A Covid Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas, but Covid was here,
So we all had to stay extra cautious this year.
Our masks were all hung by the chimney with care
In case Santa forgot his and needed a spare.
With Covid, we couldn't leave cookies or cake
So we left Santa hand sanitizer to take.

The children were sleeping, the brave little tots
The ones over 5 had just had their first shots,
And mom in her kerchief and me in my cap
Had just settled in for a long winter's nap.
But we tossed and we turned all night in our beds
As visions of variants danced in our heads.

Gamma and Delta and now Omicron
I thought to myself, "If this doesn't get better,
I'll soon be familiar with every Greek letter".

Then just as I started to drift off and doze
A clatter of noise from the front lawn arose.
I leapt from my bed and ran straight down the stair
I opened the door, and an old gent stood there.

His N 95 made him look pretty weird
But I knew who he was by his red suit and beard.
I kept six feet away but blurted out quick
" What are you doing here, jolly Saint Nick?"
Then I said, "Where's your presents, your reindeer and sleigh?
Don't you know that tomorrow will be Christmas Day? ".
And Santa stood there looking sad in the snow
As he started to tell me a long tale of woe.

He said he'd been stuck at the North Pole alone
All his white collar elves had been working from home,
And most of the others said "Santa, don't hire us!
We can live off the CERB now, thanks to the virus".

Those left in the toyshop had little to do.
With supply chain disruptions, they could make nothing new.
And as for the reindeer, they'd all gone away.
None of them left to pull on his sleigh.

He said Dasher and Dancer were in quarantine,
Prancer and Vixen refused the vaccine,
Comet and Cupid were in ICU,
So were Donner and Blitzen, they may not pull through.

And Rudolph's career can't be resurrected.
With his shiny red nose, they all think he's infected.
Even with his old sleigh, Santa couldn't go far.
Every border to cross needs a new PCR.

Santa sighed as he told me how nice it would be
If children could once again sit on his knee.
He couldn't care less if they're naughty or nice
But they'd have to show proof that they'd had their shot twice.

But then the old twinkle returned to his eyes.
And he said that he'd brought me a Christmas surprise.
When I unwrapped the box and opened it wide,
Starlight and rainbows streamed out from inside.

Some letters whirled round and flew up to the sky
And they spelled out a word that was 40 feet high.
There first was an H, then an O, then a P,
Then I saw it spelled HOPE when it added the E.

"Christmas magic" said Santa as he smiled through his beard.
Then suddenly all of the reindeer appeared.
He jumped into his sleigh and he waved me good-bye,
Then he soared o'er the rooftops and into the sky.

I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight
"Get your vaccines my friends, Merry Christmas, good-night".
Then I went back to bed and a sweet Christmas dream
Of a world when we'd finished with Covid 19.

From a childhood friend

The Red Cross strikes out again

I don't think I've seen a positive story about the Red Cross in years. It has been the subject of negative articles for about ten years. The Senate has just released a report that has been in the works for a year. Here are the report's major conclusions:

• After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross spent tens of millions of dollars more than it has previously acknowledged on internal expenses. The Red Cross told Grassley that the money was largely spent on oversight to make sure the Haiti aid was used properly. But Grassley’s office found that the charity “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred."
• Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern made false statements to Grassley’s office about whether the charity cooperated with congressional investigators.
• McGovern and her subordinates have kept the charity’s own internal investigations and ethics unit “severely undermanned and underfunded.” The charity is “reluctant to support the very unit that is designed to police wrongdoing within the organization.”

Goodbye, Red Cross?

I've been writing about the Red Cross for almost ten years. ProPublica just released an article entitled "The Corporate Takeover of the Red Cross". It documents the decline of the organization under the woman who has been CEO since 2008, Gail McGovern. Basically, it seems as though she has decimated many of the local chapters and alienated many of the volunteers. An internal survey of Red Cross employees found just 35 percent responded favorably to the statement, “I trust the senior leadership of the American Red Cross.”

Like any modern corporation, McGovern has set goals to secure the organization’s financial future and improve its delivery of disaster services. Yet, these goals have seldom, if ever, been met. 

More Red Cross questionable actions

The latest is an attempt to kill a GAO inquiry into Red Cross activity. Gail McGovern, the president of the Red Cross, wrote the following to the Congressman who had initiated the inquiry, “I would like to respectfully request that you consider us meeting face-to-face rather than requesting information via letter and end the GAO inquiry that is currently underway.” This despite an earlier statement from her lauding the organization's transparency, “we made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency.” Plus, the fact that the GAO is explicitly empowered to investigate the group.

Will they ever smarten up?

Another Red Cross Fiasco

When will the Red Cross return to operating in the public interest? Over the past several years, I've documented a number of problems in the organization. Fines for violating blood safety laws, failing to specify how their money is spent, focusing on PR rather than helping people, the rapid turnover of presidents - and the list can go on and .

The latest fiasco is the organization's handling of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. They did well in the raising of money - about a half billion dollars. The spending and their claims as to what they did is another matter. Some examples:

• Claiming they would build 700 homes in Campeche and building none.
• Claiming they provided homes to 130,000 people. They'd have a hard time fitting that number of people in the six permanent homes they built.
• Claiming they helped  “more than 4.5 million” individual Haitians “get back on their feet.” That's kind of hard in a country of 10 million.
• Launching hand-washing education campaigns where "people had no access to water and no soap.”

The Red Cross: PR or Charity

In the past several years, I've written a number of posts about the Red Cross. They have not been favorable: the lack of transparency, problems with its handling of blood, fines, rapid turnover of presidents, etc.  ProPublica has a scathing indictment of the Red Cross handling of the storms Isaac and Sandy. The essential point is that the organization is more focused on public relations than helping people.

The report uses a number of documents internal to the Red Cross to make its point. One internal document admits that the organization “diverted assets for public relations purposes,” and that distribution of relief supplies was “politically driven.”

One of the assets most commonly used for PR was emergency vehicles, which were often used as backdrops for press conferences rather than ferrying supplies. The whole matter of supplies was another issue. According to interviews and documents, the Red Cross lacked basic supplies like food, blankets and batteries to distribute to victims in the days just after the storms. Sometimes, even when supplies were plentiful, they went to waste. In one case, the Red Cross had to throw out tens of thousands of meals because it couldn’t find the people who needed them.

They probably also lost a lot of volunteers. Some were ordered to stay in Tampa long after it became clear that Isaac would bypass the city. After Sandy, volunteers wandered the streets of New York in search of stricken neighborhoods, lost because they had not been given GPS equipment to guide them. Some volunteers were too old or not well prepared for disaster relief. The “ biggest challenge,” one top Red Cross official said in the December 2012 meeting, is the “skillset that is possessed by our workforce.” Another was even more stark: The “ caliber of the people is a major issue (this is not a training issue),” according to the meeting minutes. The Red Cross acknowledges that nearly two-thirds of the volunteers responding to Sandy had never before provided relief after a large disaster.

They made conditions more unsafe. Red Cross officials are supposed to track sex offenders who come to shelters and confer with law enforcement. But staff “didn’t know/follow procedures,” the presentation notes. There was an additional problem with “ unrelated adults showering with children.”

The PR campaign did pay off. Last year the Red Cross received more than $1 billion in donations. 

Trade Secrets?

 I guess charities are competitive operations. So, in some ways I can understand the Red Cross being unwilling to document to the public how it raised and spent over $300 million after Hurricane Sandy. That's why they claimed "trade secrets" when ProPublica filed a request that the charity do just that.

The Red Cross has not been very open about its fundraising activities with regard to major drives such as Hurricane Sandy, 9/11, Katrina, Haiti, etc. They claim "the American Red Cross would suffer competitive harm because its competitors would be able to mimic the American Red Cross's business model for an increased competitive advantage."

Be careful where you buy your books

Doug Williams offered for sale a book which instructed you how to fudge lie detector tests. Naturally, he kept records of his customers. The Customs and Border Protection Service thought that some of their employees may have bought the book and used it for nefarious doings. Customs was also concerned that employees of other federal agencies may also have similar employees. So, it sent to thirty other federal agencies a list of the 4,904 people who bought the book. The list included Social Security numbers, addresses and professions of many people. However, most of the 4,904 did not work for the federal government; they were nurses, firefighters, police officers, private attorneys, employees of Rite Aid, Paramount Pictures, the American Red Cross and Georgetown University. etc. In short, many innocent people became the subjects of government inquiries and searches.  

The funny thing about this is that the validity of lie detector tests has become questionable. Despite this, several of our fellow citizens had their privacy validated for no good reason  In the words of one government official, “There’s no indication that any of these individuals did anything wrong, actually received hands-on training, took a polygraph anywhere, utilized countermeasures or are with any federal agency" .

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/14/208438/americans-personal-data-shared.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/14/208438/americans-personal-data-shared.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/14/208438/americans-personal-data-shared.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/14/208438/americans-personal-data-shared.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/14/208438/americans-personal-data-shared.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/14/208438/americans-personal-data-shared.html#storylink=cpy

Do you believe that the NFL is a non-profit organization?

You know, like the Red Cross or the March of Dimes.  Since 1966, the IRS lists “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues.”as 501(c)6 corporations", i.e., non-profits and therefore tax-exempt. 

While the teams that comprise the league are regular, profit-seeking companies, they do receive a lot of money from taxpayers, the largest amount being for stadiums.  One study calculates that league-wide, 70 percent of the capital cost - i.e., cost to build - of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers, not NFL owners.  And in many cases cities, counties, and states also pay the stadiums’ ongoing costs, by providing power, sewer services, other infrastructure, and stadium improvements.  In fact these subsidies can be so large that several teams have turned a profit on stadium subsidies alone—receiving more money from the public than they needed to build their facilities.  On an annual basis these subsidies and tax benefits can add up to perhaps $1 billion. 

Despite the fact that we pay for their stadiums the NFL has been able to charge for  television images made in those publicly funded stadiums and keep the profits.  The TV revenue for this season is $4 billion.

What is wrong with the Red Cross?

Here's a post I made in July 2008:

Fifteen years ago the FDA warned the Red Cross that their procedures for collecting and processing blood needed to be improved. At that time - and today - screening of donors for exposure to disease is not consistently performed, tests for syphilis are not routine, preparation of the area from which blood is to be taken is not what it should be and, most disturbingly, bad blood is not necessarily always disposed of.


I can't believe that I'm writing about this as it's essentially the same as a post less than twenty months ago. The numbers have gone up. Then the fines totaled $15,000,000, now they're $21,000,000. It just seems that, when it comes to blood, the Red Cross is a disaster area. Sound management is needed and badly.

Recently the FDA fined the Red Cross another $10,000,000 for essentially the same problems. What in the Lord's name is wrong with the organization?

Another Moyers Interview

Here are excerpts from an interview with Jeremy Scahill (emphases mine):

BILL MOYERS: How do explain this spike in private contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think what we're seeing, under President Barack Obama, is sort of old wine in a new bottle. Obama is sending one message to the world, but the reality on the ground, particularly when it comes to private military contractors, is that the status quo remains from the Bush era. Right now there are 250 thousand contractors fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's about 50 percent of the total US fighting force. Which is very similar to what it was under Bush. In Iraq, President Obama has 130 thousand contractors. And we just saw a 23 percent increase in the number of armed contractors in Iraq. In Afghanistan there's been a 29 percent increase in armed contractors. So the radical privatization of war continues unabated under Barack Obama.

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But, ultimately, I think that we have to look to what Jan Schakowsky, the congresswoman from Illinois, says. We can no longer allow these individuals to perform what are inherently governmental functions. And that includes carrying a weapon on U.S. battlefields. And that's certainly not where President Obama is right now.

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BILL MOYERS: But many people will say of course, the truth, which is he inherited a quagmire from the Bush administration. What's he to do?

JEREMY SCAHILL:Well, there's no question that Obama inherited an absolute mess from President Bush. But the reality is that Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan right now. And is maintaining the occupation of Iraq. If Obama was serious about fully ending the occupation of Iraq, he wouldn't allow the U.S. to have a colonial fortress that they're passing off as an embassy in Baghdad. Bill, this place is the size of 80 football fields. Who do you think is going to run the security operation for this 80 football field sized embassy? Well, it's mercenary contractors.

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JEREMY SCAHILL:Well, I mean, we have two parallel realities here. We have the speeches of President Obama. I'm not questioning his sincerity. And then you have the sort of official punditry that's allowed access to the corporate media. And they have one debate. On the ground though, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, you hear the stories of the people that are forced to live on the other side of the barrel of the gun that is U.S. foreign policy. And you get a very different sense. If the United States, as President Obama says, doesn't want a permanent presence in Afghanistan, why allocate a billion dollars to build this fortress like embassy, similar to the one in Baghdad, in Islamabad, Pakistan? Another one in Peshawar. Having an increase in mercenary forces. Expanding the US military presence there

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JEREMY SCAHILL:No. It doesn't surprise me. Because this is increasingly turning into a war of occupation. That's why General McChrystal is making that statement. If this was about fighting terrorism, it would be viewed as a law enforcement operation where you are going to hunt down criminals responsible for these actions and bring them in front of a court of law. This is turning into a war of occupation. If I might add about General McChrystal, what message does it send to the Afghan people when President Obama chooses a man who is alleged to have been one of the key figures running secret detention facilities in Iraq, and working on these extra judicial killing squads. Hunting down, quote unquote, insurgents, and killing them on behalf of the U.S. military. This is a man who's also alleged to have been at the center of the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death, who was killed by U.S. Army Rangers.

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The fact is that I think most Americans are not aware that their dollars being spent in Afghanistan are, in fact, going to for-profit corporations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These are companies that are simultaneously working for profit and for the U.S. government. That is the intricate linking of corporate profits to an escalation of war that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address. We live in amidst the most radical privatization agenda in the history of our country. And it cuts across every aspect of our society.

Where you turn war, essentially, into a videogame that can be waged by people half a world away. What this does, these drones, is they it sanitizes war. It means that we increase the number of people that don't have to see that war is hell on the ground. And it means that wars are going to be easier in the future because it's not as tough of a sell.

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When the United States goes in and bombs Farah province in Afghanistan, on May 4th, and kills civilians, according to the Red Cross and other sources, 13 members of one family, that has a ricochet impact. The relatives of those people are going to say maybe they did trust the United States. Maybe they viewed the United States as a beacon of freedom in the world. But you just took you just took that guy's daughter. You just killed that guy's wife. That's one more person that's going to line up and say, "We're going to fight the United States." We are indiscriminately killing civilians, according to the UN Human Rights Council. A report that was just released this week by the UN says that the United States is indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. That should be a collective shame that we feel in this society. And yet we have people calling it the good war.

A 21st Century House in Gaza

In the foreground are the mud 'bricks' that will be used to build some more houses similar to those in the background. Gazans are limited to such construction materials because the Israelis have banned the import of building materials into Gaza since 2007.

I'm sure that you're aware of the sewage problems in Gaza. Well, the Red Cross has joined other Gazans in scavenging materials needed to live. The organization is using cement slabs that were once part of the border wall with Egypt to help fix the sewage system.

I wonder what Netanyahu thinks of all this.

We do not torture

Talk about dancing around an issue! Here's Rice exchanging views with a Stanford student. A couple of points she makes:

• If it was authorized by the President, it did not violate the Conventions on Torture.
• We did not torture.
• The Red Cross did not accuse us of torture.

A Comparison

ProPublica has published a comparison of the recently released torture memos and a Red Cross report of their interviews with prisoners. There are nine 'techniques' compared:

• Cramped Confinement
• Dietary Manipulation
• Facial Slap/ Abdominal Slap
• Nudity
• Sleep Deprivation
• Stress Positions
• Walling
• Waterboarding
• Water Dousing

This is what our country has done to 'protect' us. Is this the kind of protection we want? Do we just suck it up and move on? Can it - will it - happen again?

Not nice reading for a Sunday morning

In 2006, President Bush allowed the Red Cross to interview fourteen 'high-value detainees' at Guantanamo and publish a confidential report of their interviews. Mark Danner was able to get a copy of that report. Danner's article in the New York Review of Books is harrowing. Here is the table of contents of the report:

Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime

And here is the report's conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

What have we become?

Very Slow Learners

Fifteen years ago the FDA warned the Red Cross that their procedures for collecting and processing blood needed to be improved. At that time - and today - screening of donors for exposure to disease is not consistently performed, tests for syphilis are not routine, preparation of the area from which blood is to be taken is not what it should be and, most disturbingly, bad blood is not necessarily always disposed of.

I can't believe that I'm writing about this as it's essentially the same as a post less than twenty months ago. The numbers have gone up. Then the fines totaled $15,000,000, now they're $21,000,000. It just seems that, when it comes to blood, the Red Cross is a disaster area. Sound management is needed and badly.

"Dignity Denied in the Occupied Palestinian Territories"

"In Gaza the whole Strip is being strangled, economically speaking, life there has become a nightmare. And for that there is no solution that can be provided by humanitarian organisations", Beatrice Megevand Roggo, International Committee Red Cross director of operations for the Middle East. These comments were made with regard to a new report, "Dignity Denied", issued by the Red Cross. The headings of this report spell out the problem once more:

• Trapped in the Gaza Strip
• Enough to survive, not enough to live
• Shrinking agricultural production
• Crumbling infrastructure
• Restrictions on life in the West Bank
• Access to land
• Access to roads
• Harassment by settlers

A unique charity

Who do you think of when you think of charitable organizations? Habitat, Red Cross, Boys & Girls Club, Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, etc. You have to add another organization to that list - Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC).

True, it is a different type of charity, but it is a charity in the eyes of the IRS because, as the company's CFO says, the company "lessens the burden on governance" and helps "the federal government and American industry to perform more effectively through the use of emerging technologies".

Most charities tout their specialty on the home page of their web sites Here's what CTC says on its home page

» Providing World-Class Services for World-Class Competitiveness

Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) offers a broad range of services and capabilities. Areas of expertise include: Advanced materials & manufacturing Command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) Force readiness Energy & environmental sustainability, and more. As a nonprofit organization, CTC conducts impartial, in-depth assessments and delivers reliable, unbiased solutions that emphasize increased quality, enhanced effectiveness, and rapid technology transition and deployment.

Did you catch that 'nonprofit organization' in the last sentence? This is a charity that has received over $100,000,000 in earmarks from Congressman Murtha. This is a charity where the top three people average $462,000 each. This is a charity that does work for the NSA and CIA. This is a charity that for two months employed a future deputy to the assistant secretary of the Air Force although he did no work for the charity.

This is a charity?

It keeps getting worse

A couple of months ago the Red Cross was fined $4,200,000 for problems with its blood supply. Earlier this week they were hit with another fine, this one for $5,700,000. In a court settlement in 2003 the Red Cross agreed to a plan to ensure that they would detect and correct any problems with its blood supply. In the first comprehensive evaluation made by the FDA of the the Red Cross' compliance with the plan, they found 204 deviations from the plan.

This brings to $15,000,000 the amount that the Red Cross has been fined since 2003.

Bombs in Lebanon

Last week Israel admitted to using phosphorus bombs in its battle with Hezbollah. They also used cluster bombs; the UN and others think 4,000,000 cluster bombs were used.

The Israelis claim that the phosphorus bombs were used according to international law. But during the war many Lebanese civilians had symptoms associated with this type of bomb, which the Red Cross and other organizations wish to ban.

Cluster bombs are particularly dangerous as they can be mistaken for batteries or other objects. Kids are most likely to make that mistake. The UN estimates that there are 1,000,000 cluster bombs that did not detonate on impact and could blow up should they be handled by non-experts.