Corporate America has pretty much had its way in Washington for the past couple of years. Its CEOs and lobbyists got the Wall Street bailout. They got the auto bailout. They set the terms of the health care bill. They blunted financial regulation. They blocked climate legislation. If they were tied to the defense industry, they enjoyed a surge of military outlays. Of course they preserved the tax cuts for the rich. They did all of this, mind you, after the Democrats swept the 2006 and 2008 elections and gained control of  Congress and the White House.

Remarkable, isn’t it?

Now, with business-friendly Republicans in control of the House, the most powerful corporate lobbies—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers—have even more clout. They can, at minimum, stop just about anything they don’t like.

But they would be well advised to use their power sparingly.

I write this as a rational optimist, and as an unabashed believer in the power of business to do good—by creating jobs, generating wealth, satisfying people’s wants or needs, and enabling an unprecedented wave of economic growth during the past half century. (See China, cappuccino and cell phones, my first blogpost of 2011) But it’s hard for me to ignore the fact that the benefits of that growth are not being as broadly shared as they should be, at least here in the U.S., and that the reason for that, at least in part, is business’s outsized power in Washington.

The growth of inequality is especially troubling in the aftermath of the great recession. Wall Street is booming again, the stock indexes are up, corporate profits are growing…while the middle class and especially the poor—43.6 million of them, one in seven Americans—are being left behind.

These issues are on my mind because I just finished reading Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson and Chrystia Freeland’s cover story in The Atlantic, The Rise of the New Global Elite.  They differ in their explanations for why things have gone awry: Freeland cites the usual suspects—globalization and the rise of a knowledge economy that leaves less educated workers behind—while Winner-Take-All Politics argues that the very rich have, in effect, seized control of American politics and used their power to wage a “thirty-year war” on the rest of us. They’re both right, at least in part. But whatever the causes, the results are striking, as Hacker and Pierson write:

From 1979 until 2006, the top 1 percent received 36 percent of all the income growth generated in the American economy, while the highest-income one-tenth of one percent – one out of every 1,000 households – received nearly 20 percent, even after taking into account all federal taxes and all government and employer-provided benefits.

Inside companies, meanwhile, something similar is happening. Those at the top are capturing more than their fair share of the pie.

In 1965, the average chief executive officer (CEO) of a large U.S. corporation made around twenty-four times the earnings of the typical worker. By 2007, average CEO pay was accelerating toward 300 times typical earnings.

…Executive pay is set in a distorted market deeply shaped by public policy. CEOs have been able to take advantage of a corporate governance system that allows them to drive up their own pay…and prevents all but the most privileged insiders from understanding what’s going on.

The United States has changed from a country where prosperity was shared during the decades after World War II into one where rewards are concentrated at the top; the same could be said of most Fortune 500 corporations.

Freeland’s article nicely captures the way in which the super-rich have become accustomed to this state of affairs, and how they have convinced themselves that their elite status is a result of their superior brainpower and work ethic. In their view, those left behind have only themselves to brain.

She writes:

For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead of obliviousness and indifference to the sufferings of others.

This is a dangerous place for business to be, particularly given the growing suspicion that investment bankers, hedge fund managers and CEOs are playing a game that they have rigged for their own benefit.

So what’s to be done? Well, lots, but most of it (stricter financial regulation, campaign finance and lobbying reform, measures to make it easier for workers to form unions) has no chance of  getting done anytime soon.

My own modes and 100% business-friendly proposal is that we fix corporate governance so that boards of directors serve the long-term interests of shareholders and are accountable to them. Reasonable pay-for-performance for executives would be one result; right now, at many companies, the link between pay and performance is weak, to put it mildly. Arguably, shareholder democracy would also bring about a more expansive sense of corporate responsibility, because most owners want their companies to treat people and communities well.  Corporate governance experts like Nell Minow, Lucian Bebchuk and Bob Monks know how to get this done; thoughtful investors and a good number of CEOs won’t stand in the way of shareholder power because they understand the risks of operating in an America where wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of too few people.

CEOs, after all, need the rest of us. We work at their companies. We buy the stuff their companies make. Unfortunately, we also bail out their companies when their mistakes put the economy at risk.

If too many Americans feel like they are getting exploited by the rich, decide that the playing field is tilted against them and conclude that the powers-that-be don’t care about their plight, nothing good can come of it. It’s easy to imagine the economic polarization of America leading to an an upsurge in protectionism or  punitive (and destructive) tax policy or the rise of who-knows-what kind of political demagoguery.

“The lesson of history,” Freeland writes,  “is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.”

Seems like an easy choice to me.

Some notable and quotable items from the news:

Mark Hurd got off easy: Yes, by all accounts, he was a great CEO of Hewlett Packard and no, he may not have engaged in sexual harassment, but let’s focus for a moment on what he did.

The WSJ reported today that “the woman [HP contractor Jodie Fisher] was paid at times when there was no legitimate purpose.” In plain English, this means that he sent money to her that belongs to HP shareholders for work that she did not do. If true, this is clearly a firing offense. If it’s not fraud, then what is it?

The HP board, it seems to me, should have fired Hurd for cause and taken away his severance, which is being valued at about $35 million by The Journal.

As my friend Nell Minow, the corporate-governance expert and founder of The Corporate Library, tweeted the other day, linking to a column by Henry Blodget:

Wait A Minute — Why Does Mark Hurd Get $50 Million Severance When He Lied In His Expense Reports? http://bit.ly/aUSYA6 10:58 PM Aug 6th via TweetMeme

See Nell’s blog here.

As for those who say Hurd will be hard to replace, well, if that’s indeed the case, that’s his fault. A key job of any CEO is to groom potential successors, and assemble a team that can keep a company running smoothly in his or her absence. It’s never a one-man show, and shouldn’t be. One measure of just how well Hurd led HP will be the company’s performance in the next couple of years.

A climate “Pearl Harbor”: Congress’s reluctance or inability to act to curb global warming has led some people, notably Joe Romm, to speculate about what it might take to spur action. Back in 2008, Romm listed a number of “climatic mini-catastrophes” that might move public and policymaker opinion, among them the Arctic going ice-free, a mega-drought hitting the American southwest, more super storms like Katrina and “a heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003.” I don’t know how the current Russian heat wave compares to the 2003 heat. But shouldn’t it be a wake-up call, if not a Pearl Harbor, when it comes to global warming?

For a detailed meteorological analysis, see Dr. Rob Carver’s blog at Weather Underground. Russian officials now say the heatwave has cost 5,000 lives as fires range out of control, says the Telegraph. Russia banned grain exports last week, with uncertain effects on world food prices. “Russian grain exports totaled 21.4 million metric tons last year, about 17 percent of the global grain trade,” The Times reported. What’s more, according to The Times’ Green blog, Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, blamed the crisis on climate change and called for action:

What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.

Unhappily, a crisis in Russia is highly unlikely to rouse the U.S. Senate to action. But imagine if this heat and drought were affecting wheat farmers in, say, Kansas and North Dakota?

Actually, even that might not have an impact. A poll released last week by the Shelton Group found that most people who doubt that climate change is occurring, and caused by man-made activity, would not change their mind even if reality of man-made global warming consumers would not change even if the polar ice cap melted, kids couldn’t go outside to play or shifting weather patterns turned Nebraska into a desert. My goodness.

But the good news is…that while Congress is stalled on the energy and climate front, and while consumers seem less engaged, companies are increasingly finding that sustainability is good for business. As my friend and colleague Joel Makower reports at GreenBiz.com:

The footwear and apparel industry has joined forces to create an Eco Index tool to better understand materials’ and products’ impacts….Meanwhile, appliance makers agreed last week to new energy and water efficiency standards for major appliances that will reduce the nation’s utility bills by billions of dollars. A new bartering exchange was launched to help small businesses with excess supply of goods or services barter for things they need. And John Finisdore writes of an effort by more than 200 companies to understand and manage their dependence and impact on ecosystem services.

I wrote about the outdoors industry initiative (See How ‘green’ are those hiking boots?) last week. You can read more about Timberland’s effort to develop standards for its products here.

Speaking of Greenbiz, later this month I will be leading an online conversation with John D. Gagel, Sustainability Manager at Lexmark International, and Daniel Schmid, Head of Sustainability Operations at SAP, about how sustainability initiatives can drive profitability.  We’ll hear stories from Lexmark and SAP about tools and techniques for monitoring, measuring and reporting on corporate sustainability performance with an aim to driving financial returns. Greenbiz will host the free webcast on Tuesday, August 24, and it is likely to fill up fast, so register soon.

Several questions for those of you who own shares of stock:

When’s the last time you voted a proxy?

When’s the last time you opened a proxy?

Do you even know what a proxy is?

Don’t be embarrassed. Roughly 80% of individual investors–let’s call them share owners, because that’s what they are–don’t vote their proxies. This is one reason why CEO salaries are too high, boards of directors are complacent and executives fail to recognize that owners want companies to behave responsibly, as well as deliver returns.

A startup company called Moxy Vote aims to change that, by awakening share owners to their nascent power.

“It’s an interesting challenge–to put passion into proxy voting,” said Doug Gates, a Moxy Vote vice president, when we talked the other day.

Doug, 41, is one of three Gates brothers involved in the venture–his twin brothers Kevin and Rich are three years younger. The startup was hatched at a West Chester, Pa., investment company called TFS Capital, where Kevin and Rich work and which put $2 million into the business.

By enlisting the help of shareholder advocacy groups, the Moxy Vote founders think there’s an opportunity to organize individual share owners so that their voices can be heard in the boardroom. About 30% of shares in public companies are owned by individuals, as opposed to institutions like mutual funds, pension funds and insurance companies (most of which, of course, represent the savings of individuals).

Interestingly, Moxy Vote already has had some success. Shareholders of a small tech firm called On2 Technologies, which is being sold to Google, organized Moxy Vote to oppose the deal, which valued On2′s shares at 60 cents apiece. In December, Moxy Vote said on its blog that it had voted about 11.5% of the shares outstanding. This month, Google sweetened the deal under pressure, raising the price from 60 to 75 cents a share, from a total of $106.5 million to $133 million. Whether Moxy Vote made a difference (or even how the shares were voted) is hard to know, but surely the fact that shareholders got organized collectively didn’t hurt.

Here’s how Moxy Vote works. It formed relationships with about 20 shareholder advocacy groups, including unions like the Teamsters and Change to Win, nonprofits like the Humane Society of the United States and the Investor Environmental Health Network, foundations, socially-responsible investors and religious groups including the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the Sisters of Mercy Investment Program.

What these organizations have in common is that they use the power of shareholder resolutions (virtually all of which are advisory, by the way) to get corporations to change. Their issues include executive pay, climate change, human rights, diversity, animal welfare, toxic chemicals and so forth. They intend to use the site to recruit support.

As Michael Passoff, associate director of an advocacy group called As You Sow, put it by email:

While shareholders are technically the owners of a company, their voice is almost completely ignored. CEO’s regularly say that are doing this or that for the good of the shareholders, but as the latest financial crisis shows, many companies engage in risky business practices and the CEO’s still walk away with huge benefits even if they fail miserably at their jobs and destroy shareholder value. We believe in empowering shareholders to hold corporations accountable.

By email, Stu Dalheim, director of shareholder advocacy at Calvert Investments, told me:

Our sense is that too many investors do not vote their proxies because they do not have the time to think through all of the issues. Moxy Vote can help facilitate participation in corporate governance or shareholder democracy by giving individuals the information and tools they need to exercise their shareholder rights

Susan Morgan, co-founder of Investors Against Genocide, which is also working with Moxy Vote, said:

Over the past two years our shareholder proposal on genocide-free investing has been on the proxy ballots at the largest U.S. mutual fund companies including Fidelity, Vanguard, and American Funds.  We have found that most shareholders throw away their ballots without realizing that they have an opportunity to vote on an issue of great social importance.  We hope that through Moxy Vote and other related efforts, mutual fund shareholders will become more engaged in the voting process and realize that they can be a powerful voice for social change.

Moxy Vote itself doesn’t take sides on shareholder controversies. In fact, it’s hoping to enlist advocates on both sides–say, an animal rights group and a meat company. To make money, Moxy Vote may charge companies to be part of the site, or sell ads.

Doug Gates explained:

It was very much a conscious decision to stay out of the fray. We thought it would be more interesting, and more fun to build an open platform, and more successful in the long run.

Can apathetic share owners be awakened? Moxy Vote isn’t alone in trying. A nonprofit called ShareOwners.org (where my friend Nell Minow chairs the advisory committee) promotes better corporate governance and shareholder activism (“Rein in Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay abuses!”). A website called TransparentDemocracy.org invites people to learn more about political and corporate elections. Social media tools like Ning and Facebook make it easier than ever to organize like-minded folk.

In light of the fact that many people can’t be bother to vote for their president or Congress, it won’t be easy to induce them to vote as share owners. But in the wake of the financial crisis, when boards of directors performed horrible and the rest of us paid for it, this seems like the right time to try.

Corporate America: Making the world a better place…or not.

That used to be the tagline of this blog, and it remains the standard I use to judge companies.

Are the jobs they create enabling their employees to flourish? Are their products and services improving lives? Are their shareholders earning good returns? Are they making their communities better?

Put simply, how well are they serving workers, customers, shareholders and communities?

Most companies, it seems to me, would like to serve better. To do so, they need better incentives. These incentives can take the form of government regulations (sometimes needed, but rarely optimal, because regulators often become captives of the industries they are supposed to oversee), industry standards (like sustainable forestry standards or Hollywood movie ratings, which general work well) or social expectations (like the growing desire of customers to patronize “good” businesses or avoid “bad” ones).

That brings me to my 2010 wish list. Each creates an incentive for companies to do business better.

Climate change regulation: Until Congress passes a law making it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, there’s no hope of solving the global climate crisis. This could be a simple carbon tax, the complex and pork-laden Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House or the promising cap-and-dividend proposal from Senators Cantwell and Collins. Each approach has benefits and flaws, which we’ll get into some other day, but the best thing that could happen to business (and the planet) in the 12 months ahead is for the U.S., at long last, to stop allowing companies and the rest of us to pollute the atmosphere at will.

Corporate governance reform: What will it take for Congress, the SEC and America’s shareholders to recognize that so many boards of directors are failing at their job? You would think the near-collapse of the banking system would do it. Or the yawning gap between CEO pay and performance. Or the fact that so many corporate mergers end badly. The breakdown of corporate governance isn’t an easy problem to solve, but there are plenty of good ideas out there, ranging from requiring directors to win a majority of shareholder votes to finding ways to give activist shareholders more power to recall underperforming boards. The best boards will encourage companies to take a long-term and expansive view of their role in society. My friends Nell Minow (of The Corporate Library) and Bob Monks have been working heroically on these issues for decades. Reform is long overdue.

Sustainability ratings: How do the cleaning products of Seventh Generation, Method, Clorox and Tide compare? What’s the carbon footprint of a plastic bottle of Dasani, versus Aquafina or Poland Spring? Measuring the environmental impact of consumer products is a gargantuan task, and assessing the social impact is even harder. These aren’t jobs for the government. But a consortium of academics pulled together by Wal-Mart is trying to develop a sustainability index, as is a division of Underwriters Laboratory (which I wrote about here). It will take years to finish the job, but I’m hoping that Wal-Mart and UL they make real progress in the year ahead.

Human rights in China: As the economies of China and the U.S. become more intertwined, it’s incumbent on global corporations to use what clout they have to make clear that they disapprove of the way basic human rights are routinely violated in China. Companies that fear speaking out on their own should organize their peers to do so as a group. They could voice their support for political dissidents and environmental advocates, provide funding to human rights organizations and aggressively monitor the workplace and environmental practices of their suppliers. China shouldn’t be too big to fault.

Electric cars: Lots of forces have to come together for the electric car business to take off this year—a price on carbon would help, as would tax incentives for buyers and support for an infrastructure of charging stations. Most of all, consumers need to embrace electric cars—neither the automakers nor the government can force them on people, needless to say. But the environmental and national-security benefits of electric cars are so compelling that it’s my wish that 2010 become the year when electric cars move from talk to reality.

Happy New Year, blogreaders! Let’s hope 2010 is a good one for business, and for the rest of us.

The Motley Fool does a great series of podcasts–I’ve listened in recent months to interviews with James Fallows, John Mackey and Simon Johnson–and the other day I heard my friend Nell Minow of The Corporate Library talking about executive pay, boards of directors and her second life as Beliefnet’s Movie Mom.

Nell was asked who she would choose to dismiss as a CEO, if she had the power to do so. Her surprising answer: Tom Donahue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“He’s a terrible CEO,” she said, with her typical bluntness. “I think he is a virulent force in the field of business and corporations. I think he has hijacked capitalism on behalf of executives rather than investors.”

Why? It turns out that Donahue has served as a director of three public companies, all of which have had problems.

He’s a director of Sunrise Senior Living, which suffered from series of accounting problems, a plummeting stock price and a decision to settle shareholder litigation. Two well-respected governance groups, Risk Metrics and Proxy Governance, recommended that Donahue be voted off the board for “failing in is oversight duties,” according to Bloomberg News.

Donahue was also a director of Qwest, the telecom firm which paid $250 million to settle SEC charges that the company fraudulently booked $3.8 billion in revenue over three years, the Washington Post reported.

Finally, Donahue serves on the board of Union Pacific, where, according to Nell, the board “supported the bonuses of executives by attributing revenue from the sale of a division as operating revenue.” Donahue’s role at Union Pacific has left him open to the charge that he has a conflict of interest on the climate-change issue because the railroad carries so much coal, as Pete Altman of NRDC has said.

Said Nell: “Hey, three strikes and he’s out and he should be replaced on those boards. And he should be replaced at the chamber of commerce.’

Certainly Donahue has not shown much respect for his own directors–that is, the companies that pay him to run the chamber. On the climate change issue, the chamber’s position runs counter to that of such Fortune 500 firms and chamber members as GE, DuPont and Ford. Dow, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Shell have all gone to the trouble of putting out statements saying the chamber doesn’t speak for them on the climate issue, as the Who Does the Chamber Represent? website notes.

You can read about Nell’s visit to The Motley Fool and listen to her podcast here. The entire series of podcasts is available via iTunes.

CORRECTION: DuPont is not a chamber member and hasn’t been since 2005

Do you care who in the government knew about the AIG bonuses, and when they knew it? Do you think the AIG executives who collected bonuses deserve opprobrium? I don’t. Although the $165 (or $218) million in bonuses have become a symbol of executive compensation gone wild, pointing fingers at Tim Geithner or Chris Dodd or some AIG executive who may or may not have done a good job misses the point. It’s a distraction from a more fundamental question, namely: What have the directors of companies like AIG, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch been doing and how can they be held accountable?

Can you name a director of AIG? I didn’t think so. (Hint: one former director has a prominent role in the Obama administration.) The Citi board has gotten a more attention, and thankfully several board members will be replaced. But, as shareholder advocate Nell Minow points out in this excellent column for CNN’s website, the directors of these companies have gotten off easy. They did a dismal job of managing risk and overseeing executive compensation.

Again, though, let’s be clear on the problem. Although I happen to think that most FORTUNE 500 CEOs are overpaid, the real issue is not the absolute size of their paychecks. It’s the way in which compensation has become disconnected from performance, the way in which pay practices create perverse, short-term incentives and, most of all, the fact that board of directors cannot be reigned in by share owners in a meaningful way.

To be clear: Rich people aren’t the problem. Capitalism can’t thrive without them. We don’t and shouldn’t begrudge people who have created great companies—the Bill Gates and Michael Dells of the world—their wealth because they have made a whole lot of money for other people, including their shareholders. They created jobs and products people want. (Why people would want Dell computers or Windows is a different question…) Nor, for the most part, should we be troubled by the vast sums of money paid to movie stars or athletes or musicians who put fannies in the seats or on front of TVs. The problem arises when CEOs get paid well for failure. Here the names of Carly Fiorina (Hewlett-Packard), Chuck Prince (Citi) and Dick Parsons (former CEO of Time Warner and lead director of Citi) spring to mind.

Here’s what’s worse: On Wall Street, compensation practices promoted dangerous risk taking. As best as I can tell, the people who packaged CDOs and MBSs got bonuses each year that were tied to the number of deals that they made and the amounts of dollars involved. (Just as mortgage brokers got paid when they wrote mortgages.) It didn’t matter whether those deals made money in the long run, or whether the mortgage loans would be paid. If you pay people to make deals, they will make deals, for better or worse. As Robert Weissman of CorpWatch wrote last fall:

Wall Street players knew they were speculating in a bubble economy. But the riches to be made while the bubble was growing were extraordinary. No one could know for sure when the bubble would pop. And Wall Street bonuses are paid on a yearly basis. If your firm does well, and you did well for the firm, you get an extravagant bonus. This is not an extra few thousand dollars to buy fancy Christmas gifts. Wall Street bonuses can be 10 or 20 times base salary, and commonly represent as much as four fifths of employees’ pay. In this context, it makes sense to take huge risks. The payoffs from benefiting from a bubble are dramatic, and there’s no reward for staying out.

So what is to be done? It’s unlikely that the Obama administration will be find a way to regulate executive compensation that doesn’t lead to unanticipated and unwelcome consequences. I favor a simple solution—giving shareholders access to proxy statements, so they can nominate candidates for the board and thereby seek to replace directors who have failed on the job. By giving shareholders proxy access, the SEC can end the self-perpetuating system that permits CEOs and incumbent boards to hand-pick director candidates. Here’s an AFL-CIO website devoted to proxy access.

As for the AIG board, the director alluded to above was Richard Holbrooke, who is the state department’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan and Friend of Hillary and Bill. Holbrooke served on the AIG board from February 2001 until last July and, according to Huffington Post, he “may have earned as much as $800,000 in cash and company stock.” (The stock’s not worth much now.) From 2001 to 2005, Holbrooke was on the board’s compensation committee.

It gets worse. Holbrooke was not only on the AIG board, he was one of the “friends of Angelo” who got special treatment from Countrywide Financial and its CEO, Angelo Mozillo. (Chris Dodd was another.) Holbrooke, his wife Kati Marton and his son David  got sweetheart deals from Countrywide, which is now out of business, as Portfolio reported last year:

Holbrooke’s wife, author Kati Marton, received loans totalling $1.4 million to refinance two properties in 2002. “Look for these,” one Countrywide manager wrote in a September 27, 2002, email, alluding to Marton’s loan applications. “These loans are incredibly important to Angelo and as such they are incredibly important to us.”

The next year, Holbrooke borrowed $1.2 million to refinance a vacation home in Telluride, Colorado. Countrywide waived at least 1.25 points, or $15,000. “Per Angelo, this loan is to be at zero points,” a Countrywide manager wrote in a February 20, 2003, email. Also in 2003, Holbrooke’s son, David, and daughter-in-law Sarah received a half-point discount on a $559,500 loan, or about $2,800, when they refinanced their Brooklyn high-rise co-op, and five-eighths of a point discount on a $428,000 loan, or about $2,600, when they bought the floor above it. Neither Holbrooke nor his wife and son returned messages.

Director of AIG? Borrower from Countrywide? If we have to point fingers, let’s point them at people like Mr. Holbrooke.

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. In a similar vein, Sheila Bair, chairwoman of the FDIC, recommended a novel, So Big, by Edna Ferber, about a frugal mother and spendthrift son, and wrote:

The shift in values from mother to son can also be viewed as allegory for our own nation’s continuing cultural shift. We have moved away from the values of thrift and financial security held by our Depression-era parents to that of overuse of credit to fund lifestyles we cannot afford, that have not always brought happiness, and — in the case of the foreclosure crisis — that have caused dislocation and despair.

True enough. Frank’s story got me thinking about what book I’d recommend if I were asked to select a single volume that explains the beat I cover–the world of green business, corporate responsibility and capitalism, for better or worse. Many come to mind but my pick for the most recent book that best captures what’s going on in business (and elsewhere) today is the latest from one of my favorite business writers, Paul Hawken. It’s called Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (Viking 2007).

In Blessed Unrest, Hawken, whose previous books, Natural Capitalism and The Ecology of Commerce, have shaped much of my thinking about business and the environment, takes on a much bigger topic–the vast array of very loosely networked environmental and social justice organizations, operating in every corner of the globe. They have no orthodoxy or charismatic leader, they often operate independently, many are tiny and local, some well-funded and global–and together they are changing the world of business, and therefore the world. Blessed Unrest is a very optimistic book that connects the dots among such disparate people and organizations as Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King; LEED, Wikipedia and the Grameen Bank; Partners in Health, Amazon Watch and Cree Indians who are fighting development of the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. Hawken writes:

This movement’s key contribution is the rejection of one big idea in order to offer in its place thousands of practical and useful ones. Instead of isms it offers processes, concern and compassion. The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant and generous side of humanity. It does not aim for the utopian, which itself is just another ism, but is eminently pragmatic.

And it is impossible to pin down….the movement defies conventional typologies…Should the idea of using renewable sources to achieve  localized energy independence be categorized as radical, conservative, ecological, good long-term economics or socially equitable?

Hawken’s book, like the movement he’s writing about, is hard to summarize or even categorize. (Although it should be noted that he and his colleagues at the Natural Capital Institute have tried to keep track of what’s going on: See WISER, the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility at www.wiserearth.org. It currently lists 109,212 organizations. Amazing.)

In the book, he says:

The massive growth of citizen-based organizations responds to threats that are new, immense and game-changing. These groups defend against corrupt politics and climate change, corporate predation and the death of oceans, governmental indifference and pandemic poverty, industrial forestry and farming and depletion of soil and water….

And they are getting results:

Despite centuries-long practices of despoilation and pollution, almost every responsible corporation in the world is moving away from destructive practices and trying to institute more sustainable ones, and all of them have turned to NGOs to assist, teach, inspire and urge them on.

That, in the journalism biz, is what we call “the nut graf”–the single idea that summarizes the book. To understand how and why citizen groups around the world are changing business, well, you’ll have to read the rest of the book yourself.

Which reminds me–there are a number of promising biz and enviro books coming out this fall that I want to mention. (Disclosure: all three are by authors who are often sources of mine, and who I enjoy a great deal.) Sitting by my bedside are Strategies for the Green Economy by Joel Makower of Greenbiz.com, aka the guru of green business, Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal by the activist Mike Brune of the Rainforest Action Network and Greener Than Thou: Are you Really an Environmentalist? by Terry Huggins, the free-market environmentalist (and no, that’s not an oxymoron) who’s a fellow at the Hoover Insitution at Stanford, and his colleague Laura Huggins.