The organization can’t get control of itself. They are too large and too inefficient. It’s one scandal after another. Don’t give them a dime because your dime is too often wasted.
http://www.startribune.com/nation/11922081.html
And it goes on and on. The Red Cross is inherently corrupt and you can do far better by donating to other organizations that actually have some control of their operations.
And if he did, we’d have learned that three out of the four links were clunkers.
The first involves a woman in China, who may or may not be affiliated with the Chinese Red Cross, posing with a fancy car. The second involves people stealing from the Red Cross, so it’s pitting the victim. The fourth involves a routine resignation due to sex-with-a-subordinate–no money involved. Oh, and it took place in 2007.
Link #1 - From yesterday, Chinese woman claims to be official high up in Chinese Red Cross, posts pics of herself with her two very fancy, very expensive cars. She may “just” be the mistress of a Red Cross fundraiser.
Link #2 - From SIX years ago, the Red Cross hired a third party to handle their relief hotline where Katrina victims could call in, provide some ID, and get a PIN to collect relief money at Western Union. Some of the employees decided to hand out PINs to friends and family. Nearly 50 of them were arrested and, I assume, sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prisons.
Link #3 - From TWO years ago, scandals plague the Red Cross, the latest one being two New Jersey execs embezzled nearly a million dollars and blew it on gambling, giving each other head, and other inappropriate uses. Critics say the chapters have too much control at the national level, and standard accounting procedures aren’t being followed.
Link #4 - From FOUR years ago, the fifth new president of the Red Cross in six years resigns after less than six months because he had an affair with an underling.
I’m trying to feel outrage, but . . . it just isn’t there. Corrupt people keeping mistresses in China? Well, they won’t get my money. Corrupt people steal money from a charity? They got caught and sent to prison (or in one case, died before trial). Man gets position of power and respect and can’t keep his pants zipped? Quelle surprise!
Note, for those who felt it was tl;dr, the Chinese Red Cross is a government-run organization. I’m not sure how money you donate to the Red Cross from the United States would be linked to it. (ETA: It probably wouldn’t.)
Yea, aside from not describing whats in the links, I’d think the OPs point would be a lot stronger if he’d dropped the first and last link. The first is more a problem with general corruption in the Chinese gov’t then anything specific to the international Red Cross, and the last is a fairly ho-hum sex scandal that doesn’t really reflect one way or another on the Red Cross. Their inclusion kinda makes it look like the OP just googled “red cross corruption” and threw up the results without reading them.
The second and third links are a little more relevant, as they deal with actual corruption with the Red Cross in the US. They obviously need to centralize their auditing to avoid similar problems.
That said, the nature of disaster work is probably such that rooting out fraud as a priority probably competes with quickly distributing money as quickly as possible to those that need it. People whose financial records just washed down river with their houses probably aren’t in a position to be able to quickly prove their identities beyond a doubt, and taking a bunch of time to verify everything means your going to be slower to get money to people that need it. A certain amount of fraud is in the nature of the business.
Is that all you got? Why don’t you also drag out the old “Red Cross charged servicemen for coffee and donuts during the war” story? That one never gets old.
You can start with MSF/Doctors Without Borders and Catholic Relief Services. There are others. They are there when there is a major catastrophe have much better control of their operations. They do much more after the fact self-analysis to find out how they can be better and more efficient.
You know, I love MSF, but do you have a citation that they have fewer problems with local chapters? (Same with CRS, but I don’t know as much about them to start with.)
What I do know is that there have not been the scandals associated with either MSF or CRS to any degree that the Red Cross has been involved in on an institutional basis.
Will you please cite me a list of scandals associated with those organizations so that we can do a comparison.
“A list of scandals” is a stupid way to try to prove it. There are dozens of organizations who exist only to rate NGOs’ methods, i.e. efficiency, corruption, etc. Why don’t you go look up the Red Cross and see how it does? Not to mention that the things you cited either aren’t the organization called the Red Cross around here or were the ground-level personnel issues that everybody has. Right now you have two not very good data points. Find some more.
(ETA: actually, I’ll add a third for you: the Red Cross (both Canada and the US, I think) was involved in a tainted blood scandal in the 1980’s. Of course, MSF was still a much, much smaller organization then, so I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison.)
