So Not a Surprise

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin is telling people not to donate to the Red Cross:

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, who represents hard-hit Kingwood, had a message for the public about the American Red Cross.

"I beg you not to send them a penny," he said at Wednesday's council meeting. "They are the most inept unorganized organization I've ever experienced."

………

"Don't waste your money," said Martin. "Give it to another cause."

Martin is not the only public official to go after the Red Cross' response to Harvey.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett has said he asked local nonprofit to set up a shelter at NRG Park in large part because he did not trust the Red Cross to do so.

"The Red Cross could not have done this. They wouldn't have had the wherewithal to do it," Emmett said. "Don't get me wrong, they're out there on the front lines, but I had already seen the difficulty and we needed to get this set up quickly."

The organization also has been faulted for failing to ensure supplies reached area shelters quickly enough. By sunrise Sunday, when much of the Houston area awoke under water, one of the city's two Red Cross shelters could not accept evacuees due to high water and the other had only 200 cots for what turned out to be more than 2,000 people. Cots did not arrive to the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown until after dark Sunday, and shortages there persisted for days.

This is a recurring theme with the American Red Cross.

They raised hundreds of millions after storms Sandy and Isaac, and f%$#ed it all up, and it raised half a billion dollars for Haiti, and built 6 houses.

Then there are its deceptive claims about overhead and serviced delivered.

The Red Cross is a broken organization. The management is driven by "the appearance of aid, not actually delivering it."

The organization is not just dysfunctional, it is completely broken, and without a top to bottom revamp of its management, it will remain broken.

What's more, the problems predate the current management, my father recalls an inadequate response to the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it gave AIDS to most of the hemophiliacs in the United States, because it refused to screen its blood supply properly.  (Liddy Dole was a part of that clusterf%$#, dragging her feet for years over changes to the program)

The Red Cross, and its charter from Congress, need to be fixed.