The Cancer Industrial Complex & the Profitable Misery It Causes (Part 2): The American Cancer Society is a Fraud

Paul Cienfuegos’ December 15, 2015 Commentary on KBOO Evening News

 

(His weekly commentaries are broadcast every Tuesday evening. You can view or listen to them all at PaulCienfuegos.com, CommunityRightsPDX.org/podcast, or subscribe via ITunes. Listen to this one HERE.)

 

Greetings! You are listening to the weekly commentary by yours truly, Paul Cienfuegos.

 

Today is my second commentary about what I call the “cancer industrial complex”. Last week I focused on the ongoing scandal of large cancer-causing corporations being major donors and partners to some of the largest and most well endowed nonprofit organizations in the world - those that claim to be battling the cancer epidemic, such as the American Cancer Society and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the Komen Foundation. Today I’m going to focus my outrage on what the American Cancer Society does and does not do with the almost one billion dollars it raises annually.

 

The American Cancer Society is the world’s wealthiest nonprofit organization. But it might as well be a fake nonprofit organization, as it’s “more interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives”, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

 

If you put the words “prevent cancer” into google, what comes up are endless pages of reminders that many cancer deaths could be prevented by making healthy choices like not smoking, staying at a healthy weight, eating right, keeping active, etc. This is all true and important for people to understand. But cancer deaths from poor lifestyle choices are massively overshadowed by another category of cancer deaths that virtually nobody talks about, and that a google search won’t help you find much information about. I am talking about the ongoing poisoning of our air, our water, our food, and our soil – from pharmaceutical corporations, fossil fuel and nuclear energy corporations, automobile corporations, cosmetics corporations, agricultural and food processing corporations, and logging corporations. These industries produce pesticides, herbicides, cosmetics, radiation, fossil fuels, tire dust, and food additives – many of which cause cancer. And many of these same corporations donate massive sums of money to the American Cancer Society year after year.

 

Winning the war on cancer means preventing cancer. But cancer-causing corporations and cancer-treating corporations are multi-billion dollar businesses. Preventing cancer may be good for We the People, but it’s bad for business! So don’t expect the American Cancer Society to focus on preventing cancer anytime soon.

 

And let’s not forget - most of the poisoning that large corporations do is perfectly legal. It’s background normal. Regulatory agencies grant permits which permit so-called safe levels of poison, in parts per million, neatly calculated by so-called experts. It’s business as usual.

 

So the American Cancer Society, in its deal with the devil, focuses very little of its massive endowment on preventing cancer, and almost all of its financial resources and research on detecting cancer, and treating cancer, and surviving cancer, and curing cancer, which if you think about it is a giant scam. Because detecting and treating and surviving and curing cancer is in itself a multi-billion-dollar industry of another whole set of pharmaceutical and mammography and hospital corporations profiting handsomely on peoples' pain and suffering.

 

If we really want to tackle the cancer epidemic in this country, we need to start by doing two things:

1) Ban all corporations from donating to the nonprofit sector, as was once the law in the US until the late 1800’s, and

2) Begin to pass Community Rights laws that strip corporations of their constitutional so-called “right” to poison us.

If we did these two things, we would see an immediate and massive drop in new cancers across this country. So here’s my proposed first tiny little step forward, to begin this urgent effort to wake people up. Listen carefully.

 

Imagine what might happen next year in downtown Portland if dozens or perhaps even hundreds of us converged at the entrance of the annual Relay For Life on Friday, May 13, to help expose the fraud that is the American Cancer Society, which preys on the suffering of those who have cancer or know someone who has cancer - which is almost everyone these days. The Relay For Life is the world’s largest cancer fundraising event. I want you – yes you – the person listening to my voice right now – to contact me today and tell me that you would like to be one of the dozens or perhaps hundreds of participants next year, on Friday, May 13, to educate the participants of this year’s Relay For Life who will once again be wasting their hard-earned money on a fraud. Let’s gently reach out to these thousands of good people with the information they will need to redirect their hard-earned money to a different kind of anti-cancer effort – one that focuses its work primarily on preventing cancer in the first place, by dismantling the corporate state that makes the cancer epidemic inevitable.

 

Will you join me on Friday, May 13 at the entrance to the Relay For Life in downtown Portland? I really mean this. Who will join me? Or perhaps you live elsewhere and would like to set up a similar action at another one of the more than 5000 Relay For Life events across the US. Please contact me, Paul Cienfuegos, via my website at PaulCienfuegos.com. Let me know that you’re with me. Share this commentary with your friends and neighbors and get them to contact me too. Let’s do this! Thank you.

 

Next week, I’ll be talking about Dr. Samuel Epstein and other heroes who have been bravely challenging the cancer industrial complex for decades.

 

You’ve been listening to the weekly commentary by yours truly, Paul Cienfuegos. You can hear future commentaries every Tuesday on the KBOO Evening News in Portland, Oregon, and on a growing number of other radio stations. I welcome your feedback.

 

You can subscribe to my weekly podcast via I-Tunes or at CommunityRightsPDX.org. You can sign up for my ‘Community Rights Updates’ at PaulCienfuegos.com. You can follow me on twitter at CienfuegosPaul. THANKS FOR LISTENING! And remember: WE are the people we’ve been WAITING for.

 



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