2012 January 26

Cory Booker Responds To Christie: ‘I Wouldn’t Be Where I Am’ If Civil Rights Were Put To A Popular Vote

Newark Mayor Cory Booker called into WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer show this morning to condemn New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) for suggesting that voters should decide whether gay and lesbian people should be allowed to marry in the state. Christie expanded on his comments yesterday, claiming “people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.”

“Frankly, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” if states had voted on equal rights legislation for African Americans during the 1960s, Booker told Lehrer. “This is not about a choice, it’s about a fundamental right and the 14th Amendment is very clear. It says, ‘equal protections under the law’ and right now in America we have second-class citizenship set-up where certain Americans can have privileges that certain Americans do not enjoy and that is just wrong.” Listen:

Booker has registered his outrage with Christie’s comments in a formal statement, during a press conference, and through his Twitter account. “This isn’t a right/left issue. There are many Republicans that are in favor of marriage equality, I’m just hoping that our legislature acts,” he said on the radio and predicted that putting the issue on the November ballot could help the GOP turn out conservative voters.

He added, “there are somethings I don’t mind putting on the ballot — we’re thinking about here in Newark putting on the ballot a question of do we want to pay a 1 percent more in property taxes to fund our police department — those kinds of things I think are good, but when it comes to fundamental rights that I believe are explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution… I do not think they should be subject to popular whim.”

Booker has long supported marriage equality and refuses to “perform marriages at Newark city hall until all couples have the right” to marry.

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Israeli Finance Minister Praises E.U. Ban On Iranian Oil, Argues A ‘More Complete Economic Blockade’ Might Be Necessary

A “massive” aerial and naval blockade of Iran is the only thing that prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, says Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. Steinitz warned Bloomberg news on Wednesday that economic sanctions “might not be sufficient” to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions and that a blockade similar to that imposed by President John F. Kennedy on Cuba in 1962 should be imposed. Appearing on Fox Business on Tuesday, Steinitz welcomed the announcement of the new E.U. ban on Iranian oil but warned that a “more complete economic blockade” might be necessary. Watch it:

Ratings, rankings and the world’s most sustainable company

I’m skeptical about efforts to rank and rate green or sustainable companies, and I have been for a time. [See 100 Best Corporate Citizens? What a CROck!] It’s terribly difficult to compare big and small companies, retailers with manufacturers, software firms with oil companies, etc. We once tried at FORTUNE, and gave up because we decided it couldn’t be done right.

Having said that, I’m impressed with the rigor and methodology used by a Canadian magazine called Corporate Knights to produce its 8th annual list of Global 100 Most Sustainable Companies, which it calls “the most extensive data-driven corporate sustainability assessment in existence.” The ratings are transparent and they encompass social as well as environmental metrics, among them energy, carbon, waste and water productivity, diversity and employee turnover, safety and, interestingly, the ratio between CEO and average worker pay–a revealing metric that most such rankings do not include. Disclousre: While I played no part in putting the list together, I did write a profile of Novo Nordisk, the top-ranked company, for Corporate Knights.

A couple of things to note about the list. First, US companies perform poorly. There’s not one US-based company in the top 10. Intel (No. 18) Life Technologies (No. 15) is the highest ranked US-based firm, followed by Intel (18), Agilent (59), Johnson Controls (64), Procter & Gamble (66) and IBM (69). Lest you suspect a Canadian bias, our neighbors to the north did no better. The top-ranked Canadian firm was Suncor (48), which calls itself an “oil sands pioneer. Go figure.

Of the 22 countries with companies that made the list,  the UK led the way with 16 Global 100 companies, followed by Japan with 11 and France and the US with eight. Northern European countries (Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden) punched above their weight, which isn’t surprising.

Interestingly, these more sustainable companies have outperformed their peers. Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights, said in a news release: “In a year in which Wall Street was occupied and capitalism became a bad word, the Global 100 companies serve as ambassadors for a better, cleaner kind of capitalism which, it also turns out, is more profitable.” The magazine reported:

From its inception on February 1 2005 to December 31, 2011, the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations has achieved a total return of 41.70%, outperforming its benchmark, (the MSCI All Country World Index at 29.30%) by more than 11%.

How did Novo Nordisk reach the top? According to Corporate Knights, the Danish pharmaceutical firm

is on record that access to essential medicines is a human right, and sells human insulin (the most basic kind) to 33 of the world’s poorest countries, at no more than 20 per cent of the average price in the western world. On the key clean capitalism metrics measured by Corporate Knights, Novo Nordisk scored top quartile performance in energy productivity ($4,851 in revenue generated per unit of energy consumption, compared to a pharmaceutical sector average of $3,603), carbon productivity ($68,585 in revenue generated per unit of carbon emitted, compared to a pharmaceutical sector average of $56,414) and pay equity (CEO/average employee remuneration ratio of 15 vs. a pharmaceutical sector average of 93). Novo Nordisk is the only pharmaceutical company within the Global 100 to report linking CEO remuneration to corporate performance on clean capitalism KPIs.

What impressed me about Novo Nordisk was how deeply sustainability issues are woven into the fabric of the company. In my story, I write about the firm’s approach to drug pricing, to climate and energy issues and to China. Here’s how the story begins:

Don’t ask Novo Nordisk for the company’s corporate responsibility report. The Danish pharmaceutical firm, which had revenues of DKK 60.7 billion (US$10.5 billion) in 2010, doesn’t publish one. Instead, Novo Nordisk reports on its environmental and social performance – including water and energy consumption, waste reduction, employee turnover, the diversity of its management team, new patent filings and charitable donations – alongside its financial performance in a single annual report.

This integrated approach to reporting reflects the way business is done at Novo Nordisk, the world leader in diabetes care and the No. 1 firm on the 2012 list of Corporate Knights Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations. Novo Nordisk has pursued a triple bottom line of financial, social and environmental gains since the 1990s, when the phrase was coined by writer John Elkington, and it incorporated the concept into the company’s legal structure nearly a decade ago.

“The main foundation for Novo Nordisk is the triple bottom line because that is what’s protecting our license to operate,” says Lars Rebien Sorensen, the firm’s president and CEO. “That begs and obliges everybody in the company not only to see that we become a good business – that’s the financial bottom line – but that we do so in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible.”

Lise Kingo, who has worked on sustainability issues since joining Novo Nordisk in 1988, says the company’s business case for corporate responsibility goes well beyond protecting its license to operate. Today, she says, the firm envisions sustainability as a way to drive innovation, and finds that engaging with stakeholders helps spot business opportunities as well as avert trouble. One sign of the value that the company places on sustainability is the fact that Kingo, 50, has been part of Novo Nordisk’s five-person executive management team since 2002.

You can read the rest here.

And, speaking of rankings, I was pleased once again to be named to the Ethisphere Institute’s 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics. Lists are fun so long as we don’t take them too seriously. (Really, how do you compare the influence of federal prosecutor Preet Bharara, Russian blogger Alexei Navalny and Walmart CEO Mike Duke, all of whom are in the top 15?) Still, some of the business people on the list whose work I know certainly deserve to be spotlighted, including Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, Jeffrey Swartz of Timberland, Brian Dunn of Best Buy, Yalmaz Siddiqui of Office Depot and Bob Corcoran of GE. I was also thrilled to see my friend Liz Maw, the executive director of Net Impact (where I’m on the board), be recognized for the great work that she, her staff and the organization are doing.

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Chris Christie: African Americans Would Have ‘Been Happy To Have A Referendum On Civil Rights’

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) defended his call for a ballot referendum on marriage equality, suggesting that the majority should vote on the rights of the minority. “The fact of the matter is,” Christie argued, “I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.” Christie opposes marriage rights for same-sex couples and has promised to veto a proposed bill legalizing same-sex marriage.

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NYT Lauds Chris Christie’s ‘Considerable Political Skills’ In Calling For Marriage Equality To Be Put To A Vote

The New York Times’ Kate Zernike lauds New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) for asking voters to decide if gay and lesbian people should be allowed to marry and praises the GOP’s “rising” star for his “considerable political skills” in out-maneuvering Democrats on the issue. Zernike characterizes Christie’s push for a vote on gay people’s civil rights as a win-win “to a public suspicious of government” and the national Republican party, without ever mentioning the consequences of the decision for gay and lesbian families who are seeking legal recognition and protection from the state or the injustice of calling on the majority to vote on the rights of a minority:

The governor announced that he believed same-sex marriage should be put before voters in November. Republicans whom Democrats had been counting on quickly backed him.

To a public suspicious of government, Mr. Christie might come across as reasonable — why let 121 people in the Legislature decide? — rather than retrograde. And by affirming that he opposed same-sex marriage and would veto the Democrats’ legislation, he avoided alienating the conservative voters who are the key to the hopes of any Republican with national ambition. Putting the issue on the ballot could even help burnish Mr. Christie’s image among national Republicans; same-sex marriage ballot initiatives have tended to bring out a swell of conservative voters to defeat them, which could help a Republican presidential nominee even in a blue state like New Jersey.

In Zernike’s narrative, it’s the Democrats who are ideologically obtuse and demanding. Christie is the brilliant political player whose charming reputation “as the big, blunt-talking guy” is quickly winning over New Jersey voters and national Republican leaders. The governor has cajoled Democrats to support “a property tax cap, limits on collective bargaining and changes to state employees’ health and pension benefits” and, Zernike writes, again managed to dance very carefully “to get what he wants” on the marriage issue, “disarming his critics or leaving them sputtering as they try to figure out his next move.”

New Jersey Democrats were, indeed, surprised to hear that Christie — who had initially left the door open to marriage equality — had told a town hall meeting that he would veto the measure on the very day that the Senate Judiciary Committee was considering a bill extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians. The comments provided instant cover for Republicans on the Committee to vote against the legislation and dismayed the same-sex couples who had delivered emotional testimony detailing how the states’ existing civil unions law allows hospitals to discriminate against their relationships and relegates them to second-class status.

But Christie’s “critics” were in no way “disarmed,” either. During the Committee’s closing comments — as lawmakers cast their votes on the marriage bill — Democrats chided Christie for his political cowardice. Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D) directly addressed Christie’s call for a referendum, saying, “The last time to my knowledge we put a civil right issue on referendum in the state of New Jersey was in 1915 and it was woman’s suffrage issue and the vote went down,” she said. “Women were not allowed to vote. This is our responsibility in this legislature.” Senate President Steve Sweeney (D) reminded the governor, “We vote on issues here, we don’t put civil rights on the ballot” and Newark Mayor Cory Booker also weighed in, comparing marriage equality to the struggle for Civil Rights. “I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960s, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states,” Booker said in a statement. “Equal protection under the law – for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation – should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day….I hope our leaders in Trenton will affirm and defend it.” Or, at the very least, reporters take the time to report it.