“Corporate Social Responsibility”

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Rob the BusinessPundit has a post on corporate philanthropy that echoes my own sentiments:

I tend to err on the side of business and say that a business is only responsible for major, direct, negative effects of its policies (like pollution). My problem with making companies too concerned with social activities is that the causes they champion aren’t necessarily the causes I, as a shareholder, would prefer they champion. Why should they get to make the decisions about which charities get funding? Shouldn’t they give that money to shareholders and let them decide what to do with it? Ultimately, I wish these people that hate corporate profits so much would form their own non-profit companies. Let them figure out how to produce pharmaceuticals and computers and cars and everything else without using profitability as a guide. If they succeed, then great we will all be better off. But my guess is that they will fail. When companies follow profit, they follow what consumers want. Profit comes from satisfying consumer needs. That is social responsibility. There is a demand for solutions to societal problems. Over time that demand is being met. That is why a poor person today eats better than a king did several generations ago.

It’s worth reading in full.

UPDATE: Lex and I have a long exchange of views in the comments.

Want some fries with that?

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Good link via Drudge about a director who documented what happens when he ate nothing but McDonalds for 30 days.

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Greedy Prosecutors

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A typical middle-aged guy with no criminal record, who started taking prescription meds for back pain, became addicted, and got caught, would be treated leniently if he agreed to seek treatment for his addiction. But if you’re famous, perhaps a famous Republican in a pivotal Democratic jurisdiction, they try to nail you.

Limbaugh can afford good legal representation and will probably come out OK. But what does this episode say about the local prosecutors? Maybe there’s so little crime in Palm Beach that they have nothing better to do than pursue this marginal case.

Or maybe the prosecutors’ proposed plea deal was so harsh because it was designed to be rejected (as Limbaugh’s attorney did). The obvious implication is that the prosecutors are either 1) Democratic hacks out for revenge for the 2000 election (or simply against a prominent Republican), 2) trying to prolong resolution of this otherwise minor case in order to advance their own careers, 3) trying to force Limbaugh to go to trial, which would be extremely costly in foregone income to him, even if he were not convicted, or 4) all of the above.

UPDATE: The Florida Attorney General isn’t playing along with the prosecutors, and the prosecutors are backpedaling:

Limbaugh’s attorney, Roy Black, questioned [Palm Beach County State Attorney] Krischer’s motives and said the release was part of a smear campaign. Prosecutors said they believed they were doing the right thing after consulting the law, the attorney general and the Florida Bar. But there was nothing in writing to support or refute their claim that they were following legal advice from the attorney general.

That changed Wednesday with the release of a letter to Palm Beach County prosecutors from Patricia Gleason, general counsel for the attorney general. The letter lent credence to Limbaugh’s claim that the release of the records was improper.

”In this case,” Gleason wrote, “… it seems to me that the purpose in contacting me about this issue may not have been to obtain impartial advice on an open government issue, but rather to use a part of our conversation to justify your office’s decision that the documents should be released. This is disappointing to me personally and professionally.”

Prosecutors dispatched a written reply to Gleason Wednesday stating that they were confident in their decision and consulted her only ”to see if there was anything we may have missed” while researching the issue.

That last quoted paragraph is a doozy. So the prosecutors already knew the answer with confidence but asked the AG anyway? Yeah, right. I’m sure that if the attorney general, a conservative Republican, had agreed with them they would have used his opinion as cover for their treatment of Limbaugh. That would have helped them, and hurt him with Florida Republicans. But he was smart enough not to let the prosecutors use him, so now they are claiming he’s irrelevant. What a bunch of jackasses. It’s too bad they can’t be impeached. (Or can they — does anybody know?)

The Mongols Return to Iraq

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Mongolian troops

It’s been a while. in 1258, the Mongols sacked Baghdad. Now, they are back under different auspices. (Link via Center For Security Policy.) You might be scratching your head over this. Why do we want 173 men who cannot be understood by anybody and whose equipment is decrepit, and who need to be flown, housed, fed and otherwise cared for by Uncle Sam? The same might be asked about many on the list President Bush ran through in his SOTU speech: “Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands, Norway, El Salvador, and the 17 other countries.” Some of the countries are making a substantive contribution. Others want to participate because they have their own reasons for wanting to work with Uncle Sam. But what we get out of this, especially with the smaller and poorer countries, is building relationships, making friends in remote places.

I recall this interesting question, and answer from an interview with Robert Kaplan:

Q: You mention the friendships that have developed between U.S. military men and their foreign counterparts. These relationships appear to be extremely important to the Special Forces service. Can you talk about why these friendships mean so much? Also, why is it important for us to have a system for tracking these relationships outside of an anecdotal one?

A: What happens now is, there will be a crisis somewhere and an officer will say, “Oh, I know that army. A guy in that army was my student at Fort Leavenworth or Fort Benning and we were really good friends for a few years and then we lost contact. I’m sure he’s in the middle of this crisis. I wonder what he’s up to? I wonder what his e-mail address is?” If we could systematically keep track of these relationships and contacts, people would be able to access them in a crisis. We’d have better intelligence quickly and we’d be able to fix a problem too. When friendships are maintained, they are used. For instance, the Ghanaian Army may have a problem-it’s got rebels in the north, it lacks equipment, or it can’t keep up an airfield because the runway is damaged or there’s not enough money to keep paving it. So then a colonel in Ghana, who is friends with a Marine lieutenant at Camp Pendleton in California, can just get in touch with his friend and say, “You know, this is going wrong and that’s going wrong. Perhaps you could help us, perhaps you could send a training mission.” And remember, some of these training missions can be one person. Or they can be ten or twenty. They can be planned nine months in advance, or they can happen on the spot. The more flexible this process is-the more seamless the relationships between American middle- and higher-level officers and officers in other countries-the better our relationships with these foreign militaries are going to be, and the better able we’re going to be to deal with problems as they emerge in a world where every country is potentially strategic. If there’s one thing we learn from the news, it’s that the places that seem the most obscure today are the stuff of tomorrow’s headlines.

Those Mongolian troops may not look like much. But this Iraq gig is a prestige assignment, for them. These are their best and brightest. Down the road, these guys are going to be the senior honchos in the Mongolian Army. And they will be in our rolodex. Just in case.