BARBWIRE
by
ANDREW BARBANO
Pirate Laureate of the High Desert Outback of the American Dream


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The Barbwire's Silver Anniversary
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.

   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.

Everybody knows the scene is dead
   But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
   What everybody knows.

— Leonard Cohen


Reader beware of what's not really there
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 11-28-2013 Sparks Tribune
Updated 1-4-2014

If you need any more reason to support the Barbwire.TV community channel, looky here.


HAT TRICK: Barbwire wins 3rd straight Nevada Press Association First-Place Award

WE WON: BIG NEWS FROM THE NEVADA PRESS ASSOCIATION CONFAB IN GOMORRAH SOUTH —> BARBWIRE NOMINEE GUY RICHARDSON INDUCTED INTO HALL OF FAME

Support Dondero next

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
Reruns 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

WE WON: BIG NEWS FROM THE NEVADA PRESS ASSOCIATION CONFAB IN GOMORRAH SOUTH —> BARBWIRE NOMINEE GUY RICHARDSON INDUCTED INTO HALL OF FAME

Support Dondero next

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST. Walmart must stop stuffing employees with stupid pills.

The bandidos are building a new store in the tax-subsidized, underachieving Sparks Marina Legends shopping center. (See Cabellyup.com/)

"Amelia McLear, senior manager of public affairs for Walmart, said the company has not closed any stores in the Reno-Sparks area and it does not plan to close any more with the addition of the Legends store," according to Garrett Valenzuela's report of a Sparks Planning Commission meeting in last week's Tribune.

Untrue.

When Walmart was trying to get its northwest Reno store approved, the Arkansas pirates likewise promised they were not "planning" to close any stores, especially Northtowne at McCarran and US395/I-580.

Activists warned that Wally World has littered the country with empty big boxes. Sure enough, Northtowne closed. (See the Wal-Mart War Room at NevadaLabor.com/)

LUMP OF COAL DEPT. Didja know that Reno car dealers threatened to stop all charitable contributions if the school repair tax passed?

So said a county commissioner during a hearing.

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT. I'm researching both a serious public safety danger as well as a burgeoning public health hazard that may end up rivaling the fabled Fallon cancer cluster.

If I'm getting hot leads like these, what are guys who do this for a living working on?

The Nevada Public Utilities Commission, NVEnergy and Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto's consumer advocate have caved to corporate welfare queen Apple's demand for secret proceedings.

Even those allowed to intervene in the Fort Churchill solar power plant case have to sign non-disclosure blood oaths.

When public business is not conducted in public, the great unwashed usually get their pockets vacuumed.

Déjà vu all over again: State officials cave to corporate con jobs.
                              — Barbwire 8-6-2000

  And we don't even get kissed afterward.

  Which leads me to Sparks City Hall. One of these days, they're gonna get busted for illegally vague meeting notices.

This week's agenda noted a hearing on minor and major deviations to a quantitative standard in city code.

Huh?

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS YET TO COME. I loved last Sunday's Reno Gazette-Journal multi-page spread about how Reno is making progress toward becoming a college town.

About time after well over 100 years.

The stories all but ignored gambling, a word no longer used in polite publications.

A front-page New Yorker-esque non-scale drawing totally eliminated the downtown casino district.

A reader from Mars would assume that hotel-casinos don't exist in these parts.

The illustration showed the northwest Walmart (obviously critical for a university environment), the Little Waldorf Saloon (ditto) and UN,R to the north with the mid-town retail district in the foreground.

The tenderloin was eliminated save for the mucky Truckee River.

Perhaps it was a purported forecast of Reno after global thermonuclear war when God herself pays the wages of sin with the grapes of wrath.

Happy Thanksgibleting to you and yours.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)

WEB EXTRAS...

SUPPORT THE RETURN OF COMMUNITY TV. Support the cause at Barbwire.TV by putting your money where my mouth is.

Keep sending show suggestions.

Current frontrunners include (pardon the pun) wild mustangs as canned goods, educationi-Guns and gay Olympics.

"Media is the plural of mediocre."
                              — Jimmy Breslin

  Please forward additional ideas or vote on the above.

  I encourage you to donate to the cause at Barbwire.TV/

The medium that shapes public opinion needs at least one refuge where it is not filtered through the distorted green eye shades of prissy corporate accountants for whom profit is the only priority; where self-censorship is the journalist's normal work environment and where all sins of omission are tacitly encouraged and forgiven with the wave of a balance sheet.

This is important.

HONOR YOUR DON. Keep sending comments supporting legendary Nevada photographer Don Dondero (1920-2003) for the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame.

His life's work appeared worldwide, including the Tribune and most probably every newspaper in Nevada.

Enlist in the campaign to install Big Don.

Please send me your memories and endorsements via e-mail or to P.O. Box 10034, Reno NV 89510.

The Barbwire got the late Reno Gazette-Journal columnist Guy Richardson elected last year.

Let's go for a repeat.

Happy Thanksgibleting to you and yours.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)

 

 

 

 

____________
Andrew Barbano is a 45-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 and JoeNeal.org. 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...

John F. Kennedy's 2014 Inaugural Address
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 11-21-2013 Sparks Tribune

JFK, Jr.: Hope dies hard and yet springs eternal
Barbwire by Barbano / Daily Sparks Tribune / 7-25-1999

Your better life today had President Kennedy lived
Barbwire by Barbano / Daily Sparks Tribune / 12-28-1997

The bloody guns of October fire on November
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 11-7-2013 Sparks Tribune

Let's persuade Apple to start making i-Guns here
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-24-2013 Sparks Tribune

Death on the job: Nevada workers remain cheap and disposable
Updates on two Laborers' Local 169 members killed and two injured on I-80
Worker dies trimming trees at MGM's Mirage on Las Vegas Strip

Nevada Day Required Reading
The Lady in the Red Dress
The Barbwire's classic Nevada Day column written in 1983
The compleat history of the Silver State in 500 words

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Sparks Tribune 10-31-2013 and previously

Barbano on the Barbwire plots new TV season
Barbwire Special Web Edition / 10-21-2013

Barbwire: Nevada not really a state
No, we were not Battle Born in Kenya
Top 10 reasons Nevada lives in the 19th Century

Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-17-2013 Sparks Tribune

Low-income penalty: Nevada socks it to the working poor
BARBANO: Nevada is one big company town
Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 10-10-2013

State of Health
National health care comes up against a very sick state. WHAT'S IN IT FOR US?
Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 10-10-2013

USA at crossroads: New Deal or new Confederacy?
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-10-2013 Sparks Tribune
UPDATE—>Bill Moyers: Shutdown is simply secession by other means

We Don't Need No Education
The continuing Barbwire series

...and more ammo yet

The Post-Dated Recession: Pay me now or pay me later
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-6-2012 Daily Sparks Tribune

The Post-dated Recession
By Joshua H. Silavent / Daily Sparks Tribune / 5-3-2011

Union decline and rising inequality in two charts
by Colin Gordon
Economic Policy Institute / 6-5-2012

Used in
journalist Mark Robison's extensive Hard Labor: Nevada unions tout role in helping workers, firms, economy (Sunday 2 Sept. 2012 Reno Gazette-Journal, page one, Reno Rebirth section of the print edition). Union men Jim Burrell, Paul McKenzie and Guy Louis Rocha did the movement proud. Not included in the RGJ online edition.

WOMEN AND UNIONS — ORPHAN MAJORITIES
The Barbwire Labor Day column
Reno Gazette-Journal / 9-3-2012


Nevada Press Assn. Better Newspaper Contest
HAT TRICK: Barbwire takes first place three years 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





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


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War Rooms:
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We Don't Need No Education
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Copyright © 1982-2013 Andrew Barbano

Andrew Barbano is a 45-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 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.

Site composed and maintained by Deciding Factors, CWA 9413 signatory

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