Hi everyone,

Before we get too worried about how CSR is leaving the poor behind while it saves the environment and society, let's remember how limited CSR will be at achieving anything other than profit maximization.  

Corporations are accountable to shareholders: the people who own them, the people whose investments, whose property they constitute.  They are not accountable to the environment, society, the poor or anyone else for that matter.  And if corporate directors tried acting like they were, then they could get sued by their shareholders, as did Henry Ford.  Read up on how Dodge Motor Co got its initial funding.

Much as I (and many others) wish that large corporations were more broadly accountable, they just aren't.  If you don't beleive me, then read Bakan, "The Corporation", or Micklethwait and Wooldridge, "The Company", depending on your political bent (left or right respectively).  For that matter read Chomsky or Friedman.

If we want change, we can't wait for corporations to deliver.  We either have to change the structure of business corporation, or replace them with public-interest organizations, like cooperatives and publicly-owned enterprises.

Cheers,
Dave

Yes, indeed, the sustainability agenda needs to do a better job addressing issues around "corporate economic responsibility," and the quick guide to equity from John Elkington and Mark Lee certainly makes a great place to start.

But one aspect of our contemporary corporate scene seems glaringly missing from their four-point equity rundown (fair trade, fair wages, fair pricing, and fair taxes), and that's the incredibly destructive concentration of rewards at the tip of our corporate summit.

Apologists for hideously excessive CEO pay packages say we critics don't understand the value of incentives. We understand incentives alright. To grab grotesquely huge rewards, CEOs will behave grotesquely. They'll outsource and downsize. They'll skirt existing environmental regs and fight like hell to stop new ones. They'll cook the books and cheat on their corporate taxes.

Sustainability is all about setting limits. That ought to include limits on incomes at the top.

I'm no economist, but from my right-brain perspective as a design firm owner and my first-hand experience at the bottom of the stock market food chain, it seems that expecting capitalism and social conscience to play nice together is like expecting the lion and lamb to make it past lunch together. Capitalism offers a little something for Everyman only to the extent that doing so keeps a fresh supply of suckers on the bottom rung. Wealth, if shared, is often done so with a feeling that it's a drawback of an imperfect system.

Socialism isn't any better with inherent de-motivators for everyone. So what's the answer? A brand new system: Socialwealthism. I just made that up. But c'mon. Let's redefine wealth by the global good it creates not by the number of acres or size of homes it can buy! Let's put an end to the reluctant or tardy creation of foundations because amassing so many millions or billions begins to appear impolite. Let's put a company's contribution to global good at the top of the list of reasons to buy stock in it. Even old-school CEOs could learn a new trick that way.

Not unlike the cause of changing the effects on our environment through the use of different fuel, we can change the effects of our capitalism through the use of a different vision among our wealth advisors. Al Gore is setting the investment vision example. Now, if only he could persuade the current crop of wealth advisors to be the world's heroes.