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Money Rains From From The Sky Onto Ground Zero
March 22, 2002
by John Bloom
NEW YORK, March 22 (UPI) -- Money has been raining down out
of the sky directly onto my neighborhood, and it's an ugly sight.
For those who live and work around Ground Zero, there are
four ways to cash in: the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the
September 11 Fund, and the Twin Towers Fund. You can do a one-
stop shop by going to the Disaster Relief Office in the old New
York Sun Building on Chambers Street, and basically if you tell
them where you live, that alone is enough to get a handout.
Call me naive, but when I saw all the millions pouring into
the various funds after September 11th, I assumed it was money
targeted for about 5,000 people--the families of the dead and the
injured. Later on, when I saw some of the small businesses that
had been destroyed, I thought, well, yes, maybe a few bucks
should go to the ice cream shop on the corner, but even that was
a stretch. Shouldn't the guy have insurance? That's not blood.
It's bricks and mortar.
In other words, I assumed it was blood money. At the very
least it should be food and shelter money. When you give money
for earthquake relief in Mexico or Turkey, there's an assumption
that, first, it will be used to feed and clothe the homeless. And
yes, we did have a few homeless in Tribeca, most of them the
residents of apartments in Battery Park City. My building was
closed for exactly one week, and most everybody simply crashed
with a friend. So, in the conventional sense of homeless disaster
relief, there were no homeless. They were no shanty towns and no
naked crying babies. These were office buildings, not homes.
The second thing disaster relief money usually goes for is
restoration of services--water, sewage, roads, electricity,
phones. In this case President Bush promised $20 billion right
after the attacks, so the charity funds don't even have to bother with that.
The problem with this particular disaster is that there's
just too damn much money. The Red Cross alone got $917 million in
donations. They were so overwhelmed by the logistics of the thing
that in the early weeks they got repeatedly hammered by the
media--mostly the Fox network--for not giving out any money. So,
humiliated by the publicity, they turned on the spigot.
And what a spigot it was. I first heard about it around the
first of January, but by then they had already given out millions
to people who just lived in the area. The first formula they came
up with was three months rent plus expenses. But we're talking
about Tribeca. Robert DeNiro's neighborhood. It's not exactly a
low-rent area. Monthly rents of $10,000 are not uncommon.
So the first phase of the it's-raining-money spree consisted
of people saying, "Hey, you won't believe this. Guess how much
the Red Cross gave me."
Followed by the inevitable second phase: "You actually took that
money?"
To give you some idea, there were people who stayed in a
hotel for a week who got reimbursed for the hotel, then up to
$40,000 for their rent and out-of-pocket expenses for September,
October and November. The Red Cross was proceeding under the
assumption that it was trauma money and inconvenience money.
People were coughing from the bad air. People were having
nightmares. People missed a few days of work.
But pretty soon you had two opposing camps in Tribeca: self-
righteous people who took the money because "I did suffer through
9/11," and self-righteous people who said "I'd never take that
money" as a judgment on the other self-righteous people.
Then we had yet a third wave of self-righteousness--people
who took the money and then gave it away. A real estate agent
told the Tribeca Trib that she collected $8,000, but gave it to
an organization that helps Afghan women. Another family said they
gave their $15,000 check to Catholic Charities to help
undocumented families that were affected by 9/11. People gave
money to literacy programs in Turkey (!), Washington Market Park,
and a downtown business organization. This is sort of the Robin
Hood Disaster Relief Theory--taking from the big bad Red Cross so
you can give to the charity of your choice, like a one-man
handout clearing house. Living in the area annoints you as a mini-
Giuliani. Somehow I don't think this is what the white-haired
ladies in Idaho envisioned when they wrote out their checks to
the Red Cross.
Eventually the damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't Red
Cross got tired of the claims and revised the rules. After
February 7th, economic damage claims were limited to $250 per
person, plus $150 for each additional family member.
Enter the fourth wave of self-righteousness. People who went
to the Red Cross before February 7 but were sent back home to
gather documentation of their claims, suddenly found out that,
yes, your next-door neighbor got $30,000 but you get $250.
Outrageous!
And then there were the people who got their panties in a
bunch because they were left out of the relief effort entirely.
The official disaster zone was defined as south of Canal Street
and west of Broadway. That meant that people living on Watts
Street, a full 19 blocks from Ground Zero and well out of harm's
way, were eligible for assistance, but people living in the heart
of the Financial District, two blocks from Ground Zero, were not. They
were self-righteous because they said they got the full
brunt of the contaminated air but were considered second-class
sufferers.
Of course this is New York, where you expect people to argue
about everything, but it was indicative of a country that
believes everything should be settled with money. The money in
this case is the problem, not the solution.
We can't even agree on what the actual relatives of the dead
victims should get. The latest Victims Compensation Fund formula
runs like this:
a) $250,000 for each dead body.
This third one I don't understand at all. When people write
out a check for charity, they're not saying, "Be sure to give
more money to the ones who had better jobs." It's so undemocratic
that it's obscene.
I have an idea. Let's take all the money in all the funds,
divide by the number of living survivors (immediate family), and
give it all away. Now. Every last cent. This money was meant for grieving
people. I know this, and every reasonable person knows
this. The donors didn't care about the people who had to live in
hotels for a couple of weeks. And they certainly didn't say, "Now
don't give this money away if it's going to make people rich."
This is the latest red-herring reason not to give money
away. "I didn't give money to charity so people can become multi-
millionaires."
I want them all to become multi-millionaires. Because I want
us to get rid of the money. The money is the problem.
© Copyright 2002
United Press International and John Bloom
b) $100,000 for each spouse and child of each dead person.
c) Additional money covering the expected lifetime income of
the dead person, which can range from $400,000, for elderly
janitors, to $4 million, for young business executives.