Reform or Schadenfreude? Reading the Fall of the House of Murdoch | Easily Distracted

Yikes! Maybe we need some TNT to bl;ow this joint.

In the U.S. you can choose between a party that favors whatever small incremental reforms that the banker class will grudgingly permit and a party that wants to accelerate the complete handover of all economic matters to the financial elite while propitiating their populist wing with some auto-da-fe of the moment. In the E.U. you can choose between the parties that got you into this mess and the parties that have no idea how to get you out of it, between two sides of a long-standing collusion. In much of the developing world, where publics have some say either through voting or mass politics, the choice is often between yesterday’s cronies and parasites and tomorrow’s. Maybe you can even trade a distant authoritarian’s exploitation for some home-town exploitation instead, as just happened in South Sudan.

Is there anything we can agree on that’ll move us forward, Burke asks.

Comprehensive transparency in government, business and institutional life is one of those ideas that could arguably be just as important to the Tea Party as it might be to progressives, but only if it applies evenly to everything and everyone, which would take activists on all sides agreeing not to be pawns on the chessboard of the political elite.

Concerning the Murdoch scandal, Burke concludes:

There’s a big difference between serious reforms pursued because the alternative is political destruction at the hands of an outraged, mobilized electorate and viscerally knifing a Caesar after he’s gotten too big for his britches and accumulated too many enemies, too many scores that need settling.

If it’s the former, that’s a sign of hope. Maybe we’re only one misstep or revelation away from a similar public consensus about other open wounds and pressing crises, one precious alignment away from change as a real possibility rather than an empty slogan. If it’s the latter, well, watching Murdoch & Co. get what’s coming to them is a pretty fair popcorn moment as far as it goes, but there’s only so many circuses left before Rome really starts to burn.

via Reform or Schadenfreude? Reading the Fall of the House of Murdoch | Easily Distracted.