Merill Lynched

Stanley O’Neill, CEO and bank veteran left investment giant Merill Lynch after the company posted a quarterly loss that Wall Street has never seen before. O’Neill is not the first and most probably not the last martyr of the wide-ranging hedge fund house-cleanings these days. Heads are falling left and right at Citigroup, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, just to name five of the big-shots on the US stock market. With the housing mess still unresolved, an ever so severe credit crunch, soaring oil prices and the full blown crisis of the subprime market, it’s tough to be a CEO these days.
…Especially if you have to tow home a moneybag worth $161 million as a "compensation package." Pocket change compared to, say Yahoo shotgun Terry Semel’s $230 million paycheck. Big is beautiful in America and people are used to big numbers here… but many raised eyebrows on today’s news. Think about it: the company suffers a $8.4 billion historical loss and the guy gets paid a fortune. Something is seriously wrong with this country. Am I the only one who’s jiggered about the fact that an average chief exec in the corporate world takes home 364 times more cash than the average Joe?
Two weeks ago the IRS (i.e. the US APEH) reported that more than 21% of the nation’s total income went to the top 1% and the income gap grew to its widest since the 1920’s. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer each and every day in America, and despite occasional media frenzy and harsh outcries from Democratic rallies, nothing, literally nothing has been done to reverse the tendency of growing income disparity.
Bush’s notorious tax cuts made the wealthiest American families the undisputed winners of his reforms and when it comes to corporate salaries, as a true non-interventionist Republican, he elegantly delegates the problem to shareholders, saying it is business’s business: the government has not much to do with boardroom paychecks.
Let’s face it, he’s not the one chewing on sour grapes and Wealth is not a new phenomenon in America. Think about Ford, Carnegie, or the Rockefellers - icons of the American dream, the dream that is fuelled by extreme success-orientedness, accumulation of material goods and appreciation of hard work. The word "equality" in the Constitution was never supposed to mean equality of income – Bronx kids and Harlem-dwellers know this just as well as the Founding Fathers did.
In America, the fact that the rich get ultra rich is perceived as an axiom of market capitalism, and apparently, enough shoulders are shrugged on Capitol Hill for the news of the day to become a non issue in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile Robin Hood bides his time.

A Cosmopolitan, please!

When I ordered my first Cosmopolitan cocktail in Manhattan on a Saturday night, and savored the first sips of my meticulously decorated Martini drink I felt Cosmopolitanism in my veins. Here I am, I thought, in the middle of this hip little arty lounge in downtown New York, packed with people apparently from all around the world and it really doesn’t matter where everyone comes from. Or does it…? The question kept bugging me until, in the form of an assigned reading and a deus ex machina, the issue of world citizenship banged on my naïve head that presumed that the idea of global identity is inextricably connected to metropolises like New York, Paris or London and internationally standardized Martini cocktails.
Strikingly enough, the Stoics waaay back in time have already philosophized about Cosmopolitanism, so there’s nothing new under the sun (except for the loungy ambiance, maybe.) Though for them it had less to do with obnoxiously tall skyscrapers, jetsetters and a globalization than with the universalizability of values, allegiance to the world and an equal regard of people, all of which I bluntly believe in. Having spent all but three weeks of this year away from home I am slowly acquiring an international identity which, weird as it might seem , has nothing to do with the deep devotion to the homeland I come from. Anyone who has ever heard me talking about Budapest, Tokaj wines, or Hungarian history can prove this here. I never felt that the miles I have behind me pushed me further away from the land of my birth.
On the contrary: I regard myself more and more as a Cosmopolitan Patriot, one who feels equally at home in her own society and in other societies but who, at the same time is rooted in a specific national context. To have a global perspective, you need the local perspective, which is why I consider myself exceptionally fortunate to have the opportunity to be totally immersed in a different society and which is why it is exceptionally regrettable that the majority of Americans don’t even have a passport. New York, in this respect is definitely not representative of the US: here, most people either just arrived, are just temporarily here, or on their way somewhere else.
Finishing the last sips of my well-prepared cocktail, as I looked around in the bustling bar, I saw rooted Cosmopolitans and rootless Cosmopolitans. For some, it didn’t matter where they came from, for others it very much did. I am inclined to belong to the former group and I don’t think it makes me less of a New Yorker.

Blackberry Buzz

As a suitable finale of yet another incredibly sunny weekend of the local Indian Summer, my friend and I were walking down on 8th Avenue to an allegedly “veeery good” French restaurant Sunday evening. Having had a rather early brunch, by 6 pm I was impatiently craving a well-prepared bowl of soup and some authentic, moldy Roquefort cheese (just to mention two from my long list of gastro hard-to-finds). When we were still looking for the place around 6.30 with a grumbling stomach, I got a little edgy. Then, he elegantly pulled out his BlackBerry, and it took about 1.2 seconds to Google the exact location of “Tout Va Bien” that happened to be one block down the street. Normally my way of finding a restaurant would be to ask someone for directions, but given the massive number of eating-out places around Hell’s Kitchen (i.e. Midtown West), this time his supermodern solution was probably more efficient and undoubtedly more stylish.
As with every new digi-device that is thrown on the market today, at first I was skeptical and completely ignorant about these handy little BlackBerry phones. But in no time, I had to realize that it is spreading more rapidly than any other smart digital device in corporate America.
When it made its debut in 1999, it was a status symbol of CEOs. Then, it reached lower and lower levels of the corporate ladder every year, chaining more and more unsuspecting employees to their virtual work desks. Today, my boss, my gym instructor and my friend next door have the same models – along with about 11 million other wireless devotees from Utah to Ukraine.
The beauty of this wonderful new gadget is that you can browse from your phone without wireless connection, you can Google your destination on your way, you respond to emails on the subway and since “your desk goes with you everywhere you go,” infamously long American work hours are now unofficially stretched out to a full day. You are virtually never off the hook.
As a keen devotee of Thomas Friedman’s notion of the “Flattening World,” I am utterly amazed by how these new American "digital steroids" and "ubersteroids" can facilitate the push and pull of information and tear down barriers of communication. But I am not sure I was very thrilled to have my tasty entrée interrupted three times by real-time emails that could probably have waited until we finished the dessert.

New York City's Poperahouse

Americans have a special talent for coining linguistically correct, but absurdly nonsensical oximorons. They easily link together two totally antagonistic, incompatible terms and come up with terms like: pretty ugly, terribly good or all natural artificial flavour. Normally, "Microsoft Works", "Peace Force", "Government Organization" and "Opera for All" would all fit into the same category too. Well not this fall in Manhattan.
The New York City Opera’s 25-bucks-a-seat promotion is more than appealling for snappy culture aficionadas, like me, who happen to live on a student budget. Don Giovanni, Cavallera Rusticana, Carmen and Agrippina are among this month’s favorites but there are more to come as we ease into the season.
To totally dispel the myth of opera, NYCO`s website offers an encouraging list of opera Q&As covering such opera related trivia as "what to wear" or "what performances to pick as an opera freshman". So, popular myths like “opera is for blue hair only”, or “opera is antiquated and boring” are crushed one by one by giving an honest argument and alluring invitation to the enchanted world of librettos.
In line with its original goal to be the “popular version” of its elder neighbor, the Met, the New York City Opera is as American as apple pie. True, one can still buy tickets for over a hundred dollars for any performance, but these new initiatives are openly aimed at popularizing a form of entertainment that bears the historical badge of elitism and exclusivity – concepts that are so foreign to the American mind.
You might think that "Opera for All" is just a new-wave example American hypocrisy. But when you do a quick sociological monitoring of the crowd in the break you see rich and poor, black and white, Asian and Caucasian, you name it!
It looks like, the NYCO realized that opera has great potential in socializing people into high culture. But to appreciate it, people have to understand it and more importantly they have to afford it. Twenty five dollars for an average student in New York is the price of going out for a dinner or a couple of drinks. For most of them, opera is not, and probably never will be, a tempting alternative, but for more and more people it is.
Obviously, NYCO is not a charity organization: it counts on its newly recruited opera fans to become frequent visitors and passionate opera consumers when they graduate and will eventually be able to afford to buy better seats. But until then, they are more than welcome to sit in discounted first row seats and informative lectures. After all, stage is the whole world, and all must play a part.

Cafeteria Refills

I got even more confused about the "Desktop Dining Dilemma" (see below), when I discovered our corporate on-site cafeteria on the 10th floor of the building: Park Cafe, the Cafeteria of CNN is the jewel of Time Warner building, my favorite place in the whole office. Our address being "One Central Park", there's not much that takes away the view of the breathtaking 180-panorama of Manhattan's green lung, one of the world`s largest public parks. Even after a month, each and every day when I go up for lunch I am stunned by the view of skyscrapers lining up on the border of the enormous green park that NY is so famous for. I do have to admit that the first week I felt a twinge of conscience when I was hedonistically savoring my parenthetically superb lunch meals with such a picturesque background being a new intern...but that 20 minutes on the top of the world recharges me more than any double-shot-cappuccino or candy bar others tend to take. I recently read an article that said Americans waste about one full hour by doing various non-work-related things which comes up as extra costs in productivity for their employers. Taking my precious break in the middle of the day when everyone else is superbusy wasting time with random things in front of the screen probably makes me less of a rockstar intern....but definitely makes me more efficient and cheerful for the afternoon than the rest of my respected colleagues on the fifth floor.

Desktop Dining

On the day I arrived to CNN one of the first things my beloved boss warned me was to take time to go and get lunch when I am hungry. "These guys never eat, " she said, pointing to my two producers sitting across her. "I eat all the time," she added smilingly and this time it had less to do with the notorious American overeating habits than her final stage of pregnancy. Here we go, I thought to myself: Corporate America 1.o1 - "workpeople don't care to eat", or at least workaholic producers don't...
Now, of course this came as no big surprise. We all know that Americans work hard and work more than many other nations in the world. They're proud of it as they think this is what drives their economy and not consumerism or Mexican immigrants. We also know that they like to eat fast and when they do, they are notorious for eating junk. So it's really not a big surpose that a new survey found that the vast majority (75%) of American workers tend to eat their lunch at their desktop instead of stretching out tired muscles, schmoozing around a little with colleagues and focusing for one second on what's indispensable for every human being: Food.
Meals in America in general are degraded to simple acts of fuelling up the nutritional system when it comes to workday lunches. As opposed to Jean-Pierre in Paris who would easily spend an hour or more out somewhere savouring a plat du jour in a random brasserie or cafe on the corner, John, the conscientious American worker 'grabs a bite' or 'something to eat' and speeds back to his cubicle to munch on a Sub, a pizza, some chips or a muffin, in exceptional cases a tossed salad...delicately served on top of the keyboard, piles of files or random documents - consumed while checking emails, watching the latest Colbert Show on Youtube or getting updates of highly important Lindsey Lohan anorexia gossip from YahooNews.
This disturbing and common phenomenon of "desktop dining" in our office made me wonder: is it just the modern side-effect of the wide availability of take-away food and a different concept of eating in general, is it an extreme version of American workaholism, or just simple hypocrisy that makes the average American worker "eat in" instead of taking the time to "eat out"?

Ősz New Yorkban

A warm Indian summer day in October makes every city look more beautiful - even New York. Last week the first warm jackets hit the streets, high heels were exchanged for winter boots and even the long distance runners of Central Park felt a bit chilly without adding one more layer of clothes. Fall came relatively late though, much to the delight of most city dwellers but less for the gratification of department stores whose fall collection didn't sell very well on Fashion street. But don't shed any tears for the local fashion industry, Manhattan would be the last place where even the most off-season clothes wouldn't sell well.
So, it was a real treat to have a last weekend spent without a jacket or worries about sitting on the cold ground outside. If only New York had more cafes with outside terraces and intimate public parks where you could sit down and enjoy sunshine through the falling leaves, a non-paper cup of coffee and the weekend papers. As simple as it might seem this trio is hardest to find in New York. You can get one or the other but not all three together. At least not around Midtown.
Since they became my beloved Sunday morning trinity in Paris and indispensable parts of a perfect start of a weekend day, I started to wonder how people spend their perfect Sunday mornings. So, I took a stroll for a couple of blocks down on 9th and did a quick field research. Local restaurants jam-packed with brunchers, numberless Starbucks addicts queueing for their grande-nonfat-sugarfree-hold-the-whip-caramel-macchiato, herds of conscientious ipod-joggers hurrying to Central Park to burn those happy-hour martini cocktail calories off, WholeFoods early birds with eco-friendly plastic double bags full of superorganic bioveggies that despite their astronomical price don't even get close to the real ones we have in Europe...a rough panorama of a blissful Sunday morning a la NewYork.
If only they knew the beau perfection that lies in an undisturbed, taxi-honkless sip of finely brewed espresso with a touch of October sunshine.