Rhinocrisy

New poll, per Hedgehog’s question below. Previous results..

With everything from Major League Baseball to my neighborhood dance parties all sporting the scarlet plus sign, I have suddenly seen more contrarians starting to pick up the idea that the Red Cross is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Americablog:
“they’re encouraging federal taxpayer handouts to religious groups.”

LA Times op-ed:
… asking where all the privately collected money will go and how much Red Cross is billing FEMA and the affected states is a legitimate question…. Giving so high a percentage of all donations to one agency that defines itself only as a first-responder and not a rebuilder is not the wisest choice.

As a former volunteer for the organization and as someone who has read over their tax filings more carefully than most members of the public, I’d like to scribble down a few of the ways in which the organization is dysfunctional.

Deceptive marketing: The Red Cross is no longer much of a first-response disaster organization. It is mostly a monopolistic biomedical supplier. Of its $2.3 billion budget, $2.1 billion are for its biomedical division. (Another $147 million was for ongoing 9/11 work, because Congress made them promise to spend all 9/11 donations on 9/11, even long after the money was no longer needed.) They are in large part a seller of donated body parts. But when it comes time to fundraise, they always show firefighters carrying children, as though they had anything to do with firefighting or injured children.

In fact, they don’t. They do almost no direct medical care anymore. When I was a volunteer in the early 1990s, I was an EMT and was in a region that still let us treat minor wounds. But even then, because of liability concerns, most geographic units of the Red Cross wouldn’t let their staff touch an injured person.

Nor do they fight fires.

What they do is after a disaster, they try to restore people to the lifestyle they had before. Which leads to:

Unjust distribution of donations: They group’s goal of restoring people to pre-disaster conditions means they provide millionaires with pallet-loads of donated furniture, books, food, whatever comes in the door. And for the destitute homeless guy whose gutter got closed by fire? He’s lucky to leave the shelter with a new refrigerator box to sleep in. OK it’s not quite that bad. He will receive a toiletry kit.

The worst was revealed after 9/11. The New Yorker reported SoHo loft-dwellers using their Red Cross checks to redo their kitchens — at last, a chance to get that Wolf Range and SubZero fridge I’ve been wanting.

But that’s the kind of class-consciousness you’d expect from a group that in 2002, gave its departing chief executive a $242,000 severance check, a $130,500 performance bonus, and $794,000 in deferred compensation. Which brings us to:

Executive pay: In both 2003 and 2004, according the group’s tax return, they had several employees making more than $300,000. I can understand that in the medical field you need to pay well to get talent. But aren’t there a lot of people in the field who would take a bit of a pay cut in return for the good feeling of working for the Red Cross? That’s what you’d think, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the tables of top-paid employees.

So in fiscal 2004, the group paid out a total of $4.4 million in executive pay to its top 13 suits. It’s not a dreadful number for a $2.3 billion biomedical company, but it’s something to keep in mind as they hold up photos of bedraggled New Orleaneans in their appeals for cash.

And finally: There’s the little matter of homophobia.

Suggestions of alternative charities are welcome.