Do you know why, you are voting for who you are voting for? by gimleteye

It is extraordinarily striking-- reading the mainstream press on Florida primaries -- how miniscule the presentation of candidates' positions relative to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Astonishing that GOP candidate Rick Scott has any traction at all, given his principal role in the healthcare industry. Then, again, the majority leader in the GOP- led US Senate had been Bill Frist, another centimillionaire from the healthcare mess. (My family's healthcare premium for catastrophic insurance with Aetna just went up 15 percent, without any explanation, so I'm not inclined to charity on this count.) Then again, there is banker Alex Sink for the Democrats whose glossing over the housing boom, its causes and origins, and bust is inexplicable.

It seems that the electorate is either brain-dead or has amnesia, when it comes to recalling what interests triggered this economic calamity. Its names and addresses roughly correspond with the same special interests who are major financiers of political campaigns; from the lowest rungs of the ladder to the top. Voters are owed explanations and assessments but it is not happening. The failure of cogent, rational debate bodes very poorly for consumer confidence. Most people know quite well that while consumers are mired in debt, banks are being permitted to reload with cheap money. Even in Miami, these well-heeled financiers have names.

Let's be clear about the assessment of blame, at least, in the context of Jeff Greene: whatever questionable personal behavior you may find fault with, Jeff Greene is not to blame for making a good bet that many more of us might have made-- (or a bet that would have been far less profitable)-- if the mainstream press had done due diligence of the housing boom. A clear record of the fraud and fraudulent arguments underlying the boom and financing would have cast dark shadows where the media, instead, shone klieg lights and praise so long as they, too, got a piece of the action. Jeff Greene did not make his money like the investment banks who touted one set of investments while betting heavily against them, at the same time. He didn't make money garnering advertising revenue while supressing stories of the housing bubble fraudsters and downtown bankers and law firms that ginned up hundreds of millions doing to the market "what the market wanted".