Tom: This phenomenon is nothing new. Always the consolidation follows the revolution. The people power/NGO revolutions are completely Leninist in nature.
This has all happened before, identically. In places like Slovakia, once the "evil dictator" Meciar was finally deposed with US funds we saw virtually every newspaper that didn't support the new US-backed government disappear almost immediately. The international press freedom organizations, which had provided ammunition for the revolutionaries with lurid tales of "press crackdowns," were suddenly totally uninterested, and the Western journalists had already gone on to the next hot spot.
There and elsewhere, such as in Georgia after Shevardnadze overthrew democratically-elected Gamsakhurdia, Saakashvili overthrew Shevardnadze, Albania after Marxist Hoxha-ites overthrew pro-free market president Sali Berisha, Serbia, Montenegro, and so on, massive purges of the state media followed, as well as a total cleansing of the civil service sector and intelligence. Then "corruption" was attacked, which meant a wholesale attack on the private sector to assure that wealth was redistributed to the favorites of the new government with enough juicy bits to pay off the US government and its corporate partners who helped make it happen (VSZ Kosice, anyone?).
Long time observers have written volumes on this pattern, which is why some had predicted what we now see in Ukraine. Others, particularly Beltway "libertarians" had their fun ridiculing those who had seen all of this before (though admittedly the machine is getting more efficient and creative at these things), but I don't expect we will hear much more from them now on it. They may even get a bit of funding from new governments to set up "free market" think tanks in these new outposts of the empire -- think tanks that will defend to the ends of the earth the rights of the Gas Queens of the revolution to keep their ill-gotten new wealth...in the name of private property of course!
