PicoBusiness

In the spirit of all of the other “of the year” awards handed out on blogs across the world, I thought I would create my own.  This is the award given for the most egregiously anti-customer organization of the year 2006.  While often the market will punish organizations for being anti-consumer, there are a number of organizations where, for a variety of reasons, this is extremely difficult to do.  In general, nominees are judged on style, level of evilness and poise.   As a rule of thumb, if you could picture C. Montgomery Burns implementing this business practice, it is suitable for inclusion in this list.
The nominees:

• The RIAA for both suing otherwise harmless individuals who may or may not have shared music “because the artists need their royalties”, and simultaneously asking that the royalties for artists be reduced “because of digital distribution.”
• WalMart and the US Government (tandem) for deliberately (ab)using the medicare system to keep their healthcare costs down.  This is in two parts, because the politicians shouldn’t have created a system that can be abused in this way.
• Microsoft, for creating an ‘international standard” that is so complex that no-one but the original creator can implement it

I invite you to submit your own, and send this out to friends for their own suggestions as well.
(Note, I will not accept nominations for either the Russian or Chinese government.  Both are too easy)

To the tune of “American Idiot” (click to hear the song)

Don’t want to be a Socialist idiot
Don’t want a nation of stifling taxes
And can you hear the sound of hypocrisy?
The leftist mind-control America

Welcome to a new kind of thinking
All across the liberal nation
Where they tell you what you must do and buy
And then they claim that they know better
They want to be the ones that you follow
And you’re just dumb if you argue