Gulliver

Ramsay Health Care is an Australian healthcare giant with subsidiaries present in countless countries, from the UK to France to Indonesia. Its facilities in France have undergone almost constant strikes by workers who allege understaffing, poor working conditions and low salaries, amongst other issues. In the UK and Australia protests against the company have focused on the issue of privatization, as movements demand that health care should be universal and free. The Australian community of Mildura recently celebrated a victory as a Ramsay-run hospital was returned to public hands after years of campaigning by the groups Mildura Hospital Conversation and Reclaim the Base.

Raytheon is a major missile manufacturer. Founded in 1922, it makes Patriot & Tomahawk missiles, the GBU- 28, a 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bomb as well as sensors and radars used on drone aircraft. Its weapons have been used in Afghanistan, Brazil, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine and Yemen. Multiple Saudi-led attacks on Yemeni civilians have been tied to Raytheon’s weapons. In September 2016, for instance, an airstrike killed 15 members of the same family, including 12 children. The shrapnel was later identified as belonging to Raytheon. The company’s “bunker buster” bombs were also used by the Israeli military to target the homes of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2014.

Repsol is a fossil fuel exploration company that evolved from a Spanish state venture that was set up in the 1920s. It acquired oil fields and refineries in South America in the 1990s by taking advantage of the wave of privatizations of state-owned oil companies, pushed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, notably of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) in Argentina. Repsol-YPF has been accused of trampling on the rights of the Lonko Purran community of Mapuche people in the Cerro Bandera oil field in Argentina; as well as the Kugapakori, Machiguenga, Nahua and Yine people of the Urubamba River who are impacted by the Camisea Gas Project in Peru.