With the current financial circus pitching its big top at a foreclosed house near you, it's tough to pick out exceptionally awful companies among the detritus of publicly traded disasters.

For one thing, what metrics — we already talk the talk 'round here — do you use?

At The Consumerist, how customers get the shaft is the preferred yardstick, and the determinant is public input. Hence they host a series of contests, corporate death matches if you will, pitting the likes of Ticketmaster against Wachovia (Ticketmaster wins on our brackets), or Comcast vs. Menu Foods.

But a lot of companies have shown a remarkable ability to weather customer outrage. How about outrage from investors? While it helps if the investor has the surname Icahn, another 800-pound gorilla, California’s $235 billion Public Employees Pension Fund, has released its top 5, er, bottom 5, companies today.

The eagerly anticipated “focus list of underperformers” includes a couple of consumer names, such as Cheesecake Factory and La-Z-Boy, as well as insurance broker Hilb Rogal & Hobbs, health care equipment supplier Invacare, and homebuilder Standard Pacific.

What’s noteworthy about the CalPers list is that it goes beyond stock performance, which any number of second-tier personal finance mags can dissect, to assess corporate governance of both C-level execs and directors. For example, the Cheesecake Factory is urged to adopt a “clawback” policy allowing it to regain money its paid executives who are shown to have committed fraud or submitted bogus performance data.

Besides the satisfaction of nailing the creeps, this matters how? Well, according to CalPers: “Research shows that improved corporate governance leads to performance gains, over time. Wilshire Associates studies of the ‘CalPERS Effect’ of corporate governance have found that the stock values of companies on the Focus List generally outperform the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index later.” So pulling up your socks pays non-tax-advantaged dividends (although not everyone concurs).

Another metric is employee satisfaction. As our Amy Ramos wrote a while back, “Professor Alex Edmans of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business says stock performance and social responsibility don’t have to be mutually exclusive, if the criterion the investor uses for social responsibility is employee satisfaction. Edmans recently published research in which he demonstrated that publicly traded companies on Fortune magazine’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list  earned more than twice the market return from 1998 to 2005.”

We point this out because Standard Pacific made it to No. 85 on Fortune’s 2007 list.