Holy cancerous chemicals, it’s Pink Fracking. The color pink and its connection to breast cancer awareness has been co-opted - like so many other things - by that touch of greed that often haunts capitalism. Breast cancer pink turned to Corporate Pink when the ad guys realized people would buy, if a piece of the pie was charitized... oh me... oh my. More and more products go pink from chicken buckets to T-shirts, but “Pink Fracking”? Come on.
The toxic cocktail injected into Mother Earth during hydraulic fracturing - or fracking - for fossil fuel has a boatload of known carcinogens. For the second year, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer charity has entered into a devil’s partnership with the oil field services industry, Baker Hughes. The company will donate $100,000 to Komen while it sells 1,000 pinkly painted fracking drill bits. The $100,000 seems generous until you realize the deep coffers of the company and that it can cost $125,000 for one year of treatment for a single breast cancer patient.
It’s not the first time the charity has been taken to task. In 2012, there was massive outrage when the charity defunded Planned Parenthood. Buying pink probably won’t cure breast cancer and hydraulic fracturing will probably create more and more cancer patients.
Mother Jones:
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/10/fracking-susan-g-komen-drill-bits
Here’s the sad but funny Daily Show take:
http://grnpc.org/IgewP