Gulliver

Asklepios Kliniken is a major hospital operator in Germany. Founded by billionaire Bernard Broermann in 1984 to capitalize on the privatization of government healthcare facilities, Akslepios recently expanded into the luxury hotel sector with the purchase of three Kempinski hotels. It has been the subject of multiple investigations and faced lawsuits as well as protests for failing to provide services that it promised when it bought up hospitals at below market value. For example, at the end of 2019, Asklepios closed a children’s ward in the small town of Parchim in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, obliging residents to travel 50 kilometers to get to the nearest medical facility. Goslar district in Lower Saxony sued Asklepios Kliniken for €20 million in 2019 for failing to guarantee inpatient and emergency care at the Clausthal-Zellerfeld hospital. This has brought up debates of whether privatization of government-owned clinics was helpful or not, with unions and social movements calling for the re-municipilization of Asklepios clinics on multiple occasions.

Balchem is a chemical manufacturer that makes health and nutrition products for animal and humans. It was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in New Hampton, New York. One of its biggest subsidiaries is BCP Ingredients, which manufactures ethylene oxide, used in medical equipment sterilization, and choline chloride, which is used in animal feed for chickens and cows. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) estimates that the excess lifetime cancer risk from ethylene oxide emissions at the BCP Ingredients’ plant in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, located in ‘Cancer Alley,' an 85 mile stretch of the Mississippi river in Louisiana with over 150 toxic petrochemical plants, was 47 times higher than acceptable limits. The excess lifetime cancer risk from the company’s ethylene oxide plant in Verona, Missouri, was 27 times greater than the EPA’s stated acceptable limit.

Banco Santander is a multinational financial services company that was founded in 1857. It was sued by 34 U.S. states over it’s automobile loans that involved high interest rates and prolonged repayment plans. Some 82 percent of these borrowers were considered sub-prime of whom roughly half defaulted. Despite these high default rates, the bank made a profit by borrowing at low interest rates and then re-selling the loans on the secondary market. In 2020, the bank paid the U.S. government $550 million to have the lawsuits dropped.