What's the worst company ever. Period.
Nestle? Spectrum? Some random company nobody knows about?
Nestle? Spectrum? Some random company nobody knows about?
Bayer. They knowingly sold HIV infected blood to Latin America after the blood was rejected in Europe. This still blows my mind. Some corporate waste of oxygen actually decided to do this. It wasn't an accident. That guy needs to get stabbed with thousands ten fucking thousand of AIDS needles.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/aids.suzannegoldenberg
They also bought Monsanto and, if anything, ramped up the evil from THAT murderous shitshow!
Why am I suddenly thinking about Norm Macdonald and Hitler? π
I was actually thinking of Norm Macdonald's catchphrase "the more I hear about that Hitler fellow, the less I like him!" but yeah, that's heinous as fuck too π¬
Quite the opposite, actually: he was a great comedian known for his deadpan delivery of the most outrageous things π
Here he is affably roasting the fuck out of people π
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And the Essure permanent birth control device, causing persistent pain, bleeding and other health problems to thousands of women. Withdrawn from the US market before the Netflix documentary released
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/25/the-bleeding-edge-netflix-documentary-medical-devices
Did a little bit of digging on that one, before being bought by Bayer, the Cutter biological division was responsible for another pharmaceutical disaster. They accidentally (?) sold 120 000 doses of polio vaccines containing the live polio virus.
They also acquired and still run the business previously done by Monsanto known for things like agent orange and eliminating corn biodiversity. Their legal department is also infamous for bankrupting small farmers.
Lots of drugs started out as medicine. And heroin is a great medicine, still used in this sense today.
They are the Bug Bad Evil in my pirate themed DnD campaign. Or a proxy of them at least. What better justification for becoming a pirate than them? To quote a real pirate captain from the 1700, "They rob the poor under cover of law, we plunder the rich under the cover of our own courage."
came here to say this. though if American slave traders had actually been a unified corporation I'd be pointing at them.
Ok so Nestle for child murder, Bayer for AIDs blood, Union Carbide for Bhopal disaster and its parent Dow Chemical for Agent Orange (Monsanto too).
IBM for helping the Nazis with concentration camps and Degesch for Zyclon B. United Fruit Company and Dutch & British East India Companies for colonization, also everyone that was shipping rubber out of the Belgian Congo.
Everyone who makes landmines, cluster bombs, etc.
I think when this question is asked in 100 years Palantir is going to feature.
United Fruit Company because they manipulated several countries in Central America and helped the CIA overthrowing the democratically elected government in Guatemala
So many to choose from...
My pick would be Bank of America for their illegal foreclosure practices which have ruined many families' lives, and especially for their role in the subprime mortgage crisis which destabilized the entire global economy and which we are still trying to recover from. Everyone on the entire planet was impacted by the Great Recession.
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Chiquita bananas. They literally stole entire south/central American countries and used death squads and the CIA to enslave the workers and kill them when they asked for such unreasonable demands like being paid in actual currency
Banana Republic is a term coined for all the countries where this company operated.
As someone who lives in a banana republic that now has banana republic stores in its malls, this is a perplexing and sort of insulting end result, and I don't understand how the name of the store ever took off
Don't forget Dole. They caused the annexation is Hawai'i.
Both have paid terrorist organizations in the last couple decades.
NestlΓ© is responsible for misleading African mothers into thinking formula is better than their own breast milk. They lied to expectant mothers just to sell formula.
They made private data the βnew goldβ which it is today long before social media started exploiting it. Changing their motto /code of conduct βDonβt be evilβ into βDo the right thingβ (for our shareholders) didnβt benefit their reputation eitherβ¦
Changing their motto /code of conduct βDonβt be evilβ into βDo the right thingβ (for our shareholders) didnβt benefit their reputation eitherβ¦
It's still in their code of conduct, though.
I'm sure there are worse, and it's not one company, but the companies that provide malware to dictatorships are pretty bad, and western countries are sheltering them/not doing much about them.
Examples:
That's the problem, really. Numerous companies do unspeakable evil, which makes it very difficult to name and shame any one of them.
Right. Corporations aren't the problem, they're just a symptom of the real problem. Even though they're evil, they're just a product of their environment. The "good" corporations aren't profitable and go out of business.
I don't know if there's a phrase in english for it, but in slovak we say a fish stinks from the head, basically meaning company is whatever the very top managers are like.
Fun fact. Saudi Aramco got hit with malware that took down basically their entire computer system. The hackers then demanded $50m in ransom.
The virus was used for cyberwarfare[4] against national oil companies including Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco and Qatar's RasGas.[5][2][6] A group named "Cutting Sword of Justice" claimed responsibility for an attack on 30,000 Saudi Aramco workstations, causing the company to spend more than a week restoring their services.[7]
It really is just a matter of scale. I've known some evil little fuckers, but they lack the resources to commit full scale atrocities. They're not employing children in hazardous conditions or selling tainted blood, but that's only because they don't have access to a steady supply of either.
The ethics is actually very simple. Taking those two examples:
Kids love to work if you just give them the chance. What kid wouldn't want to go and show how they can do grownup things and at the same time make money to help their family survive? It happens all the time with family businesses. Just because I'm a wage slave means my kids can't contribute? What kind of elitist bullshit is that?
The rest is just regulations meant to strangle the small businessman. You've got some pencil neck in an office somewhere who wants to stop LIFE SAVING MEDICATION from getting to people who need it. Bitter little fuck cares more about swinging his dick around and writing "laws" than actually helping people. Most of that blood is perfectly fine but the paperwork got fucked up and sure - maybe some isn't fine - but if you ask the guy bleeding out from a stab wound if he wants some, he'll say "YES!" In any case, malaria will probably get the poor fucker before the AIDS does. And he probably already has the HIV anyway.
/s for those last two paragraphs because it's not an argument that I'd make, but it very much is a parallel to arguments that I've seen being made in real life by seemingly normal people.
And then of course people tend to operate on a spectrum of
*literally does not care
*only cares if it's happening to me
*only cares if someone else finds out (because then I'll have to pretend I never noticed)
*cares, but not enough to lose my livelihood over it
*cares, but is really good about not thinking too hard and/or focusing on all the nice things instead of the things that probably aren't even all that bad
*will think about quitting, but realizes that they other guys are just as bad (or worse)
*will quit and go live in a cave
One let babies starve for profit, the other has shitty internet service /customer service. Seems equal /s.
Johnson&Johnson
swindled does a few episodes about them. Itβs FUCKING INFURIATING the shit they got away with.
I'm guessing it would some of the big companies of colonial times, like the British East or Dutch India Companies.