I get the boycotts for Target, Walmart, and Amazon for rolling back their DEI programs and bowing to Trump. What companies are treating employees fair or standing up for human decency? Seems like Costco gets brought up?
Most things I need I can get from my local grocery store which seems pretty non evil but where do you go if you need like a new keyboard?
ACAB: All Corporations Are Bastards. Corporations are not your friends. Brands aren’t your friends.
Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yup. Everyone has to buy something. The point is to direct people to do that at places that are LES evil rather than giving in and saying “nothing matters I guess I’ll just do whatever.” Defeatism is collaboration.
I used to not vote because all politicians are evil. Someone pointed out that if everyone picks the lesser of two evils then things are going to get less evil. I’ve voted every opportunity since.
Corporations are just legal structure organizing people together to do something. The soup kitchen, local artisan, person cutting hair out of their house, they all set up an LLC to operate under. They didn’t instantly become evil.
But if I need to buy a blender, plywood, or underwear (my shopping list this weekend), I’m going to have to buy it from a corporation. If I could buy it from a less evil corp then hopefully I make things less evil.
One way to fight the corporations is to stop worshipping at the altar of blind consumerism, and embrace the concept of “Reuse, Repair, Recycle.”
Stop buying stuff you dont need. Keep using what you have, sell/buy used items, repair things, and if it cant be fixed or repurposed, then recycle it.
Repairing things is a big one. Often repairs are remarkably easy. My wife has been ready to replace numerous appliances over the years, and I figured it was worth taking a shot at fixing it, if I can save a few hundred bucks, and successfully extended the life by years.
Very satisfying, and it forces your wife to rethink her conclusion that you are an incompetent dolt.
Sorry. My underwear is beyond repair
lol. Intimates are poorly constructed, but we also ask a lot of them. In all seriousness though, I have repaired undies and bras and gotten another 6 months to a year out of them.
I hear some people enjoy that particular fashion statement.
Voting for lesser evil just slows down the evil, it doesn’t reverse it. It’s still going in the wrong direction.
If people would vote for good that’d be a choice. Consistently voting for “less evil” works towards that goal - having good candidates.
If “more evil” candidates keep winning, what message does that send to candidates?
Yeah. Lots of people didn’t vote because we had two evils. The greater evil won…
You cant run a candidate who supports a far right wing genocide from the left and expect to win. Its really that simple. It’ll probably be that simple next time as well.
What we need is Russian and israeli influence kept out of the US government with no exceptions. Zionist influence on the dems is why Harris lost, not some ‘voters dont understand that voting for evil is just necesssary’ like you pretend. Stop telling the voters they need to be ok with war crimes. Thats cowardly BS. I’ll never be OK with murder and you shouldnt ever be either.
Russia and Israel do not control the US Empire. Both have a minor fraction of the power and wealth of the US, it is not that easy to influence US policy. The US’s relations with other countries are dominated by the US.
The US props up Israel not because the US is controlled by Israel, but because Israel secures the US’s interests in the Middle East via massive terror campaigns.
In the prosecution of its purposes, the Slave Power has obtained the control of both the great political parties. Their recent nominations were made to serve its interests, to secure its supremacy, and especially to promote the extension of Slavery.
…
I hear the old political saw, that “we must take the least of two evils.” My friend from Ohio [Mr. Giddings] has already riddled this excuse, so that I might well leave it untouched; but I cannot forbear a brief observation. It is admitted, then, that Cass and Taylor both are evils. For myself, if two evils are presented to me, I will take neither. There are occasions of political difference, I admit, when it may become expedient to vote for a candidate who does not completely represent our sentiments. There are matters legitimately within the range of expediency and compromise. The Tariff and the Currency are of this character. If a candidate differs from me on these more or less, I may yet vote for him. But the question before the country is of another character. This will not admit of compromise. It is not within the domain of expediency. To be wrong on this is to be wholly wrong. It is not merely expedient for us to defend Freedom, when assailed, but our duty so to do, unreservedly, and careless of consequences.
-Abolitionist Charles Sumner, encouraging a third party vote in the 1848 election
Yes, because a third party vote is going to do so much in a FPTP system.
pointed out that if everyone picks the lesser of two evils then things are going to get less evil
That’s just absolutely not how it works even if you take it at face value. Both evils can be greater than the one rn, that has absolutely no bearing on which one is “lesser” among them.
LLCs are specifically unincorporated associations, i.e not corporations.
Thank you. This sent me on a rabbit hole of differences between LLC and Corporations. LLC being a pass through protects the owners a little bit but passes through all the tax and some of the liability (hence Limited Liability). I remember reading something about how banks got significantly more risky with investments and predatorily with their practices when they started moving from partnerships to corporate structures.
Maybe we should get rid of corporations and force all companies into a partnership or LLC structure. Less to hide behind.
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Repeal of Citizens United and change that.
All Corporations Are Bastards, in a four hundred year unbroken chain going all the way back to the English East India Company and Dutch East India Company, and even before those.
I get that, but anarchy doesn’t manufacture shower tiles and I need to buy some.
I’m not saying we should boycott every corporation. I’m saying it’s a fool’s errand because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
And we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A poke with a stick isn’t good but it’s sure as shit better then a pistol whipping.
We’re not trying to boycott EVERY corporations. We’re voting with our wallets for the lesser evil the same way we vote at the ballots for the lesser evil.
If the extent of your participation in politics is choosing between evils, and not trying to actually achieve good, then you’re accepting evil as eternal and unchangeable. It is much more important to focus on organizing, and thus working towards good.
Open source orgs
i use the nothanks app on my phone to scan the bar codes and it tells me if it’s okay to buy or if i should boycott, along w why
I found the thing you mentioned a good idea so I googled the app to find out how they decided who should or should not be boycotted. I landed their homepage and it said they offered digital marketing solutions.
I’d love to use something like that if community driven but sounds like an important conflict of interest.
that’s good to know that they’re doing the same thing as adblock plus did.
there are other apps that do the same thing and i’ll be trying them now; thanks for the heads up.
edit: maybe this one?
Buycott seems promising cause campaigns and boycott lists are user-driven (which, you know… could also be faked I guess) and haven’t found anything fishy in their policies yet, but still snooping around on them. Gonna look into their ownership now.
Edit:
So umm… apparently Buycott was founded by a random 20 something year old LA dev (Ivan Pardo), a 2008 CS guy from Colgate University who basically coded it on his own. Boycott’s social media has been inactive since 2016.
Their business model is they sell access to their barcode API, which basically means they sell the pics of the barcodes and the product descriptions people add voluntarily to companies to do what they want. Not great but you know… better than digital marketing services.
Buycott is related to solidarity tech, which Ivan Pardo also founded, and is a CRM who claims to be “helping unions & grassroots organizations build people-powered movements that transform society…” which could be legit. They’re not free and they’re not cheap and they claim to cater to unions, advocacy orgs and non profits… but idk. Am I full paranoid delusional or does this sound like a honeytrap kinda thing? Like if I was an evil right wing politician this is exactly the kind of company I’d want to have leverage over to be able to sabotage opposition. And we don’t know who Pardo’s partners are. Only that he’s founder.
Oh, also, solidarity tech openly claims they give their customer info to Google analytics in their terms, which, you know… Kinda concerning when your “I’ll handle your grass roots movement” software sees no reason to not freely give your information to the most blatant and thinly veiled CIA front in contemporary history.
In their webpage they say they are “Trusted by Progressive Campaigns and Causes” and name a full total of 5 clients: Debt Collective, UAW, Pilipino Workers Central and CWA. As a non american I don’t know what these things are…
idk I don’t trust them. But I’m also running out of options at this point. Might as well use something. They seem like the best so far.
based solely on what you’ve found (and not doing my own homework): it seems like they’re going the adblock plus route where they’re good to use until they get a critical enough mass of users to start selling their data and the we’ll have to switch to the ublock origin like alternative.
Yes this sounds right and it also makes sense.
i think i’m going to start using more than one at a time as a cross comparison and investigate the dissenter.
Not a bad idea but keep in mind you’ll also potentially be adding yourself to lists. i assume i just ended up in a few databases i’d rather not be in by doing this snooping alone. Hard to tell the sheep from the wolves. I’m not an american though and my country isn’t currently on “hardcore mode” political setting. Stay safe, friend.
I’d go with buycott until something better appears tbh. I’m gonna see how it works for me. Too tired to keep snooping for today.
I checked out boycat.io
Searched a bunch of “everyone knows they’re bad” companies and the info they provided seemed accurate, reasonable and well sourced.
However, their business model seems kinda fishy. first of all they sell “I’m a nice company” certifications, which in itself s a conflict of interest, but especially if you can’t find who the owners of boycat are anywhere on the site or the internet, their whois information is private and if you look at their privacy policy, they allow themselves the right to track “usage data” (i.e. what you scanned) and “location data” which they later allow themselves to “share” with “service providers”, which are “companies providing hosting, data analysis, marketing, customer service, and technical support.”… so umm… Yeah. Basically same conflict of interest as the other company, but less explicit.
And again,. not once do they say who owns them, how they started or is behind them nor do they provide an explanation on why they don’t talk about themselves… Cause I could understand well intending devs trying to keep private to stop companies from threatening them, but tell the community this is why you don’t share your info. Their contact us doesn’t work either.
I would really like to see something community driven but i guess big companies could infiltrate something like that easily. I’ll look into other solutions and let you know if i find anything promising.
ps: 90% of their news were about Israel-palestine, which, you know… OK, good and important but ummm… I’d also like to know about other stuff.
Sure. Mentioning them helped me remember i have to get my act together regarding who i give my money to, so even if they’re evil now something good may have come from using and naming them. Thanks for the reminder. I needed it.
Money ruins literally everything.
It really does.
i wish i could say the same thing; but i dont have enough money to know. lol
You’re not a billionaire. You just became 50% more attractive to normal people!
Is there a way to add brands i want to avoid that aren’t on their list? I live in Aotearoa so I’m not sure if the list will have everything included
nothanks does
Clicking around, it seems like everything is on the boycott list. The reasons are also so bad. For example, Mars Inc is banned for working together with Israeli academic institutions to further foodtech innovations. Bullshit like this is why Republicans are able to link together antisemitism and reasonably critiquing the actions of Netanyahu.
Mars directly investing in Israeli startups and working with the university of genocide is a pretty good reason to boycott Mars
The app simply puts every company which invests money into Israel on the boycott list.
Goods Unite Us is another similar app, showing which companies donate to political parties. It does have some paywall issues but it’s better that nothing.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.goodsuniteus.goods
I second this app. Really saved me a few times at the grocer.
agreed, but only for now.
if you read further on in this post, it’ll appear that their ultimate goal is to give brands the opportunity to clean any ghoulish reputation w money.
… can there not be one single good intention ever?! ffffffff
Stay TF out of other countries you parasites.
Every US intervention leads to miseryAre you seriously following me from a Nigerian article where I was shocked the US didn’t fuck their government up?
Boy, you are fucking SAD.
I’m not following you, I can smell you tho
Borat: “yOu’rE iNsAnE” Also Borat: “I can smell you tho”
If there’s a place that you just can’t stomach to shop because of how they treat their employees then I highly recommend you do not shop there. I was avoiding Walmart before avoiding Walmart was cool.
However…
Boycotts only really work when organized, towards an end goal. What was Walmart doing before, what is it doing now, what do we want it to do, and who’s coordinating? That’s how you change corporate policy through boycott.
If certain DEI policies are important enough to you to boycott when a company removes them then that’s fine. I guess it’s also worth asking what it is about any given program that makes it good enough for not, which companies should or shouldn’t have it, why, and all that.
I’d say Steam.
Only as long as Gabe Newell runs it. After that it will enshittify like any other company that needs to make profits.
Private equity is salivating over the idea of
running his carefully built brand into the groundmaximizing value extraction from steam.The current meta here is that things like brand loyalty and reputation are not really worth preserving, and are only as good as whatever short-term gains you can squeeze out of them.
Supposedly gaben has threatened to release code in a death switch that would make every steam user able to play their games without phoning home.
I know that I would never buy another game if steam went down the toilet. Piracy was fun when I was a kid, and I bet it could be fun again.
Let’s hope musket doesn’t buy it.
This Steam?
NAACP has a list of companies committed to DEI: https://naacp.org/campaigns/black-consumer-advisory
Apple and Ben and Jerry’s right at the top lmfao
Ben & Jerry’s is actually cool though, no? Although they’re a capitalistic enterprise in the full sense, they had the spine to put a stand against Gaza genocide
they were on the BDS list for a while, but I don’t see them anymore, maybe they changed
They pulled out of the illegal settlements and maybe the greater occupation some years ago and reactionaries were furious.
you do love to see it
But Ben didn’t have the spine or brain to stand against Putin.
Apple Ben and Jerry’s Costco Delta Airlines ELF Beauty
Tim Apple attended Trump’s
coronationinauguration along with Altman, Bezos, Musk, Pichai, and Zuckerberg. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-inauguration-ceo-guests-bezos-zuckerberg-musk-2025-1Yeah. Was surprised NAACP had them on their list but I suppose they still have DEI verbiage. But shady company (he types on his iPhone…)
Why was this downvoted? I just listed the companies on NAACP website so you didn’t have to open link.
Bandcamp, because it is the best place for independent music and there is nothing close to it.
Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options) and now they are one of the companies that help Linux succeed for gaming (Steam Deck is just a Linux computer with controllers attached, and Proton is awesome for running Windows games on Linux).
Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options)
Au contraire, Steam was LOATHED back in the day, they were the first to force you to install a store just to play a single game.
For other games, you needed to enter a CD key on install (which keygens helped with) and then you needed the CD itself in the drive (which cracks helped with). Steam started the trend of online DRM in games, which was then adopted by others who made even more draconian offerings (I think for Spore you could only get 3 hardware IDs registered?)
Ah good point, totally forgot the early times, I was too young back then I guess. Okay then the impact of Steam is kind of mixed then. From practical experience it is more up to the game developers to enforce or not enforce it and often in practice especially indie games are DRM free or it is easy to circumvent. Steam at least does not install some surveillance rootkit on your system. And I’d claim that it plays about the same role in the indie game ecosystem as Bandcamp plays for music and GitHub plays for open source software, at least that is my impression.
And contra Bandcamp is of course, they recently sold out i.e. got bought by some larger fish with totally different but music legal stuff related business and Bandcamp lost a lot of employees. But at least for now I don’t see drastic enshittification ot Bandcamp yet.
I guess ultimately there is no perfect saint company, they are entities that must generate profit, and only sometimes it really means making customers happy, but more often than not it doesn’t - that’s just capitalism, how it works everywhere.
Bandcamp: Semi. Because it was owned by Epic.
Dunno how bad it’s with Songtradr.
NetBSD, Signal Foundation, other FOSS orgs
Dropout TV
Dr Bronners soap has specifically reaffirmed their DEI policies since Trump’s reelection, and they have a 5-to-1 cap on the top-level exec’s salaries compared to their lowest paid retirement-vested employees. They seem to walk the walk from what I’ve seen and read.
Holy shit. Imagine if more companies did the 5 to 1 cap thing.
Even at 20 to one it would drastically change some company payscales.
Needs to apply to “bonuses” so there’s no loopholes though.
The only one that comes directly to mind is Valve.
Besides that I’m not going to follow this narrative too much of finding “the good ones”.
Costco
Gog
Used computer store for keyboard, or Craigslist or Market place
I don’t really believe in ethical consumption, but Penzys spices are awesome! They’re such troll too, I love it!
