Social & Political Issues – Page 8

Our Fluid Morality, or What Makes “The Blacklist” So Seductive

Not the most watched TV show in America (somehow it’s impossible for any series to compete with everyone’s guilty pleasure aka the NCIS franchise), The Blacklist, nevertheless, draws respectable numbers of viewers: Between those who must watch every episode when it first airs (out of fear that they will be assaulted by the spoilers at the water coolers, no doubt) and those who are grateful for the opportunity to do things on their own schedule (i.e. DVRists and On-Demandists), about 16 million people watch every episode of the show within 3 days from its original airing (if you prefer accumulating new episodes and then watch them 6 at a time or you just binged on the entire first season on Netflix, you don’t count). The episode that aired after the Super Bowl had a record of 30 million viewers.

Impressive! Of course, the show’s creators keep hooking and reeling in the audience with secrets and vague hints about the main characters’ pasts, futures, connections and disconnects, the overall story arch, and the possible endgame. Plus, it’s an action thriller, so there are plenty of twists and turns, car chases, shootings, tortures, and “suspenseful” misadventures in every case. Except that we can get all that through so many other media outlets, don’t we?

There is no doubt in my mind that the main draw of the show is its chief protagonist – the former Navy officer (“he was groomed for admiral”), now one of the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, Raymond “Red” Reddington. We know it and so are the designers of all printed-media ads. And, some part of it may be attributed to James Spader‘s offbeat charm and subtlety, that almost shy smirk in the corners of his mouth, that hidden trauma deep inside his eyes (or to our memory of the charm and subtlety, the smirk, and the trauma as he finessed them as Graham Dalton). But the real truth is that, James Spader or not, we LOVE the hard-core criminal, the ruthless, the calculating, the self-righteous, the snobbish know-it-all, the flawed, the mysterious hero that is Red Reddington.

Look, we live in bizarre, degenerative times of perpetual futility and failure, with dubious future prospects and shifting moral standards. Everybody (and I mean, EVERYBODY) does illicit things, lies, steals, cheats, covets.

And I’m not even talking about big-time thieves (like corporate moguls) and liars (like politicians), arms and drug dealers, rapists and molesters, or even that CFO who stole $7 million from his employer.

I’m sure you, my reader, consider yourself a fairly decent person. So, I invite you to examine just one day in your life and I guarantee you will find something that, strictly speaking, is not moral.

Start small and “innocent”: half the time when you take a sick day off your aren’t sick at all, right? Of course. And what’s wrong with that? As far as you know, everyone does it. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do… to survive: resumes, interviews, taxes, drugs, office supplies you bring home from your place of work, your expense account, that last drink you took before you got into the car, that little tryst with a hotty from marketing, 99% of the bullshit that comes out of your own and everyone else’s mouth, etc., etc. – just the basics of an average person’s somewhat moral existence.

All that matters is how slick and seamless you are when you do it and whether you can get away with it. As long as you don’t get caught, fired, kicked out of your house, or sued, you will continue doing what “everyone else does.”

When we see wrongdoings we don’t speak up because we are afraid of the consequences; and we don’t express our opinions because we don’t want to be ostracized; we hide our own sins and look away from those of others.

But most of us are not sociopaths: while on the surface this behavior goes unpunished, our buried in bullshit subconscious is nevertheless secretly troubled. As a result, we suffer from unexplainable fears, anxiety, and anger.

Yep, we are very-very angry; you may even say wrathful – pretty much at everyone and everything: our governments, generations of people who destroyed our planet and those fucks who still do, overpopulating nations and individual families, domestic animal abusers and wildlife killers, the dwindling quality and escalating prices, our bosses and subordinates, parents and children, spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, exes, neighbors, customer services and customers, people who don’t think like us; every single motherfucker who takes advantage of us; everyone who we blame for who we are, including ourselves; our own cowardice and impotence.

We are livid watching the worst sinners reaping life’s rewards and those untalented idiots who, by some fluke of fate or flourishing nepotism, are recognized as cultural icons. Sometimes it overwhelms us to the point when we just want to grab people by their collars, lift them up, and smack them against the wall real hard.

And in this condition of perpetual moral sacrifices, bewilderment at the state of things, intense disappointment, and the pent-up anger, how can we not be drawn to a morally flawed character, who confirms that the world is fucked and we are not crazy, that we are justified in feeling the way we do?

Practically in every episode, he exposes every branch and every agency of every government as thoroughly corrupt and incapable. He confirms that money and the corporations behind them rule the world and us; that a handful of people possess virtually unlimited powers and can destroy fates of nations by raising their hands in some treacherous vote. And, given a chance, he will try to hurt those devils or at least to interfere with their evil plans.

He walks into the most dangerous situation with a surety of an invincible superhero. If it’s necessary, he coolly raises his hand with a gun in it and squeezes the trigger with an air of a vermin exterminator. He will lie, scheme, and take advantage of every opportunity to reach his goals. On top of that, he prefers animals to humans!

Even more impressive is his sober understanding of the faults and weaknesses of those to whom he is personally attached. Just because he cares about them, it doesn’t mean that he has any illusions about who they are.

We marvel at the way Reddington stands out against the background of powerless and defective schmucks, oh, so similar to us. Cause (did you notice?), whether they are on the side of the “law” or on the criminal side, there are no good, honest, decent people in the show’s vast cast of characters – everyone is ethically deficient and either confused about their selfish motivations or knowingly hide them. In contrast, Red’s immoral clarity is incredibly refreshing.

To tell you the truth, I don’t think that the show’s creators had consciously cooked this up as a marketing ploy. They are not different from us – just as ethically corrupt (maybe even more so) and anxious. They simply follow their instincts and realize their dreams of justice through their fictional creations. And by making these apparitions public they allow us to participate in the experience as well. Such has been the prerogative of writers for over 4000 years.

What I do have to give the creators and producers credit for is the targeting of wide slices of viewing demographics. First of all, they got the most relevant age groups covered: 20-somethings who like shows with hot FBI/CIA/Mossad chicks and ugly foreign dudes with big guns; 30-somethings still preoccupied with cool jobs, career advancements, and scarred-forever hearts; and middle-agers who fucked up their own lives and those kids’ futures to the irreversible point, yet still hope that they can “fix things.”

Then they got the important interests groups: people of both genders who are interested in guns and explosives and those who are into politics; women who put their jobs ahead of everything else and those who still dream the American dream. And they got nerds with cutting-edge tech stuff and conspiracy theories! Plus, they keep uncovering domestic and world-wide social boils, thus appealing to people with at least some ability for progressive thinking.

Bravo! They get them interested and then Red keeps them hooked. Let’s just hope that the show-runners have an actual sense of direction and that they will not let the seductively successful character drown in some muddy bullshit. Maybe James Spader’s new co-executive position that his reps negotiated for him after the first season’s success will prevent commonly destructive tendencies.

And look what happened: He just got the executive power and two episodes in the first half of the second season were directed by Andrew McCarthy. Nepotism, of course, but still, honoring old ties, supporting old friends – it ranks pretty high on our contemporary degraded morality scale. All we need now is a guest appearance by Jon Cryer (now available after 12 seasons of Two and a Half Men) and Molly Ringwald as agent Keen’s presumably dead mother. The Pretty Pinklist, anyone?

The Frustrated CFO’sTalk on International Trade Turns into Gender Equality Q&A

If you took my absence from these pages during the past few months as an indication of my giving up on the blog, you were wrong. This activity is important to me. If nothing else, it lets me "talk" without being interrupted. It's just that the time slot in my overscheduled life, usually allotted to the writing of the blog posts, had to be temporarily relinquished to an extracurricular activity of preparing for a talk I was invited to give to a professional group called Women in International Trade.

Oh, no-no-no! I'm not talking about OWIT (the Organization of Women in International Trade), the big non-profit with global reach headquartered in Washington, DC. This group is much smaller - sponsored by a reputable New Jersey CPA firm, it is pretty much localized to the international-commerce entities and banks (like PNC) with offices and operations in that particular state. It's not like they don't welcome sisters-in-trade from everywhere, it's just how their network happened to develop: commercial clients of the said CPA firm, trade finance clients of the said bank, the local government bureau that deals with exports – all of them work and live in New Jersey.

And the reality is, there are a lot of big and small international businesses located in New Jersey. That's where you can have large office buildings that cost a fraction of what they would in Manhattan; there is plenty of open space for manufacturing and storage; there are Hudson ports that can berth oceanic freighters, etc., etc.

Truth be told, I would never know about these particular Women in International Trade if it weren't for one of the group's member who is also one of my former trade finance bankers and a friend. She is the one who mentioned me to the sponsoring CPA firm's Chief Growth Strategist - a force behind a lot of women initiatives in the Garden State.

They've been inviting me to participate in various women's and co-ed business events for some time. But I have to admit that when you live and work in Manhattan, the hassle of getting to an 8 o'clock breakfast meeting in New Jersey's Essex County makes such invitation very unattractive. I mean you need to drive or get a limo. You'll do it for business, of course, but for a semi-social gathering… that's a bit too much.

Of course, your attitude totally changes when the same professional group invites you to appear for them as a speaker. Vanity is a terrible sin – it demands constant massaging of one's ego. That's why some of us write books that bring meager royalty, give lectures without fees, etc. Plus, unlike the vast majority of people, I actually enjoy sharing my knowledge. And not for narcissistic, show-off reasons – I get a kick out of recognizing to myself, "I taught her that." So, naturally, I agreed.

After the initial invitation, I kicked a list of possible topics at the talk's organizer and we settled on two that we both agreed would be the most interesting to international-trade professionals: the position of trade finance in the value chain and KPIs specific to international commerce. I was advised of the reglament: 1.5 hours talk and 30 min Q&A.

"Well," I thought, "If you are going to talk shop with a group of working women for 90 minutes at 8 o'clock in the morning on a Wednesday, you'd better make it engaging and gratifying," and went to work. The rule of thumb is that 90 minutes of talking translates into about 15,000 words. And that's actually is not very short.

Of course, if you are the one who proposed the topic in the first place, you most likely know the subject at hand through and through; you have already developed original ideas and time-proven recommendations; your thoughts and opinions are well formulated. And that's great, but if you are not a professional lecturer who does this sort of things all the time, you still need to outline what you want to say; you have to construct your delivery in a coherent and logical way; you must prepare an exciting Power Point presentation that would prevent your audience from getting drowsy, and use cultural references to make your points memorable. Yeah! If you want to impress people, it's a lot of work. As I said, vanity – it costs you.

The third week of January came, and there I was, in New Jersey, shaking hands with the organizers and the attendees – by all appearances a group of successful and confident women, whose statuses make it okay to be out of the office in the morning hours for the sake of this event.

I proceeded with my presentation and it went well: they paid attention, they were interested, they nodded, they offered sensible and appropriate comments, they loved my visual tricks, and they sincerely laughed at my jokes. The time ran out. "Do you have any questions?" I asked. I was convinced that I've had a pretty good idea about the points of the talk that could've prompted further inquiries.

Imagine my surprise when the first comment/question I've received was, "You are obviously a strong woman. In your professional capacity, how do you handle male resistance to your authority or any other sorts of gender difficulties?" (Notice how the question was formulated: The woman had no doubt that I've encountered such obstacles ans she wanted to know how I dealt with them.)

Slightly taken aback by the sharp shift of gears I skipped a bit, but really – just a bit. I don't need to prepare for a gender equality discussion; I was born ready for it. So, I briefly described my experience: the unfair treatment; the skewed perception; the idiotic remarks; the preferences given to nitwits because "they have to support their families" (many of us have to do the same); which battles I pick; what I say and how I say it; when I bite my tongue and walk away; how I lie in wait and then find a way to teach them a lesson, etc., etc.

Oh my God! It was as if that question and my answer triggered a flood. Apparently these women found my interpretation of the international-trade topics quite clear. What they were confused about was why in 2015 we are still treated like second-class citizens.

At this point (the time was, obviously, running out), everyone talked fast. Many things were mentioned: "honeys" and "sweeties," unequal raises, unreasonable promotions, difficulty of holding back the tears, female professional "ceilings," the insulting male disbelief at a good-looking woman who is also smart. Amazingly, there were not a single person who didn't have something to add. Nobody said, "I have no idea what you all are talking about." You know why? Because there were no men in the room.

One woman in her 30s who was just recently appointed to a Marketing Director position (her warpath has just began), asked me whether I was born "this tough." Actually, I've thought about it before. What I told her was that we (i.e. the women who want to succeed) are not born tough. What we are born with is the ambition, the desire to be rewarded in accordance with our merits, the need to be treated as human beings regardless of our gender. But, while we claw our ways towards whatever peaks we want to achieve, we have to acquire toughness. We have to harden or they will eat us alive.

It is possible that I will never see most of the members of this group again, but when we were saying our goodbyes we felt like sisters. I taught these women a thing or two about trade finance and performance analytics, and, in return, I've learned a lesson of my own: There are no happy and satisfied women in international trade (and, I dare to extrapolate, in other business activities as well), because their ambitions and efforts are constantly curtailed on account of their gender, which is silly, irrelevant, anti-merit, and (call me an idealist) anti-American.

MTA by the Numbers (Or At Least Those Few Available to Us)

When NYC's cabs caught up with the 21st century and started accepting plastic for fare payments…

[Side Note: I always found it fascinating that the habitual check-out question, "Paper or plastic?" is technically applicable not only to the packaging choices but also to the forms of payment – cash (paper) or credit (plastic).]

Anyway, when it happened I was ecstactic: one less reason to touch dirty bills, no more listening to a driver's bullshit how he just started his shift and doesn't have any small bills for change, etc. – many reasons, really. Unfortunately, there was a downside: all Credit Card Systems came with PIM's (Passenger Information Monitors).

It could be just my personal experience, but I have not been bombarded by images and sounds in any other plastic-accepting cabs: not in London, or Tokyo, or Amsterdam… But NYC's TLC (no, not "tender loving care" or T-Boz+Left Eye+Chilli, but the formidable Taxi and Limousine Commission) has swallowed Mad Men's lure long time ago - Inspiria Media has been brokering taxi-top ads' revenues into the agency's pockets for years. They couldn't possibly pass on this incredible opportunity to make money by letting ABC, NBC, and random ass commercial advertisement to jump at you as soon as the meter is on.

And I fucking hate it! I really don't want all that noise and bullshit to exacerbate any further my already unpleasant experience of an overpriced ride in a shitty car with a bad driver. Yes, you can turn it off (assuming the touch screen still retains some capacity for response), but not right away. Thus, if you are like me, you spend the first few moments of the trip tensely waiting for this thing to come alive, so that you can shut it up as soon as possible.

Sometimes you get distracted, though: the driver doesn't understand your instructions or he/she doesn't know how to get there - whatever the reason, but you don't get into the combat with the blaring device right away and you catch things, for better or worse.

It happened to me several weeks ago and what my eyes didn't want to see my brain registered anyway. The screen flashed at me the familiar MTA logo, the words "Budget Proposal," and then three bits of information in large and bold letters:

$14.2 billion annual budget

4% fare and tolls hike

$20 million service enhancements

I turned it off and tried to read my magazine, but the incongruity of these numbers kept eating at me. I couldn't stopped myself from doing a bit of analysis.

$14.2 billion seems like a humongous number to a layman, but considering the scope of operations (Subway, LIRR, Metro-North, 341 bus routes, 7 bridges, 2 tunnels), it's not really such a big deal. I mean, the stupid facebook spends $5.1 billion to keep their operations going and it doesn't own and maintain 15 thousand vehicles, nor it employs 70,000 people. In fact, the entire staff of facebook is exactly 10 times less – 7,000. So, no, the total number doesn't sound too overwhelming to me.

However, there are a couple of aspects that make this number into a bothersome issue:

First of all, where the fuck they are planning on getting this kind of money? What appears to the general public as mountains of cash being shoveled by MTA out of ever increasing fares and tolls is not really all that bountiful. The agency claims around 8.5 million riders per day. Let's be generous and assume that it's like that 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. At the current fare rate this yields $7.735 billion a year. The Bridges and Tunnels arm collects measly $600 million. That brings us to $8.335 billion. Well, okay, they will hike it up by 4%, squeezing another $333.4 million out of the Metropolitan area residents. Still that's less than $8.7 billion altogether.

Before we go any further let me explain something, in case you don't know: As an entity, MTA is that weird creature called Public Benefit Corporation. Without going into too many obscure details let me just point out that this beast is essentially a Chimera – a combination of a private entity with rights to contract debt independently of the State (the Lion), a municipal agency (the Snake), and a non-profit organization (the Goat). One must keep these bizarre characteristics in mind when faced with the wild and weird facts swirling around this organization.

For example, as a public benefit corporation and a non-profit, MTA should not be making any profits or have excess cash. How could they anyway, if they constantly claim that they don't have enough money to cover their budget? Yet, during the audit of 2013 fiscal year ordered by the City Comptroller state auditors found an absolutely unanticipated $1.9 billion (!) surplus. Nobody is explaining to us how it could possibly happen: nearly $2 billion of unused cash have been discovered within the fiscal system of this "always-struggling" agency and let's leave it at that.

Well, say they put this extra money back into operations (as they must) – that still brings them to only $10.6 billion against the $14 billion needed. So, where the $3.4 billion will come from? We know: from the loans MTA is authorized to take independently! Wow, $3.4 billion of debt! Can you imagine the financial cost on that? Even in the most preferable situation, i.e. institutional (big banks) secured (all those fixed assets to pledge) loans at 2.5% – that's $85 million in an annual interest expense! And if they cannot obtain a sensible deal like that because their creditability has gone down the shitter, we are talking 5%, 7.5%, 10% or more – you do the multiplying.

However, that's actually mere peanuts. If you are wondering where the majority of MTA's current budget actually goes, I can tell you - to keep those 70,000 employees well compensated. Around 60% of the authority's current budget ($7 billion) is used to pay labor costs including payroll, pensions, and overtime. And the Chairman's salary of $350K a year plus his $3,500 per month housing allowance are not an issue here. I mean, it's really not a big deal for a head of such a huge organization. However, they have some bus drivers and train operators making over $100K, with averages around $56K. And guess what? MTA estimates that the increase in labor costs will amount to $260 million during this current fiscal year.

This makes that third number, the $20 million in service enhancements, sound like a bad fucking joke. That's all that will be spent on improving our public transportation experience, 0.14% of the budget? Common people, it's 13 times less than you plan to spend on raises!

You know how small this number is for the system that transports 8.5 million people a day? Let me give you a reference point. You can buy precisely ONE used private jet with the same sum of money. CEOs of Coca Cola, Goldman Sachs and GE each made that much in 2013 annual compensation. Moreover, they were nearly at the bottom of the top 100 highest-paid CEOs list. And Robert Downey Jr. made 4 times more the same year. This means that, if he felt generous, he could've made our commute at least two times (after taxes, of course) better, than MTA will.

Global Economics Newsflash: You May Never Have a Chance to See the Mona Lisa Again

So, apparently France got themselves into a $2.6 trillion debt hole. This translates into $42,623 of national obligations per each of 66 million French têtes. Of course, the number is staggering. However, I feel obligated to state that this is not as bad as what we have here, in our own beloved country with our very own $17.8 trillion burden pressing hard on 319 million of us with a weight of $55,684 per capita.

Still, someone just asked me the other day, how the hell France got itself so fucked. It’s not like the country pays $42 billion into IMF every year; or covers 22% of the UN budget; or sticks its nose into every hot spot in the world, bankrolling military and whatever-else aid campaigns. And it definitely doesn’t spend billions on artificially fueling the US stock market, even though if it crumbles the economies world-wide, including the French, will be doomed. It’s our government that borrows funds for all that.

I’m no expert on French economy and I’m not about to embark on researching their problems in detail (God knows, I have more pressing things to do). However, basic knowledge of European affairs is sufficient for a logical person to form some general ideas.

This is what happens with the formerly wealthy, but already shaky (who isn’t now?), national economies when they decide to build an opposition to USA by combining as many European countries as they can into some utopian economic union: they start breaking their financial backs by carrying on their shoulders weaker (like, ahem… Greece) nations. And, of course, the state needs resources to support domestic industries (solely in the name of protectionism). Add to that immigration policies driven by “special interests,” which result in a population seriously skewed toward multi-children families with idle heads of households, who don’t pay taxes but draw extensively on social programs. And why not? The majority of French population don’t want to work too hard anyway: shorter hours, exuberantly long vacations, early retirement (at 60!). And again, why not when there is the Mandatory State Pension Provision in place?

What the poor France to do? Well, the French government came up with this brilliant idea: They are going to sell national treasures, starting with… Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (!), which, thanks to king Francis I, has been in France’s possession since Leonardo’s death, i.e. nearly 500 years.

Don’t tell me that this doesn’t sound like the end of the world: Through ages of political rioting and religious massacres, twenty three wars, three full-blown revolutions, multiple colonial rebellions, and Nazi occupation France managed to hold on to Mona Lisa. It’s the perverted foreign policies and socialistic interior governing of our foolish times that led to the total socio-economic bankruptcy of the formerly powerful country.

You and I may think that La Gioconda is priceless, but the French have already assessed its market price, i.e. how much money someone may be willing to shed for it. During the 60s the best guess of the art-dealing community was around $100 million. Now, 50 years later, the time-adjusted equivalent of that sum is $2.6 billion. Never mind that this would cover only 0.1% of the debt in question. As they used to say in pre-Euro France, every centime counts.

One can’t help but marvel at the utter stupidity and nearsightedness of the government that can entertain the idea of eliminating one of the main reasons for the international tourism to the infamously snooty, unreasonably expensive, and ethnically unstable City of Lights (the Louvre is still #1 visited museum in the world). Can these people see anything beyond their service terms? I can clearly visualize the snowball of layoffs and business closures, which will unavoidably lead to the further drain on the state’s treasury. But those are French problems. So, fuck them!

What the rest of the world, especially those of us who care for the arts, should be concerned about is the distinct possibility that we may never ever have a chance to stand in front of the Mona Lisa and attempt to absorb (it’s really not that easy in the room full of tourists holding up their video and photo devices) Da Vinci’s masterpiece in person. And this is especially heart-breaking because it is one of only 23 surviving major works that are either universally or generally attributed to Leonardo.

It’s dreamy to imagine one of the world’s major museums trying to acquire the painting. However, it is unlikely that any such institution will be able to come up with a $2.6 billion check. The third-ranked museum in the world, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is America’s richest cultural institution with $2.7 – $3 billion annual endowment. However, the $300 million operating budget and constant structural updates apparently eat away the majority of the funds – during the fiscal year of 2012 the Met spent only $39 million on new acquisitions. Of course, there is an aggressive deaccessioning, which allows the museum to sell off “minor” pieces in pursuit of the “major works,” but even with an average of $1 million per item, the institution will need to liquidate 2600 (!) works to collect the required amount. Highly doubtful!

So, if the transaction does materialize, it most likely will be funded by private wealth. You can pack a large ballroom with people from different corners of the world whose wealth amounts to multiples of the asking price. For the sake of my personal amusement we can entertain another beautiful fantasy: How grand would it be if one of our openly super-rich individuals with strong philanthropic inclinations shelled out a chunk of his wealth for La Gioconda and then gave it away to the Met, so that the grateful general public could continue enjoying it (only now in my own backyard)!

It would take only 4.4% of Warren Buffett’s worth or 3.2% of Bill Gates’s. But both of them are too preoccupied with keeping the world healthy and the US technologically comfortable (don’t ask me why) to bother with art gifts like that. And by the way, the Codex Leicester, the most famous of Da Vinci’s scientific journals, which Gates bought in 1994 for $31 million, is kept in the MS mogul’s own private vault. It is considered a great generosity that the Codex is let for display once a year in different cities around the world. Yes, it is hard to imagine that anyone would give away the Mona Lisa as a gift to an institution or a nation.

The way I see it, the buyer will probably be someone whose immeasurable wealth you can’t find on some Forbes list, because it is not valued in the ephemeral public-stock prices. This multi-billionaire is someone who keeps a low profile and his name would mean nothing to the majority of the world even if he walked into the Louvre in person. But such an individual will transact through multiple proxies, and when all is done the Mona Lisa will disappear from the public eye into a secret stronghold. We will be left with reproductions and copies, while a handful of people will enjoy the privilege of up-close peering into the delicate strokes of oil paints applied by the genius’s hand to a piece of poplar wood.

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