Braised Lambchop
a nurse trying to work while suffering with chronic pain - she rambles a bit

Richard Walden, founder of Operation USA , blogs tonight for HuffPo and adds another, louder voice against the boondoggle that is the American Red Cross.

Take a look at what ARC has raised just in the last five days:

As of noon on Friday, September 2, The American Red Cross was reporting it had already raised $73 million in private funds for Hurricane Katrina victims. At the same time, the authoritative journal, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which monitors nonprofit fund raising, stated that $108 million had been raised by all private charities willing to report.

That means about 70% of the public's compassion has flowed to The Red Cross. [This percentage was no doubt bloated by FEMA's mystifying screw-up when it released the names of only certain faith-based charities -- like Pat Robertson's wholly-owned nonprofit Operation Blessing -- rather than the wider group of established relief agencies.]

This skewed giving to Red Cross would be fine if the Red Cross were paying for the cost of the 80,000 people they are expertly sheltering in 240 designated shelter sites; but FEMA and the 4 affected state governments (including Texas which will shelter up to 75,000 people) are reimbursing the Red Cross under pre-existing contracts for emergency shelter and other related services. The existence of these contracts is no secret to anyone but the donating public. The Red Cross carefully says it exists by the grace of the American people--yeah...and 'people' includes the US government, 50 state governments and thousands of county governments, too.

What we've come to expect from a major disaster is a media blitz -- paid and unpaid -- by the American Red Cross' expert fund raising staff. Last year, the Red Cross reports it spent $125 million on fund raising; and if you surf the net or watch TV or listen to radio, you can't escape the faux Red Cross news breaks warning of Armageddon if you don't call in a credit card number or send a check or donate blood (which it resells to the tune of over $1.5 billion annually out of its $3 billion in income). In Los Angeles, we're currently going through the spectacle of 'drive-by' drop offs of bags of money at public places like Pasadena's Rose Bowl all promoted by local media. Hollywood studios and Hollywood stars compete to make 6 and 7 figure donations to the Red Cross almost robotically. The Red Cross brand is platinum.

No one asks what The Red Cross actually does, what it does not do, and whether it has another primary source of funding for those rapid responses it claims to do so well and so comprehensively.

Not wanting to dwell on the present Hurricane disaster while it's in progress, let's look at September 11th. The Red Cross collected over $1 billion, a record in philanthropic fund raising after a disaster. But the Red Cross had very few things it could do in the 9/11 disaster -- a modest amount of tracing missing persons, a handful of people in the few shelters that were opened, some comfort food for the fire, police, paramedics and excavation crews, but little else. When NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer asked for documentation of expenditures and income, the Red Cross' response was that it is federally chartered and not answerable to state governments...

(snip)

...an earlier Red Cross CEO was fired after the San Francisco Bay Area earthquake when it was revealed that Red Cross only spent $16 million of the $54 million it had collected. The problem was that the 4 major Bay Area cities' mayors shilled for the Red Cross and only the Red Cross, much like President Bush, the media and Hollywood are doing now...since then, the American Red Cross uses slippery language about 'national disaster accounts' so it has post-9/11 deniability if questioned about why funds designated or donated for one purpose were used for another.

ARC is crying for money for shelters that FEMA is already paying for!! Is it a good use of your money to pay for things twice, once with your tax dollars and again with a donation to the Red Cross? That's what people who donate to ARC are doing!

I've already told you about the ARC Blood Services and the 'National Disaster Relief Fund' language. I'm surprised that Walden thinks it's a new ploy by the ARC to use ambiguous language to get donations. It's not -- they've been doing it for decades. I'm not surprised at the amount of money ARC has been able to raise this week. They're very good at it, and their brand is indeed platinum, as Walden says.

I know people want to do the right thing, and they automatically think of Red Cross, but that's because Red Cross is so good at marketing itself. I'm looking at yet another ARC help plea on CNN right now -- they're shilling for laptop computers with wireless cards. I think they could go buy computers with some of that $73 million they've raised this week. How much money and how much blood has to be wasted before the American people wake up and smell the coffee about the ongoing scandal that is the American Red Cross?

Please spread the word to anyone you know who has not yet donated to the hurricane fund. Tell them that despite what they've heard since their childhood, the ARC thinks it answers to no one and will likely waste most if not all of the money it collects. The Red Cross is in the business of helping the Red Cross -- nothing and no one else.

(If you're still looking for a secular charity, Operation USA is secular and is appealing for donations for hurricane victims.)

The link is to a CNN video of Bush today in Biloxi, Mississippi. Bush is talking to two near-hysterical African-American women, sisters, who have lost their house, and a white guy is standing close by in the background:

Bush to women: 'There's a Salvation Army center that I want to, that I'll tell you where it is, and they'll get you some help. I'm sorry.... They'll help you.....

Woman 1: 'I came here looking for clothes...'

Bush: 'They'll get you some clothes, at the Salvation Army center...'

Woman 1: 'We don't have anything...'

Bush: 'I understand.... Do you know where the center is, that I'm talking to you about?'

Guy with shades: 'There's no center there, sir, it's a truck.'

Bush: 'There's trucks?'

Guy: 'There's a school, a school about two miles away.....'

Bush: 'But isn't there a Salvation center down there?'

Guy: 'No that's wiped out....'

Bush: 'A temporary center? '

Guy: 'No sir they've got a truck there, for food.'

Bush: 'That's what I'm saying, for food and water.'

Bush turns to the sister who's been saying how she needs clothes.

Bush to sister: 'You need food and water.'

Why can't he tell them that he's here to help them? Why didn't Air Force One bring a load of food or generators or some type of help when it came to Mobile? Instead of comfort, he misunderstands their needs and tells them the Salvation Army will do the job he can't do?

Meanwhile, Charity Hospital in New Orleans still has 200 patients. Five days after the storm left, the big hospitals have their remaining staff evacuated while the public hospitals, with poor patients ready to be loaded, watched from across the street. They are still in the same dire straits they were in yesterday and the day before, with bodies stacked in stairwells and no power.

What's the first thing the Senate will take up Tuesday morning? Of course, it's yet another tax cut for the super-rich. The Republican agenda isn't to rebuild New Orleans or get help to the Mississippi coast -- it's to permanently repeal the Estate Tax. That's not being a Compassionate Conservative. That's being a Cruel Conservative.

I'm so angry at those of you who voted for Bush and his moronic minions that I could slug you all in the jaw.

(Via Daily Kos.)

Currently playing in iTunes: American Idiot, from American Idiot by Green Day

I am so enraged by the situation on the Gulf Coast, which is a mere 600 miles from here, that I haven't slept for three nights. I keep waking up and thinking I've dreamt the whole thing, and if I turn on the radio that the BBC won't be talking about New Orleans or Biloxi, and CNN won't be showing dead bodies on the concrete outside the New Orleans Convention Center. My RN sisters are working in Charity and University Hospitals, surrounded by fetid waters, manually bagging patients who should be on mechanical ventilators for hours and hours on end, and they still don't know when or if a helicopter or boat will come and rescue them. (What is it like to manually breathe for someone else? Take an empty two-liter soda bottle, attach it to the end of a garden hose, and start squeezing. Do it every 5 seconds, amid decomposing bodies and without food or water for yourself, for five days. They don't have pure oxygen to use for these critically-ill patients, so they have to use air that stinks of rotting flesh and urine and feces. Then tell me who the politicians should be thanking.)

Why it took five goddamn days to get food and water into that city will never be satisfactorily explained to me. Some say the people there deserve it because they 'didn't do what they were told' -- bullshit. People who couldn't leave were told the Superdome would be their shelter. The people in the Superdome did as they were asked -- and in return, this government has STARVED THEM for almost a week. Children have been raped in the Superdome. A man jumped from the upper deck to his death after finding out his home was gone, because he felt he had nothing left to live for. I would be shocked to see another football game or celebration in the Superdome. CNN said a moment ago that the New Orleans Police Department has been forced to start looting stores to feed its officers, that armed gangs are commandeering rescue boats, and that groups of men are getting drunk from stolen liquor. All the while, Condoleezza Rice goes shoe shopping and Cheney remains on his own vacation.

But just when I thought the people who had enough financial resources to evacuate were the lucky ones, the ones who could get away and get some food and shelter and sanitation, I read about the fine, upstanding, God-fearing/compassionate conservatives who manage hotels in Tallahassee. There's a football game in Tallahassee this weekend -- Florida State is playing Miami -- and it seems those pesky evacuees are taking up the hotel rooms that out-of-town football fans need for their parties and Sunday brunches. Football is, of course, the most important thing in Florida, next to 'rescuing' Terri Schiavo from that godless death-monger husband of hers and maintaining the Bush political machine. But I digress.

The Tallahassee hotels, with the exception of a Ramada Inn, have told the hurricane refugees staying in their facilities that they must leave tonight and go 'somewhere else.' Just exactly what these people, who have likely lost everything they own except what they have with them, should do isn't the problem of the hotel chains. The hotels want them out. Now.

You flee one area because you're told to do so for your own safety, you lose everything you worked for your entire life, and then you're told to leave the place to which you ran because that place is too hard-hearted and its priorities are much too insanely out of whack to let you stay. Thank goodness for that Ramada Inn, which called all its weekend reservation holders trying to figure out a way to let these desperate families stay.

Read the story to see which hotel chains you should frequent and which hotels don't give a shit about anything but the dollars (registration required -- use BugMeNot).

If this happened near Oklahoma City, nobody would be kicked out of a hotel to make room for some OU fan. Oklahoma City has proven itself and its capabilities in disaster management and has shown its humanity over and over again. I don't understand why a college football game takes precedence in Tallahassee to simple humanitarian needs. Then again, I don't understand why it took five days to get supplies to what was a major American city, and I don't understand why the supplies happen to show up right as Bush makes his grand 'surveying the damage' tour.

And now Rice is standing at a podium at the State Department and crowing about all the foreign aid she's accepting from everywhere. I hope her new shoes aren't hurting her feet.