US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a dinner last week for the tech industry's key leaders. It looks to me like the consolidation of a trend.

I attended a talk a few years back and I am struggling to recall where it was. It was either in Boston or in Washington. Anyway the talk was given by a recently retired general counsel of a mahor corporation - perhaps IBM, perhaps GM. The main argument of the talk was that corporations need a foreign policy. I thought the idea was instantly exciting and terrifying.

Exciting because back then I had recently written a paper on "Legitimacy risks and peacebuilding opportunities for businesses in post-conflict Iraq". The fact is that businesses have presence, relationships and power and they will have an impact on communities and even nations whether they have a policy or not.
 

Terrifying because, as that paper had tried to make clear, legitimacy was key, and in the Iraq situation the absence of inclusiveness and accountability pretty much assured that the reconstruction effort would lack local goodwill. Think about how the reconstruction contracts were allocated, the absence of community involvement in allocation, the lack contract winners of Iraqi origin, then the failure of firms that undertook the work to do so from the outset with a solid local outreach and inclusion approach.

There are plenty of extractive industry firms with a substantial involvement in foreign affairs, too often with dubious and opaque relationships supporting regimes run by corrupt elites.

It is the global technology firm - particularly though not exclusively the internet-based firms - that is new to the art of running aground on foreign policy issues in most recent years. So I was very interested to hear about a small private dinner hosted by Hilary Clinton last week with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie. The subject under discussion: how technology can be used to meet the nation’s foreign diplomacy goals.

It is a topic I touched on here during the first major upheavals in Iran when twitter played such a role: Iran, business models and the right to tweet speech. The basic argument of that post - that access to twitter is crucial to freedom of speech - has been echoed in a State Departent blog post which said the agency wanted to use twitter in a contest as a:

"worldwide platform in which people can discuss the meaning of democracy and exchange ideas from diverse perspectives."

My thoughts/questions are these:

1/ Is corporate foreign policy simply an alternate name for existing corporate responsibility issues with a global hue, like climate change or, in the internet company case privacy issues? Or is it - and I believe it is - something more, where corproations are taking on a responsibility to consider their impact on human rights within their sphere of activity in a more accountable, thus perhaps quasi-public way?

2/ how do we assure legitimacy? How can we bring the right kind of transparency and inclusivity to corporate statecraft to ensure that it is just?

3/ global corporations are based in dozens of countries. Is there a question of to which foreign policy it needs to align its own?

Do you have any views?

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So after a week-long brouhaha Apple Inc has decided to permit the release of a new iPhone application called iSinglePayer.

The application enables users to see which US legislators have received political contributions from which limb of the anti-healthcare-reform lobby, and then to phone up the representative at the touch of a button. The application's data is supplied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The link between industry money and political process has never been more transparent.

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Australian investor activists are urging investors to look beyond the headline cash figure when deciding whether a firm is tying pay to performance.

Many companies have said they are freezing or cutting executive compensation in response to the downturn. The devil amy remain in variable pay elements such as short term bonuses and share options.

The real levels of compensation may not be known until next year's report and accounts. The focus now should be on ensuring a tight definition of performance to which executives can be held.

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Cool. 

From Shanghai Daily:  "Samsung South West Asia headquarters President and CEO J.S. Shin and Indian Minister for New and Renewable Energy Farooq Abdullah pose at the global launch of Samsung's first solar powered mobile phone, the Solar Guru 1107, priced at 2,799 rupees (US$59) in Noida, India, yesterday."

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Tomorrow the phone maker will release two new phone models which boast a 15% reduction in carbon footprint.

According to the Guardian report, the phones' environmental credentials are achieved by "cutting packaging, using recycled plastics and reducing the use of solvents in the paints".

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Communications Workers of America is waging an online "picketing" of the 2009 Masters Tournament this weekend by encouraging workers to tweet their concerns.  A sample of tweets from theweekend: RT AT&T execs: watching golf and cutting retiree health benefits; AT&T at the top of the leader board for corporate greed; From a blog on AT&T CEO: One day before he announced he would not be taking a bonus, he was gifted some 300,000 shares of stock.#Masters.

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AT&T's union landline workers' contracts expired at midnight on Saturday, as the unions and management have failed to reach an agreement over key issues.  The primary issue is whether the company will continue to subsidize employee healthcare at current rates, which AT&T claim are like the auto industry's rates, and therefore unsustainable. 

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Orange Mobile has launched a new promotion in France, called a "sim-only" offer, in which they pay new customers €40 to keep their old phones, rather than the usual new-phone-with-contract offer They're pushing the promotion as a green initiative, and donating €5 to WWF for each new customer.  In light of the current economic situation, this sort of scheme is likely to catch on as more mobile phone users around the world try to quell their iPhone lust and think twice before they trash their (average fourteen month) old phone. 

Right?

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The Norwegian oil fund, following a recomendation from its Council on Ethics, has banned investment in China's Dongfeng Motor company.

The rationale is that the company is supplying trucks to the Burmese military, so supporting a military dictatorship credited with widescale human rights abuse.

German engineering company Siemens is to be placed under close scrutiny by virtue of “gross and systematic corruption the group has been involved in over many years”. The fund owns 1.34% of Siemens stock as of the end of last year.

The Council on Ethics apparently recommended divestment now, so the Siemens statement is somewhat upbeat about the fact that the recommendation was not implemented. Bloomberg reports:

"Siemens “welcomes the decision by the Norwegian Royal Ministry of Finance for the first time not to follow the recommendation of the Council on Ethics and to remain invested in Siemens,” spokesman Marc Langendorf said in an e-mail. “Siemens has now implemented comprehensive measures in the area of compliance and established a long-term compliance culture.”

The Munich-based company has been embroiled in a bribery scandal since 2006, leading to investigations in at least a dozen countries. Units of the company have been charged with paying kickbacks and bribes to win contracts in Iraq’s government in the United Nations oil-for-food program and for projects including commuter rail in Venezuela, mobile-phone networks in Bangladesh, power plants in Israel and Russian traffic control."

The oil fund announcement, however, appears to suggest that going forward even a minor infraction by Siemens could trigger divestment.

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