What is the Worst Company in America?

[BlooInBloo]

http://tags.consumerist.com/consumer/worst-company-in-america/

The RIAA vs Uhaul seems like a straightforward match-up.

[krispos42]

1. BushCorp. Next... :-)

[AX10]

2. Where's Merck?

Just wondering....

Now, seriously, what standards are they using to make these comparisons?

[BlooInBloo]

4. I think you're thinking WAAAAY to hard about it....

... I assume WalMart is gonna end up "winning", though.

[Straight Shooter]

3. Depends upon what you're measuring. I say Halliburton. n/t

[Initech]

5. RIAA, Exxon-Mobil, and Verizon Wireless are big contenders.

A company that wants to arrest its customers for violating a stupid fucking law that only it benefits from, a company who is notorious for polluting the environment (and one who paid scientists to suppress that information) and a company who sold private information to the feds for the purposes of surveill... er, security... which is worse?

[Rainscents]

6. Wal-Mart,

[philosophie_en_rose]

9. Second that.

Wal*Mart - a rash of on the rear end of America.

[razors edge]

7. Monsanto.

crops that kill other crops, and no more crops less you by more of their seeds that kill crops.

Starvation is a money maker.

[marmar]

10. Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel....

The evil triumvirate

[razors edge]

11. So many choices.

So little retribution.

[LaPera]

8. Halliburton, Wal-Mart, Exxon, Disney. Dow, Merck, GE, I could go all day.

[Blue_In_AK]

12. Exxon's on my short list....

Billions and billions of profit, but they won't pay up for the damage they did in Prince William Sound.

[BlooInBloo]

13. I think my Final Four is: RIAA, Exxon, WalMart, and Haliburton....

... I dream that the NCAA Final Four could be so exciting!

[Pavulon]

14. The Umbrella corporation...(nt)

[Broken_Hero]

22. ........

:spray: :thumbsup:

[Cobalt Violet]

15. Smithfield Foods isn't on that list?

They should be.

[JackRiddler]

16. The six who own the media and make 95 percent of the movies

NEWSCORP
Disney
Time Warner
Sony
GE
Viacom

Doesn't sound like an entirely evil list but it is they who provide the propaganda cover for all of the rest.

Monsanto and Halliburton though - who can top that pair for the sheer brazeness, the piracy? SAIC, Dyncorp, MPRI...

[TygrBright]

17. KBR. n/t

[PhilipShore]

18. CIA=SAIC (for Science Applications International Corporation)

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow
Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the "body shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war.

by
Donald L. Barlett and
James B. Steele
March 2007

One of the great staples of the modern Washington movie is the dark and ruthless corporation whose power extends into every cranny around the globe, whose technological expertise is without peer, whose secrets are unfathomable, whose riches defy calculation, and whose network of allies, in and out of government, is held together by webs of money, ambition, and fear. You've seen this movie a dozen times. Men in black coats step from limousines on wintry days and refer guardedly to unspeakable things. Surveillance cameras and eavesdropping devices are everywhere. Data scrolls across the movie screen in digital fonts. Computer keyboards clack softly. Seemingly honorable people at the summit of power—Cabinet secretaries, war heroes, presidents—turn out to be pathetic pawns of forces greater than anyone can imagine. And at the pinnacle of this dark and ruthless corporation is a relentless and well-tailored titan—omniscient, ironic, merciless—played by someone like Christopher Walken or Jon Voight.

To be sure, there isn't really such a corporation: the Omnivore Group, as it might be called. But if there were such a company—and, mind you, there isn't—it might look a lot like the largest government contractor you've never heard of: a company known simply by the nondescript initials SAIC (for Science Applications International Corporation), initials that are always spoken letter by letter rather than formed into a pronounceable acronym. SAIC maintains its headquarters in San Diego, but its center of gravity is in Washington, D.C. With a workforce of 44,000, it is the size of a full-fledged government agency—in fact, it is larger than the departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined. Its anonymous glass-and-steel Washington office—a gleaming corporate box like any other—lies in northern Virginia, not far from the headquarters of the C.I.A., whose byways it knows quite well. (More than half of SAIC's employees have security clearances.) SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent. If "contract backlog" is any measure—that is, contracts negotiated and pending—the future seems assured. The backlog stands at $13.6 billion. That's one and a half times more than the backlog at KBR Inc., a subsidiary of the far better known government contractor once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Halliburton Company.

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"—they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it involves the most sensitive matters of national security. The Founding Fathers may have argued eloquently for a government of laws, not of men, but what we've got instead is a government of body shops.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703

[mb7588a]

19. The VA? Congress? nt.

[AngryAmish]

20. Safeway Insurance

[provis99]

21. what, no General Electric?

It would have made my no.1 for the past 60 years.

[La_Fourmi_Rouge]

23. Catholic Healthcare West.

"Not-for-Profit" grave-robbing, labor-hating, environment-trashing, PR juggernaut run by a mad crook.

[jmowreader]

24. The RIAA ain't exactly a company

It's just a trade association. Still evil, but not a company.

I'm going with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart may not have thought up the idea of dictating prices to suppliers on their own, but they're the first ones who actually got away with it.

[Hekate]

25. Kellog, Halliburton, Brown & Root/Went to Iraq to loot, loot, loot.

If they don't already own the USA and half the world, they're sure trying to make it happen -- with Darth Cheney's eager assistance.

'Nuff said.

Hekate