WSJ Roundtable Revisited
I must say I’ve learned a ton about how some of RAN’s naysayers justify their stances. Global Finance Director Ilyse Hogue, Competitive Enterprise Institute founder Fred Smith and GE Senior VP for law and public affairs Benjamin Heinemann participated in a Wall Street Journal roundtable on Monday (via email) that clued me into a whole mess of opinions and theories I’d only heard about. For those of you who don’t know, CEI is a rather harsh critic of RAN and openly claims global warming and CO2 emissions a bunch of hooey. Meanwhile, GE with it’s latest launch of Ecomagination has shown it’s willing to take the needed first steps that will move business and technology to the next level when it comes to ecological balance. Fred Smith (we’ll call him Freddie) chastised Heinemann (H-Mann) and GE for joining the global warming alarmists and then went on to say…
GE (and Ben, I guess) get treated better at NYC cocktail parties and they get an occasional back-handed complement in the PC-literature, but does this diversion into secondary justifications for the great work that GE has done do anything more than that?
Youch. Zing. I guess you could say Freddie is letting H-Mann know that he’s not pleased with the way GE took the criticism around their dumping PCBs into the Hudson and turned it into Ecomagination.
One quote I found interesting was from Freddie’s argument that if everything was privatized (owned) we wouldn’t have any environmental problems.
In my view, a better concept of CSR [corporate-social responsibility] would be for businesses to work together to promote institutions that would allow the private sector to play a more responsible role. As an example, the oil industry works cooperatively with landowners and other to find and produce petroleum efficiently. That desirable outcome is made possible only because the oil resource, like other underground mineral resources, has become private property. In contrast, underground water (aquifers) is at risk everywhere – it is more vulnerable to pollution (the equivalent in the oil field is pressure loss and illegal drilling), it cannot be regrouped into more efficiently managed units…and water is everywhere becoming an increasingly scarce resource…unlike oil.
Huh? First of all, Freddie’s right: oil isn’t becoming a scarce resource, it is one. Secondly, this statement says a lot about how market liberalists justify their theory that the free-market can solve all of our problems. Freddie’s premise is such: if everyone did own natural resources (including the water, heck, even the air) then at least someone feels they have responsibility to keep it clean, healthy, in working order. And these owners would go to the end of the earth to see that their "product" isn’t polluted or ruined, not because it would harm their health but because it would harm their bottom line, afterall how are you going to sell water if its got arsenic it? Here’s the problem with that premise: it assumes a buyer’s utopia (i.e. the buyer no longer has "to beware" since what kind of seller would try to swindle a fellow human being out of the earth’s second most-precious natural resource?). The problem, as we all know, is that human beings aren’t wired that way. Someone, at some point is going to try to make a profit by selling arsenic laden water, and our history is full of similar examples.
And if water is "an increasingly scarce resource" who will divy it up when we start to run out? Those who own it? When resources become scarce they become expensive and when only the wealthy have access those in the middle and below don’t. Governments, the collective bodies that we voted into power, should retain the right to keep privatization out of our last remaining natural resources. More coming on the debate in a little while….
3 Responses to “WSJ Roundtable Revisited”
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December 7th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
Amen! It’s encouraging to see more and more people talk about the absurdity of privatizing our precious water supplies. Communities across the U.S. and the world–from Lexington, KY to Felton, CA–are organizing to maintain water as a public trust. The Water for All Campaign at Food and Water Watch works with these communities to strengthen the movement for Water Democracy. Stay tuned to http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org as we prepare to launch our new website in January!
December 8th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
One thing I agree with Freddie on is that corporations’ sole responsibility is to maximize shareholder profit. That’s exactly why civil society must hold corporations to higher standards. The sad reality today, however, is that Corporations in fact operate under LOWER standards than average citizens. And that’s exactly why organizations like RAN and Food and Water Watch are necessary. Otherwise, why hasn’t former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson been extradited to India to face justice for 3000 deaths in the Bhopal chemical spill? Why is the only recourse to get GE to clean up its PCB dumping in the Hudson River a lawsuit by the US Government?
Citizens are supposed to follow the laws of the land or face the consequences. Corporations, on the other hand, are not, unless the public holds them accountable.
January 13th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Hope my response is not too late. Thought I’d add some info and thoughts about CSR – and global finance.
I recently discovered that the World Resources Institute has had a program for years to try to change the MBA education system to train students about sustainability and green issues. Checking out their website, I discovered that their ranking program “Beyond Grey Pinstripes” had listed Stanford U. School of Business as the top school recently.
I checked their website to explore how this might be evident. Although courses seemed to go by standard titles, the university had this fall hosted a Net Impact Conference with Al Gore as the keynote speaker. Most notable was their Center for Social Innovation http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/csi/index.html . One feature article in a recent CSI review “The Myth of CSR: the problem with assuming that companies can do well while also doing good is that markets don’t really work that way â€? by Deborah Dione noted that CSR lulls us in to a false sense of security, is really a “placebo, leaving us with immense and mounting challenges in globalization for the foreseeable futureâ€?.
In her report she includes the Corporation 20/20 Draft Principles (http://forums.seib.org/corporation2020/), a project to redesign the corporation. (if interested, you can still download a copy of the complete article from the CSI website).
Another, hopeful, voice is Raymond Baker of the Brookings Institute, who recently spoke at the World Affairs council and wrote “Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System”. He got an MBA from Harvard in the 60s and has spent most of his life in Africa and third world countries; noting the stability and hope of the Peace Corps heyday in the 60s, he contracts a very dangerous world now with corrupt leaders around the world and in banking institutions – like Citibank. He thinks we can clean up capitalism (tho a big job now). He deals well with social issues, but did not focus lots on environmental issues.
There seem to be a going openness to healthy criticism. Hopefully the Fred Smiths of the planet will wake up soon.