Red Cross Chief Takes Fall for Katrina

Quoth the New York Times:

Red Cross Chief Steps Down; Interim Successor Is Named

By STEPHANIE STROM

The American Red Cross announced today that Marsha J. Evans, its president and chief executive, had resigned. The resignation takes effect at the end of the month.

The Red Cross named John F. McGuire, its executive vice president for biomedical services, as its interim head. Mr. McGuire had overseen the organization's blood operation, its biggest source of income, which has repeatedly been fined by the Food and Drug Administration for problems in the way it handles blood collection and storage.

As recently as June, the F.D.A. fined the Red Cross $3.4 million after the organization reported 135 instances in which it had retrieved unsuitable blood products that it had distributed.

The Red Cross's already tarnished reputation was badly hurt by blistering complaints about its response to Hurricane Katrina, and Ms. Evans may have taken the fall for those recent failures.

Survivors of the hurricane complained that the Red Cross was not present in the worst-hit areas immediately after the storm, that its phone lines were inaccessible, that disabled victims were turned away from shelters, and a variety of other problems.

Yet donors gave it the lion's share of their generosity, funneling more than $1.5 billion to it in the aftermath of the hurricane. Its fund-raising success has sparked anger among smaller nonprofits that had to deal with the crisis without the Red Cross's assistance and that have no hope of raising money to cover their expenses.

The Red Cross's response has been that this disaster was so vast in scope and impact that it could never have adequately prepared to respond, but that explanation has failed to satisfy its critics. ...

In the eyes of people affected by this year's hurricanes, the American Red Cross is second only to FEMA as being part of the disaster rather than part of the response.

Unlike FEMA, a successful agency that was ruined by corruption and patronage of the Bush Administration, the failures of the American Red Cross are structural.

The ARC has a long history of deception and mendacity around using major disasters as fundraising opportunity. Over and over again the story is told of a disaster -- the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Oakland Hills Fire, the Northridge quake, etc. -- for which people, out of the goodness of their hearts, reach into their pockets and donate money to the ARC help those who were affected, and rather than spend it on relief for the disaster for which the donors intended their money, earmarks it instead for ongoing operations. The extreme case of this was last year's tsunami in the Indian Ocean, for which the ARC enthusiastically solicited donations from Americans – at a time when the supposedly non-political organization is withholding funds from the International Committee of the Red Cross over a contemptibly political issue.

Marsha Evans is taking the fall for the ARC failures in the Gulf Coast. She is being replaced by John McGuire, the ARC's head of biomedical services, i.e. its blood drive, which is plagued by scandal unconnected to Katrina. McGuire is unlikely to lead the sort of housecleaning that would be required to set things straight. Nothing is going to change at the American Red Cross any time soon.