BARBWIRE by ANDREW BARBANO

Barbwire Archives

The awful truth hurts so good
Expanded from the 1-1-2012 Daily Sparks Tribune
Site map
Corporate Propaganda Research Archive

Everybody knows the dice are loaded. 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.

— Leonard Cohen

HAT TRICK: Barbwire wins 3rd straight Nevada Press Association First-Place Award Barbwire.TV Watch NevadaLabor.com for show times. Help us get the word out. Support the project at http://resurge.tv#donate SUING FOR SCHOOLS Updated 8-30-2011 Now rerunning on Carson-Dayton 226 Additional programs on Boulder City cable. Go to bcnv.org and then go to the BCTV link. If Reform Fails: Health Care, Jobs and Unions — new power to the people on the public airwaves The program premiers were available to every television set in the region because of a high-mileage media hybrid. The shows appeared on both commercial and community stations. The non-corporate entity produced the events, commercial TV greatly expanded distribution. Thus began an ongoing series of sane public interest programs which generate both entertaining heat and more than a little light. Please spread the word and consider contributing to the cause online at ReSurge.TV. You may also take the public option known as the U.S. Postal Service and send a check or money order to ReSurge.TV, P.O. Box 10034, Reno NV 89510. Your contribution will help fund the distribution as well as ongoing efforts at developing new media, including a regional, non-corporate community radio station and the return of community television to Reno-Sparks-Washoe. You are present at the creation of what I hope can become a new media model where the programming accurately reflects what's happening on the ground and the media impact is powerful enough to forcefully pass the message upward. Thanks. Be well. Raise hell. Andrew Click here for selected on-demand re-runs from the 2009, 2010 and 2011 Barbwire.TV archives Barbwire.TV: 15-year overnight success Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008 The Barbwire's Greatest Hits Highlights from radio days mp3 file HAT TRICK: Barbwire wins 3rd straight Nevada Press Association First-Place Award

Accurately predicting the future comes easy for me.

For all the complaints about biased media keeping us mushrooms in the dark, factual information is readily available.

Alas, it usually takes a disaster or a demagogue to make the masses into true believers. By then, you're in foreclosure.

Crystal balls are a dime a dozen, but brass balls remain rare. Princess Cassandra and her descendants always suffer for warning drunken Greeks not to let that wooden horse into Troy.

Pass the wine jug.

BARBWIRE, Memorial Day weekend 2005:

We may not be able to avoid economic collapse...As economist Paul Krugman noted in The New York Times (5-27-2005), the dot-com bubble was replaced by the real estate bubble.
Once the housing boom busts, he asserted that we have nothing else available to prop up a faltering economy.
World War II deficit spending and tax hikes are often credited for pulling the U.S. out of the Great Depression.
But we have been on a full war footing for four years, so the military remedy will not be available come the next crash.

The ancient Mayans, who accurately predicted their civilization's destruction by Spain, have warned us about 2012.

Nikolai Kondratieff (1892-1938), a Russian economist writing in the 1920s, issued similar medium range warnings.

We are now at the edge of the fabled Kondratieff Wave which forecasts a cyclical tsunami, a major economic contraction followed by a flood of widespread destruction.

The real estate bubble officially burst a couple of months later.

BARBWIRE AUG. 7, 2005:

No less than Intel guru Andrew Grove warns that a bad moon is on the rise. Grove is a bear on the globalization which helped make him megarich.

"I don't think there is a good outcome," he told New York Times business columnist Joseph Nocera.

"Although mainstream economic thought holds that America's history of creativity and entrepreneurialism will allow it to adapt to the rise of such emerging economies as India and China, Mr. Grove thinks that is so much wishful thinking. In his view, globalization will not only finish off what's left of American manufacturing, but will turn so-called knowledge workers, which was (sic) supposed to be America's competitive advantage, into just another global commodity…

"What particularly bugs Mr. Grove is that he can't see a way that this country can find the equivalent of a disruptive technology that will allow it to retain its current place atop the economic heap," Nocera reported.

BARBWIRE AUG. 12, 2007:

"Just like the few remaining reasonable Republican conservatives, I have been warning that it won't take much of a scare for our financial house of cards to fall," I wrote in March 2007.

"My money, if I had any, would be on a crash caused by hedge fund speculation in market derivatives, a deadly financial game of Russian roulette with lots of zeroes to the left of the decimal point, which very few people understand. Let's just say that such investors are betting on a quadruple trifecta on any given day."

In June 2007, the huge investment firm Bear Stearns bailed out two of its hedge funds to the tune of $3.2 billion. They had lost almost all their value in less than a month. BS didn't have to cover the losses of its casino bettors, but apparently did so to avoid a major crash in market confidence.

No less than Bill Clinton did the same thing – twice. When Brazil and Mexico at separate times teetered at the brink of financial collapse, the Clinton administration rescued them. The fear was the same: domino theory, a cascading worldwide financial cratering followed by global depression.

Late last week (2007), the Federal reserve made two huge cash infusions into the market and bought up a bunch of probably worthless home loan packages in an attempt to stabilize matters. Some major banks tried the same thing in 1929, postponing that legendary crash by all of a single day.

Borrowing from the House of Saud and the Temple of Mao to finance our wars will haunt us for decades to come….

I wish I had sage advice for those in power on what to do before it's too late, but it's probably already too late. Since Dubya's dunces have made a pig's breakfast of everything they've tried – other than keeping blacks, Jews and senior citizens from voting – I wouldn't trust them to fix anything.

Everything they do is filtered through the lens of royalist dogma. They just don't see anything wrong with the way things have been trending. Like King Ronald the Vague, Bush the Lesser has lately been touting the economy's strong fundamentals. I believe that the captain of the Titanic was fundamentally a strong sailor.

All I can do is repeat that you should put some away for a rainy day because a hard rain's gonna fall and the first sprinkles have begun.

ON THE LOCAL LEVEL, (as predicted) Charter Communications filed bankruptcy and Reno City Manager Charles McNeely resigned. The bankruptcies of Sparks and Reno are still a little ways out. (8-12-2007)

Washoe County officials are now openly predicting a Reno default in 2012. Sparks can't make the $25 million balloon payment due on its Marina project.

SUPPORT THE NEVADA CITIZEN TV PROJECT, a non-corporate environment for a new channel and network showcasing the many voices of activists, artists and magnificent misfits of the High Desert Outback of the American Dream. For more info or to ante in, go to ReSurge.TV or contact me.

If the kids can occupy Wall Street, we can occupy our fair share of the public TV spectrum.

Help give the gift of non-corporate TV to your community.

Happy High Holly Days and Feliz Nuevo Ano.

Be well. Raise hell.
______

Andrew Barbano is a 43-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.

Smoking Guns... Economist: This is a true depression Elliott Parker Guest Editorial / Las Vegas Sun / 11-27-2011 POWERFUL PUNDITORY PANJANDRUMS: Compelling guest commentary Nevada Press Assn. annual award winners announced. HAT TRICK: Barbwire takes first place for third year in a row. 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 desktop RED flags flying low over Sparks Expanded from the 1-10-2010 Daily Sparks Tribune The wrath of self-righteous racism Expanded from the 11-8-2009 Daily Sparks Tribune Government contacts Nev. congressional delegation Nevada Legislature State of Nevada Secretary of State Carson City Clark County City of Las Vegas Douglas County Reno City Council Sparks City Council Washoe County Commission Washoe Registrar of Voters The campaign against forcibly-paid newspaper obituaries 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 2008 first-place Nevada Press Association award winners The price of a piece / 6-17-2007 Boxing Pandora /9-23-2007 The Lady in the Red Dress 10-28-2007 1997 Pulitzer Prize entries ...and more ammo The plight of the paper pushers The great recession made bashing public workers a national sport Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review / 11-23-2011 Bury the Bad News with Rose-colored Reporting How urgent can economic troubles be if leaders say things are getting better? Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review / 11-23-2011 Fact-free nation: Inside the lie machine Mother Jones Magazine May-June 2011 / Cover story and in-depth analysis Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Plutocracy Money fights hard and it fights dirty Speech delivered at Boston University on 29 Oct. 2010 Part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series Barbwire Corporate Welfare Archive Cabellyup.com From clear-cut forests to dirty Gulfstream waters, this land belongs to old BP 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 suckers Labor Day 2009: Rise of the Vampire Corpobots Expanded from the 9-6-2009 Daily Sparks Tribune Angry Americans and Freudian fraud Using war to market cigarettes Expanded from the 8-23-2009 Daily Sparks Tribune BARBWIRE Nevada Corporate Welfare Archive Propaganda fuels gasoline price fixing Barbwire 8-14-2005 Donate 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 5-20-2007 Johnson, 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 Australia The 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 Carey       BARBWIRE: The Nevada Republican Party Becomes Communist, 3-30-97 A prescient Plato on the dangers of oligarchy The 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

NevadaLabor.com | U-News | Bulletins + Almanac Casinos Out of Politics (COP) | Sen. Joe Neal Guinn Watch | Deciding Factors | BallotBoxing.US DoctorLawyerWatch.com | Barbwire Oilogopoly Archive Barbwire Nevada Corporate Welfare Archive Annual César Chávez Celebration War Rooms: Banks, Cabbies, Cabela's, Cable TV, Cancer Kids/Mining, Energy, Food, Health Care, Resurge.TV/consumers, Starbucks, Wal-Mart Search this site | In Search Of...

Barbwire Archives

Copyright © 1982-2012 Andrew Barbano

Andrew Barbano is a 43-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.

Site composed and maintained by Deciding Factors, CWA 9413 signatory

Comments and suggestions appreciated. Sign up for news and bulletins