Sunday, December 19, 2010

Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 2nd edition

A post on why Facebook, Netflix and Amazon will join the Google-Apple truce reminded me it's time to update Gordon's 15 point scale of publicly traded corporate evil.

Here's the current list, with notes on who's moved up and down ...

  1. Philip Morris: 15 (defines the upper bound)
  2. Goldman Sachs: 14 (up - working for SPECTRE).
  3. Exxon: 13 (global warming advocacy)
  4. AT&T, Verizon: 12 - up two
  5. Facebook: 11 (down 1 - still most evil tech company)
  6. For profit health insurance companies: 11
  7. Microsoft: 10
  8. Average publicly traded company: 8
  9. Google: 5 (down one)
  10. Apple: 5
  11. CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)
at

2 comments:

  1. Lord Blagger12/20/10, 4:47 AM

    Meanwhile, the UK government has racked up debts of 300,000 GBP per household. 6,800 billion in total

    Bank bailout, 27.5 billion.

    Government is evil. You have been warned

    ReplyDelete
  2. JGF12/20/10, 10:16 PM

    I had too many thoughts on your comment to put into a full response, but here are some quickies ...

    1. As evil as Philip Morris is, it is not quite in the same league as the Khmer Rouge. Many of its past CEOs, for example, were themselves smokers (I don't think that is true now, however.) This is only a scale of corporate evil, not of all evils.

    2. Governments of modern western democracies are still largely the result of voter decisions. To the extent they are not, they are the product of the decisions of very rich people and of corporations. So is the perceived failure of the UK government a result of voters, the powerful, or the corporate? Is this evil, or incompetency?

    ReplyDelete