Very interesting and important analysis. Nor is it clear that Komen
has actually reversed itself. Sarah Seltzer documents here Komen's
leadership as arch-right-wing pals of George Bush and Sarah Palin.
I pulled this from Portside. You can sign up for Portside messages at
http://portside.org/subscribe
- Mitchel
Six Things You Need To Know About the Komen Foundation/Planned
Parenthood Controversy
(Updated: Komen Reverses Decision)
By Sarah Seltzer, AlterNet
Posted on February 2, 2012, Printed on February 3, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153989/
(Updated 2/3/2012 11:40 am)
By now, unless you're living on Mars, your newspaper
reports, radio waves, Facebook and Twitter streams are
being swamped with stories, images and chattering about
the shocking decision of Susan G. Komen for the Cure,
the nation's most ubiquitous breast cancer awareness
foundation, to essentially sever financial ties with
Planned Parenthood.
Within a few short days, Komen's "choice" went from
being a heavy blow against women's health to a heavy
blow against them--and victory for Planned Parenthood
supporters. On Friday morning, February 3rd, Komen
issued a (weak) apology and agreed to keep funding to
Planned Parenthood--although pro-choicers remained
dubious that full funding would be restored without
pressure. But it was too late for their brand; once
people started investigating Komen, its non-partisan,
mainstream image was tarnished by some unpleasant
revelations.
The initial, disheartening move to end funding,
ostensibly due to the latter's being "under
investigation" (a bogus congressional investigation
spurred by the right wing) was clearly politically
motivated, despite weak denials from Komen officials.
It's unleashed a hail of criticism and controversy that
seems as large, if not even larger, than when Planned
Parenthood was under threat of being defunded by the
federal government. Whether Americans were suspicious of
Komen to begin with or just fed up with the
politicization of women's health, this feels like the
last straw.
The reality is that between the backlash and the
uncomfortable facts that have been bubbling to the
surface about Komen's way of conducting business, the
story has shifted from the war on Planned Parenthood to
the campaign against the truth being waged by "Big
Pink." Here are the key facts and context you need to
know about this story, which tore through the news cycle
for several days, the most decisive pro-choice victory
in a while.
1. Although it started off as a blow, this ended up as a
PR disaster for Komen--and a win for Planned Parenthood.
When the decision was announced over the Planned
Parenthood email list (it had initially been broken a
short while earlier), it felt like a crippling blow to
women's healthcare--and in some ways it still is. But
the big story is actually how furious many Komen
supporters are, how many have taken to the Internet, to
petitions, and more to declare the end of their support
and donations to Komen.
This is a big change, considering the fact that Komen
was a beloved, celebrity-endorsed brand -- and Planned
Parenthood was increasingly under attack. But something
shifted after this announcement: immediate analyses from
social media in fact show that the number of angry
comments against Komen and in favor Planned Parenthood
vastly outnumbered the comments that applauded the
decision -- even as Komen began to frantically erase
them on its Facebook page.
Marketing expert Kivi Leroux Miller calls Komen's
actions a "communications debacle unfolding before us,"
writing, "At one point last night, I did a quick count
and found the ratio of anti-Komen decisions to pro-Komen
decisions to be about 80 to 1 on Twitter." Miller has a
blow-by-blow post on how the news broke and essentially
how the Komen foundation utterly failed at every step to
anticipate and properly deal with the outrage.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood, in a few short days,
nearly raised the entire amount of money lost from Komen
-- $650,000 has been pledged as of February 1. On
Thursday, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a
$250,000 donation, and Facebook has been flooded by
loyal supporters posting, "I still stand with Planned
Parenthood" graphics on their pages.
This video of Susan G. Komen CEO Nancy Brinker with
Andrea Mitchell shows how poorly this has been thought
through. She's hedging, speaking in jargon, and denying
any political motivation to the decision. It's a
disaster of an interview:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news
about the economy
2. Despite the uproar, this disheartening move was a
natural end-result of the political "war on women"--a
war which will continue to try to isolate abortion
providers at all costs.
As heartening as the outpouring and the reversal has
been, and as satisfying as it's been on some level to
watch Komen's PR strategy implode, the initial decision
is still bad news, and it comes after a year of bad
policy. One of the primary items on the right-wing
agenda since the GOP swept into Congress in 2010 has
been to isolate, ostracize, harass and shame Planned
Parenthood. They've tried to de-fund it at the federal
and state levels and launched a bogus investigation.
Planned Parenthood and all abortion providers are part
of a never-ending paranoid obsession. Many bloggers have
been comparing it to the Salem, Massachusetts hysteria,
the kind of witch-hunt that taints everyone by
association.
They've already succeeded in making abortion a pariah
among medical procedures, the only one not funded by
Medicaid, the only one hushed up and shunted aside. Now
they're trying to extend that blacklist to Planned
Parenthood, and backlash aside, Komen's move shows that
this relentless campaign has met with some success.
3. Komen is a corporatist nonprofit organization with a
dubious record when it comes to putting women's needs
above its own interests.
While some of what Komen has done is undoubtedly
beneficial, it is an organization that has been in
trouble for corporate ties and lack of concern for
health issues for a long time. In a Daily Kos diary,
user Betty Pinson has an explosive account of her own
research into Komen. Her journey began with a rude
awakening when she called a local politician to advocate
for a cancer treatment funding program for low-income
women--and discovered that Komen was lobbying against
it. Here's what she says about Komen:
They fought behind the scenes in my state to
prevent the governor from adopting the treatment
program. They worked for several years to stall or
kill the Breast Cancer & Environmental Research
Act. In the end, they eviscerated it by removing
new funding for environmental research and
substituting a panel to review all research on
breast cancer & environment. Using private funds,
they recently collaborated with the Institute of
Medicine to develop said report. Released last
December, it sadly detailed the same old arguments
that there's no evidence of links between
environmental toxins and that no further research
should be done on the subject since everyone has
those toxins in their bodies already. Instead they
chose to blame breast cancer patients for getting
the disease (more here).
In 2009, Komen lobbied behind the scenes to weaken
the healthcare bill (ACA) as it was being debated
in Congress. They hired Hadassah Lieberman, wife of
Joe, in an effort to convince Joementum to vote
against the Public Option. Komen spent over $1
million in 2008 & 2009, on behind-the-scenes
lobbying related to the healthcare reform bill, so
who knows what else was on their agenda.
She also notes CEO Brinker's ties to George W. Bush and
other Republicans -- which partially explains her
institution's opposition to progressive policy.
These kinds of positions go hand-in-hand with being
buddied up to corporate behemoths, as Komen is--and
becoming more focused on appearance than results.
The list goes on--Komen has also been accused of being
overly litigious over use of the word "cure," which
began to raise public ire and suspicion that the charity
was more concerned with its image than the "cure" it
claimed to be desperately seeking.
The corporatization/sanitization of breast cancer that
Komen and similar organizations practice has been
labeled "Pinkwashing." A new documentary titled Pink
Ribbons, Inc. is due out in Canada this weekend. Watch
the trailer:
4. Even within this context, this decision was so heated
it led to resignations and defections within Komen.
Contrary to the spin put out by Komen, the decision
caused tremendous friction within the organization.
Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic made some phone calls
on Thursday morning, and his sources told him their
perception of what happened once the decision was
reached:
The decision, made in December, caused an uproar
inside Komen. Three sources told me that the
organization's top public health official, Mollie
Williams, resigned in protest immediately following
the Komen board's decision to cut off Planned
Parenthood. Williams, who served as the managing
director of community health programs, was
responsible for directing the distribution of $93
million in annual grants.
Williams offered a statement to Goldberg saying she
hoped that Komen and Planned Parenthood would find a way
to work together. Meanwhile, several Komen chapters,
including affiliates in Colorado and Connecticut, have
expressed their dissent with the national group's
decision and their desire to stay in partnership with
Planned Parenthood locally.
This may explain some of the reason for Komen's eventual
reversal.
5. The new policy was created expressly to defund
Planned Parenthood, not as a blanket rule.
Susan G. Komen top brass are claiming that the sloughing
off of PPFA is purely a side-effect of a new rule that
prohibits funding organizations under political
investigation. However, Goldberg notes that according to
his research, the order was reversed: the investigation
was a convenient way to get rid of PPFA.
But three sources with direct knowledge of the
Komen decision-making process told me that the rule
was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off
Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to
roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new "no
investigations" rule applies to only one so far.)
But if the "blanket rule" applies to all entities under
investigation, why is Komen still funding Penn State? At
Mother Jones, Adam Serwer makes this brilliant catch.
Komen, he notes,
currently fund[s] cancer research at the Penn State
Milton S. Hershey Medical Center to the tune of
$7.5 million. Like Planned Parenthood, Penn State
is currently the subject of a federal government
investigation, and like the Planned Parenthood
grant, the Penn State grant appears to violate a
new internal rule at Komen that bans grants to
organizations that are under investigation by
federal, state, or local governments. But so far,
only the Planned Parenthood grants appear to have
been cancelled.
Sounds like a double-standard is in place.
6. It is widely understood that the anti-gay, anti-
choice Palin pal who's a new VP at Komen had a major
role in the company's new direction--and replaced a
Democratic lobbyist.
Jezebel dubs the aforementioned "no grants to
institutions under investigations" rule the "Handel
rule," after Karen Handel, the company's new vice-
president, plucked from the far-right of the Republican
party. Handel got caught red-handed retweeting a nasty
little tidbit after the decision was announced, and then
later deleted the tweet--but not before the screengrab
was captured, with tens of thousands of views already.
This tweet disappeared, but others, revealing Handel's
ultra-conservative bona-fides, remain. At Jezebel, Erin
Gloria Ryan goes back through Handel's previous tweets:
Handel didn't bother to scrub her earlier political
tweets before becoming the Senior Vice President of
Public Policy at Susan G Komen for the Cure. Like this
one, where she talked about how great it was to hang out
with pro-life organizations. Or this one, where she
promised to pass a racist immigration law in Georgia,
like the one they have in Arizona. Or the celebratory
tweets where she's just beside herself that Sarah Palin
endorsed her, making her an honorary Mama Grizzly. Or
all the tweets where she promised Georgians to get rid
of Obamacare- because health care is something you earn,
especially if you have cancer, right, non-doctor lady
who works for Susan G. Komen for the Cure making health
care decisions for poor women?
It seems that just before Handel was hired, a previous
Democratic-leaning VP left Komen. Megan Carpentier at
Raw Story has dug up information around that staff
transition:
Before Handel's hiring, Komen's lobbying shop was
staunchly Democratic - from its head to its hired
guns...And when their lead lobbyist, former Democratic
staffer Jennifer Luray, quietly left in 2010, she took
with her a six-figure severance package not in keeping
with an employee that just found a new job.
At the time Handel was hired as a consultant - shortly
after Luray left - Handel told the local magazine
Northside Woman that Komen was her first and only
client, and that her role was to "[work] with [the
affiliates] to make sure they are as strong as they can
be"...That would seem to belie Komen Foundation
President Nancy Brinker's assertion today that Handel
wasn't involved in the decision to end most affiliates'
grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer
screenings, let alone her assertion that none of their
decisions were "political."
Handel and Brinker are in the middle of a genuine
firestorm, deservedly so.
Here's the reality -- the war on Planned Parenthood will
continue and the effort to isolate it from the medical
vcommunity will continue. But the pro-choice community
can be thankful that this nasty public breakup reflects
well on Planned Parenthood, and poorly on those who
disavow it. It reflects on those disavowers so badly
that many of us have remembered just how pernicious
certain aspects of the mainstream breast cancer
awareness movement has been, and redoubled our
suspicions.
Like many dozens of others this week, I've gone back to
Barbara Ehrenreich's Cancerland to be reminded of this
truth: "In the harshest judgment, the breast-cancer cult
serves as an accomplice in global poisoning --
normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it,
perversely, as a positive and enviable experience."
Planned Parenthood keeps its focus on women's health,
plain and simple, and includes abortion as part of that
comprehensive approach. It doesn't try to gussy up
health issues, or prettify them, or politicize them.
It's the other side that does the politicizing. Maybe
the outrage and the mea culpa it forced Komen to issue
will finally make other organizations think twice before
they stab a beloved health organization in the back the
way Komen has done.
-------------------------------------------
Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet, a
staff writer at RH Reality Check and a freelance writer
based in New York City. Her work has been published in
Jezebel.com and on the websites of the Nation, the
Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal.
Follow her on Twitter at sarahmseltzer.com.
c 2012 Independent Media Institute.
___________________________________________
Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.
Submit via email: [log in to unmask]
Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3
Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq
Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe
Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive
Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate
http://www.MitchelCohen.com
Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen
|
