Ah, ‘tis Spring when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of creative seduction, satyristic dancing, nubile wenches, fertile frolicking — and riots in the streets.
Commentary
Forgotten in the mayhem of these times is the painfully obvious: The ayatollah and Putin have won this round, having created worldwide chaos, advancing their dreams of conquest.
Chaos, the best friend of dictators, creates insecurity and works like a charm.
It elected Nixon in 1968 and we’ve never recovered. New Hampshire and Texas provide bookends of modern day rebellion. Flaming commie liberal Ivy League Dartmouth College engaged youthful rebels in conversation and dialogue. The kneejerk reactionary governor of Texas sent in the headbreakers.
MURPHY’S LAW. All this reminds me of corrupt Officer Murphy back in Fresno. Murphy actually believed in a stop-dead simple way to rid the streets of those dirty Commie long-haired hippie demonstrators: One machine gunning to send the message.
The descendants of Officer Murphy are all around us, two-bit practitioners of the eternal cycle of violence. What poet e.e. cummings called “this monster mannunkind” is still so very vicious and so self-destructively tribal.
You have probably seen the longrunning TV commercial which includes visuals of picket lines and riots in the streets. It closes with “Choose God.”
What perversion of piety. Fighting starts when some hammerhead, trying to get rich or get laid or both, decides to cash in by asserting that his god is better than their god. (Note to anti-grammatical pronoun persons: It’s always a “him.”)
I would be more worried if protest had become a lost art here in the land of the free with liberty and justice for some.
Decades ago, Ralph Nader was asked if the fires of consumerism and environmentalism had waned.
Not at all, he replied. It’s just become “diffuse” and decentralized. Whenever a land grab, oil hustle or coal plant are proposed, protestors show up. That’s a good thing.
Worry when they don’t. And beware modern day sanctimonious opportunists like Murphy.
THE REAL LABOR DAY: TODAY. MayDay is Labor Day worldwide. The only reason we celebrate it in September lies with President Grover Cleveland who wanted to keep it as far away as possible from the date of the Pullman railway workers strike.
Cleveland was the only defrocked president ever to run again and regain the office, a cautionary tale.
Czar Donaldov’s idol, Andrew Jackson, hated the U.S. Supreme Court and the Bank of the United States. The latter had refused him a loan to benefit his slave plantation. So when he won the presidency, he destroyed it. The lack of a central bank debilitated the country’s economy for the next century.
The current court majority of blackrobed ammotextuals are plunging headlong toward a new Confederacy. They just don’t believe in federalism, which leads to every state becoming a nation unto itself. John C. Calhoun, call your office to get in on the ground floor of a second Civil War.
Jackson hated anything and anyone who disagreed with him. Sound familiar?
He once said “the chief justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Sound familiar?
I’ve got a better idea.
SEND THEM PACKING. President Franklin Roosevelt had the right idea when he wanted to expand the Supreme Court which had stymied so many of his desperately necessary Great Depression recovery programs. Kneejerk reactionaries stopped it. One justice, seeing the danger of the court not responding to trying times, switched his votes and the fabled “switch in time saved nine.”
Had he not done so, there may not have been a United States today. The danger yet abides.
Moonhowlers for decades decried Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society enhancements like civil rights and voting rights.
And the benighted right, backed by money-gorged monopolists, has done one helluva job. Throw in riots in the streets and Nixon Part Deux looms large.
What to do?
The U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors provides the template.
Currently, nine serve on the eleven-member body. President Biden just appointed two Democrats and has nominated former Boston mayor and secretary of labor Marty Walsh for a vacant Democratic seat. Biden also appointed one independent.
If Biden can find a moderate Republican to fill the eleventh seat, he can engineer enough votes to fire Trump shill Louis the Clueless Dejoy, whose job it is to destroy the system (and mail-in voting) in order to privatize it, something he has long advocated.
And that can save northern Nevada’s postal service from going from merely clunky to junky. It already takes five days for some mail to get across town. Add Dejoy’s plan to move processing to W. Sacramento, and that will spawn…drum roll, please…demonstrations in the streets.
LABOR NOTES, workplace tidbits that caught my eye or fouled the atmosphere: Congratulations to local company Sierra Nevada Corp. for landing a $13 billion federal contract to build the next generation of the flying White House/Pentagon. The “Doomsday Planes” are engineered to keep the government going during the unthinkable — nuclear war.
One thing that stands out in the Doomsday Plane story: Boeing will not be considered to provide the four flying fortresses.
Full warning came many years ago. An expert blamed Boeing’s continuing woes on its 2006 merger with Lockheed-Martin, a huge military contractor.
“Lockheed-Martin brought the ethics of government contracting to Boeing,” the insider noted. Lord, was he ever correct, to our everlasting peril.
GETTING IT RIGHT. The Sparks-based Building and Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada/AFL-CIO just proposed a solution to government contracting gone awry: union involvement.
Executive Secretary-Treasurer Rob Benner, a sheetmetal worker by trade, noted that the $9 million failure to bring high speed Internet to Lovelock might well have been avoided had the crooked contractor engaged with qualified union constructors. (The entire $9 million was apparently lost to a fly-by-night contractor.)
With so much government infrastructure contracting coming to Nevada, Benner called the Lovelock disaster “a cautionary tale of what happens when we sideline the expertise and the voice of organized labor. Let’s not repeat this mistake,” he noted in a Reno Gazette-Journal guest editorial.
Amen, brother. Happy Labor Day.
Vaxx up, stay safe, pray for Ukraine and almost 100 other currently war-torn lands.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 55-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and a member of the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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