When you ask, Linsy, "is there manipulations"? or in other words, is the deck rigged?" Oh yes, I believe that it is. I think once we go urbanized, those most qualified for leadership are never the ones who attain it. In an urban environment, the innate compulsion to "look after one's tribe" is turned inside out because the beast (society) is just to large and complex. I was reading a book, I may have mentioned this in a post here, it was Fromm's "Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" and in the beginning he says "when I look at history, I'm a pessimist, when I look at PRE-HISTORY (emphasis added) I'm an optomist". I know just what he means, humans are...more HUMAN in much smaller groups. But we are not returning to the village system. The cat is out of the bag. And we just never learn. As a learned man said recently in an interview, there is no learning curve. It's just tabula rasa. Oh sure, there are some countries that look out for their people better than others, they are run by women. The Netherlands. But any attempts to even things out in society, take the U.S. and Bush's veto of the freakin' children's health care increase. We are spending BILLIONS in Iraq, but as for manipulations as you mention Linsy? These evil greedy bas%^&%$ look at any attempts to care for the least among us as some sort of commie plot. They actually turn red in the face and sputter furiously at the very idea of universal health care, or any redistribution of the obscene superfluous wealth that is in the hands of the very top few. Sigh...it's not going to change