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 Barbwire Archives |
No more Mr. Nice Guy
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 4-10-2011 Daily Sparks Tribune
Updated 4-13-2011
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
That's how it goes. Everybody knows.
HAT TRICK: Barbwire wins 3rd straight Nevada Press Association First-Place AwardCOMING SOON
The new season of Barbwire TV. The first show will be about (what else?) jobs. The lack of them is well documented. How we've blown them and where they can be regenerated, that's something else. I guarantee you'll get mad enough to want to get even. Watch NevadaLabor.com for show times. Help us get the word out.
Support the project at http://resurge.tv#donate
SUING FOR SCHOOLS
Updated 3-21-2011
Lawsuit gains supportIf Reform Fails: Health Care, Jobs and Unions — new power to the people on the public airwaves
The program premiers were available to every television set in the region because of a high-mileage media hybrid.
The shows appeared on both commercial and community stations. The non-corporate entity produced the events, commercial TV greatly expanded distribution.
Thus began an ongoing series of sane public interest programs which generate both entertaining heat and more than a little light.
Please spread the word and consider contributing to the cause online at ReSurge.TV.
You may also take the public option known as the U.S. Postal Service and send a check or money order to ReSurge.TV, P.O. Box 10034, Reno NV 89510.
Your contribution will help fund the distribution of the Dec. 6 and Feb. 21 programs as well as ongoing efforts at developing new media, including a regional, non-corporate community radio station.
You are present at the creation of what I hope can become a new media model where the programming accurately reflects what's happening on the ground and the media impact is powerful enough to forcefully pass the message upward.
Thanks.
Be well. Raise hell.
Andrew
Click here for on-demand re-runs
from the 2009 legislative sessionBarbwire.TV:
15-year overnight success
Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008The Barbwire's Greatest Hits
Highlights from radio days
mp3 file
HAT TRICK: Barbwire wins 3rd straight Nevada Press Association First-Place Award
Sisyphus was not a horny Greek god for whom a nasty disease was named.
He was an unfortunate dude who ticked off Zeus, who then damned him to roll a rock uphill forever. Every time he got close to the top, it would roll down forcing him to start over.
Kinda like Nevada trying to become an actual place to live rather than a superannuated boomtown mining camp with neon and indoor plumbing.
Today, the great unwashed suffer protest fatigue and the only thing endangered in Carson City is the legislature's front lawn. And maybe a few careers.
The right wing moonhowlers bay and bloviate that legislative Democrats haven't presented an alternative to Gov. Sly Sandoval's proposed assassination of Nevada education.Translation: Please give us something new to trash.
Republicano Sandoval, running hard to become the first Latino president — something he will have to do with no Latino votes — stands by his no new taxes pledge.
Assembly Speaker John Oceguera, D-Las Vegas, has said the guv is as irrelevant this year as Gov. Jim the Dim was in 2009.Translation: Big Bad John thinks he's got the necessary handful of GOP tax increase votes to survive Sly's promised veto.
This is great theater, but now that baseball season is here, us poor peons have better things to do.
Let those clinging to the ledge do their thing. Let the corporate lobbyists make tons of money screwing the little guy. Even liberal Assemblymember Peggy Pierce, D-Las Vegas, has proposed a sales tax on services, the worst kind of tax for the least among us.Jesus of Nazareth, call your office.
So no more Mr. Nice Guy. Time to sue the bastards.
As regular readers are aware, for the last three years I've been beating the drum for what is known as an adequacy lawsuit against the state.On July 15, 2008, then-University Chancellor Jim Rogers published legal research showing that 27 other jurisdictions had been successfully busted for illegally underfunding education. That study will be available with the web edition of this column at NevadaLabor.com. Additional references are linked to the Feb. 21, 2010, Barbwire entitled Suing for Schools, also at my flagship website.
Better yet, states most likely to lose such legal action are those that have already done the research admitting guilt. Such a smoking gun was delivered in the form of an interim committee study submitted to the 2007 legislature. Anybody who wants a copy, just lemme know. (See the Dec. 5, 2010, Barbwire entitled Smoking Guns and Suing for Schools.)
The Nevada Constitution orders the ledge to adequately provide for a system of education. We have been in violation of the law for decades.
I have been building a coalition of groups now ready to make the old Fram Oil Filter threat: Pay me now or pay me later. Contact me if you want to join the fight.
Either the ledge will do it or we will do it for them. A federal judge has managed the western Nevada water system since 1944. Can a blackrobe do any worse running Nevada education than our governors and lawmakers have done for the past three decades?
It's crunch time. Stay tuned.
MAKE MY DAY. As you may have noted from the above, I'm spoiling for a fight.As I turned a corner while walking into Circus Circus for the March 31 César Chávez celebration, I was hit with a faceful of cigarette smoke.
About 10 feet ahead of me walked a young family. Dad was pushing a baby carriage, mom was profusely puffing. I couldn't control myself.
"You there! You're endangering your baby. Put out that cigarette," I shouted.
Dad immediately turned and told me to commit a sexual act impossible for normal male mammals, then repeated it several times while calling me a sick old man.
I was cool, told him he was on the way to dying a hard death "but don't take the kid with you."
He ended our conversation with several obscene gestures and I thought for a moment he was going to charge like a weak, skinny, bearded rhino.But he proved a coward for not defending his kid against his drug addicted wife.
TAKING CARE OF EACH OTHER. My NAACP and Communications Workers union sister Patricia Gallimore asked to address the crowd on César Chávez Day.
Sofia Guadron, a member of our union, lost her son Luis Chinchilla, 19, a Sparks resident who died in his sleep on March 30. We passed the hat — an actual hat — at the event and raised $535 for the family. Anyone who would care to contribute may call Patricia at 775-746-9453. In her spare time, she chairs the Reno-Sparks NAACP Freedom Fund Awards Dinner Committee. You can call her for reservations or buy tickets at RenoSparksNAACP.org. The event happens on Saturday, May 14. Watch the website for details.
REV. ONIE COOPER, Reno-Sparks NAACP past president, died last week at 86. His memorial service will be held at 9:30 a.m on Friday, April 15, at Reno's Second Baptist Church, 1265 Montello St. Public viewing will be conducted from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 14, at O'Brien Rogers Crosby, 600 W. Second Street in Reno. Please send personal remembrances to me for web posting.
BACK FROM THE ASHES DEPT. Support the return of community radio and television. Go to Barbwire.TV for more information, to join the club and contribute via the web.
It's important.
The first step toward restoration has been taken. After going dark for six months, the public access channels now broadcast live legislative hearings and floor sessions fed to Reno-Sparks-Washoe from AccessCarson. Charter cable victims can watch on digital channel 216 or high definition 80-295.This presents a true opportunity to observe, as they simultaneously happen, your government in action and government inaction.
If you harbor a morbid interest in witnessing the assassination of the Nevada education system and most public services, this is your time.Turn on, tune in and tell a friend.
Be well. Raise hell.
______
Andrew Barbano is a 42-year Nevadan, chair of the Nevada César Chávez Committee, producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration, first vice-president and political action chair of the Reno-Sparks NAACP, labor/consumer/civil rights advocate, member of Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO and editor of NevadaLabor.com. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. Check local listings for other Nevada cable systems. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Daily Sparks Tribune since 1988.
Nevada Press Assn. annual award winners announced 9-18-2010.
HAT TRICK: Barbwire takes first place for third year in a row.
Next year, we go for the sombrero.The winning entries:
Suing for Schools: The 20-year shuck
Expanded from the 2-21-2010 Daily Sparks Tribune
Click here to view the show on your desktopRED flags flying low over Sparks
Expanded from the 1-10-2010 Daily Sparks TribuneThe wrath of self-righteous racism
Expanded from the 11-8-2009 Daily Sparks Tribune
And they wonder why the newspaper business is dying?
The Dean's List
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006
The 2009 first-place Nevada Press Association award winners
Tony the Tiger & the flaky NFL
Barbwire / 11-30-2008
Deregulation is never having to say you're sorry
Barbwire / 8-3-2008
Nevada: A good place to visit, but do you want to live here?
Barbwire / 6-15-2008
The price of a piece / 6-17-2007
Boxing Pandora /9-23-2007
The Lady in the Red Dress
10-28-2007
Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Plutocracy
Money fights hard and it fights dirty
Speech delivered at Boston University on 29 Oct. 2010
Part of the Howard Zinn Lecture SeriesBarbwire Corporate Welfare Archive
Cabellyup.com
TOLJASO LONG TIME AGO
BP/ARCO: The greasy root of our evils
Barbwire / Daily Sparks Tribune 9-10-2006
The awful truth — Read it and weep, fellow suckersLabor Day 2009: Rise of the Vampire Corpobots
Expanded from the 9-6-2009 Daily Sparks TribuneAngry Americans and Freudian fraud
Using war to market cigarettes
Expanded from the 8-23-2009 Daily Sparks TribuneBARBWIRE Nevada Corporate Welfare Archive
Propaganda fuels gasoline price fixing
Barbwire 8-14-2005Donate to the cable ratepayer legal defense fund at our PayPal-enabled ReSurge.TV Consumer War Room
Phillips, Kevin; Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know
Harper's Magazine; May 2008; page 43
Phillips has authored numerous books on history and politics over the past 40 years. His most recent, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, was published by Viking on April 15, 2008.NAOMI WOLF: Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps
There are some things common to every state that's made the transition to fascism. Author Naomi Wolf argues that all of them are present in America today.
Alternet 5-20-2007Johnson, Chalmers; REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States; Harper's magazine; January, 2007. I love it when heavy hitters validate what I've been saying for years in the tiny Sparks Tribune.
Barlett, Donald L. and Steele, James B.; America: What Went Wrong? (1992); America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? (1994); America: Who Stole the Dream? (1996) ; Andrews & McMeel/Universal Press Syndicate.
Review of Alex Carey's Taking the Risk Out of Democracy:
Propaganda in the US and AustraliaThe Orwell Diversion by Alex Carey
Excerpted from the book available below
ORDER Taking the Risk Out of Democracy
Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty
By Alex Carey
Edited by Andrew Lohrey
Foreword by Noam Chomsky
University of Illinois Press
SEE ALSO: Lapham, Lewis H.; Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, A Brief History; Harper's Magazine cover article; September, 2004, page 32.
By one conservative estimate, the corporate right has spent about $3 billion over the past three decades manufacturing public opinion to suit big business goals. Lapham's number covered the early 1970's to the present day. Alex Carey noted that by 1948, anti- New Deal corporate propaganda expenditures had already reached $100 million per year, not adjusted for inflation, for advertising alone. (Carey, ibid; page 79)
Adjusted for inflation, that 1948 $100 million becomes $801,659,751.04 in 2005 dollars.
Conservatives Help Wal-Mart, and Vice Versa
As Wal-Mart struggles to rebut growing criticism, it has discovered a reliable ally: conservative research groups.
New York Times 9-8-2006; Free registration may be required.BARBWIRE: Labor Day '94: People vs. corporate con job, 9-4-94
Chilling forecasts from Alex CareyBARBWIRE: The Nevada Republican Party Becomes Communist, 3-30-97
A prescient Plato on the dangers of oligarchyThe sands of time do not cloud the long memories of the sheiks of Araby
Barbwire 9-10-2006
Rinfret, Pierre A.; Peace is Bullish; Look magazine, 5-31-1966
Copyright © 1982-2011
Andrew Barbano
Andrew Barbano is a 42-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and JoeNeal.org; and former chair of the City of Reno's Citizens Cable Compliance Committee, He is producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration and serves as first vice-president, political action chair and webmaster of the Reno-Sparks NAACP. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us.
Barbwire by Barbano premiered in the Daily Sparks (Nev.) Tribune on Aug. 12, 1988, and has originated in those parts ever since. Tempus fugit.
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