Make Them Show The Math! (image: zooboing/flickr)

Insanity! That’s how Thomas Sternberg, co-founder of Staples, describes Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act. “Incredibly wasteful,” adds John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank. For the past year or so, CEOs and business lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable and the National Investor Relations Institute have been fighting “tooth and nail” against 953(b). With the SEC preparing to issue its proposed rules sometime this spring, expect a lot more noise.

Why all the fuss over 953(b)? This section of Dodd Frank deals with disclosure of executive compensation – always a touchy subject. Specifically it would mandate public companies to disclose, in their SEC filings:

(A) the median of the annual total compensation of all employees of the issuer, except the chief executive officer (or any equivalent position) of the issuer;
(B) the annual total compensation of the chief executive officer (or any equivalent position) of the issuer; and
(C) the ratio of the amount described in subparagraph (A) to the amount described in subparagraph (B).

Issuers — public companies — advance a number of arguments against having to make this dread calculation. The one repeated most often is that it is cumbersome – a burden, just too difficult, a waste of everybody’s time and money. (They respond in the same way when they are asked to report on human rights, by the way.) But compensation data can’t be all that hard to gather, can it? What would it really take to calculate the median of the annual total compensation of all employees? Are we to take seriously the claim that companies do not have these numbers already available? And if they do not, isn’t that a sign of seriously poor fiscal management, or negligence? Time to demand better housekeeping.

Second, we are told, 953(b) disclosures wouldn’t be of value to investors; the measure is just politically motivated. “Everyone recognizes that this is a political disclosure, not an economic one,” writes Michael S. Melbinger, partner at Winston and Strawn; 953(b) is “intended to give unions and certain media folks a tool to bash corporate America”.

The unions and the media? Melbinger’s argument is specious at best. You can only bash corporate America, and these disclosures will only count against companies, if there is something disclosed that is embarrassing, or worse. And of course there is. The research of Duke University’s Dan Ariely suggests that these disclosures would reveal gross inequities: in the past 20 years, CEO pay has increased from 130 to about 350 times that of the average worker. Does that give people a bashing tool? Or does it reveal that ordinary people are regularly getting bashed by a bunch of corporate tools? Read the rest of this entry →

There have recently been plenty of shareholder proposals asking companies to disclose political spending. In fact (as noted in an earlier post), the share of proposals to the Fortune 100 focusing on political spending increased 84 percent in 2011 from the three previous years. Last week, to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision (on January 17th), Trillium Asset Management and Green Century Funds took things up a notch.

Urging “corporate leaders to heed the call of shareholders and citizens,” the two social investment firms filed shareholder resolutions at Bank of America, 3M, and Target Corporation asking those companies to stop political spending altogether. This was the first time institutional shareholders have formally asked corporations to refrain from political spending.

The chances of these resolutions winning approval are slim to none, of course – at least right now. The hope is that over time support will build around these proposals, until they reach a threshold where boards of directors can no longer ignore them. (That’s around 30 percent of shareholder approval.) That day seems a long way off. Still, a slim chance is better than no chance, and — let’s face it — there is simply no chance of legislative remedies to Citizens United, especially from the current Congress, and definitely not in an election year.

“We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” David Stockman tells Bill Moyers in an interview that will air this weekend. “As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.”

That sounds about right, though I would ask whether Stockman and others who take this view have really put their finger on what’s novel or unique about the present moment. Entitlement and cronyism are not exactly new in America; some would say the game has been rigged all along.

But that’s a historical discussion. The more pressing question is one these new shareholder resolutions would have us address. Is corporate political activity good for business? Is the corporate plan to capture government sound? Are corporations really getting what they pay for? Can those entitled CEOs and Wall St. financiers win the game, or are there rules to the game they don’t understand? In other words, how well does crony capitalism work? Those broad questions frame the question posed in the title of this post.

There’s some compelling evidence to suggest that corporate political activity is not only bad for democracy but also bad for business. The Trillium and Green Century announcements cite the research of Michael Hadani, who sets out to “question the standard narrative that political spending is an unmitigated good for firms.” Hadani, a Professor of Management at Long Island University, concludes that despite spending extravagant amounts of money – AT&T, for instance, “officially” spent over 219 million dollars between 1998 and 2008 “on achieving political success” (and that was before Citizens United!) — corporations are not achieving the political outcomes they want.

What’s worse, corporate political activity generally does not appear to increase shareholder value.

This chart tracks a negative correlation between firm market value and PAC activity:

And that is just one lens. The research Hadani presents tells a pretty consistent story: the profligate pursuit of illusory goods, usually without the requirement to disclose where the money goes, or what companies and their investor-owners get for it (apart from heightened risk and reduced transparency). It should therefore alarm all shareholders – not just socially-conscious ones — that Citizens United makes it possible for executives to plunder the corporate treasury in pursuit of those same uncertain ends, without any limits or any real accountability. A new kind of barbarian may already be inside the gates: the CEO in search of the ever-elusive political fix.

Cross-posted from my blog over at 1913massacre.com:

In the most recent essay for his new “On Democracy” series, Bill Moyers picks up on the news that the George Kaiser Family Foundation has acquired the Woody Guthrie Archives for 3 million dollars. Plans to open a new center in Tulsa are already underway. Woody’s papers, drawings and things will be returning to Oklahoma. The irony is not lost on Moyers:

What he wrote and sang about caused the oil potentates and preachers who ran Oklahoma to consider him radical and disreputable. For many years he was the state’s prodigal son, but times change, and that’s the big news. Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahoma’s more conservative than ever – one of the reddest of our red states with a governor who’s a favorite of the Tea Party.

Times change, and the scene may change; the cast of characters remains essentially the same. In 1913 Massacre, the Oklahoma oil barons and their patsy preachers play the parts of Michigan mining captains, Boston stockholders and the thugs they hire to do their dirty work.

Woody saw right through their change of costume. He knew that the man who robs you with a six-gun is likely to be more honest than the man who uses a fountain pen. In Oklahoma, in Michigan, in California, all around the country, he sang about the beauty of ordinary people whose undoing he witnessed. And the simple message at the heart of his songs is just as radical today as it ever was.

You just have to listen.

Moyers discovers it in This Land Is Your Land: Read the rest of this entry →

I’m always thrown by attempts to measure prosperity purely in terms of economic growth or high employment figures. Those measures are too restrictive, and they are also disorienting. Politicians who offer jobs leave me cold, and do us all a disservice. As I’ve written several times, the country is, or ought to be, more than a workcamp.

There’s an opportunity to reflect on that last point in Close to Home, the documentary Ofra Bickel made for Frontline about the 2008 financial crisis. In Chapter 4, we see Rob, a human resources executive who has “been out of work for a year,” attending a series of “networking functions.” He has found the job search an “insurmountable” challenge, and he hopes – in vain – that these networking events will help him get over the hurdle.

We see Rob and his fellow networkers – all of them out-of-work middle management types — exchanging business cards, practicing their pitches, learning how to introduce and present themselves. It’s an endless rehearsal for a debut that never comes, and Bikel finally decides to give up on Rob and on the networkers: it’s pretty clear none of this is going to pay off.

As Bikel realizes, there is something pathetic in their efforts. There is something ridiculous — and telling — here as well: a gathering of able-bodied, educated, smart American adults, all in dire economic straits, and all they can think to do is to practice for their next job interview. It never occurs to Rob or any of his fellow networkers to do something together, to join efforts and start something, to create something where there is nothing. In a word, they never really build a network. They simply want to get back on the corporate payroll. It’s disturbing to think that that’s all they know how to do.

What happened to that can-do spirit? American gumption? Bootstraps? Independence? Entrepreneurialism? Nowadays, over 90 percent of adult Americans are regular employees (as opposed to self-employed people); whether they have jobs or not, most Americans can think of themselves only as employees. Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time, before the industrial era and the great waves of immigration it brought, when the majority of Americans did not have a “job” and wouldn’t take one unless they had to. “Being an employee was considered a form of bondage, only a step above indentured servitude,” as John Curl puts it in his history of American cooperative movements. “One submitted to it due to economic hardship, for as short a time as possible, then became free once more, independent, one’s own boss.”

We still like to pay tribute to the freedom from wage slavery we once enjoyed, or lament its loss. Take another film, this one from 1961: The Misfits, directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. Gable plays Gay, an aging cowboy who thinks that most anything beats “working for wages” and sees employment for what it is – a loss of freedom.

Gay’s tragedy is that he has outlived the possibility of that freedom. The Wild West has become nothing more than a rodeo show; the cowboy life Gay leads is “like roping a dream. I just gotta find another way to be alive, that’s all,” he realizes, “if there is one anymore.” In the film’s closing scene, Gay, bloodied and defeated, drives off toward a new life, or at least what’s left of his life, with his friend Guido yelling after him: “Where’ll you be? Some gas station polishin’ windshields? Makin’ change in a supermarket? Try the Laundromat! They need a fella there to load the machines!” That’s all that’s left for cowboys in Miller’s postwar America.

The most important thing to realize is that it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to succumb to the despair of another networking meeting or turn in your cowboy hat for a Walmart greeter’s cap. And you don’t have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Few people can or ever have. Throughout our early frontier history and well into the industrial era, independent Americans relied on altruism, mutual-aid societies and cooperative working arrangements to build houses and raise barns, protect one another from fires or other losses, or “to accomplish their liberation from wage slavery.” That’s the story Curl’s book tells — a side of the American story we don’t usually acknowledge, but ought to understand and appreciate if we hope to prosper, together, with or without jobs.

In 1998, Howie Klein was the president of Reprise Records, and had the privilege of attending a dinner Bill Clinton threw to honor Vaclav Havel. The entertainment that evening was Lou Reed. (Havel is a big fan.) Klein was seated at a table with Senator Dick Lugar, the Indiana Republican, and he remembers Lugar’s reaction to Reed’s performance:

Lou Reed sang “Dirty Blvd,” his then-current hit. People kind of recognized the melody or something and they kind of danced in their seats. I remember Lugar could barely contain himself. His big plastic smile never even faded when Lou sang:

Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I’ll piss on ‘em

That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says

Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ‘em to death

and get it over with and just dump ‘em on the boulevard

No one seems to have noticed but me and my friend Brian.

For that brief moment, it was as if the country had not just gone through the adolescent convulsions of the Lewinsky affair. Vice President Gore’s “chair rocked constantly during Reed’s 35-minute performance,” according to a report in the Washington Post.


“Political leaders rarely listen to lyrics,” writes Klein. Maybe that’s why none of the APEC leaders took much notice the other night when Makana, dressed in an Occupy with Aloha t-shirt, sang his “Occupy” song for 45 minutes to the assembled dignitaries. But I wonder if that’s all there is to it.

Something else might be at work here as well. I am especially intrigued by the Post report of Al Gore rocking back and forth in his chair to Lou Reed. That’s not someone ignoring the music; that’s someone digging it. And from what I have seen and read about Al Gore, it’s pretty safe to assume that he was genuinely enjoying Reed’s performance. And why not? In his mind, he’s no bigot; he’s a friend of the poor and the huddled masses. How could he think otherwise? He and Lou Reed are on the same side; he shares the rocker’s indignation.

I am willing to bet that Gore doesn’t see himself as an oppressor or exploiter, and neither, for that matter, does Dick Lugar. Does that make them delusional, or hypocrites, or is it evidence of false consciousness? Maybe. Gore’s detractors like to put up images of his compound in Tennessee and talk about its huge energy footprint. They calculate how much fossil fuel he burns, flying around in airplanes to educate people about climate change. It’s an easy game to play.

But I wonder what it really proves about Al Gore (or Dick Lugar, or anyone, for that matter). Would Gore be a more credible messenger if he lived in a small solar-powered cabin and cycled to his engagements? Probably. Would you and I have heard of him? Unlikely. Would the world be better off if he just gave up, sank into an oblivious rich man’s hedonism, and cackled with wild delight as he drove a Hummer over the fragile habitats of endangered species? Probably not.

The right has now learned from the politically-correct left to demand ideological and moral purity from the left. There is something ridiculous in the demand. I’d say the same about putting too much emphasis on moral consistency.

Be that as it may, it’s now Michael Moore’s turn to prove his authenticity, or at least disprove his duplicity. While mixing with the Occupy protestors, Moore has had to defend himself, repeatedly, against the charge that he belongs to the 1 percent. And there’s little doubt he does, if you look strictly at the numbers: the top one percent in this country earn around 350,000 dollars a year.

So a CBS reporter in Denver asks Moore whether it’s true that he’s worth 50 million dollars; Moore calls the reporter a punk and tells him to stop lying. A blogger with the same Denver TV station lambasts Moore for his “hypocrisy.”  Fox News and the New York Post have been flashing pictures of Moore’s lavish Torch Lake compound. They were also posted on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog.

On CNN, Piers Morgan put the question to Moore this way:

“I need you to admit the bleeding obvious. I need you to sit here and say, ‘I’m in the 1 percent,’ ” Morgan pressed.
“I’m not,” Moore insisted. “I am devoting my life to those who have less and who have been crapped upon by the system.”

His evasive answer caused an uproar. “How Rich is Mr. 99%?” “Hypocrite and Liar.” “Occupy Wall Street Supporter Michael Moore Belongs to the Affluent Class.” But it’s also worth thinking about. Moore is trying, clumsily, to say you can be in a socio-economic class but not of it. He would have a much easier time of it if he would just “admit the bleeding obvious,” but let’s not pretend for a moment that that would silence his critics. Might Michael Moore be acting in his own rational economic self-interest by pretending to be one of, or at least one with, the 99 percent? Sure. But I’m naive enough, or optimistic enough about human nature, to think Moore’s concern for “those who have less” is genuine. Does it amount to more than noblesse oblige dressed down in a baseball cap? That’s hard to say.

It’s mildly amusing to see the American news media peddling class warfare and crude ideas about class-consciousness, but if that’s the game we’re playing, then let’s start looking at the class interests behind the American news media. CNN? Piers Morgan? CBS? Fox News? Andrew Breitbart? Follow the money. Let’s specify the interests behind the American news media’s questioning of Michael Moore’s true allegiances or those asking about his annual income. Let’s look at the rich people they ostracize and those they unthinkingly celebrate. It should be obvious – bleeding obvious — that Michael Moore is not the problem; but there are people determined to make him the problem, and you have to wonder why.

I’m certainly not out to defend Michael Moore. Nor does he need me to defend him. Yes, Michael Moore has gotten very rich from his books and films. Yes, he’s obnoxious. Yes, he shamelessly promotes himself. Would he command more credence if he were not all those things – if he were poor, soft-spoken, and retiring? Maybe, but then most likely his films would never have gotten made or shown, and — more to the point — the TV would just find somebody else to distract us all from the real troubles of the day, or some other way to feed the resentment that keeps ordinary people from acting in their own best interests.

Words are not Rick Santorum’s friends. The Republican presidential candidate has the distinction of having had his own name turned against him. He pleaded — to no avail – with Google to cleanse the Internet of the “filth” associated with santorum.

Now Mr. Santorum has turned to etymology. In the most recent Republican debate, he argued that the real trouble with the economy is the breakdown of the American family. For advancing this view, he was predictably pilloried by the left and praised by the right. Both sides, however, seem to have given him a pass on one argument he advanced.

“The word ‘home’ in Greek is the basis of the word ‘economy.’ It is the foundation of our country,” Santorum said. “You can’t have limited government, you can’t have a limited government, if the family breaks down.

Technically, Santorum is correct: we derive our English word “economy” from oikos (household) and nomos (law); economy involves the ordering or dispensation of the household.

But the ancient Greek household – with its patriarchal order, its separate and unequal quarters and roles for men and women, and its slaves, who did the household chores and, on larger estates, worked the fields– is not the happy suburban home Santorum would like to associate himself with in his campaign for the presidency.

Who knows? Maybe there is a patriarchal, pro-slavery, plantation-owning constituency out there, waiting for someone to take a stand on its behalf.

So maybe all is not lost. Santorum can probably find fodder for his family-values argument in the observation that Greek lawmakers took an interest in promoting marriage, the main object of which was perpetuation of the oikos through child-bearing and child-rearing. That regressive view of the household and of women’s place in the world might not win him the women’s vote; but he wasn’t going to win that anyway.

(Photo: eyewash on flickr.) Value Voters occupying Wall Street the first time - September 25th 2008 protesting the Bailout.

If it accomplishes nothing else, Occupy Wall Street creates an extraordinary opportunity for a conversation about American values. This became clear to me yesterday morning as I was reading about the Values Voter Summit and tweeted:

#OWS 99% are value voters, too. #vvs

My thoughts had drifted from Values Voters to voters’ values, from the “Premier Conservative Event of 2011” at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC to Zuccotti Park, where people have been gathering to protest a whole multitude of outrages. Some are ridiculous and confused; some are dead serious. All, however, are pretty unanimous in their denunciations of greed – which is as good a place as any to start a conversation about the values we need to promote, embrace, recognize and celebrate in order to prosper. This is, I believe, a conversation we need to start now, and continue long after all the protestors have left Zuccotti Park.

Minutes after my tweet, someone named Dan Gainor (who, I have since learned, is a right-wing flack) shot back:

@lvgaldieri #OWS supports the WRONG values. #OWS #VVS

And that’s how the conversation started. When I asked what values he thought were being promoted by the Occupy Wall Street movement, Gainor said the protestors were intent on “crushing Wall St. and wrecking capitalism”: Read the rest of this entry →

"Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz Holds Up White Balance Card" by sillygwailo on flickr

A letter from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been making the rounds, asking other CEOs to join with him and “forgo all political contributions until Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally-disciplined, long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.”

The idea has gained plenty of admirers: “thousands of Americans – both CEOs and everyday citizens” (as CNN puts it) have contacted Schultz to express their support. Joe Nocera dedicated his entire column in the Times last week to Schultz’s proposal, praising the boycott as “hardheaded and practical, the kind of idea you would expect from a good businessman”.

That it is. But its virtues are also its limitations. Schultz wants to tackle a very big, very difficult problem: what he calls “the lack of cooperation and irresponsibility among elected officials as they have put partisan agendas before the people’s agenda. This is not the leadership we have come to expect, nor deserve.”

We can debate that last point: the current crop of ineffectual cowards in Washington might be exactly the leadership we have come to expect and deserve. Be that as it may, I am a little suspicious of grassroots movements in which angry “everyday citizens” find themselves in cahoots with angry CEOs; and it seems odd that we are being asked to entrust “the people’s agenda” to Schultz and his gang of CEOs – who may be well-meaning, but whose agenda (it seems fair to say) may not exactly match up with the aspirations and priorities of everyday citizens, or at least those of us who don’t happen to be leading multibillion-dollar multinationals.

I know that Starbucks bristles at the suggestion that multibillion-dollar companies might not always put the interests of its people, its “baristas” and “partners,” front and center. (But just a couple of weeks ago, baristas in Chile went on hunger strike because the company refused to negotiate with them over wages.) And I understand that Schultz prides himself on being a good CEO – one who has done well by doing good. He is, in fact, regularly singled out for praise by the business press as a CEO who defies the “the power-hungry stereotype,” and who will put the long-term good of his employees, his company or the environment over short-term advantage. (That’s the story Motley Fool’s Alyce Lomax told just last week in a Howard Schultz puff piece on AOL’s Daily Finance site.) Read the rest of this entry →

If you haven’t yet read it – and I admit I am late on this, as I am on nearly everything else – have a look at John Cassidy’s profile of Bridgewater hedge fund manager Ray Dalio in the July 25th issue of The New Yorker. Cassidy exerts most of his energy trying to figure out whether Bridgewater, which has bragging rights as the world’s richest and biggest hedge fund, is a Fountainhead cult, a Maoist re-education camp, or just a big bond-market player that happens to be run by a super-rich sociopath with intellectual “pretensions.” I was most struck by the passage where Dalio is “rambling” about how “everything,” or “almost everything,” is a “machine.”

“Almost everything is like a machine,” he told me one day when he was rambling on, as he often does. “Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.” His constant goal, he said, was to understand how the economic machine works. “And then everything else I basically view as just a case at hand. So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work—what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?”

I’ve talked about this view of nature, “the life cycle,” and the world as a machine in another context. Its philosophical heritage stretches back at least to the 17th century. But in Dalio’s case it’s hard to decide whether this is a considered view, informed by careful reading and thinking, or just some immature posturing, intended to create the impression that Dalio is an amoral übermensch. It’s not even clear how seriously Dalio takes himself: is everything a machine or is everything “like” a machine? The distinction is a crucial one, but Dalio wants to have it both ways.

It’s unfair, I suppose, to expect coherence and rigor from ramblings. And yet Dalio’s express goal – “to understand how the economic machine works” – deserves to be taken seriously. He’s betting the future of his firm on it; it’s key to his success. And it’s not just an offhand remark. As Cassidy explains, this mechanistic outlook is of a piece with Dalio’s crude social Darwinism.

He regards it as self-evident that all social systems obey nature’s laws, and that individual participants get rewarded or punished according to how far they operate in harmony with those laws. He views the financial markets as simply another social system, which determines payoffs and punishments in a like manner.

There’s nothing self-evident about any of this; and to track “all” social systems back to “nature’s laws,” whatever those are, is merely to admit one’s ignorance of social arrangements and social history and to confuse metaphors. The confusion, moreover, is not just Dalio’s; it’s general, and it fails us every day.

When, like Dalio, we regard the economy as a “machine,” and markets as a “social system,” we are inclined to put the system first and relegate people to the status of beneficiaries or collateral damage. The system does not serve human priorities. Instead, we put aside those priorities to keep a dysfunctional system running. The system “determines payoffs and punishments”; the system is the ultimate arbiter of our lot in life. We’ve already surrendered.

But we don’t have to. Umair Haque put up a post yesterday called “How Our Economy Was Overrun by Monsters and What to Do About It.” It offers a reminder that the market is a social construct – our construct, something not just hedge fund managers but human beings from all different places and all walks of life make and remake every day. And what we’ve created, says Haque, are monsters of opulence and greed, rather than markets that work for people and help us thrive. This is not just a moral reproach and it’s not (at all) an anti-capitalist rant. It’s simply about getting priorities right, and putting human prosperity before the efficiencies of a dysfunctional machine.

Last Wednesday, the UN Human Rights Council announced its endorsement of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, developed by John Ruggie. The UN press release called it “an unprecedented step,” the establishment of “the authoritative global reference point” in questions of business and human rights.

Unprecedented? Only if you ignore history. In fact, the UNHRC endorsement caps a long period of unhappiness over business and human rights at the UN.

Consider the origins of Ruggie’s mandate. After several false starts, beginning in the 1970s, the UN in 2003 issued the Norms on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises. The original goal, as Ruggie describes it [pdf], was “to impose on companies, directly under international law, the same range of human rights duties that States have accepted for themselves under treaties they have ratified.”

Sensible enough, you’d think. The Norms gave the UN a chance to “revive its relevance,” as Surya Deva puts it [pdf], “in a new world order in which states no longer enjoy the monopoly as violators of human rights”. Despite a promising start, the Norms ended up falling far short, in Deva’s judgment, of laying the groundwork for “an effective international regulatory regime of corporate human rights responsibility.”

Businesses fought back fiercely; and governments, far from offering support, “went into hiding,” as Ruggie put it in a 2008 interview. By the time the Norms emerged from a UN Sub-Committee in August of 2003, they were hardly fighting words. Like the UN Global Compact, launched amid much hullabaloo only three years earlier, the Norms were not legally binding and left it up to businesses to decide the depth of their commitment and to meet human rights responsibilities on their own terms. (And as I pointed out in a previous post, most companies are only too happy to say that they are equipped to decide, all by themselves, whether they are respecting human rights.)

Recognizing that his mandate began in “controversy,” Ruggie took a “consultative” approach to developing his framework. This was shrewd, as it included business from the start, and gained endorsements — I almost want to call them corporate sponsors, given the display of logos on the Global Business Initiative site — along the way: South American mining company Cerrejon, GE, Flextronics, Coca Cola, JSL Stainless, Sime Darby, Novo Nordisk, and French oil giant Total, among others. 47 states, including the United States, also signed on.

The diplomatic achievement is admirable, but result of all this consensus-building is predictably anodyne. According to the “Protect, Respect and Remedy” framework Ruggie developed, the State has a duty to Protect human rights; corporations have a responsibility to Respect human rights; and victims of abuse need access to judicial and non-judicial Remedy. The Guiding Principles set out “comprehensive recommendations” for how states and businesses are to “implement” the framework, “in order to better manage business and human rights challenges.” “Manage” seems to be the operative word here, and the whole exercise is, unfortunately, replete with management-speak.

In other words, the Guiding Principles and the Framework they accompany feel a little like Norms 2.0, offering guidance and encouragement instead of rules and regulations, and on terms business finds acceptable. Like the Global Compact, the Guidelines create a forum for discussion and dissemination of ideas — “another talk shop,” as Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch said dismissively. US envoy Daniel Baer was a little more generous – and decidedly cautious — when he said the Guiding Principles would make it “less likely” that businesses take “actions that might undermine the enjoyment of human rights.”

So it’s unclear to me exactly how much has been accomplished. Julian B. Gonzalez, Vice President for Sustainability and Public Affairs at Cerrejon, says Ruggie’s work has “not been in vain” and credits Ruggie with having shown his company the way: now the mining company has established “a rights-based Grievance Office” and has gained “better knowledge of neighbor communities and our impacts.” Flextronics reports it is now “proactively” addressing human rights; Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent appeared in a “global video” emphasizing the importance of respecting human rights across the global supply chain. And so on.

Maybe this counts as a step in the right direction, or maybe it’s just a public relations exercise. It might be both. Whether the UN could have done more this time around remains a question. In any case it seems clear that Wednesday’s announcement represents another attempt to establish UN authority in the area of human rights without offending some of the world’s most powerful actors, without regulating business activity or curtailing bad corporate behavior.