede!

César Chávez Celebration XVII / Celebración de César Chávez XVII
Wednesday 27 March 2019 / miércoles 27 de Marzo 2019
Tahoe Ballroom / Grand Sierra - Reno

UNR-sponsored day of service and celebration 3/31/2019
Reno Gazette-Journal ads break March 24
KTVN TV-2 (CBS/Home of March Madness)
Spots break 'round the clock starting March 24
[VIEW]

GOP avoids Chávez event
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 3-21-2019

Guns, gouging and guts: once upon a time in the west
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-20-2019 Sparks Tribune

Guv keynotes César XVII: 17-year overnight success
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-13-2019 Sparks Tribune

Hope you looked sharp on the Ides of March!
And on March 17, you remembered that St. Patrick was a slave who rose to sainthood.

Judge not lest ye be judged — or misjudged
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-6-2019 Sparks Tribune

Even in Sparks, God works in mysterious ways
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-27-2019 Sparks Tribune

OF CRABS AND CLANS: White bibs or white sheets tonight
Barbwire Confidential by Andres Luis Barbáno / 2-23-2019 SPECIAL ONLINE HUSHhush E-EDITION

His own Man: Nevada Legislature learned to work with a black senator
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 2-21-2019 / Review of "The Westside Slugger: Joe Neal's lifelong fight for social justice"
Clarification about the review: In 2003, Sen. Neal won passage of an increase in Nevada's gambling tax on the state's largest, most profitable casinos.
It has not risen since he retired in 2004.
Sen. Neal and author John L. Smith will autograph copies on March 27 at César Chávez XVII at the Grand Sierra-Reno.

Hot off the press: "The Westside Slugger"
The life and times biography of Joseph M. Neal, Jr.
Nevada's first African-American senator
By Nevada Press Association Hall of Famer John L. Smith
Published in January 2019 by the University of Nevada Press

Trump's Wall: First step toward ending Nixon's War on Drugs
"Our for-profit prisons overflow with mostly black and brown people convicted of dastardly crimes like possession of two ounces of the Demon Weed."
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-20-2019 Sparks Tribune

NAACP Nevada Black History Month information

2-14-2019 GMT

Happy Valentine's Day, Betty.

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

BLACK LIKE ME 2119: The problem as solution
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-13-2019 Sparks Tribune

Andrew Barbano, former governor of Nevada
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-6-2019 Sparks Tribune

Downtown Sparks: New taxes, gun controls & a wall
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-30-2019 Sparks Tribune

Striking sex: The only thing Trump understands
UPDATES: CULINARY UNION DEFEATS THE CARANO CIRCUS ATTEMPT TO DECERTIFY (TERMINATE) THE UNION
The murderous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire gets NY Philharmonic treatment and a Barbwire exclusive
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-23-2019 Sparks Tribune

Retired IBEW Local 401 Business Manager Jerry David and wife found slain in Reno home
Linked to 2 other recent homicides in Douglas County / Evidence of robbery found
UPDATE: Suspect in custody
By Siobhan McAndrew / Reno Gazette-Journal 1-19-2019

Sands of time blast the milestones of life
Nevada MLK weekend events announced
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-16-2019 Sparks Tribune

In memoriam: 60 years ago toward a lonely road

January 16, 1959, brought the births of Debra Joyce Donlevy/Carson High '77 (1959-1978) and Donna Leslie Cline (1959-1999). Their youth was cut in twain on the same night in 1978 within the loneliness of the High Desert Outback of the American Dream. Remember them fondly.

Bob Price: Cowboy, lawmaker, union man and Elvis fan
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-9-2019 Sparks Tribune

Bob Price, hall of fame Nevada lawmaker, union man and lifelong critic of casino corporate welfare, died 4 Jan. 2019
Las Vegas assemblymember tried to stop casino campaign contributions and paid the price.
Guitarist and friend of Elvis and Joe Neal was 82

Hot off the press: "The Westside Slugger"
The biography of Sen. Joseph M. Neal, Jr.
Nevada's first African-American senator
By Nevada Press Association Hall of Famer John L. Smith
Published in January 2019 by the University of Nevada Press

Hope you and yours had Happy High Holly Days
Merry Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus/Chanukah
Hope you and yours enjoyed enthralling Thanksgibleting.
HAPPY NEW YEAR / Feliz Año Nuevo / Felice Anno Nuovo
Frohe Weihnachten und beste Wuensche fuer 2019

More stupid signs of our republic's decline
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-2-2019 Sparks Tribune

Crystal Balls: Peerless Predixions 2019 & Beyond
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-26-2018 Sparks Tribune

So this is Christmas: May we get what we deserve
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-19-2018 Sparks Tribune

Melvin and Howard: The untold reality show
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-12-2018 Sparks Tribune

A Christmas fantasy for freedom-loving racists
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-5-2018 Sparks Tribune

The growing tide of Teslacide

Latest news from Nevada's $1.4 billion corporate welfare champion

Nevada corporate welfare queens rip off megabux from dumb hick taxpayers
By James De Haven / rgj.com 7-22 / Reno Gazette-Journal 7-28-2019

Menial Tasks, Slurs and Swastikas for Minorities
Many black workers at Tesla California plant say they faced racism
By Lauren Hepler / New York Times / First business page / Sunday 2 Dec. 2018

NYT report on racism at fits a larger pattern of Musk’s company brushing off alarming allegations from workers.
Slate.com / 12-1-2018

SCOTUS coitus interruptus and terminal Teslacide
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 7-11-2018 Sparks Tribune

Broken Promises in Boomtown

November 30 —> St. Andrew's Day. Alleluia!

144 years ago on Thanksgiving weekend,
Barbed wire was patented (11-24-1874), ensuring full employment for doctors and lawyers in perpetuity.
On 18 Jan. 1813, Joseph Glidden, inventor of barbed wire, was born.
The west was never the same. Likewise here.
Stick with The Barbwire to sharply point out the awful truth. Always here.
Get ahead of corporate-influenced news—>Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential
For all the news you never knew you needed to know 'til now—>TOP SECRET, HUSH HUSH!

Requiescant in pace
John F. Kennedy
May 29, 1917 — November 22, 1963

C.S. Lewis: November 29, 1898 — November 22, 1963
Aldous Huxley: July 26, 1894 — November 22, 1963

BREAKING NEWS AND THEN SOME—>

A pledge of allegiance for our empire's children
Editor's note: The above was published before the death of President George HW Bush. His record survives him.
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-28-2018 Sparks Tribune

Federal judge blocks threatened Sparks-Reno-Washoe garbage strike by Teamsters 533
By James DeHaven / Reno Gazette-Journal 11-21-2018

Trumptasic tree ornaments for fun and prophet
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-21-2018 Sparks Tribune

Bluish waves, silver bullets, yellow dogs & chickens
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-14-2018 Sparks Tribune

If we stop killing, we stop killing ourselves
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-7-2018 Sparks Tribune

Required Reading
The Lady in the Red Dress
The award-winning Barbwire classic Nevada Day column written in 1983
The compleat history of the Silver State in 500 words
SPARKS TRIBUNE 10-31-2018

Personal & political hygiene & hijinx for fun & prophet
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-24-2018 Sparks Tribune

Women march to the polls in downtown Reno Oct. 21

BallotBoxing '18: Maximum confusions & contusions
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-17-2018 Sparks Tribune

Great Depression 2.0: Sure cure for what ails us
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-10-2018 Sparks Tribune

Labor legend Stan Jones dies

OCT. 8 10:00a.m.-12noon—> Postal workers and supporters rally to save the system.
Bruce Thompson Federal Building, Liberty @ S. Virginia, Reno
Trump order would take Nevada back to the Pony Express

Déjà vu all over again
FED UP AT THE FEDERAL BUILDING (9-27-2011) — More than 200 postal workers and members of other unions demonstrate at the Bruce Thompson Federal Building in Reno in favor of passage of HR 1351, which would remove the funding drain now threatening the United States Postal Service. The federal courthouse may be seen in the window reflections of the auto in the foreground. (NevadaLabor.com photo)


MEDIA ADVISORY
8 October 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
Clancy McCarthy, President
National Assn. of Letter Carriers Branch 709
(775) 250-8348

POSTAL EMPLOYEES OPPOSE TRUMP PRIVATIZATION MOVES
10:00 a.m. today / Bruce Thompson Federal Courthouse / Downtown Reno
Trump order would take Nevada back to the Pony Express

RENO, NEV. (10-8-2018) — Nevada postal employees will join their counterparts across the nation this morning protesting the Trump administration's move to privatize the system.
Representatives of four major U.S. Postal Service employee unions will gather from 10:00 a.m to 12 noon in front of the Bruce Thompson Federal Courthouse, 400 S. Virginia at Liberty Street in downtown Reno.

"The US Mail is not for sale," stated Clancy McCarthy, President of National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 709 in Reno.

Last May, President Trump created a task force to review USPS operations. Trump's executive order suggested that the USPS universal service obligation be terminated. The proposal runs headlong into the U.S. Constitution (Article I, section 8, Clause 7) among other problems.

The postal service is as old as the nation itself. Trump's order purports that universal service is no longer necessary.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," McCarthy asserted.

"In an age of e-commerce, mail-order prescriptions and voting by mail, affordable universal service is more important than ever," McCarthy added.

UPS and Federal Express have skimmed the cream of the package business but even they use the postal service to complete many of their deliveries because it's by far the most economical. Without the universal service mandate, private companies will only serve profitable, densely populated areas. The likes of Austin, Nevada, will be relegated to the Pony Express or carrier pigeon.

Congress has been complicit in undercutting the service by imposing a mandate suffered by no other organization in the country: paying into a pension fund 75 years into the future. The postal service runs at a profit but this non-creative accounting method shows paper losses and is designed to weaken the service's image and thus its public support.

Last June, the Office of Management and Budget's government-wide reorganization plan called for privatization of the system. Much of the U.S. military has been privatized to mercenaries at huge cost and the momentum continues. Social Security and Medicare are next. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society die with them, a goal of reactionary conservatives for most of a century.

Does anyone wonder how the new, improved U.S. Supreme Court will view these issues?

[Release prepared by Andrew Barbano, Editor, NevadaLabor.com/]
CWA 9413/AFL-CIO

50 shades of rape: Tales of future past
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-3-2018 Sparks Tribune

From Barbwire Confidential

9:14 p.m. PDT 9-26-2018 / 04:14 GMT 9-27-2018 — MY WILDEST DREAM: Tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. PDT, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford walks into the U.S. Senate crucifixion star chamber flanked by her new legal team — lawyers Anita Hill and Barack Obama. (Can we also get Gerry Spence out of retirement?) Alas, love's labours lost.

Blacks honor whites with a dash of electric pink
In search of a pink Cadillac to honor Aretha
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-26-2018 Sparks Tribune

The more things change, the more they remain the same
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-19-2018 Sparks Tribune

FROM JOURNALIST DENNIS MYERS' DAILY ALMANAC


IN MEMORY
Addie Mae Collins
Denise McNair
Carol Robertson
Cynthia Wesley

ON SEPT. 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members, killing four girls attending a Sunday service at which the sermon was titled "The love that forgives"; ON SEPT. 15, 1979, using a hot air balloon that took months to devise, two east German families escaped over the Berlin wall; ON SEPT. 15, 2007, Sally Field received an Emmy for her portrayal of family matriarch "Nora Walker" in the television series Brothers and Sisters and the Fox Network censored part of her acceptance speech: "But at the heart of Nora Walker, she is a mother. So surely this belongs to all the mothers of the world. May they be seen. May their work be valued and raised, and especially the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait-wait for their children to come home from danger, from harm's way, and from war. ... And let's face it, if mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddam wars in the first place."

FROM A FATHER AND A BROTHER

Osama bin Laden's strategic logic was to embroil the United States in a never-ending conflict to ultimately bankrupt the country.

"All that we have to do is send two mujahadeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda,' " he said in 2004, "in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note."

Why are we continuing to do what Bin Laden wanted all along? I refuse to take Bin Laden's orders. I will not stay quiet. End the war.

— Joe Quinn, veteran of two tours in Afghanistan who lost a brother in the World Trade Center. His son is now deployed in the never-ending war. (New York Times op-ed, 9-11-2018)

 

 

 

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." — George Santayana

 

Dim and Dimmer: Ghost of Jim the Dim rides again
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-12-2018 Sparks Tribune

Michael Moore and Checkers the Corporate Crime-fighting Chicken try to breach a criminal fortress — but can't get past the fortress waitress. (From his Emmy-winning series, TV Nation)

Message from the Mahatma —> FAHRENHEIT 11/9
Opening Night kick-off of the Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO 6 Sept. 2018 —We open nationwide on September 21, 45 days before the most important election in American history (and with voter registration still open nationwide!). I have spent the better part of this year constructing a film that will not only explain how the @#&% we ended up with Trump, but also help show us the way out. I must warn you — I do not pull ANY punches in the film. No one is spared— not even me.

This film is THE moment of truth we've all needed for some time and I truly believe its release will be the real beginning of the end for Donald J. Trump (and perhaps, more importantly, the eventual end of the rotten, corrupt system that gave us Trump in the first place).

I need your help. I’ve made a film that was meant to be seen on a big screen, in a dark theater, filled with a hundred strangers. My hope is that you will experience the magic of cinema the way it was meant to be experienced, in a movie theater. It's the best way to truly feel the big story I'm telling you. Any bit of anger, despair, or frustration you’ve felt over the past few years must be channeled into action this fall!

We are the majority — never forget that. But we need to rise up. That’s the only way out of this mess.

All my best,

Michael Moore
MichaelMoore.com


 

P. S. I'll bring you into the world premiere tonight via Facebook Live just before 11pm ET.

Barbwire 30th Anniversary Trilogy
Now well into a 4th decade of equal opportunity harassment of the rich, famous & powerful

Part 3: Biting the hand that feeds me
GOP '18 upsets: Déjà vu all over again
Laxalt and Heller favored to win in November
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-5-2018 Sparks Tribune
Part 2: Biting the moonhowlers
Good reasons to lie to those pesky pollsters
Heller eats sheep balls to get the courage to perpetrate guilt by association
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 8-29-2018 Sparks Tribune
Part 1: Bitten by my buds
Machine Gun Michele and her low-caliber, low-cut friends
The censored Barbwires of the 2015 legislature finally see ink and my fantasy fiancée bares all
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 8-22-2018 Sparks Tribune

30 Years before the masthead: Barbano remembers the Barbwire's greatest hits
By Kayla Anderson / Sparks Tribune 8-22-2018

Barbwire by Barbano moved to Nevada's Daily Sparks Tribune on Aug. 12, 1988, and has originated in them parts ever since.
Whom to blame: How a hall-of-famer's hunch birthed the Barbwire in August of 1987
Tempus fugit.

Some like it hot —

Nevada State AFL-CIO annual convention Grand Sierra-Reno Aug. 19-21
Be there or be square.

And some like it hotter —

HIGH-RISE TOUGH GUYS

New York, NY — Ironworkers Local 580/AFL-CIO high-rise tough guys Miguel Millan, left, and Steve Gulitti sweat for the cameras while not sweating the altitude over Central Park. (That's The Big Apple cooking in the distance.) Brother Gulitti has long been a great source of news and info to NevadaLabor.com. I strongly suggest that if you like to stay in the know about who's doing what, with which and to whom, get on his e-list (at HotMail, of course). Tell him Barbano on the Barbwire sent you.

From Brother Gulitti:

Labor Union Approval Best Since 2003 at 61%
Americans' approval of labor unions has risen to 61%, the highest since 2003.
A new high of 39% say unions should have more influence.
news.gallup.com

From the venerable Harper's Magazine Sept. 2018:

LABOR'S LAST STAND: IS THIS THE END OF AMERICAN UNIONS?
RED FLAG WARNINGS ON HOT RED MORNINGS
A September swan song we won't sing. READ IT! THEN GO ELECT SOMEBODY.

From Barbwire by Barbano 3-7-2018:

Successful teachers strikes make 1985 prediction come true

    "How will labor come back? In a strike. That's not romanticism, that's a fact. It'll start with one plant. One plant. And they strike. And there'll be guys across the street at a second plant, and they see it, and they think 'Hmm, maybe we can do that.' And they win. Then somebody in Idaho does it, the same thing, independently. And then all of a sudden you're seeing some John L. Lewis again, a leader, but he gets thrown up, he's just riding the thing...That's not romanticism, that's a fact." — Ed Sadlowski, United Steelworkers Subdistrict Director
    (From Geoghegan, Thomas, "WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON: Trying to be for labor when it's flat on its back" / Penguin/Plume Books, 1991, at 248)

HOT TOWN SUMMER IN THE CITY — Gulitti photo taken July 3, 2018, the fourth day of a major heat wave.

Historical Black Colleges & Universities Tour 2018

NARAL Pro-Choice America Rally/Reno City Hall Plaza Sunday Aug. 26

NATURAL WOMAN: QUEEN OF SOUL ARETHA FRANKLIN DIES AT 76
DETROIT (8-16-2018) — Aretha Franklin, the undisputed Queen of Soul who stood as a cultural icon around the globe, has died at age 76 from advanced pancreatic cancer. Several years ago, Rolling Stone named her the greatest rock singer of all time, ahead of Ray Charles and Elvis Presley. Music rises as tears fall around the world. May she continue to make a joyful noise unto the Lord into eternity.

ALMANAC: On August 16, 1977, Elvis died. On August 16, 2018, Aretha died.

Wisdom from the immortals: Goethe, Ali & Connery
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 8-15-2018 Sparks Tribune

Buy local? 'Bye local and goodbye to Paul Laxalt
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 8-8-2018 Sparks Tribune

Analog anachronisms and digital dinosaurs
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 8-1-2018 Sparks Tribune

Ballardini black hole: Let's get our millions back
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 7-25-2018 Sparks Tribune

Putin & the Blowfish: High treason season of the witch
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 7-18-2018 Sparks Tribune

SCOTUS coitus interruptus and terminal Teslacide
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 7-11-2018 Sparks Tribune

Fake boobs and fake news: Guts, feathers and all
Another public relations coup for Nevada: Teslacide
In The Guardian/London & worldwide, Barbano and Nevada conservatives decry corporate welfare depredations
Menlo Park and Reno-Sparks-Fernley share similarly sad high-tech stretch marks
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 7-4-2018 Sparks Tribune

Cat house to state house: Any publicity is good publicity
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 6-27-2018 Sparks Tribune

Ghost in the machine: The return of NAGPAC
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 6-20-2018 Sparks Tribune

Lucky June 13: Cheap shots and low blows
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 6-13-2018 Sparks Tribune

A duo of D-Days visit Nevada this week
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 6-6-2018 Sparks Tribune

Mother Dolores: Our village loses its patron saint
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 5-30-2018 Sparks Tribune

Grandma, gold standards, forearms and tin ears
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 5-23-2018 Sparks Tribune

Las Vegas hospitality workers overwhelmingly vote to authorize citywide strike

Nevada Democratic Gubernatorial Debate: 6:00 p.m. PDT 5-21-2018 KTVN TV-2 (Northern Nevada) and KLAS TV-8 Southern Nevada. The game's afoot. Watch The Barbwire for a review.

Beer & music and rendering unto Caesar
Barbwire by Andrea Luigi Barbáno / Expanded from the 5-16-2018 Sparks Tribune

Stormy weather: Poll dancing for fun & prophet
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 5-9-2018 Sparks Tribune

Flint, Nevada: Dirty deeds done dirt cheap
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 5-2-2018 Sparks Tribune

Poor Denny's Almanac: May Day 2018

On May 1, 1886, in a period of economic brutality and robber barons like today, a strike was begun in Chicago for an eight hour day, a challenge to economic power that later became International Workers Day and gave May Day its name, and on the same day Boston plumbers and carpenters issued a strike threat against the Master Building Association unless an eight hour day was allowed, brewers at a Philadelphia firm struck, a building trades strike was scheduled in the District of Columbia, a labor mass meeting was held in San Francisco, furniture makers and cigar makers unions in San Francisco imposed an eight hour day without bothering to ask employers, the Baltimore Sun agreed to an eight hour day for carpenters it employed, St. Louis carpentry employers agreed to an eight hour day, and business and journalism throughout the country tried to play workers off against each other, particularly against Chinese workers (two days after the first May Day, Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers, killing four people and wounding many more); in 1886 at a labor union rally held in Milwaukee, the first known use was reportedly made of the labor slogan “8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for what we will”; in 1888 in Washington, part way through his second term in the U.S. House of Representatives, William Woodburn of Nevada decided he’d had enough and wired Republican leader R.H. Lindsay in Reno, “Have concluded not to run for Congress. Am tired of fighting men in our party. Nominate a winner.”; in 1908, California physician S.A. Ellis, who had mining investments at Searchlight, said he believed the town would make a good health resort and sanitarium because “I know of no better place for people affected with lung troubles”; in 1926, Frank Garside took control of the Clark County Review, one of the forerunners of the Las Vegas Review-Journal; in 1939, George Thompson became acting Las Vegas police chief following the removals of chief Dave Mackey and assistant chief Harry Miller; in 1952, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh legally nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and provided for compensation to be paid to the British corporation (the next year, at the request of MI-6, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency engineered the overthrow of Mosaddegh, an action that was illegal under international law); in 1968, peace candidate Truong Dinh Dzu, the opponent of Nyuyen Van Thieu in the 1967 presidential “election”, was jailed by Saigon officials (on July 23d, they said he would be tried on charges of advocating a coalition government); in 1971, Ringo’s “It Don’t Come Easy” was released; in 1972, The New York Times received the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service for providing the Pentagon Papers to the public and Jack Anderson received the prize for national reporting for disclosing President Nixon’s tilting U.S. policy toward Pakistan while telling the public he was not, but the Pulitzer trustees also released a statement expressing reservations about the “timeliness and suitability of certain of the journalism awards” (which the Times reported was aimed at the Pentagon and Pakistan prizes because they relied on leaked government documents)—apparently praising and condemning the reporting at the same time; in 2006, immigrant workers and their families and supporters marched in Chicago, birthplace of May Day, against anti-immigrant legislation being debated in the US House and Senate, a march supported by a surprising array of management leaders, including the Illinois Restaurant Association and meat processing giant Cargill, which closed for the day in support of immigrants.

Just when you thought there was no good news
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-25-2018 Sparks Tribune

¡Viva Chávez!
César Chávez Celebration XVI / Celebración de César Chávez XVI
Saturday 31 March 2018 / Sabado 31 de Marzo 2018
Latest news and event lineup
Watch this website for a complete event report starting here:

Flying machines in pieces on the ground, part deux
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-18-2018 Sparks Tribune

We Don't Need No Education Part LXXXVIII—>
Flying machines in pieces on the ground
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-11-2018 Sparks Tribune

We Don't Need No Education Part LXXXVII—>
Marked for life for making a phone call
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 4-4-2018 Sparks Tribune

Poor Denny's Almanac
March 31: A birthday for giants — Jack Johnson and César Chávez

March 31 — On this date in 1870, Thomas Peterson Mundy of Perth Amboy became the first African American to vote under the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been ratified the previous day (he also served as a school principal and was later elected to the Middlesex County Commission); in 1878, boxer (and future world heavyweight champion) Jack Johnson was born in Galveston; in 1911, after three years of prosecutions by the (Theodore) Roosevelt and Taft administrations of newspapers that reported on tawdry government conduct in the construction of the Panama Canal, the cases—which were thrown out by the courts—formally came to an end when a U.S. attorney in New York requested permission to enter a filing called a nolle prosse dropping all criminal libel charges; in 1927, César Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona; in 1949, attorney Madison Graves filed charges against Las Vegas police officers after a teenager was beaten in the city jail and then given no medical attention to head injuries for four hours; in 1961, what was reported to be Reno’s first sit-in was staged by African Americans at the Overland Hotel’s café while elsewhere in the downtown a picket line was thrown up at the Nevada Bank of Commerce; in 2008 (and 2018), César Chávez Day will be celebrated with a large gathering at the Circus Circus Hotel in Reno. [Courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' daily Poor Denny's Almanac, Copyright © 2007-2018 Dennis Myers.]

From the den of iniquity to the holy of holies
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-28-2018 Sparks Tribune

What's harder: Finding a doctor or Stormy Daniels?
Sucking up money: The ever-expanding tentacles of the voracious Renown medical octopus
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-21-2018 Sparks Tribune

Poor Denny's Almanac

March 30 — On this date in 1963, aeronautical engineer Ed Dwight, an African-American U.S. Air Force test pilot, was admitted to U.S. astronaut training, where—after full public relations mileage was obtained from him—he was harassed and threatened into quitting two years later (he is now a renowned sculptor).

March 29 —On this date in 1951 in New York City, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage by an all-Christian jury; in 1971, Lt. William Calley was convicted of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians, the only responsible official ever brought to justice for the My Lai massacre.

March 28 — On this date in 1939, an agent for Argentine meat packers who supplied dog food in the U.S. was quoted by columnist Drew Pearson: “My two best sales areas are Park Avenue and the deep South. On Park Avenue, it is the dogs that eat the dog food, but in the deep South, it is the negroes and the poor whites.”; in 1944, the two-day murder of all the Jewish children in Lithuania’s Zezmariai death camp was completed; in 1953, the Reno Sparks Indian Colony formed a planning board to prepare for release of the colony’s residents from wardship and resultant securing of deeds to their properties; in 1979, an accident at Three Mile Island set off the nation’s worst nuclear power plant disaster.

March 27— On this date in 1961, after a morning in which African Americans from around Nevada poured into the state capital, a senate committee kept approving a weak civil rights bill and then revoking its approval, finally allowing a full senate vote by which the measure lost 9 to 8.

March 24 —On this date in 1890 in a case dealing with whether state railroad rate setters could set rates, the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced in Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railroad vs. Minnesota the legal doctrine that a corporation was a person within the meaning of the 14th amendment to the Constitution; in 1944 in Poland, Allied airmen began escaping through a tunnel 30 feet deep and 300 feet long from the German prison camp Stalag Luft III, continuing into the early morning hours of March 25, 76 men eventually escaping, 73 being recaptured, 50 executed, and three avoiding recapture to reach freedom (the movie The Great Escape invented the role of U.S. soldiers, none of whom escaped or had a major role in the escape plans and operation); in 1956, U.S. Navy officials confronted Lt. Thomas Dooley, famous for his humanitarian work in Indochina, with the results of an investigation into his sexuality and forced him to resign his commission; in 1959, The Drifters’ There Goes My Baby was released; in 1980, during a U.S.-funded war by the El Salvador government against its own people that claimed 3,000 lives a month, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while he said mass, shortly after he unsuccessfully begged President Carter to stop financing the slaughter (a United Nations investigation later concluded that the murder had been ordered by Salvadoran Major Roberto D’Aubuisson); in 2004, after starting an unnecessary war for an imaginary reason and sending thousands of soldiers to fight it — more than four thousand of whom died — George W. Bush turned his lethal rationale for war into alleged comedy material at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in D.C., showing slides of federal officials searching the White House for weapons of mass destruction, a performance that the sycophantic journalists in his audience — and in later news reports — considered a riot, a judgment not shared by the public, which sent a flood of angry messages to the networks.

March 23 —On this date in 1918, trial began of the Woodrow Wilson administration's prosecution of 101 labor leaders indicted for “espionage” (opposing U.S. participation in World War One), among them Bill Haywood, who at age 15 worked in a mine in Nevada’s Humboldt County; in 1923, Chollar Mine worker Andy Antunovich lost an arm on the job as rumors circulated of a miners strike on the Comstock; in 1943, twenty-nine Jewish children from the La Rose Orphanage in France, and their adult caretaker, were gassed at Sobibor death camp; in 1954, French Chief of Staff General Paul Ely and U.S. Joint Chiefs chair Admiral Arthur Radford concocted a plan called Operation Vulture (Opération Vautour) to use an atom bomb in Vietnam to rescue the besiged French at Dien Bien Phu (both Vulture and other plans for U.S. involvement died when the Eisenhower administration was unable to lure British Prime Minister Winston Churchill into the scheme); in 1960, after Storey County District Attorney Robert Moore obtained a nuisance order from Nevada District Court Judge Richard Hanna that said Joe Conforte’s Triangle Ranch brothel was being “unlawfully used for the purpose of maintaining a house of prostitution” and should be destroyed at Conforte’s expense, a fire crew from Washoe County burned the brothel to the ground; in 1964, John Lennon’s In His Own Write was published; in 1979, former Chilean Ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington DC by two Cuban exiles hired by the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Letelier's aide, Mrs. Ronni Karpen Moffit, a U.S. citizen, also died in the car bomb attack perpetrated by agents of a Nazi-loving mass murderer installed by the Nixon-Kissinger administration via a 1973 coup de'tat which resulted in the death of democratically elected President Salvadore Allende — and the death of the second-oldest democracy in the western hemisphere.]

March 22 — On this date in 1864 in the U.S. House, Representative Henry Winter Davis pointed out that Lincoln’s “emancipation proclamation” had no legal effect so it was necessary for congressional action to accomplish abolition of slavery.

March 21 (Barbwire/César Chávez XVI Update) — On this date in 1806, Benito Juárez was born. ¡Viva Juárez!

March 20 — On this date in 1896, the United States attacked Nicaragua, one of at least eight U.S. wars on that nation (1894, 1896, 1898, 1899, 1907, 1910, 1912-33, 1981-90); in 1919, Slats, who would become the original MGM lion, was born at the Dublin zoo; in 1971, Army Secretary Stanley Resor announced reforms to deal with treatment of African Americans, particularly at U.S. posts in Germany where they received fewer promotions and harsher punishments than whites, and where they faced discrimination in off-base housing rentals; in 1994, Italian journalists Ilaria Lapi and Miran Hrovatin, who reportedly were digging into gun running by the Italian military in Somalia, were mysteriously murdered by a Land Rover full of gunmen in Mogadishu as Italian troops were leaving Somalia; in 2003, the U.S. government began its unprovoked war against Iraq; in 2009, Michelle Obama launched a campaign for healthy food and exercise by planting a vegetable garden at the White House, assisted by school children, and in a knee-jerk response Republicans attacked her and continued their assault for months, with Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann among those joining in the attack.

Remember: St. Patrick was once a slave who returned to minister to the land which shackled him

On St. Patrick's Day: in 1934, thirty African American students were ejected from the U.S. House of Representatives dining room when they sought service as a protest against the firing of a waiter who tried to serve blacks, with police shoving the students out of the restaurant, down the hallway, and outdoors, fists swinging and blows landing; in 1966, farm workers led by César Chávez began a march from Delano to Sacramento; in 1970, U.S. postal workers struck. [PDA]

The César Chávez Long March, 3-17-1966
by Reno artist Erik Holland

The original watercolor above was displayed for several years in the Nevada Legislature offices of Sen. (now Congressman) Ruben Kihuen, D-Las Vegas, prime sponsor of the 2009 César Chávez Day bill. Mr. Holland is preparing a new painting to be unveiled at César Chávez Celebration XVI on March 31, 2018, at Circus Circus-Reno. Click here for event reservations and sponsorship opportunities.

Copyright © 2009 Erik Holland. All rights reserved.

Buyer beware the Ides of March
Full house: Renters face a bleak future in the Truckee Meadows
Barbano: Shoddy developers still call the shots
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 3-8-2018
And we didn't even get kissed afterward

A world in fear: It's always 9/11 somewhere
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-14-2018 Sparks Tribune

And a little child shall lead them

Wednesday, March 14: National student walkout for gun control. Stand by for detention, you rambunctious little protestors. The University of Nevada-Reno says OK. The Washoe County School District says you're busted, you truant juvenile delinquents.

DETENTION JUNCTION: Reno-Sparks students will risk reprisals for walking out against guns
By Siobhan McAndrew / Reno Gazette-Journal 3-13-2018

Walkout date is an opportunity for Washoe students
Washoe School District Trustee Scott Kelley Op-Ed / Reno Gazette-Journal 3-13-2018

Hope for a nation more interested in butt control than gun control —  Andrew Barbano, Sparks Tribune, 3-14-2018

March for Our Lives — and against guns — March 24 in front of the Bruce Thompson Federal Building, W. Liberty at S. Virginia, Reno, 11:30 a.m., concluding at the Reno City Hall BELIEVE PLAZA at 1:30 p.m. Info: Nnedi Stephens, 775-338-4561

Washoe County Commissioner Kitty Jung wins poll position on candidate filing day

West Virginia teachers: Strike one, strike won
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-7-2018 Sparks Tribune
LATEST Barbwires

Mayorga muerto

Tony Mayorga (Español)
1952-2018


FORMER LABORERS' LOCAL 169 PRESIDENT & TRAINING INSTRUCTOR TONY MAYORGA DIES AT 65

Mayorga Memorial Celebration Saturday March 10

RENO (19 Feb. 2018) — Brother Mayorga passed away at 3:01 p.m. PST at Renown Regional Medical Center. He was hospitalized early last week with a respiratory illness. His wife, family, close friends, union sisters and brothers watched over him. Please monitor this website for updates. If you are not on the NevadaLabor.com mailing list, you may want to join now. Whatever your core beliefs, please send powerful prayers, projections, thoughts, vibrations and emanations toward our friend, Tony. Thank you.

 
Tony Mayorga dies at 65
Advance notice to NevadaLabor.com union lists

VETERANS — Left to right, Maria Zamora, Librado "Lee" Chávez and Tony Mayorga. Lee Chávez holds up a hand-crafted United Farm Workers of America flag signed by his late brother. The flag is part of Ms. Zamora's collection of Chávez/UFWA memorabilia which she displayed at the 2004 Chávez Celebration. Ms. Zamora marched with César Chávez in the 1960's and cooked for the multitudes as they trekked across California. She traveled from California to attend the 2014 event and has been our guest several times since. She weaved wonderful stories for the audience in her Hall of Fame address. As always, the Chávez family was well represented by Reno resident Ramon Chávez and his family. Tony Mayorga served many years as director of training and President of Laborers' Union Local 169, a founding sponsor of the celebration. [Librado Chávez and a dozen family members attended the 2008-2011 events. Lee and Tony are now gone. César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Famer Maria will induct Tony into that exclusive club on March 31, 2018. Adios, hermano.]


MEDIA ADVISORY
Photos at NevadaLabor.com/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
CARLOS GOMEZ (775) 303-1328
Andrew Barbano (775) 786-1455

FORMER LABORERS' UNION PRESIDENT & LONGTIME TRAINING INSTRUCTOR TONY MAYORGA DIES AT 65
Memorial celebration March 10, Hall of Fame induction March 31

RENO, NV (March 10, 2018) — All Nevada labor mourns the loss of longtime union leader Tony Mayorga who died Feb. 19 at Renown Regional Medical Center.

A memorial celebration will be held at 3:00 p.m. Saturday, March 10, at Walton's, 1745 Sullivan Lane in Sparks.

"He didn't want tears, he wanted joy, music, dancing and laughter, so that's how we will remember him," stated Carlos Gomez, his son-in-law.

In lieu of flowers, his family asks for contributions to the Domestic Violence Resource Center (formerly the Committee to Aid Abused Women). In his training capacity, Mayorga led the crew that re-paved their big parking lot for free in 1999. He did the same in 2005 for the American Red Cross as well as for several local churches among other organizations. (Stories and photos at NevadaLabor.com/)

Mayorga was honored with the César Chávez Distinguished Labor Educator Award at the 2015 Nevada César Chávez Celebration. He will be inducted into the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on César Chávez Day '18 on March 31, only the second posthumous honoree in the event's history. (The first was Fred Ross, Sr., the legendary organizer who taught César Chávez how to organize workers.)

Mayorga, 65, worked with his hands all his life and earned his way to the top. He spent 18 years in the field on construction projects before becoming Laborers' Local 169 training instructor in 1997 and president in 1999. He held both positions for the 1,400-member union until his 2015 retirement.

"He was a strong and proud union man throughout his working life," stated Local 169 Business Manager and State Assemblymember Richard "Skip" Daly, D-Sparks.

"Beyond his family, colleagues and friendships, Tony's impact will be felt for decades to come through the thousands of women and men he educated in skilled construction," Daly added.

He was hospitalized in mid-February with a respiratory illness. His wife, family, close friends, union sisters and brothers watched over him.

Jose Antonio Mayorga Torres was born to Elias Mayorga Ovalle and Catalina Torres Araujo on October 25, 1952, in Chihuahua, Mexico. He grew up and went to school in Tijuana before emigrating to the United States.

He met Filipino immigrant Leah Aranda in Nevada. They became U.S. citizens and were married 36 years, residing in Sparks since 1972.

"Theirs is truly an American success story," stated Eloy Jara, Mayorga's successor as president of Local 169.

"Tony earned our admiration as a leader, teacher and mentor. We honor him by using the skills he taught us," Jara added.

Mayorga is survived by his parents of Tijuana, Mexico; his wife, the former Leah Aranda; children Antonio Mayorga, Elias Mayorga and Amalia M. Gomez (Carlos); brothers Adrian, Elias and Ismael, all of Nevada, and six grandchildren.

UPDATE 3-7-2018 [From Barbwire by Barbano, SPARKS TRIBUNE] — SATURDAY ADIOS. My friend Tony Mayorga will be inducted into the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on March 31. First, his family, friends, union sisters and brothers will have a high-hearted going-away fest for the good man who died Feb. 19 at 65. He didn't want tears, he wanted joy. So be it.

The Mayorga Adios happens at 3:00 p.m. this Saturday, March 10, at Walton's, 1745 Sullivan Lane in Sparks.

In lieu of flowers, his family asks for contributions to the Domestic Violence Resource Center (formerly the Committee to Aid Abused Women).

A few years back, Tony led the crew that re-paved their big parking lot for free. He was like that.

RENO, NV (20 Feb. 2018) — All Nevada labor mourns the loss of longtime union leader Tony Mayorga who died Feb. 19 at Renown Regional Medical Center.

Mayorga, 65, worked with his hands all his life and earned his way to the top. He spent 18 years in the field on construction projects before becoming training instructor in 1997 and president of Laborers' Local 169 in 1999. He held both positions until his 2015 retirement.

"He was a strong and proud union man throughout his working life," stated Local 169 Business Manager and State Assemblymember Richard "Skip" Daly, D-Sparks.

"Beyond his family, colleagues and friendships, Tony's impact will be felt for decades to come through the thousands of women and men he educated in skilled construction," Daly added.

Mayorga received the César Chávez Distinguished Labor Educator Award at the 2015 Nevada César Chávez Celebration. He will be inducted into the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on César Chávez Day '18 on March 31, thus becoming only the second posthumous honoree in the event's history. Watch CesarChavezNevada.com for additional information as matters proceed.

Brother Mayorga was hospitalized early last week with a respiratory illness. His wife, family, close friends, union sisters and brothers watched over him.

He leaves his wife, Leah, three children, six grandchildren and a union family of thousands.

Please monitor NevadaLabor.com for updates. For additional information and family contact, you may e-mail Carlos Gomez, Tony's successor as Local 169 training instructor.

Your kind remembrances will be appreciated.

Thank you.

In Solidarity,

Tony's Sisters and Brothers

A version of the above will appear in the Feb. 21 Sparks (Nev.) Tribune.

Poor Denny's Almanac

March 5: On this date in 1885, Assemblymember David Allen of Washoe County introduced legislation providing for the appointment of “state detectives”, which, after the bill was enacted, were paid by commercial interests like the mining and cattle industries and empowered with deputy’s powers to serve those interests, often being employed against labor; in 1981, President Reagan called for an end to legal aid for the poor.

March 4: On this date in 1887, twenty-three year old William Randolph Hearst purchased the San Francisco Examiner; in 1911, a million acres of federally managed land was transferred to the State of Nevada under the Carey Act [Editor's note: Read what happened to 4 million acres of Nevada land originally intended to benefit education in perpetuity, also by Dennis Myers, of course); in 1914, the new $110,000 University of Nevada library was dedicated; in 1944, four Jewish women found in the Aryan section of Warsaw were murdered; in 1970, over the objections of ABC network executives, Johnny Cash hosted blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger on the Johnny Cash Show (Cash called Seeger’s critics “crackpots” and called Seeger “one of the best Americans and patriots I’ve ever known”); in 2002, Matthew A. Commons of Boulder City died near Gardez, Afghanistan; in 2007, the Associated Press reported that U.S. troops threatened the lives of Afghan reporters unless those reporters erased images of a U.S. attack on civilians: “Delete them or we’ll delete you.”

March 3: On this date in 1994, Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa issued a legal opinion saying that the county supremacy movement’s “Plan for Public Land” (which argues that Nevada holds title to federally managed lands within the state) does not have a “theory with any measure of respect in the legitimate legal community” [Editor's note: Cliven Bundy and Wesley Snipes, please call your laywers]; in 2003 at a food court in Crossgates Mall near Albany, New York, where he was having lunch with his son, attorney Stephen Downs was ordered by security guards to remove the “Give peace a chance” shirt he had purchased at the mall and was arrested and charged with trespass when he refused (the mall later backed down and asked that the charge against Downs be dropped after about a hundred people wearing peace shirts entered the mall and refused to leave until the complaint against Downs was withdrawn).

March 2: On this date in 1934 Tom Mix, Wallace Beery and other movie stars having lunch at the Brown Derby failed to get their food when the restaurant’s twenty-seven waiters walked out in a pay dispute; in 1946, the National Assembly named Ho Chi Minh president of Vietnam; in 1955, “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley was recorded for the Checker label, introducing the driving, insistent beat that was so influential that “Bo Diddley beat” became the term to describe it; in 1960, the Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal began moving from their offices on Center Street to a new building on Stevenson Street; in 1979, Norma Rae, a movie about union organizing at a J.P. Stevens textile plant, was released and its star, Sally Field, eventually was nominated for the Academy Award, Golden Globes, New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and award competitions of the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the Cannes Film Festival — and won all of them; in 2009, Fox network personality Megyn Kelly and U.S. Representative Trent Franks claimed on the air that U.S. Sen. Harry Reid had language in the federal recession stimulus legislation that would be used to build a railroad from Disneyland in southern California to the Moonlite Bunnyranch in northern Nevada, which was false (and Reid opposes legal prostitution). [Editor's note: Did Harvey Weinstein know about this?) [PDA]

Lousy lawyering for pun and prophet
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-28-2018 Sparks Tribune

Latest Barbwires

 

ToddBQ '18
The Building & Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada/AFL-CIO roasts Brother Todd Koch into retirement on Saturday, 24 Feb. 2018 at Circus Circus-Reno. Mandalay Ballroom doors open at 5:30, Dinner at 6:30 p.m.
Click here for sponsorship, table and ticket information. Show up and make it hurt!

ROASTED INTO RETIREMENT
Labor leader Todd Koch departs with praises sung and feathers singed

RENO, NV (24 Feb. 2018) — Public officials and union members will roast longtime Nevada labor leader Todd Koch into retirement this Saturday evening, Feb. 24.

The Koch Retirement Roast begins with cocktails at 5:30 and dinner at 6:30 p.m. in the Mandalay Ballroom of Circus Circus, 5th & Sierra in downtown Reno. Valet and garage parking are both free.

Tickets are $150 per person in advance, $175 at the door. Seniors over 65 and students with identification are $135 per person in advance, $150 at the door. Advance reservations may be made online through NevadaLabor.com or by calling the Building & Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada/AFL-CIO, (775) 355-9200. Proceeds will benefit union member education activities.

Reno City Councilmember Paul McKenzie (NP) will emcee the event.

"I have worked side-by-side with Todd for many years in my capacity as executive secretary-treasurer of the building trades council," McKenzie stated.

"For his entire life, he has been a tireless advocate to enhance the value of hard work and there is no better example than his own career," McKenzie added.

Koch's 40-year tenure will be honored by public officials including U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto, D-Nev. (via video), State Sen. Julia Ratti, D-Sparks, County Commissioner Kitty Jung, D-Washoe, and Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve (NP).

Koch focused on drafting and architecture during four years split between Mt. San Antonio College and Cal-Poly Pomona.

He then pursued hands-on architecture by enrolling in the Painters Union state-certified apprenticeship program. After graduating early, he joined his father, Sonny Koch, in the trade. He soon became a foreman running major construction industry projects within his field.

APPRENTICESHIP CLASS — Todd and his fellow macho studs prepare for Chippendales dancer auditions. The handsome skinny kid at left is tonight's guest of honor. (Oh, the humanity of it.) Fully dressed in the photo are Kenny McCune, second from right, and Todd's dad, Sonny Koch, at far right. The guys tried their best to unionize Chippendales. Todd did not receive a callback. Legend has it that his father did.

Koch was elected business manager of Sparks-based Painters & Allied Trades Local 567/AFL-CIO in 1997 at age 39. He served in that capacity until 2003 when he became a regional director with International Union of Painters & Allied Trades District Council 16. The council's jurisdiction covers northern Nevada and northern California.

In addition to his duties for his fellow union members, he served as president of both the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council and the Building & Construction Trades Council. He also became a principal organized labor representative to the Nevada Legislature and was elected vice-president of the Nevada State AFL-CIO.

In 2015, Koch was appointed to the board of the Nevada Governor's Workforce Development Board. In 2011, he was honored for his community service at the Washoe County Democratic Party's annual Virginia Demmler Dinner.

"We want good jobs and an end to raging inequality. We want our democracy back. That's why bus drivers, nurses, construction workers and so many other working people are taking to the streets across the nation," Koch said at the Demmler event.

At 59-ish, he will continue involvement with his union, starting as leader of the District Council 16 retirees club in northern Nevada.

He and his wife Debbie are longtime Reno residents and have one daughter and one grand-daughter.

District Council 16 honored him with a testimonial dinner in California in January. This Saturday promises much spicier fare, Nevada style.

No country for old men (Carson City, Nev., 3-27-2013) — Superannuated union guys in front of the Nevada legislative building at a noontime rally to preserve Nevada's prevailing wage law. Left to right are Gary Peck of the Nevada State Education Assn., Andrew Barbano—CWA 9413/AFL-CIO, Todd Koch—Painters & Allied Trades Local 567/District Council 16/AFL-CIO; Danny Thompson, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Nevada State AFL-CIO and Anthony Rogers, International Brotherhood of Machinists & Aerospace Workers Lodge 845-Las Vegas. César Chávez/NevadaLabor.com Hall of Famer Sam Lumpe of Sheet Metal Workers Local 26, wearing a white cap, may be seen in the background behind Bro. Koch's head. (Photo: Annie Jantzen, High Desert Gypsy Photography)

BLASTS FROM KOCH'S CHECKERED PAST
Building Trades Council responds to GOP misrepresentation
KOCH: Sen. Dean Heller attempts to stage illegal political rally at federally-subsidized housing complex
Todd on the picket lines
Labor Day then and now
Painters Local 567 apprentices paint the historic Lake Mansion
Credit Todd for the looks of this union-created website

BLACK HISTORY MONTH ALMANAC

"They gave us the shortest month of the year" — Chris Rock

African Americans in Times of War
BLACK HISTORY MEET & GREET
NETWORK WITH NEVADA COMMUNITY LEADERS
Thursday, February 22, 2018, 6:30-8:00 p.m.
EVELYN MOUNT NORTHEAST COMMUNITY CENTER
1301 Valley Road, 2nd floor, Reno NV
Snacks, Displays, Books and Small Talk Provided
For more information contact
Patricia Gallimore, Reno-Sparks NAACP President
(775) 746-9453
Don Gallimore, Second Vice-President
(775) 303-7050

RenoSparksNAACP.org
2018 Black History Month Almanac
Courtesy of journalist Dennis Myers and friends

March 1: On this date in 1942, a citizens’ committee complained about the brutality of riot police who arrested 101 African Americans and three whites when white pickets prevented black families from moving into the newly completed Sojourner Truth defense workers housing project in Detroit.

February 27: On this date in 1898, the Nevada State Journal raised the issue of the 35 year-old debt supposedly owed by the U.S. government to Nevada for the cost of fighting against state tribes during the Civil War: “As there is now a probability of an appropriation being made for the payment of those claims, as several States are interested in the passage of the bill, the press of the State should agitate the subject and publish facts from old settlers relative to the manner in which the depredations were committed and the hardships endured by reason of the loss of their cattle, and provisions and the burning of their houses by hostile Indians.”; in 1920, Woodrow Wilson set a pattern for U.S. presidents by rebuffing a friendly overture from the Soviet Union; in 1933, the Nevada Senate approved a $4 a day minimum wage (the Assembly had passed a $5 version of the bill); in 1939, the NBC Radio series I Love A Mystery began a month-long serial, “The Case Of The Nevada Cougar” about killings at a Nevada gold mine; in 1951, Nevada assemblymembers who previously had stopped ratification of the 22d amendment to the U.S. Constitution (limiting presidents to two terms) were informed by reporters that Utah was about to become the next-to-last state needed for full ratification, whereupon the Assembly rushed it through and sent it to the Senate and the Senate sat on it until informed by phone that Utah had acted, the senators then approving it 16 to 1 (small counties Senator Harry Wiley voted no); in 1964, heavyweight champion Cassius Clay confirmed that he had converted to Islam (the World Boxing Association suspended him because his conversion was “conduct detrimental to the best interests of boxing” but state boxing regulators declined to honor the suspension); in 1973, Native Americans took control of a richly symbolic settlement at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota to protest federal treatment of Native Americans and alliances between federal officials and entrenched tribal leaders; in 1994, candidates Jan Jones and Robert Miller, running for governor against each other in the Democratic primary, spoke against an anti-gay initiative petition at a rally at a Reno gay bar, Bad Dolly’s; in 2013, gasps were heard in the U.S. Supreme Court hall when Justice Antonin Scalia referred to the Voting Rights Act as an example of “racial entitlements” (a week later, U.S. Representative Jim Clyburn said he was told by Scalia, “The 15th Amendment of the Constitution ain’t got no concerns for me because I’m white and proud.”)

February 25: On this date in 1925, Klansman Gutzon Borglum was fired as the sculptor of the Stone Mountain Confederate memorial project in Georgia (Borglum had earlier sculpted a statue of John Mackay for the University of Nevada campus and would later plan the sculpting of Mount Rushmore; in 1991, Adrienne Mitchell was killed in the U.S./Kuwait war, the first African American woman in history to die in combat for the United States.

February 21: On this date in 1982, Ain’t Misbehavin’, about the African American musicians of the Harlem Renaissance, closed in New York after 1,604 performances.

February 20: On this date in 1881, Matt Canavan of the Comstock said, “Among these Indians no one has ever found a harlot, a coward or a thief” to which the Nevada State Journal responded, “This is a pretty high compliment to pay to an ‘inferior race;’ but, thinking over it, we cannot say that it is undeserved. We know the male Piutes are a fine brave, manly set of fellows. We will have to take Mr. Canavan’s word for the [females].”; in 1929, The Vote, a London suffrage publication, reported on U.S. legislation sponsored by Senator Tasker Oddie of Nevada to restore citizenship to a U.S. woman who lost it by marrying a foreigner and was later divorced.

February 18: On this date in 1546, Martin Luther died; in 1861, under pressure from federal officials, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal leaders agreed to surrender much of Colorado that was guaranteed to them by an 1851 treaty, only to face the fierce opposition of their tribes to the land cession;in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old high school graduate, discovered the planet Pluto; in 1942, the Mills Brothers’ “Paper Doll” was released by Decca; in 1960, the U.S. Post Office began sale of a new winter olympics stamp on opening day of the Squaw Valley games.

February 17: On this date in 1864 President Lincoln fired Edward Beale, surveyor general of California and Nevada, because of mishandling of Native American funds; in 1909, two weeks after alleged adults in the Nevada Legislature enacted anti-Japanese legislation in defiance of President (Theodore) Roosevelt’s expressed wishes, a group of boys in Reno with a slingshot tormented a Japanese man named Hashamura (an article on the incident in the Goldfield Chronicle ran just beneath an article on plans for juvenile courts in Nevada); in 1919, African American veterans, not permitted to march in the main New York parade for veterans returned from the World War, held their own parade; in 1944, U.S. Representative Charles MacKenzie of Louisiana denounced “with all the intensity of my soul” the CIO’s wartime canteen in D.C. for U.S. servicepeople because both blacks and whites were served (Eleanor Roosevelt had appeared on opening night); in 1972, Beverly Harrell defended her decision not to admit an African American man to her brothel at Lida Junction in Esmeralda County (“A bordello should have a choice of who they entertain.”) but Nevada Equal Rights Commission director Tony McCormick said a formal complaint would be filed against her. (Editor's Note: Two years later, Republican Harell ran for Nevada State Assembly and probably won because of her anti-BLM campaign centepriece. Although central Nevada was far from sacrosanct back then, the good old boys nonethless worried about their public image. The power structure's worst nightmares came true a few years later when national media started looking into Nevada's Cow County feudal system. Hangovers remain and some of them still get elected to this very day.)

February 16: On this date in 1863, [an ad appeared in] the Boston Journal: “To Colored Men: Wanted. Good men for the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers of African descent, Col. Robert G. Shaw (commanding). $100 bounty at expiration of term of service. Pay $13 per month, and State aid for families. All necessary information can be obtained at the office, corner Cambridge and North Russell Streets”. (After African American men had been lured into enlisting, their pay was cut to $10 a month, less than that paid to white soldiers, and they were forced to pay for their clothing, also not required of white soldiers.)

February 15: On this date in 1896, an effort was underway in Topeka to obtain federal pensions for African Americans who were enslaved before the civil war.

How to befriend a racist: Because that’s one way to change someone’s mind
By Wade Gainer / Reno News & Review 2-15-2018

Happy Valentine's Day

February 14: On this date in 1955 in Florida, Dade County Republicans walked out of the Miami downtown Urmey Hotel—and later threatened legal action—after hotel president E. N. Claughton ordered 24 African American guests at the dinner out of the hotel because “this place is for whites only.”

February 13: On this date in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt, speaking to the New York City Republican Club, gave a patronizing analysis of race relations in the U.S. that urged “that the backward race [African Americans] be trained so that it may enter into possession of true freedom while the forward race [whites] enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers"; in 1920, President Wilson fired Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who during Wilson’s extended convalescence from multiple strokes had called cabinet meetings and urged consideration of Vice-President Thomas Marshall becoming acting president; in 1937, when rumors circulated that Michigan union members, fresh from the victory of the General Motors strike, were traveling to Indiana to support fellow unionists, Indiana Governor Clifford Townsend declared martial law to keep them out (in Detroit, a union official denied the rumor).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NAACP

February 12: On this date in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded; in 2001, Earl Washington, a mentally disabled African American, was sentenced to a halfway house instead of being freed after being exonerated by a DNA test of a murder for which he spent 19 years under sentence of death in a Virginia prison.

Feb. 11: In 1960, sixty members of the NAACP appeared at the doors of the whites-only Hawthorne, Nev., casino, the El Capitan, and were refused entry. (Editor's Note: Former Reno-Sparks Branch President Eddie Scott [1928-2017] remembered it well.); in 1916, Reno’s Twentieth Century Club heard author Jean Morris Ellis (Character Analysis/Subhuman or Superman) speak on eugenics; in 1950, two days after making his first charges that there were communists in government, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy spoke in Reno at a Republican fundraiser at the Mapes Hotel (Edward Connors of the Nevada State Journal reported that on the senator’s reading copy of his speech text where he named the number of communists, McCarthy had scratched out the number “205” and written in the number “57”); in 2006 on a quail hunt, Vice-President Richard Cheney shot a friend, Harry Whittington, in the face.

Feb. 10: in 1865 legendary western lawman, attorney, politician, educator Elfago Baca, a champion of Latinos against white prejudice, was born in Socorro, New Mexico; in 1887 the St. Joseph [Missouri] Daily Herald reported, “CARSON CITY, February 9.—Both houses of the legislature, to-day, adopted resolutions disenfranchising Mormons in Nevada.”; in 1909 a few weeks after whites in Reno burned the city’s Chinatown down, the Chinese Benevolent Association of San Francisco, also known as the Six Companies, wired President Roosevelt asking him to help “right the wrongs suffered by the Chinese of Reno.”;

Feb. 8: In 1865 Martin Delany, founder of one of the first African-American newspapers (the Mystery), physician, and colleague of Frederick Douglass, was appointed the first black major in the U.S. Army.

February 7: On this date in 1941, Nevada consumer activist Betty Barbano was born in Enid, Oklahoma.

Feb. 7: I In 1956 African-American student Autherine Lucy was expelled from the University of Alabama after mobs interfered with her attending classes (24 years later, the university lifted the expulsion and Lucy graduated in 1992).

 Feb. 6: In 1820 the U.S. census reported that just under two out of every ten citizens was black — except that under article one, section two of the U.S. Constitution, each black counted as only three-fifths of a citizen.

 Feb. 5: In 1962 four days of work began at Capitol Studios in New York and United Recording Studios in Hollywood on Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, the blockbuster Ray Charles LP that cut across musical and racial lines, included songs by Hank Williams, Don Gibson, Jimmie Davis, Floyd Tillman, Eddy Arnold and Zeke Clements, produced several charting singles, and is listed on a couple of dozen essential album lists, including those of Stereophile and Rolling Stone (the track “I Can’t Stop Loving You” received an Emmy and the album was entered in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999); in 1990, The New York Times wrote: “BOSTON, Feb. 5 — The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School. The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii. ...”; in 1994 Byron de la Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison for the assassination three decades earlier of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

 Feb. 3: In 1865 in a conference arranged by newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and C.S. Vice President Alexander Stephens met on a steamboat in Virginia to try to negotiate an end to the civil war, but the conference promptly broke down when Lincoln refused to negotiate unless the south first surrendered, and refused to make any concessions such as recognition of the Confederacy; in 1910 Robert Earl Jones, one of the first black motion picture actors to achieve prominence (Odds Against Tomorrow, Mississippi Summer, The Sting, Trading Places, The Cotton Club) who was blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s and was the father of actor James Earl Jones and producer Matthew Earl Jones, was born in Senatobia, Mississippi; in 1956 after the NAACP obtained a court order against her being rejected and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the order after a five-year legal battle, Autherine Lucy enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Alabama (on her third day of classes, a mob prevented her attendance, which the university used as a pretext for her suspension and then expulsion, which was reversed a quarter century later, followed by her graduation in 1992).

 Feb. 2: In 1870, Samuel Clemens married Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York; in 1951 two days after U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy pardoned and released 21 Nazi war criminals, the State of Virginia began two days of executions of seven African Americans convicted of rape in dubious circumstances by all-white juries. [PDA]

[Most of the above courtesy of Nevada Journalist Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac, © 2018]

More Myers

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they'd been refused service. (NY Times)

8 the hard way!
Barbwire wins 8th Nevada Press Assn. award
Je Suis Charlie

West Virginia teachers: Strike one, strike won
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 3-7-2018 Sparks Tribune

Lousy lawyering for pun and prophet
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-28-2018 Sparks Tribune

Recognizing the red flags of instant replay
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-21-2018 Sparks Tribune

Valentines for Cleopatra & wayward beautiful girls
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-14-2018 Sparks Tribune

On Feb. 7, 1941, Betty Joyce Luffman (Donlevy Barbano) was born in Enid, OK.

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

Bliss Barbies: The yellow brick road to anorexia
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-7-2018 Sparks Tribune

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON PRESIDENTE NARCISSIO GRANDE'S PEAL OF THE ONION. Read this and then watch something important. Barbwire Confidential Union Yes! Special Edition

6:09 p.m. PST Jan. 30 / 2:09 GMT/CUT Jan. 31, 2018

9:58 p.m. PST Jan. 30 / 05:58 GMT/CUT: I watched that show. I wept. AB

Barbwire Confidential—>HUSHHUSH!
For tomorrow's news today, subscribe to Barbwire Confidential at BallotBoxing.US/
Turn on, tune in and tell a friend —>before subscription prices rise on Feb. 1.

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON TONIGHT'S PEAL OF THE ONION. The best TV this p.m. will air on that dirty commie liberal should-be-scuttled PBS at 9:00 p.m. PST/8:00 in the provinces.

"The American Experience" reruns the story of America's labor holocaust, the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City which claimed 146 lives and injured 71 others. Most of the dead were young, immigrant Italian and Jewish women. Some of the former most probably came thru Ellis Island with my family. Hell, some of the latter may well have, too. Requiescant in pace.

If there was a most significant spark (pardon the expression) for safer working conditions in sweatshop America, this was it. The battle remains joined as Czar Donaldov and his cossacks unravel what took more than a century of struggle, blood, sweat, tears, murder and mayhem to achieve.

The Triangle fire spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, now part of UNITEHERE/AFL-CIO which happens to represent culinary workers at Circus Circus and the Grand Sierra in Reno and throughout southern Nevada. The GSR is doing its damnedest to destroy the union. Stay tuned to the Barbwire for more, but tune in KNPB TV-5 at 9:00 tonight (and probably KLVX TV-10 in Gomorrah South). It's the most relevant TV you will see. (Check local listings for reruns. I have requested info and will post times with this bulletin at NevadaLabor.com/)

The country's first woman cabinet member "witnessed the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a pivotal event in her life. It was because of this event that Frances Perkins would leave her office at the New York Consumers League and become the executive secretary for the Committee on Safety of the City of New York." (Wikipedia) She served 12 years as President Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor, "longer than any other Secretary of Labor. She became the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the United States and thus, became the first woman to enter the presidential line of succession." (id.)

IRONICALLY DISGUSTING UPDATE: A photograph of one of the murderous Triangle Factory moguls remains featured on the Emmy-winning open credits of the longrunning and still-syndicated "Cheers" TV sitcom. Worth just $75 dead, the workers continue to be exploited after 107 years.

ILLEGAL BETTING. Anybody making book that El Presidente Narcissio Grande says that the state of the union is the best it's ever been? With the bodies still smoldering in 2001, he couldn't help bragging that with the World Trade Center towers down, his palace became the tallest building in Manhattan. So my bet's safe.

We Don't Need No Education Part LXXXV—>
Awards season: bad bids, bad hits and bad attitudes
Excerpted from Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-24-2018 Sparks Tribune and affiliated publications

Links and references may be accessed at the latter URL including how the artificial turf your kids play on could kill them. It's everywhere and it's deadly. But who cares? It's Nevada.

U-NEWS. Culinary Union Local 226 beat back a decertification attempt by the Reno Grand Sierra and remains in negotiation. Another decert has been filed. Time perhaps for another Hot August Strike during Hot August Nights? (Every union that ever used that headline — my all-time number one — won.) The only other union hotel in northern Nevada is Circus Circus, which hosted last October's Reno-Sparks NAACP Freedom Fund Awards and has two majors coming up.

The Building and Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada/AFL-CIO will roast Sparks labor leader Todd Koch into retirement at ToddBQ '18 on February 24. I'm editing the commemorative program and need choice insults about the man I first met many years ago when he was young, handsome and promising. Alas, Todd today stands 0-for-3. Send entries to the e-mail below.

César Chávez XVI happens on the great man's 91st birthday on March 31. Ticket/table info for both events may be accessed above and via CesarChavezNevada.com/

Be well. Raise hell. Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)
_______
Andrew Barbano is a 49-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and SenJoeNeal.org/ He serves as first vice-president of the Reno-Sparks NAACP. As always, his comments are strictly his own. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since 1988. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> (775) 882-TALK.

=================
NOW ON THE PRESS FOR TOMORROW'S SPARKS TRIBUNE (and already distributed to Barbwire Confidential Co-Conspirators) —>

We Don't Need No Education Part LXXXVI—>
Terrorism in the Nevada outback
Mississippi West 2018: Sexy moral depravity abides
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-31-2018 Sparks Tribune and affiliated publications

Available via Barbwire.US sometime betwixt now and the first cherry blossoms if the Good Lord's willin' and the nukes don't rise.

For all the news you never knew you needed to know—>Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential

Hie thee to BallotBoxing.US before subscription prices rise Feb. 1. Tell your friends. And your enemies.

HOT TV TIP: CesarChavez.TV is coming soon. Stay tuned.

CWA 9413/AFL-CIO
BRWR V1/30 HushHush/HH/BRWR/OPSN18

-30-

Oh, you beautiful doll!

Forever a Fox: Rosie in 1995

Naomi Parker Fraley, aka Rosie the Riveter, dies at 96
Mrs. Fraley’s connection to Rosie was made public in 2016, ending years of speculation over who was the model for the fictional 1940s war worker.
By Margalit Fox / The New York Times front page 23 January 2018

Gowabunga!
Los Angeles Times journalists vote 248-44 to unionize
Journalists at the Los Angeles Times have overwhelmingly elected to form a union and be represented by the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America. It's a historical first for the 136-year-old news organization that for much of its history was known for its opposition to organized labor.
By James Rufus Koren / Los Angeles Times 19 January 2018
Editor's Note: This website's editor/publisher is a longtime member of Nevada CWA Local 9413/AFL-CIO. Mazeltov!

Bizarro R Us: Win bar bets predicting the 51st state
Terrorism in the Nevada outback
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-17-2018 Sparks Tribune and affiliated publications

Poor Denny's Almanac for January 11, 2018

On this date in 1885, Alice Paul, chair of the National Women’s Party and author of the Equal Rights Amendment, was born in Moorestown, New Jersey; in 1901, the Reno Evening Gazette denounced U.S. Senator Henry Teller of Colorado for what it called a “treasonous” act—presenting a petition signed by 2,000 Filipinos, whose nation the United States was in the process of conquering and colonizing; in 1917, the day after William Cody died, the Nevada State Journal editorialized: “ ‘Buffalo Bill is dead.’ Some day this will be seen as a landmark along the road of history traveled by these young United States. Every word is significant. The Buffalo died before ‘Bill’ did. The Indians died before the Buffalo. And now ‘Bill’ himself, before whom, both in point of history and location, red- and brown-skin, biped and quadruped, went into oblivion,— ‘Bill’ dies.”; in 1937, General Motors security guards and Flint Police Department officers attacked striking workers at the Flint, Michigan, General Motors plant (eventually Governor Frank Murphy—with the support of President Roosevelt—sent in the national guard not to evict the strikers but to prevent the police from terrorizing strikers); in 1949, United Press reported, “Las Vegas, Nev., whose slogan is ‘Fun in the Sun,’ today was brushing off two inches of snow which fell during the night on top of three inches deposited yesterday.”; in 1956, U.S.-backed Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem issued Ordinance No. 6, providing for internment of his political enemies in concentration camps; in 1965, Buddhists launched anti-war and anti-government protests in South Vietnam; in 1968, Jack Webb, who revived his Dragnet television series in order to preach against the 1960s, had his “Joe Friday” deliver a lengthy lecture to a Timothy-Leary-like character: “Marijuana is the flame. LSD is the fuse. Heroin is the bomb. ... Marijuana is a narcotic. It never did anybody any good.” (Webb, a heavy smoker and drinker who peddled cigarettes in advertising for Fatima and Chesterfield, died of a heart attack in 1982; in 1976, the Reno Repertoire Club and the Reno Banjo Club held a bicentennial concert (preceding a performance by the Utah Symphony) to raise money for John Carrico’s Tahoe Music Camp; in 2001, the Pentagon admitted U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri, Korea, in July 1950, though the report put a pro-U.S. spin on the events, relied on incomplete documents, and continued a coverup of essential information. [PDA] — More Myers

The spirits of MLK and Bull Connor live right here
Terrorism in the Nevada outback
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-10-2018 Sparks Tribune / Updated 1-11, 1-12, 1-13 and 1-14-2018
"The good Lord created the world. Mankind built the cities. And the Devil thunk up the small town." — Auld folk wisdom

Déjà vu all over again

Sexist climate: Casinos long noted for harassment
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 4 Jan. 2018

The True Face of Nevada Gambling
Institutionalized Discrimination: Dare to grow older and you're fired — the law of the land
Barbwire by Barbano / Daily Sparks Tribune Oct. 8, 2000

Chickens Beware! Reno Gazette-Journal names fox its citizen of the year
Reno News & Review Editorial 4 January 2018
BONE DRY MARTINI always drank the corporate welfare Kool-Aid
EXTRA EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT! —> Barbwire by Barbáno Special Internet Edition 12 Dec. 2015

ORGANIZED LABOR: IBEW LOCAL 401 FOOD DRIVE



JANUARY 4, 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
ELOY JARA (775) 856-0169, 750-9134

LABORERS' UNION FILES MISDEMEANOR CRIMINAL COMPLAINT AGAINST DOUGLAS COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT TRUSTEES

MINDEN, NEV. — A misdemeanor complaint was filed today against six members of the Douglas County School District Board of Trustees for violation of Nevada law regarding Construction Manager At Risk (CMAR) contracts. [Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) 338.169(2)]

At their meeting of October 10, 2017, Douglas County school trustees voted to engage in a single CMAR contract that included six scopes of work with a single contractor.

The complaint states that the bundling of six separate and distinct projects at six different locations is in direct violation of the limitation established by statute in NRS 338.160(2) which states:

     2. A public body in a county whose population is less than 100,000 may enter into contracts with a construction manager at risk pursuant to NRS 338.1685 to 338.16995, inclusive, for the construction of not more than two public works in a calendar year that are discrete projects.   

"Bundling six separate and distinct ('discrete') projects into one CMAR cannot be done legally by a public body in a county with a population of less than 100,000," stated Eloy Jara, Assistant Business Manager of Laborers' Union Local 169, who filed the complaint with the Douglas County Sheriff's office.

"According to latest estimates, the county does not approach even half that threshold," he added. The Reno-based union's jurisdiction includes Douglas County.

Prior to filing the complaint, the union asked Douglas County District Court for a declaratory order. The school district challenged the union's standing to seek a declaratory order and the case was dismissed on that ground.

"The filing was made by a Douglas County taxpayer and the union. If a taxpayer does not have standing, who does?" Jara asked.

The court did not make a determination regarding the underlying issue over what constitutes a “discrete” project or who might have legal standing.

"The common definition of discrete is 'individually separate and distinct,' Jara said, adding that "we believe the plain language of the law is clear and that the legislative intent of NRS 338.169(2) was to limit by law the number of CMAR contracts in the smaller counties to two per year."

The misdemeanor criminal complaint was filed pursuant to NRS 193.170.

     NRS 193.170 Prohibited act is misdemeanor when no penalty imposed. Whenever the performance of any act is prohibited by any statute, and no penalty for the violation of such statute is imposed, the committing of such act shall be a misdemeanor.

"By not allowing or seeking on their own a declaratory order from the court as to the legality of their course of action prior to taking it, the Douglas County School District has placed the individual school board members, the projects and the taxpayers of Douglas County at risk," Jara added.

Jara's complaint further asks for a change of venue: "I hereby request that this complaint be given to another jurisdiction for prosecution due to the fact that the Douglas County District Attorney has a conflict of interest based on the fact that the Douglas County District Attorney also represents the Douglas County School Board and provided the School Board with the legal advice that has resulted in this complaint."

Laborers' Union Local 169 was established in Reno in 1902 and represents more than 1,400 workers throughout northern Nevada.

Union claims school board violating state law
Gardnerville Record-Courier / Uploaded 10 Jan. 2018

 

All the Money in the World: The greatest story never told
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-3-2018 Sparks Tribune

Breaking News, Bulletins & Almanac 2017

Happy 152nd Birthday, Ms. Nevada
Nevada Day Required Reading
The Lady in the Red Dress
The Barbwire's award-winning Nevada Day classic written in 1983
The compleat history of the Silver State in 500 words
SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Sparks Tribune 11-4-1990 and oftimes since

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

In memoriam: 59 years ago toward a lonely road

January 16, 1959, brought the births of Debra Joyce Donlevy/Carson High '77 (1959-1978) and Donna Leslie Cline (1959-1999). Their youth was cut in twain on the same night in 1978 within the loneliness of the High Desert Outback of the American Dream. Remember them fondly.

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Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

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