No Good Organizations (NGOs)

The CEO of Red Cross makes $500,000 dollars. Who knew helping the poor was so lucrative? Sad thing is, it truly is a bountiful business. Factoring in the salaries of Red Cross’s top executives, a large portion of every dollar donated never actually makes it to the people it’s intended for.

While it is easy to reprimand an organization for paying its executives so much, the Red Cross is one of the largest non-profit organizations in the world. It requires qualified and effective leadership.

If I had these qualifications I sure wouldn’t be interested in running such a vast network without a competitive salary. Arguably, no one else would either. Compared to the salaries of other CEO’s, $500,000 can seem like chum change. 

But even if this line of thought justifies the salary, it really only absolves the tip of the iceberg. Taking a closer look, there are technicalities behind many of these non-profits that are less obvious and even more vile.

 Long story short – non-profits are marred by money mongering like any other business sector. And the consequences are much worse.

 One of the best examples involves non-profits working to bring foodstuffs to the impoverished in Africa. These organizations get their funding from developed governments based on statistics rather than efficacy. The more food they give out, regardless of where, the more funding they get.

 In the competitive market of getting grants, many non-profits end up giving out an actual excess of food to places that are already overflowing with aid. This way they can report inflated numbers. They’ll literally give out an extra thousand pounds of food just to get more funding.

What’s wrong with more food? Sometime too much can be more damaging than too little.

For one, in order to distribute a large amount of food, many of these organizations have to rely on effective public transportation, including paved roads and highways. This limits their ability and desire to go into the more rural regions where their help is needed most.

As such, a major “food dump” occurs in the urban areas. This poses a massive problem for the rural, agrarian population that composes the vast majority of Africa’s underserved.

These people already struggle to meet ends meet by selling their foodstuffs against more competitive corporate farmers. With NGO’s giving out free food to their urbanite customers, these farmers find themselves in an even more desperate situation. They lose customers and they lose money.

            It’s a vicious cycle.

The need becomes greater as the farmers become poorer. More NGOs arrive to give out more food, and the farmers become even poorer. Money is continuously thrown into Africa to fund more food, and all the while the continent starves beneath a pile of potatoes and dollars.

The death of the African farmland and the increasing urban sprawl is a direct result. Poor farmers are forced to flock to urban cities, giving up on their traditional way of life

These urban centers don’t have enough jobs to support the influx, and soon underdeveloped cities become overpopulated. The result? Massive super-slums where disease and poverty reach new heights. It’s genocide in the indirect degree.

Sadly, this issue doesn’t end with food relief. When I did a case competition on Haitian disaster relief, the same issue became very clear. After the earthquake over a thousand NGOs began operating in the country. The most NGO presence to occur per square mile, ever!

Yet the situation in Haiti remained dire for years. It came down to wasted spending by NGOs who were overlapping, providing two times the aid in areas that had already received care.

 It was a massive lack of collaboration and hundreds of thousands of donations were put to waste. NGOs used the number of people they’ve serviced as an advertisement for more donations.

 But what donors didn’t know was that several of these NGOs were counting these same people twice, and many NGOs were counting the same people as other NGOs. The numbers sounded nice, but they meant little. In fact, they were false.

So while the Red Cross is getting so much heat, in reality, paying an executive an extra hundred thousand is relatively miniscule in a system that causes more damage than repair. A system that wastes sums of money ten times greater than a mere $500,000, through loopholes and inefficiency.

 NGO reputations are based on the amount of funds they receive. Funds based on numbers. And as such, it is no surprise that NGOs spend much of their marketing and publicity on making sure these numbers remain high. Without funding, they cease to exist. And to prevent their own demise, they let those they’re helping die instead. 

Political Backlash and Reverse Racism

Anyone that says the current election isn’t about race is turning a blind eye to our nation’s most engrained, and supposedly elusive pandemic.  After the election and following Romeny’s concession speech the number of “white shame” posts on Facebook made it very clear that this election wasn’t an issue of race just for colored people, but one for the Caucasian majority as well.

            It seems this term around; people are more comfortable being vocal about taking sides based on race. It may be because the American people have become de-sensitized to having a colored president or because there is a new political beast in town, a massive group of voters who awoke with the 2008 election – and unlike popular belief – have yet to go back to sleep.

            While the expected spew of racist remarks comes from southern America (see: racist twitter posts) , there was also no shortage of “reverse racist” remarks from both coastlines. Interestingly, the minority celebration has been deemed a form of reverse racism that justifies the anti-minority backlash. Undoubtedly there were racist remarks from pro-Obama voters, such as “I voted for Obama cause he balls and Michelle has a fat ass”, but most are made without mal-intent.  The question really comes down to, why can’t people say “white shame” without criticism when others are priding their own color just as vocally?

            According to a particular view of sociology however, the very term reverse racism is racist in of itself. The idea that racism can be reversed without the historical backdrop that has engrained senses of superiority and inferiority over generations is quite silly. In a sense, reverse racism cannot be considered of equal power when equality doesn’t exist in the first place. To put it simply, unless “whites” are dislocated from their homeland, forced into labor for generations, and segregated for decades there after can reverse racism even be a plausible term. According to this way of thought, minorities have the privilege to praise and pick apart race. They can say white shame on behalf of whites, but whites can’t say it themselves. It’s a long-time debate over the unfair advantage minorities have in expressing themselves racially, whereas whites must be more careful and even fearful of doing the same.

            Not willing to give minorities this one societal privilege, when many are neglected from the subtle privileges of predominantly Caucasian communities, corporations, and politics can even be deemed racist in of itself. I personally, haven’t quite decided how to feel about this way of thought. While to many it seems a rather extreme justification – I can see the reason. But following this reason seems like playing eye for an eye, which may not, and probably isn’t, the best way to progress into a more tolerant and diverse future. 

The Death of "White" America

Today is the day “white” America has fallen. While the election maps still show the heart of America basked in a republican red, it is a blood red hue that signifies the bleeding out of ignorant America into the veiny blues of its two coastlines. The 2012 election signifies a new age, an age where manifest destiny is a political reality based on a set of values less concerned with Puritans, providence, and the Mayflower.

            In 2008 whites made up 76% of all potential voters. If the white turn out dropped to 74% or lower, Obama was calculated to win. This election it dropped to 72%. With the Hispanic population rising enormously in states like California and ethnic minority populations growing across all of America, even with Romney’s four point advantage in the independent sector, he lost the election by a startling one hundred electoral seats. Romney had a large chunk of senior white voters from the baby boomer era, and Obama won amongst young voters.

            With Romney’s loss in the face of widespread underestimation on youthful political enthusiasm, it is clear that the political generation is changing, and the Democratic Party is the foam on the front of the wave. We aren’t speaking of whites here as a race, we’re speaking of “white” America (notice the quotations) as the major chunk of the political electorate that were predominantly conservative, oppressive, and arguably intolerant. Today’s political generation involves a mix of open-minded Caucasian Americans and their minority counterparts. It isn’t a generation that never existed, it’s a generation that was awakened during the 2008 election, and unlike popular belief, has yet to go back to sleep. If the Republicans don’t grab the minority vote in some fashion, or show enough tolerance for minority concerns to grab the support of educated and multi-cultural whites, they may find themselves out of the white house for decades.

            Today, for the first time, the Latino vote crossed 10% nationally. The minority vote reached 27% total, and several historically republican states such as New Mexico, may be permanently considered a blue state from here onwards. It’s a matter of numbers, and Romney has been on the wrong side of the numbers for his entire campaign – from impossible tax cuts to a flawed belief in the white majority. In comparison to 2000, it seems the Electoral College is suddenly working in favor of the minority vote. The system is working for non-whites.

            Even with the heart of America struggling to keep the popular vote nearly equal, our immigrant hubs, the west and east coast have made it clear that the system works for them now. Contrary to public media, the country is not divided; it has just found a new majority, one composed of several colors.

            Multicultural America has spoken, and it wishes to be global, to understand other countries and work across cultures in ways “white” America couldn’t fathom. It’s an inherent understanding that people from different backgrounds can connect with and appreciate, and it is a rare mixture of individuals that no other country can advertise and harness. We may have less battle ships under the Obama administration, but we now have the strongest weapon of all – diversity in numbers. Our foreign policy isn’t weak. It’s smart. It’s not strong handed, it’s strong minded. An ethnic undercurrent that values education over football.

Historically, the successful movements against American racism were the fights that didn’t argue face to face on an unfair platform. They were the fights that came from small movements all across the country, from the accumulation of seemingly benign actions against the status quo. Something as simple as sitting at a barstool against a white only table to waiting in line for hours to cast a ballot. The republicans spent an enormous amount of money on a candidate who took the nation by storm, and they lost because “white” America lost. The republican reliance on the hardcore Caucasian vote is no longer a reliable fallback, and from here on out, it never will be, a historical change worthy of celebratory recognition.

Even though many republicans are not white, or racist, or ignorant, it is hard to deny that Obama’s victory is not a slap in the face of the status quo. In Obama’s victory speech, he emphasized tolerance as an integral part of his next four years. That our truest power was our diversity. Because until today, tolerance and diversity was not a staple of our political foundation. And while some say the initial election of Barack Obama may have been the most historic movement in minority movements, the fact that Obama survived amongst the most economically soft electoral situation in history, proves that his election was not a fluke, but solid evidence to changing notions. And that is truly, truly historical.