Word: authoritarian
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During the Cold War, Soviet bloc dissidents had to rely on primitive printing technologies to reproduce samizdat literature in tiny quantities. Today's dissidents living under authoritarian regimes around the world can disseminate their message world wide with the click of a mouse, through blog postings and viral videos. And, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in a recent speech, the United States plans to champion their cause by enabling unprecedented freedom of speech on the Internet, in defiance of all political censorship...
Sure, the authoritarian rulers in Beijing can sometimes implement policies more efficiently than the argumentative democrats of the West. That's exactly why Beijing's recession-busting stimulus plan proved more effective than Washington's. With no political debate to get in the way, China's bureaucrats splashed money everywhere to toss up shiny new infrastructure. The slumping economy needs more credit? Well, that's easy - if you own the banks. Just open a spigot and watch the money flow. China's government can also push ahead on important long-term projects with greater speed. While health care reform...
...there are few things more annoying than pundits in the democratic U.S., who are firmly protected by the Bill of Rights, waxing poetic about the virtues of dictatorships. What they're forgetting is the frightening downside to China's authoritarian state capitalism, and not just in terms of human rights. China's stimulus program might have produced growth, but it could very well have undermined the health of the banking system. The Chinese economy is riddled with excess capacity, inefficient state enterprises and asset bubbles...
...factories laid off thousands of workers. Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009 placed Ukraine 146th out of 180 countries, on the same level as Zimbabwe. "Things were better under Leonid Kuchma," says Stepan Grechkivskiy, who owns a milk factory in western Ukraine, referring to Yushchenko's authoritarian predecessor. "There was order, but now there is chaos." (Read more about Ukraine...
...told supporters, "Sometimes I'm envious of China, where they have just what's needed for punishing corruption - they cut off hands and execute people." Her aggressive rhetoric, coupled with recent surveys that show Ukrainians want a strong leader, has raised concerns of a possible return to more authoritarian rule were she to win. But Oleh Rybachuk, a former chief of staff to Yushchenko and a Deputy Prime Minister in Tymoshenko's government says that while Ukrainians may want a strong leader, they won't allow a politician to curtail their freedoms. "Ukraine is not Russia," he says...