Do you like trends? Are you into fads? Are you up on all the latest lingo? I’m not, but nevertheless, I learned a new word this week – ‘pinkwashing.’
Pinkwashing, according to thinkbeforeyoupink.org, is the act of claiming that your organization cares about breast cancer by promoting awareness through pink ribbon products or fundraisers, when in reality, you yourself are part of the problem. Case in point – Baker Hughes, Inc.
Baker Hughes, Inc. presented the Susan G. Komen foundation with a $100,000 donation Sunday at the Steelers game, and has manufactured 1,000 pink drill bits in their Doing Our Bit for the Cure campaign.
Drill bits, you ask?
Oh yes – Baker Hughes is a major manufacturer of drills and other equipment that are used in – get ready for this – natural gas fracking.
You heard that right. In an example of pinkwashing at its absolute finest, Baker Hughes is using its donation to Susan G. Komen to give itself a better public image, hoping that we’ll overlook the fact that at least 29 of the chemicals used in fracking are known or suspected carcinogens, according to usnews.com.
The fact that the Susan. G. Komen foundation is taking money from the very people responsible in part for causing the disease in the first place is not as lost on us as either organization would prefer it to be. Protests were held at the game where the handoff took place, and groups such as New Voices Pittsburgh, Breast Cancer Action and Friends of the Harmed gathered 150,000 signatures on petitions urging Susan G. Komen not to take the money. The Pittsburgh office said that it was a decision made at the national level, not the local one, indicating that there was nothing they could do about it.
Considering Susan G. Komen’s spotty track record and recent rapid decline, I sincerely hope that this last debacle is going to be the icing on the cake. The organization lost so much money after its 2012 decision to stop funding cancer screening at Planned Parenthood because of a Republican-backed anti-abortion witch hunt that it had to cancel roughly half of its regularly scheduled fundraising events due to lack of participation. According to nytimes.com, a Harris Institute study showed that Komen’s brand health had dropped by 21 percent after that decision, despite the fact that, after realizing how much money they were going to lose, they quickly changed their minds and gave the money back to Planned Parenthood.
If Susan G. Komen wants money, they don’t need it from Baker Hughes anyway. I suggest they ask their CEO – Dr. Judith Salerno gets paid $475,000 per annum to head up the foundation. Her predecessor, founder Nancy Brinker, officially got paid $548,000, though tax documents showed she received much more than that – $684,000 per year, and reflected that she’d received a 64% raise since 2010. Ken Berger, CEO of Charity Navigator, told NBC News that Brinker’s pay was “way outside the norm,” and pointed out that the head of the Red Cross, an organization ten times the size of Susan G. Komen, didn’t even make that much.
Nancy Brinker may have started the Susan G. Komen foundation in order to find a cure for the disease that killed her sister, but somewhere along the line, Brinker seems to have lost sight of reality. The bottom line is that behind all that pink there’s a lot of green – and green changes a person. Like a cancer. And that phenomenon isn’t new or trending.
It’s as old as time.
