Gulliver

ExxonMobil is a fossil fuel company headquartered in Irving, Texas. It was founded in the 1870s as part of the Standard Oil group. Exxon (formerly Standard Oil Company of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil Company of New York) were spun off in 1911 but merged again in 1999. Exxon is most famous for the massive spill by the Valdez oil tanker in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in 1989 that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound, polluting more than 700 miles of shoreline. Courts fined the company $5 billion but the company’s lawyers got the final payment down to just over $500 million in damages plus an estimated $2 billion in clean-up costs and $1 billion in in civil and criminal charges. Exxon’s refineries in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Baytown, Texas, has also been in the news over a series of explosions in 1989, 1994 and 2021 that killed workers and caused major air pollution.

Facebook is a social media company that was founded in 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg. It trades in the data of over two billion users and their daily activity which has allowed Facebook to become an advertising behemoth. As one of the largest distributors of information globally, it has been accused of distributing fake news and aiding violence in India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma) and the United States, where fundamentalists have weaponized its ability to fan hatred and riots. Facebook has also been accused of censorship of gay and lesbian contents as well as activism in places like Kashmir, Kurdistan, Pakistan and Palestine.

Formosa Plastics Corporation was founded in 1954 in Taiwan. It manufactures plastics, and is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The company first attracted global attention when it was caught dumping 3,000 tons of toxic mercury-laden waste in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, that originated at a PVC plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In 2012, the company became infamous again when it unsuccessfully sued Ben-Jei Tsuang, a professor at the Department of Environmental Engineering in National Chun Hsing University, who published a paper linking high cancer rates in Mailiao, Taiwan, to toxic dioxin and heavy metals air pollution from the Six Naphtha Cracking plant.

Fresenius is a healthcare company that owns dialysis clinics and manages hospitals, in addition to manufacturing medicines and medical supplies. In 2016, the company agreed to pay out $250 million in compensation to families of U.S. patients who died of heart attacks after being treated with GranuFlo and NaturaLyte treatments used in dialysis machines, for failing to warn them about potentially deadly side effects. Fresenius has also been fined $50 million after employees were caught destroying records prior to a 2013 inspection of a plant that manufactured cancer medicines in Kalyani, West Bengal, India.

G4S is the world's largest provider of private security. It was founded in 1901 by a group of 20 ‘nightwatchmen’ in Copenhagen as the Kjobenhavn Frederiksberg Nattevagt (the Copenhagen and Frederiksberg Night Watch). In April 2021 it was acquired by Allied Universal.

In addition to providing private security services, G4S runs prisons, immigration detention centers, police stations, as well as asylum housing. Migrant rights and prison rights groups have fiercely criticized G4S operations in Israel, South Africa and in the UK over human rights abuses. For example, in 2010 Jimmy Mubenga, an Angolan refugee in the UK, died on October 12, 2010 while being restrained by G4S guards who were hired to help deport him from the country. In 2018, the UK government took control of a G4S-run prison in Birmingham after finding that violence and drug abuse were rife. 

A G4S guard has been accused of helping a convicted criminal escape from Mangaung maximum security prison in South Africa. Previous reports on the Mangaung prison documented violence and anti-psychotic drugs used by G4S guards to subdue inmates.