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![\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/fe-logo-13-feb-09-250-px1.jpg?resize=250%2C133&ssl=1\" "\\"Fe\\"")
<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\nSince that announcement , the Komen Foundation spent over a week in clumsy damage control of what turned out to be a corporate PR fiasco.\u00a0It was inevitable that the Foundation would have little else left to do but take the next step to avoid further corporate cratering, tarring and feathering: find the scapegoat and force her to resign.<\/p>\n
Yet Handel’s resignation will probably not bring an end to the Komen Foundation’s public relations troubles. There is still the issue of her boss, Nancy Brinker. Komen Foundation CEO Nancy Brinker — Susan G. Komen’s sister — has been under equal, if not harsher, scrutiny. The oscillating rationale as to why the foundation cut Planned Parenthood’s funding for breast cancer screening raised enough antennae for the media — mainstream and bloggers — to put legs on the story and interest in the backstory. Brinker was not under the scrutiny of a Congressional investigation, or\u00a0a press or left-wing blogger jihad.\u00a0It was simply the unveiling of Ms. Brinker’s political and corporate history, revealing how much of a shield the foundation was for its CEO’s portfolio and history, which is rife with corporate and political conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n
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As reported back in 2002<\/a>, Brinker owns stock in General Electric, one of the largest manufacturers of mammogram machines, and the foundation is an advocate for breast cancer screening, which means mammography. Brinker also sat as board member for various pharmaceutical\u00a0companies. With the Komen Foundation’s advocacy of tamoxifen for treatment of breast cancer, Astra-Zeneca — tamoxifen’s maker — made large educational grants to the foundation. Tamoxifen was found to have a link to causing uterine cancer in 1 out of 1000 women.\u00a0Brinker also owns stock in U.S. Oncology — a chain of for-profit treatment centers for cancer which shares a lobbying firm with the Philip Morris tobacco company.<\/p>\n
Occidental Corporation, the petroleum company (once known as Hooker Chemical) that was responsible in the 1970s for the Love Canal<\/a> — a mass-scale toxic waste dump and EPA Superfund Site near Niagara Falls, NY — donated upscale corporate office space to the Komen Foundation in Dallas, Texas.\u00a0Even though the foundation itself purports to be pro-environment, its lobbying efforts were restrained when called upon to support Congress’ Breast Cancer and Environmental Awareness Act, which would have studied the environmental links to breast cancer in women. The Love Canal disaster involved a school and nearly 800 homes being built on top of tens of thousands of tons of chemical and radioactive waste. The site was so disgusting that barrels full of toxic waste were popping up in the backyards of suburban homes. The neighborhood was finally evacuated after two house moms locked representatives from the EPA into one of the women’s homes, and called the White House.<\/p>\n
Hypocritical to its mission as advocate for women’s health, from 1999 to 2001 the Komen Foundation was instrumental in lobbying to block the Patient’s Bill of Rights, a bill designed to help Americans deal with the spiraling costs of health care. The bill was watered down to favor the medical providers so much that its name was changed by its opponents to the HMO Bill of Rights.<\/p>\n
It may all be coincidental: the foundation’s hiring of a known right-wing conservative as vice-president of policy; the foundation’s ties to pharmaceutical brands which have a vested interest in profiting off the foundation’s credibility as a women’s health advocate; the cozy relationship between environmental polluters, their lobbyists and the foundation. These are things that when looked at as a whole and seen as part of a trajectory, along with the fact that Nancy Brinker and her husband were Bush Pioneer Republicans, makes you more than just pause. You have to step way back to see how big a picture Ms. Brinker played in, and gasp.<\/p>\n
The war on women is nothing new. But in America, this war has escalated from the picket signs on the streets, the bombings of clinics and the killing of doctors who practice at these clinics, to the practices and policies of boardrooms of supposedly benevolent foundations. Yet this last week, with the help of Neptune transiting into its home sign, time has come due for structures to stand tall or crumble.\u00a0In trying to wage corporate warfare against Planned Parenthood and the poor women and children who rely on their services, the Susan G. Komen foundation stepped on a land mine of their own making, and at the same time, vaulted Planned Parenthood and other organizations more legitimately concerned with women’s health and the environment back into the limelight. At the very least, the handling of the aftermath of the attempt to defund Planned Parenthood will be a casebook study for public relations catastrophes in colleges and universities for decades.<\/p>\n
Schadenfreude<\/em> is the pleasure derived from the downfall of others once held in high esteem. With last week’s public relations firestorm at the SGK Foundation, I had that same pleasure felt last year when Rupert Murdoch’s\u00a0News of the World<\/em>\u00a0was (and still is) being investigated in the UK for invasion of privacy.\u00a0Karen Handel’s club-handed policy making should be seen as a blessing in disguise. Her overreach from the boardrooms of the foundation’s corporate offices helped tip those towers over, opening up a world of secrets once veiled by the non-profit sheen of a presumably benign organization. Even now, by resigning from the foundation without a severance package\u00a0that would guarantee her silence over foundation activities, Handel can continue to make this Neptune transit over the Susan G. Komen Foundation a story to gleefully behold.<\/p>\n
Making everyone aware of a disease is one thing, but it should never replace or supplant the importance of all sincere and just efforts to prevent the disease from happening in the first place. Nor should it restrain advocacy for prevention of environmental causes of disease. One pink-covered corporate logo should not replace or vilify years of legitimate practice fighting to save women’s lives, nor is it sufficient cover up of a close-to-criminal corporate and political agenda working hard to destroy them.\u00a0We’re past time to put our dollars elsewhere — anywhere but the pink.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today, Karen Handel the vice-president of policy and center of the public relations firestorm at the Susan G. Komen Foundation, resigned her post.\u00a0Handel, a former candidate for governor for the state of Georgia and pro-life activist, was the alleged instigator of the foundation’s decision last week to cut off funding for breast cancer screening at … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}