Dirt Diggers Digest

Shades of Green

Michael Moore may be on all the talk shows these days touting his new film on the evils of capitalism, but elsewhere in the mainstream media the celebration of big business continues apace. Especially when it comes to the environment, we are meant to believe that large corporations are at the forefront of enlightened thinking.

This is the implicit message of the cover of the new issue of Newsweek, which is filled with leaves to promote its feature on “The Greenest Big Companies in America: An Exclusive Ranking.” The list itself, however, has more validity than the usual exercises of this sort, which tend to take much of corporate greenwash at face value.

The Newsweek rankings are based on what appear to be solid data from KLD Research & Analytics, producer of the reputable (but expensive) SOCRATES social investing database, along with Trucost and CorporateRegister.com. Each company in the S&P 500 is rated on its environmental impact, its environmental policies, and its reputation among corporate social responsibility professionals, academics and other environmental experts. The ratings even take in account a company’s “regulatory infractions, lawsuits and community impacts.”

Not surprisingly, those at the top of the list are high-tech companies—such as Hewlett-Packard (ranked No. 1), Dell (2), Intel (4), IBM (5) and Cisco Systems (12)—which have never had quite the same pollution problems as old-line industries and which in many cases have made themselves “cleaner” by outsourcing their production activities to overseas producers. Dell, in particular, is on its way to becoming a hollow company by selling off its plants.

More interesting is that supposed sustainability pioneer Wal-Mart comes in at No. 59, behind old-line industrial companies such as United Technologies and Owens Corning. Whole Foods Market, purveyor of over-priced organic groceries, is a bit lower at 67. Oil giant Chevron, which urges the public to “join us” in its supposed commitment to energy efficiency, is ranked 371, not much better than long-time global warming denier ExxonMobil (395).

Since the Newsweek list covers the entirety of the S&P 500, we can also look at what is probably the most significant group: those at the very bottom. The harm that these companies—especially utilities such as American Electric Power and Southern Company with lots of fossil-fuel-fired power plants—do to the environment far outweighs any good done by those at the top of the list. Also among the laggards are agribusiness giants Monsanto (No. 485), Archer Daniels Midland (486), Bunge (493) and ConAgra Foods (497).

But special mention must be given to the absolute worst company of all: mining giant Peabody Energy. On a scale of 0 to 100, Peabody is awarded all of 1 point, presumably reflecting its single-minded dedication to climate-destroying coal and its support for groups fighting the climate bill now in Congress.

Newsweek deserves credit for undertaking a serious evaluation of corporate environmental performance. The web version even has a nice sidebar on green fakery. But the magazine could have easily turned the list upside down and headlined its feature “The Biggest Environmental Culprits of Corporate America.”

A Truly Captive Market

parasites The House of Representatives, in a rare embrace of de-privatization, has just passed legislation that would put an industry out of business. If approved by the Senate, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act will eliminate the heavily subsidized business of bank origination of federal student loans. Students would get their loans directly from the federal government and would see a huge increase in the Pell Grant program, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars saved by eliminating the subsidies.

Unfortunately, the impulse to abolish a parasitic form of private enterprise has been missing from the official debate on healthcare reform ever since Democratic leaders and the Obama Administration shunned the idea of expanding Medicare eligibility to non-seniors. Now, given the uncertain prospects for a public insurance option (a weak substitute for single payer), we are faced with the possibility that the parasites of the private health insurance industry will not only survive but will be empowered as never before.

While support for the public option has waned, the powers that be in both major parties have never wavered from their endorsement of the individual mandate—the bizarre idea that the solution to the problem of the uninsured is to force them purchase insurance. This implies that being without insurance is a personal shortcoming rather than a social problem. It makes as much sense as saying that the way to help the homeless is to compel them to buy a house.

It is true that the proposals for an individual mandate come with provisions for subsidies, yet as the plan just issued by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus illustrates, those subsidies would not extend to many middle-income families, who might find themselves in the absurd position of having to pay penalties to the federal government for failing to buy coverage they cannot afford.

What’s wrong with the imposition of an individual mandate without a public option is more than that of inadequate subsidies. It would amount to an unprecedented move by government to compel residents to become customers of a particular set of corporations. States currently require drivers to obtain insurance for their vehicles from private carriers, but automobile ownership is not compulsory. Adoption of an individual mandate sans public option would make it a condition of being alive for the uninsured to start paying premiums to a private insurance company.

What next? Will the federal government allow the likes of WellPoint and Cigna to put private bill collectors to work harassing “deadbeats” who don’t make their mandatory payments? Since the carriers could not drop these non-paying customers, would the companies be allowed to lock them up in healthcare debtor prisons until a relative takes care of the bill?

Maybe not. But there’s a strong possibility that the furor over unaffordable mandatory coverage would prompt Congress to bring down rates by allowing insurers to offer lower-quality plans. If the public option is jettisoned along with single payer, “reform” may turn out to be nothing more than a way of making millions of Americans pay for the dubious privilege of shifting from the ranks of the uninsured into a captive market of the woefully underinsured.

Will BusinessWeek Escape from the Vultures?

BW2 This summer it has appeared that the venerable BusinessWeek, born in 1929 at the dawn of the Great Depression, might not survive the Great Recession, at least not in its traditional form. In July it came to light that McGraw-Hill was seeking a buyer for BW, which like many other print outlets has been suffering from a sharp decline in advertising revenue.

Numerous observers have claimed that the magazine is essentially worthless, speculating that it might sell for a token price plus the assumption of liabilities. It has also been taken for granted that the new owner would sharply scale back or even eliminate the print operations and take a machete to the staff.

The potential buyers whose names surfaced over the past two months have included media industry vultures such as Platinum Equity Partners, which bought the San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this year and embarked on a frenzy of layoffs, and OpenGate Capital, which last year paid all of $1 to take over TV Guide (and its debt) and got seller Macrovision to lend it $9.5 million to boot.

So it is encouraging that the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Bloomberg LP is considering a bid. Of all the potential buyers that have been mentioned, Bloomberg seems most likely to preserve BW’s unique position in U.S. financial journalism.

For decades, BW served as the one relatively independent voice among the major business magazines. While Fortune (after its early years) and Forbes functioned as cheerleaders and hagiographers for the business elite, BW was often willing to take an honest look at the shortcomings and outright transgressions of major corporations.

This was demonstrated most clearly in its famous (among progressives) September 2000 cover story that asked whether corporations had too much power, noting: “Part of the problem is that no one’s reining in business anymore. Most of the institutions that historically served as a counterweight to corporate power — Big Government and strong unions — have lost clout since Ronald Reagan came to town crusading for deregulation and local control.” These themes were echoed in an October 2003 cover article “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?”

BW’s March 1986 cover piece called “The Hollow Corporation” sounded the alarm about the way major companies were eroding the U.S. industrial base by contracting out their production activities to foreign firms. Its April 1987 article “Warning: The Standard of Living is Slipping” was one of the early reports on the reversal of upward mobility.

The magazine also diverged from its competitors on the issue of labor—both by covering unions more seriously and by declining to demonize them. In 1991 it published a commentary by its long-time labor writer Aaron Bernstein headlined “Busting Unions Can Backfire on the Bottom Line” and in 2004 it put SEIU’s Andy Stern on its cover for a piece entitled “Can This Man Save Labor?”

It is difficult to imagine the private equity firms and other bargain hunters said to be considering bids for BW supporting this kind of journalism. Bloomberg, on the other hand, has exhibited similar moxie in the editing of its Bloomberg Markets magazine. For example, as noted here, that publication recently published a hard-hitting piece on the way major U.S. corporations are contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon and thus exacerbating the problem of global warming.

In an era of continuing corporate misbehavior, we can ill afford the loss of an information source such as BusinessWeek. Let’s hope it escapes from the vultures.

Note: I recently did a thorough update of my guide to online corporate research as well as the index of information sources mentioned here in the Digest.

Will Democracy Invade the Boardroom?

board meeting Life has been tough for the Securities and Exchange Commission, what with the power grab at its expense by the Federal Reserve and new revelations that its investigators acted like Keystone Kops when looking into tips about the suspicious behavior of Bernie Madoff. Now the SEC has the opportunity to do some good. The question is whether it has the nerve to stand up to powerful corporate interests.

In May the SEC voted to propose rule changes that would enable shareholders to nominate directors for corporate boards. The Commission issued a 250-page description of the proposed changes in June and asked for public comments. A decision is expected this fall.

The process of selecting board candidates makes a mockery of the idea of corporate democracy. Except in those rare instances when a takeover effort leads to a proxy fight, potential directors are chosen by management and run unopposed. This helps ensure that the ranks of outside (non-executive) directors, who are supposed to function as watchdogs, are filled with agreeable souls.

The proposed SEC rules would be a vast improvement, but they would allow shareholders to name no more than one-quarter of the candidates, and they would limit nominating rights to large shareholders (those with at least 1 percent of big companies and larger percentages in smaller ones). However, alliances of shareholders would be able to use their combined holdings to meet the threshold.

Comments flooded into the SEC over the summer. As a review of the comments conducted by the Wharton School of Business shows, the reactions have been highly polarized, with large companies warning of doom and proponents such as large pension funds predicting the changes would be a boon for shareholder rights.

The Business Roundtable weighs in with more than 150 pages of comments, posing dozens of plausible and not-so-plausible objections, including the hilarious claim that the rules would violate a corporation’s First Amendment rights by forcing it to include comments by outside candidates in its proxy statement.

Revealing a fear that the rule changes would undermine the clubbiness that characterizes the current system, comments submitted by McDonald’s Corporation fretted that shareholders might nominate someone “who may not have even met the existing members of the Board.” Another laughable objection is one made, for example, by Sara Lee Corporation claiming that the change would result in directors who represent a special interest rather than the interests of all shareholders. Sara Lee conveniently forgets that under the current system outside directors are often chosen because of their affiliation with a financial institution or other entity that has a significant relationship with the company—a suspicious practice known as corporate interlocks or interlocking directorates.

Some commenters, including a joint submission by 26 large corporations, support a compromise that, instead of imposing new proxy rules on all publicly traded companies, would make it easier for shareholders to seek changes in the nominating process on a company-by-company basis. This seems like little more than an attempt to undermine the whole idea.

But perhaps the saddest thing about the comments is the surprisingly large number of submissions by owners of small businesses—from a dog bakery called For Pampered Pooches to Dreamland Daycare—who have somehow been brainwashed by some trade association into thinking that a reform aimed at major corporations is somehow going to threaten their privately held enterprise.

Here’s hoping that the SEC ignores the preposterous arguments of both large and small companies and injects some measure of democracy into Corporate America.

Will Corporate Cash be Allowed to Overwhelm Elections?

nast moneybag2 If the United States were a country truly committed to democracy, we would now be having a national discussion on limiting the role of big money in politics. After all, we are still recovering from a financial crisis brought on by an orgy of deregulation instigated by Wall Street interests that spent lavishly to influence members of Congress from both major parties and then had to be bailed out by taxpayers. Major auto companies such as General Motors, which for years successfully lobbied to weaken fuel-economy standards, also had to be bailed out when they could no longer sell gas-guzzling SUVs.

Instead, the role of corporate money is stronger than ever. Rather than having the decency of withdrawing from the policy arena, bailed-out companies have continued to lobby for weaker regulation. At the same time, the insurance industry has thrown a monkey wrench into long-overdue healthcare reform by making hefty contributions to conservative Democrats. The energy industry used its resources to weaken the climate bill.

And now the U.S. Supreme Court may be preparing to open the floodgates completely. In June the high court took the unusual step of announcing it would hold a special hearing this September on a case involving a rightwing advocacy group, Citizens United, which ran afoul of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law in connection with its distribution of a film attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton during the last presidential campaign. Instead of ruling narrowly on the case, which involves some of the technicalities of McCain-Feingold, the Court signaled that it wanted to reconsider the entire question of corporate political spending. Direct corporate contributions to federal campaign were first banned in 1907, and independent campaign expenditures by business corporations were prohibited in 1947.

There is little doubt that this unusual move was promoted by conservative justices such as Scalia and Thomas who think that any restrictions on corporate electoral spending are violations of the First Amendment. And it is no surprise that pro-business groups are generally praising the Court for taking on the issue, conveniently discarding their usual disdain for judicial activism.

Meanwhile, progressive watchdog groups such as Public Citizen are sounding the alarm, warning that eliminating limits on corporate spending would allow large companies to use their resources to buy elections with impunity.

The cynical way of looking at this is that Big Business already manages to dominate the electoral system through its political action committees and lobbying expenditures, so uncontrolled spending would not make much difference. The danger, however, is that eliminating the restrictions would allow capital to completely overwhelm the electoral system. And it would be a huge boon for the destructive principle of corporate personhood, the basis on which business interests exercise such outsized influence over American life.

What makes this issue trickier is that the cases in question deal not only with political expenditures by business corporations but also ones made by labor unions and non-profit corporations. Unfortunately, there is a long legal tradition of treating democratic organizations such as unions as equivalent to business corporations, which are undemocratic entities that should have no constitutional rights.

That is not going to change anytime soon. Meanwhile, we can only hope that reason prevails and the Supreme Court does not turn the electoral system into a total financial free-for-all.

Fighting Dirty on Healthcare Reform

gangs You’ve got to hand it to the health insurance corporations and their front groups for knowing how to play hardball. To protect the interests of the industry, they have been willing to spread outlandish allegations about euthanasia, gambling that the ensuing uproar will force nervous Dems to dilute their plan.

It remains to be seen whether the streetfighters ultimately prevail, but for now they have succeeded in reframing the debate. The country has been talking about pulling the plug on grandma when we should be discussing pulling the plug on the likes of Aetna, Cigna and Humana.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress have ruled out euthanizing the for-profit health insurance, leaving us with the alternative of a public plan that would compete with the commercial carriers and supposedly “keep them honest,” as Obama likes to put it.

Since the industry doesn’t seem interested in becoming virtuous, it has instead encouraged opposition to the public option. Apart from whatever behind-the-scenes role it has played in the town hall disruptions carried out by the rightwing lunatic fringe, the major insurers are cultivating the fifth column that is undermining the public option from within the Democratic Party. It’s widely known that members of the Blue Dog Coalition have been showered with campaign contributions from the industry. A recent Business Week cover story entitled “The Health Insurers Have Already Won” details other ways the big insurers have cozied up to and co-opted conservative Dems.

I’ve already written about the suspicious role the Lewin Group, owned by UnitedHealth Group but purportedly editorially independent, has played in the reform debate. Business Week describes how UnitedHealth itself feeds self-serving data to “information-starved congressional staff members.” The magazine depicts an especially close relationship between the company and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who “echoes UnitedHealth’s contention that a so-called public option could be a ‘Trojan horse for a single-payer system.'”

The infatuation of Warner and some other Dems with UnitedHealth is all the more baffling in light of the controversy over the company’s Golden Rule Insurance subsidiary, which has repeatedly been fined by state regulators for deceptive practices. Golden Rule was one of the companies singled-out in a recent House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on abuses in the individual health insurance market.

Business Week reports that the health insurers consider the battle against the public option already won and are now focusing on shaping the terms under which they will be providing new subsidized coverage. They are, the magazine says, pursuing the “aim of constraining the new benefits that will become available to tens of millions of people who are currently uninsured.”

How long will it be before Obama, having abandoned the public option, finds himself pressured by the health insurers and their surrogates to give ground on other aspects of the reform plan, such as the elimination of lifetime benefit caps? Or the prohibition on denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions?

The insurance reform effort will continue its slide toward irrelevance until Obama recognizes that he is engaged not in a boxing match with Marquis of Queensberry rules but rather a knife fight in which anything goes.

Corporations and the Amazon

These days just about every large corporation would have us believe that it is in the vanguard of the fight to reverse global warming. Companies mount expensive ad campaigns to brag about raising their energy efficiency and shrinking their carbon footprint.

Yet a bold article in the latest issue of business-friendly Bloomberg Markets magazine documents how some large U.S.-based transnationals are complicit in a process that does more to exacerbate the climate crisis than anything else: the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest.

While deforestation is usually blamed on local ranchers and loggers, Bloomberg points the finger at companies such as Alcoa and Cargill, which the magazine charges have used their power to get authorities in Brazil to approve large projects that violate the spirit of the country’s environmental regulations.

Alcoa is constructing a huge bauxite mine that will chew up more than 25,000 acres of virgin jungle in an area, the magazine says, “is supposed to be preserved unharmed forever for local residents.” Bloomberg cites Brazilian prosecutors who have been waging a four-year legal battle against an Alcoa subsidiary that is said to have circumvented the country’s national policies by obtaining a state rather than a federal permit for the project.

Bloomberg also focuses on the widely criticized grain port that Cargill built on the Amazon River. Cargill claims to be discouraging deforestation by the farmers supplying the soybeans that pass through the port, but the Brazilian prosecutors interviewed by Bloomberg expressed skepticism that the effort was having much effect.

Apart from the big on-site projects, Bloomberg looks at major corporations that it says purchase beef and leather from Amazonian ranchers who engage in illegal deforestation. Citing Brazilian export records, the magazine identifies Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Kraft Foods and Carrefour as purchasers of the beef and General Motors, Ford and Mercedes-Benz as purchasers of leather.

The impact of the Amazon cattle ranchers was also the focus of a Greenpeace report published in June. That report put heat on major shoe companies that are using leather produced by those ranchers.

Nike and Timberland responded to the study by pledging to end their use of leather hides from deforested areas in the Amazon basin. Greenpeace is trying to get other shoe companies to follow suit.

Think of the Amazon the next time a company such as Wal-Mart tells us what wonderful things it is doing to address the climate crisis.

Corporate Lobbying Goes from Fake to Fraud

bonner As the Yes Men have shown with their impersonations, misrepresentation is sometimes the best way to convey a larger truth. That same lesson has been demonstrated, albeit unintentionally, by the lobbying firm Bonner & Associates, which was just exposed as having forged letters from non-profit organizations to members of Congress expressing opposition to the climate bill. In this case, the larger truth is that much of the support that corporate interests claim for their policy positions is bogus.

The story came to light thanks to the Charlottesville (Virginia) Daily Progress, which revealed that the office of Rep. Tom Perriello had received letters urging him to vote against the climate bill from two local civil rights organizations–Creciendo Juntos and the Albemarle-Charlottesville branch of the NAACP–that were discovered to be forgeries. Additional faked letters were later reported by two other members of Congress.

Soon it was revealed that the letters had been sent out by Bonner, which had been hired by Hawthorn Group to help in its work on behalf of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a major coal industry front group. Bonner, which specializes in fabricating what it calls “strategic grassroots/grasstops” campaigns for large corporations, apologized for the phony letters but insisted they were the work of a rogue employee who has been terminated. This has not prevented a firestorm of criticism and calls from the likes of MoveOn.org and the Sierra Club for a Justice Department investigation of the matter.

Environmental groups are entitled to their righteous indignation, but some of this is akin to expressing shock that gambling is taking place in Casablanca. The entire point of the Astroturf work done by the likes of Bonner is to be deceptive–to give the misleading impression that there is a groundswell of support for the policy positions of big business.

The Bonner firm, founded in 1984 by former Congressional aide Jack Bonner (photo), made its name creating bogus campaigns on behalf of clients such as the banking industry (to fight proposals to lower permissible interest rates on credit cards) and the auto industry (to fight stricter fuel efficiency standards). In 1997 Ken Silverstein wrote a piece in Mother Jones describing Bonner as “a leader in the growing field of fake grassroots” lobbying.

In other words, Bonner is in the business of generating communications to members of Congress that are “real” messages from fake organizations. The current case involves fake messages from real organizations. It’s too soon to tell whether this represents a new tactic by the firm or an employee simply got confused about which aspects of the messages are supposed to be bogus. But either way, firms such as Bonner are helping large corporations co-opt political discourse.

Even more ominous are the supposedly spontaneous disruptions of town hall meetings being held by members of Congress. These confrontations are being carried out by rightwing opponents of healthcare reform–such as the group FreedomWorks–serving the interests of the for-profit medical establishment. It is bad enough when agents of business try to manipulate “civilized” communication with members of Congress; it is much worse when they begin to act like storm troopers trying to intimidate elected officials from diverging from the corporate line.

Toyota to California: Drop Dead

nummi The U.S. market, especially in states such as California, has played a major role in Toyota’s ascent to the top of the global automobile industry. Now the company is showing its appreciation by announcing plans to put nearly 5,000 people out of work in the San Francisco Bay Area by closing its New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) operation. The move came shortly after the new federally subsidized General Motors decided to exit what had been a 25-year joint venture between the two companies.

If Toyota ignores the pleas of California public officials and proceeds with the shutdown, the closing would represent a sharp break with the company’s paternalistic traditions. “It’s as if a long-held doctrine at Toyota – that it doesn’t shut down factories and it doesn’t fire workers – has crumbled,” a Japanese auto analyst told the New York Times. “Some would say this is a new era for Toyota.”

To be accurate, Toyota’s paternalism has not extended to the contingent workers it has employed at home and in the United States, and earlier this year it used voluntary buyouts to thin the ranks of regular workers at various U.S. plants.

Conditions are admittedly tough for Toyota. It posted its first annual loss in half a century for the fiscal year ending in March amid the sharp economic downturn. Yet it cannot be an accident that the only one of the company’s ten U.S. manufacturing plants to be put on the chopping block is the one where the workers are unionized.

Toyota, like other foreign automakers, has made sure to keep its U.S. operations non-union. NUMMI was a special case. It was created at a time when GM thought it needed to learn the secrets of Japanese auto production, Toyota was looking for ways to increase its U.S. market share without inflaming anti-import sentiments, and the United Auto Workers union was willing to experiment with new work rules that raised productivity amid rising industry layoffs.

The UAW took a lot of grief for its “jointness” arrangement at NUMMI, where the intensified pace of production was denounced by critics as “management by stress.” The contracts negotiated by the UAW have forced workers to earn a portion of their pay in the form of production bonuses. Earlier this year, the U.S. Labor Department ordered NUMMI to pay its workers an additional $862,000 because the company had miscalculated the bonuses for 2008 (Labor Relations Week, 6/25/09).

Despite the extent to which the UAW and NUMMI workers bowed to Toyota’s way of doing business, the company did not hesitate to shut down the operation once GM was out of the picture. Toyota has apparently given little thought to the impact of the closing on California’s economy amid the recession and the state’s fiscal crisis, which was resolved only by enacting cruel cuts in education and other public services. Instead, it is complaining about labor costs at NUMMI compared to its non-union plants in places such as Kentucky.

Not long ago Bloomberg reported that Toyota was considering using the NUMMI plant to produce its popular Prius. That would be appropriate, given the hybrid’s popularity in California. But the company quickly quashed that rumor and insisted that instead it would add Prius capacity at its planned plant in Mississippi once the market begins to recover. The Mississippi facility is slated to receive some $300 million in state economic development subsidies and, of course, will be run without a union.

Despite all that California has done for Toyota, the company’s message to the Golden State is: drop dead.

Wal-Mart’s (Un)sustainability Index

Wal-Mart has taken the latest in a long series of steps to make itself look good by imposing burdens on its suppliers. The mammoth retailer, which is thriving amid the recession, recently announced plans to require its more than 100,000 suppliers to provide information about their operations that would form the basis of a product sustainability index.

Rating products is a good idea. It’s already being done by various non-profit organizations that bring independence and legitimacy to the process. Wal-Mart, by contrast, brings a lot of negative baggage. In recent years, Wal-Mart has used a purported commitment to environmental responsibility to draw attention away from its abysmal record with regard to labor relations, wage and hour regulations, and employment discrimination laws. It also wants us to forget its scandalous tax avoidance policies and its disastrous impact on small competitors. The idea that a company with a business model based on automobile-dependent customers and exploitative supplier factories on the other side of the globe can be considered sustainable should be dismissed out of hand. Yet Wal-Mart is skilled at greenwashing and is, alas, being taken seriously by many observers who should know better.

On close examination, Wal-Mart’s latest plan is, like many of its previous social responsibility initiatives, rather thin. All the company is doing at first is to ask suppliers to answer 15 questions. Ten of these involve environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, water use, waste generation and raw materials sourcing. The final five questions are listed under the heading of “People and Community: Ensuring Responsible and Ethical Production.”

Two of them involve “social compliance.” It is an amazing act of chutzpah for Wal-Mart, which probably keeps more sweatshops in business than any other company, to claim moral authority to ask suppliers about the treatment of workers in their supply chain.

The questions in this category seem to assume that suppliers don’t do their own manufacturing. This is a tacit acknowledgement of how Wal-Mart has forced U.S. manufacturers to shift production offshore, and often to outside contractors. Now Wal-Mart has to ask those companies to be sure they know the location of all the plants making their products and the quality of their output.

The point about quality was one that CEO Mike Duke (photo) emphasized when announcing the rating system. This is also highly disingenuous. For years, Wal-Mart was notorious for pressing suppliers to reduce the quality of their goods to keep down prices. Now the behemoth of Bentonville is suddenly a proponent of products that “are more efficient, that last longer and perform better.” Will Wal-Mart pay its suppliers higher prices to cover the costs of improving quality?

I can’t bring myself to jump on Wal-Mart’s bandwagon. If I want product ratings I will turn not to Mike Duke but rather to someone like Dara O’Rourke, who founded a website called Good Guide that rates consumer products and their producers using independently collected data from social investing firms such as KLD Research and non-profits such as the Environmental Working Group. It uses criteria such as labor rights, cancer risks and reproductive health hazards that are unlikely to ever find their way into the Wal-Mart index.

Good Guide also rates companies, including Wal-Mart, which receives a mediocre score of 5.3 (out of 10), and it reaches that level thanks to its marks on p.r.-related measures such as charitable contributions and some but not all environmental measures. In the category of Consumers it gets a 4.1, Corporate Ethics 3.9, and for Labor and Human Rights 4.1 (which is generous).

Maybe Wal-Mart should focus on improving its own scores before presuming to rate everyone else.