Tag: corporations

North Korean IT workers infiltrated Fortune 500 companies in massive fraud scheme

Federal authorities have unraveled several schemes by the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) that were used to fund its regime through remote information technology (IT) work for U.S. companies, resulting in two indictments, tech and financial seizures and an arrest.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Monday that North Korean actors were helped by individuals in the U.S., China, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan to obtain employment with over 100 U.S. companies, including Fortune 500 companies.

In one scheme, U.S.-based individuals created front companies and fraudulent websites to promote the legitimacy of remote workers, while hosting laptop farms where remote North Korean IT workers could remotely access company-provided laptop computers.

In another scheme, IT workers in North Korea used false identities to gain employment with a blockchain research and development company in Atlanta, Georgia, and steal virtual currency worth over $900,000.

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Toxic Fallout: NC Lawmakers Face Fire Over Monsanto ‘Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free’ Provision

In a move that has ignited fierce backlash, North Carolina lawmakers attempted a “gut and stuff.” By inserting a last-minute “de facto immunity provision” into an unrelated House bill, agrochemical giants like Monsanto-Bayer will be given a free pass from accountability for its products linked to cancer and infertility, depending on what happens next. 

A highly controversial policy, Monsanto-Bayer has been seeking state level labeling exemptions amid bankruptcy exploration, as the company faces over 67,000 lawsuits nationwide for its product Round Up.

The revelation, brought to light by molecular toxicologist Dr. Alexandra Muñoz, set off alarm bells among health advocates and concerned citizens alike, who quickly lit-up the phone lines. 

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Digital Harvest: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street – Shareholders in the Shadows

They don’t sell seeds. They don’t own tractors. They don’t run warehouses or ship grain. But BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are among the most powerful actors in global agriculture.

Together, these three asset managers control more than $26 trillion in assets—more than the GDP of the United States and India combined. They are shareholders in nearly every major agribusiness: Bayer, Cargill, ADM, Nestlé, Deere & Co and more. They don’t compete. They co-own. And through that ownership, they govern.

This is not capitalism as competition. It’s capitalism as quiet coordination.

These firms don’t need to dictate policy. They shape the terrain on which policy is made. Their influence is structural, not spectacular. It’s exercised through boardrooms, shareholder resolutions and capital flows. And it’s largely invisible to the public.

But its effects are everywhere.

According to the Food Barons 2022 report by ETC Group, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street hold dominant stakes across the agrifood chain—from seeds and chemicals to supermarkets and logistics platforms. In many sectors, they are the top three shareholders in all the major firms. This means that ‘competition’ between companies like Bayer and Syngenta, or Nestlé and PepsiCo, is often little more than a performance. The real power sits behind the curtain.

These firms don’t micromanage. They don’t need to. Their power lies in alignment—in shaping what counts as value, what counts as risk and what counts as acceptable behaviour. And increasingly, that behaviour is being framed through the lens of ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance metrics.

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It’s Not a Broken System: From Food to Development, It’s a Masterpiece of Control

Industrial agriculture is not a system in crisis. It is a system in command. Engineered with precision, it reflects the civilisational logic of industrial modernity: domination over cooperation, profit over sufficiency, scale over ecology. It is not malfunctioning—it is functioning exactly as designed.

Across three volumes—Food, Dependency and Dispossession (2022), Sickening Profits (2023) and Power Play: The Future of Food (2024)—I have mapped this critique in layered terms. What emerges is not a sectoral failure but a planetary regime of dispossession: a machinery that converts ecological life into economic assets, undermines autonomy under the banner of development and metabolises resistance into market-friendly reform.

The food system is not broken. It is a weapon. And it is intended as such. It concentrates power, severs people from land, deskills and displaces producers and commodifies nourishment. It benefits financial capital and corporate actors while externalising its costs—to health, biodiversity, labour and culture.

In the Global South, ‘development’ is the velvet glove of structural dependency. It arrives cloaked in the language of poverty reduction and climate resilience—while deepening indebtedness, consolidating proprietary seed systems and subordinating food sovereignty to export-driven logic. For all its rhetoric and well-laundered PR, Bayer is not saving Indian agriculture. It is enclosing it.

Behind the slick brand messaging lies a familiar pattern. Corporate contracts replace commons. Proprietary inputs replace knowledge. The land is enclosed—not always by fences, but by code, debt and bureaucratic abstraction. This is not progress. It is programmed disempowerment. Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation is no longer metaphor—it is agronomic policy, algorithmic governance and institutional capture.

Post-development theorists like Arturo Escobar and Gustavo Esteva have long exposed ‘progress’ as a colonial narrative—one that erases plurality and imposes a singular vision of modernity. Barrington Moore’s study of agrarian class structures illuminated a deeper truth: the fate of democracy and dictatorship often hinges on how land is owned, who controls surplus and which coalitions form around agricultural production.

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Rare Earth Startups Say Without Subsidies and Support, US Can’t Shake China’s Control

Without a federally supported market and strategic reserve stockpile, the United States will remain reliant on China for critical minerals and rare earth refining, experts told a House panel during two-plus hours of testimony on June 24 that exposed how vulnerable the global economy and the nation’s defense is to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.

Even with swift deregulation, permitting reform, and rapid recycling ramp-up, they warned, it will take years of government support to untether domestic manufacturing from a supply chain China has strategically built for decades.

“Over the years it’s taken for us to do nothing, the Chinese have dominated. They and their government have been extremely supportive of their ability to create world dominance in this, and it was part of a strategy,” U.S. Critical Materials Executive Director Harvey Kaye said during the hearing before the House Small Business Committee.

This glaring vulnerability is confirmed by the Congressional Research Service’s April 2024 report documenting the nation’s 100 percent import reliance for 12 of 50 “most critical” minerals, and more than 50 percent import reliance for another 29.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Mineral Commodity Summaries January 2025 report paints an even scarier picture. Of 31 critical minerals needed to produce everything from iPhones to F-35 fighter jets, the United States cannot domestically source any and can commercially refine only one, beryllium.

China, meanwhile, is the lead source for eight and the near-exclusive provider of 17 minerals needed for a rapidly electrifying economy. China processes two-thirds of the world’s lithium and cobalt, supplying 60 percent to 90 percent of the world’s processed minerals.

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Economic suicide by design

This week, Oregonians heard the announcement that Tektronix, an iconic Oregon-based company, is moving its headquarters from Oregon to North Carolina.

Tektronix has decided that it has had enough of the Oregon Democrat high taxes, poor schools, and constant degradation of the quality of life for its employees. Textronix was once one of the largest employers in the state of Oregon. Anybody working in the electronics branch of technology relied on Tektronix test equipment to troubleshoot electronic problems. Driving by the Tektronix campus was very sad for me when we moved to Oregon. The parking lots around the Tektronix buildings were mainly empty, and slowly got even emptier. As an Electronic Technician who relied on the Tektronix test equipment my entire career, this was like watching an old friend slowly die from neglect.

Elections have consequences, and so does how people vote. Voting for more taxes, higher fees, and the crazy bills the Democrat supermajority pushes through is costing Oregon thousands of highly-paid citizens who have had enough, and they then leave Oregon for different states. Yet Oregon continues down the same old path to economic disaster. Oregonians cannot figure out that Democrats are all the same; their solution to problems is to raise taxes and fees on everything. For decades, Oregonians have been voting for Democrats to lead Oregon, and nobody noticed that conservatives and Republicans were leaving over economic or freedom issues. The Democrats, Liberals, and progressives just kept on making Oregon less affordable and less desirable to raise a family or retire here.

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Good news: The biotechnology industry is collapsing

If you read the newspapers, you may not know it, but biotechnology is going through a process of collapse.  According to authoritative pharmaceutical industry online Endpoints News:

The opening months of 2025 have offered no respite to the chilly biotech market of the last few years, biotech correspondent Kyle LaHucik reported this week. Despite the comeback everybody seems to want, there’s been a steady drumbeat of restructurings, pipeline cuts, layoffs and short-lived pivots. Kyle highlighted iTeos Therapeutics, once a darling of the anti-TIGIT class of biotechs, as an embodiment of the current struggles. iTeos had a clinical failure and lost a partnership with GSK this spring. It’s now shut down.

The picture is stark. Biotechnology is in a terminal existential crisis. According to Raymond James bankers who provided data to Endpoints, there were six strategic reviews launched in April alone, with 30 active strategic reviews as of 4 May. These strategic reviews are being conducted because biotechnology research is not delivering viable products. According to Stifel bankers, at least 168 biotechnology companies have negative enterprise value as of 16 May. And the dreariness follows 90 total restructurings in 2024. Fewer than five new biotechnology companies have been floated so far this year, down from 16 last year.

Biotechnology is an industry built on an exclusively materialistic paradigm of life. In fact, as everyone experiences every day, life involves a continuous interaction between consciousness and matter, mind and body, psychology and physiology, awareness and the environment. To pretend otherwise, to ignore consciousness as the prime mover of life, as myopic bio scientists continue to do so, is a fatal error and a scientific dead end.

As a result, biotechnology is an industry built on false advertising dreams and the same kind of financial thinking that leads millions of people, who are doomed to disappointment, to buy lottery tickets every week.

Five years ago, a door was opened which allowed failed covid “vaccine” and treatment products onto the market without long-term testing. This was not just “on the market,” it was forced on unwilling populations as a modern-day exponential expansion of Mengele-style medical research. The result has been a public health disaster, as we all now know (except for some extreme dreamers who keep their faith and belief in a biotechnology future). Floundering in a sea of adverse events, they are trying to save their misguided and twisted paradigm of life by pretending success is just around the corner. Vinay Prasad, Trump’s head of the Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research (“CBER”), which regulates biotechnology, has promised “to ‘rapidly’ push even small advances for rare disease drugs.” 

Reality may now be catching up with this hopeful, or is it hopeless, kind of thinking but, unfortunately, vaccines still enjoy protection from product liability or efficacy standards. Therefore, the excessive claims of the industry and the harms that result cannot be judged in the courts. Nor do their deficiencies find any but the smallest echo in the media. There are powerful monetary, government and career incentives at work here. The billions made during the pandemic from fake cures are sufficient to drive to a frenzy those who seek to profit by controlling medical, political, scientific and financial narratives. Their twisted dreams extend to rebuilding the physiology of whole populations, no matter the certainty of deadly risks, the sea of unknowns or the obvious and final impossibility of the whole enterprise.

The journal Nature headlined last week ‘Cancer-fighting immune cells could soon be engineered inside our bodies’. Because CAR T-cell gene therapy for cancer sufferers is so expensive ($800,00 per shot), risky, difficult to administer, laborious and time-consuming to make, researchers are pushing the boundaries, hoping to re-engineer the body’s own cells to produce novel cancer-fighting capabilities using mRNA technology. What could possibly go wrong?

The terminology of biotechnology research is a dead giveaway. An article in The Guardian headlines ‘‘Inverse vaccines’: the promise of a ‘holy grail’ treatment for autoimmune diseases’. Which describes the “hope,” or is it hype, of some researchers that the genetic suppression of parts of the immune system will cure a multitude of diseases. Really??? Suppressing the immune system will cure disease and there won’t be a downside??? Note the use of the word “promise” and the reference to the myth of the Holy Grail which brings to mind a fruitless search through the ages for something that may not exist, over which bloody battles were fought.

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‘This is insane:’ Lawmakers grill 23andMe exec on what sale means for genetic data

The bankruptcy sale of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe and its trove of genetic data has raised serious national security concerns among lawmakers on Capitol Hill. They want to know what will be done to make sure the data will stay out of the hands of adversaries like China.

“It’s hard to not sit here and listen to this conversation and not feel like we’re living through a sci-fi movie,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., said during Tuesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing where 23andMe’s interim CEO Joe Selsavage and founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki, who is also bidding to buy the company, appeared as witnesses.

“A private company has our data, they experience bankruptcy and now, we have no federal regulatory system to protect that data. And we’re concerned that foreign adversaries might purchase the company and thus, the data. I mean, this is insane. Like this is crazy,” Stansbury said.

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T-Mobile Faces Backlash for Auto-Enabled Screen Recording in T-Life App Without User Consent

T-Mobile is facing renewed backlash over its T-Life app, this time for quietly introducing a screen recording feature that is automatically activated on some devices. The tool, labeled “Screen recording tool,” has been discovered by users in the app’s settings, prompting immediate concerns about transparency and user consent.

Described as a means of gathering behavioral data to help enhance the app’s functionality, the tool is being deployed without upfront notification in many cases.

Though T-Mobile insists it does not collect personal data and only monitors activity within the app itself, the feature’s default-on status has unsettled many customers. The company told CNET, “This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information,” and noted that users can deactivate it under the Preferences section.

While this type of telemetry is not uncommon in the tech world, the method of deployment here has caught attention. Unlike the app’s pre-existing Screen Share function, which allows support reps to view a user’s screen during troubleshooting, but only with explicit approval, this newly introduced screen recorder operates passively in the background.

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ADL Regional Director Calls for Government-Regulated Online Censorship

The Anti-Defamation League’s David Goldenberg is demanding a broad overhaul of how speech is governed on the internet, calling for both government intervention and intensified corporate censorship. In a recent appearance, Goldenberg, who heads the ADL’s Midwest operations, expressed frustration over what he sees as declining efforts by tech firms to suppress online content he deems hateful.

Citing Meta’s rollback of its fact-checking team in the United States, he argued that platforms must be forced to take action. “You have a platform like Meta that just gutted its entire fact-checking department…And so what we need to do is we need to apply pressure in a real significant way on tech platforms that they have a responsibility, that they have an absolute responsibility to check and remove hateful speech that is inciteful.”

Goldenberg advocated not just for voluntary moderation, but for legislative and regulatory measures, both at the federal and state level, that would compel platforms to act as speech enforcers. He pointed to efforts in states like California as examples of where local governments are already testing such models.

His concern centers around what he perceives as an ecosystem of radicalization made easily accessible by today’s digital infrastructure. He warned that extremist ideologies no longer require obscure forums or dark web communities to spread. “It used to be you had to fight going into the deep dark web… Now… it’s easier and easier to be exposed in the mainstream,” he said.

Framing the online environment as a catalyst for violence, Goldenberg argued that free access to controversial viewpoints must be curtailed. He called for social media companies to take a stronger stance by excluding users whose views fall outside accepted boundaries, adding that regulation should enforce this responsibility.

He zeroed in on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a critical piece of legislation that shields platforms from legal liability over user-posted content. “Congress needs to amend Section 230, which provides immunity to tech platforms right now for what happens,” Goldenberg said. He dismissed comparisons between modern platforms and telecommunications companies, referencing past remarks by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg about how phone providers were not liable for threats made over calls. Goldenberg’s view was blunt: “These tech platforms are not guaranteed under the Constitution. They’re just not.”

From his perspective, private companies should be free to “kick people off, to de-platform,” and if they fail to do so voluntarily, they must be pressured or regulated into compliance. He described accountability as a mechanism for shaping behavior, stating, “Accountability is a tool that can be incredibly effective in changing behavior.”

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