(While this is about a future thread game, I placed this in IMHO as I felt I would get a more varied response in this forum. If y’all disagree, move it as you wish.)
Going to start a thread game (as well as make an actual bracket) of the most evil companies of all time. Like my “Greatest People of All Time” game of over a decade ago, it will be a round-robin where, for each round, we vote off the LEAST evil of the remaining companies, these firms grouped in four category.
What I need are suggestions. For companies, and for seedings. Seedings will not matter in the SDMB game, but will matter when I create brackets.
Here is what I have so far:
Seed
Resource Extraction
Finance and Tech
Industrials
Miscellaneous
1
Standard Oil
Goldman Sachs
Farben
East India Company
2
United Fruit
Microsoft
Dow Chemical
Nestle
3
De Beers
Google
Halliburton
Philip Morris
4
Monsanto
Apple
Pfizer
WalMart
5
British Petroleum
Facebook
Cargill
News Corp
6
Chevron/Texaco
Amazon
Koch Industries
Purdue Pharmaceutical
7
Union Carbide
JP Morgan Chase
General Motors
8
ATT
My Tech and Finance section is really weak and full of recency bias (is Amazon really “evil”?), need more non-American companies, etc.
So, the ask:
What are some additional companies, and in which bracket would you place them?
Let’s not worry about seedings right now - the companies are largely in the order in which I thought of them. Once we get a full list, then we can discuss rankings.
The British East India Company has a uniquely evil history which includes colonial conquest.
“In an act aimed at strengthening the power of the EIC, King Charles II granted the EIC (in a series of five acts around 1670) the rights to autonomous territorial acquisitions, to mint money, to command fortresses and troops and form alliances, to make war and peace, and to exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction over the acquired areas.”
Monsanto-hate has been overblown and co-opted by anti-GMO forces; if you feel compelled to include them, they probably belong in the “Industrials” category.
Guys, I threw the list together in 10 minutes and then decided, fuck it, let’s make a thread out of this. Of course it isn’t comprehensive, that’s why I’m here!
I remember this one. Add it to the list.
And I saw the one above it was real estate. This started me thinking about evil real estate sellers but then it hit me: All of the financial institutions in 2008 as one entry.
I really want just one company per entry, not entire industries. Else I would have to enter “the slave trade”, “the opium trade”, and that expands the focus. And, frankly, “most evil industries” is a different list.
I don’t want to jam up my lists with similar companies*. For example, Chevron is now officially off the list because I just realized it’s a Standard Oil spinoff, and why have it twice? Now, the Russian oil company? Sure, it can join, but then, I don’t want the list to just be 8 oil companies and 4 others. Representation matters, lol.
Also, damage caused to investors matters less in my list than damage caused to customers or secondary parties. Enron would make this list (if it does) because of its actions in California, not because it was a shitty investment which went belly-up in 8 months.
I wasn’t going to include US Steel, but damn if it isn’t emblematic of US corporate development - rise, dominance, bloat, fall, taken over by financiers.
The Royal African Company was Britain’s largest slave trader. Franklin and Armfeld was America’s. Yeah, I’ve got a number of slavers on this list. That’s fine. Portugal and Spain moved a lot of slaves, let’s see what entities were responsible…
ETA: Spain didn’t move a lot of slaves, as the Portugese dominated the Atlantic slave trade. And the Portugese effort was organized differently than the English/American use of private(esque) companies: In Portugal, the impetus was solely at the discretion of the monarch.
Chemie Grunfeld was the thalidomide company.
Drexel-Burnham Lambert gets my vote for most pernicious financial company, especially in the 1980s, as they normalized a world of debt with Michael Milken’s junk bonds.
Sorry, I missed seeing the East India Company on your list before.
I was thinking of its role in the California electricity crisis. But the company’s sleazy actions caused a lot of collateral damage, costing an estimated 4500 jobs at Enron alone (Arthur Anderson also went bust in the fallout), and sending billions in pension funds and investments up in smoke.
As a symbol of corporate greed and malfeasance, Enron fully deserves a place on the list. Also, I got tired of seeing their stupid corporate logo when I went to Astros’ games (once upon a time they played at Enron Field).