“Do Not Donate to the Red Cross”: Red Cross CEO Made $500,000 a Year in 2008 as Credibility of Aid Organization Once Again Under Fire [video included]

By Alex Thomas
theintelhub.com
November 5, 2012

The credibility of the Red Cross has come under fire once again after Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro slammed the organization during a now viral press conference.

Molinaro brought up some significant points including the fact that the people in charge of the Red Cross actually make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year while never stepping foot on the front lines of a disaster.

“All these people making these big salaries should be out there on the front line, and I am disappointed.

And my advice to the people of Staten Island is: Do not donate to the American Red Cross. Let them get their money elsewhere.”

Although the borough president later claimed that the Red Cross had come through with the needed supplies, his initial comments were important as they have now reminded the populace of past corruption and shady practices that many believe have been carried out by the aid organization.

In the days after 9/11, as the true horror of the attacks unfolded, millions of Americans sat glued to their TV. The Red Cross immediately capitalized on this and went to work calling for donations to help the victims of the largest terror attack of our lifetime.

The outpouring of financial support for the victims was tremendous. Sadly, most of the money meant to go to victims of the horrific attacks actually went to the organization itself. (This according to their own President)

Family members of the victims actually had to publicly fight the Red Cross to access even portions of the funds.

“The Liberty Fund is a war fund. It has evolved into a war fund,” stated then President Dr. Bernadine Healy.

A 2009 investigation by CBS News uncovered a small tidbit of the possible corruption and fraud carried out by the Red Cross in regards to the 9/11 victims funds.

In the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, a record-breaking amount of donations started pouring into more than 1,000 local American Red Cross chapters.

What donors didn’t know was that some of the chapters entrusted with all that money had been identified by Red Cross headquarters just a few weeks before for having poor accounting procedures, inaccurate financial reports and for keeping national disaster contributions that should have been sent to headquarters in Washington.

That according to internal documents obtained by CBS news.

The Red Cross isn’t known for keeping a tight rein on its chapters. But now, it was suddenly crucial for headquarters to find out what chapters were doing with the millions in Sept. 11 donations.

So the Red Cross leadership rushed special investigative auditors out to conduct surprise inspections. The results were startling.

According to documents obtained by CBS News, a dozen of the Red Cross chapters audited were marking, or “coding”, donations as local funds.

This means chapters like San Diego, Southwest Florida, and Gateway Area, Iowa would keep the money instead of sending it in for Sept. 11 victims.

An article published in 2005 by Paul Joseph Watson gave a stern warning to those who were considering donating to the Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

“The Red Cross, under the Liberty Fund, collected $564 million in donations after 9/11. Months after the event, the Red Cross had distributed only $154 million. The Red Cross’ explanation for keeping the majority of the money was that it would be used to help ‘fight the war on terror’.

To the victims, this meant that the money was going towards bombing broken-backed third world countries like Afghanistan and setting up surveillance cameras and expanding the police state in US cities, and not towards helping them rebuild their lives.”

Issues with where money donated to the Red Cross actually goes began long before 9/11. Allegations of keeping donated money go, at least, as far back as the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Victims reportedly only received $10 million of the $50 million dollars donated.

As if issues of giving donated money to the right people were not enough, executives of the aid organization have historically received ridiculous sums of money to run what many believe is a simple charity group.

In 2008, the Washington Post revealed the fact that new CEO Gail McGovern was set to make $500,000 dollars a year with a $65,000 signing bonus.

That’s right, the big wigs of this organization are millionaires who, without ever stepping foot in any disaster area, are making huge sums of money.

The facts and allegations outlined above paint a picture of a massive military industrial complex sponsored organization that should, at the very least, be investigated before it is continually given full-scale promotion on every major TV show in the United States as the number one place to donate money to help victims of disasters.

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