The Magazine of Corporate Responsibility

Archive for May, 2011

Marketing to Children: Accepting Responsibility

Product marketing campaigns that target children – such as McDonald’s Happy Meals – are once again coming under fire. Columnist Gael O’Brien thinks they raise important questions about corporate behavior and who bears responsibility for unhealthy outcomes.

What Became of the 2010 Safe Cosmetics Act?

The proposed bill aimed to ensure that all personal care products for sale in the U.S. would be free of harmful ingredients and that all ingredients would be fully disclosed. The bill would’ve given the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to prohibit the use of certain ingredients, including carcinogens and reproductive and developmental toxins, to recall products that fail to meet safety standards, and to require product labels to name each ingredient.

SEC Adopts Final Whistleblower Rules

Commission chairman Mary Schapiro said that while the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has helped protect whistleblowers and improve internal reporting systems at public companies, “too many people remain silent in the face of fraud. Today’s rules are intended to break the silence of those who see a wrong.”

In HBO’s ‘Too Big to Fail,’ the Heroes Are Really Zeroes

Pulitzer Prize winner Jesse Eisinger says HBO’s “Too Big To Fail” The Movie is the story of how three leading financial figures in U.S. government “didn’t see the financial crisis coming; hadn’t prepared for it; made mistake after mistake as it was cresting; and then, in their moment of triumph, made their most colossal blunder of all.”

Opinion: ESG Yields Profits

Factors pertaining to ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues are now included in mainstream corporate stock and bond analysis in numerous investment firms, funds and managers globally. Why? Because it provides analysts better insight into companies and a possibility of producing higher investment returns with less risk.

Despite Mining Disaster, Report Says Massey “Has Not Changed”

Buried within a damning report on last year’s Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster were some interesting details about what could lie ahead for Massey Energy, its executives, and the safety of its operations. “More than a year after 29 men died in the Upper Big Branch mine, there is strong evidence that Massey has not changed the manner in which it operates its mines,” the report said.

Coming to America: Tar Sands Oil from Canada?

ar sands have been in the news of late because green groups and many U.S. public officials are worried that the construction of a new pipeline to transport tar sands crude from northeastern Alberta into the U.S. —TransCanada’s Keystone XL project—would greatly increase American consumption of this carbon-intensive fuel and jeopardize U.S. efforts to reduce its oil consumption and overall carbon footprint.

Social and Environmental Shareholder Proposals Gain Traction

Shareholder proposals on social and environmental issues constitute about half of all resolutions in the 2011 proxy season and have become a serious strategic consideration for corporate boards and their members, according to a new report from the consulting firm Ernst & Young. “The degree of support for these types of resolutions is growing among mutual funds and other important investors,” the report finds.

Opinion: Stand Up to Big Plastic

If Oregon succeeds in passing the nation’s first statewide ban on plastic bags, it will be over the strenuous objections of the plastics industry, led by South Carolina-based bag manufacturer Hilex Poly. Opponents in the plastic industry have waged an all-out campaign to deny that plastic bags pose a threat to the environment, even raising fears about the safety of reusable bags.

Reducing energy use – globally

Scaling back our energy consumption significantly, whether voluntarily or as a result of laws and regulations, would go a long way toward achieving our pollution reduction and air and water quality goals. But Americans—and to a lesser extent those in many other developed nations—have never been very good at using less of anything, let alone the energy that makes everything in our whiz-bang modern world possible. That said, conservation is going to play an increasingly important role in all of our lives as we struggle to reduce our collective carbon footprints in a quickly warming world.