Can Greed be Green?

The current issue of Utne has several interesting articles on socially conscious business, including "The New Capitalists" which talks about the new wave of corporate social responsibility...

In 2004 Wal-Mart established a "global ethics office" to enforce 10 principles, including to "never manipulate, misrepresent, abuse, or conceal information" and "never act unethically -- even if someone else instructs you to do so." Employees have access to a confidential hotline to report abuses.

In October 2005 CEO Lee Scott announced a long-range plan to use 100 percent renewable energy at the company. For starters, Wal-Mart is working on a new store design that will reduce energy use by 30 percent in the next three years and plans to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet -- one of the largest in the world -- by 2015...

If you can't keep your cynical side from making you squirm, maybe it's because you can't forget the New York Times story in October 2005 that revealed that 46 percent of the chain's employees' children are uninsured or on Medicaid. The company has been fined repeatedly for violating the Clean Water Act, including $3.1 million in 2004 for failing to contain runoff at construction sites. Wal-Mart hired Eugene Scalia, former solicitor of the Department of Labor and son of U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia, to defend the corporation against three whistle-blower lawsuits, and federal prosecutors just recently nailed vice chairman Tom Coughlin for embezzling $500,000 to buy, among other things, supplies for his hunting dogs and a couple cases of Smirnoff...

So which is the real face of Wal-Mart? The easy-being-green family-owned company that donated nearly $1 million to make Sesame Street episodes that help military kids cope with the Iraq war? Or the I-love-trash megachain that, according to a study conducted at Penn State, actually ends up reinforcing, not improving, countywide poverty rates when it plops down a store?

Read the entire article here.