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Most/Least Evil Corporations?

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M

Mineshaft_Gap

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There are a number of corporations I'd brand as "evil" but that's only based on my rather limited knowledge of the things they've done to rip people off. Or the things they hire lobbyists to do in Washington. Verizon fits the bill for a number of reasons BUT they're far from the most evil. What corporation today do you think has crossed the line from regular villainy to cartoonish supervillainy.

As far as I've been able to tell, the Monsanto corporation has to be up there. Just look at their wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

Terminator seeds: Genetically altered seeds which don't reflower year after year. Forcing farmers to repurchase the seeds every season. Really though. The majority of their wikipedia page is made up of all the different controversies they've been at the center of over the years.

Anyways. What are the most evil corporations?
 
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It would be helpful in this thread to have a link to what a corporation is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation

Many people who go into work with another person are incorporated. It doesn't make them evil or on the path to being evil. People incorporate their businesses for one primary reason (and a small host of others), debtor liability, so that starting a business does not ruin your life. Before people post "All corporations are evil..." Which is inevitable, just remember, your mom and pop store that you buy milk from? Probably a corporation. The pizza joint down the street that you worked at in high school? Probably a corporation. Volunteer organizations like YOU Inc or the Boys and Girls Club or the Red Cross? Corporations.
 
They are all pretty evil. Even the seemingly friendly ones like Google or Apple use cheap overseas labor and Double Irish tax schemes/foreign tax havens.

You don't get rich by writing out a lot of checks. Buy 'em out boys.
 
Was going to post Monsanto. Good job, OP.

They sue farmers who they find growing their crops but don't have the license to use their patented seeds. "That sounds reasonable," you might be saying to yourself... but these farmers are not actually growing their crops on purpose. The crops ended up growing on their land due to the natural effects of pollination. And yet, Monsanto is still suing them and the farmers basically all have to settle and pay Monsanto because they don't have the funds to fight it.
 
Least evil corporations I can think of:

Mondragon
Valve

Pretty much any corporation based in Sweden/any other nordic country
 
I've signed NDAs but I will say that certain parts of the financial sector makes Monsanto look like the Fredo in the family.

Least evil? I'll let you know when I find a candidate. Ben and Jerry's seems pretty reasonable.
 
In the past, in a horrible temp part time job that I needed before my current career, I worked for Ticketmaster.

The experience convinced me that this company is a malevolent, evil blight on the planet and I want it destroyed. Its the worst of corporate culture combined with fucking over each and every customer as much as you possible can.

I remember when a customer rang in because he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and wanted to make sure his family could collect and use his tickets as he would be either undergoing chemotherapy or dead. He got a no.

Everything was geared to getting the customer off the phone, and if you didn't lie about the quality of the seats and sell them as majetic even if they made the performance utterly unviewable, then it was an autoflag instant disciplinary offence.

The computer systems were as cheap and unreliable as they came, with a DOS ticket overlay running on Windows XP with incredible instability, it would often take money but never acknowledge the need for actual tickets, deleting transactions and leaving customers without money and their purchase.

The service charges were extortionate. The postage fee was at least quadruple the actual cost of postage. The ticket-packers were encouraged to rush, because a certain number of mistakes and ticketless customers was an acceptable margin of error.

The script for each call ordered us to pretend we were at the venue in question, rather than at a horrible call centre, and every line was designed to support this lie.

Oh and every time a customer thought they had pre-sale or special access tickets, they were really just a shit allocation of bad tickets that the company was trying to flog before the real sale. Customers bought them thinking that they were all that was left, and everything was in place to encourage this delusion.

Oh and they tried to fire as many people as possible, because taking on new staff at a lower wage for their induction period, then failing them on a technicality to prevent permanent employment and a pay rise, was commonplace. Never happened to me, but saw it happen to others.

The initial call waiting system, in which callers had to reply to recorded messages by pressing numbers on their phones to be navigated to the right staff, was fiction. It raised the cost of the customer's phone bill and took everyone to the same person in the end.

If I needed to go to the toilet, a counter on my screen would count up how long I was in there for, and if it was too long then they'd come and get you.

Its the most evil business I've encountered, and one of the things I truly, truly HATE.
 
Ducky_McGee said:
As far as I've been able to tell, the Monsanto corporation has to be up there. Just look at their wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

Terminator seeds: Genetically altered seeds which don't reflower year after year. Forcing farmers to repurchase the seeds every season. Really though. The majority of their wikipedia page is made up of all the different controversies they've been at the center of over the years.

Anyways. What are the most evil corporations?
Click to expand...

Ultimately, if it makes a better product/higher profit for the farmers then the wild strains then it's justifiable. From what I hear, people who work at the company love their work and find it fulfilling to deal with such an important problem as agricultural capacity/efficiency. However the board and legal team is very shady so I don't know what to say. I wouldn't call them a good company but I definitely wouldn't call them the MOST evil as society needs this type of research to be done.
 
No particular problems with oil companies. Big problems with chemical companies and coal mines.

Worst offenders are tobacco.

Worst potential future offenders are legalized narcotic drug companies (Which will copy their dealer ancestors in squandering human potential).
 
Kad5 said:
BP

I'm not fond of it's history as a person of Iranian descent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP

Formerly the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Indirectly responsible for overthrowing Iran's democratic government with the help of the CIA.
Click to expand...

There wasn't really anything indirect about it. They set democracy in Iran back over 50 years. A friend of my father said that when he was in Iran and he asked a worker what "BP" means, the dude told him it means Benzene Pars. That feels insulting when you think of how little money the actual Iranians got during the years the British operated there.
 
The least is Amazon. If you don't take advantage of them they usually are pretty cool customer service-wise. And afaik they've never destroyed any company they've bought.

Valve and Steam's CS needs massive work. As does Google's.
 
sk3 said:
The least is Amazon. If you don't take advantage of them they usually are pretty cool customer service-wise. And afaik they've never destroyed any company they've bought.

Valve and Steam's CS needs massive work. As does Google's.
Click to expand...

Not having a sales tax did give them an unfair edge over local merchants, but right now they are backing a nationally standardized tax rate for online sales.
 
Monsanto is basically Evil, Inc.
But pretty much all corporations are evil in some sense. Basic human kindness flies out the window the moment profit enters the room, even more so if multiple people are in charge.
A single person will feel remorse for exploiting some poor sap in India, the upper echelon of a corporation will not.
 
Obsessed said:
Eh, their customer service could use some improvement.
Click to expand...

We're not talking about "best and worst" corporations here, we're talking about "evil/not evil". Having bad customer service just means they have a less then stellar side of the corporation. (Good customer service is also really hard to come by in general). It doesn't make the company evil, it just shows that it has a side that needs improvement.

I bet some of the least evil corporations have a lot of services that are lackluster because they won't compromise certain standards to be on the top of the industry in those regard. (Not saying this is the case with Valve and customer service, just as a general idea.)

If, say, Wal-Mart was less evil, I'm sure their stores would be a lot less useful for the consumer.
 
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