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With companies eager to tout their "green" credentials to consumers, advertising watchdogs in a number of countries are stepping up efforts to rein in marketers that make false or exaggerated claims.

Shopping in a Target store, you know you're not in Wal-Mart. But, critics say that in terms of working conditions, sweatshop-style foreign suppliers, and effects on local retail communities, big box Target stores are very much like Wal-Mart, just in a prettier package.

I was reading this article about Wal-Mart tricking its customers into signing up for a stealth PR campaign to burnish the retailer's image, when this stopped me cold:

Last December, Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., created its own grassroots group, Working Families for Wal-Mart. It hired Edelman, a global public relations firm, to organize the group out of its Washington office and launch a nationwide campaign.

Wal-Mart said it will build the stores in neighborhoods with high crime or unemployment rates, on sites that are environmentally contaminated, or in vacant buildings or malls in need of revitalization.

Like almost anything involving Wal-Mart these days, the dispute has less to do with specific legal or regulatory questions than it does with the deep rift the company has opened across the American landscape.

Here's a story that will make your blood boil: The Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart, the world's largest corporation, are planning a huge art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. There's nothing wrong with a little culture in the Midwest, right?

Except when you consider how much they are spending on their little hobby, while resisting spending a fraction as much to simply pay their employees a living wage.

Rebecca Solnit's article on the subject will enrage you. She discusses a single painting the family recently bought for $35 million:

Wal-Mart Stores, facing a raft of state legislation that would require it to increase spending on employee health insurance, will lift several of its long-standing - and most-criticized - restrictions on eligibility over the next year, the giant retailer said this morning.

Wal-Mart Stores, facing a raft of state legislation that would require it to increase spending on employee health insurance, will lift several of its long-standing - and most-criticized - restrictions on eligibility over the next year, the giant retailer said this morning.

Corporate social responsibility, once a do-gooding sideshow, is now seen as mainstream. But as yet too few companies are doing it well, says Daniel Franklin (interviewed here)

This latest example of Wal-Mart's "direct procurement" approach continues the company's practice of upending the traditional relationship between the makers of goods and those who sell them.

The deal has some in the recording industry alarmed at the thought of Wal-Mart's establishing direct partnerships with musicians and cutting out the labels. And it may just be the start.

The "union project" was a secret scheme, approved by senior Wal-Mart executives, to pay union members for information about which stores they planned to organize.

Wal-Mart apologized yesterday after its retail Web site directed potential buyers of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Planet of the Apes" DVDs to also consider purchasing DVDs with African American themes.

In a national campaign aimed squarely at Wal-Mart Stores, lawmakers in 30 states are preparing to introduce legislation that would require large corporations to increase spending on employee health insurance, according to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which planned to announce the initiative this morning.

The legislative push underscores state lawmakers' growing frustration with the progress of federal health care reform and the success of a union effort to turn Wal-Mart into a symbol of everything that is wrong with the system.

It's a new year and the fate of Wal-Mart Bank still hangs in the balance.