Without wanting to start a political battle here, this is not behavior that is limited to political systems. Western democracies have inflicted their fair share of death and carnage as well, though because they are "our team" we tend to see our behavior as justified and the other teams' behaviors as unjustified.
Humans with sufficient power will always eliminate any potential threats to their power, and do what they feel is necessary to expediently reach their goals...once that course of action has been successfully justified. That justification happens via one of or a combination of two ways: 1) rhetoric, propaganda, coalition building, education, etc. (various means of influencing those that might present road blocks to accept the behavior), and/or 2) possessing sufficient power that challenging the behavior is not an option.
Once corporations are able to politically justify eliminating those that stand in their way, they will...all humans in history with sufficient power have done so, and that is never going to change. Many large corporations already have more wealth than half of the nation states on this planet. That is a lot of power. The cornerstones of future political justifications are happening in things like TPP effectively raising the corporation to the level of nation state in some regards.
It will happen, it is only a matter of time. Initially it will be the ability to capture and imprison those threats to their power, and eventually it will lead to war and killing. This is the nature of our species. It's not going to change.
So, yes. Anything in the name of profit.
Clearly anyone selling soul food is just as guilty of murder (hate crimes?) as the guy who shot up that church in Charleston. And don't get me started on those murderous Punjabis, putting ghee on everything...
Once you grant that the corporations are at least partly complicit, it's just a matter of multiplication. If the corporations can degrade enough people's quality-of-life, then in principle yes, they can ultimately have been Worse Than Hitler (TM).
So the question is actually, "To what extent have the corporations degraded people's lives?", and if you really must be binary, "Are the corporations Worse Than Hitler (TM)?". You are simply not addressing the actual question; you have answered the question, "Is murder equivalent to someone making a certain lifestyle choice?".
So again, I ask: if Hostess corporation is genocidal, is La Bouche d'or merely a serial killer?
I'm asking for a little more than just whether a corporation could in principle be worse than Hitler (the specific claim lordarminius made), I'm asking for an actual plausible mechanism by which that could happen.
Seems they got to you too. Or perhaps you're one of them.
Contrast to this post, which accuses of him of being "one of them", presumably part of a conspiracy to spread apologia for poor food choices on a hacker interest forum!
An absurd claim, insulting, illogical, of no service to the conversation, but remaining alive and upvoted. We can see further content-free insults in replies to this post. This is the first time I've seen a post killed for reasons that are obviously wrong. In addition, they are wrong in a dangerous way, killing mere rhetorical sarcasm while allowing actual insults, of negative worth, to run wild.
Moderators didn't touch his post. His post was downvoted by users, and flagged by users.
I'm not a mod, so I don't know this, but it's pretty clearly what happened.
If you think it shouldn't be dead you should click the timestamp and then click the [vouch] link.
The above japery is to demonstrate that to a large extent, your sarcasm misses the point.
Stopping with chemical assistance, the success rate rises to about 30%.
If you control people's access to information, you control people's minds, albeit indirectly. Its a simple philosophy that has kinda-sorta worked in China. You can get large scale approval from the public for pretty horrendous things like the US has done, simply by controlling what gets seen on cable news/mainstream media, etc. If Google is the gatekeeper of all information (so far it isn't), and they're ultimately controlled by the NSA or CIA, then we're screwed. So how many people has the US killed? How many of those wars could have been avoided if the public weren't fed lies?
And while obviously murder is worse than stalking, we don't really know where things will end up. We are in uncharted territory with the new information collection society we live in.
There is something as the walking dead, there really is. As Nietzsche said, the last man lives the longest... but the question probably is, do they actually live. People seem to become more timid and more neurotic, instead of more alive, more defenseless rather than more skillful, they suffer "information overload" rather than being more informed. That's just anecdotal, but I'm amazed at just how many weak and stuck up people I meet each day, and how young so many of them are. Between their parents being fools or having no time for them, and them being sprayed with the mental equivalent of fast food everywhere else, sometimes even reaching into the education systems -- all that does have an effect. You might say we're being gaslighted on a global scale.. and mixed, dishonest signals hurt even the strongest people, others they can drive positively insane.
And they are only emitted by the unhinged, too. Only broken people, or people in broken moments (same difference really, even though I speak of "types of people" I ultimately do mean types of behaviors and habits etc., I think everybody can theoretically change but it's easier and more satisfying to be self-righteous) want power for the sake of power, all rationalizations and neat excuses be damned, that's what is at the core of it and it matters, and they are slowly molding us in the image of the screaming, empty abyss that is their personality.
Would you rather live for 2 weeks as you, or for 50 years with very strong dementia? If you set aside how strongly I feel about this, that I have chips on my shoulder and pet peeves; do you at least see my point in principle?
For totalitarian systems, murder is not an end in itself. Making people, their individual agency, their unpredictable "spark", totally obsolete, by murder or other means, THAT is at the heart of it. And in that sense, we live in a world that is becoming so totalitarian it might not even afford us the honesty of murdering us.
The future is subtle damage, not necessarily heads-on-pikes evil.
Nazis killed approx 40M people. Communists add another 100-200M to that total. Are you really suggesting that "large unbridled corporations" have proven through history that they will kill more than 240M people?
The only mechanism I can think of by which google might even approach this is by creating evil AI. Is that what you are referring to, or something else?