If you have even the primordial flickerings of 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") or ethical ("they were clubbing baby seals in Alaska and forgot to invite me") there's got to be some money-making organization out there 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 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 and visionary, but if no one else knows about it then it's little more than masturbation.

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

Got a suggestion for this list? Make it here.

Hartz Mountain Corporation

Y'know, I'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. I get the feeling holding a bottle of their tick shampoo that I'd be buying a bottled roach motel. Apparently now, I'm not alone. These people, for all the emotionally charged anecdotal evidence they offer, do provide enough valid reasons to boycott Hartz Mountain for me to add them here.

Metallica

Adding this one should have occured to me years ago, but didn't. I think it had something to do with how meaningful this band (in the Cliff Burton days) was to me. Anyway, they sued 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. When I asked Lars what the fuck they were suing Napster for, he told me 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 commercial commodity. 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.

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.

SCO Group, Inc.

No one has ever liked the Santa Cruz Operation. SCO-the-Operating System has always sucked. It has excelled at nothing else but beating out every other UNIX in any list of Top 10 Worst UNIX Implementations you care to mention. So 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. Yay greed!

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. I've not seen any reports from ECOWAS yet, 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

The Church of Scientology

There is evil in the world, and then there's Scientology. Bad Sci-Fi writer L. Ron Hubbard (the "L" is for "Lame" as much as it is for "Lawyer") figured he wasn't making it as a hack writer, so he formed his own religion. These silly goofballs would be amusing if they weren't dangerous, and I assure you, they are dangerous. From mind control to extortion, this "religion" makes the Roman Catholic Church look good.

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.

Raytheon Missile Systems

If I have to explain this one, you're either an employee or a politician. Either way you have no business being here.

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?

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.