The Gold Card

Today I got a new credit card. It’s actually the same credit card I’ve had for 14 years. But now it’s called the “Chase Freedom” card, which sounds like some piece of shit good only at your participating Family Dollar.

Here’s the lineage of this card. I got it in 1996, thanks to my college roommate, who was a branch manager at Wachovia on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I had an annual income of $17,000, pre-tax, as Jacksonville’s 22-year-old military affairs reporter. Scot nonetheless approved my Gold Card application. Credit line of $10,000, on the spot. When it arrived I bought a 2GB hard drive for my Macintosh Performa 6116 and a copy of “Afterlife,” which I played once.

That gold card later became a platinum card, going up to a $25,000 credit limit. I could buy a Kia with that. I did get in some trouble with it in 1997, but I never missed a payment, which probably accounts for the ever soaring credit limit and the monthly six-pack of “convenience checks” inviting me to buy up some cash at interest rates more fitting one of those white-trash payday loan places.

Wachovia sold the debt to Chase well before some stooge came in to run that once-proud bank into the ground and get an eight-figure parachute for doing so. But the card always remained platinum, in name if not color.

Then this week I get this “Chase Freedom” bullshit. The card number didn’t change, but the expiration did, moving up by a month. That probably means Delaware or South Dakota relaxed its usury laws (not that they meaningfully exist there in the first place) so that I can be charged 96 percent interest or something. Because buttfucking American taxpayers only gets you back to sustainability; after that, you must buttfuck your customers to get to profitability. That’s America, love it or leave it.

No, I didn’t read the credit agreement that the Senate forced them to send me. Really, thank you for that protection. Like I’m gonna refuse the terms and pay off my balance tomorrow.

Open thread commences below.