Barbwire by Barbano: Top 10 Cures at 14: Exorcist wanted

Top 10 Cures at 14: Exorcist wanted
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 11-20-2024 / Updated 11-20-2024 GMT / Expansions in blue /

"We have met the enemy and he is us." — from Walt Kelly's legendary "Pogo" comic strip

In 2010, I started and have occasionally updated Top 10 Cures for What Ails Us. Now's the time to look backward and forward.

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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

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Should you get the impression that my head is spinning, suffice it to say that of late, I've been shopping exorcists.

If some of the following seems familiar, it should. The more things change, the more they stay the same here in the High Desert Outback of the American Dream.

1. END NIXON'S BOGUS WAR ON DRUGS. In 1994, former Nixon White House aide John Erlichmann told journalist/author Dan Baum that Richard the Rotten hated two enemies, "the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities...Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (Harper's Magazine, April 2016)

Nixon originally started down the enlightened path of treating drug addiction as a disease, but chose "law and order" darkness with damnable results.

2024 UPDATE: The nightmare abides.

2. START A WAR ON WAR. In his farewell address, our greatest president warned against foreign entanglements.

We have ignored George Washington's advice at our peril. The richest country in human history has all the money needed to cure what ails us. We just spend it wrong.

Economists term the choice as between guns and butter.

Alas and alack, we have almost always opted to use butter for gun grease.

2024 UPDATE: Look around, fellow headspinners. World War3 is on, we just don't call it that. Yet.

According to the United Nations, 195 countries exist today. Our CIA lists 237. (They oughtta know. They've created some of them and overthrown others.)

The Global Peace Index identifies 92 countries involved in 56 major "conflicts." (Is that like a "special military operation?")

No matter the label, it's the highest level since WW2.

Two other credible carcass counters say current carnage counts 110 or 160 impacted, depending on how you sort the rubble.

I just saw a Facebook meme showing a Post-it Note reading "Peace is not profitable." Sure it is. Constructive beats destructive every time.

Compare tanks and tractors. A macho, menacing tank costs labor and materials, then does nothing much productive until it's blown up and another is ordered.

A boring old tractor goes out and plows benefits back into the economy for the next half-century or more.

As the great economist Pierre Rinfret wrote back in the 1960s, "peace is bullish."

One day, we may give peace a chance.

3. EXPAND ECONOMIC AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY plus Medicare for all. Bernie Sanders, call your office.

2024 UPDATE: As always, expanded opportunity creates and spreads wealth toward a peaceful, successful society.

Alas and alack, today, the very rich and their political minions increasingly prosper, riding a golden escalator at our expense.

4. INVEST IN COMMUNITY POLICING. Since I heard him say it in 1970, I have quoted the late Nevada Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Charles Springer: If you want better policing, invest in better police officers.

Charlie advocated for improved pay, education and training. Dream on.

5. UNSCREW the 1981 Tax Shift (aka the Tax Shaft) which turned local property taxes into an unfair Kafkaesque twilight zone and made us dependent on unstable, punitive sales taxes, three of every four dollars of which are paid by Nevadans.

2020 UPDATE: The 2005 Nevada Legislature made things worse by capping property tax increases, thus starving already stingy education and public safety budgets.

When Wall Street cratered the economy in 2007-8, property values sank. They recovered handsomely but the cap kept taxes far below current market rates.

That's a major reason why both the Clark and Washoe school districts have been running multi-million dollar deficits.

2024: Déjà vu all over again.

6. CLOSE 19th Century loopholes allowing the mining industry to get away with murder.

UPDATE: Rape and pillage persist.

7. SHRINK many other corporate welfare tax exemptions. Defying fiscal and common sense, state and local governments continue to hemorrhage tax money into the pockets of the already-rich. You know their names.

Nevada's most promiscuous corporate welfare queen is currently shacked up at Mar-A-Loco. See the ever-expanding NevadaLabor.com corporate welfare section.

8. RAISE the gross gaming tax on our largest, most profitable casinos which, with miniscule exceptions, continue to enjoy the lowest levies in the world.

2020 UPDATE: Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, capped his 32 years in the upper house by winning a quarter-percent tax hike in 2003. Gamblers have not seen an increase since he retired. See JoeNeal.org/

2024: The original 1931 deal to legalize gambling in Great Depression-racked Nevada was that taxing the vice would pay for the costs of communities.

Gamblers have since increasingly shifted the burden onto the rest of us.

9. STOP skimming property and room tax money toward casino promotion through convention authorities and redevelopment agencies.

In 1957, hotel room taxes were established for community improvement but were hogged by the gambling industry for its marketing expenses.

2024 UPDATE: The skim continues. Reno's Grand Sierra Resort is now trying to get taxpayers to fund its new arena complex.

10. PUT WOMEN IN COMMAND, my perennial solution. Men are demonstrably inadequate problem solvers.

All suggestions appreciated.

DARKNESS DESCENDS. The Scripps News channel has been folded.

Advertisers increasingly shy away from old-fashioned objective reporting in favor of operations preaching to their respective choirs.

LOOK FOR THE LIGHT. Go to the web edition of this screed to sign the petition to save local library funding.

Get the latest boosters, stay safe and continue to pray for Ukraine and the above World War-torn lands, including us.

¡Sí se puede!

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)
être bien, élever l'enfer (Pardon my French.) Stammi bene. Scatenare l'inferno. (And Italian.)
_________________________

Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 56-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, SenJoeNeal.org, DoctorLawyerWatch.com, BallotBoxing.US, ConsumerCoalitionv.org, ChantalCoalition.org, Rentvolution.org, MIssissippiWestNV.org and CesarChavezNevada.com among others. He is a longtime member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP and Sparks-based Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO. As always, his comments are entirely his own. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since August 12, 1988.

The Northern Nevada Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO inducted him into the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on April 5, 2024.

Breaking News —> Masks work!

And the plague is rampant once again. Be very afraid.

Trump Victory Would Be a Public Health Disaster
By Whistleblower Rick Bright/New York Times/10-10-2024

President Hoover, meet Smoot and Hawley
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 11-13-2024 / Updated 11-14 & 11-15-2024 GMT / Expansions in blue /

I took a vacation starting at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 6. Didn't read a paper or watch any TV news for almost a week.

How could that happen to an addict whose favorite sport is follytix? (All due respect to the SF Giants and Formula One.)

I now realize I have PTSD: Perpetual T-Rump Stress Disorder, an epidemic running rampant within the American body politic.

Perhaps the saddest Nov. 5 loser was the Washoe County Library System. Extension of a longstanding miniscule tax earmark to support the institution went down in flames.

Locals have launched a petition drive.

MAGA moonhowlers are conditioned to go ballistic at the word "tax." Some pray for deliverance, others beat their wives and kick their dogs

A cruel counterpoint was unintentionally made by Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar when he announced that some 11,000 ballots had not been counted and were under review.

Why? Required signatures on mailed ballot envelopes did not match government records.

Why? Because most of them were from young people who so seldom write anything (save with their thumbs) that their unpracticed penmanship produces irreproducible results.

Understandable in an environment where writing is "old school."

Today's communication has been reduced to obscure abbreviations as we plunge butt-first back to the future of Egypt c. 3000 BC. WTF, eh wot?

Prepare for complete abandonment of alphabets in favor of pictures, formerly termed hieroglyphics now called emojis. Old school A thru Z is so very 20th Century.

All this fits with the anti-literacy and anti-science attitudes of the world's ascendant dictatorships.

Curtis Yarvin AKA billionaire blogger "Mencius Moldbug," one of T-Rump's Silicon Valley brain-trusties, actually sees "democracy as a 'destructive' form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to 'get over their dictator-phobia.' " (NYTimes Magazine 10-27-24)

The micro-chipped crypto-fascists have won.

Fascism? That's a new facial cream, right? (Barbwire 10-30-24) You can't disprove it by 11,000 young people who can't write their own names.

If you read old school double-Pulitzer superstars Don Barlett and Jim Steele's books about how softshoe fascism has metastasized in America, you will notice a direct line from Andrew W. Mellon more than a century ago to his grandson Timothy Mellon.

At $125 million, the kid actually gave T-Rump more money than Nevada's number one corporate welfare queen Elon Musk, who upchucked a paltry $119 million. (Fortune Magazine, 11-9-2024)

Since the 1960s, I've been reading in fake news publications like Fortune and the Wall Street Journal about how the elder Mellon's advice turned the 1929 stock market crash recession into the Great Depression. Only the huge tax increases necessary to fund World War2 production ended it.

In Barlett & Steele's "America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?" (1994), they noted how Andrew Mellon actually coined many of the terms and media spins which today have become Reaganautical gospel.

All taxes are bad, so scuttle the Washoe Library. All "tax reform" is good because it's a great label for taxpayer giveaways to the small tribe of today's billionaire Muskovites. Dasvidaniyah, tovarich.

Since we just witnessed the re-run of the 1828 presidential election, let's go back to the future of 1928.

Retiring President Silent Cal Coolidge wholeheartedly embraced Treasury Secretary Mellon's tax phobia.

Herbert Hoover, an able public servant who managed post-World War One European relief, was elected over a dangerous Commie named Al Smith who was (gasp!) A CATHOLIC. Why, the pope would be running the U.S. government.

JFK weathered the same smears in 1960.

When the 1929 stock market crash tanked the economy, Andrew Mellon advised Hoover to leave things alone and it would fix itself. (Kinda like T-Rump's warm weather Coronavirus cure.)

Alas, some guys didn't get the memo.

Sen. Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Rep. Willis Hawley (R-Oregon) pushed the infamous 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff into law, turning a garden variety recession into worldwide depression.

That pesky Frenchman Voltaire once said "History never repeats itself. Man always does." Mais oui.

President T-Rump now wants to build financial as well as physical walls around America. All disagreement is fake news.

I attended Jim Steele's University of Nevada-Reno lecture on Dec. 7, 1992. With respect to global trade and the economy, he said "there is no issue where we know less in this country."

Alas and alack, not much has changed.

Coming soon to your town, concentration camps to facilitate deportation of millions of undocumented U.S. residents (and some citizens if they look brown enough).

Suffused with Smoot-Hawley 2.0, the loss of millions of low-wage workers will make T-Rump's 2020 COVID-19 inflation look mild.

What to do?

Why, make those illegal invaders earn their posh concentration camp accommodations by working to defray their internment and deportation costs.

Nobody rides for free, dammit!

What to call it? How about Jim Crow 3.0?

After 159 years, the Confederacy has finally won.

SILVER LININGS. Institutional inertia, longstanding law and regulation will make hollowing out the federal government a long, tedious and painful process.

Even though T-Rump's Supreme Court has made the president a king, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, the Orange Crusher may well find that ruling by fiat and fear has ego-crushing consequences.

Most Republican officeholders aren't stupid, they just bend with the wind.

When jobs and prosperity within their home districts get threatened by T-Rump's tariff terrorism, many will revolt. As will state and local governments.

And no matter who wins the House, it takes 60 of 100 votes to get a bill passed in the U.S. Senate. Just a single senator's objection can bring legislation to a dead stop. (Just Google dingbat football coach Sen. Tommy "Down the Tubes" Tuberville, R-Confederate States of America.)

Then again, does T-Rump care what Congress does?

Hope springs eternal. Buckle up, we're in for a bumpy ride.

COMING SOON. A tastefully obscene NevadaLabor.com front page tableau of 2024 election one-liners, memes and 'toons.

Get the latest booster jabs, stay safe and continue to pray for Ukraine and almost 100 other currently war-torn lands.

¡Sí se puede!

The Northern Nevada Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO inducted him into the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on April 5, 2024.

The Saga of Sarah the Tranny Granny
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 11-6-2024 / Updated 11-6-2024 GMT

FASCISM? That's a new face cream, right?
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 10-30-2024 / Updated 10-30-2024 GMT