Gulliver

Southern Company is the second largest utility company in the U.S. Its subsidiaries Alabama Power, Georgia Power and Mississippi Power are effectively electricity monopolies in their respective states. The company is one of the largest secret funders of climate disinformation, spending at least $62 million on climate change deniers between 1993 and 2004, almost twice as much as the $33 million that Exxon spent in the same time period. For example, it paid for research conducted by Willie Soon, a climate change denier at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Tax payers and rate payers had to foot a $7.5 billion bill for the failure of Southern Company’s so-called “clean coal” carbon-capture Kemper project in Mississippi that was never completed because the technology did not work. Southern also has a history of fighting solar power. In 2013, the company levied a $5 monthly fee per kilowatt hour on any customer who generated solar power in Alabama, effectively killing off the industry in the state.

Spire Healthcare is one of the UK’s biggest private healthcare providers. Founded in 2007 by a private equity firm, it has profited heavily off the gradual privatization of the UK's National Heath Service. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Spire Healthcare, alongside other private healthcare providers, was criticized for charging the taxpayer huge sums to take advantage of the backlog in demand for healthcare services.

Since 2017, the company was forced to set aside £50 million (US$ 61.45 million) to compensate victims of breast surgeon Ian Paterson who conducted unnecessary and damaging operations on over 1,000 patients. According to an independent inquiry, medical colleagues had been voicing concerns about the Paterson since 2003 but he wasn’t suspended until 2011 after 14 years of problematic work. Two Spire orthopaedic surgeons at Spire's hospital in Solihull, West Midlands, have also been investigated for conducting unnecessary and damaging operations.

Car manufacturer Tesla makes electric cars in China, Germany and the U.S. The company has come under severe criticism for its “full self-driving” mode in its vehicles. Tesla vehicles have been involved in 273 crashes, of which six were fatal and five resulted in severe injuries, over a nine-month period between 2021 and 2022. Telsa’s factories reported 10 times more safety violations than Nissan, despite the fact that Nissan built something like 10 times as many cars over the same time period.

Tesla has benefited from several billion dollars in government incentives such as a $1.3 billion tax break in Nevada. One of the most unsustainable components of a Tesla vehicle (and all electric cars) and power storage systems are the batteries, notably the use of cobalt, lithium and nickel, which are mined under horrific human rights conditions. The company buys cobalt from Glencore’s copper mine in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is alleged to use child labor. It buys nickel from the Vale mine in Voisey's Bay in northern Labrador, Canada, which has long been opposed by the native Innu and Inuit people as well as from sites in China and Indonesia with serious environmental pollution problems.