Ask Lemmy

Chick-fill-A and Hobby Lobby are part of the same asshole Christian subspecies, do crazy shit like stealing/buying stolen artifacts, and being super anti-gay and anti-trans.

Oh and Chick-fil-A's did is trash. I tried it before I learned the company sucked, not long after it first moved into Chicagoland. Not only is the chicken bland AF - including the "spicy" chicken - but they managed to somehow make waffle fries taste bleh. How the hell do you even fuck up waffle fries? I can't understand how these assholes stay in business in the area with chicken that's worse than what I can get at Burger King, much less any of a million small local places and chains.

HSBC - how many times can a bank be caught laundering dirty money and still exist?

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“Mormons, Inc.”

Palantir is pretty core to the Surveillance Society in several supposedly Democratic countries. More in general just about all companies in that space such as the NSO Group makers of the Pegasus software for remote hacking of smartphones are invariably unethical

Similarly the whole business of Investment Banking is pretty unethical, and that definitely includes most Hedge Funds, the latter never being household names.

Prenda law. A legal outfit that would seed porn and then sue downloaders for copyright violations. The idea being that people would settle to avoid being publicly humiliated by their porn viewing habits.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

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.

Generally the larger the company the more evil it is as a general rule, so a lesser known evil company would be unlikely. That's why I'm supportive of a strong democratic federal government, the natural predator of companies.

There is a US company that I understand the importance of so I won't share the details but very few know anything about them. I'll just say they make products used for arts and crafts, celebrations, and also Nuclear Weapons.

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.

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 worked for an investment firm that had about 75 employees, but managed $35 billion in assets. There are a lot of those. Their investments tended to be a lot of the companies ruining the world, ranging from the privatized ambulance companies to the privatized hospice care companies to the emerging-market banks, etc...etc... And that's just one "small" investment firm.

Bank of New York Melon

By far all of the US MIC companies.

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 think we'd compile a shorter list if we tried to name wholesome, respectable companies.

riot games settles for 100 million dollars after sexually harassing its own employees.

Male employees (developers, I think) engaged in drunken "panty raids" where they would crowd into a woman's cubicle and take things from her while she worked.

Riot games chose to pay these women to go away, rather than fix the problem.

They make League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. I will never spend another dollar on their products.

Goodwill specifically hires disabled people under the guise of "giving them work experience", but it's really because they can get away with paying them less.

Chick-Fil-A supports conversion therapy.

Red Bull, they are nazis and spread fake news about conspiracy theories on their own TV network in Austria. Source

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.

Anduril, Palmer Luckey's foray into military hardware and an ever-present surveillance state. Some of the first hardware they rolled out were surveillance towers for the US border patrol.

So Mark Zuckerberg officially isn't the only giant pile of shit connected to Oculus, the original owner is a fucking pile of shit, too.

Trader Joe's is also thought of by many people as "progressive" and a "good company." Go learn about the conditions in their warehouses and you'll find out that's not true at all. I had a friend who worked TJ's warehouse in Lacey, WA and all he had was fucking horror stories and how the warehouse was owned and run by MAGA fucks.

EDIT: Found the article my friend was excited about coming out that didn't seem to get any MSM traction.

Inside ‘Teflon Joe’s’: Why your favorite grocery store is not what you think

How Trader Joe’s remains a beloved brand despite record product recalls, safety violations, worker misconduct complaints, and an environmental record that belies its reputation.

So yeah fuck Trader Joe's.

Oh yeah and the CEO of Protonmail revealed himself to be a Trump supporter.

So fuck Protonmail.

The Brave browser CEO recently went on an hinged rant on that orange site about "lefties," "glowies," and George Soros. He also has a long history of being anti-gay, which is why he lost his job at Firefox, and Brave itself has a shady history with stuff like injecting affiliate codes into URLs.

So fuck Brave.