.This blog is for my various interests, such as bicycling, karaoke, clean living, internet memes, video games, roleplaying games, progressive politics, humor, and futurism.
(via anattractivecryingman)
Where Your 2011 Tax Dollars Went
If you don’t know much about the history of the pink ribbon, or the massive cause marketing facets it has, then you need to watch this film.
The fight against breast cancer has been depoliticised. Pushes from pharma companies to produce a “cure”, combined with corporate links with fundraising campaigns, have fundamentally shifted the debate and public awareness of the disease.
History of the ribbon: corporate appropriation
The Guardian covered this in their recent article Cancer’s not pink:
The pink ribbon was originally orange. Conceived in 1990 by Charlotte Haley, a 68-year-old American, it was a grassroots protest against the fact that only 5% of the US National Cancer Institute’s budget was going towards cancer prevention.
When Estée Lauder asked to use the logo for a breast-cancer awareness campaign, Haley wanted nothing to do with it, saying she had no wish for them to use the ribbon as she felt it was too commercial. So the company changed the colour to pink, because research identified it as the most non-threatening, soothing colour – everything a cancer diagnosis isn’t.
Estee Lauder threatened Charlotte with their vast squad of lawyers, and then just evaded the legalities by slightly changing the colour.
From the start, a symbol tainted by corporate appropriation.
Cause marketing: framing it nice
Charities like Susan G Komen for the Cure (recently famous for their decision to not back Planned Parenthood) are largely responsible for the links between breast cancer fundraising and corporate cause marketing i.e. ‘buy this and part of the profits go to a good cause’.
The bottom line is that these companies only enter these partnerships because they are lucrative.
To be an effective sales tool, breast cancer needs to be portrayed as beatable. Positivity and reassurance mean that the more you buy, the more you’re helping is the dominant philosophy.
An off-shoot problem is that the focus on positivity is that it:
- creates a frame of ‘the more I fight the more likely I am to succeed’, which promotes victim-blaming when it fails e.g. “oh you should have eaten more green veg”;
- implies all breast cancer is always treatable and beatable;
- softens something ugly and difficult, and invalidates the very valid feelings of anger people have.
This sanitising from corporate links took the teeth out of the growing movement pushing for prevention rather than a “cure”, and shifted focus from preventative options.
“It’s not a conspiracy, it’s business as usual”
Popular focus on the disease being beatable on one level encourages the quick fix self-help ideas you hear in the papers: “eat more fruit and veg”, “do more exercise”, etc.
What most people don’t know is that only 20-30% of breast cancer is caused by known risk factors. However, publicising this would undermining the public perception of the disease being manageable, and thus undermine the potential profits from cause marketing.
This focus on a cure encourages an atmosphere of medicalisation, even when that’s not necessarily beneficial for patients. 85% of funding goes towards cures in the form of pills that may only increase life expectancy by a small amount. Only 15% goes towards prevention of the disease - a far less lucrative market.
Of the money going to prevention, only a third is going towards investigating environmental causes for breast cancer. Another problem with corporate links: cause-marketing companies are ‘helping the cause’ whilst profiting from products that cause breast cancer.
A few quick examples: the estrogenic plastics used in Ford’s manufacturing; the rBGH growth hormone in dairy products (Yoplait); the fact that only 20% of ingredients in cosmetics have had any safety checks (Estee Lauder, Revlon). All these companies engage in breast cancer cause marketing.
The sad fact is that this is an inherent problem with corporate engagement in fundraising.
More reading
Not even touched on the fact that most research studies focus on white middle class women because those are the ones with buying power for cause-marketing products, or the globalisation of pinkwashing (using the social licence from breast cancer campaigning to operate in places like the middle east by the US after Iraq war).
Film review for Pink Ribbons Inc.
Pink Ribbons Inc. by Dr Susan Love is the book the film is based on
Welcome to Cancerland, an article by Barbara Ehrenreich
Breast Cancer Action do some great work in the US e.g. the Think Before You Pink campaign
big shout-out to Human Rights Watch for screening the film!
This is a good and important subject.
I’m not a big fan of the commercialization of breast cancer research.
I do want to point out one thing though. Breast Cancer went from being one of the most devastating forms of cancer to one of the most curable largely because of the fundraising and publicity brought to this particular form of cancer. Here’s a quick look at the improved survival rates
For local disease, the number of women alive at 10 years rose from 55.0% in the first decade of the study period when radiation therapy was the mainstay of treatment to 86.1% by 1995-2004 (P<0.0001 for trend).
For regional disease with skin or lymph node involvement, 10-year survival improved from a dismal 16.2% to 74.1% over the same period (P<0.0001 for trend).
Even for those who presented with cancer disseminated to distant sites, improvements were seen from 3.3% alive at 10 years among those seen in 1944 to 1954 up to 22.2% by 1995-2004, again a significant trend at P<0.0001.
Other kinds of cancer, such as Ovarian cancer, have not improved so significantly. There hasn’t been a new drug for Ovarian in something like 15 years.
All the fundraising and activism does have an effect, a serious one. So I’m a little uncomfortable with some of the things quoted above about too much funding going to “cures in the form of pills”. People, those pills are the reason that breast cancer is a survivable disease. Pills like Tamoxifen and Herceptin allow people with the worst forms of breast cancer who might have been given 3-4 months to live to go on living their life for many more months, years, even a decade after that. To the person who now gets to see their 40th birthday or watch their kid graduate high school, that’s a big fucking deal. Actually complaining about that smacks of anti-medical paranoia that I’m really wary of right now.
Here’s the real problem: the whole reason we need fundraising and activism is that the government does not provide enough funding for medical research. If we had the funding structure to do the research that’s really needed for ALL forms of cancer, we wouldn’t need individual funding efforts like Susan Komen with all of the attendant problems that leaving research to corporations and semi-shady foundations brings.
Other than that I fully agree with the critiques about cause marketing and linking products to breast cancer fundraising.
I NEED TO SEE THIS
I took a really great class my senior year of undergrad on the Biology and Policy of Breast Cancer (it was dope) I slept through most of the BIO part (uh not my forte) but the policy stuff and the construction of the movement? Very Very interesting. That class radically shifted my perspective on supporting national foundations that don’t explicitly outline the proportion of direct service action that they do on behalf of the communities they claim to represent.
Another major issue, otherwise un-addressed, is the corruption and conflicts of interest that are inherent here. The American Cancer Society is run by a board, and that board is made up entirely of executives and shills and lawyers and lobbyists from the pharmaceutical companies, or the conglomerates that own them. So, the ACS, especially its Pink Ribbon branch, raises money from government grants, public donations, and targeted fundraising. It takes that money, and spends it on salaries and overhead first, financing more fundraising second, lobbying for more money third, and takes the rest and puts that money into cancer research. And that last one, that sounds like the only good part here, is actually just “take the money that generous citizens gave us and hand it to the corporations that we really work for”. The money you donate, just finances R&D for the pharma corp to make drugs that they’re going to charge full market price for.
Fuck these guys.
(via scionofmalphas)
I’m just going to make this answer rebloggable~
Okay, I’m going to explain something to you and I think this might help other people when they feel like they shouldn’t be upset or crying.
There are four steps of emotion.
- Physiological changes
- Nonverbal responses
- Cognitive Interpretation
- Verbal response [internal & external]
Those first two? We can’t change those. Those are completely out of our control because our brains release certain chemicals and hormones that make our bodies react to certain conditions.
We can control the last two. We can control how we decide to interpret the actions of others and how to react to them. No one can or should tell us how to feel. We are responsible for our emotions.
Crying = physical/nonverbal response, so that means we can’t control it. It’s okay to cry, or sweat, or twitch, or fidget because we cannot control that.
Whatever emotion you want to feel, that’s perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with it.
Don’t tell people how they should feel or react to situations because that tells me you’re not “emotionally intelligent”.
-B
ETA: I do not intend “emotionally unintelligent” to be insulting at all. It just means you have some trouble assessing the emotions of others, and has nothing to do with conventional intelligence.
In another sign that Democrats have embraced income inequality as a cause célèbre, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing on the subject today. The committee’s ranking Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, managed to look concerned during two hours of testimony about the kneecapping of the Middle Class—not that it should have been all that difficult. Here are some of the hearing’s most striking charts…
Be sure and click through and check them all out.
(Americans Against the Tea Party; h/t to @CEs_Mustache)
Simple and easy to understand. Well done.*
*(minus the “insanity” part, nitpicking but it’s technically ableism)
(via stfuconservatives)
According to this tax rate data, in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent.
‘The unemployment rate continued to trend downward Friday, reaching 8.3 percent, the lowest rate in three years.
Our own more inclusive statistic that adds the underemployed and those who want a job but have been out of work so long the government no longer counts them is down to 16.9 percent for January.
That’s the lowest we’ve seen since we started tracking the figure in January 2010.’
This month’s unemployment numbers, in non-slicked-over form.
(via shortformblog)
- positive According to a hypothetical posed by the Congressional Budget Office, if Congress’ deadlock worsened and nothing got done this year, the deficit would shrink heavily as the Bush tax cuts would expire and other spending initiatives would end. Huh.
- negative However … this comes with a…
“Societies with more income inequality have higher infant death rates than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of mental illness than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher incidence of drug use than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher high school drop out rate than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality imprison a larger proportion of their population than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher rate of obesity than other societies:
Individuals in societies with more income inequality are less likely to be in a different class of than their parents compared to other societies:
Individuals in societies trust others less than people in other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of homicide than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality give less in foreign aid than other societies:
Children in societies with more income inequality do less well than children in other societies:
The authors sum it up pretty simply: : “Th[e] dissatisfaction [measured in this data is] a cost which the rich impose on the rest of society.”
Fantastic info - this is why we should focus on income inequity.
(via stfuconservatives)
