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Recent Posts by Marc Gunther
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Gold mining is a dirty business, for many reasons. In poor countries, where most of the world’s gold is mined, regulations are lax, cyanide is commonly (and carelessly) used to separate gold from waste rock, and children work under unsafe conditions, literally scratching out a living from the earth. These problems have been well-documented by NGOS and by reporters for the New York Times, which did a great series on gold in 2005, and more recently in this fine investigative article by the Associated Press. But corporate America is responding with an ambitious effort to reform the mining industry, led by Tiffany & Co., Wal-Mart, independent jewelers and NGOS. Forward-thinking mining companies like Rio Tinto are on board, too. My new feature story, Green Gold, which appears in the
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You won’t hear much about gay marriage this week at the Republican convention, but it remains a hotly-contested political issue, particularly in California, where a fall ballot initiative would overturn the state Supreme Court decision giving same-sex couples the right to wed. John McCain supports the ballot Proposition 8 while Barack Obama and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger oppose it. A recent poll shows that most Californians side with their governor, Obama and gay rights groups like Equality for All. Should gay marriage win at the ballot box in the nation’s most populous state, that would be big news.A political win for same-sex marriage would also reflect the fact that in corporate America, support for gay marriage – or at least workplace policies that treat same-sex
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What book best explains the today’s world of business — the credit crunch, housing bust, diving dollar, etc.? That’s the question that reporter Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post put to some biz luminaries, resulting in a lively story in today’s paper. Interestingly, my friend Nell Minow (of The Corporate Library and movie mom fame) and my former college classmate Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. recommended the same book, David Copperfield, and cited the same quote, the advice given by Mr. Micawber to David: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’ Following that advice will protect you from the worst of economic upheavals. Ah, yes.
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I’m writing this post on my Apple PowerBook G4, which ordinarily does very well what I need it to do—except that right now it is sitting on my lap and giving off enough heat to keep me warm on a cool day. That might be welcome if today were a February day in Denver. But it’s August. I’m in the mile-high city where the sun always seems to shine to moderate a discussion on sustainability for Coca Cola Enterprises, the big bottling company; to attend a bunch of events on the environment and energy; and to soak up the atmosphere as the Democrats and thousands of hangers-on here to nominate Barack Obama. The Coke discussion went well, I thought—participants included the major of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, who talked about the drought and water conservation, Majority Leader
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The other day, John McCain visited an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to call for more offshore drilling. The massive Chevron rig produces 10,000 barrels of oil a day. Meanwhile, I just filled up my new Honda Fit with gas for the first time. After driving 282 miles, I bought 9.47 gallons at $3.62 a gallon. So I’m getting 29.6 mpg, mostly in the city. What’s the connection? The actions of millions of Americans like me—as we trade big cars for smaller ones, drive less, or do both—are going to have a whole lot more impact on oil prices, more quickly, than drilling for more oil. In fact, they already are. Gas prices have been falling by more than a penny per day and the price of oil has dropped from about $147 a barrel to about $115 a barrel in the last couple of months for one
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The easy way to do corporate philanthropy is to write a little check to everyone who asks. Many companies operate this way–$5,000 to the Boy’s Club, $5,000 to the YMCA, $5,000 to the local cancer society or heart association. This is mostly a feel-good exercise, performed, it must be said, with other people’s money.
Today’s Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com is about GE, and the company efforts to be strategic in its corporate giving. I met Bob Corcoran, who runs the GE Foundation, on a trip to Ghana in 2004, and had a chance to see GE’s health care initiative in action there—the company donated medical equipment, a generator, money and lots of expertise to a hospital in rural Ghana. Last week, Bob and I had a chance to catch up when he was in Washington.
Here’s how the column begins:
I’m not a big fan of corporate philanthropy. Too often, it’s a feel-good exercise, generating little value for a company’s shareholders. At its worst, it allows CEOs to use other people’s money to glorify themselves. (Tyco once pledged $5 million to Seton Hall University, which named a building or two after its then-CEO, Dennis Kozlowski.) Rarely is corporate giving both benevolent and strategic.
General Electric (GE, Fortune 500) is one company that does philanthropy right. On Monday, the company announced a new donation - a five-year $18 million grant from the GE Foundation to the New York City public schools, the largest-ever single corporate contribution to the school system. New York is the sixth city to join in what GE calls its “Developing Futures” program, which is aimed at improving schools in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Louisville, Stamford, CT and Erie, PA, all places where GE operates. GE has been working on school reform for decades.
The company’s other charitable focus - health care in poor countries - is newer. I had a chance to see it up close in 2004 when I traveled to Ghana, with Bob Corcoran, GE’s vice president for corporate citizenship and president of the GE Foundation. (See Money and Morals at GE in the Fortune archive.) Back then, GE had promised to donate $20 million of equipment and to lend its expertise to public hospitals and clinics in Africa, beginning in Ghana - a country where it does no business. Corcoran and GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, justified the Africa initiative in several ways: They told me the company had been asked to do more in Africa by its African-American employees, that GE wanted to develop good will in a region that soon could grow into a real market, and that knowledge gained from working in poor countries might pay off in unexpected ways for GE.
You can read the rest here.
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