Greed and self-service

[Mel Asher]

Here in Britain, the ' mother of Parliaments ' is experiencing a crisis unlike any in the past 300 years. The elected representatives of the British People have many of them successfully exploited weak regulations when claiming ' expenses ' so as to tap taxpayers' money for their own personal gain, over the years benefitting to the tune of many thousands of pounds. Clearly acting, many of them, within an elastic interpretation of the guide-lines, their ' self-regulation ' has become ethically quite unacceptable to the average Brit. Their actions echo the disastrous handling of Hedge Funds in the financial markets of the US and the UK which has been a definite trigger for Recession.

My questions are these : [/LIST]How is it that many institutions in the West continue to reward failure and mishandling of public funds, while the person in the street who picks up an wallet and fails to hand it in the the authorities is penalised by the Courts ?
How can corruption be countered if regulations are written in such a way as to benefit those who wrote them ?

I'd be most interested to read the views of members resident outside the UK on what is presently happening to our country.

My views on our present governments are quite definitely heavily