Once a year I make it my business to interfere with the fundraising efforts of the International Rescue Committee (IRC)–even though they use every opportunity from Mother’s Day to Christmas to shill for dough. The IRC must hire a top public relations firm because their public image of children is quite poignant & compelling. They purport to raise funds for prenatal & maternal health care, clean water, warm blankets for refugees, fighting Ebola in West Africa. Not unlike the appeals of the International Red Cross in Haiti which raised millions & built six houses after the 2010 hurricane with no accounting for the rest of the money.
Both the IRC and Red Cross are corporate-sponsored. The Red Cross has a leadership of magnates from Wall Street banks & credit card companies, Apple computer, Home Depot, & Target (the latter two ferociously non-union)–none of them usually wellsprings of compassion for human suffering but progenitors of it. You can’t tell it from its leadership body, but the Red Cross has always been associated with the highest levels of power–which is why media & people like Michelle Obama shill publicly in its fund appeals.
The IRC is a front group for lord-knows-what nefarious purpose. The board of directors includes people like its president David Miliband & Timothy F. Geithner (a protégé of Henry Kissinger & the Obama official who presided over the Wall Street bank bailouts). Its trustees include Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell (the war crimes of those four need no elaboration), Elie Wiesel (who publicly accused parents in Gaza of using their children as human shields to justify Israel’s carpet bombing siege in 2014), magnates from JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, including Felix Rohatyn (who presided over the dismantling of social services in NYC during the 1970s) & James Wolfensohn (past president of the World Bank who dismantled social services on several continents), & the usual cosmetic array of celebrities.
Kissinger Associates is a secretive company that won’t reveal it’s clients or activities on their behalf but appears to be a consulting outfit for corporate investors in neoliberal plunder. It’s absolutely excluded that a foul character like Kissinger would be moved by the suffering of children because he is on the record in favor of population control/eugenics & is responsible for the torture, suffering, & deaths of millions of people.
There are plenty of worthy humanitarian organizations to give money to but the Red Cross & particularly the IRC are not among them. I get plenty of fund appeals so if you’re looking for a place to give, let me know & I’ll suggest a few–including some for the people of Gaza.
(Photo is logo of IRC which pollutes up my newsfeed every time one of my friends likes them on FB.)