BARBWIRE
by
ANDREW BARBANO

Barbwire
Archives


The great ones died but Newt's like Dracula
Expanded from the 12-25-2011 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

"George Washington could not tell a lie, but he was relatively new to politics."
Betty Barbano (Feb. 7, 1941- Dec. 27, 2005)

Thumbing through the Barbwire golden oldies file makes me wish I opened a fortune-telling business. I'd look good in a turban and robes.

One of my earliest columns for this newspaper, in 1988, predicted that we'd eventually get a Nevada presidential primary. The part about hiring Don King to promote it hasn't worked out — yet.

Six months before the Washington Post confirmed the story, I broke the news that Saddam Hussein had access to U.S. military satellites and could have used them to aim his SCUD missiles at both Israel and U.S. troops during the 1991 Gulf War.

One of the things that helped me defeat Lush Rambo in the radio ratings (and why I can't get commercial radio work today) was that I used my show to rally the great unwashed. I once put out a bulletin at 9:00 a.m. and by noon, my listeners and local unions ringed downtown casinos with picket signs.

And I had almost forgotten that I picketed Newt Gingrich before Newt was cool.

Insanity from the eye of the newt screamed the Barbwire headline of 20 May 1990. (Linked to the expanded web edition of this column at NevadaLabor.com)

"It must be the water in DC. I refuse to believe that anyone sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States could conjure up House Resolution 4079 without something nefarious impinging on the fringe of sanity," I wrote.

"The bill's principal sponsor, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., added insult to injury by introducing the damned thing on George Washington's birthday.

"The bill authorizes (government agencies) to 'examine the feasibility of using temporary facilities for housing prisoners with specific examination of the successful use of tent housing for mobilization during WWII.'...We put dirty slant-eyed traitors in tent city 'relocation centers' while decrying Adolf Hitler's concentration camps...

"The bill gives substantial authorization for private companies to operate the prisons, to put all prisoners to work and make a profit." I wonder if Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is Newt's long lost bastard brother.

HR 4079 (I still have a copy) was a police state wet dream. When polls showed that 52 percent of Americans would be willing to lose some constitutional rights to win the ersatz war on drugs, Gingrich's National Drug and Crime Emergency Act followed. He never missed an opportunity for demagoguery.

HR 4079 would have allowed the president to declare an emergency and in concert with an executive finding, suspend the writ of habeas corpus which allows the accused to know the charges against him. Newt anticipated the grotesquely mislabeled Patriot Act by more than a decade.

"The Fourth Amendment prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure is another pain in prosecutorial posteriors. Write a law authorizing just about every search and making illegally obtained evidence more admissible in court," I stated.

"The Eighth Amendment is really bothersome," I noted.

"Many judges agree with prisoners that human sardine cans constitute cruel and unusual punishment...Screw the Eighth Amendment. Water it down until 1995...Mandate drug tests (to qualify) for broad classes of (federal) funding if states don't comply. Immediately confiscate the property of the accused. Make it hard to hire a lawyer. Make people prove they legally obtained all their property or forfeit to Uncle Sam."

Better ask for receipts with your Christmas presents today.

My listeners and I picketed a satellite-fed speech by Newt the Zootsuit at UNR later that year. The current GOP presidential frontrunner has not changed his spots.

The Patriot Act and the currently inflammatory National Defense Authorization Act are the ugly grandchildren of HR 4079. And Grandpa Newt may either become the Sharron Angle of 2012 or the next president of the United States.

Newt is back, bigger and meaner than ever.

Have a Merry Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus anyway.

FALLEN HEROES AND HEROINES. Nevada stands diminished at their loss but forever enriched by the time they spent walking among us: Trumpeter and band leader Al Shay (Musicians Local 368); Sylvester Kelley (Electrical Workers 1245); Jim Arnold (Culinary Local 226); movie star-union activist Tura Satana Jurman and Chuck Fisher (Security, Police & Fire Professionals Local 1010); Mike Ayers (Operating Engineers Local 3-Elko); Mel Turner (IATSE [stagehands] Local 720-Las Vegas); David "Fasto" Casto, KCBN 1230-am Radio of Reno's yesteryear; Rev. Onie Cooper (Reno-Sparks NAACP); Dr. Milton Glick (Reno-Sparks NAACP, UNR); Washoe District Judge and former trial lawyer Robert Perry.

Finally, in a class by herself in death as in life, Mary Valencia Wilson: Reno-Sparks NAACP, Nevada ACLU, Progressive Leadership Alliance, César Chávez's United Farm Workers Union, Nevada Alliance for Workers Rights, Washoe Legal Services, League of United Latin American Citizens and much more.

Please read more about them at the NevadaLabor.com Barbwire archive and breaking news pages or use the NevadaLabor.com search engine to sweep for their names.

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!

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





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


...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
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Copyright © 1982-2011 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.

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