RIDING THE BIG RED TRUCK

The guiding thread for this week's Goat Rope is fire fighting and El Cabrero's fond memories thereof, although many other topics are covered.

If this is your first visit, please scroll down to earlier entries.

In my days as a volunteer, I was very impressed by the skill and dedication of fire fighters, many of whom are working people trying to balance jobs and family with the many unpaid hours they give to the community.

As a newcomer, I had some revolutionary ideas that didn’t go anywhere. One was just for PR and involved installing a baby on each fire and rescue truck so that we could whip it out and pretend to save it in case the media showed up.

Another was proposed legislation to the effect that, if we had to respond to a motor vehicle accident in bad weather at an ungodly hour and the passengers had the bad manners to get out of their cars themselves, we would get to play with our toys and cut up their cars anyway.

I think the failure of my innovations was due to an irrational conservatism and something about liability.

Before closing, I must address the proverbial elephant in the room. I am referring, of course, to the cat question, an issue that lingers just beneath the surface in any discussion of firefighting. To wit: do we now or have we ever rescued an old lady’s cat from the top of a tree?

The official answer I am supposed to give is probably “No,” although the real answer is that we probably would if we were bored enough. In that case, we might even put the cat up there to start with...

To my dying day I will regret not responding to a call that involved getting a cow down from the second floor of a rickety barn after it partially fell through. I still don’t know how our guys got it out unscathed, but I’m reasonably certain they didn’t plant it there.

My volunteer firefighting career came to an end due to heart problems. I miss it. There is really nothing that can take the place of riding the big red trucks.

St. Paul famously said that when I was I child I spake and acted as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things. In this instance, I must beg to differ. Every little kid knows that fire trucks and fire stations are cool.

And every little kid is right.

THE LATEST REMINDER of the risks both career and volunteer firefighters face is the recent death of Ceredo WV firefighter Christopher Jaros, who died Saturday in an auto accident in his private vehicle while responding to a call. Here's the report from the Huntington Herald-Dispatch about his funeral.

MORE ON THE REAL WALTER REED SCANDAL. The Hightower Lowdown sums up the real issues of the Walter Reed story. Here's an excerpt:

The gross mistreatment of our wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is disgusting, but there also appears to be a scandal behind the scandal.

The Army Times reports that the head of the center warned last year that "patient care services are at risk of mission failure." Why? Because under George W's "competitive sourcing" directive, the Pentagon has been pushing to privatize as much of its work as possible. And in 2006, top officials awarded a $120 million contract to turn the facilities management over to IAP Worldwide Services, run by two former senior Halliburton officials. IAP, which brags that Dan Quayle is on its board, is the contractor that botched the delivery of ice to New Orleans during the Katrina fiasco.

ON A RELATED NOTE here's an item about the damage the Bush administration has inflicted on the Army itself.

TAX DAY. Here's a breakdown from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about where tax dollars go. Here's a rant on taxes and trickles by Antipode. And here's a comment from the Coalition on Human Needs about the effects of the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy:

The federal tax cuts enacted starting in 2001 have failed both to preserve an adequate amount of revenue and to collect it fairly. The deficit for FY 2004 is estimated at $422 billion. The tax cuts have added more to the deficit than all other new federal legislation combined since 2001. If made permanent, they will cost more than $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Such massive reductions in revenue strangle the government's capacity to meet the nation's needs. Further, the tax cuts worsen the gap between the rich and everyone else. In 2004, half of the combined value of all the tax cuts passed since 2001 will go to the richest one percent. The bottom 20 percent will receive only 1.3 percent.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE SHOCKING TRUTH

Caption: Ferdinand only obeys the goddess of love.

A long time ago on Saturday Night Live, Fr. Guido Sarducci talked about the Five Minute University, an educational program that would teach you what you'd remember after you graduated.

Sample: Economics...supply and demand.

In the spirit of Fr. Sarducci, if you ever had a psychology class or talked with someone you had, you would probably remember "some dude who told people to shock other people and they did."

That would be the late Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who, in light of the many atrocities of obedience in the 20th century, wondered how and under what conditions ordinarly people would follow orders to inflict harm on people they had nothing against.

Short answer: it was WAY easier than he initially thought.

To briefly recap, Milgram set up a situation in which subjects thought they were participating in an experiment on the relationship of punishment or negative reinforcement to learning. They were to give a task invovling word memory to a learner who was in fact an actor. Each time the learner/actor made a "mistake," the subjects were asked to give them an electric shock of steadily increasing severity.

According to the StanleyMilgram.com website, published by Dr. Thomas Blass,

He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.

(Blass, by the way, wrote a biography of Milgram cleverly titled The Man Who Shocked the World. That's going on my list.)

Milgram tried lots of variations of the experiment, but the above will do if you remember nothing else.

In addition to whatever topics emerge,El Cabrero is going to ponder the issue of obedience to authority, which has probably led to more atrocities and misery than all the crimes of "deviance."

SPEAKING OF (ERODING) AUTHORITY, a new poll released this weekend reveals a further drop in support for the war in Iraq. This weekend, thousands of Americans, including several hundred West Virginians, came together to protest Bush administration Iraq policy. El Cabrero took part in an event at the state capitol sponsored by WV Patriots for Peace, WV Citizen Action Group, and allied organizations.

(Once again, I didn't bring a camera. I keep forgetting that those things work with people too...)

MORE ON PRIVATIZATION AT WALTER REED. Here's a new item that came out yesterday that shows how the administration's mania for privatization eroded the quality of care at Walter Reed:

Documents from the investigative and auditing arm of Congress map a trail of bid, rebid, protests and appeals between 2003, when Walter Reed was first selected for outsourcing, and 2006, when a five-year, $120 million contract was finally awarded.

The disputes involved hospital management, the Pentagon, Congress and IAP Worldwide Services Inc., a company with powerful political connections and the only private bidder to handle maintenance, security, public works and management of military personnel.

While medical care was not directly affected, needed repairs went undone as the staff shrank from almost 300 to less than 50 in the last year and hospital officials were unable to find enough skilled replacements.

SELF ADMINISTERED FILM CRITICISM. I'm still getting used to having DSL, which is way cool. I admit that this short Ferdinand flick is not exactly Citizen Kane. They should get better though.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A JUDICIOUS MIX: PRIVATIZATION AND VET HEALTH CARE, CORPORATE TAX CUTS, "THE OFFICE," AND DEBT

Caption: This guy really needs cable.

FIRST ITEM...Here's more on the breaking story from Tom Paine.com of how privatization and outsourcing hurt wounded U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan vets at Walter Reed and elsewhere.

WEST VIRGINIA ACTION ALERT: If you live in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, please contact your representatives in the House of Delegates and urge them to reject the state Senate's irresponsible corporate tax cuts, which would force cuts to K-12 education, the college and university system, health care and human services, etc. Thanks to Prevent Child Abuse WV, here's an easy way to do it.


THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID. We will now move on to the topic of Cabrero's favorite TV show.

And, no, it's not American Idol.

It's...what else? The Office! (American version, although the British is OK too.)
The show is sometimes excruciating, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes very realistic. That's Thursdays on NBC at 8:30.

It's also the subject of the "That's What She Said" blog by Julie Elgar, a labor and employment attorney. The subject of the blog is all the legal and other trouble that could happen if people really acted that way in the workplace.

My favorite episode was the one about diversity training...

Still, if I had to pick, I'd prefer a workplace that tilts more towards craziness than to inhuman efficiency.

Full disclosure: El Cabrero received no compensation for this unsolicited endorsement of a network TV show. A tour of Scranton would be nice though.

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS, REVISITED. Earlier GR posts have noted America's current negative savings rate, which is about where it was in the depths of the great depression.

Here are some nuggets from the March 12 issue of Business Week:

...The average U.S. consumer has four credit cards, according to a recent nationwide sampling of 3 million consumer credit files. The most credit-happy states: New Hampshire and New Jersey, where 20% of customers carry 10 cards or more...

According to the survey, 51% of Americans have at least two credit cards, 14% have at least 10, and 14% use at least 50% of available credit.

Can you imagine what would happen to the U.S. economy if people had to live on what they actually earned? Holy crisis of overproduction and/or underconsumption, Batman!


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED.