Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Being Rupert Murdoch: How the Founder of Fox News Spreads His Brand of Destruction
A scene from the play "Ink," featuring Jonny Lee Miller as Larry Lamb, left, and Bertie Carvel as Rupert Murdoch. Photo: Joan Marcus/Courtesy of the Manhattan Theater Club

TheIntercept | Peter Maass | 04/25/19

"I like moving around, never in one place long enough," he says, a napkin tucked into his collar to catch the drippings from a nearly raw steak he consumes. There is a flash of steel from the knife, which he points with menace at a dining companion. "Isn't that the joy of a hotel? You can check in, turn it over, spill a glass of wine, take a shit in the toilet, fuck in the bed, make a mess, and then leave. And someone else cleans it up after; isn't that wonderful?"

This conversation is taking place 40 feet from where I sit, though I should clarify that an actor is playing Murdoch, and another actor is playing the editor of one of his British tabloids, The Sun. The relationship between the two -- the powerful master and his willing surrogate -- is explored in a play called "Ink" that opens this week on Broadway. If you want to understand the mentality of the multibillionaire who has done more than any other person to spread far-right extremism in America, you should see this play, though it stumbles before the considerable task of exposing in its fullness the harm machine that is Keith Rupert Murdoch. ... Read more

How Trump can stall House Democrats
Axios | David Nather, Jonathan Swan | 04/25/19

President Trump's White House appears to have figured out the secret of congressional oversight: there's not much Democrats can do if they say no to everything.

The big picture: The millions of voters who elected a Democratic House in November are about to find out how hard it is for one party -- with just one chamber of Congress and without the cooperation of the other party -- to investigate a president who's determined to run out the clock. ... Read more

What Would an Open-Borders World Actually Look Like?
TheNation | John Washington | 04/24/19

... After three and a half centuries of brutal and exploitative involvement in the region, the last 90 years as official imperial overlord of the British Raj, the United Kingdom was officially abdicating colonial rule. Deeply in debt from two world wars, and facing pressure from increasingly militant anti-colonial movements, the UK was to cede control of the crown jewel of the British Empire to its inhabitants. It was left to Radcliffe to sort out the borderlines of the new territories.

What Radcliffe and his commission contrived was to divide the subcontinent according to religion: The so-called "Radcliffe line" separated a Hindu-majority India in the center from Muslim-majority East and West Pakistan on its wings, with a smattering of independent princely states throughout. But neat division wasn't remotely possible, and what resulted was a labyrinthine confusion of over 100 enclaves (a portion of a nation entirely inside another nation), counter-enclaves (an enclave within an enclave), and even a counter-counter-enclave, in which a little pocket of India sat in a little pocket of East Pakistan which sat in a bigger pocket of India which was entirely enisled in East Pakistan. His carving done, and the heat of the subcontinent not agreeing with him, Radcliffe returned to England. ... Read more