Contrarian,

I can't dispute any of your comments. There is one more comment however than can be added, so that we can make some sense of the representative debacle and it is this one.... How can we blame anyone from following the crowd when we know that without money, only disaster awaits. In Canada, one of the countries you mention, a few dozen of its citizens are found frozen to death in their tents in the middle of January because they couldn't pay the rent. Just that makes the political class amenable to corruption.