Tweet
After reading TBogg’s blog today on the Komen sellout, my friend Pedinska wrote a letter to Susan G Komen For the Cure to express her outrage. The non-response response from the foundation and Pedinska’s counter-response get straight to the heart of the problem.
Will Planned Parenthood be the next ACORN?
Pedinska to Komen:
To whom it may concern,
I agree with the following statement from a post at FireDogLake blog:
“The Pink Badge of Cowardice”
By: TBogg Tuesday January 31, 2012 5:12 pm
“I have to say that killing women with breast cancer before they might consider abortion sometime in their lives is one way to eliminate a woman’s right to choose.”
I am astonished that an organization supposedly built on women’s health would choose to punish another organization with the same goals.
Concurrent with FDL’s recommendation, the money I would have directed to the Komen Foundation has now been redirected to Planned Parenthood in the form of an Honorary Donation in the name of Karen Handel, your Senior Vice President for policy, a self-declared enemy of Planned Parenthood, one of the only organizations left that still serve the needs of women who can’t afford health care anywhere else.
I am also throwing all my pink ribbon wear into the trash – I’m not even going to donate them since I don’t want anyone advertising for an organization that is so fickle in its commitment to women. And you’ll see me picketing, along with my pro-choice friends, at every single Komen event in the area as well. I want women to know that your organization permits it’s leaders to politically influence the care of women everywhere, but especially the care of women who have no political power at all.
I am furious and I am going to make sure that every woman I know is aware of what you are doing.
Komen to Pedinska:
Hi Pedinska,
We’d like to take this time to clarify the issue about our community-based granting programs.
Though Susan G. Komen for the Cure has changed its funding criteria, the change does not affect the Columbus Affiliate’s ability to provide vital breast health services for uninsured and under-served men and women in Central and Southeastern Ohio. In 2011, thanks to your donations and support, we provided $1.5 million to support local breast cancer education, screening and treatment services in our community. Our commitment has always been and continues to be to support uninsured and under-insured men and women and we will continue to do so through these grantees.
Our Affiliate serves local men and women. Susan G. Komen for the Cure on a national level has recently adopted criteria that bars grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities.
We review our grant programs on an ongoing basis to ensure that we are meeting the highest standards and achieving maximum impact for our donors’ dollars. We have always had safeguards in place to terminate grants to organizations for financial or administrative improprieties, loss of federal or state funding, or changes to their tax-exempt status. Going forward, if we learn that an applicant or its affiliates are under formal investigation for financial or administrative improprieties by local, state or federal authorities, the grant will be terminated and the organization will be ineligible for grants. An organization may regain its eligibility once the investigation is concluded and the organization and its affiliates are cleared of any wrongdoing.
The people we serve are our highest priority in everything we do. Nationally, Komen affiliates were able to invest $93 million in community health programs. These programs provided 700,000 mammograms, saving countless lives.
Feel free to contact us with any further concerns.
Becca
Becca Thomas
Director of Communications
Susan G. Komen for the Cure Columbus Affiliate
929 Eastwind Drive, Suite 211
Westerville, OH 43081
614-297-8155 ext. 202
beccathomas@komencolumbus.org
www.komencolumbus.org
facebook.com/komencolumbus
twitter.com/komencolumbus
Register today for the 20th Annual Komen Columbus Race for the Cure on May 19, 2012!
Pedinska to Komen:
Ms. Thomas,
“Going forward, if we learn that an applicant or its affiliates are under formal investigation for financial or administrative improprieties by local, state or federal authorities, the grant will be terminated and the organization will be ineligible for grants.”
So, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland your organization enacts the sentence first, is that how you function? Really??
The investigations in Congress are politically motivated.
http://www.lifenews.com/2011/09/27/congress-to-investigate-planned-parenthood-abortion-business/
They were instigated under pressure from a pro-life organization, Americans United for Life. The fact that you are so eager to defund PP, a group that has historically provided services for poor women, solely on the basis of such politically motivated witch hunts - no need for proof of wrongdoing of any kind – tells me that your organization puts politics above the needs of women. And right-wing politics at that. That’s fine, but your group should at least be honest about it instead of hiding it behind a punishment first, findings second rationalization that is thin, dishonest and misleading.
I stand by my initial letter and will continue to educate women everywhere about the kinds of actions your organization is taking. When you will only support women through groups who remove their ability to choose what is best for their own bodies, you have removed yourself from the realm of the apolitical and that has consequences.
Thank you for your response. It is exactly what I anticipated.
Pedinska
p.s. my communications with you, including your responses, are being shared with a large group of men and women who I know have supported your organization in the past.
43 Comments
Pedinska is one smart woman.
She’s awesome.
Recommended.
~
Give ‘em hell, grrl!
This Becca Thomas women, she not too bright is she?
Standard practice among the Survivalist Community is to avoid fucking with Pedinska.
HA HA! Right on.
Valuable and much appreciated work, Pedinska. Also, thanks for posting this, Presumptuous Insect.
I’m sure I’m not the first to suggest that all requests from SGK be met with contributions to Planned Parenthood.
If SGK chooses to be political it should be treated as a political organization.
Oh, jeez, you guys. Keep it up and I won’t be able to get through the door due to cranial hypertrophy. ;-}
If folks are willing to write to their own local Komen Kowz but aren’t sure what to write, please feel free to use whatever bits of my letters you want.
These people need to have their damn pink ribbons blasted right off their bare pink asses.
Heh. She was bright enough to cut her losses after the first response, but that’s about as far as she was able to trundle.
Methinks they are in MAJOR damage control mode right now.
Good.
awesome! recommended.
ROFLMAO at the video! [snort!]
I’m still not understanding this. If you read the article in the NYT, statements by Planned Parenthood clearly state that Susan G. Komen was under pressure from the outside to do this. And yet when you read here, it is entirely Susan G. Komen’s inside job decision and they are the bad guy.
Those are quite different. One portrays an organization buckling under pressure. That’s not totally admirable, but as I’ve written elsewhere, is something that even Planned Parenthood has done before. And the other portrays the organization as entirely at fault itself.
Are you saying that what Planned Parenthood said is wrong?
Fantastic letter. Well done.
I make a tiny annual donation to Planned Parenthood and another to the ACLU. It would be more except that we’s po folk.
Please give to Planned Parenthood. If SGK is part of the fetus fetish cult let them get their money from the Republican Church.
Read this:
http://my.firedoglake.com/rhrealitycheck/2012/02/01/the-cancerous-politics-and-ideology-of-the-susan-g-komen-foundation/
I read it. I want to know why the president of Planned Parenthood would lie. Answer that please.
Either/Or.
Because otherwise, you are destroying SGK’s funding base instead of getting the right wing to call off their “investigations”.
I’ve seen lots of NPOs do dumb things. HRW supported the DTA wholeheartedly, with Tom Malinowski doing speeches and everything, only to find out that it immunized torturers. ACLU supported closing Guantánamo first and only when it was pointed out to them that they needed to ask where the prisoners were going and what the conditions were, did they qualify. Planned Parenthood defended the Boston Police’s arrest of Bill Baird. Red Cross trusted a brand new volunteer with a million dollars in donations during Katrina. MSF admitted last week they fixed people up for torture in Libya. The list is endless. It doesn’t make the NPO bad and deserving of destruction without just a little more. We’re all hanging on by our teeth here.
I am confused. You think the comments by Richards are exculpatory??
And again, from RHRealityCheck’s essay:
“So why the shift? First, Komen last year hired Karen Handel, a former Georgia anti-choice gubernatorial candidate and Sarah Palin acolyte who promised as part of her platform to defund Planned Parenthood and other vital health services. Handel, who lost her race but is said to have future political ambitions, is now Senior Vice President for Policy at Komen. She was originally endorsed in her race by and received money from current GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, with whom some sources suggest she remains closely allied. Romney, in turn, has suddently become more anti-choice than thou and has promised a federal personhood amendment as well as to defund Planned Parenthood.
Second, sitting on Komen’s Advocacy Alliance Board is Jane Abraham, the General Chairman of the virulently anti-choice and anti-science Susan B. Anthony List and of its Political Action Committee. Among other involvements, Abraham helps direct the Nuturing Network, a global network of crisis pregnancy centers known for spreading ideology, misinformation and lies to women facing unintended pregnancy. Also on the board of Nuturing Network is Maureen Scalia, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
That Komen–an organization ostensibly dedicated to scientific exploration of cures for breast cancer–has invited on its advocacy board women so closely allied with organizations that blatantly ignore science and medicine and spread outright lies to other women about their health and welfare speaks volumes about Komen’s ethical principles as an organization.”
It is not either/or. These wingnuts joined the organization before the latest assault against PP by congress critters. Why blame this on pressure from without when there are clearly people from the foundation who have been working to take PP out of the picture?
No, but before we kill off a very big NPO, I want to know that it’s the right thing to do. NPOs aren’t that easy to create, you know. If it’s a matter of firing some people and strengthening some backbones, and more than anything, doing some battle against the right wing jerks that have been after Planned Parenthood with a vengeance since they decided they were invincible after bringing down ACORN, then we should do that. If it’s really about killing off Susan G. Komen then we should do that. But you can’t resurrect Susan G. Komen once you decide to kill it, so you’d better be right.
Budget shortfalls all over the NPO world really suck so make sure you’re right. They have good funding over at
Amnesty InternationalRHRealityCheck.It doesn’t have to be either/or ondelette. It’s entirely congruent with how right-to-life groups work to acknowledge that there were powers working from both inside and outside of Komen in order to effect this defunding.
In fact, I would say that it wasn’t Cecile Richards, but rather the Komen group, that has been engaging in falsehoods about, if not outright inventing, the reasons for the defunding.
And I doubt that SGK’s funding base will be “destroyed” as I’m sure there are loads of anti-abortion groups who will rise to fill the void. And many of the comments I’ve seen wrt this situation are from people stating that they will be shifting their funding from one NPO (SGK) to another (PP), not stopping their donating.
Yes, it would be great to get the wingers to stop with the false investigations, but since most of us lack the clout to do that the next best thing is to shift our hard-earned money away from groups who hire the kind of folks for upper management who engage in these tactics, and toward groups that support the ideals we believe in. I’m sorry that you disagree with that strategy but we’re entitled to decide who deserves our money.
The either/or is this: either SGK is beset by pressure from right wing groups and caved, like PP says, or it is run by and is a right wing group itself, like RHRC says. And yes, to that extent, Cecile Richards comments are exculpatory to the thesis that SGK is out to kill off PP. Not exculpatory to the extent that they did a good thing.
TBogg!!
So, here’s the thing. Any NPO can make a stupid mistake. And, you hope the errors they make aren’t damaging. Something that can be covered with an Oops! We’re correcting course. Stay tuned. And, people will accept a public Oops. But, there are some errors that are so egregious, and so stupid, that without a rapid retraction, the NPO is deservedly injured. And, they can contemplate that error as they try to undo the damage. There is overlap between SKG and PP. Anyone not fookin’ brain dead – as in flat line – would expect there to be overlap. For those who sit in the intersection of those domains on the Venn diagram, SKG’s decision is an enormous error. And, deserves a response.
Now, I have exactly one item with a pink ribbon. Exactly one. A pair of Sidi cycling shoes. I’d have purchased them without a pink ribbon, and I didn’t purchase them because of the pink ribbon. They fit, they’re comfortable, they’re broken in, and they were expensive. Unlike Pedinska, I’m not throwing them out. I’m just cutting the pink tag off them. Until SKG rethinks its position I am averse to purchasing anything else with a pink ribbon. I eschew pink ribbons. I will actively seek an alternative to anything with a SGK pink ribbon. I will substitute with enthusiasm.
Also,
If it’s a matter of firing some people and strengthening some backbones, and more than anything, doing some battle against the right wing jerks that have been after Planned Parenthood with a vengeance since they decided they were invincible after bringing down ACORN, then we should do that.
What do you think would be the most effective way to instill a little backbone at SGK? Because I think it will only happen if enough people write letters similar to mine informing them that we are going to keep PP alive, in spite of efforts both internal and ex- to their organization.
Pedinska, you’re perfectly entitled to put your money wherever you please. But if PP was hoping to ride this out and go back to getting those $700,000 checks someday, and NPR is right that a lot of people will break it off with SGK over this and possibly sink it, well, you know enough NPO workers to know. I needn’t tell you who ends up having won the doubleheader.
Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones adds a bit more.
Via sysprog:
Celebrity supporters of Komen should be pressured:
http://www.looktothestars.org/charity/534-susan-g-komen-for-the-cure
Here’s my problem. I trust you people, PresumptuousInsect, Pedinska, bystander. I’m also doing 5 hours of sleep for the third night in a row working. As in an organization that raises money and doesn’t ever have enough of it and fails to make budget when public wrath turns off the donations for some reason. It doesn’t affect my salary, I don’t have one, but it affects my efficiency and what I can do a lot. So before I see the full throated “Die! Infidel!” as something good, I need to know SGK can’t be fixed.
And no offense, but about all these articles that scream, “Look! a Bush lover! Look, a wingnut!” If every NPO that had a winger somewhere in their management were sentenced to extinction, people on the street would starve to death, because most of them practice full spectrum hiring and have someone somewhere in the organization that could be the basis of such an article. If they don’t, then they’ve collaborated with an organization that did, or they have board members who worked for Goldman Sachs or something. Part of it is that the same people circulate all the C-Class jobs and boards of big organizations, and part of it is that the NPOs cargo cult these people in hopes of raising funds or proving they are efficiently managed, which is a joke because they aren’t businesses and corporate management experience doesn’t help.
Here’s my problem ondelette. I appreciate the trust you extend in my direction, which is why I am puzzled that you choose to characterize the letters I wrote as full throated “Die! Infidel!”, when I see myself as saying, “Live Planned Parenthood!”
There are two distinct sides to this coin. And GSK has not been honest about what their half of the coin is created from. I choose not to support that. I don’t like organizations that cloak their intentions in misdirection. And I don’t have any qualms in sharing that information when I find it with others I know that feel the same way.
And I would ask you, knowing as you do how groups dependent on good science have been warped from within by appointees who don’t believe in science, good or otherwise, why would you defend an organization that willingly puts anti-science folks into their leadership – policy-making positions, not just somewhere in the organization – when they are supposed to be funding cutting edge research?
Do you really think they won’t have an impact?
ondelette, I understand the point you’re trying to make. It’s a genuinely *decent* point; as in decent human beings make those kinds of points. But, imo, Komen is as much about Komen as it is about a cure. The piece that sat me down and made me think, Okay. Enough. was this one by Mary Elizabeth Williams, who is a cancer survivor herself (melanoma). I’ve been looking to see if Xeni Jardin has weighed in. She was very recently diagnosed with breast cancer. I think these cancer survivors’ opinions have cred.
There’s good and bad in every organization. The stuff they get right and the stuff they simply fuck up. For me, personally, this is less about attacking Komen, although it does do that, but it’s more about defending Planned Parenthood and pushing back against one more difficult to pin dynamic with all of its own built in feedback loops. I’d prefer to nail the individual board member(s) who actually have the responsibility for this policy change at Komen. But, if Komen is going to circle its wagons and defend this policy – whatever their reasons, basis or rationale for the policy change – then, count me in.
I take your point: But if PP was hoping to ride this out and go back to getting those $700,000 checks someday… but I see it more like defending PP when PP isn’t in a good position to defend itself for just that reason.
Truth to tell, the more I learn about Komen, the less I like it as an organization.
Yeah. I’ve seen than maneuver before. Seems like Lance Armstrong sicced his legal eagles on some small groups that crossed into his Livestrong™ yellow bracelets idea. In the end it made him look small, in the same way Komen looks small. I sure wouldn’t want any of my donated $$ going to defend “for the cure.” It’s petty for an organization the size of Komen. And, as someone else observed, this whole dust-up is bad news for Komen in other ways. All manner of semi-clean/dirty laundry is going to get pushed front and center that would have stayed well below radar. They cut off $600K in grants, but it could cost them a lot more. It’s a really stupid business decision; again, I don’t care what their rationale for the policy change was. It was beyond dumb.
Oh, Jeeze…
Heysoos effing marimbas Ondellette . . . you are just SO wrong about this I don’t know where to begin. Komen is and has been run from the inside by religious conservatives since it’s inception . . . their work overseas comes with bibles handed out.
Komen has been known for decades as just yet another non profit run by ambitious people seeking to make a name and a fortune for themselves.
This has been widely reported for a few decades, it was a study case when I was enrolled in PR in the late 80′s/early 90′s.
My advisor and professor, and Ph.D, a former employee directly under Roy and Walt Disney, used it in her classes.
She herself, a cancer survivor, was the first one to teach me about donor dollar to services provided/goods provided as being the ONLY worthwhile measure of a non profit.
Handel, as the diary author and his subject Pedinska point out, is a moral majority pro life anti choice advocate, a LOUD AND VOCAL one, now and during her time as an erected offal.
Komen rewrote their mission guidelines when SHE (Handel) came aboard to exclude Komen funding to PP. Because as YOU know, the HOUSE RETHUGS have been and DESPERATELY WANT to take down PP in any way, manner, or matter they can. So, they as the majority, fabricated an investigation, which Handel then gleefully pounced upon to deny PP Komen funding.
It was malicious, with bad intent to women and their health and their bodies.
It’s fucking plain as day and you just keep screwing the pooch with your jive and misleading activist wanna be rhetoric.
Get the shit straight before you open up your mouth and keyboard, will ya?
Kudos to PresumpInsect and Pedinska . . . n RHCHeck.
Highly rccd people and thank you for your work!!!
No, Ondelette, I’m NOT gonna go find links to support, do yer own backtracking, that stuff’s been around for decades and it’s easily researched.
I’m just calling your shit out, again.
Yer a plague on the truth at times in here . . . especially for GREAT causes and issues you continually seek to belittle one way or another.
Harumph.
Really great letter and blog, thanks!
Thanks, I had not seen Bogg’s diary on that.
Good reading, and supports my contentions about Komen and MOST hi profile non profits and their pure and central intent.
Executive salaries, fundraising expenses to fellow travelers as contractors, a desire to be well known and a ‘player’ in The Veal Pensof non profits, support for and from right wing religious fanatics who themselves are scamming their publics.
Komen, started in ’82, by ’90 we were studying them as a new and NEGATIVE model of non profit management and marketing.
GREAT movie it looks like . . . . hope it goes viral and destroys the faux memes Komen and other non profits have created to deceive their intended service or goods recipients.
Thanks again for that link . . . i also thanked TBogg for his attention to the movie . . . good on him for that . . . I wasn’t so kind to him in a few other posts about this issue lately.
;-)
Ok, the SIMPLEST of all searches.
Wiki.
To QUOTE Wiki:
“However, the organization has been criticized for its use of donor funds, as well as its choice of sponsor affiliations and its role in commercial cause marketing.[11]”
I mean, that’s just a SHELL of the reality and truth.
“n December 2009 Brinker was appointed CEO of the organization.[18] The Komen CEO salary in 2010 was $459,406 a year.[19]”
Brinker being Komen’s (who died in 80) younger sister . . . now worth salary alone, nearly half a mill annual. Oh and Brinker is described as a ‘Repuplican Ambassador’, altho I’m not sure what that means . . . but politically ambitious and appointed folks always serve their masters and their masters values.
It’s also amusing to me that folks just don’t see the connect between the non profit, the message, and the actual actions and outcomes.
In this case, Komen enhances, spreads, and embeds the message that things like mammograms (overuse of them) and such are essential. Let’s not forget, those are XRAYS!!! N the mams and other detection devices and procedures are NOT free from exposure to cellular altering processes . . . so just what exactly is the detection component contributing to the formulation or advancement of the disease at hand?
Where’s the research on that? Not much . . . kapiche?
Now, my wife is a cancer survivor, it was detected and removed early.
But the entire profiteering model of our healthcare is based on detection and cure . . . not a lot of prevention based research is funded by Komen, Inc . . . or their ilk.
Ya see, it’s all part of the system in place . . . money moves upwards, people are motivated by fear to act or donate, n along the way, everyone but the patients and us citizens profit mightily off our fear and misery.
Executives, contractors, and marketing fundraising companies and their executives and think tanks and research firms, they all profit mightily, one way or another.
N the politicians write legislation, grants, and enable it all for their cut, and once (like Handel) out of politics, they become the shills for something that profits them mightily, and they enable things org wise that will somehow profit or support or pay back someone that’s also got cachet in the game.
N their siren calls are always the same, no matter how they couch it.
“Hey, Rube!”
(RIP HST)
N if no FireBagger gets that, how it’s all gamed top to bottom, to remove us from our wallets, then well, you aint no FireBagger.
In the above comment, I neglected to add, my wife and I remain skeptical about the detection phase of her condition.
There are ample cases of folks with detection of ‘things’ that sit there and NEVER become active . . . or in cancer talk, deformed cells that never mutate or gravitate and multiply to become invasive cancer and life threatening.
Are mamms good? We think, yes. Once a year, every two years . .
Should EVERY detection be acted upon immediately? Thru other detection methods and then surg and then chem, pills, or other post surg methodologies?
I ain’t sure, my wife sure as shit ain’t sure, she’s adamant this is covered up turf.
She often wonders if she was scammed just cuz she had great health insurance . . .
N wonders when any of these non profits helped a woman with no money or insurance and kids to support . . . working women, who get sick.
My wife wonders how these non profits ever directly helped the poor and needy . . . I think, she’s smarter than me sometimes in this regard.
Cuz I don’t see much research about that shit, either.
Again, kudos to diary author and his subject, bless ya both and all yers. Good stuff, people, give us more!!!!
“And I doubt that SGK’s funding base will be “destroyed” as I’m sure there are loads of anti-abortion groups who will rise to fill the void.”
The anti-abortion groups DO NOT support anything that is not anti-abortion. There may be some verbal gratitude toward anyone supporting their cause, but money would never go toward supporting a non-fetus health initiative.
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation will be left twisting in the wind in spite of their stand.
I don’t characterize your letter as full throated Die! Infidel! I characterize some of the other reactions that way, and that’s exactly what they are. This isn’t the only column even on FDL running on this topic. And my point in using that phrase is that there seems to be a consensus to kill off the organization. United Way was rife with corruption and it was killed off. But it took a lot of the organizations under its umbrella almost a decade to recover, too.
So decide whether or not we are killing this one or trying to fix it. That isn’t addressed so much to you personally as to the on-off switch crowd here. A lot of funding won’t be there when the switch is set to off. Everybody here will feel quite smug about gittin’ them wingers, but a lot of budgets will tighten and projects will get suspended indefinitely. If that’s still worth it then I accept the judgment of others. I know I’m not having a good time working with 1/4 the staff we used to have and pretending not to remember the previous staff cuts so I can pretend we are only working with 1/2 the staff we used to have.
Really, Larue?
Do you have the slightest idea what point I was trying to make?
Ever work at an NPO? As a volunteer? How many volunteers work at SGK do you think? And do you think that between yesterday, when SGK funded PP and today, when they don’t, those volunteers saw themselves as fundamentally different, and all did a complete switch to the league of the devil? Do you think they all just saw all their fundraising efforts go down the crapper? And what do you think they think of their cause? Or about Planned Parenthood?
You go ahead and slam on the doctrine and bring down the guillotine. To them, and to a lot of people who’ve been in an NPO when a thing like this hit them, it isn’t as fucking crystal clear as it is to you. And they were actually doing something about the cause, not talking about it on a blog.
Try a fucking mile in their shoes, for a change.
Perhaps the volunteers at SGK should reconsider where to invest their time and energy. I don’t question that their intent is to alleviate suffering, but it is not clear that SGK is run in a way to achieve that goal.
What you refuse to see is that the act of SGK cutting off PP for political reasons quite visibly is not in the interest of alleviating suffering. To most of us that observation is self-evident.
From TBogg’s post, in reference to Pink Ribbons, Inc. the upcoming movie on SGK, “In 1940, a woman had a one-in-22 chance of developing breast cancer; today, the number is one in eight”.
Not only are things not getting better, they have gotten a lot worse. Why is that? Might the resources of SGK and other like-minded organizations be better spent? Perhaps those are questions volunteers should be reconsidering for many reasons, the PP decision among them.
Yes, perhaps they should. I’m not refusing to see anything. I can see it, and I will do what is necessary. Including writing my share of angry letters and all the rest. I’m not refusing to see what you want me to see.
Now You see something, please. A lot of funding is going to be lost. The funding you think could be better spent won’t exist for a while. During that while organizations and interests that are very worthwhile will be impacted, and not in a good way.
You might reflect on the fact that the pot of money won’t just get re-allocated like it is sitting there waiting to be redistributed somehow. First it will dwindle as people withdraw their support. The money won’t be there. Volunteers will be shed, staff will be let go, projects will be cancelled or will scramble for funding. There will be a lag period. Budget shortfalls will occur and those will last for some years. And then organizations will pick up the pieces and try to raise the funds again and hopefully get donors to start giving at the previous levels.
So when you say that the volunteers and money and resources should be better spent, you are really not talking about something that can be shifted around like pieces on a monopoly board. Just wanted you to know that. Until you’ve done a few budget meetings at one of these organizations, you haven’t dealt with “Might the resources be better spent?”
The right wing had already won the minute this rupture occurred.
I hear you, ondelette, and thanks for clarifying. I feel your concerns and share them as well. Smug isn’t part of what I feel at all. In fact it makes me sick to think of how mislead folks often are about the underlying currents at some of these organizations.
The crunch in funding is unavoidable unless and until there is some improvement in the economy. Since it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon, if ever, my preference would be to have funding going to organizations that aren’t distorting the science and/or the funding stream for spurious political reasons. And I don’t know how we can affect that except to make our objections heard through whatever means possible when we perceive deception.
I recognize everything that you noted above about the difficulties of that process. I know this because of my work, funding of which is similar in many ways to that process. But the bottom line is that not challenging GSK, or any other org that deceives ends up doing more harm whenever the deception is discovered – and it will be – not just to employees and volunteers but, more importantly, to the people who are impacted by the science that may have been corrupted by the processes engaged in by these orgs.
There are an increasing number of people who believe that a good chunk of the science being done is based on lies and politics. Situations like this one reinforce that perception, especially if no one is seen as working to correct it in some fashion.
You are presuming that how SGK is spending their money is effective. I’m not convinced that is true.