This October marks 20 years of Breast Cancer Action’s Think Before You Pink campaign. In the past BCA has called out “pinkwashers” from all over the map. To mark 20 years BCA takes on the biggest monster of all, capitalism. The machine fueling much of what Breast Cancer Action works against.
From the BCA, “Rampant, unregulated capitalism both causes breast cancer and encourages profiteering from the disease.
The practices and tactics of bloated pink ribbon capitalism are designed to encourage unlimited profiteering, not the structural change solutions that will end the breast cancer crisis. Think Before You Pink’s 20-year legacy of calling out pinkwashing provides an invaluable inlet into identifying and disrupting deceptive marketing tactics and profit-driven campaigns that are implemented performatively only, in the name of social justice causes, but have one true motive: profit.
The prioritization of profit above all else – including public health – exacerbates health inequities and worsens health outcomes, including increasing our risk for breast cancer.
How Capitalism Encourages Profiteering from Breast Cancer
The industry tactics we’re exposing are the Manipulation of Media, Marketing, and Advertising, Disinformation and the Suppression of Scientific Evidence, and Political Influence and Interference.
The Manipulation of Media, Marketing, and Advertising
Cause marketers exploit the constituencies they claim to serve (such as people living with breast cancer), turning harsh human realities into a saleable commodity. Direct-to-consumer advertising by Big Pharma plays to the hopes and fears of ailing individuals by presenting biased, over-simplified information focused on possible outcomes while ignoring or downplaying the seriousness of side effects.
Disinformation and the Suppression of Scientific Evidence
For-profit corporations have been found to suppress scientific information that links their products to increased breast cancer risk, so that they can continue to grow their profits. Worse yet, the regulatory agencies that are tasked with monitoring these corporations often turn a blind eye to these practices as capitalism has metastasized to normalize profit as the ultimate goal, ignoring community safety, public health, and the right to live free of toxic environmental exposures.
Political Influence and Interference
Under capitalism in this country, corporate stakeholders can be appointed to regulatory agencies, and people from regulatory agencies often leave to become lobbyists for the corporate sector they once regulated. This “revolving door” practice is illegal in many countries but it thrives under capitalism. This often leads to “regulatory capture” which occurs when an agency that exists to serve public interest instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups within an industry.
Pink Ribbon Marketing Has Evolved
Now it’s bigger than pink post-its, pink ribbon perfume, and pink personal care products. Industry tactics have evolved. Pink ribbon marketing campaigns have become less blatant and their deceptive marketing strategies can be harder to spot.
But our Think Before You Pink® campaign has evolved as well. Think Before You Pink: A (R)Evolution doesn’t just call out one specific pink product. We’re calling out gross, profit-above-all-else capitalism as the common denominator throughout two decades of our Think Before You Pink® campaigns.
Twenty years ago we launched our first-ever Think Before You Pink® campaign “Who’s Really Cleaning Up?” directed at Eureka Vacuum’s pink ribbon cause-marketing campaign. Now, in our 20th anniversary campaign, we’ve evolved and we’re asking, “Who’s Really Capitalizing?” on the tactics employed across pink ribbon marketing culture, and how?
Pink ribbon marketing culture and pinkwashing have paved the way for the commodification of other social justice issues, as cause-marketing is running amok under capitalism. Whether it’s pinkwashing, greenwashing, or rainbow-washing, capitalist campaigns worship consumerism as the solution to the social justice causes with which we are grappling, and distract from true, structural change solutions.
The Revolution We’re Calling For
We’re exposing how uncontrolled capitalism causes breast cancer and encourages profiteering from the disease. The prioritization of profit above all else is responsible for exacerbating the climate crisis, the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry creating toxic exposures across the fossil fuel continuum, the environmental racism causing that results in breast cancer disparities, and the ability of corporations to continue to poison our products with cancer-causing chemicals. The increase in breast cancer risk caused by each of these injustices is downplayed so that mega-nonprofits, corporations, executives, and shareholders can continue to line their pockets.
While corporations make billions off the disease, we have not seen nearly enough progress in breast cancer treatment, prevention, survival, and inequities.
Dismantling the systems that enable profit-driven pinkwashing calls for radical structural change, and it means working toward our organizational vision: a world in which people and communities thrive because they are healthy, liberated, and free from breast cancer.
Throughout Think Before You Pink: A (R)Evolution, join us to:
Educate.
We’ll be releasing educational materials and resources throughout October so you can learn more about how rampant, late-stage capitalism encourages profiteering off of breast cancer.
Organize.
Help spread the word on the consequences of pinkwashing and share our resources with your community, including our newly-revised Think Before You Pink® toolkit.
Take Action.
Attend our October member connector event, Radical Disruption Compassionate Resistance, and stay tuned to take action on our campaign!”
You can learn more about Breast Cancer Action here.
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As you’re hopefully aware, midterm elections are approaching. If you read my website regularly, we probably agree that politically things in the United States are not great. Now it is more important than ever to be an informed participant in all our elections, from local to national. There are many organizations that keep tabs on assorted political issues, and today I want to bring 
This is a riveting autobiography that let’s American readers learn a few things about our neighbors to north; Canadians, particularly the politicians, can be just as big of puritanical hypocrites as any United States citizen, and they’re justice system suffers from much the same horrible flaws as ours. Yes, Canada has some issues despite tighter gun laws and better healthcare coverage. Terri-Jean Bedford outlines her life from her beginnings in poverty, to successful dominatrix, to years of legal proceedings that ultimately changed prostitution laws in Canada.
Zimbabwe is at a crossroads. After eight years of oppression under the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) regime, president Robert Mugabe is forcibly ousted from power in the military coup of November 2017. When Mugabe was removed from power, Zimbabwean military leaders promised they would not seize control for themselves, but rather ensure democracy in a national general election. In the context of an economic crisis, food shortages and political violence, the stakes could not be higher. 
Nearly a third of all survey respondents from their subsample reported perceiving religious discrimination at some point in their working tenure. A larger proportion of Muslim (63 percent) and Jewish (52 percent) respondents reported religious discrimination compared with other religious groups. Additionally, perceptions of religious discrimination varied within Christian subgroups, with 36 percent of evangelical Protestants, 24 percent other Christian/other Protestants, and roughly 20 percent of Catholics and mainline Protestants each reporting religious discrimination. A little more than one quarter of all nonreligious respondents perceived religious discrimination in the workplace. It is also worth noting that respondents who perceived religious discrimination at work often reported other forms of discrimination tied to their social location. Of the 27 percent of people who reported experiencing religious discrimination, 24 percent reported experiencing one or more other forms of discrimination in the workplace. This was especially true for Muslim and Jewish respondents, of whom 60 percent and 44 percent reported experiencing other forms of discrimination, respectively.
One of the examples:
I just received a press release from 
Greer does an excellent job explaining the primary division amongst Americans as being investment class, salary class, wage class, and welfare class. Your experience of America is greatly based on where you fall in these categories, with the investment and salary classes being catered to and the wage class and welfare class being left to fend for themselves. It is a more refined version of the “problems with the vanishing middle class” concern that politicians bandy about and that many Americans are actually experiencing. Everyone gets an opinion on why Trump won in 2016, and Greer’s is that the wage class was motivated by promises of bringing jobs back to the United States. A new generation Jim Carville’s, “It’s the economy stupid.” “The King in Orange” spends a great deal of time exploring Greer’s thoughts on the mundane reason for the Trump victory, which also include bring soldiers home and the wage class’s struggle with Obamacare. 
As the pandemic continues to affect the global economy, Christian History magazine dedicates its latest issue to exploring how Christians have influenced economic life. In this issue, Christian History examines how, in past centuries, individuals and church leaders founded financial and trading institutions that are essential industries and taken for granted today. As contained in Biblical accounts, Christians found a higher purpose in the market and influenced complexities that define the world’s marketplace and global economies. (from their press release)
Cost is one factor people sometimes don’t consider in the debate over the death penalty. The complexity of seeking it and carrying out an execution is a long and expensive process. Many capital cases are appealed, and incarceration on death row can span 10, 15 or 20 or more years. And with capital punishment costs imposing a burden on state government budgets that are already stretched, it’s more cost-effective to commute death penalties to life imprisonment without parole.
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