We all know and accept that failure is a natural part of the business cycle.  Bad ideas will be rejected by the market, and good ideas will flourish and lead to a more prosperous and efficient economy.  Hell, even perfectly good ideas that outlive their usefulness will slowly die ignominious deaths no matter how marketable they were a few years ago.  But some business ideas are so catastrophically awful, so based on warped views of what the market wants, that they fail quickly and often in spectacular fashion.  And we’re not just talking about your local artisanal cheese shop that failed to flourish in a down market.  Most of these ideas had tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars and big name companies backing them, and still couldn’t manage to survive more than a year.
 

Motorola Iridium

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Way back in the late 90s (kids), there were phones that connected to the walls using cords, and voice messages were sent over these vast “wire” networks. But also around this time, the cell phones that we all know and love were beginning to gain widespread popularity (despite their giant size and weight), especially among the wealthy business elite. 
 
The problem was, they didn’t quite work everywhere.  And when savvy business execs were negotiating ways to exploit children in southeast Asia, they had some trouble getting reception because this was Vietnam in 1997, where the locals were lucky to own shoes―much less advanced electronics.  The only solution at the time was a satellite phone, which were outrageously expensive, bulky, unreliable and altogether impractical. 
 
There were several sane approaches to this problem at the time:  Pick up a normal phone.  Wait a few years for infrastructure to catch up and cell prices to go down.  Not worry about it because Motorola is a cellphone company.  Instead, Motorola went the super villain route and launched a dozen or so satellites into low-Earth orbit at the cost of several billion dollars.  After several years of work and billions invested, Motorola was finally ready to reveal…another brick of a satellite phone that cost thousands of dollars and was generally unreliable.   

Not to mention that the areas where it was necessary to use this device (poor, impoverished, devoid of infrastructure), were also the last place you wanted to pull out a $2,000 phone on the street.  Oh did we mention that the phone, like the GPS in your phone now, needed a clear view of the sky to work?  To top it all off, by the time the network was complete, cell phone service had started to become widely available in just about every corner of the globe.  The network was essentially dead upon launch.  The Iridium network is still there, and is reportedly quite popular with Arctic and Antarctic researchers. 
 

Webvan

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Obviously the dot-com boom of the 90s encouraged some of the most spectacular expenditures on the most bone-headed business ideas, so let’s start getting some of the more hilarious examples out of the way.  Webvan was founded in 1999 with a simple idea you think would take off quickly in the Internet age: we have all this Internet shopping, why not allow people to buy groceries online?  A few massive infusions of capital later, and Webvan was off, quickly building facilities 10 US cities, guaranteeing a delivery time of 30 minutes or less, and greedily eying another 16 markets. 

Hoping to copy Amazon’s success as a first-mover in the space (i.e., the first major player can scoop up market share and hedge out future competitors), Webvan’s executives spent like there was no tomorrow, gobbling up warehouses and delivery trucks.  There was just one, tiny, itty-bitty problem: no one had any freaking idea what they were doing.  None of the executives had any experience with grocery stores or retail food sales at all.  And this led them to miss one all-important detail that you think would have come up in earlier discussions when people were throwing millions of dollars at them: Profit.   

Grocery stores, as opposed to the hodge-podge of items being sold on Amazon, have razor-thin profit margins―some of the lowest of any business in the world.  And they can’t leave a product on a shelf for weeks, or even days, hoping that someone will buy it.  Webvan went from tens of millions to hemorrhaging millions within the span of a few months.   

The Kardashian Kard

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If only this had been called the “Kool Kardashain Kard”, every joke about the Kardashians that every needed to be made would have. Imagine the thrilling board meeting where this idea came up:  having exhausted all their make-up, reality shows, marriages, and divorce merchandising, some incredibly boring accountant walked into the room and said, “You know what’s exciting and kool? F*CKING DEBIT KARDS!” 

The idea here was that (shudder) tweens could live the lavish Kardashian lifestyle with this stylin’ debit card without learning a single thing about money.  It’s the American Dream!  Just like the Kardashians, kids could symbolize everything decadent and destructive about modern America. They could do it in style and possibly even without a sex tape.   

Fortunately, the Kardashian Kard of Koolness ran into several roadblocks, the first being outrage from parents and advocacy groups.  Associating important matters of finance with pop culture and a symbol of status led to outcry as some argued it would teach personal finance through opulence, rather than responsibility.  Additionally, the Kards came with various fees which could easily add up to more than $100 a year.  The second and more serious problem was pre-paid debit cards are just plain boring and way too much of a hassle.  Why buy something, put money on it, then use it to buy season one of Keeping up with the Kardashians when you could just guilt your estranged parents into buying it for you?  Unsurprisingly, the kard was a huge flop. 

Kozmo.com

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Much like Webvan, Kozmo.com jumped on to the hysterical “everyone will buy things on the Internet and everything will be delivered”-bandwagon of the late 90s and early Aughts.  Only Kozmo took the Amazon idea and dialed past 11 into 13 territory.  They promised to deliver anything, virtually anywhere inside their markets, even if it was only a $0.50 pack of gum.  It quickly became a favorite among young professionals and college students, but because this was 2000, the end was coming. 

Contrary to popular belief, the idea of delivering just about anything wasn’t all that crazy.  The problems Kozmo suffered from were twofold: low margins and jittery investors.  Seems that paying someone to deliver a pack of gum tends to cost a lot and not net the company too much money.  After an initial capital investment of $280 million, Kozmo had to find a way to make themselves profitable after overextending to too many unprofitable markets.  Believe it or not, they actually succeeded, and their top 6 regions were actually briefly profitable. 

Of course this was shortly after the NASDAQ tanked.  Kozmo’s executives went to investors with their profits, expecting the money needed to go forward with a merger that would keep them afloat.  That’s when some genius in the boardroom realized that, even though Kozmo was turning a profit, the margins were still too razor-thin.  They wouldn’t see the principle on their $280 million dollars for years down the road, not to mention to two to threefold return on investment they’d begun to expect in the dotcom era.  And that is the reason why we all have to get up off our asses and actually walk to the corner store like savages for gum. 
 

XFL Football

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In 2001, Vince McMahon and NBC got together to fill the NFL off-season with something other than reruns of Friends.  They decided to start a hip, new league with lots of boobs and perhaps the most annoying commercials ever played ad nauseum. 

The XFL was supposed to be a meaner, tougher, grittier version of football, designed to attract a younger demographic and, as McMahon elegantly put it, “people who watch movies”.  They cobbled together a bunch of sub-NFL level athletes and threw the whole gaudy, over-hyped mess on TV for precisely no one to enjoy.  To everyone but McMahon’s lack of surprise, it set new records in how small of an audience a sporting event could get. 

But despite our hindsight hatred of this thing that invaded every commercial space from December through February, it’s more football, isn’t it?  Who wouldn’t cheer the chance to not have to wait almost 6 months for the new season to start?  The problem was that in trying to brand the XFL as a new, edgier, more sensational football league, McMahon and NBC managed to alienate all of their viewers who like football.  The overwhelming reason cited for not watching the XFL season was “it looks too much like wrestling”.  Fans refused to believe that the entire exercise was genuine and not staged like every other thing McMahon puts his hands on.  Though it was slated for at least two seasons, the incredibly low TV ratings of the XFL led to its cancellation after only a single season. 
 

Kibu.com

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Kibu.com opened its doors to much fanfare in the fall of 2000, but quickly became yet another victim of the dot com bust.  So who cares?  Hundreds of seemingly promising businesses back by millions of dollars died in that virtual firestorm.  What makes Kibu, a site targeted at adolescent girls, any different than the hundreds of sites that thought they could get rich quick off of ad revenue alone (heh)?  Well Kibu set something of a record, even in the crazy dot com era.  A short 46 days after their opulent launch party in a San Francisco neighborhood, they shut their doors.  In less than a month and a half, the entire company tanked. 

So what happened?  Well it’s kind of unclear.  What’s likely is they made the same mistake countless other dotcoms did, they targeted a tiny, fickle, difficult-to-capture market, and expected minuscule advertising revenue to lead to the astronomical returns on investment their backers were expecting.  Still, Kibu remains as one of the shortest-lived vs. most-hyped dotcoms of the early Aughts, despite having a name that sounds like some sort of Japanese fetish site. 

The Edsel

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One of the most famous flops in business history, the Edsel was a series of cars produced by Ford from 1958-1960.  Spending a mind-boggling $400 million to develop and market the cars, the Edsel (named after Edsel Ford) was supposed to be Ford’s newest and most exciting entry, a shot over the bow of its competitors.  Instead it became one of the swiftest and most expensive flops in automotive history. 

By all accounts, the Edsel should have succeeded wildly.  It was slickly marketed, price-competitive with competitors, and a generally well-built with plenty of top-of-the-line features.  But as they rolled them out, Ford started hearing disconcerting stories about consumers taking one look, then walking out of the dealership.
   
So what was the problem?  Well there are many differing opinions on the subject, ranging from the price, marketing, appearance and reliability.  All of which sound like an exercise of “It should have worked, buuuuut”

Price: It should have worked because the Edsel was only slightly more expensive than the basic Ford models.  Buuuut, no one quite knew what the Edsel was supposed to be (a luxury car? A budget alternative?) — and so the price still seemed too high.

Marketing: The slick marketing campaign built a lot of anticipation around the Edsel’s release by only showing the car through unfocused lenses and thin, gauzy sheets. Buuuut, again, like above, no one knew what the hell the Edsel was supposed to be.  Also the name is ugly as sin.

Appearance: Even by today’s standards, the Edsel is not a bad looking car.  It’s a bold design to be sure, but it’s still slick and classy.  Buuuut, at the time it looked like “an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon”

Reliability: On paper, the Edsel was a sturdy car built with good parts and meant to last.  Buuuut, the assembly of the Edsel often took place in different plants, making quality control nearly impossible.  Some cars were shipped to dealers only partially assembled, with instructions in the trunk.

On paper, the Edsel must have looked like a slam dunk to Ford executives, but it’s amazing that with all the numerous tiny problems, no one pointed a single one out.   

Premier Smokeless Cigarette

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By now you’ve likely ran into at least one douchebag at a party smoking an E-cigarette while gushing about how healthy it is.  If he’s really a douche, he’ll straight smoke it in bars and then yell self righteously when he gets thrown out and ruins everyone else’s night (Steve).  This futuristic-looking smoking device doesn’t burn tobacco, but instead vaporizes a nicotine gel.  The smoker gets their nicotine fix without having to tear up their lungs. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? 

They did,  in 1988. It was called the the Premier Smokeless Cigarette. Company spokespeople often said that if smokers would just stick it out, they’d quickly acquire a taste for the new cigarettes.  Which is unfortunate because consumer studies showed that few smokers made it past their first Premier.  Premier survived less than a year, which is amazing because that’s a hell of a lot shorter than Camel Snus and I dare you to find a single person not on an airplane who enjoys those. 
 

Netflix Price Raise

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Last July, the popular Netflix service decided to split its streaming and DVD services into two separate deals.  Netflix would remain a streaming service, and DVDs would be delivered through a separate account called “Qwikster”.  Oh and the price for both services combined went up by around 6 dollars.  The justification generally went that Netflix delivered hundreds of free movies instantly for one-fifth the price of your average cable bill.  Certainly a small increase shouldn’t bother anyone.   

Except they ignored one of the first rules of business: don’t raise prices without offering additional services.  As if that wasn’t enough, customers who had DVDs delivered were now responsible for two accounts, and typing in two website addresses is like, really a lot of work, man.  Trying to perform damage control, Netflix offered a sincere and heartfelt apology which was about as sincere and heartfelt as Darth Vader and Skeletor’s lovechild.   

Eventually, Netflix called it quits.  They kept the price increase, but they gave up on the unnecessarily separate services.  But not before they lost much of their “Not Comcast” credibility, upward of 800,000 subscribers, and 10% of their quarterly revenue. 
 

boo.com

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This high-end online UK retailer launched in 1999.  They left the gate with $135 million in venture capital and launched simultaneously in most major European countries. They burned through their venture capital in less than 18 months, which is more than $250,000 a day.  Unsurprisingly, the capital ran out before sales caught up, and the company went into bankruptcy in 2000. 
 
The funny story here is that boo.com was actually not doing that terribly when the company fell apart.  By the time the money ran out, sales were close to $500,000.  While that’s roughly two days of expenditures at boo, in any other environment that would have been enough to justify further capital investment. But this was the dot com era, and investors were vacillating wildly between “Where are my 300% returns in two years!” and “I need to horde my money it’s the end of the world!”.  $500k simply wasn’t enough to justify further investment.   

But the real reason behind boo’s failure wasn’t investment, it was their terrible, terrible website.  While it might not look so bad nowadays, it combined all the terrible popups and animated logos of the late nineties with the bandwidth-heavy flash widgets of 2003.  And this was in 1999, when somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of their customers were still using dial-up. 

PAW-PALS

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A tiny little shop in Oroville, California, PAW-PALS is probably the worst business idea you’ve never heard of.  You know you’re off to a bad start when the origin story of this quaint little store began with two people walking their cats.  This is an activity that precisely not a single sane person in the world participates in, but oddly founder Jeffrey Sentose thought was a large, under-serviced market demographic.   

The story goes that Sentose was out walking his cat one brisk morning.  All of the planets and stars and quasars and brown dwarfs and asteroids and comets in the universe apparently aligned and he met yet another person out walking their cat.  The two cats got along so well that Sentose, who according to the article never met a terrible idea he didn’t try to make money off of, decided to create a lavish store for people to bring their cats for cat play-dates. 

If you’re shuddering right now, it is because you have actually owned more than one cat and know that cats are evil, angry hellspawn.  Especially when other cats are around.  And especially when they’ve been plucked from the sunny perch they’ve been lounging on for the past 72 hours to go hang out with other cats and other humans.  Cats are the hermetic, possibly homicidal, Ted Kaczynskis of the pet world, and yet Sentose decided he should open a place to bring all these murderous little furballs together like some sort of feline Madrassa.  As proof that there is some justice in the world, PAW-PALS failed within a month, presumably because those strange enough to actually visit the place were never heard from again―a point bolstered by noise complaints that (quite seriously) complained of “frequent mrrrowwwwwwwws [sic] loud and shrill enough to chill the bones of any man”.
 
[PAW-PALS is not actually real.  But honestly, could you could tell the difference?]

The arms industry is a truly global phenomenon. Guns, ammunition and other larger weaponry mean big business all over the world, and where there’s money to be made there will always be a corrupt or criminal element looking to capitalize on the market. The following men were or are masters at the gun game — shady figures who have traveled far and wide trafficking and distributing arms for cold hard cash while attempting to stay one step ahead of the authorities and their business rivals. What follows are the ten most notorious arms dealers in modern history.

10. Adnan Khashoggi

Adnan Khashoggi is an extremely successful Saudi Arabian businessman. He also happens to have been a hugely prominent arms dealer. Regarded as the richest man in the world during the 1980s, the American-educated Khashoggi, now 76, began his arms trading career in the 1960s, brokering deals between US companies and the Saudi government. Amongst Khashoggi’s most famous clients were Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin), who during the early 1970s paid him $106 million in commissions. He concealed his financial dealings by setting up front companies in tax havens such as Switzerland. Caught up (along with Imelda Marcos, the widow of exiled Philippine president, Ferdinand) in the Iran-Contra affair, Khashoggi was arrested in 1988 but was acquitted two years later. He currently resides in Monaco, where his services as a facilitator are apparently still occasionally called upon — most recently in 2003, when he allegedly met with American political advisor Richard Perle right before the invasion of Iraq.

9. Dale Stoffel

Dale Stoffel was an arms dealer who was heavily involved with the reconstruction efforts established in the wake of the Iraq War. Known for chomping a cigar and routinely having a machine-gun slung across his back — the popular image of a mercenary — Stoffel was killed while on his way to Baghdad in 2004. In 2003, his company, Wye Oak Technology, was awarded one of the first contracts from the newly established Iraqi Ministry of Defense, and in the end the value of his contracts with the nascent Iraqi government totaled over $40 million. During the year leading up to his death, the goatee-bearded Stoffel became an outspoken critic of irregularities in the Iraqis’ methods of payment for his efforts, and those of others like him, with allegations that corruption was rampant. Shortly before his death Stoffel was owed $24.7 million. His widow Barbara sued the Iraqi government for $25 million in 2009.

8. Dr. Moosa Bin Shamsher

Dr. Moosa Bin Shamsher is a Bangladeshi business tycoon known for being a major player in international arms trading during the 1970s and 1980s (as well as for many other business ventures). Affectionately dubbed “Prince Moosa” by the South Asian press, this high-profile figure is, notwithstanding, known for dealings with other shady big name arms dealers on this list such as Adnan Khashoggi and Sarkis Soghanalian. It is also alleged that Shamsher has had Swiss bank accounts worth $7 million frozen because of “irregular” transactions. Formed in 1974, Shamsher’s business, DATCO, deals in global weaponry, including tanks, fighter planes and ballistic missiles. Almost as renowned as Shamsher’s arms dealings is his love of excess: he owns a fleet of a hundred private cars that includes Rolls-Royce models and limousines and wears diamond-encrusted shoes valued at $3 million.

7. Samuel Cummings

Samuel Cummings was an American arms dealer and founder of the International Armament Corporation — a company that grew to all but monopolize the global market in private arms sales. Cummings died in 1998 at the age of 71 following a series of strokes but has been called (by The New York Times) the “undisputed philosopher-king of the arms trade.” Recruited as a weapons expert by the CIA in 1950, he spent the rest of the early 50s traveling Europe buying up large amounts of excess WWII weaponry. This led Cummings to start up the arms dealing business Interarmco, which would come to dominate the small arms market of 1950s and ’60s America. He also dealt with many famous international leaders, including Fidel Castro, to whom he sold a consignment of AR-10 rifles — much to the ire of General Rafael Trujillo, leader of the Dominican Republic, where Cummings was later doing business.

6. Fares Mana’a

Said to be Yemen’s most infamous arms dealer, the official occupation of Sheikh Fares Mohammed Mana’a is Governor of Sa’dah, a city in north-western Yemen. Despite such standing, Mana’a's more illicit activities have been noted by the United Nations Security Council, who added his name to a list of people accused of dealing arms to the Somali insurgents known as Harakat al-Shabaab Mujahedeen — a notorious group suspected of having links to Al-Qaeda. Mana’a has also been accused of spying for the late Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in return for millions in funds. In March 2011, Mana’a was installed as the new governor of Sa’dah following a battle between pro-government tribesmen and the Mana’a-supported Houthi rebels, to whom he is also accused of supplying arms.

 5. Sarkis Soghanalian

When Florida-based private arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian died recently, on October 5, 2011, an extraordinary life ended. Born in 1929, Soghanalian— nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” — established himself during the Cold War, becoming the leading arms merchant during that time of political conflict. He was also infamous for being the foremost seller of weapons to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. With the full knowledge and backing of the CIA, Soghanalian sold arms to Iraq in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War. He also sold weaponry to militia groups during the Lebanese Civil War, as well as to Ecuador and Nicaragua, and to Argentina during the Falklands War. Following the first Gulf war with Iraq, Soghanalian was jailed for six years for possession of arms and the intent to sell to Iraq. His sentence was reduced to two years, however, after he supplied the US with intelligence.

4. Monzer al-Kassar

Syrian-born Monzer al-Kassar — also known by the glamorous title, the “Prince of Marbella” — is an international arms dealer of some notoriety. Currently incarcerated, al-Kassar began his career in trading weapons in the early 1970s when, by his own account, the Yemeni government requested that he buy arms for them from Poland. He lived in London from from around 1972 until 1984, at which point he was thrown out of the country by the British government for arms and drug trafficking. From London al-Kassar moved to Marbella, where he gained his extravagant nickname. Further allegations of arms dealing followed — including that he sold arms to and helped the hijackers of cruise ship the Achille Lauro. He also pocketed millions making sales to Croatia, Bosnia and Somalia when there was a UN arms embargo with the three countries. Al-Kassar was caught and convicted thanks to an elaborate DEA sting that began in 2006 and proceeded to his arrest in Madrid in 2007 and extradition to the US a year later.

3. Jean-Bernard Lasnaud

When the French-born Jean-Bernard Lasnaud was arrested in 2002 in Switzerland, it ended almost three years of arrest requests from Argentinian courts and Interpol. Despite this, together with accusations from European courts on counts of arms smuggling and fraud, amazingly Lasnaud was allowed to live peacefully in South Florida for more than ten years before his past finally caught up with him. Lasnaud was in the business of selling arms from his luxurious gated community to anyone interested, with China and Somalia just two of the suspected client countries. According to his own estimates, Lasnaud’s Caribbean Group of Companies sold between $1 and $2.5 million in weapons every year. Accused of brokering thousands of tons worth of Argentinian weaponry to Croatia and Ecuador between 1992 and 1995, Lasnaud even boasted his own website to aid with his transactions. He is caught up in a complex web of corruption and scandals the true extent of which may never be known.

2. Leonid Minin

Leonid Minin, a Ukrainian by birth, is a notorious international arms dealer. Born in 1947, he moved to Israel in the 1970s. He  was arrested by the German authorities later in the same decade for using false identification as well as under suspicion of art theft. His customers in the arms trade have allegedly included the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor as well as the Revolutionary United Front group which operated in Sierra Leone. The weapons that Minin dealt in are held to have had their origins in the Russian arms company Aviatrend, a group also involved in money laundering connected with toppled Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević. Arrested by Italian authorities in 2000 for illegal arms dealings, Minin was sentenced to two years. Nicolas Cage’s character in the 2005 movie Lord of War is partly based on Minin, as well as Sarkis Soghanalian and our number one, Viktor Bout.

1. Viktor Bout

Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, the most notorious arms smuggler on this list, currently faces seeing out the rest of his life behind bars. Extradited from Thailand to America in 2010 following a five-year operation by the DEA, the Russian national stands accused of illegally arming the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in their operations against US forces. The jury found him guilty and he will receive sentencing in early 2012, when he could stand to receive a life sentence. Bout is reported to have made substantial amounts of money shipping goods in Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s and 2000s, and the former military translator for the Soviet Union may well have fed the flames of various African civil wars by supplying vast quantities of arms during the Nineties. He has also been dubbed a “sanctions buster” because of allegations that he violated UN arms embargoes in trading with Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Congo during the same decade. In 2001 Bout was furthermore implicated in the movement of gold and cash out of Afghanistan. The charges against him make Bout’s future prospects fairly grim indeed.

Doesn’t anybody drop acid anymore? Either that only happens at music festivals these days, or someone in the drug business has figured out an efficient way to transport large amounts of hallucinogens without letting the crazy seep into their pores. While the usual suspect (cocaine) occupies three spots on our list over the past several decades (including number one), the most recent list-worthy bust occurred just last year and involved the attempted transport of nearly 30 tons of marijuana — which is really too bad, because nobody likes a grumpy stoner.

$6.9 Billion – Cocaine — 1989

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In 1989, the biggest bust in history yielded 20 tons of cocaine, which came out to a street value of about $7 billion, or five “doses” (whatever that means) for each person in the United States. Big time Mexican drug trafficker Rafael Munoz Talavera was about to make it rain on every man, woman and child, had his cohorts not been caught in their warehouse in Sylmar, an upscale residential community near the San Gabriel Mountain foothills in California. Evidence in the trial against warehouse manager Romero McTague (who received life without parole) and the other 6 men arrested in Sylmar (which did not include Munoz), showed that this bust was small potatoes in comparison to the additional 77 tons that had moved through the warehouse in previous months, during which time the DEA was planning their attack. This brought in a whopping $81 million in transportation fees alone, according to the prosecution. Munoz managed to escape jail time for Sylmar, and also remained unscathed for his alleged involvement in importing 200 total tons of cocaine between 1988-89. His reign came to an end in 1998 though, when he was murdered by a rival Mexican drug group and drifted away to his own personal powder bowl in the sky. 

$4 Billion – Heroin — 1991

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It’s the summer of 1991 in Hayward, California: Grunge is happening, Freddy Mercury is still alive, and no one has a clue that Steely Dan is about to spontaneously reunite. Great time for music; a not-so-great time for the heroin business. Authorities snagged nearly 1,200 pounds of China white heroin from a warehouse in Hayward, making it the largest heroin seizure in U.S. history. The estimated street value of 1,200 pounds of Mr. Brownstone came out to almost $4 billion. At the time, the DEA even said that this collection represented 5% of the world’s total yearly production. To get to it’s place in the sun, the drug traveled all the way from Thailand to Taiwan, stowed away on a ship to the Port of Oakland and hitchhiked to Hayward, only to meet its demise before it had enough time to kill a comedian.

$1 Billion – Cocaine – 1984

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Coming in at number three on our list in true Blow fashion, was the 1984 raid of Sr. Pablo Escobar’s now infamous “Tranquilandia,” which was a large-scale laboratory used to process and mass-produce really good cocaine. Stowed away in the Colombian jungle, the Medellin Cartel boss lost an estimated street value of more than $1 billion when the Colombian National Police snatched up 14 tons of cocaine after getting a hot tip from the DEA. The complex, which boasted 19 total laboratories, an independent water source and electrical system, had actual dormitories for the lab workers to blow their noses and sleep off the stimulant. The Cartel also constructed eight private airstrips in the area, specifically for the transportation of their product. Apparently the DEA knows what they’re doing though, and those smarties put tracking devices on ether (which is a major chemical in processing cocaine) tanks purchased by a Medellin Cartel associate, from some chemical plant in New Jersey (shocker). Their fancy devices led them into the Colombian jungles, and the rest is Johnny Depp history.

$600 Million – Cocaine – 2007

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Coke smugglers should really strive to do better work, because in 2007, 20 tons of the drug got intercepted yet again, this time from a Panamanian ship named the Gatun. Unlike most of the busts on the list, this one never made it to a warehouse, and was dubbed the largest maritime cocaine bust in U.S. history, thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard. They were just hanging out on a Sunday, patrollin’, and they caught got the Gatun ridin’ real dirty. DEA administrator Karen Tandy said that (duh), traffickers at least try to make an effort to stash their stash in secret compartments or inside other humans, but these guys “simply loaded these bales of cocaine into cargo containers on the top of the deck of this freighter. They were hiding in plain sight on the main deck.” D’oh! And to think they would have raked in nearly $600 million for this trip, had they not been so obvious.

$20 Million – Marijuana – 2010

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Finally, in true Weeds fashion, no less (because television and movies make real life more relatable, right?), authorities discovered 30 tons of weed (approximately $20 million) in a 600-yard tunnel under the California-Mexico border in November of last year. The tunnel, which came complete with rail system, lighting and ventilation, would have been more than fit to house several families from New York City’s mole people population. The space connected a warehouse in Tijuana to one in San Diego, which now explains how they sedate the beasts at the San Diego Zoo.  It also explains how San Diego’s economy became so dependent on “international trade.” 30 tons of weed.  That equals at least 5 male elephants, which don’t bring nearly as many repeat customers.  Interestingly enough, two days prior to the bust, California constituents voted against a proposition to legalize the personal use of marijuana. To think they could have donated all that green to charity. Sigh.

Credit is the lifeblood of any well-functioning economy.  It allows us to buy cars, houses, education and terabytes of filthy, filthy porn (you know, the stuff so filthy you can’t find it for free).  For most people, their most accessible line of credit is a credit card — basically an instant ability to cover sudden outrageous expenses without having to pawn belongings.  If you don’t have a credit card, you better have a rainy-day fund as big as Scrooge McDuck or else you’re one car repair or medical expense away from bankruptcy.  Credit card companies know that customers depend on this line of credit, sometimes desperately, so they do their best to provide it an easy and simple a fashion as possible.  Just kidding, they try to gouge customers for every last red cent in anyway that will keep them technically legal.  Or they’ll just take your money without telling you.  You know, like the exact definition of a thief. 
 

“Fee-Harvesting” Cards

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For those with low incomes or abysmal credit scores, getting a credit card with a decent interest rate and credit limit can be a frustrating challenge.  Once you finally do find a creditor willing to give you the time of day, you’re likely to end up with an usurious interest rate and a credit limit roughly high enough to buy some crusts of stale bread and weeks-old milk.  While unfortunate, from a business perspective this makes sense.  A bank can’t simply go lending out money to high-risk individuals without trying to protect their investment somewhat, so it’s hard to blame them for being careful and circumspect about who they extend credit to. 

Or it would be, if this is what actually happened.  In reality, these cards for the credit-poor are often what experts refer to as “Fee-Harvesting” cards.  What this means is that someone might get a card with a limit of $200-$300 dollars, and an interest rate in the high 20s.  Buried in the fine print of the agreement is a whole bevy of fees, often adding up to a huge chunk of the customer’s credit limit.  In one case, a customer with a credit limit of $250 was only able to put $50 on the card after all the fees were applied.  The worst part about all of this is that the fees apply whether or not the card is used or paid off each month.  Meaning that someone who doesn’t pay attention to the fine print, and barely uses the card at all, can suddenly find themselves hundreds of dollars in debt after a few months.  And that debt will only continue to pile on at that incredibly high interest rate. 

From the credit card company’s point of view, they just got someone hundreds of dollars indebted to them, without having to extend more than a few bucks of credit up front.  This is why they apply the fees, instead of just making the credit limit that much lower.  This apparently all happens as they cackle cravenly while swimming through piles of money and murdered puppies while ignoring evidence that severe debt can often lead to depression and suicide. 
 

Monogram Credit Card Bank of Georgia

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Believe it or not, those promotional in-store cards that usually come along with some sort of discount or interest-free purchase are actual credit cards.  You could use your Sears card at Home Depot and your Best Buy card to buy cigarettes at the corner store.  A large section of these cards are issued by Monogram Credit Card Bank of Georgia, which delights in teaming up with retailers to bend customers over a pinball machine.   

In what you’ll begin to notice is a recurring pattern, customers are misled about the terms of whatever deal they’re signing, whether through terms, interest rates, or hidden fees.  One good example of the sociopathic deft of Monogram was a promotion with Home Depot and Lowes.  Customers were allowed to purchase items using the store’s credit cards, and pay them off interest-free.  Except they never mentioned to the customers that they were required to pay down the interest-free balance before anything else, meaning customers who purchased anything else were forced to watch that item gather interest while they paid down the cheaper balance first.  (Fortunately, this practice is now illegal). 
 
Unsurprisingly, several class-action lawsuits have been brought against Monogram.  Monogram responded by saying “that’s so quaint” and pointing out the required arbitration clause in the customers contracts—basically guaranteeing that any complaints won’t be able to legally see the inside of a courtroom. 

Bank of America Credit Cards

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Oh Bank of America.  When you aren’t trying to charge $5 for using your debit card each month, you’re borrowing billions of dollars from the Federal Reserve and making billions off of taxpayer money.  It seems like there’s no money you won’t take, and no one you’ll avoid paying it out to (except your executive bonuses, of course).  So because they hadn’t found enough avenues for evil-doing, BofA decided their credit card arm should get involved in the financial wizardry of tricking people into owing the bank more than they could possibly afford.   

former support people came forward in 2008 and admitted to a host of unethical and illegal practices that were rampant throughout the company.  These two former employees worked in a call center, which was ostensibly there to help customers with questions or account issues.  Their actual purpose was to push huge cash advances on customer’s credit cards onto people who couldn’t afford them.  As one of the employees put it, instead of helping the customers,   “Every customer that calls in is a mark, it’s a great big con”.  Some of these advances totaled upward of fifty to one hundred thousand real actual dollars.  The interest rates on these loans? As high as 28%.   

One of the hilarious unintended consequences of offering people tens of thousands of dollars right now, is “support” reps had trouble convincing customers they had anything to spend several grand on.  The favorite expense they suggested was using the cash advance for a down payment on a house.  Since down payments are used as a way for home buyers to prove that they have enough money to make regular mortgage payments, borrowing the money for a down payment is highly illegal.  BofA circumvented this by telling customers they could deposit cash advances in their checking accounts, and what happened to the money was the customer’s business.  So yes, one of the largest financial institutions in America literally went with the “I’m going to take this money and leave the drugs here on the table, what you do with them is not my responsibility” defense. 

The VISA Black Card

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Some of you may be familiar with the American Express Centurion card, and by familiar, I mean you’ve heard someone rich brag about it.  If you actually own one, please stop reading this and immediately give to the You Have Way Too Much Stinking Money Fund for Poor Internet Writers.  It’s basically a card for the super-rich that requires a $2500 annual fee but gets American Express to be your personal bitch.  It holds a Guinness Record for shortest time from reveal to panties hitting the floor in history.  Basically if you have the AMEX Centurion, your credit problems involve figuring out which supermodel to sleep with, or which low-income community will be the least-likely to fight your company’s toxic waste dumpings in court. 

In contrast, the VISA Black card is marketed to those with decent credit who want to look cool to idiots and like complete tools to everyone else.  The card requires an annual payment close to $500 dollars, putting it well near the top of the market as far as annual payments for normal people things go. For this hefty payout, the lucky owner of this card gets… well, shittier terms than just about any other comparable credit card.  A 14.99% APR doesn’t look too attractive when a little bit of bargaining can get most credit cards into the single-digits. VISA is essentially piggy-backing on the luxury image of the Centurion card to sell an inferior product to people who don’t understand personal finance.   

PayPal

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Most of us know PayPal as that thing that we use to buy stuff on eBay with, and also probably the expensive way to get money on or off the Internet (as opposed to, oh I don’t know, an actual credit card).  For those who are fans of redundancy, PayPal also offers a credit card.  To online retailers and freelance workers, PayPal can be a convenient way to move money around the Internet with relative speed and convenience, and some people like the idea of keeping these accounts separate from their bank or “real” credit cards. 

The problem arises not with the card itself, but when you try to get access to the money in your PayPal account to pay off your balance.  Funny enough, PayPal is not legally considered a bank, meaning it’s not subject to the reams of laws and consumer protections that banks are.  While this makes sense because PayPal actually holds on to your money (instead of lending it out as banks do), that means you’re dealing with a private company with their own policies about how you get to your money, and we all know that customer support is a real joy to deal with when you’re trying to transfer funds to pay your bills on time or avoid a ten percent jump in interest rates on your credit card.  

What does this mean for the average PayPal user?  It means that, “for whatever reason at any time because we want to, so now go fuck yourselves, that’s why”, PayPal can freeze your account and redistribute funds as it sees fit.  This happens especially often to online merchants, and pretty much all the time during informal charity events.  In one case, more than $30,000 raised for victims of Hurricane Katrina had to be returned.  Why?  No reason, just because PayPal thought it looked “suspicious”.  And while every other credit card company on the planet will inevitably try to suck a few extra fees and interest rate hikes out of you, at the very least they let you spend your own money.

 
It’s been a rough couple of years for banks in America and around the world.  First they suffered debilitating losses during the crash of 2008, and since have been criticized vehemently by the public and hounded by regulators. Just kidding — they’re actually raking in huge profits and still paying employees obscenely large bonuses.  It’s little wonder that Americans look at an industry that received trillions in bailouts and seems to be constantly embroiled in lawsuits like they’re not sure if bankers deserve the money, or they’re just scamming scumbags.  Whether banks are lecherous drains on capitalism or its very backbone, anyone who’s ever dealt with overdraft fees can tell you they’re kind of huge dicks.  Things such as:  
 

Morgan Stanley

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There’s really no easy place to start with Morgan Stanley.  In the Aughts alone, they’ve racked up an impressive rap sheet of fraud, disinformation and bald-faced lies.  Before he was famous for having sex with call girls that really upped the ante on sex for money, Spitzer spent most of his time pursuing organized crime and banks making fraudulent claims to investors, including Morgan Stanley (they’re the bankers, not the organized crime, in case that wasn’t clear).  Shortly thereafter, they settled a sex-discrimination suit to the tune of $54 million.  Then they had to cough up even more to the NYSE for regulatory violations, and the list goes on.  But all of that is really obscure financial law that is dense, complex, and really, really boring.  Fortunately, Morgan Stanley decided securities fraud was for nerds and losers and decided they needed to do something really dirty and soulless so they could look good in front of Goldman Sachs. 

Tragically, Morgan Stanley had large offices in the World Trade Center in 2001, which were completely wiped out.  Later, when claimants in arbitration or regulators came forward asking for documents relating to their cases, Morgan Stanley would solemnly remark that all its saved emails and records perished with the towers, perhaps adding a sentimental sniff and a whispered “those poor souls”.  Except they’re a bank and they’d never let a good tragedy go to waste. 

Turns out Morgan Stanley had a back up all along.  They were just using the tragedy of 9-11 as a smokescreen to win arbitration suits and evade regulators.  Eventually this deception was found out by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and Morgan Stanley settled for roughly $12 million—about 4% of their total revenue.  So the next time you hear a banker complaining that protestors are lazy and need to learn how to work for their money, ask them how much money they made exploiting—not just the deaths of thousands of innocents—but of a good section of their own employees. 

HSBC

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HSBC is a UK company whose initials inexplicably stand for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.  To put it lightly, they’re uh…pretty big and have offices in just about every country that matters on Earth (sorry Africa).  Right as the subprime crisis was growing like a festering abscess underneath the American economy, HSBC decided they needed to get in on that shit.  So in 2002, they acquired the Household Finance Corporation and became the second-largest subprime lender in the country.  Not only did HSBC happily hand out these junk loans that would later cause one of the greatest financial meltdowns in history, but they also charged Blacks higher interest than Whites, even if they had the same credit score.  And in what’s become a persistent, depressing theme, when the crash hit they happily took government bailout money and paid out bonuses of $1.6 million to over 200 employees. 
 
As if being criminally negligent and racist weren’t enough, HSBC also has a long, proud history of hiding behind technicalities to protect the funds of wealthy autocrats.  One of the most notable accounts comes from the oil wealth of President Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, a regime widely recognized as one of the most oppressive on the planet.  

Bank of America

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When you hear Bank of America, the scummiest thing that comes to mind is probably their recent bid to charge a $5 fee each month for the use of its debit cards.  After initial outrage at the move, BofA backed down.  While a bank needs to charge some amount of money to cover its costs, BofA’s move was particularly douchey simply because it was unnecessary.  Let’s do a little math to show just how lazy and abusive of its customers this was.  To start, BofA has somewhere in the neighborhood of $57 million customers.  Not all of these use debit cards regularly and not all of them even have debit cards, but let’s assume they do and they use their debit card every month (the charge wouldn’t have applied if the card wasn’t used for the month).  That means BofA would make $60 a year off of each customer, or around $3 billion in total per year.  BofA’s total revenue is more than 43 times that, and in the past decade has spent roughly 30 times that amount in acquisitions.  Also it’s about half of what they wanted to pay in bonuses in 2009, before the SEC stepped in.  In other words, it’s a pittance that some lazy executive decided to institute to boost the numbers (and his bonus) by single digits of a percent while directly hurting every one of their customers.   

But just in case you’d think BofA’s awfulness were limited to things you complain about over the water cooler, there’s also the uncomfortable fact that they are kind of hugely responsible for the current financial miasma.  To oversimplify vastly for the sake of humor and brevity, BofA was one of the largest subprime lenders in the country leading up to the crisis.  They then took those mortgages, bundled them in packages of assets to conceal their crummy value, and sold them to AIG.  This multi-layered shit cake ensured that a disruption to the housing market would spread to the entire economy, and collapse whole sectors that had nothing to do with housing, but were insured by mortgage-backed securities.  

Citigroup

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The last time there was a scandalous headline involving Citigroup that you actually read probably involved a sexual discrimination lawsuit.  The only reason you read it was probably because this woman’s picture was at the top.  That’s Debrahlee Lorenzana, a woman so hot even her name has to be read in a breathy tone.  Allegedly, she was fired by her managers for refusing to wear less provocative clothing.  When she pointed out that her clothing wasn’t any more revealing than other women in the office, her bosses responded by saying she was just too hot and they couldn’t concentrate on their work.  So, you know, instead of chastising lecherous male colleagues to act like professionals, they got rid of Lorenzana. 

Oh but the rap sheet for Citigroup doesn’t even begin to end with titillating tabloid stories that are a thinly-veiled excuse to plaster pictures of an insanely beautiful woman across the top of business journals.  Two of the biggest financial scandals of the Aughts—Enron and Worldcom—both saw Citigroup paying billions in fines and settlements after being accused of falsifying documents.  There’s also the infamous “Plutonomy Memo”, where the head analyst of Citigroup came out and confirmed basically everything that Occupy Wall Street is complaining about today — the top 1% owns most of the wealth, there are steep economic barriers to those in the middle-class raising their income, and that Citi should focus on investing in areas the 1% would spend their money in the following years. 

I bet you thought we were done, but no, the list goes on and on.  In 2008, Citigroup presumably got tired of complex financial manipulations as a way of skimming money without alerting regulators, and started outright stealing money from customers accounts.  And since it’s obligatory to mention, after receiving tens of billions in bailout money, they paid bonuses over $1 million to more than 700 employees.  Have any faith left?  Well sorry it’s going to be crushed by the story of an Indonesian man who went to meet with Citibank debt collectors in Jakarta, and was straight beaten to death” 

Goldman Sachs

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Oh Goldman Sachs, the big ole’ boogeyman of the Great Recession.  So many delightfully amoral details have been revealed about you in Matt Taibbi’s so-angry-they’re-almost-gleeful takedowns.  There is honestly not much to be added to Taibbi’s excoriations.  In a few short years you have transformed the heart of the American dream from something that worked and strived for better pay, to something that seeks to make money in the easiest, most underhanded methods possible. 

As the bipartisan report condemning you puts it, your actions over the past few years constitute literally “a million fraud cases a year”.  You are the Hitler of the Financial Apocalypse: you have succeeded in creating a lie so big, no one dares disbelieve it. 

The idea of drugs being “good” or “bad” depending on whether they are legal or not is a relatively new concept. Most of the laws criminalizing psychoactive drugs only came into effect in the 20th century, and before they were outlawed, a fair number were freely available. As scientific and chemical analysis became more sophisticated, and the effects of drugs were more widely studied, lawmakers deemed it necessary to limit the availability of certain drugs, while taking little or no action against other popular — but often just as damaging — drugs from which corporations were making a killing (*cough* nicotine, alcohol). Here, then, are 10 drugs that can get people high (some more dangerous than others) which used to be sold over the counter. Just don’t complain to your local pharmacist.

10. Opium

Opium, the milky fluid extracted from the opium poppy, has been used since ancient times as a powerful narcotic. Islamic societies, for instance, knew of its effectiveness as a painkiller (and doubtless the blissful high it could induce) long before its re-introduction to Western societies around the 16th century. Its popular medicinal use continued well into the 19th century, and it was freely available over the counter. It was sold, for example, dissolved in alcohol in the tincture known as laudanum, which was a favorite among the poor. Famously, the British even fought wars with China over the opium trade, such was the value that was seen in the drug. In the years before Britain’s 1868 Pharmacy Act limited its availability, opium was freely accessible to anyone who wished to buy or sell it. The fact that a significant proportion of the population was dependent on the drug went largely ignored.

9. Cannabis

Cannabis (a.k.a. marijuana in widely adopted slang) — or to give it its older name, hemp — has been used by humanity for its euphoric effects since the dawn of time. In America, for example, it was used enthusiastically for such properties — as well as for its excellent qualities as a strong rope-making fiber — by new European settlers, who found that the plant could grow in abundance in the new soil on which they had landed. In 1619, legislation was passed by the Virginia Assembly stipulating that all farmers were obligated to grow hemp. Early American presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson even grew the weed in their own backyards. The first laws concerning cannabis distribution were not passed until 1906, and sentences for possession of the drug were not handed out before the 1940s — after it had become enmeshed in the public consciousness with fears about Mexican immigration. Before then, the drug was widely available from catalogues and pharmacies: at the turn of the 20th century $2.40 would have bought you an ounce of resin.

8. Benzedrine (Amphetamine)

Benzedrine, in the form of inhalers and later tablets, was readily available over the counter until the 1950s. Marketed under this brand name by Smith, Kline & French (the company that was to become part of GlaxoSmithKline), the drug was initially used as a bronchodilator. However, people who needed help to breathe soon discovered that the innocuous inhaler had a potent stimulant effect. By 1949, many stories had been reported of the drug being used for recreational purposes, as well as as an appetite suppressant. A decade later, “bennies” (as they came to be known) were reclassified as a controlled substance. Benzedrine was then replaced by non-prescription inhalers containing propylhexedrine, which was sold as Benzedrex.

7. Methamphetamine (Sudafed)

Methamphetamine — or to give it its street names, crystal meth, ice or glass — is a particularly strong form of amphetamine. It can create intense feelings of alertness, euphoria and self-esteem when taken in large enough doses. It is also highly addictive, can quickly lead to anxiety and paranoia, and is associated with a range of serious public health issues. Methamphetamine can be produced in home laboratories using pseudoephedrine or ephedrine, which interestingly used to be active ingredients in over-the-counter medicines like Sudafed. Over the last two decades, more and more restrictions have been placed on products that contain the aforementioned chemicals (Sudafed no longer contains the ingredient, for example) and today buyers need identification to purchase them.

6. Amyl Nitrate (Poppers)

Amyl nitrate, popularly known as “poppers” (because of the popping sound originally made by crushing the glass receptacle that held the liquid), used to be available for legal purchase in the United States. From 1960 to 1969 it could be obtained without a prescription. By the end of the 1980s, after a rise in casual use was observed, it was deemed too dangerous and was banned. That said, until very recently it was still widely available in continental European countries such as France, where the dizziness and “rush” associated with it were sought after. In the UK, poppers can still be bought in stores, usually in drug paraphernalia “head shops.” Online suppliers having circumvented the 1968 ban on their sale for human consumption by marketing them as room deodorizers.

5. Codeine

The pain-relieving drug codeine is a derivative of opium that was first isolated in 1832 by French chemist Pierre Robiquet. While codeine can be obtained directly from the opium poppy, it is more commonly extracted and synthesized from morphine. Apparently favorites of late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, cough syrups and cold remedies containing codeine were commonly available without prescription until relatively recently in the United States. Medicines containing the ingredient can still be found in pharmacies around the world.

4. Mephedrone

Mephedrone, also known as meph, drone and MCAT, made headlines in Britain in 2010 when there were widespread reports of a craze for the drug  sweeping the nation. Producing a similar effect to MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamines (speed) and cocaine, the drug is believed to have been be manufactured in China and is chemically similar to the East African plant khat, which is also taken for the high it induces. The drug was first synthesized in 1929. It was however not widely known about until 2003, when it became easily obtainable over the counter and extremely popular in the UK and other European nations — where it was sold as “plant food” to bypass laws against its sale for human consumption. Nevertheless, in 2010 the EU ruled it illegal and America has followed suit as of October 2011.

3. Cocaine

The coca leaf has been used by people indigenous to South America for thousands of years, although the isolation of cocaine itself, by the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke, was not achieved until 1855. It will probably come as no surprise by now that the drug widely known as coke used to be freely available to buy over the counter in Europe and the United States. Anesthetic toothache powders and congestion relief medicines all contained cocaine at one time. These products (as well as Coca-Cola, which really did use cocaine as an ingredient when it was first produced, and later coca leaves until 1906) could be easily procured at the local pharmacy. Drug companies like Parke-Davis (a subsidiary of Pfizer) and Merck sold it in forms ranging from cigarettes to powders to a mixture for injecting! It was only later — in 1914 in the US — that the sale and distribution of cocaine was outlawed, its dangers having been entwined with American social and racial moral panics. Today, substances such as lidocaine replicate cocaine’s numbing effects without the general euphoria that comes with it.

2. Quaaludes

The drug commonly known in America as Quaaludes, “ludes,” Mandrax or Sopors was produced using the sedative-hypnotic drug methaqualone. Originally synthesized in India in 1951, it soon made its way to Europe and Japan as an allegedly safe alternative to barbiturates. Having been available over the counter in Germany in the early ’60s, it appeared in America as the sedative known as Quaaludes in 1965, and by 1972 widespread abuse of the drug had become a problem. Ludes were extensively in use among ’70s college students, who took them in order to experience a dreamy high. However, the risk of overdosing was high, particularly if they were washed down with alcohol. By 1973, it was illegal to be in possession of the drug without a prescription in the US, but that didn’t stop unscrupulous doctors from prescribing it. Still, by 1984, methaqualone had been reclassified as a Schedule I drug, effectively outlawing it.

1. Heroin

Amazingly, heroin — the notoriously addictive illegal drug today used by 50 million people on a regular basis — was once far more readily available than it is now. Yes, heroin could be acquired over the counter with consummate ease in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in UK and the USA. Synthesized by German chemist Felix Hoffmann, it was commercially produced by Bayer Pharmaceutical from 1898 onwards for medicinal purposes — including as a cough syrup for children and as a “non-addictive morphine substitute.” Surprisingly, its importation and manufacture was not banned in the United States until as late as 1924. It was only with the passing of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914 that heroin’s sale and distribution was controlled in the US. It was widely available without a prescription in the UK until 1926. Alarmingly, Bayer sold the substance as a cure for morphine addiction only for it to be discovered that the body quickly processes it into morphine, actually making it a faster-acting and doubly potent alternative.

Murder, kidnapping, torture, sex crimes, production of chemical weapons, war profiteering and warmongering, worker discrimination, sale and distribution of lethal products, water pollution and privatization, child labor and environmental degradation sound like plot points of an Academy Award-winning film starring Angelina Jolie. Sadly, these atrocities are not only forged by the imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters, but also human rights abuses perpetrated by some of the most influential (and dangerous) companies in the world. And though greedy and corruptive business practices easily and often openly weave through the day-to-day functions of seemingly harmless corporations, some companies wear their disregard for human life like a badge of honor and a magnet for an increased profit margin.    
 

Big Tobacco

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Big Tobacco is more properly an alternate name for the tobacco industry as a whole. It encompasses the heavy hitters of this highly controversial industry, including Altria Group, Reynolds American and Philip Morris International. As manufacturers and marketers of products that cause and contribute to the deaths of an estimated 443,000 Americans annually, to say that Big Tobacco has regard for human life would be as much of a lie as to say that Bernie Madoff was just a real go-getter.  

Although anti-smoking campaigns and organizations like The Truth and The Foundation for a Smokefree America work to expose the harms perpetuated by Big Tobacco, the tobacco industry continues to remain an economic giant, even among the highs and lows of a turbulent stock market. According to Forbes, despite the fact that Big Tobacco is continuously (and rightfully) inundated with expensive lawsuits and cries for newer and better product warnings and health reviews, Standard & Poor’s lists both Altria Group and Philip Morris International as a “strong buy.” So what if stock in these companies contributes to the addictions of approximately 46 million people and to the number one cause of preventable death in the United States? Money is money, right?  

Monsanto

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Despite Monsanto’s name origin deriving from the Spanish and Portuguese for “sacred mountain,” there is nothing sacred about this company or its treatment of Mother Earth and her children. Monsanto, which is the overlord of herbicides and genetically modified seeds, strikes fear in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world, from farmers to consumers, at the very mention of its name. Although Monsanto’s website states, “If there were one word to explain what Monsanto is about, it would have to be farmers.” the evidence peppering this company’s dark and controversial past and present amounts to the contrary.  

In addition to current calls for GMO (genetically modified organism) labels on all products grown from Monsanto seeds, cries for overhauled standards regarding the use of Monsanto’s herbicidal baby, Roundup, and a seemingly endless parade of farmers and co-ops who claim to have been bullied and abused by this agri-tech giant, Monsanto has been wrecking lives for decades. When you think about deadly herbicides two words come to mind: Agent Orange. And guess which company helped manufacture it from 1965-1969?  

Nestlé

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A company that produces chocolate and baby formula sounds innocent enough, but when that company exploits children as child laborers, pressures poor mothers into choosing their products over their own breast milk and knowingly sells dangerous, chemically tainted baby products then that company’s description shifts from innocent to villainous.  

Nestlé is one of the world’s leading buyers of cocoa from the Ivory Coast. This fact isn’t surprising given that the country produces nearly half of the world’s cocoa, but what is surprising is that the Ivory Coast and its cocoa industry have been repeatedly condemned for their use of child labor, yet Nestlé continued to utilize it.
 
The company’s treatment of children does not improve when you consider the that Nestlé knew for months about a 2005 chemical contamination of formula distributed to Italy, yet did not recall the formula. Given Nestlé’s more than questionable actions toward children, candy-coating itself as a wholesome, warm cookie out of the oven, family friendly company is, “A little too ironic…and yeah, I really do think.”  

BP

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Not many could argue against BP’s poor environmental record, but this oil and gas company’s history of keeping its workers as well as the general public safe is just as dismal. In addition to the more than 200 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, 11 Deepwater Horizon workers were killed during an explosion on the drilling unit. Prior to this catastrophic 2010 incident 30 BP workers were killed and more than 200 injured during other disasters. In all cases, BP allegedly had prior knowledge of equipment failures that if remedied in an appropriate and timely manner would have prevented the deaths of workers. According to OSHA statistics, BP has had nearly 800 “willful” violations of safety practices.    

DuPont

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There are companies that create lethal products. There are companies that deal in arms. There are companies that endanger the health of the public and the environment, and then there are those that fall under the classification of “All of the above.” The history of this centuries old company is fraught with instances of corporate crimes and human rights violations.  

DuPont has contributed to the development of explosives and chemical agents like one of a certain orange hue, as the is the world’s largest seed producer it has often been accused of manipulating patent laws so as to gain control of the food industry like an over-eager child playing Monopoly, it has endangered the lives of countless communities in its instances of improper waste disposal and it has received some of the harshest OSHA sanctions ever issued. In addition, DuPont has demonstrated its disregard for humans by being notoriously unsupportive of unions, exploiting prisoners for labor and supporting regimes that are deemed oppressive.  

Can someone get Erin Brokovich on the line again?

At first glance, Paypal sounds like an amazing service; transfer your points/gold/dollars/XP from one account to another in a matter of seconds, making it just as easy to buy from eBay as it is to open a small online store. But there’s a dark side to Paypal which has been emerging more and more as of late.

Services like Dwolla have emerged to compete with the behemoth, offering considerably lower fees and less inconvenient ‘validation’ time periods. The negativity surrounding Paypal extends further than just its terms and conditions — the company’s choices regarding socially relevant matters have been criticized as well. Here are four reasons Paypal doesn’t deserve your money.
 

“Funds Release” Time

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PayPal has recently implemented a policy which allows them to withhold merchants’ receipts up to 20% in a ‘rolling reserve’ (to cover chargebacks and refunds) for up to three months. Small businesses were outraged, but PayPal stood their ground and stuck to their canned email responses when contacted with pleading emails. Businessweek lambasted the new policy as ‘disruptive to cash flow’ and said it could put some companies out of business.

Although Paypal claims that it notifies its sellers of the policy 30 days before implementation, many upset customers claim that they weren’t contacted by Paypal whatsoever. Companies successfully using the service for years and years.

High Rates

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The more expensive the transaction, the higher the fee charged by Paypal. There’s a 2.9% transaction fee on each sale, plus a additional $0.30 per transaction. International sales, however, pay a 3.9% fee. It sounds small, but it adds up. A sale of $500 is charged a fee of $14.80. That’s fourteen cheeseburgers, a movie ticket, a lawn chair from Target, three large Red Bulls, or two whole lunch specials from the Chinese place. Three, depending on where you live.

The fees aren’t the only bad part; the way they came about were pretty shady. PayPal created the fees, available for viewing in their ToS section and nowhere else, without notifying anyone. They snuck them onto the website and quietly began charging unsuspecting customers.

Other services have popped up, charging smaller fees or none at all. Dwolla is one, and charges $0.25 per transaction, regardless of the amount. Dwolla is also interesting because they don’t rely on credit or debit cards linking to each account; they simply hook up your bank account directly to their service. WorldPay and SagePay also offer similar services.

Deplorable Customer Service

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Paypal is notorious for responding to customer concerns with cold, indifferent canned responses. Most importantly, it’s hard to find a phone number on their website, especially if you don’t have a PayPal debit card or aren’t a pro number. The premium number is costly to use. Multiple emails asking for help are answered with the same copy and paste response.

Although every company has a few unhappy customers, googling ‘Paypal sucks’ turns up a slew of angry blog posts by people Paypal has burned. Most complaints are about unreasonably banned accounts, transactions gone wrong which end up getting ‘rectified’ at the victim’s expense, and the dreaded ‘verification’ suspension Paypal seems to randomly place on accounts belonging to legitimate small businesses.

The impersonal responses are insulting and condescending, repeating the same vague phrases in every email. Chris Rossi, for example, was permanently banned after purchasing a programming service from a vendor. When he looked into the matter, it turned out that the vendor had been banned for the sale of pornography — causing every single person he had ever received money from to be banned as well, regardless of what the sale was for. All five emails from Paypal include ‘Your account has been permanently limited. Customers who are permanently limited for violating the Acceptable Use Policy are not permitted to open new PayPal accounts” and don’t address his long list of evidence in his defense at all.

Bad Decision Making

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Paypal is, overall, bad at making decisions. Internationally recognized as less-than-the-best, the company is prone to reversing transactions, charging fees, withholding money, and canceling accounts without notice or a response afterwards.

In 2010, Paypal suddenly reversed all exchanges marked as “personal” coming in or out of India. Without notification, they screwed over hundreds of people and many businesses who were left with overdrafted accounts — not only had many vendors already withdrawn the removed money, but others were left uncompensated for services they had already completed.

During the same year, donations to Cryptome were frozen and $5300 removed. PayPal refused to explain this action.

A few months later, two other legitimate and high-traffic accounts were closed without notice or acceptable response. Finally, the Wikileaks fiasco ensued in December 2010 when Paypal permanently banned an account taking donations for WikiLeaks. A PayPal VP eventually admitted that this was the result of pressure from the US State Department.

A government puppet with little to no respect for the customer, nor how he or she is treated, doesn’t deserve your money. Even if you settle for Paypal, the other services are at least worth checking out.

My company owns thousands of domains. Very few of them are registered with GoDaddy. Turns out that was a smart, unintentional business move. And that’s why we’re writing this review.

Our experience with GoDaddy has been a bureaucratic nightmare. They can literally freeze up your account and not give you access to domains that you’ve paid a lot of money for and that you’ve invested in developing if your company ever triggers their anti-fraud mechanism. And then your account could be locked up in-perpetuity if you’re unable (for legitimate reasons) to provide all the documentation that they request. To top it all off, when you call to talk to someone at GoDaddy about the frozen account, they tell you that they are not able to resolve fraud cases over the phone (at least the customer service guy we talked to AND his supervisor said this).

Here’s our saga with GoDaddy so far: about a month ago we purchased a premium domain that was intended to be one of the cornerstones of our business growth strategy for the next 3-5 years. That went fine. We had invested thousands of dollars not only into securing this domain and then developing it, but also doing keyword research and other due diligence that we perform when buying a high-value domain. In other words, we were paying salaries to secure high-value intellectual property.

A few weeks after buying this domain, a new employee was tasked with purchasing about 10 additional domains that were less foundational, but still important to our business strategy. The problem is that this employee did not yet have a company credit card. So he proceeded to use his own credit card to purchase these domains. Despite the fact that our employee’s credit card company allowed the charge to go through, GoDaddy flagged our account for fraud.

Ok. Big headache, but not the end of the world. GoDaddy was just requesting that we send in some scanned identification to ensure that the credit card that was being used was being used legitimately. First it was the driver’s license. That wasn’t enough. Then it was the front and back of the credit card. That wasn’t enough. Then it was a printed financial statement showing the GoDaddy charges. Should be fine right? Well, turns out that upon flagging a transaction for fraud, GoDaddy reverses the charges. The reverse happened quickly enough that our employee’s credit card company simply did not reflect the transaction on the statement. But there’s no one at GoDaddy to explain this to and so we’re stuck in the mud.

So here we are, three weeks into a red-tape nightmare with GoDaddy, meanwhile our business has lost access to one of it’s primary assets. At this point, I would estimate that the loss that our company has taken measured in terms of man hours and lack of progress towards our business goals is somewhere around $4800 (and the longer this takes to resolve, if it will ever resolve, the more this loss will compound: exponential, not linear). And this analysis of loss is not taking into account the thousands of dollars we have invested into the domains themselves which we still do not have access to and for all we know could permanently lose access to. Nor the loss in intellectual property we could encounter when GoDaddy releases the 10 or so domains that triggered this anti-fraud flag back onto the market.

Our company was caught in a false-positive anti-fraud filter at GoDaddy. We have done our due diligence. We have sent in scans of every reasonable request for information. And we have been on the phone with GoDaddy now for hours, trying to find someone who can navigate us through this bureaucratic nightmare. So far, no one has been willing to help. And that speaks volumes about the type of company we’re working with.

We do not plan to use GoDaddy in the future, and we can’t recommend that you use them either.

In many ways, McDonald’s is the model business empire. All-American food, speedy service and a perceived value for money all go some way to explaining why the giant corporation continues to pack in diners to its restaurants every day. Nothing seems to dent the popularity of the burger behemoth. Diets and fads may change, but the golden arches continue to stand tall. Even when under pressure from fierce criticism, Ronald and his gang seem to bounce back stronger than before.

Some things, however, you just can’t ignore. Such as the man from Jackson County, West Virginia who claimed he discovered a capsule in his hash brown in 2007, or the Missouri woman who said she found a “hard, circular” object in her beef patty in 2009. And that’s just for starters…

The following surprise ingredients in the famous McDonald’s menu may just make diners think twice — three times, or more. Apologies if you’re about to have your lunch; here are the 10 most revolting things discovered in McDonald’s menu items.

10. Band-Aid with Fries

In 2005, Lauren Coleman, a senior at the University of Illinois, got an unexpected side order with her fries at the Illini Union’s McDonald’s. Just as she was about to dig in, she spotted a used bandage sitting in her fries. Understandably shocked and disturbed, she took it up with the manager, who had the good grace to order Coleman some fresh food and give her her money back. The owner of the offending bandage then came out and apologized to the shell-shocked student, saying, “I’m sorry, that’s my Band-Aid.” Coleman, who chose to take no further action against McDonald’s, said: “The McDonald’s on campus is not classy or clean, but it’s the only one on campus… [I]t’s like taking a risk when ordering there.” Sounds like a sticky situation…

9. Needle Double Cheeseburger

In 2008, a different kind of foreign First Aid object showed up in a teenager’s double cheeseburger in Reading, Massachusetts. The unnamed 14-year-old girl was biting into her burger when she came upon a hollow piece of metal about an inch long. Health officials who examined the object said they believed it to be part of a veterinary needle or syringe that somehow found its way into the food chain at a meat packing plant in Ohio — possibly as a result of an animal being vaccinated prior to its slaughter. A statement from McDonald’s at the time read: “We take these matters seriously. However, at this time, these are allegations. Upon learning about these claims, we immediately began an investigation to gather the facts. Without the facts, it would be inappropriate to further comment or speculate on where this object may have come from.” However, McDonald’s stopped using that shipment of meat, while the uninjured girl was taken to the hospital as a precaution.

8. Nail Burger

McDonald’s is, of course, that most global of businesses — with restaurants everywhere from New Zealand to the North Pole. Perhaps, then, it almost goes without saying that unanticipated items will show up in their menus all over the world. Take this painful example from Hisingen, just outside Gothenburg in Sweden. Forty-seven-year-old Yusuf Bercil innocently bought a burger from McDonald’s, and on taking his first bite found himself with a nail almost half an inch long pierced through his gums. ”It was stuck between my teeth and gums,” he explained. “I managed to get it out but then I threw up. What if one of my children had got the burger instead?” Staff at the outlet had no explanation for how the nail got there. “We have started an investigation and informed our suppliers but can only apologize,” said the manager, Axel Gustafsson. Bercil, meanwhile, has been left with a fear of fast food following the 2010 incident. “We are going to make homemade burgers from now on,” he said.

7. Dead Rat Salad

Ordering a salad from McDonald’s is one of those noble acts of self-respect and self-denial that should make you feel better about yourself. However, this was far from the truth in 2006 when football coach Todd Haley — then an assistant coach with the Dallas Cowboys — took home a salad for his wife and their live-in babysitter. Upon unwrapping and half-eating their healthy option, the two women allegedly found a less than healthy extra ingredient among the salad leaves: a dead roof rat, six inches in length, the discovery of which left them deeply fearful of having contracted a disease. After a manager from the Texan McDonald’s drove out to investigate and — according to the family — “didn’t offer any comfort,” Haley filed a lawsuit against the burger chain for $1.7 million in damages. The case was settled before it went to trial for an undisclosed amount. That’s a defensive play Haley might not have been expecting.

6. Bugs “Unhappy” Meal

Sadly, not every meal can be a happy meal. That was certainly the case in 2010 when 18-year-old Hayley Parsons ordered the popular packaged item from a McDonald’s drive-thru in South London in the UK. While nibbling on a few of the fries in her car, she was more than a little dumbfounded to discover three or four bugs scuttling around in her food. Shocked and disgusted, Parsons initially flung the box up in the air, but kept one of the bugs as evidence to show staff. However, on visiting the McDonald’s in question, an environmental health officer found no infestation or risk to public health. The suspicion was that the bugs fell onto the food somewhere outside in the drive-thru area — although a McDonald’s spokesman did issue an apology after the “isolated incident.” Parsons, meanwhile, vowed to take no more chances: “I will never ever be eating McDonald’s again,” she said.

5. Big Xtra Burger with Chewed Gum

In 2007, in Vancouver, Canada, Max Ipinza got a scare when he bit into his Big Xtra burger and tasted not meat, but peppermint. Immediately realizing that there was chewing gum in what remained of his burger, he spit it out and, by now feeling very sick, went to the hospital to get checked out, worried about the risk of contracting hepatitis. He believes someone intentionally put the gum into his food. McDonald’s Canada said the company had begun an in-depth investigation into Ipinza’s complaint with the co-operation of health officials. Ipinza said he would henceforth be bringing his own packed lunches to work.

4. Condom with Fries

Another “unhappy meal” was served up in Fribourg, Switzerland, in 2009, when a seven-year-old girl found a condom nestled in her fries. The child’s upset mother called the police, who in this case launched an immediate investigation into how it got there. The rogue rubber was sent to a forensics lab to see whether or not it posed a health risk. At the time of the story, McDonald’s declined to comment. If they had, they probably would have avoided saying, “Do you want sauce with that?”

3. Chicken Legend with Wire Brush

In 2010, 18-year-old Brett Stephens somehow managed to escape injury when he found a sharp, five-inch-long wire brush embedded in the meat of his Chicken Legend sandwich, bought from a local McDonald’s in Kidderminster, England. The boy’s furious mother, Janet, claimed the fast food chain’s bosses simply laughed when she challenged them over the find, and that all she was offered was an exchange. A McDonald’s spokesperson said: “McDonald’s takes the safety and quality of its food very seriously indeed and we offer our unreserved apologies for this isolated incident.” Sounds as though Brett had a brush with danger…

2. Maggot Big Mac

In March 2011, Melbourne, Australia resident Leigh Savage opened up his Big Mac to check that the extra pickles he’d requested were inside. They were, but to his horror, there were also as many as 30 maggots crawling around the meat patties. McDonald’s wanted to examine the burger inside a laboratory to discern how the maggots ended up there. But Savage, who also reported the incident to police — who were unable to help — just wanted a refund and an apology. “It’s just disgusting, [I’m] never eating there again,” he said. Interestingly, this is another case in which the victim claimed McDonald’s staff merely laughed when first informed of the discovery. Savage, for one, was definitely not lovin’ it.

1. Chicken Head with Wings

Number one on our list is the most famous of these stray object horror stories. It’s a tale that garnered a lot of attention back in 2000 when it first appeared and was featured on television news programs. It has also been the subject of countless email correspondences. The story goes like this: Katherine Ortega, a Virginia mother of two, bought some chicken wings at a local McDonald’s. While serving the poultry up for her kids, she noticed that one of the pieces was slightly weird looking. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a fully-formed, perfectly intact chicken head, battered and fried, just waiting to be eaten. Some doubts were expressed about Ortega’s story, especially as she went to the TV station with her story before filing a complaint with McDonald’s. Also, in the last decade or so, the story has become something of a legend, with different “facts” orbiting around the fateful chicken head. Whatever the reality, at the time, Ortega told reporters: “I will probably cook at home from now on.” Whichever way you look at it, it’s just not one of the “things that make you go mmmm.”