The WIC. (West Indische Compagnie)
So successful that the word “Company” comes from there. (Or their sister the VOC “Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie” - the first “modern” corporation.)
Rupert Murdoch’s entire business empire, including Fox Corp, News Corp, Sky, and whatever else he owns. A propaganda machine that churns out constant lies, that has assisted in the election of some of the worst people ever to lead a supposed democracy.
edit - on review, I see you already have News Corp. But Fox Corp is a separate company, as far as I understand, and should have a separate entry.
Dude, Bayer… they now own the company formerly known as Monsanto, and their Nazi activities are well known. But also this fucked up stuff.
Does the Congo Free State count as a corporation, I’m not sure.
Yeah, that’s tough.
Do I let Monsanto and Bayer duke it out side-by-side, let the most evil win?
Or do I create a SuperEvil corporation by putting it in the current formation? A Bayer-Monsanto 1-2 punch is almost Tysonesque…
It’s the opposite of Standard Oil, isn’t it? That one company includes Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Amoco, and others.
I kind of want to go with the historical play, with the companies listed being in (roughly) their form when they were most powerful and evil. Bayer will be in the next published list… as will Monsanto.
Yeah, JohnT’s list is notably missing any health insurance companies.
~Max
Well, there was the Dutch East India Company as well.
Latest list:
| 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 | Halliburton | Philip Morris | |
| 4 | Monsanto | Apple | Pfizer | WalMart |
| 5 | British Petroleum | Cargill | News Corp/Fox Corp | |
| 6 | Texaco | Amazon | Koch Industries | Purdue Pharmaceutical |
| 7 | Union Carbide | JP Morgan Chase | General Motors | Royal African Company |
| 8 | Anglo American South Africa Ltd | ATT | Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe | Franklin and Armfield |
| 9 | Tata Steel | Drexel-Burnham Lambert | Colt’s Manufacturing Company | Chemie Grünenthal |
| 10 | US Steel | Dutch West India Company | ||
| 11 | Monsanto | Enron | ||
| 12 | Bayer |
Tata Steel owns a shitload of absolutely horrible mines in India:
AASF poisoned a town in Zambia with their open pit lead mine
Zambia: Tackle Lead Poisoning at Former Mine | Human Rights Watch
Bayer and Enron have made the list as well.
Keep 'em coming!
People aren’t fond of Uber and their business practices. Taxi drivers and taxi companies, municipalities, people who work/worked for them and riders with bad experiences. They seem to fit as much as Amazon, who, like Uber, “disrupted” the scene and still has tons of customers but they have plenty of enemies.
What about Theranos? They never really made it as a company but they managed to get in a whole heap of trouble as a company!
Missed this post, some good suggestions, look for em on the next update.
Pretty despicable folks, thankfully they do not exist long enough to get up to the level of mischief like some of the other contestants managed in a couple of centuries.
Uber also seems pretty tame in a larger framework where companies poisoned whole ecosystems or/and literally enslaved 100,000s of people.
A couple more entries for “Resource Extraction”:
Rio Tinto - they mine just about anything under the earth’s surface, and aren’t good at cleaning up their messes.
Phelps Dodge (now part of Freeport McMoran) - The Bisbee Deportation and the Arizona copper mine strike of 1983.
The lightbulb cartel really deserves an honorable mention. They were so fucking brazen they levied fines on their members for bulbs that lasted too long.
IG Farben, the company that made Zyklon B for the Nazis.
I don’t think so. Wasn’t it the personal property of the King of the Belgians?
And maybe I’m missing something. Why is General Motors on that list?
The Corvair, anti-union activities, following and harrassing Nader.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nader_v._General_Motors_Corp.
And that’s going up against Union Carbide and how it killed all of those people in Bhopal? I know who I’m placing my bet on.
That reminds me of the strike against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1913.
I nominate the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company.
I was looking at my Freakouts of the Right list and noticed that I had this Evil Corps list on the same Excel file, different worksheet. So let’s wrap this up.
Worked on it a bit tonight, and here is what I have: 4 categories, 12 companies per category, 48 companies in total. I have zero problem admitting (a) there is an American bias to this list, (b) there is a “popularity” and recency bias to this list, and (c) there was a need for “representation selection” - for example, I could have put half of the American health insurance industry on this list, but settled for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Same goes for corps such as McDonald’s, Walmart, etc.
Tell me what you think, please do your own Googling if you don’t know a company (I’ll put the effort to do links in the contest thread), and if you have any replacements, let me know who you’re replacing and with whom, with an eye to the three things listed above: If you want to remove the one representative of the American fast food industry for another company, you’d better make a good case as to why.
I have “seeds”, but this list is not ranked according to such. And “seeds” will just be my opinion, nothing more.
| Seed | Resource Extraction | Finance and Tech | Industrials | Miscellaneous |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Standard Oil (Exxon/Mobil/Chevron/etc) | Goldman Sachs | Farben | British East India Company |
| 2 | United Fruit | Microsoft | Dow Chemical | Nestle |
| 3 | De Beers | Halliburton | Philip Morris | |
| 4 | Monsanto | Apple | Pfizer | WalMart |
| 5 | British Petroleum | Cargill | News Corp/Fox Corp | |
| 6 | Texaco | Amazon | Koch Industries | Purdue Pharmaceutical |
| 7 | Union Carbide | JP Morgan Chase | General Motors | Royal African Company |
| 8 | Anglo American South Africa Ltd | ATT | Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe | Disney |
| 9 | Tata Steel | Drexel-Burnham Lambert | Colt’s Manufacturing Company | Amway |
| 10 | Aramco (Saudi Arabia oil co) | Black Rock | US Steel | Dutch West India Company |
| 11 | Syncrude (Albertan Oil Sands) | Comcast | Monsanto | Enron |
| 12 | Glencore PLC (current largest mining co) | Blue Cross/Blue Shield | Bayer | McDonalds |
Abir absolutely, positively makes the list of most evil.