Aiede

"I just got a tablet in addition to my phone. Somebody go get a saw for the other leg."

I'm a Red Cross disaster volunteer in the US at the local level, but I'm speaking only for myself.

Much of the issue with the Red Cross in Haiti seems to me to be that the things that the organization has been trying to accomplish there are things that we don't do in the US, under the National Disaster Recovery Framework, Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, etc. For instance, we don't build homes here. We don't run sanitation projects. We don't deal with land title. We come in, help people with basic needs after a disaster -- food, clothing, shelter -- and then help people connect with and transition to the correct organizations for longer-term recovery needs if they have them. That's how the US system basically works. Normally, complaining that the American Red Cross didn't build a house would be the equivalent of complaining that Habitat for Humanity didn't operate an emergency shelter -- that's just not what it does.

I don't know how or why the American Red Cross took on the role it has in Haiti since national Red Cross/Red Crescent organizations usually don't do long-term work outside their own borders, but my personal suspicion is that there was a recovery vacuum where Haitian NGOs and government couldn't handle response and no other international organization had the resources to even begin to take on something that size. Whether or not that was a great decision is open for debate, but at some level there's probably a "If not the American Red Cross, then who?" question to ask as well.

(And I'll add my standard disclaimer when discussing the Red Cross -- Disaster relief is really, really complicated. Until you've tried to accomplish anything in a disaster environment, you have no idea. The Red Cross is there because important things aren't functioning, so expecting everything to work well is deeply unrealistic. The amazing thing to me about disaster relief is that it ever goes right.)

In the interest of historical accuracy, the first "War on Drugs" pronouncement came from President Nixon in 1971. Source

I'm a local disaster volunteer with the Red Cross, have been for five years or so. They don't pay me, nobody asked me to post this and these are my opinions:

I'm not surprised that an employee survey last year showed poor morale and faith in leadership, because the Red Cross has been going through a massive transformation that's created a lot of upheaval and cost a lot of good people their jobs. But good journalism should have noted this beyond "latest in a series of layoffs" since I think anybody concerned about donor dollars should actually note the organization's changing business model and view it as a positive, not a negative. The word "transformative" gets thrown around a lot, but in the past few years the Red Cross truly has transformed and virtually nobody outside the disaster relief community even noticed.

Until four years ago or so, the Red Cross (outside of blood services) ran virtually in a franchise model, where each chapter had its own bank account, finance people, HR people, purchasing, marketing/PR, board with fiduciary responsibilities, health & safety product sales force, fundraising, etc. with all of the overhead that entailed.

The national board brought in McGovern from AT&T with the intention of stripping all that inefficiency out of the organization, doing things like centralizing HR or accounting or purchasing at the state level or higher; taking marketing away from local chapters and making it a district function, combining smaller chapters into bigger regions, etc. She did. It was really painful. In some cases, I think it's gone too far. Locally, for instance, we've probably got less than half the number of staff members in disaster cycle services than we did three years ago but we're responding to the same number of disasters regardless.

Having lived through this as a volunteer I hated watching a lot of people lose their jobs or have to move around the country, but as a donor to the Red Cross it's clear to me how much more efficient we are today than we used to be and how much lower our cost structure must be just given the empty cubicles in the local chapter. Again -- bad for the folks involved, often frustrating to volunteers who're trying to figure out who's got a particular responsibility these days, but done entirely with an eye toward fiscal responsibility.

I'm not against independent reporting on the Red Cross -- I'm a former reporter myself, I value good journalism -- but I do feel that I've yet to see any reporting on the Red Cross that truly understood and explained it in all its complexities to an audience. I've joked that it's the best-known and worst-understood brand in the world, and when I see the discussions here and elsewhere I'm increasingly hard-pressed to think of a competitor for that distinction.

The big challenge with libertarians "coming around" on AGW is what David Hume identified as the "is-ought problem" -- simply identifying what is doesn't necessarily give you the ability or right to say what ought to be. Science informs policy, it doesn't dictate it.

When it comes to global warming, "The Earth is getting warmer and we caused at least some of it" is a statement based on relatively reliable science and most libertarians I know are on board with it. Where we're not "coming around" is the unquestioned collectivist response to that state of affairs, since there's plenty of debate to be had regarding whether or not that's actually a problem (and for whom), whether we're capable of doing anything that meaningfully addresses the problem, whether it makes sense to expend resources now on something that will cause issues down the road given the arc of technology and wealth worldwide, etc.

TL;DR -- You can believe in global warming and still think the proposed "solutions" to it are a doomed-to-fail power grab.