Op-Ed

The high-profile and sudden failure of Silicon Valley Bank, which hid huge losses from its depositors, investors, and regulators, highlights the dangers of corporate fraud for our financial system. It confirms the kind of problems highlighted by a recent study published in the Journal of Financial Economics estimating that only one-third of corporate frauds are detected, with an average of 10% of large publicly traded firms committing securities fraud every year. This means that the true extent of corporate fraud is much larger than what is currently being reported. The study also estimates that corporate fraud destroys 1.6% of equity value each year, which equals to $830 billion in 2021.

The future tapped me quietly on the shoulder the other day and suggested that I take a moment to learn about the writing bots.

They’re coming!

Excuse me, they’re here. And they struck me as alien invaders, this recent manifestation of artificial intelligence on the Internet, which college students, high school students — anybody — can download, feed a topic and get it to write an essay for them. Is this technology’s next step, after Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner? Humanity is relieved of one more odious task — writing stuff.

Confession: I have a few books out there that no one knows about because I haven’t written them . . . well, finished them.

I’ve talked in previous columns about “wrestling with infinity” — the match I always lose — by which I mean, picking a subject too large to reduce to words and eventually getting hopelessly lost in it, e.g.: shifting human consciousness, transcending what we think we know, truly creating peace (whatever that is).

So welcome to my latest attempt to circumvent infinity. The book I’m aiming at is a collection of the poetry I’ve written over the past two decades, but not exactly. It’s not really a “collection” of anything — art objects on display in glass cases, meant to be admired — and the poetry (and other stuff) I would include I think of essentially as “soul fragments”: bleeding pieces of personal truth.

And the point of the book is to enter the present moment with the reader, to revere life together, to tremble at its wonder, to look into the eyes the unknown . . . with the help of something I call the Blue Pearl.

A week from today the Florida Democratic Party is going to choose its new Chair. A few years ago, Florida like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania was considered a purple state. No more. 

What caused Florida’s deviation? Faulty Democratic Party leadership. Like it or not to counteract the abundant right-wing forces that make Florida their home, the main force of opposition is the State’s Democratic Party. But what hindered the Democratic Party from being a force to counteract the rapidly increasing rightwing volume of the Republican Party? Very simple, the Florida Democratic Party failed to distinguish itself politically from a Republican Party that every day gives thinking Floridians a view of what Fascism would look like. 

The governor of the State, Ron DeSantis, who has presidential ambitions is using Florida as a laboratory to promote his Fascist ideas, and the Democratic Party, instead of focusing in combating those ideas it engaged in a coco maniac battle with the Republican Party meant to show Floridians that they are more anti-socialist than the Republicans, as if many people cared. 

No doubt everyone grows old in their own way.

But once you actually hit it — that three letter word, “old” — watch out: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .”

So wrote William Butler Yeats, back in the last century, conjuring a mystical journey to the spiritual city of Byzantium in order to escape his entrapment in that word, and in the world that values only youth. Hey Bill, how does it feel to be so old?

Curse that First Amendment! What were the Founding Fathers thinking?

As Ron DeSantis has declared and legislated, the safety of Florida — and, yeah, the safety of the nation — isn’t a matter of gun control (or police control) but speech control, especially in public-school classrooms and libraries, where the innocent minds of our children are developing.

There were a couple of interesting articles that have appeared in the past several weeks that illustrate inter alia how the Israel Lobby operates when anyone dares to challenge America’s wag-the-dog relationship with the Jewish state. To be sure, the labels antisemite and holocaust denier are flung about with wild abandon as a first step, but there is a level of viciousness that goes well beyond that as the Zionists seek to ruin the reputations and employment prospects of those whom they target.

I had a passing moment of wonder the other day – as I read about the latest . . . you know, mass shootings.

Troubled souls with guns. Big problem.

My thought was simply this: What if . . .? And then I lapsed into uncertainty. What if    . . . violence were not the simplistic and obvious – and only – solution to so many problems? Violence presents itself, in our imaginations (and in our games, in our movies, in our defense budget), as consequence-free, instantaneous and, for God’s sake, necessary. It’s the essence – it’s the definition – of empowerment.

And then the headlines scream about crazy guys grabbing hold of that empowerment to escape their personal cages, their crises on the moment: Yeah, it’s the fault of . . . whoever, and then another dozen people are dead.

“Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

The words — actually a 2019 Facebook post — are those of then-Iowa Republican congressman Steve King, loosing a puerile smirk as he stirred the pot of violence on the American political right. The politics of stupid has intensified since then, as white supremacy and fear of the Great Replacement Theory take over the GOP.

For many months, conventional media wisdom has told us that Joe Biden would be the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump in 2024 because he did it before. The claim was always on shaky ground -- after all, Trump was the ultimate symbol of the status quo when he lost in 2020, as Biden would be in next year’s election. That’s hardly auspicious when polling shows that the current electorate believes the country is “off on the wrong track” rather than “headed in the right direction” by a margin of more than a 3-to-1.

But now, the bottom has dropped out of that timeworn spin for Biden in the wake of the discovery of unsecured classified documents under his control, the appointment of a special counsel to investigate and the botched handling of the scandal by the White House.