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 thousandsten fucking thousandof AIDS needles.
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 Withdrawn from the US market before the Netflix documentary released
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.
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."
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
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.
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
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
Nestlé 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 „new gold“ which it is today long before social media started exploiting it. Changing their motto
/code of conduct „Don’t be evil“ into „Do the right thing“ (for our shareholders) didn’t benefit their reputation either…
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.
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
long island jewish northwell 23 hospital monopoly chemically tortured me October 2005 for being bisexual, 2013 and 2014 banned Quran, July 2019 "Muslims, Blacks are a delusion," May 24, 2020 liquid poison and religious interrogation for questioning overdose death of African American; has admitted stalker gang member employees; 9/5/2022 perjured 10 times rather than listen to my Advance Directive or history, 9/26/22 11 AM doctor and staff pushed me for no reason while hands in the air; contempt of court overdosing for 2 months ending with will "destroy your ambition" to marry a foreigner.
...And how exactly do you think people are going to be able to eat meat otherwise? Or have dairy, eggs, wool, etc.? Do you think that people should e.g., raise chickens in the city?
And that's ignoring the small obligate carnivores that make up most of the pets in the world.
Hey, I'd rather hunt my own food too, but we no longer live in tribal or feudal societies where you can reasonably expect to engage in animal husbandry yourself.
We shouldn't be eating meat or any other animal products.
Animals are living and feeling beings who experience the world much like humans do, we shouldn't be exploiting, abusing or killing them for profit/taste when we can easily avoid it.
Man, this is like going against slavery in the past, you are going to be downvoted to hell, but, in the future you will be on the right side of history, cheers.