Communication is vital to a free market so that an informed purchaser can make rational decisions based on factual evidence. Being capitalists, we at VioPac want to support those whose work in the world we want to see thrive, and oppose those whose corporate actions (or personal actions) offend us, our reason, and/or our aesthetics.

Whether or not you have a social conscience, there will be companies out there that you won't do business with. Whether it's for personal reasons ("they treated me like a criminal"), aesthetic reasons ("their advertising is preaching vice as virtue to the lowest common denominator") or ethical ("they were clubbing baby seals in Alaska and forgot to invite me") there's got to be some organization or service provider you don't like.

This is all fine and good, but it's absolutely useless for anything other than self-righteous happy hippy horseshit if no one else ("the Market") is joining you. Not buying anything from Jimmy-Lee's Industrial Sealant and Wax Bolt Enterprises, Ltd., might make you feel like you're being enlightened, progressive, and visionary, but if no one else knows about it then it's little more than philosphical masturbation.

That is why this page exists -- to chronicle companies and organizations that we think you should not be supporting. Some of the big hitters are in here, yeah, but the goal here is to focus on the small- and mid-sized companies many people might not have heard of. We all know about Exxon, Nike, BP and Microsoft; but do you know about Kit Kat?

Got a suggestion for this list? Make it here.

Hartz Mountain Corporation

Y'know, we've never trusted them to begin with. Their advertising is too reminiscent of agricultural-grade insecticides, and the colors they employ in their branding just feel poisonous. One gets the feeling holding a bottle of their tick shampoo that we're buying a bottled roach motel.

These are not themselves rational arguments to favor a boycott, even if they are rational aesthetic arguments; but apparently there's more to this story. This site catalogs the issues people have been having with Hartz Mountain products and, if emotionally charged at times, does provide us with valid enough reason to add them to the list of VioPac boycotts.

Metallica

Adding this one should have occured to us years ago, but didn't. I think it had something to do with how awesome this band was back in the Cliff Burton days.

It seems they weren't the equal of their wealth without him, and they sued filesharing pioneer Napster. Yeah, Metallilca sued Napster. They signed up with the RIAA with no understanding of what they were doing and they set the context in which the entire MAFIAA lawsuit parade plays out even today (see the entry on GoDaddy). VioPac staff even asked Lars what the fuck they were suing Napster for, he told us that Napster had stolen and copied Metallica's master tapes and were selling copies of those. Seriously.

It's not just that they didn't understand what they were doing, it's that they didn't care. Their ignorance, apathy, and open contempt for their fans brought about a swift end to the idea that people--you and I--could have some measure of control over the means of distribution. That art just might be a communal and cultural phenomenon once again, instead of a force-fed mash decided on by committee. They betrayed everything they claimed to stand for and if the price of their CDs is any measure, they won't be losing their mansions any time soon. Verdict: fuck 'em.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy supports fundamentally breaking the way the Internet DNS root servers work (and fundamentally breaking the Internet itself) by enthusiastically supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy (and Save The Kittens and Children Too) Act". Apart from being really bad legislation and incompatible with anything dimly resembling a free society, GoDaddy found it particularly easy to ensure that they're exempt from it because they co-wrote the damn thing!

Rather than relying on the thugs at GoDaddy, we suggest GANDI, with whom VioPac has been very happy for many years.

SCO Group, Inc.

No one has ever liked the Santa Cruz Operation. SCO-the-Operating System has always sucked. It has excelled at nothing other than beating out every other UNIX in any list of Top 10 Worst UNIX Implementations you care to mention. You can imagine what that's done to their bottom line.

SCO is in danger of going under, so now they're suing. They're suing IBM for $1,000,000,000 because, says SCO, IBM stole 70 or so lines of UNIX code from them and put it into Linux. Code that they are utterly unwilling to show to anyone, I might add -- not without signing a draconian Non-Disclosure Agreement. Not to be outdone by your run-of-the-mill ambulance chasers, though, they're now shaking down Linux users and Linux companies for $1,400 in license fees - per seat. Finally (at the time of this writing at least) when it was pointed out that they themselves were distributing the code with their own Linux distribution, and had released that distribution freely under the terms of the General Public License they declared the GPL invalid!

SCO's claims are groundless, and are designed not to reap licensing rewards for something they don't own, but rather to get them bought out by either Microsoft or IBM. In short, it's designed to scare enough people who don't know any better into helping destroy a vibrant, creative community, all to salvage the broken remnants of an incompetent, poorly run, and disastrously mismanaged company.

The Free Software Foundation has some good info on the case. Linux Weekly News has an interesting final word too, nicely demonstrating how SCO is simply lying.

Nestlé S.A.

Nestlé S.A. is guilty of some rather heinous advertising practices in Africa, detailed either by a lazy, sloppy Google search or specifically at, say, the BBC. We've not seen any reports from ECOWAS as of this writing, but the jist of it is that Nestlé has, through their advertising in the whole of Africa, led pregnant mothers to believe that Nestlé's powedered milk was better for their babies than their own natural breast milk. In many instances, they have not stopped there and actually given their powdered milk to mothers for free -- so that, when their natural milk runs out, they become reliant on Nestlé, who would then start charging inflated prices for their product.

There are documented cases where Nestlé even went so far as to tell mothers that it was dangerous to feed their children with their own milk.

According to Nestlé, their brands include:

• Alpo
• Butterfinger
• Calistoga
• Carnation
• Coffee-Mate
• Crunch Cereal
• Dreyer's
• Fancy Feast
• Friskies
• Juicy Juice
• Häagen-Dazs (controlling interest)
• KitKat
• Lean Cuisine
• Lifesavers
• Nescafé
• Nesquik
• Nestea
• Nestlé Toll House
• Ortega
• Perrier
• PowerBar
• Purina
• Stouffer's Lean Cuisine
• Tidy Cats
• Wonka

A well-informed consumer base is far more effective than State-powered economic restrictions and trade embargoes, so VioPac asks that you join us in boycotting these Nestlé products.

The Church of Scientology

VioPac is no friend of Religion, but we want to be specific here. There is evil in the world, and then there's Scientology. Bad Sci-Fi writer L. Ron Hubbard either figured he wasn't making it as a hack scribler, or he was smoking some really excellent hash that day, so he formed his own religion. These silly goofballs would be amusing if they weren't so dangerous, and we assure you, they are dangerous. From mind control to extortion, this "religion" makes the Roman Catholic Church look like the Episcopalians (or was that the other way around?).

Enemy -- SP (Suppressive Person) Order. Fair Game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed. -- L. Ron Hubbard, "Fair Game Doctrine"

Operation Clambake is the place you want to look for for info on the threat that is Diarrhetics and the danger that is Scientology.

L'Oréal

As if Nestlé wasn't bad enough, they own a 50% stake in L'Oréal, who have run afoul of many people for the persistent testing of their cosmetics on caged animals. Since their practices first came to light in the 1990s, they have released a statement saying, in effect, that they no longer test their finished products on animals -- a half-truth, because if it still needed testing, it wouldn't be finished.

I have not been able to verify L'Oréal's current animal testing stance yet -- this seems to be a common difficulty -- but list them here anyway for their involvement in animal cruelty in the past and because of their connection with Nestlé. Anyone who has non-biased documentary evidence either way of their current practices is welcome to contact us.

Monsanto

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is FDA's job". So say Monsanto, giving us a timely and informative insight into one of the worst companies out there. Bribery, dumping highly toxic waste chemicals in European landfills, terminator seeds tying farmers to one distributer, bullying, Bovine Growth Hormone .... is this company actively trying to kill us? VioPac recommends a boycott in this case as a measure of personal safety.

Included among the Monsanto brands are Asgrow Agronomics, Bollgard/Bollgard II, Dekalb Genetics Corporation, Deltapine, Roundup, Roundup Ready Technology, Seminis, Vistive, Yieldguard, and Yieldguard VT. As well, the company owns or controls American Seeds, Inc., International Seed Group, Interstate Seed, and the PAC, American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology.