What a waste. Americans opened their hearts and their pocketbooks to the tsumani victims and all they got was a storm of corruption.
Mark Steyn, the inimitable, points out that Oxfam paid a million dollars in "fees" Sri Lanka to be allowed to use their four-wheel-drive vehicles to get into the country to deliver aid. And fourteen Unicef ambulance idled on the docks in Indonesia because of the Indonesian Red Cross paperwork.
Here's an idea: let's turn the UN, the Red Cross, all the do-nothing NGOs and their hangers-on over to the NEA here in America. The NEA can design a feasibility study, see, one that would be based on outcomes or some other education-speak, and we could give all these organizations and the countries in which they languish some report cards.
In addition to SOLs for students, we could have SOLs for non-profits, including the UN. Oh, dear God, especially the UN. They could get report cards, grades to be based on what they actually do rather than on their thick, bound, handsome proposals about what they're going to do. Someday.
Until we get some hard facts on their accomplishments here's an idea for the next major disaster: send your contributions to the Pentagon so they can be used to fuel the ships and planes and personnel who actually get there, do something useful, and then move on.
Otherwise, keep your money in your pocket. Sometimes the best response is no response, as the Tsunami Tshakedown (thank you, Mr. Steyn) has proved.
2 comments:
I think Americans just have no clue, and refuse to believe, how much the foreign cogs of government turn on corruption. We look at ourselves and our own world and assume that people everywhere else are going to share our ideals and wants - we just think that they don't have the opportunity to express it.
Not. The. Real. World.
The U.N. would fail any SOL's which rely on facts or on character.
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