Former President George W. Bush recently gave his first address since leaving the presidency. He delivered it, not at a military installation in the United States, his favorite venue while in office, but in Calgary, Canada. There were no reporters, no TV, no radio coverage of the speech and, in fact, the whole deal seemed clothed in secrecy. Two things we do know, however: we know that Mr. Bush went to the auditorium from his hotel via an underground tunnel, thereby avoiding a mass of protesters outside wielding, you guessed it, shoes, shoes of the “throw these at George” variety; and we also know he charged his listeners, whoever they were, a ton of money. (George was quite candid about one of the things he planned to do upon leaving office: “refill the ol’ coffers,” he said on several occasions.)
Notwithstanding all the secrecy, there were the inevitable “leaks” regarding the big secret, that is, leaks about what it was he said. One of them is that in the speech he described a book he was writing, or intending to write, the subject of which is something like “the 12 toughest decisions” he made as president. Reportedly, Bush has no interest in (nor, it might be added, the ability for) writing a full-blown, detailed memoir like so many persons do after leaving high office. (Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld, among others, are said to be doing that right now. Can hardly wait, can you?) So, he’s content to regale us with a few high points (or, low points, as the case may be) he experienced as “The Decider” over the past eight years. The underlying reason for writing such a book, he went on to say, was that when the history of his presidency is written “at least there [will be] an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened.”
Whoa. As we must when listening to Mr. Bush for any length of time, in order to figure out what he was trying to say it's a good idea to turn to the dictionary. The word “authority” means “an accepted source of information or advice.” The word “authoritarian” is defined as “characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.” And “malapropism” means “ludicrous use of a word, especially by confusion with one of similar sound.” It’s pretty evident that, if there were a Nobel Prize for malapropisms, Mr. Bush would be a shoo-in, after which the Nobel Committee would retire the prize altogether.
As Rachel Maddow, reflecting on Mr. Bush’s speech, remarked: “Not all Freudian slips are created equal.”
You Know It’s Bad When . . . . You know those junk-mail “come-ons” we receive on a regular basis from credit-card companies trying to entice us to join up? Well, American Express has a new spin on that undertaking. Rather than luring new customers with cash rewards as it once did, AmEx is now offering selected customers a $300 prepaid gift card if they pay off their balances and close their accounts. Yep, AmEx is now paying some customers not to do business with it anymore.
Notwithstanding all the secrecy, there were the inevitable “leaks” regarding the big secret, that is, leaks about what it was he said. One of them is that in the speech he described a book he was writing, or intending to write, the subject of which is something like “the 12 toughest decisions” he made as president. Reportedly, Bush has no interest in (nor, it might be added, the ability for) writing a full-blown, detailed memoir like so many persons do after leaving high office. (Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld, among others, are said to be doing that right now. Can hardly wait, can you?) So, he’s content to regale us with a few high points (or, low points, as the case may be) he experienced as “The Decider” over the past eight years. The underlying reason for writing such a book, he went on to say, was that when the history of his presidency is written “at least there [will be] an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened.”
Whoa. As we must when listening to Mr. Bush for any length of time, in order to figure out what he was trying to say it's a good idea to turn to the dictionary. The word “authority” means “an accepted source of information or advice.” The word “authoritarian” is defined as “characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.” And “malapropism” means “ludicrous use of a word, especially by confusion with one of similar sound.” It’s pretty evident that, if there were a Nobel Prize for malapropisms, Mr. Bush would be a shoo-in, after which the Nobel Committee would retire the prize altogether.
As Rachel Maddow, reflecting on Mr. Bush’s speech, remarked: “Not all Freudian slips are created equal.”
You Know It’s Bad When . . . . You know those junk-mail “come-ons” we receive on a regular basis from credit-card companies trying to entice us to join up? Well, American Express has a new spin on that undertaking. Rather than luring new customers with cash rewards as it once did, AmEx is now offering selected customers a $300 prepaid gift card if they pay off their balances and close their accounts. Yep, AmEx is now paying some customers not to do business with it anymore.
“The intention is to help cardholders lower their debt and encourage responsible management of their credit,” said an AmEx representative. “It’s being promoted as a means for customers to 'simplify their finances.'” Yea, right. I’ll bet this type of credit assistance wasn’t on the mind of AmEx when it signed people up in the good ol’ days, encouraging them to spend profligately at every conceivable opportunity and to reward them when they did. What AmEx is actually doing is giving some not-so-good customers 300 bucks as an incentive to "simplify" things by paying off AmEx. This recently adopted strategy is a “huge paradigm shift,” according to CardRatings.com, a credit-card review web site. They expect “other large companies to follow suit with offers to entice consumers to pay off their balances, as card issuers cope with increasing defaults.”
Quite rightly, consumer advocates don’t see it that way. “It’s a nice way of saying, ‘We want you out and we want to entice you financially to get out,” says CardRatings.com. “It’s not about them handing out $300 out of the kindness of their hearts.” Put it this way: say you have a $5,000 credit-card debt (a not unusually high amount). The $300 “gift card” amounts to a 6% discount if you pay it off and don’t come back. (If the credit-card debt is $10,000, the discount of course is only 3%.) In other words, it’s really a device to dump the folks the credit-card companies have decided are dead-beats.
Speaking of dead-beats . . . . AmEx is one of several credit-card issuers that have closed accounts and increased late fees and interest rates for cash advances in recent months. More significantly, AmEx, that model of financial responsibility, after converting into a bank-holding company in late 2008, received $3.4 billion from the U.S. Treasury in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds in exchange for a government stake in the company. Okay, TARP was a remedy for the great big dead-beats, but where, we might ask, is the bailout for the little guys — the little dead-beats? Oh, that’s right: they don’t get one because they got themselves into that jam all by themselves. And the big guys didn't. Right.
By the way, you know those ubiquitous credit-card solicitations we receive in the mail I mentioned at the outset? (In the last couple of weeks, I’ve received three just from Capital One.) Harper’s Index says that 5.2 billion such solicitations were sent to Americans in 2008. That means the credit-card people sent out about 20 million each business day, enough to provide every man, woman, and child in the country with 17 solicitations over the period of the year.
And that, folks, on top of the other issues, is a lot of trees.
2 comments:
Not in defense of W, but no one has to go outside in Calgary. Nearly the entire downtown is connected with a series of passages. Too cold and too dark there in the winter for even the bravest to venture outdoors. (And brave isn't one of the adjectives I'd use to describe him.)
Could be. All I can say is that, though George gave the speech last week, today the high in Calgary was 52F, the low 26F. I have a hunch the protesters were a more formidable problem than the wind chill.
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