Corporate Watchdog Radio co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon speak with John Elkington, author of
The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World. Elkington explains how social entrepreneurs use business strategies, such as scaling and replicability, to help solve social and environmental problems. He also discusses how this book finishes his trilogy, starting with
Cannibals with Forks from 1997 that coined the term "triple bottom line" for measuring social, environmental, and economic progress and
The Chrysalis Economy that predicts a 30-year period of creative destruction for business. Elkington founded the UK consultancy SustainAbility in 1987, which helped define the term "sustainability," and recently received a grant to support its work on social entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation and also received a
Fast Company Social Entrepreneur Award.
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The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World
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John Elkington.com
Fast Company Social Entrepreneur Awards
Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship
On this, the last-ever episode of Corporate Watchdog Radio, we take a stroll down memory lane to revisit the best moments in CWR's history. The exchanges that had us on the edge of our seats, straining into our headphones to hear every syllable. We hear from a crotchety Barney Frank, a reflective Frances Moore Lappe, a tentative but ultimately optimistic Bill McKibben, a hopeful George Monbiot, and an eloquent Paul Hawken. Starting in 2009, CWR is changing its name to Sea Change Radio to cover the shift to social, environmental, and economic sustainability.
Over the weekend, President-Elect Barack Obama appointed John Holdren as his Science Adviser, a move applauded by many environmentalists. Holdren is director of the Woods Hole Research Center and teaches at Harvard. Corporate Watchdog Radio has featured him twice. We aired part of his opening address at the 2008 UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk. And in September 2006, he talked with us about the pros and cons of nukes as a low-carbon solution to the climate crisis. This week, we reprise these shows to give a sense of Holdren's opinions.
CWR News Analysis: Nick Robins of HSBC Analyzes the Poznan Climate Talks and the EU Climate Legislation -- Listen
As head of the Climate Change Centre for Excellence at the major UK bank HSBC, Nick Robins attended the recent climate talks in Poznan, Poland. This was the last step for the Kyoto Protocol before talks in Copenhagen in late 2009 negotiate post-Kyoto climate agreements. And, as world leaders met in Poznan, European Union Commissioners hammered out new climate legislation. Robins, co-author with Cary Krosinsky of the new book Sustainable Investing, weighs in on these as well from the HSBC offices in the UK.
CWR ViewPoint: Real or Fake -- Christmas Tree, That Is! Listen
Today's show focuses on the intersection between sustainability and war -- sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? Eugene Jarecki, author of The American Way of War, certainly thinks so. Jarecki explains to CWR Co-Host Francesca Rheannon how the mission of the military, to protect and defend the United States, gets subordinated to the enrichment of military contractors.
Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes, co-author with Joseph Stiglitz of The Three Trillion Dollar War, discusses her blog post this week about the report issued by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. She says it calls the US reconstruction effort in Iraq "a massive, unmitigated fiasco and waste of taxpayer money."
On December 10, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calling on member country governments to promote the UDHR. Now, on the Declaration’s 60th anniversary, responsibility for promoting human rights protections has expanded to include the business community. The UN codified this link in 2005 when it issued a mandate for a Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, and this year it extended the appointment of Harvard Professor John Ruggie to the post for another three years. The year 2005 also saw the launch of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre as a web platform covering both positive and negative news on corporate conduct around human rights. Today, we speak with Annabel Short, Head of Programme at the Resource Centre, about its innovative work promoting improvements in companies' policies and practices on human rights.
In October, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre launched the world's first online portal profiling human rights lawsuits against companies. We caught up with the Resource Centre's Head of Research Greg Regaignon from its California offices to describe the Corporate Legal Accountability Portal.
We’re excited about our new commentary partnership with Human Rights Watch. We inaugurate this collaboration today with the opinion of HRW’s director of the Business and Human Rights Program Arvind Ganesan.
The 18th century British author Jonathan Swift wrote that under the enclosure movement in Britain, "sheep eat men". That's because large landowners threw thousands of tenant farmers off their land to make way for raising sheep on an industrialized scale, in order to feed the textile mills of the new industrial age. Something of the same could be said of our current system of producing food. It was supposed to solve the problem of hunger in the world. The so-called "green revolution", with its massive use of herbicides and pesticides, did usher in the era of cheap, abundant food. But Paul Roberts says that era is coming to an end. In his book, The End of Food, Roberts says the technologies meant to end hunger don't fit the conditions in the very countries they were supposed to feed. Small farmers are squeezed off the land, their families go hungry, and suicide sweeps their ranks. Rich countries are vulnerable, too. In a globalized food system, plant diseases could wipe out major food crops like wheat, fish stocks are crashing, and antibiotic resistance threatens both our meat animals--and ourselves. Roberts says the global industrialized food system is overextended, under threat of disruptions and unsustainable.
Last month, Fortune magazine's Sustainability Columnist Marc Gunther blogged and wrote an article on the "cozy" relationships between NGOs and corporations. For the Corporate Watchdog Radio ViewPoint, we caught up with Marc from his home office in Bethesda for his take on this issue.
While some view the negative impacts of economics and environment as separate, Herve Kempf sees financial inequality and environmental destruction as inextricably linked. The author of How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth, Kempf explains how the wealthy of the world are living unsustainable lifestyles, and everyone else is trashing the earth too trying to keep up with the rich Joneses. The solution? Move away from materialism and growth.
Bloomberg Columnist Jonathan Weil, the first journalist to expose Enron's cooked books in 2001, recently criticized President-Elect Barack Obama's appointments to the Transition Economic Advisory Board, pointing out that almost half hail from companies that fried their financial statements or fueled the market meltdown -- or both. CWR Co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon chat with Weil about his critique.
At the G-20 Summit addressing the global financial crisis this weekend, the government leaders of the world's largest economies essentially twiddled their thumbs, punting on setting ambitious goals until April 2009 -- when the Barack Obama Administration, which is dedicated to addressing the financial crisis and the climate crisis, is in office. Before the Summit, Worldwatch Institute Senior Researchers Michael Renner and Gary Gardner proposed that the G-20 enact a Global Green Deal, evocative of FDR’s new deal but more audacious in scope and vision. CWR co-hosts Francesca Rheannon and Bill Baue speak with Renner about the proposal's 5 strategies, including transitioning to a renewable energy economy, launching an efficiency revolution, and investing in green infrastructure.
And speaking of green infrastructure, Deutsche Asset Management issued a report calling for the establishment of a “green” National Infrastructure Bank. Bill Baue speaks with Deutsche Climate Change Investment Research Director Bruce Kahn about the report, a followup on the Investing in Climate Change 2009: Necessity and Opportunity in Turbulent Times report CWR covered recently.
The Top BENNY Award for 2008, given to activist campaigns holding corporations accountable by the Business Ethics Network (BEN), went to the Clean Up Ecuador campaign for bringing Chevron to justice for decades of pollution in the Amazon. The campaign is led by the Amazon Defense Coalition and Amazon Watch. Mitch Anderson of Amazon Watch has our commentary today, produced in partnership with BEN.
What's behind the rise in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's? Lifetime exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment such as fossil fuel pollution, as it turns out. This according to a new report from the Science and Environmental Health Network and Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility. Today, CWR co-host Francesca Rheannon speaks with the report's lead author, Jill Stein, who heads the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities. Dr. Stein also ran for governor of the commonwealth in 2002 on the Green-Rainbow ticket, as well as Secretary of State in 2006.
As icecaps and global markets melt down, localism is rising up as a solution to our ecological and economic crises. United for a Fair Economy and Class Action, two national nonprofits based in Massachusetts that address the inequitable distribution of resources, are sponsoring a workshop entitled "Building a Local Economy that Works for All." Today, we speak with Class Action Executive Director and United for a Fair Economy co-founder Felice Yeskel, and current United for a Fair Economy Board Chair Prakash Laufer about how the workshop weaves together economic, social, class, and environmental solutions to build a local sustainable economy. We at CWR have spoken with Felice in the past about her book, Economic Apartheid in America. Prakash founded Motherwear, a worker-owned catalog company providing clothing for breastfeeding mothers that is based on the principles of PROUT, or progressive utilization theory, which envisions a post-capitalist economy that is sustainable and just.
On September 26, 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy,president of France and the European Union, said, "we must rethink the financial system from scratch, as at Bretton Woods.” On October 22, US President George Bush announced that Bretton Woods II, as it was called, would be held in Washington DC on November 15. The new summit seeks to fix the broken economic order created at the summit of world leaders held in a small New Hampshire ski town as World War II wound down. In today's ViewPoint, we speak with Hazel Henderson of Ethical Markets about her recent CSRwire commentary, "Advice for Summitteers on Reforming the Global Casino." This continues our series with Hazel commenting on the market meltdown.
We reported last week that Barack Obama will regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act if elected. Not so for John McCain. Today writer and scientist Joseph Romm wrote on his blog Climate Progess, that a McCain-Palin administration would use a voluntary or incentive-based approach, one that "has never worked in any country to restrain emissions growth." Today, we talk to Joe Romm about how Barack Obama and John McCain differ on their approaches to the climate crisis and alternative energy. Romm is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he maintains its blog, Climate Progress. It was named one of the top 15 green websites by Time Magazine. Romm is also the author of the 2006 book Hell and High Water: Global Warming--the Solution and the Politics--and What We Should Do. He was Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy during the Clinton Administration.
You could see the global market meltdown coming a mile away, according to futurist Hazel Henderson of Ethical Markets. She's been identifying fatal flaws in the global economy, and sustainable alternatives, for three decades. Her most recent commentary on CSRwire critiques the "fractional reserve banking system," which allows banks to lend 10 times the amount of money they actually have in reserves. In other words, money for nothing. Today, CWR co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon speak with Henderson about using the financial crisis as an opportunity to shift to a more sustainable economy.
Plan A -- the business-as-usual, free-market, capitalist economy -- is clearly breaking down, causing meltdowns of global markets AND polar icecaps. Time for Plan B. That's the title of the book by Earth Policy Institute Founding President Lester Brown, published five years ago. In it, he proposes an alternative economic model for "Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble," according to the subtitle. An updated version 2.0 came out two years ago, and earlier this year, Brown unveiled Plan B 3.0, this time subtitled "Mobilizing to Save Civilization."
It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Yogi Berra said that. He also said, the future ain't what it used to me. For Glen Hiemstra, the future holds the key to current planning. The founder of the website futurist.com, Hiemstra consults for businesses and governments on how to take the long view on trends. In his book, Turning the Future into Revenue, he argues that the planning horizon should stretch out for several decades in order to meet the sustainability challenges we face right now.
The meltdown on Wall Street has many people asking, how come the government can find hundreds of billions to bailout the guys who brought us this mess--but always claims there's no money to save homeowners from foreclosure, provide health insurance to those who can't afford it, or clean up the environment? Today's guest David Cay Johnston says it's all part of an endemic pattern of "corporate welfare", where government policy is rigged to benefit the richest Americans at the expense of the rest of us. Johnston's latest book is Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). Johnston was an investigative journalist for the New York Times before becoming an independent reporter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code.
The market meltdown is spurring an urgent response from Congress, with both houses debating and revising versions of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bill on an hourly basis. The bill revises the President's proposed bailout of financial institutions, which some call "Cash for Trash." CWR co-hosts Francesca Rheannon and Bill Baue interview US Representative (D-MA) Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee that is now ushering the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill, or TARP, through Congress. While many question whether this bailout is the best path out of the market meltdown, others are proposing a road to recovery paved in green. Bob Pollin of the Political Economy Research Institute co-authored a report on the Green Recovery that was released last week with the Center for American Progress. Francesca and Bill interviewed him here at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst the day after he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming at a hearing entitled "The Green Road to Economic Recovery."
In this special preview edition of this week's show, CWR co-hosts Francesca Rheannon and Bill Baue interview US Representative (D-MA) Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee that is now ushering the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill, or TARP, through Congress. The bill revises the President's proposed bailout of financial institutions to the tune of $1 trillion, which has been labeled "Cash for Trash." The bill is changing practically by the hour, and we caught Rep Frank today as the bill makes its way toward debate in Congress.
Check back and tune in Wednesday for the full show, which will include this interview, as well as a conversation with Bob Pollin of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in his new Green Recovery report, and the CWR ViewPoint from futurist Hazel Henderson of Ethical Markets on the market meltdown.
We woke up this week to find Lehman Brothers, the venerable bank founded over a century ago, belly up, and Merrill Lynch merged with Bank of America in a shot-gun wedding. And late last night, the Fed announced it had taken control the mega-insurer American International Group, or AIG. As the subprime meltdown continues, it feels as if the market is crumbling around us. What caused this crisis, and where do we go from here? To address these questions, we speak with three experts. Economics Professor Jim Crotty of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst explains the underpinnings of the problem. Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility Executive Director Laura Berry talks about how the faith-based lens exposed problems in predatory subprime lending a decade-and-a-half ago. And independent economic analyst Chris Martenson gazes into his crystal ball to project the likely trajectory of the credit crisis.
Extended interview with Jim Crotty: part 1 and part two.
In place of CWR headlines, this week we hear extended comments from Steve Adamske, communications director of the House Financial Services Committee, about Chair Barney Frank's plan to create a new federal entity to oversee government management of companies collapsing due to mortgage debt.
This week CWR rebroadcasts a show from earlier this year that got great feedback. CWR co-host Bill Baue spoke with Michael Conroy, author of Branded! How the "Certification Revolution" is Transforming Global Corporations. Conroy discusses how activist campaigning for improved corporate social and environmental practices has gotten companies to respond. The two sides moved from antagonism to tense collaboration in the creation of certification schemes that solved activist concerns while preserving--and often boosting--companies' profitability. Conroy brings a hands-on view to the story as a program officer at the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, where he helped fund the activists NGOs as well as the resulting certification processes. He also serves as chair of TransFair, the Fair Trade certifying body in the US, as well as serving on the board of Forest Stewardship Council, which certifies lumber and paper practices.
In June, the Century Foundation and the The New York Times Foundation invited Corporate Watchdog Radio to a seminar for a select handful of journalists on "Billionaires and Their Impact." There, CWR co-host Francesca Rheannon heard Chuck Collins speak on a panel about the "Billionaires' Club" and the impact of extreme wealth on the rest of us. A co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Collins wrote the lead article in a special issue of The Nation on "The New Inequality" that helped frame the seminar.
The ViewPoint from BEN -- the Business Ethics Network -- comes from Bjorn Claeson of Sweatfree Communities about its recent report, Subsidizing Sweatshops: How our tax dollars fund the race to the bottom, and what cities and states can do.
The Democratic party has shied away from linking clean energy, the economy, and the environment since Jimmy Carter's 1977 Energy Policy. But the political winds are changing. At Tuesday evening's Democratic National Convention, almost all of the speakers hit on the theme of green collar jobs. Nancy Floyd of Nth Power noted that there are 2.4 million green collar jobs worldwide -- but less than 10 percent are in US. Presumptive Democrat candidate Barack Obama's platform calls for more than doubling that number to 5 million green collar jobs in the US alone. And he's framing it as a win-win-win to get us off foreign oil, stop global warming, and create tons of green jobs in the US. This week, we feature the second part of our conversation with Bracken Hendricks, co-author with Congressman Jay Inslee of Apollo's Fire, and co-founder of the Apollo Alliance. The discussion focuses on the political will required to build a green economy.
Climate change, racial discrimination, and economic recession may seem impossible to solve. But building a green economy could do the trick. The beauty of the green economy is that it could tackle all these problems at the same time. But only if labor is a driving force behind it. And that's beginning to happen. Green collar jobs build a clean energy infrastructure. They're hard to outsource because most of the work, like weatherizing homes, happens on-site. Advocates are working to make the green workforce more racially inclusive. And incomes could rise as demand grows for workers left out of the oil-based economy. Today we speak with 2 of the most prominent advocates for green collar jobs and the green economy. Today, we speak with Bracken Hendricks, author of Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy. and co-founder of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a green economy. We also hear from Van Jones, founder of Green For All, an initiative seeking to lift 250,000 people out of poverty through green-collar jobs.
The World Bank Group's mission is to reduce poverty. The Bank also works toward environmental sustainability. What's the link between them, and does its practice on the ground promote both priorities? That's the question posed by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group or IEG in a recent audit of the Bank's funding projects. The results? Disappointing. CWR co-hosts Francesca Rheannon and Bill Baue speak with Vinod Thomas, Director-General of the IEG about the report. The IEG is producing a follow-up report focusing directly on the effectiveness of the the World Bank Group's environmental and social sustainability safeguards and standards.
Steve Herz comments on how International Finance Corporation social standards fail to protect against human rights abuses. Herz recently co-authored a report on the human rights performance of the International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standards and the Equator Principles. The analysis was conducted in partnership with the World Resources Institute, the Center for International Environmental Law, the Bank Information Center, BankTrack, and Oxfam Australia. Herz practices international, environmental, and human rights law in Oakland, CA.
Dean Cycon has long believed in using business to promote social justice, and Fair Trade is his bailiwick. As founder and CEO of Dean's Beans Organic Coffee, he's helped small coffee farmers around the world get a fairer price for their product. From Papua New Guinea to Peru, he's helped farmers build cooperatives and establish educational and health programs for their families. And perhaps most importantly, he's listened to them -- the stories of their lives and their work. He's put his experiences together in a terrific book called Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee, which won a 2008 Gold Medal for best travel book from the online magazine, Independent Publisher.
Every five minutes, another American dies from taking their prescription medicine – as prescribed. Kids as young as preschoolers are taking powerful prescription drugs, like Ritalin and antipsychotics, whose safety has never been tested in children. And doctors are on the take, feted at junkets costing thousands of dollars, paid tens of thousands to sign their names to articles written by drug company marketers, and pressured to give the newest, least tested drugs to their patients instead of cheaper, safer and effective older ones. They've also created new illnesses out of common human conditions – like shyness or heartburn – so they can push more drugs into the marketplace. Today, CWR co-host Francesca Rheannon speaks with Melody Petersen about her book, Our Daily Meds. The book's subtitle says it all: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." Shareholder activists have long promoted transparency in corporate reporting. Now, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) acknowledges its rules governing company disclosures aren't good enough. So FASB is proposing new rules. Today, we speak with Corporate Watchdog Radio co-founder Sanford Lewis about his shareholder activism promoting better corporate disclosure on environmental and human health risks. Lewis, who serves as general counsel for the Investor Environmental Health Network (IEHN), identifies several strengths -- as well as some disconcerting weaknesses -- in the proposed rules. IEHN has issued an action alert outlining these strengths and weaknesses to guide submissions during the public comment period ending August 8.
Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, comments on toxics in cosmetics. Malkan points out that companies are allowed to label products ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ and still use harmful synthetics. Her award-winning book,
Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry (New Society, 2007), tells the inside story of the campaign’s five-year effort to hold the beauty industry accountable to women’s health.
When it comes to renewable energy, wind is taking the lead--at least at this stage of technological development. But what's the best model for developing it? Should we follow the centralized utility model with big wind farms set up in a few places -- offshore Massachusetts or the state of Texas -- and then send the juice over wires to power homes and businesses far away? That's the dominant model in the US. Or should we follow the community-owned wind power model, where the people using the power have a financial stake in it, too? Maybe a healthy mix of both would be best. Today, CWR co-host Francesca Rheannon speaks with Dan Juhl of Juhl Wind Development, which is helping communities around the country develop locally owned wind power cooperatives. The company has developed about 140 megawatts -- or several hundred million dollars worth -- of community-based wind projects. Francesca met him at the Sustainable Energy Summit at the University of Massachusetts in June. And Rheannon speaks with journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her recent
New Yorker article, "The Island in the Wind," profiles the Danish island of Samso, known internationally as the "renewable energy island" because residents get most of their power from windmills they cooperatively own.
Each generation reinvents the world inherited from the previous generation. A new generation is inheriting a wounded planet and a dysfunctional economy. Youthful energy seeks to heal our world and revitalize our economy using new strategies and adapting existing tools. Today, we focus on new generations in sustainability. First, we hear from Tim Cohen-Mitchell of the Young Entrepreneurs Society in Orange, Massachusetts, from a presentation he made at the recent Pioneer Valley Sustainable Investing Summit that Corporate Watchdog Radio helped organize. Then, CWR co-host Francesca Rheannon speaks with Jeremy Daw about the BioTour, an initiative brainstormed by an enterprising group of 20-somethings at Burning Man, an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self expression and self-reliance in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. The BioTour is about to embark on a journey across the US in a biofuel bus to raise awareness on sustainability.
Robin Giampi tells about Timberland’s trendsetting use of social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube to advance its corporate sustainability initiatives.
Francesca and Bill ain't exactly spring chickens, but we've got a lot of youthful energy, so we're joining this trend in linking social networking with corporate sustainability by launching CWR pages on Facebook and MySpace this week. Thanks to our new intern, Tom Hartmann-Boyce, an international affairs student at Skidmore, for getting those pages up and running. Check out our website for links to these pages, and join us there as "friends."
Utilities and coal companies are pushing to open over a hundred new coal-fired power plants in the US. But activists, investors, communities, consumers, and scientists are pointing to financial, regulatory, environmental, and social risks that far outweigh the potential benefits of coal. And they are pulling back the veil from the myth of clean coal, exposing that king coal is a naked emperor. Carbon capture and storage, the key to coal's "clean" claims, has years of technical and economic hurdles to cross. Leslie Lowe, director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibilty's Energy & Environment Program, speaks with us today about the risks of committing to a future of new coal plants.
CWR ViewPoint:
Listen or
read (Thanks to our partner CSRwire for posting text of CWR commentaries.)
Yochi Zakai of Co-op America points out that clean coal is dirtier than it's cracked up to be. He comments on the recent Georgia court ruling against a new coal plant proposed by Dynegy, and Co-op America's ongoing activism aimed at that company and others in the industry.
The ExxonMobil annual shareholder meeting this year carried high expectations from shareholder activists. Members of the Rockefeller family, descending from the founder of the Standard Oil monopoly that splintered into Exxon and Mobil, attended the meeting to support four different shareholder resolutions on corporate governance and climate change. Of these four, the resolution supported by most Rockefellers asked the company to split the CEO and Board Chair positions. Today's CWR guest, Bob Monks, has filed this resolution at ExxonMobil since the early 2000s. His struggle to hold ExxonMobil accountable exemplifies the broader struggle to hold corporations accountable described in his new book,
Corpocracy. Monks is co-founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, The Corporate Library, Lens Governance Advisors, and a former Labor Department official in the Reagan Administration.
Web extra: Bob Monks chats with CWR co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon about the US presidential candidates' ability to take on corpocracy.
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CWR ViewPoint:
Listen or
read (Thanks to our partner CSRwire for posting text of CWR commentaries.)
Longtime shareholder activist Steve Viederman presented this statement at the ExxonMobil Annual Meeting in May 2008 to introduce resolution 19 asking Exxon to adopt a renewable energy policy. He filed the resolution along with other individuals, families, foundations and religious orders, joined by 20 institutional investors worth over $740 billion in combined assets, including Exxon Mobil stock valued at more than $8.6 billion.
Last week, the price of corn rose above $7 a bushel on the commodities market for the first time, and soybeans rose sharply, too, reacting to the harsh weather hampering crop production across the US Midwest. Soaring global demand in addition to the increased use of corn for ethanol, an alternative fuel, have shrunk the worldwide supply of staples that are the core of practically every continent's diet. Meanwhile, the price of oil has jumped, raising the cost of producing crops and feeding livestock and causing an increase in grocery bills here and abroad, sparking riots and protests in at least two dozen countries. CWR co-host speaks about this global food crisis with Raj Patel, author of
Stuffed and Starved. Patel is a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and a researcher with the Land Research Action Network as well as the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
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Bob Pollin
Hazel Henderson
Laura Berry of ICCR
Chris Martenson
Jim Crotty of the University of Massachusetts
Timberland's Earthkeepers
