"Sitting on corporate boards and organizations that have vested interests in cancer policies is an even higher level of conflict than taking funds: a board member is expected to promote the interests of that corporation," said Batt.
"Even the NBCC takes money from the pharmaceutical industry, but I doubt [its leaders] sit on corporate boards," a fact confirmed by an NBCC spokeswoman in a recent interview.
San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Action goes one step farther, refusing all donations from corporations that make money off breast cancer such as pharmaceutical companies, tobacco and pesticide manufacturers, and cancer treatment facilities.
Explained BCA's executive director Barbara Brenner, "With the growing effort by corporations to look like 'good guys' by supporting cancer organizations, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know whether an advocacy organization's positions are based on well thought out policies or on who's paying the bills."
Batt said that one of the dangers of Komen's success is that only messages that don't threaten or embarrass corporations or the Republican Party get through to the media and Congress.
During the 1990s for example, she said, the NBCC and smaller organizations worked to try to convince the National Cancer Institute and other government policy makers to begin addressing the health concerns of a more diverse group of women: ethnic minorities, the poor, and lesbians. But the power brokers in government and the corporate world still listen most readily to the messages publicized by the high-profile Race for the Cure.
It's an uphill battle, Batt said. "For one thing, the Komen Foundation has had more money. For another they carry friendly, reassuring messages through the media and their own programs, a phenomenon I like to term the 'Rosy Filter,' meaning the public is spoon-fed through a pink-colored lens stories of women waging a heroic battle against the disease, or the newest 'magic bullet.' Yet little light is shed on insurance costs, the environmental causes of breast cancer, or conflicts of interest."
One topic you'll never catch either of the Brinkers mentioning is the need for a cleaner environment. That might be because the international petrochemical giant Occidental Corp., big Komen boosters and the same folks who brought us Love Canal, donates 4,000 square feet of "glass and marble offices" to Komen on the premises of Occidental's Dallas headquarters.
The petrochemical industry, including Occidental, successfully lobbied in 2000 and 2001 for looser EPA air, water and chemical regulations at the same time government researchers reported auto and industrial emissions caused cancer.
Recently, the Bush administration essentially gutted the Clean Air Act, pleasing the President's oil industry friends including Occidental.
Officially, the Komen group is pro-environment, and joined with a national coalition of cancer and women's groups in late 1999 to demand research on the links between breast cancer and environmental toxins. However, a subsequent Congressional bill, the Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act, went nowhere fast when it was introduced in May 2001. Komen's lobbyists made little or no effort to fight for the bill or the concepts behind it, according to mid-year 2001 lobbying records filed by Evans & Black and Akin & Gump. Black, along with many Occidental officals, sat in with Brinker on the Bush Inaugural Committee. And coincidentally, Occidental lobbyists also spent time in 2001 on the House version of the Patients' Bill of Rights.
Bennett Weiner, Chief Operating Officer of the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance, a national charity rating organization, says it's wrong for Komen's literature, website, and public statements to feature a central figure like Nancy Brinker — or Norman Brinker for that matter — while omitting relevant parts of their lives such as seats on boards of private cancer treatment corporations, stock interests, lobbying ties or their political activism as GOP favorites. Weiner said, "If a charity is making recommendations to the public regarding health care among other things, and if they have ties to the industry, then the public needs to be able to objectively use that information."
The Foundation denies that it spends money to lobby, and denies that it is solely aligned with the Republican health care and environmental agendas. In a letter in response to questions for this article, a Komen spokeswoman defends Norman Brinker as a devoted "volunteer." The Foundation even seemed to distance itself from Nancy Brinker by citing her new post overseas.
As Judy Brady points out, the Komen Foundation, and the Brinkers in particular, represent the systemic corruption of business as usual in a corporate-dominated society. "It would be a mistake to demonize the Komen Foundation," Brady says. "They have the best of intentions and I truly believe that they think they are doing good — with a capital G. What they don't see is that 'business as usual' is why we have cancer."
