It’s the winter of their discontent from Venezuela to Ukraine to Thailand...Were the unrest in three countries that were geographically or ethnically closer to each other, the Western media might have bundled them together the way they did with the “Arab Spring.” ...The root problem in each country is unaccountable government...the economist Rodrigo Constantino noted that there’s “no use to roar like a lion in the streets and then vote like a donkey in the polls.”...Although it is grievances about specific governments, specific policies, and specific abuses of power that animate any particular protest, it is the ability of government to wield as much power as people have allowed it to that give life to protest in the first place.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 01:45:55 +0000