A New Brand of Power

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Wal-Mart and Al Gore. A marriage made in the sickest online German porn chat rooms.

A New Brand of Power: "Consider public opinion about junk food. Parents don't want kids to eat it, and Ronald McDonald understands. McDonald's has added salad and fruit to its menu; the home of fries and burgers has transformed itself into the nation's biggest buyer of apples. Meanwhile, Wendy's has stopped frying its food in trans fats, which have also been banished from Oreo cookies and Frito-Lay snacks; General Mills makes its Cheerios and Wheaties out of whole grain. In all these cases, companies have responded to public sentiment before regulators compelled them to do so. As a mechanism of political accountability, we have elections -- and now brands.
Or consider public opinion about globalization. No regulation compels Nike to pay more than the prevailing wage in the poor countries it works in. But the value of Nike's brand dwarfs its costs of manufacturing, so it wisely chooses to do so. No regulation, or at least none that is enforced effectively, prevents furniture companies from despoiling Third World forests. But U.S. stores with brands worth protecting insist on certification from the Forest Stewardship Council. The fight about including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements rages inconclusively in Congress. But corporations do not suffer from that sort of gridlock, so they're ahead of the curve.
Or consider the environmental behavior of U.S. companies at home. This used to be the classic case of politics leading business: For most of the past generation, regulators have forced environmental rules on grumbling corporations. But in the current debate on climate change, this order has reversed itself. Impatient companies are capping their own carbon emissions: Wal-Mart has promised to double the efficiency of its vehicle fleet and achieve a 30 percent cut in its stores' energy usage. Its "