Why will Charles and David Koch produce a video about their position on the Keystone XL oil pipeline and not testify before Congress about it? The Koch brothers have refused to answer questions about how they stand to profit from the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700-mile long boondoggle that would cut through six states and damage American homes and farmland.
The Koch brothers have an attack-dog website of their own, KochFacts.com, which they have used defensively and reflexively to attack me and others who’ve questioned or investigated the Koch brothers’ vast $100 billion business. The Koch brothers refuse to testify in Congress about their interest in the pipeline, but they’ll make a web video asserting their innocence.
We took the Kochs’ video retreat and added a few facts from the historical record.
Maybe the Koch brothers prefer to let their allies in Congress speak for them? House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Rep. Ed Whitfield got $15,000 in donations from Koch Industries. Is he doing the Koch brothers bidding?
Whitfield is the tip of the iceberg. The Koch brothers and their employees were the single largest oil and gas donors to the committee with jurisdiction over the Keystone XL pipeline. They’ve contributed $279,500 to 22 of the 31 Republicans and $32,000 to five Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to the Los Angeles Times. It makes sense then that Whitfield and his cohorts would shy away from biting the hand that feeds them.
But the Koch brothers admit their business interests in Keystone. A Koch company website confesses to being among the “largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters” at the pipeline’s starting point in Northwest Canada.
What’s stopping the Koch brothers from testifying under oath in Congress? Apparently the Koch brothers are OK publishing statements on KochFacts.com that they won’t repeat in Congress. Why won’t they testify before Congress and put the issue to rest?
Activism around the Keystone pipeline has put the Koch brothers on the defensive. We need to continue insisting the Koch brothers testify in Congress. If they’ll make a video about the Keystone XL pipeline, why can’t they testify about their interest in it?
I invite you to join the conversation with me on Twitter and on our Koch Brothers Exposed page on Facebook.
Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Is the Susan G. Komen Foundation using a “mammogram diversion” as a precursor to denying Planned Parenthood state affiliates access to future grants for breast cancer education and screening?
Komen’s ostensible new strategy, to focus its prevention grants “only on mammograms,” would not only exclude Planned Parenthood clinics from eligibility, but would also deny tens of thousands of low-income and uninsured women medically-indicated primary preventive breast health services and, potentially, leave many with undiagnosed breast cancers. This at a time when there is an urgent need among low-income and underserved women–those served by Planned Parenthood–for greater access to primary preventive care. Yet even despite the lack of medical evidence for the strategy, the far right anti-choice publicity machine went into high gear over the weekend in what seemed like a pre-emptive strike in support of it.
Last week, Komen created a firestorm when it said that Planned Parenthood affiliates would be prohibited from applying for the breast cancer education and screening funds they had been getting for five years. The first of what turned out to be a changing list of reasons was “a new policy” denying funding to any organization “under investigation” and specifically pointing to Planned Parenthood, which is the target of any number of witch hunts but no actual investigations. (Curiously, the new policy did not, apparently, apply to Penn State University, which is under actual criminal investigation, nor to a long list of universities and corporations in which researchers and others are under investigation and to which Komen money continues to flow.) Komen executives and board members at first vociferously denied the move was political, but they’ve now been caught out by emails provided to Laura Bassett of the Huffington Post which make clear that Karen Handel, Komen’s anti-choice Senior Vice President of Policy, was the architect of the new policy, and by reports that former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer also was involved. Moreover, Jane Abraham, General Chair of the virulently anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List continues to sit on Komen’s advocacy board right there alongside Komen Chief Executive Officer Ambassador Nancy Brinker.
Then came Part Two. As the backlash against the “investigation exception” grew out of control, Brinker came out with another reason that their grant criteria were changing: They want to focus directly on mammograms.
Last week several groups, including the United Steelworkers, petitioned the federal government to whack the latest trade mole – illegally traded auto parts from China.
With President Obama announcing creation of a new trade enforcement unit in his State of the Union Address, the feds probably will investigate. But even if they whack down the auto parts mole, experience has shown a new mole will pop up.
Mole-by-mole trade enforcement isn’t the solution to America’s massive trade deficit. Although conservative candidates revel in ridiculing Western Europe, America could learn crucial economic lessons from Germany, which doesn’t rely on Whack-a-Mole and maintains trade surpluses, including one with China in auto parts.
The Steelworkers – along with the United Auto Workers, the Alliance for American Manufacturing and Campaign for America’s Future – explained why the federal government must smack down the latest trade problem that has raised its ugly head.
China and several other countries promote their auto parts manufacturers by providing subsidies and engaging in additional practices banned by the World Trade Organization (WTO). As a result, the United States imports more auto parts than it produces, a situation that kills manufacturers and manufacturing jobs here. For example, over the past 11 years, as the U.S. auto parts trade deficit increased by 867 percent, the Unites States lost 45 percent of its auto parts jobs – a total of 419,000.
The reason the groups sought action against China specifically is that its exports of auto parts to the United States have increased faster in the past three years than any other country’s and China supports its auto parts industry in ways that violate its commitments to the WTO.
For example, China provided $27.5 billion in subsidies to its auto parts industry between 2001 and 2010. It’s fine with the WTO if countries subsidize industries that sell their products domestically. But it forbids subsidies for exported products because that distorts the free market, wrongly destroying jobs and industries in the countries that buy those artificially low priced goods.
Beijing also aggressively limited import of American-made auto parts. This is hardly startling. In December, China imposed steep tariffs on imported American-made sports utility vehicles and other large cars. And the WTO affirmed last week that China violated its trade commitments by restricting export of key raw materials. Earlier, the WTO supported President Obama’s imposition of tariffs on tires imported from China because Beijing had violated international trade rules.
China has prospered by breaking the rules. Electronics manufacturing is a good example. In a story about Apple’s experience, The New York Times described how America lost these jobs to China. Worker wages, while achingly low in China, were not the lure. And they were not the issue for Apple, a company that makes $400,000 in profit for every worker. It was a combination of other factors including the Asian supply chain and Chinese subsidies.
An example is the Chinese company that bid on supplying glass for the iPhone. When Apple executives visited, they found the company already constructing a wing where the iPhone glass would be cut. The company built it with subsidies from Beijing, subsidies that never would be provided by the United States to American companies, subsidies that are of questionable legality under WTO rules because they were for exported goods. Apple gave the contract to the Chinese firm, of course. Here’s how the Times described it:
“The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.”
Beijing is a serial trade rule violator. The USW has won trade cases against China for violations involving paper, steel pipe, tires and other products. The Steelworkers filed for protection of the U.S. green energy sector against Chinese encroachment abetted by WTO violations and already has won negotiated settlement of several aspects of that case.
The USW and others that file trade cases often win. But this is Whack-a-Mole trade enforcement. A union or industry wins a case, whacks down that individual annoyance, but immediately another surfaces. America is losing, and far more is at stake than in an arcade game.
America can win. But it’s got to deal with trade differently. It needs a game changer, like Germany’s manufacturing policies.
Germany accounts for nearly 17 percent of America’s auto parts trade deficit. Germany sells more auto parts to China than it imports from China. German auto parts manufacturers accomplish this while paying higher wages and benefits than their American counterparts.
An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute notes that Germany actively enforces its industrial policy. This, EPI noted, stands in stark contrast to the United States, which doesn’t even have an industrial policy.
Germany encourages a sector of banks that is devoted to financing small and medium firms – the size that auto parts manufacturers are likely to be. In addition, Germany favors stakeholder capitalism, and corporate boards of directors there are populated by equal numbers of managers and workers. This changes the focus from profits benefitting only the 1 percent to company operation in the interest of the community, the country and the workers, as well as the executives and stockholders.
Republicans and Americans of the World War II generation might choke on the idea of learning something from Germany. But, frankly, this Western European country has prospered in manufacturing and trade with sophisticated state and corporate planning – not with the arcade-economics of Whack-a-Mole.
Written by TrustingWomen for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
“Keep politics out of women’s health.”
In the extraordinary amount of activity surrounding the Komen’s foundation decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood for mammograms, you have probably heard something along the lines of “keep politics out of women’s health.” Komen was frequently criticized for making a politically-motivated move.
Of course it was a politically-motivated move. My question to us all: is it not also a political move to restore the funding? Is not funding mammograms for poor women inherently a political act?
You see, I believe that the personal is always political. I believe that all of our acts are rooted in our values and deepest held beliefs about good and bad, right and wrong. It’s impossible not to be ‘political.’ What you do as a human being on this earth inevitably makes a claim on what you believe and what you believe is good and right, and what you believe is harmful and wrong.
Written by Will Neville for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Cross-posted with permission from Amplify Your Voice.
See all our coverage of the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s break with Planned Parenthood here.
Earlier today, the Susan G. Komen Foundation issued a formal apology for their recent decision to discontinue more than $600,000 in annual funding for cancer screenings and prevention services at Planned Parenthood. After an unrelenting outcry from the general public and grassroots activists across the country, the Komen Foundation found itself facing a nearly unprecedented public relations nightmare.
In its press release, the Komen Foundation has promised that only “criminal” investigations will disqualify potential grantees, not political ones. The original criteria (written in late 2011, possibly for the exclusive purpose of ending Planned Parenthood funding) disqualified Planned Parenthood from receiving Komen Foundation funds since it is the target of a political “investigation” [read: “witchhunt”] led by Rep. Cliff Stearns. (What that means for Komen’s $7.5 million grant to Penn State remains to be seen, given the criminal and legal issues for which they are under investigation.)
The Komen Foundation’s statement says that it “will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.” And that’s where we hit the real problem. From the beginning, the Foundation has been clear that no current grants will be affected. As such, this is NOT a reversal of any kind.
One of the most heartening moments of solidarity in the Tar Sands Action movement took place last summer: A contingent of Appalachian coalfield residents, whose homes are literally under siege from daily blasting and stripmining fallout, took their place at a White House sit-in and went to jail in an appeal to President Obama to deny the TransCanada Keystone pipeline permit.
For the Appalachian residents, like many citizens on the dirty energy frontlines, the pipeline decision served as a litmus test for the Obama administration’s commitment to dealing with climate change and a clean energy future.
Eastern Kentucky activist Teri Blanton, who lost her brother to a coal mining accident and has witnessed the destruction of her native Harlan County from stripmining over the past decades, invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
We need that same sense of urgency and solidarity in the central Appalachian coalfields now—from non-coalfield residents, Big Green environmental organizations, citizens and civil rights groups, students and senior citizens.
We need to call on President Obama to commit to an immediate moratorium on all mountaintop removal mining operations until the federal government can effectively mitigate a spiraling humanitarian crisis.
To be sure, central Appalachia has not cornered the market on dirty energy destruction. Coal-fired plants and coal ash piles take their daily toll on millions of American lives across the nation; natural gas fracking has spiraled out of control; uranium mining has left behind a deadly legacy. Devastating stripmining and longwall mining operations for coal take place in 24 states—including my own homeland in the heartland, where a new coal rush threatens our forests and farms and communities again.
In fact, mountaintop removal has received far more attention and media coverage—and generated major foundation support and large donations to numerous nonprofit groups outside of the coalfields—than many other forms of dirty energy mayhem.
But the unfathomable level of destruction of our historic central Appalachian mountain communities and forests—the carbon sink of the nation—the mounting death toll, the unconscionable forced removals of American citizens, and the reams of studies on the indisputable health care and humanitarian crises from mountaintop removal coal mining should place it at the forefront of any litmus on President Obama’s commitment to health care, clean energy and dealing with climate change.
Last summer, Dr. Michael Hendryx of West Virginia University released a study that should have headlined every newspaper in the country—and launched an all-out national campaign on the level of the anti-tobacco campaigns of the past. Hendryx concluded: “Living in a mountaintop mining area was a bigger risk for birth defects than smoking.”
This is truth: If we don’t have the will to place a moratorium on mountaintop removal mining operations in four central Appalachian states, which provide less than five to seven percent of all coal production in the United States, it’s game over for any effective mitigation of climate destabilization or the pursuit of a clean energy transition.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, President Obama told the nation that we needed to find a way to generate energy without “blowing off the tops of mountains.”
Four years later, we are still blowing off the tops of mountains—and needlessly so, as a clear environmental and human rights violations, following a 40-year policy of “regulating” mountaintop removal violations, not abolishing them. In truth, mountaintop removal operations have been plundering central Appalachian since 1970—more than four decades of regulated criminal violations, civil rights abuse, and death.
In 1971, Rep. Ken Hechler testified in front of Congress:
Representing the largest coal-producing state in the nation, I can testify that strip-mining has ripped the guts out of our mountains, polluted our streams with acid and silt, uprooted trees and forests, devastated the land, seriously destroyed wildlife habitat, left miles of ugly highwalls, ruined the water supply in many areas, and left a trail of utter despair for many honest and hard-working people.
Four decades after Hechler introduced a bill to abolish mountaintop removal and reckless strip mining, the U.S. Congress has completely abandoned central Appalachia to the whims of Big Coal lobbyists and their sycophant Big Coal-bankrolled supporters in the House, who have effectively derailed any legislation.
We can no longer wish for any congressional intervention. And while individual state efforts—in Tennessee, for example—are important, the buck on mountaintop removal stops with President Obama.
This is where the urgency and solidarity and audacious determination of national organizations—and residents across the country—are desperately needed, on a par with the tar sands movement. If we can stop the proposed Keystone pipeline, we can stop mountaintop removal.
If President Obama—and Lisa Jackson’s EPA, Eric Holder’s DOJ, along with national civil rights and environmental groups in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere—truly believed in a clean energy future and environmental justice, they would invite 97-year-old Ken Hechler to a special meeting at the White House this spring and announce a moratorium on mountaintop removal operations until the federal government can effectively mitigate a spiraling humanitarian crisis.
As one of our nation’s greatest heroes of democracy, Ken Hechler deserves a Medal of Freedom.
As one of our greatest resources and historic natural landmarks, Appalachia deserves its freedom, too.
Low level marijuana arrests in New York City rose for the seventh straight year in 2011 to 50,680. The arrest total is the highest total on record since former pot smoker Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office and it is the second highest total of pot arrests ever recorded in the history of the city (just 587 arrests behind the record holding year 2000, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani oversaw some 51,267 people arrested for marijuana violations).
Shockingly, the near-record high arrest total comes just months after New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly called on officers to cease making marijuana misdemeanor arrests. Apparently, NYPD officers aren’t very good at listening to their commanding officer.
Of course, what is most troubling about these arrest figures is that under state law they largely shouldn’t be occurring at all. Since 1977, New York State law has categorized the possession of 25 grams of marijuana or less as a violation, not a misdemeanor crime. So then how are NYPD making so many misdemeanor pot arrests? By violating the spirit of the law, if not the law itself.
Rather than ticketing low level marijuana offenders, City police for over a decade have been taking advantage of a separate statute, NY State Penal Law 221.10, which makes it a criminal misdemeanor to possess pot if it is ‘open to public view.’ According to an investigation last year by New York City public radio station WNYC, it was determined that City cops routinely conduct warrantless ’stop-and-frisk’ searches of civilians, find marijuana hidden on their persons, and then falsely charge them with possessing pot ‘open to public view.’
And what has been the result of these illegal ’stop and frisks?’ A press advisory issued yesterday by the Drug Policy Alliance lists the grim details.
– The NYPD has made more than 100,000 marijuana possession arrests for the last two years; nearly 150,000 marijuana possession arrests in the last three years; and more than 227,000 marijuana possession arrests in the last five years.
– New York City spent at least $150 million in the last two years and has spent at least $340 million in the last five years making marijuana possession arrests.
– In the last decade since Michael Bloomberg became mayor, the NYPD has made 400,038 lowest level marijuana possession arrests at a cost to taxpayers of $600 million dollars.
– Nearly 350,000 of the marijuana possession arrests made under Bloomberg are of overwhelmingly young Black and Latino men, despite the fact that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young Blacks and Latinos.
– In the last five years, the NYPD under Bloomberg has made more marijuana arrests (2007 to 2011 = 227,093) than in the 24 years from 1978 through 2001 under Mayor Giuliani, Mayor Dinkins, and Mayor Koch combined (1978 to 2001 = 226,861).
Commissioner Kelly’s 2011 memorandum explicitly directed officers to stop charging defendants with criminal misdemeanors in instances where the contraband ‘was disclosed to public view at an officer’s direction.’ Nevertheless, the record number of low level pot arrests appears to be continuing unabated. Most likely, it will take an act of law to stop this practice.
Fortunately, bipartisan legislation is pending in both the New York State Assembly and Senate to stop this disgusting, ongoing practice. Assembly Bill 7620 and Senate Bill 5187 reduce marijuana penalties involving cases where where marijuana was either consumed or allegedly possessed in public from a criminal misdemeanor to a non-criminal violation. Passage of SB 5187 and AB 7620 will save taxpayer dollars, protect New York City’s citizens against illegal searches, and reduce unwarranted racial disparities in arrests by clarifying the law and standardizing penalties for marijuana possession offenses.
If you reside in New York and want to end the City’s dubious distinction of being the ‘marijuana arrest capital of the world,’ then please contact your state elected officials today and urge them to support SB 5187 and AB 7620. You can do so via NORML’s ‘Take Action Center’ here.
Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Can you trust a breast cancer organization whose staff and board lie about medical science, including breast cancer?
Today, amidst the outcry surrounding the decision by the Susan G. Komen Foundation to demand that its state affiliates terminate a successful five-year relationship working with Planned Parenthood clinics to increase access to breast cancer screening for low-income and uninsured women, it dawned on me that there is another pressing question here not being asked.
Why has the world’s largest breast cancer advocacy organization hired senior staff people and elected to its board individuals who misrepresent, or are allied with those who misrepresent, medical and public health evidence, including about causes of breast cancer?
It seems to me that the most fundamental measure of accountability for an organization dealing with life-threatening illnesses and public heath problems such as breast cancer is the efficacy with which that organization evaluates, communicates about, and respects medical and scientific evidence. Further from that, it would seem imperative that such an organization hire staff and elect board members who uphold the highest standards of science and medicine without regard to personal ideology.
Yet Komen has done just the opposite. They hired a known anti-choice politician, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Karen Handel, as their Senior Vice President for Policy, a woman who misrepresented facts about government funding of Planned Parenthood as part of her core campaign strategy, and who also supports the spread of misinformation about public health and individual consequences of abortion care, outright lies that have been soundly refuted by medical and public health experts. The foundation of Handel’s career and poiltical candidacy is an ideology based on misrepresenting scientific, medical, and other facts. Isn’t that damaging to an organization that claims to be the world’s largest donor to scientific research on breast cancer? Why would an organization concernd about accuracy in research hire such a person?
From the high plains of Wyoming to the urban centers of Atlanta, Chicago and New York City, hundreds of schools launched a historic teach-in movement today to incorporate lesson plans from the banished Mexican American Studies program in Tucson in their own classrooms.
Organized by the Teacher Activist Groups and joined by Rethinking Schools and other educational networks, the month-long “No History is Illegal” initiative comes on the heels of an unusually strong statement by over two dozen of the nation’s largest publishing, literary and education organizations that calls on the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) and Arizona state education officials to recognize First Amendment rights and “return all books to classrooms and remove all restrictions on ideas that can be addressed in class.”
Thousands of detained books remain behind lock and key in the school district’s warehouse like broken chairs and desks and school bus parts, despite the fact that the TUSD library catalog shows that there are less than 2-3 copies of several of the removed Mexican American Studies textbooks in the entire school district, which serves more than 55,000 students.
In outrage at the detained books, nearly 15,000 people have also signed a petition started by former Mexican American Studies teacher Norma Gonzalez, which calls on the Tucson school district to “immediately remove these books from their ‘district storage facility’ and make them available in each school’s library. Knowledge cannot be boxed off and carried away from students who want to learn!”
Signed by representatives of the Association of American Publishers, American Association of University Professors, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, National Coalition Against Censorship, National Council for the Social Studies, National Council of Teachers of English, and the PEN American Center, among other national groups, the censorship statement yesterday also calls out the troubling doublespeak by Tucson Unified School District administrators like Superintendent John Pedicone, who declared the drastic confiscation of textbooks and curriculum materials in front of children and subsequent detainment in locked storage units is not a ban.
School officials have insisted that the books haven’t been banned because they are still available in school libraries. It is irrelevant that the books are available in the library — or at the local bookstore. School officials have removed materials from the curriculum, effectively banning them from certain classes, solely because of their content and the messages they contain. The effort to “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, [or] religion” is the essence of censorship, whether the impact results in removal of all the books in a classroom, seven books, or only one.
The American Library Association issued a similar denouncement of Tucson’s extraordinary book banishment and forced removals last week. A larger list of other unacceptable titles, including numerous Native American authors, from the banished Mexican American Studies literature and history curricula can be found here.
Along with curriculum lists, videos and suggested lesson plans, the “No History is Illegal” website includes links to other actions around the country. On Saturday, for example, educators and civil rights activists in Atlanta, Georgia are holding a special “teach-in on Tucson” at Georgia State University.
“The national outpouring of support has been amazing and this website, this movement of solidarity, is proof of this,” said former Mexican American Studies literature teacher Curtis Acosta. “It is humbling to think of the hard work that our friends across the country have produced to keep our story and program alive in the minds and hearts of so many people. I believe the tide is turning due to the deplorable enforcement of the law by our district. Now it is clear what the agenda was truly about — banning books, censoring teachers, rolling back the decades of civil rights and equality all to appease the desires of egocentric politicians. The love and respect from fellow educators and citizens will lift the hearts of our students during these dark days. Now they will know that they are not alone.”
February 1st, of course, also kicks off Black History Month, which pioneering historian Carter Woodson launched in West Virginia more than 80 years ago to address “distortions” and “deletions” in the historical record. Only days away from Arizona’s centennial celebrations on February 14th, residents in the beleaguered state, and particularly in Tucson, have once again been reminded of Woodson’s admonition to guard against the “danger of being exterminated” through historicide or the removal of certain histories from the national experience.
In her State of the Union last month, California-transplanted Gov. Jan Brewer failed to even mention a single Native American, Mexican American or African American in her round-up of pioneers in the state’s history.
In 1895, in fact, African American innovator Henry Flipper made history in Nogales, Arizona, when he became the first black editor of a non-black-owned newspaper in the nation. In the following spring, Flipper published a historical booklet, Did a Negro Discover Arizona and New Mexico, that provided some of the first translations of Spanish documents on the role of Moroccan slave and scout Esteban, who most historians consider to be the first non-native to enter present-day Arizona in 1539, at the head of a Spanish expedition.
“As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us,” the “No History is Illegal” website notes, “‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ What is happening in Arizona is not only a threat to Mexican American Studies, it is a threat to our right to teach the experiences of all people of color, LGBT people, poor and working people, the undocumented, people with disabilities and all those who are least powerful in this country. Our history is not illegal.”
Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
This week it became clear there are things more important to the Susan G. Komen Foundation–the fundraising giant that each year during breast cancer awareness month virtually swathes the United States in pink, a la Christo–than ensuring women are able to access exams for early detection of breast cancer.
What could be more important to an organization ostensibly dedicated to the elimination of breast cancer? Answer: The politics and personal agendas of the organization’s senior staff and board, both of which have been infiltrated by right-wing ideologues and both of which were instrumental in a decision to deny further support from Komen affiliates to Planned Parenthood clinics that provide breast exams. In fact, it is now clear that Komen has been infiltrated at various levels by anti-choicers willing to actually sacrifice women to breast cancer to satisfy their own agendas.
