Clara Jeffery

Susan G. Komen founder Nancy Brinker

On Friday, day three of Susan G. Komen's mission/PR clusterf*ck, the group announced it was reversing its decision to defund Planned Parenthood. Well, sort of. What Komen reversed was the claim that PPFA had been blackballed because it was under investigation. The question of PPFA getting further funding is left open until the next grant cycle. Can meet road.

This non-reversal reversal was just the latest example of terrible crisis communications that compounded what was a mind-blowingly stupid decision to begin with. How did Komen come to such a terrible decision? (Hint.) Once made, why did they let Planned Parenthood frame it? Why did they wait almost two full days after the story broke—meanwhile hemorrhaging advisory board members, chapters, corporate sponsors, donors, and enduring poignant disappointment at the hands of Andrea Mitchell and Judy Blume fer Christ's sake—before even attempting to control the damage?

These mysteries have all been much pondered, and I won't do so here again. The question now before Komen is: Can it regain the trust of all those women and men who ran 5Ks and bought boatloads of pink stuff in the belief that this was the best way to ensure breast cancer research, screenings, and treatment?

The answer to that question, as to all the previous ones, lies with the board.

Source: Susan G. Komen 2009-2010 Annual ReportLet me stipulate: I've long had mixed feelings about Komen. Years ago, I edited Barbara Ehrenreich's "Welcome to Cancerland," so I was well versed in "pinkwashing," i.e. corporations donating a miniscule fraction of money earned from peddling stuff adorned with Komen's pink ribbon to cancer research, or holding a run (after which less than half of the proceeds go to "the cause," pre-overhead) rather than, say, providing decent health care to workers or keeping toxins out of water supply. I was also aware that Komen had threatened to sue other charities for daring to use "for the cure" in their marketing. That Komen had denied the link between BPA and cancer (while taking in lots of money from BPA makers and users) and generally prioritized "treatment" and "the cure" over "prevention." But hey, Komen did "raise awareness," and when you're talking about a disease that afflicts 1 out of every 8 American women, maybe you take the good with the bad, right?

I knew too that the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure™ had purposefully strived for a nonpartisan image (despite the fact that founder/CEO Nancy Brinker was a major Bush funder and ambassador) and that part of that was staying on the sidelines about issues of choice. A perfectly reasonable course.

But the board abandoned neutrality when, as part of a larger attack on Planned Parenthood that began with the antics of conservative pseudo-journalist James O'Keefe, pro-life groups began targeting Komen for their Planned Parenthood grants. They were assisted from the inside by new Senior VP for Public Policy Karen Handel, who'd recently run for governor of Georgia on a pro-life and stridently anti-Planned Parenthood platform, and further guided by Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer*. [Update: Handel finally fell on her sword and resigned on Feb. 7.]

But all attention that's been paid to the Handel/Fleischer deus ex machina, however, misses the greater culprit: a sucky board.

What do I mean?

The board of directors (not to be confused with Komen's multitudinous advisory boards) currently has nine members. There's Nancy Brinker, who founded Susan G. Komen in the name of her sister, who died of breast cancer. Brinker is a major mover and shaker in Dallas GOP circles, and a former major bundler, a.k.a. "Pioneer," for George W. Bush. Also on the board is Brinker's son Eric. Then there's Dallas socialite/philanthropist/GOP donor/oil baroness/Junior Leaguer Linda Custard, who chairs the board of the elite Hockaday prep school (once attended by G.W. Bush's daughters), and serves as a trustee for Southern Methodist University (eventual home to the G.W. Bush Library). Connie O'Neill has a similar portfolio; she notably serves on the school district finance committee of the uber tony Highland Park (the most enthusiastically conservative zip code in the country), as well as the Crystal Charity ball, which is ne plus ultra in the world of rich Texas Republicans (and where O'Neill was coincidentally named one of Dallas' ten best dressed women). Also in the rich Republicans camp is corporate real estate law firm founder (and Silicon Valley VC) Linda Law, who's a Republican National Committee Regent, meaning a $250,000+ donor. 

But wait, there are a few Democrats, including former Nine West executive Brenda Lauderback, who made some modest donations to Obama but is also notable for the number of boards she serves on (Bloomberg Businessweek links her to 51 board members in five different organizations across six different industries). Fellow Obama donor, oncologist Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall Jr., is co-chair of the board, and the only medical professional on it. A bigger Dem donor is lobbyist John D. Raffaelli, whose firm Capital Counsel LLC helps both GOP and Dem causes; he was also the counsel for tax and international trade to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.). Finally there's the only board member without any track record of political donation: breast cancer survivor, longtime Komen foot soldier, and VP at a hospital consulting service, Elyse Gellerman, whose job is to represent the Komen affiliates.

But my point isn't about who's a Republican and who's a Democrat. The point is that Komen is a giant grant-making operation (nearly $2 billion since 1982) that purports to represent all of womanhood and it's being run as if it were still a small family foundation. Brinker and son, Custard, and O'Neill all run in the same circles, sit on the same boards, send their kids to the same elite schools. Komen's board makes a nod to race (both Lauderback and Leffal are African-American), a nod to medicine, and a nod to someone with pull in DNC circles, but the core is a group of rich, Texan, conservative friends.

There should be more racial and economic and regional diversity, to be sure. But Komen should, and must now if it wants to regain trust, bring on board members who will challenge the way Komen has done business. Like downplaying environmental factors that would be problematic for corporate sponsors. Like being less than honest with runners and ribbon-buyers about how little of the money raised in those events actually goes to research or treatment.

Board members don't run the day-to-day operations, but they should be (and were) consulted on controversial decisions and they do step in when an organization is in crisis. It's not likely, but the board's best move would be to reform itself. Enlist people like Ehrenreich, tech-goddess Xeni Jardin (who's been chronicling her fight with breast cancer), and Dr. Susan Love, a leading researcher who's been critical of Komen's lack of effort toward prevention. Andrea Mitchell wouldn't hurt either. If you can't or won't put them on the board, make sure you somehow capture their POVs. 

New energy might, for example, persuade the board that it's time to change the balance between money spent on treatment (7%), screening (15%), research (24%), and "education" (34%). Two decades ago, it was of utmost importance to get women to get over the fear and the shame and into the doctor's office, to go public with scars and wigs and hot flashes. But mission accomplished, Komen. Now it's time to put more weight into stopping the disease before it starts. Dig deep enough into Komen's financial statements, and you'll find that of the 24 percent they spend on research, only 15 percent goes to explore how to prevent the disease. Pharmaceutical companies probably do a pretty good job of finding new and better chemo drugs; a nonprofit should put more of its clout into research without a near-term financial payoff.

New insight might also help the board to grok that if they want to maintain a fig leaf of impartiality in the abortion debate and they bring on Jane Abraham—head of the Susan B. Anthony List; the most powerful pro-life funding group around—to their "advocacy alliance" board, they'd better enlist someone like Stephanie Schriock of pro-choice group Emily's List as a countermeasure. And a board more savvy to opinions outside of Highland Park might persuade Brinker she should sit back on her Neiman Marcus/Chili's fortune and not pay herself $417,000 a year plus board-approved first-class travel from the donations of jogging bald ladies and their family members. 

And for god's sake, get a better crisis communications team. Or at least a head of communications that has more than 154 followers on Twitter.

*This article has been corrected to reflect the fact that Fleischer advised on hiring of other Komen VPs, not Handel.

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A few weeks after the Occupy Wall Street protests began, we found ourselves having a random conversation with a couple of San Franciscans at a store counter. What were these kids going on about? they asked. Time was tight, the inquiry a pleasantry, really. Best to keep it simple. "Jobs, the economy, income inequality." Well, one offered, he knew the wife of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, and according to him, the reason companies aren't hiring is because they are worried about the extra cost of Obama's health care reform.

Stunned silence.

Because what can you really say to that, except…let them eat cake? Stumpf made $17.6 million in 2010—672 times what the average American takes home. And say what you will about Obamacare, but for large companies that already offer health benefits, it imposes pretty much zero costs and might even save money.

But why single out Stumpf, who actually sounds fairly cuddly for a bank CEO? (His hobby is baking bread, for Christ's sake.) Let's turn instead to John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager who unctuously admonished Occupy protesters: "Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City and continue to grow." Or how about the homeless-themed Halloween party thrown by an upstate New York foreclosure mill? Or the financier David Moore, who, having been dressed down by a panhandler for proffering only a dollar, took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages to bray about Obama's class-warfare rhetoric: "The president's incendiary message has now reached the streets. His complaints that rich people must 'pay their fair share' have now goaded some of our society's most unfortunate."

Are all of the 1 percent so unmoored from the concerns of ordinary people? We've asked friends in high finance how their colleagues feel about the Occupy protests. Some, we're told, see them as hacky-sacking WTO wannabes, but a more insightful contingent regards the movement as akin to Europe's anti-austerity demonstrations: the understandable yet futile raging of people stranded by the shifting tides of the global economy.

This is a sentiment worth interrogating a bit, for it is a popular one among the Davos class. Sorry, American and European masses: We know you liked secure jobs that paid a living wage and held the promise of a cat-food-free retirement. But, well, that was then. The things you used to make are made elsewhere; now the knowledge economy the pundits wax about has gone global too. You're up against a lot of bright kids in Beijing, Bangalore, and Brasília, and know what? You can't compete.

There's some truth to this. But let's keep in mind that, globalization notwithstanding, the US economy is far wealthier now than it was a couple of decades ago—our GDP per capita is up 24 percent (PDF) just since 1995. The problem is not scarcity; it's that a tiny number of players get rewarded no matter how badly they screw up. Recall that one of the things that gave Occupy Wall Street escape velocity was Bank of America's decision to slap a $5-per-month fee onto everyone's debit card—just as it handed a pair of hapless executives golden parachutes to the tune of $11 million.

"Let me give you a hint that will save you countless hours and millions of dollars spent on consultants and the public relations morons you keep on staff," observed investment adviser Joshua Brown, who blogs at The Reformed Broker. "This is why they hate you. You want to roll your eyes and make snide remarks about 'dumb college kids' and 'socialists'? Go ahead, but you're missing the point. Because it is the small business owner who's really been wronged here, not the fringe elements you mockingly dismiss. The business owner whose losses are not socialized like yours, the business owner without the government in his pocket, the business owner who is forced to play by the rules that you have paid to have written. He's not a hippie, he's not a Marxist…but he's waking up, dummy."

Waking up to what, exactly? In chronicling Occupy Wall Street, it struck us that the protesters, the passersby, and even the cops weren't just pissed about being permanently gated off from the spoils of the über-rich. Oh no. What they were really pissed about is that the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington." You didn't have to spend long at the edge of Zuccotti Park before you heard the phrase Citizens United, as folks who'd come to see the camp from New Jersey, Texas, and Montana began to contemplate the connection between their anemic bank accounts and political decisions that line the pockets of those already most advantaged.

Americans are not opposed to the rich getting richer—as John Steinbeck is said to have noted, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." But this prospect only satisfies so long as people believe that with luck and hard work, their ship, or at least their kids' ship, may some day come in. In a system overrun by piracy—a system in which the pirates also, sorry to stretch the metaphor, run the Navy—the dream becomes hard to sustain.

The 1 percent have always had outsize influence, but not since the robber-baron era have they been able to throw their weight around so exuberantly. Our lawmakers might as well wear NASCAR-type logos signaling their corporate sponsors. And you can kiss judicial propriety goodbye when Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dine with the law firm challenging Obamacare on the very day the Supreme Court decides to take the case. That's the selfsame court that cannot brook any restriction on the amount a company (er, person) chooses to spend to influence elections, the selfsame Congress that conveniently can't stomach the most elementary disclosure rules.

Case in point: Campaign spending by the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors has grown about eightfold since 1990 and reached $500 million for the '08 election. On one hand, that sounds like real money; on the other, it's only what Bank of America earns in a week. In any case, it's one of Wall Street's safest bets: Big Finance invests in politicians who enable it to play ever riskier games with other people's money, generating ever more fantastical returns, a tiny portion of which is invested back in political giving, which further cements a favorable regulatory environment…a perfect self-sustaining cycle.

And now, the decades-long crusade by the brightest minds of Washington to turn back the post-Watergate election laws (prompted by oh, say, Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas stuffing $100,000 in an unmarked envelope for Richard Nixon) has finally triumphed. Brace yourself: The Koch brothers and their fellow gazillionaires are about to make Andreas look like a Boy Scout. When people feel screwed economically and see no redress politically, guess what happens? Boston shopkeepers dump tea in the harbor. Mobs roam the streets of 1863 New York City shouting, "There goes a $300 man!"—the amount wealthy draftees paid to send a poor kid to be cannon fodder in their stead. The Bonus Army encamps in Washington. The petulant wealthy would also do well to remember that part of what precipitated the French Revolution was the nobility's réfus, in the face of desperate pleas from Louis XVI, to consider paying taxes at a time when large portions of the crushingly taxed citizenry were literally starving.

The revolution that preceded that one—ours—sprang from the insight that a just government derives its power from the consent of the governed. And if the Occupy movement has accomplished nothing else, it's provided a vehicle for many people to consider whether anyone actually bothered to obtain their consent before eliminating the basic safeguards of democracy. While the media and political professionals fixated on the movement's lack of demands, they missed the real story. It wasn't about demands; it was about diagnosis.

The occupations provided a catalyst, but the most interesting conversations haven't taken place in the camps via the human mic. They've happened among the millions of people who found that kids in tents were quite effectively articulating their own sense of abandonment. What comes next is the question that should occupy us in 2012, and beyond.

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