{"id":182383,"date":"2015-10-06T05:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T10:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/10\/06\/props-to-charles-grassley\/"},"modified":"2015-10-06T05:01:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T10:01:00","slug":"props-to-charles-grassley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/10\/06\/props-to-charles-grassley\/","title":{"rendered":"Props to Charles Grassley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yeah, I cannot believe that I said this either.<\/p>\n<p>He has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/senator-wants-names-red-cross-officials-didnt-cooperate-government-inquiry\">gone on mdeieval on Red Cross efforts to stonewall a GAO investigation<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Sen. Charles Grassley is demanding more information about the American Red Cross and its \u201capparent unwillingness to fully cooperate\u201d with a government investigation into its disaster relief work.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Grassley asked the head of the Government Accountability Office for a list of material the Red Cross refused to provide to investigators, as well as the names of officials who didn\u2019t cooperate and any communications in which the charity explained why it was not cooperating. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cThe lack of transparency is cause for concern as the Red Cross is a federal instrumentality created by Congressional charter and receives millions of dollars every year from donors across the country,\u201d Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote in a letter today to the head of the GAO.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The GAO report, released earlier this month, explored the Red Cross\u2019 government mandated role in responding to disasters. It found that there is no regular oversight of the Red Cross despite a string of flawed disaster responses. It also recommended Congress find a way to fill that gap. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The head of the GAO inquiry said earlier this month that the Red Cross had not given \u201cunfettered access\u201d but that investigators were able to get the information they needed \u201cto sufficiently answer our research questions.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Seeing as how the American Red Cross seems to have a long history of inefficiency in the execution of large scale disaster aid, as well as bait and switch in their fund raising,<sup>*<\/sup> there seems to be some justification in heightened oversight, particularly given their federal charter.<\/p>\n<p>This sort of crap has been going on since the late 1980s, when Red Cross refusal to properly test their blood products killed a significant portion of the US hemophiliacs.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">And there is that whole thing in Haiti, where <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2015\/06\/yet-another-reason-to-not-give-to-red.html\">they took in nearly \u00bd billion dollars for Haiti aid, and built a grand total of 6 homes<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yeah, I cannot believe that I said this either. He has gone on mdeieval on Red Cross efforts to stonewall a GAO investigation: Sen. Charles Grassley is demanding more information about the American Red Cross and its \u201capparent unwillingness to fully cooperate\u201d with a government investigation into its disaster relief work.Grassley asked the head of &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1056,998,970,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charity","category-congress","category-corruption","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}