A Dollar Per Vote: Getting Best Use of Your Own

peteyboy100 · 1 year

I will repost a comment of mine from the other thread... since it will be seen now.

Probably the single most important thing to show is how a company/corporation spends the money they receive.

When you spend a dollar at company X....

How much goes to the CEO? to the employees? to politics? which politics? to making more of the product?

Then we break down what goes into making the product. What materials are used? are they renewable/sustainable? are people getting hurt by them from mining/harvesting? are people getting hurt by them from ingesting/touching (BPA comes to mind)?

Who is affected by product being made? Are they getting screwed over (coffee workers)? Are they working in inhumanly dangerous conditions (diamonds?)? etc etc

EDIT: Adding categories suggested by comments below.

How much are they paying in taxes What loopholes are they using? Are they subsidized?

Environment deforestation? air and water pollution? the amount of energy used from non-renewable sources? the effect on local wildlife? and harming endangered/threatened species?

Where do they donate money? Do they advertise about the donation? How much was advertising vs. actual donation?

C&H for fun

worldRev · 1 year

I am a recently graduated biz student with experience working in CSR (corporate social responsibility), corporate affairs, and marketing at international conglomerates. I can confidently say that this idea is 1) exactly what the world/people need, and 2) exactly the kind of transparency that would shift corporate practices.

I will follow the progress of this dialogue closely. I am willing to support this project in any way. A centralized source to fact check corporate ethics would be a powerful aggregate and catalyst for reform. Do not give up, please. The world needs this. Thank you.

proteustitus · 1 year

I have been wishing for an idea like this to take root on the etherspace, especially in wiki form, for a while now. Thank you for starting this. I've always wanted to be able to easily find the corporate "family tree" of a company, because if you're looking for what companies to avoid, or to support, it would be helpful to know who the parents and subs are.

The internet is a gift to the modern consumer, without it we would have no chance against the emerging Corporatocracy. Knowledge is power, and this wiki a powerful idea. Keep it going.

peteyboy100 · 1 year

What are the expectations for how a corporation should behave, for us as individuals to call it socially responsible... or not?

When Corps put the value of a dollar above the value of humanity, they are not socially responsible.

That is my answer to that. Clearly, they have to make money... that is the whole purpose of business, but they should be able to do it without hurting others.

Ashrik · 1 year

I think the simpler "Wikicorp" is a much easier and agile name

Bakuhatsu · 1 year

I think that this is a great idea. One recommendation that I would make would be to have an overall "index" of desirability/reprehensbility (actual terms would obviously be up for debate). For simplicity sake, it should be a 200 point system (From -100 to 100) where corporations start off at 0 and receive counters either for or against them.

For example, corporation A has their products manufactured in a sweat-shop type environment, so they get -20 to their score. Their executives also take home over 20 times their average employee's wage, which is maybe a -5 counter (it would be more negative for larger disparity). Corporation B from the same industry as A manufactures their goods in a more "socially responsible" environment, so they get a +10 counter. Their executives are not overpaid (say, less than 10x average worker wages), so they get a +5 counter there. They also employ locally, earning them another +10. So you look at both Corp A and Corp B and you have Corp A with a -25 index, and Corp B with a +25 index, so you try to buy Corp B whenever possible.

liberal_texan · 1 year

This is something I've been wanting and mulling over for quite a while now. The single biggest flaw in the concept is that as soon as it gets big enough to be useful, it becomes a target. How would we protect this idea from being gamed by the large corporations it is supposed to hold accountable?

peteyboy100 · 1 year

Lochmon, a couple of us are chomping at the bit (codeKrash, LittleMissNerdy, yorrick21). Is there anything we can do to get this going right now?

I have a wiki page set up that we can use until we have a permanent space.

stuff from other thread:

Inane_BD_to_Follow said he'll donate server space and hosting
TheMightyGooch owns wikicorpia.org and said he'd donate it.

Are you in talks with these redditors already?

Lochmon · 1 year

I've been browsing through some of the other posts in /r/greed. This is a community I didn't know was here until I went looking for a likely place to post this one. There are a lot of linked articles on corporate misbehavior that had not come to my attention before. I'll be spending more time here in the future, and in the political equivalent /r/corruption.

stop_alj_censorship · 1 year

I liked this idea when it was called BuyBlue

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/BuyBlue.org

SurlyTurtle · 1 year

Great idea Lochmon. Some addition ideas:

is it a worker owned co-op?
are the workers allowed to organize and run a union without harassment?
does the company use or generate green electricity?
does it recycle it's waste?
does it do business with locally owned companies?
does the company provide their employees health care, good health care?
has the company shipped jobs overseas? % or #
does the company receive corporate welfare in the form of direct payment or in the form of reduced taxes?
do they use genetically modified food ingredients? organic? local?
when sued, does it work to resolve the issue in a fair way or deny responsibility, counter sue the plantiffs, and drag the case through the courts for years
how does the executive compensation (including stocks and other benefits) compare to the salary of the average worker? Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream had a policy that the highest paid employee could not earn more than 10% more than the lowest paid employee.
does the company doing business overseas treat the workers abroad and the soil, water, air in the foreign country as if they had to meet the labor and environmental laws in the US?

Another issue is keeping the information collected up-to-date. Ben & Jerry's got bought out which would change much of the data. This is a lot of man hours.

winstonsmith · 1 year

You should take a look at SourceWatch. It's similar to what is being proposed here in that it is a collaborative wiki concerned with bad corporate behavior, but it's focused mainly on one category of bad behavior: propaganda, spin, lies, regulatory capture, etc. I think their list of bad actors should be a good start for a list of bad actors in all categories; when corporations behave badly, they usually lie about it. In any case, it's interesting as an example of something similar that's already been done, it's really useful, and more people need to know about it.

The Center for Media and Democracy publishes SourceWatch, this collaborative resource for citizens and journalists looking for documented information about the corporations, industries, and people trying to sway public opinion. We believe in telling the truth about the most powerful interests in society—not just relating their self-serving press releases or letting real facts be bleached away by spin. SourceWatch focuses on the for-profit corporations, non-profit corporate front groups, PR teams, and so-called "experts" trying to influence public opinion on behalf of global corporations and the government agencies they have captured. —Lisa Graves, Executive Director

See especially their tips on researching corporations:

This Guide, consisting of this main article and three more in-depth sub-articles, is designed to help researchers and activists gather essential information on any type of U.S.-based company, whether small or large, privately held or publicly traded. The resources listed here are all, in one way or another, part of the public record. The first part covers leading sources of basic information on companies of all kinds. The second part focuses on information sources relating to the key relationships every company must have in order to function. The final part shows you how to gather information about a company’s "social responsibility" record. Together, these sections will help you find all the basic information needed to support efforts to get companies to do the right thing. Happy hunting!

CodeKrash · 1 year

a couple sleezy actions off the top of my head:

ISP:

By ISP i mean any data/voice service provider, wired or wireless

new ISPs secretly planning to "merge" with the established ISP (phone or broadband doesn't matter) as long as you end up without real, sustained competition for that geographical location. This allows the perception of competition in the market, and a shadow monopoly allowing for astronomical competition-less fees, and shittier service. -- black hat technique.

insurance industry:

usage of a big established name (like All State) to do business, when in fact you're a newbie and need to borrow the name for trust issues. Both the newbie and the big guys are at fault for this kind of contract. This sets up a false sense of security for the consumer -- black hat technique.

drug industry:

usage of "parent" aka. proxy companies to create a hierarchy pattern of companies. This is used to generate a sense of trustworthiness similar to the insurance industry, but this has an added effect. If the actual company fails ethically or is sued, the parent company (sponsoring it) doesn't take responsibility, and their name remains intact. It's a way to fund risky projects, and insulate the one fueling the project from consumer backlash -- black hat technique.

theblackcrayon · 1 year

Is the purpose of this wiki to feel better about ourselves, or to actually make a difference? If all you guys want is a way to make sure the dollars you spend personally go to a responsible company that's fine, but if you want a large, influential wiki that influences the spending of thousands of people we really need a plan for marketing it.

tdehnel · 1 year

There's a great site called Skin Deep that ranks beauty products by their toxicity and harmfulness to the environment. It combines the available info into rankings that are easy to use when buying these types of product.

This could be good inspiration for the project.

charters14 · 1 year

This is the best way to change corporate policies we find despicable. My two cents: you are not alone in this and will not have to start from scratch. There is a new movement among 'ethical investors' who evaluate companies based on their disclosures surrounding CSR and their track record on moral business practices. The wiki page on socially responible investing might be a good place to start searching for information that has already been aggregated by financial experts.

I am about to graduate with a Masters degree in accounting and finance and might be able to help go through financial statements or give insight into the specific criteria we can evaluate companies on which comes from reliable sources.

Keep me posted, I would enjoy to be involved in any way possible.

worldRev · 1 year

OK. Lets break it down.

NEXT STEP: (Market Research) There are already existing institutional resources that hold keys to the data we seek. It is our job to lace together the numbers from these different places into an easily-understandable public profile for every company. * We should start to identify the specific NGOs that we will be have to build alliances with or use data sets from. * Sockholder letters and financial sheets for publicly-traded companies will give us insight into which data is readily available and which we will have to dig deeper for.

eleftheriaHthanatos · 1 year

the opacity of the corporation should be a major factor. If you've got nothing to hide from the masses, then chances are you're a socially ethical enterprise.

Lochmon · 1 year

[deleted]

ekaj · 1 year

Dreamhost is having a sale today, 9 bucks for a domain name and 1 year of hosting, I would be willing to donate a website...

LittleMissNerdy · 1 year

Does anyone know anyone who worked on wikipedia in the early days? I think their input would be valuable.

martyshannon · 1 year

I have no idea how to contribute to this, I just wanted to say that I am 100% in favor of this idea.

ChipChopChip · 1 year

This would make a great app

yorrick21 · 1 year

Also, it would be helpful to know who owns what, although this is an undertaking in-and-of itself. I was munching on a bag of Red Hot Blues (organic chips made by Garden of Eatin') today, thinking how nice it was to support local farmers. Wait... is this organic company local? Are they even independent?

This acquisitions chart by the Univ of Michigan outlines which corporations own which organic brands. Some surprises:

Odwalla -> Coca Cola
Naked Juice -> Pepsi
Green & Blacks chocolate -> Cadbury
Cascadian Farms -> General Mills
Bear Naked, Kashi, etc -> Kellogg

Interestingly, according to the chart, a lot of these relationships are not indicated on product labels. There's no way to know when you're in the store, making purchases, unless you Google search with your iPhone :0)

RiversIsMyHero · 1 year

This is a fantastic idea and would be willing to do anything I can to support.

intjk · 1 year

This book/website is very relevant. I use it all the time.

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