A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve. The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained. In an interview with The New American, Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success. Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.” Read  more...

CEO pay has been going in one direction for the past three years: up. The head of a typical large public company made $9.7 million in 2012, a 6.5 percent increase from a year earlier that was aided by a rising stock market, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm. CEO pay, which fell two years straight during the Great Recession but rose 24 percent in 2010 and 6 percent in 2011, has never been higher. Read more...

A recent amendment inserted into the 2013 Farm Bill passed by the House of Representatives' Agriculture Committee last week will revoke the ability of individual states' lawmakers to pass GMO-labeling laws, food advocates warn. The amendment, introduced by Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, is the newest salvo in an ongoing battle between food advocates and companies like Monsanto that create and sell genetically modified and genetically engineered seeds, which grow into GMO crops and find their way into an estimated 70 percent of processed foods in American grocery stores. If the King Amendment makes it into the final Farm Bill, it would take away states’ rights to pass laws governing the production or manufacture of any agricultural product, including food and animals raised for food, that is involved in interstate commerce. Ppolicy analysts emphasize that the amendment, broadly and ambiguously written, could be used to prohibit or preempt any state GMO labeling or food safety law. Read more...

Many were roundly criticized for daring to say that the Cyprus thefts could visit our shores. If Treasury Secretary Jack Lew gets his way, Cyprus will look like a walk in the park compared to what’s coming because Cyprus was a beta test for the massive theft of private wealth which is on the horizon. In fact, I would say to my fellow countrymen who don’t think the government would ever perpetrate a fraud against the American people in which the government would oversee the outright theft of personal assets of American citizens, you might want to jog your memory and look about to a period of time going back four to five years in this country. Read more...

More farmers are turning back to pesticides to combat rootworms after genetically modified seeds have started to loose their effectiveness. Until recently, corn farmers in the U.S. had abandoned soil insecticides, thanks mostly to a widely adopted genetic trait developed by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. that causes corn seeds to generate their own pest-killing toxins, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, two-thirds of all corn grown in the U.S. includes a rootworm-targeting gene known as Bt. However, researchers at Iowa State University and the University of Illinois have found rootworms that are immune to the Monsanto gene, causing farmers to use pesticide to kill any rootworms that have developed a resistance. Read more...

Big phone companies have begun to sell the vast troves of data they gather about their subscribers' locations, travels and Web-browsing habits. The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive. Read more...

A woman who became an activist after JPMorgan Chase foreclosed on her home in 2011 was shocked with a Taser and arrested while protesting outside the Department of Justice on Tuesday. In video obtained by Occupy Our Homes Atlanta, large men with assault rifles can be seen surrounding Carmen Pittman before one of the agents shocks her with a stun gun and she falls to the ground. Pittman seems to writhe in agony on the ground for a few moments before a man in a yellow police shirt picks her up. As he restrains her, other officers place her in handcuffs. Read more...

A major U.S. private prison operator known for inmate abuse, violations, and disregard for the truth reported a 56-percent spike in profit in the first quarter of 2013, due in part to its new strategy for drastically reducing its taxes, the Associated Press reports. During a conference call touting its success, representatives at GEO Group boasted that the company continues to have “solid occupancy rates in mid to high 90s” and that they are optimistic “regarding the outlook for the industry,” in part due to a “growing offender population.” Read more...

This serves as both an open letter to Thurgood Marshall Jr, a PSA for those who didn’t know about his appointment to CCA and a reminder about mass incarceration, and the overrepresentation of black men in prison. It came as a complete and utter shock to discover yesterday that Thurgood Marshall Jr, son of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and lawyer best known for his victory in Brown v. Board of Education, sits on the Board of Directors for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison owning company in the United States. “What’s the big deal?” you ask? Well, in order to understand the irony we must look at the incarceration rates of black men, private prisons and CCA. Read more...

Billionaires with an ax to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country. Read more...

Retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Costco are utilizing biometric identification for accurate management of goods, while hoping to incorporate the biometric checkout where customers can use their fingerprint or retina to pay for their items without having to use their credit/debit cards or write a check. By having employees scan their fingerprints into a corporate database, retail corporations can reduce theft and eliminate payroll confusion; however this initiative is really about collecting biometric data to store and use at a later date. Read more...

America’s ticking debt bomb has been reset. Washington has suspended the debt ceiling, setting a date, and not a concrete dollar sum as a deadline, an unprecedented first in US history. Citing ‘extraordinary measures’, the US Treasury has further delayed tackling America’s debt, and will wait until Labor Day, September 2nd, to revisit the burgeoning crisis. The ceiling has been lifted, and the Treasury has promised it will keep cash pumping into government spending programs beyond the debt limit through a series of emergency cash tools. Read more...

The floodgates of farm bill amendments opened Monday as senators rushed to put their own touches on the $955 billion agriculture bill. The legislation as written would save $23 billion over the next decade by tightening restrictions on the country's food stamps program and cutting direct payments to farmers, but lawmakers are hoping to add their own cost-shaving provisions to the bill as well. Read more...

Poverty is soaring in the suburbs. According to a new book from the Brookings Institution, the suburban poverty rate in America has climbed by 64 percent over the past decade, more than twice as fast as the poverty rate in urban areas. Nearly 16.5 million people live in poverty in the suburbs, compared with about 13 million poor people in cities. Elizabeth Kneebone, an author of Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, said that every major suburban area in the country has experienced growth in its poor population. Read more...

Suddenly a robotised, automated economic reality is moving off the science fiction pages and into daily life. The growing use of unmanned battlefield drones is encouraging the growth of pilotless commercial aircraft – the first ever flew in British airspace last month. Google's driverless car is completing ever more trials ever more successfully: the world's major car companies are all hot in pursuit, working on their own prototypes of their own versions. The automated checkouts at supermarkets are becoming as familiar as bank cash machines. From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines. This is the "Great Reset" – a cull of broadly middle-class jobs with middle-class incomes that is apparent across the west, but with little current sign of what industries and activities will replace them. Read more...

NATIONAL TEACHERS Appreciation Week, traditionally the first full week of May, passed this year without even a token statement from Barack Obama. Instead, the White House issued a presidential proclamation honoring the same weeklong period as…National Charter Schools Week. Yep, you read that right. Barack Obama–who got the votes of millions of teachers last November and whose party depends on hundreds of millions of dollars in political spending by teachers’ unions and the rest of organized labor–not only couldn’t be bothered to utter a symbolic good word about teachers. He went out of his way to celebrate an initiative of the Republican Bush administration that spotlights a centerpiece of the anti-teacher school deform agenda. Read more...

Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security. Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics. U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat — and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it. Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. Read more...

Yahoo's board has approved a deal to buy New York-based blogging service Tumblr for $1.1bn (£725m), US media reports say. The acquisition is expected to be announced as early as Monday. The deal was a "foregone conclusion" and was a unanimous vote by the board, tech blog AllThingsD reported, citing sources close to the matter. If confirmed, it will be CEO Marissa Mayer's largest deal since taking the helm of Yahoo in July 2012. Analysts say that by acquiring Tumblr, Yahoo would gain a larger social media presence and enhance its ability to attract younger audiences. It will also help Tumblr generate more revenue from advertisements. On its home page, Tumblr says it hosts 108 million blogs, with 50.7 billion posts between them. Read more...

Anyone who’s been to Abercrombie & Fitch in the last few years has probably noticed that they don’t carry XL or XXL sizes of women’s clothing because they don’t want overweight women wearing their brand. According to this popular teen clothing retailer, fat chicks will just never be a part of the “in” crowd. They take a big risk with this tactic because two of Abercrombie’s biggest competitors, H&M and American Eagle, both offer XXL sizes for men and women. The largest women’s pants available at Abercrombie are a size 10, while H&M goes up to 16 and American Eagle goes even farther to 18. Abercrombie’s attitude towards plus-sized women derives from CEO Mike Jeffries. Read more...

1) All the major banks in the world are owned and controlled by the banking families.
2) They control the entire process of the creation, the printing, and supply of money around the world.