Ones I haven’t seen mentioned here yet:
Honeywell is a major millitary contractor.
Meijer, Hanes, Circle K, Jimmy Johns, Thermos, Thortons, Hyvee, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Conair, AAA, Yamaha, Dixie, Roku, New Balance, Sparkle, Saucony, Hoka, Sport Clips, and Lowes - donate almost exclusively to Republicans
Tripplite (bought by Eaton) - Barre Seid donated 1.6 billion to a dark money conservative group.
It’s a minefield out there.
There’s a site called “goods unite us” that I’ll check before making a big purchase or deciding to make a store a regular stop. It has the average donation history of the company and who they donated to. It sucks that we have a Home Depot in a really convenient location but they’re especially egregious donators.
I use them as well. I wish there was a better agregator though, Walmart passes their check, but treat their employees and suppliers like dirt.
Conair
All my combs and brushes are made by evil? No wonder I can’t feather my hair right. They’re only good at keeping it straight.
I was pretty shocked at how many big brands around cosmetics, haircare, and hygeine were big Trump or Project 2025 supporters. It’s about as rampant as gas stations and tool brands.
Chemical regulations
Minefield, you say?
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004SPIE.5441...13R/abstract
The Self Healing Minefield (SHM) is comprised of a networked system of mobile anti-tank landmines. When the mines detect a breach, each calculates an appropriate response, and some fire small rockets to “hop” into the breach path, healing the breach. The purpose of the SHM is to expand the capabilities of traditional obstacles and provide an effective anti-tank obstacle that does not require Anti-Personnel (AP) submunitions. The DARPA/ATO sponsored program started in June 2000 and culminated in a full 100-unit demonstration at Fort Leonard Wood, MO in April 2003. That program went from “a concept” to a prototype system demonstration in approximately 21 months and to a full tactically significant demonstration in approximately 33 months.
Ah yes, not self-healing as in able to be disabled after the war is over, but self-healing as automatically “hops” mines into different locations to cover gaps after a single mine explodes.
(To be fair DARPA eventually dumped money into “smart mines” which can be disabled remotely. Still…)
Also I’m reminded of military contractor KBR and Halliburton:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/jamie-leigh-jones-claims-iraq-rape-employer-held/story?id=13884264
June 21, 2011
A woman who says she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq will face down an attorney for KBR in a Texas courtroom today.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 26, was working her fourth day on the job in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven U.S. contractors and held captive by two KBR guards in a shipping container. Jones, whose story was featured in an award-winning ABC News “20/20” investigation, is one of a group of women who claim they were harassed or assaulted while working for KBR and former parent company Halliburton in Iraq. She is suing KBR, former parent company Halliburton and KBR firefighter Charles Bortz, who she claims was one of the rapists.
She never got her day in a real court, the contract to force her to take it through arbitration court stood firm.
I am a bit confused as to why we don’t have landmines that has a chemical self disarming mechanism, I mean a compound explosive charge that would was armed by combining two liquids that reacted to form the explosive, but then slowly kept reacting to go inert after 10 years or so.
Sadly that not going to work; liquid explosives are a lot less reliable and far more unstable than the stuff they use now. All it takes is a little leak or some crack to set those off. This means manufacturing the mines is significantly more hazardous and transporting them is riskier. You wouldn’tbeable to stockpile them because the explosives would be losing potency from the moment the chemicals were made. Worst of all since they can’t be used to make shaped charges most of the explosive force would go into the ground instead of being directed up and anti tank mines would be impossible.
This isn’t to say self deactivating mines are impossible but every solution I’ve heard is either impractical or could easily be exploited by the enemy.
Oracle is so shitty to its customers there’s multiple law firms that specialize in helping customers sue them.
Out here in Seattle, if you give your two weeks notice as a tech employee to Amazon, and you tell them that you’re going to Oracle, they’ll just send you home that day. Probably not every team/manager, but it’s a thing.
I agree, but the wording of that is imprecise…
Google reimplemented the same API (which should be legal) but “use” sounds like they called Oracle’s implementation of the function
Oracle tried to argue that writing your own virtual machine with the exact same same interface as theirs (even a clean room reimplementatio, or an improved version) was copyright infringement
If Oracle had won, it would likely have killed things like OpenJDK, WINE, Proton, Rosetta, etc. and would have made licensing around OpenGL/Vulkan very confusing (for a few examples)
Gotta love a company that will sue you if you benchmark their software…
Stickermule and uline
https://slate.com/business/2024/07/sticker-mule-ceos-pro-trump-maga-email-surprised-employees.html
After stickermule went full magat the owner started to dox people who left negative reviews or spoke out against them.
https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial
A previously unreported boom in profits for the shipping supply giant Uline has provided the funds for a deeply conservative Midwestern family to bankroll anti-democracy causes around the country.
I think the question already contains a sort of ideological trap: it assumes that a specific company can be uniquely evil, as if morality were some trait that varies between company to company.
I’m sure everyone’s heard this before:
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
It’s not just a slogan. It gives us insight into the very structure of capitalism. That doesn’t mean every individual act is equally bad, but the system demands a sort of baseline complicity.
CEOs and executives are legally required to maximize shareholder profits. Not just encouraged— legally obligated. So when Coca-Cola, for example, hires paramilitary death squads to kill labor leaders in Colombia, it’s not because it is uniquely monstrous. Replace Coca-Cola with Pepsi, or Nestle, or Amazon, or Raytheon… whatever. The logic of the system would produce the same result. If I gave the same chess position to 30 different Grandmasters… if there is a best move they will all see it and choose that best move.
Think of an ant colony. An ant colony doesn’t decide to be cruel; it expands, consumes, protects its territory, destroys threats. Is it evil when some colony wipes out another for resources? A colony committing what we could term ant genocide? No it’s not. The colony is simply acting in its nature. Much like a slime mold would expand in a radius looking for food in a petri dish.
Large corporations are like ant colonies. Complex emergent behavior resulting from a large number of individual units acting by a set of rules. The intelligence or perspective of the individual does not actually matter for the organism as a whole. As long as the individual units follow a set of rules it creates a sort of “hive-mind” pseudo-intelligence that acts in its own interests and has an almost Darwinist natural selection process.
So this is all to say that I reject the question. I don’t believe in uniquely evil companies. The horror is precisely that they’re all, in a sense, innocent. They act not out of hatred or sadism or cruelty, but because the system itself has carved out the pathways where the ball inevitably rolls down the hill following the path of least resistance.
I think we’d compile a shorter list if we tried to name wholesome, respectable companies.
Nah, we have loads of great companies here in the UK.
Didn’t the UK develop the first large evil corporation?
It sure did!
among more brutality around the world, yes
Like the other comment said, I would love to know some morally appropriate companies, that way I can choose to use them. Boycotting is nice but if you lack the knowledge of where to shop then it’s a fruitless effort
Valid thing to want, but I get the feeling this thread is about alerting people to horrible companies they might not realize are horrible… like my comment about Trader Joe’s.
There are large companies, many of them in Germany, who are owned by foundations. Perhaps the best known is Bosch, which is almost entirely owned by a charitable foundation. Another very large one is ZF Friedrichshaven, owned by the Zeppelin Foundation. They don’t do any consumer products, but are one of the world’s largest players in the automotive industry.
Disney decided to keep their dei policies so that’s something.
But they also cut a trans story to avoid controversy and probably other shit things I cant remember atm. So take what you will I guess
Isn’t that the same company which refused to pay a guy compensation for choking because he used a disney+ free trial and also completely ruined copyright law
Yeah. That’s one of the shitty things I forgot
They don’t follow morality, they follow money. They go for whichever gets them more money and/or less criticism.
Disney didn’t. Their shareholders did.
Mark all corporations off your list. Corporations don’t care about the consumer. Only your money, which supports their shareholders.
Businesses exist for 1 reason: To make money.
Save the Children might have an objection to that.
Are they a business?
Yes, non-profits are still a type of “business” and many of them absolutely do not help their supposed causes as much as they portray. Susan G. Komen Foundation went from a darling of the non-profit world to people wondering whether they really helped women at all.
I think they’re using Save the Children as an example because ostensibly 74% of their revenue actually goes directly to aiding people, and 26% is employee compensation, advertising, and so on.
I mean, the whole “no ethical consumption under capitalism” or “all corporate ethics are fake” type stuff has plenty of truth to it, but at the same time, one does have to get any good or service not made oneself from somewhere, and corporations are made up of people with different views about what they’re personally willing to do, or how much they think taking unethical actions even is the profitable thing. So, there is still room for some businesses to be worse than others.
Ben & Jerry’s was traditionally a “good” company for example, but what killed that was them getting bought out by an evil company, Unilever. This path is the path a lot of “good” companies take when they go bad.
We had to pressure them about occupied Palestine.
To be fair, Unilever has owned Ben & Jerry’s since April 2000.
Unless you were pressuring them about that issue before April 2000, you were actually dealing with Unilever.
Which is literally my point.
Published date: 20 July 2021 14:27 BST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%26_Jerry's#Unilever_era
In April 2000, Ben & Jerry’s sold itself to British multinational food giant Unilever for $326 million
In 2010, Jostein Solheim, a Unilever executive from Norway, was appointed CEO.
In 2018, Matthew McCarthy, previously a Unilever executive, was appointed CEO, replacing Solheim.
You’re missing the point here. It hasn’t been in control of the original people who ran the company for a long, long time. It’s literally been being run by Unilever executives.
_The brand said it would end sales in the territories
spoiler-title
after years ::: of campaigning by activists allied with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign._
I think I see what you’re saying but they still owned the company.
However,
When did Ben and Jerry’s become a public company? In 1978, with $12,000, Ben & Jerry’s opened in a vacant gas station. The first franchise followed in 1981, distribution outside Vermont began in 1983, and the company went public in 1984.
So maybe that’s the biggest issue.
All restaurants
Sinclair group in the US, bought up basically every local news station and began inserting propaganda into scripts as stories. Highly insidious because the older population generally trusted their local news anchors more than the national outlets.
GEO group, one of the largest private prison corporations that also manages ice detention facilities and many mental institutions, not sure I need to say much more.
I’m now boycotting GEO Group. Henceforth, I will only do IRL heist missions in places where there’s a public prison option.
Ah yes, the Sinclair “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” foreshadowing
Sinclair is literally why I don’t have a local news station anymore, and also part of why after 10 years of working in local television news and being promoted to higher and higher positions I was finally like “fuck this, I’m out” and started working at a fucking Subway.
The Sinclair monopoly is an invisible part of why Trump is in office. Local news doesn’t really exist anymore.
For the big makers of pseudo-science based bullshit medicine, see Weleda (naturopathy, anthroposophy) and Boiron (homeopathy).
Pharmaceutical company Bayer. Sold HIV infected blood to poorer countries because they didn’t want to lose the investment they had in the blood.
Basically the blood was tested, found out it was HIV contaminated, went to a part of the world where they didn’t test as well. Messed with the results of the tests, and infected thousands of people with it, and eventually AIDS. All because the financial loss they would have taken from destroying the blood was considered too much.
Granicus
Unknown to most, but they maintain a large number of local, state, and all the way up to Federal US public websites. They have quickly relocated their entire US based team outside of sales to underdeveloped countries over the last year for a very specific reason… And also unbeknownst to most of their clients.
Last year they brought in MS and Amazon CEO brains that have been turning things upside down for a quick flip ever since. These type of people need to BURN.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Mormons, Inc.”
riot games settles for 100 million dollars after sexually harassing its own employees.
lesser known
It’s lesser known to people who go outside
And tbh I never knew about that so thanks for sharing!
I met a guy who really wanted to work at riot games and found no issue with their culture. And the longer I spent talking to him, the more I realize… Ah, you’re an edge lord. Of course you would like the company.
They’re also 100% Chinese owned. It’s the major turnoff for me with their Path of Exile titles.
I want to add to this their absolutely egregious forced kernel-level anti-cheat. It demands full privileged access to a user’s machine, and unlike some competing systems, it doesn’t want to go away when the game is no longer being played.
The assurance this won’t be used or exploited for ultra-malicious purposes across the globe by a corporation owned ultimately by the CCP is…
“Just trust me, bro.”
The POM Wonderful company
Along with Fiji Water and Teleflora.
Basically anything touched by Stewart Resnick, the wealthiest American “farmer” and water pirate.
