Bond: An irksome legal burden
Especially when $US464m is at stake
Watching Donald Trump’s legal woes play out is one of the more surreal pieces of drama in a world which seems to specialise in surreal dramas right now. Lurching from slow motion train wreck to daytime soap opera to Greek farce, it’s hard to believe the whole horror show revolves around a man who is putting himself forward as the next President of the world’s greatest democracy.
Yet here we are.
Trump’s greatest challenge is the $464 million bond (the amount varies depending on which news article you read) that he has been ordered to pay (or find a guarantor for) by a New York court. Even for a man of his wealth, it looks like this sum will be a bridge too far, not least of all because most of his wealth is tied up in assets that cannot be easily or quickly sold.
Bond is an early 13th century word meaning anything that binds, fastens or confines. It began life as a phonetic variation of band, and for some time was interchangeable with it. By the 14th century, the meaning had extended to encompass the idea of an agreement, and by the 1590s it could also mean a financial instrument binding one person to pay an agreed sum to another.
Bonds in the latter sense are the stock in trade of the financial world. According to Investopedia, “a bond is a fixed-income instrument that represents a loan made by an investor to a borrower (typically corporate or governmental). [It can] be thought of as an I.O.U. between the lender and borrower...”.
In other words, I lend you $100, and you agree to pay it back with an agreed time frame at an agreed-upon interest rate. Governments love issuing bonds to help fund capital works (and the odd war), and corporations like them because they provide a way of raising more capital - via private investors - than banks will typically fund.
The earliest known bond was issued in Mesopotamia around 2400 BC. The Republic of Venice issued bonds in the 1100s to fund a series of wars, England decided it was a great way to fund its war against France in 1863, and the US had had a similar thought during its revolutionary war against England 100-odd years earlier.
Oddly enough, bondage in the sense of serfdom or slavery is unrelated to the sense of bond we’ve been discussing so far. That word comes from the Old English bonda, or householder, which comes from Old Norse, where it meant “occupier and tiller of soil, peasant, husbandman.”
Initially, bonda was a word of some standing. Over time, however, especially with the rise of the feudal system, it developed a pejorative sense. Tenant farmers went from being seen as free men in charge of their destiny to mere serfs, vassals of their overlords.
Such changes in meaning over time are called semantic shift (also semantic change, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift). Etymologists have studied the phenomenon for centuries, although not fully in earnest until the 1800s. In 1933, linguist Leonard Bloomfield named the following types of semantic shift, a list that remains the most widely accepted scheme in academia to this day: Narrowing, widening, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, meiosis, degeneration and elevation.
Some of these are more or less self-explanatory: bond underwent degeneration; knight, which originally meant “knave” or “boy”, experienced elevation. Others are less obvious. Meiosis is a shift from a stronger to a weaker meaning, as in astound, which originally meant, literally, to strike with thunder. Synecdoche is beloved of journalists, who love nothing better than to refer to a government by the name of its capital city. Thus it is that the US government rarely does anything, but Washington (or the Capitol or the White House) gets up to all manner of things, some of which may even be positive.
Bloomfield, who lived from 1887 to 1949, was an intellectual giant. His areas of study included Indo-European historical linguistics, Austronesian languages, and the languages of the Algonquian family. He is regarded as the father of distributionalism, the linguistic theory that dominated American thinking from 1935 to 1960, when it was overtaken by Noam Chomsky’s work in transformational generative grammar.
As for Donald Trump, time will tell if he can survive this current circus, although the consensus among those who understand its implications better than I do is that his future is looking grim. His bank accounts would be an obvious and easy first target should he default, with state prosecutors also able to seize Trump properties and companies registered within New York state.
Filing for bankruptcy could allow him to avoid the debt altogether, but for a man who boasts of his unfettered success in life, this would surely be a deep humiliation.
Call me out of touch with reality, but I can’t help but contrast the current state of US politics with the world I grew up in. As a kid, I heard John F Kennedy implore his fellow citizens to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. For most of recent history, Congress made a point of working with whoever was President for the greater good, regardless of political leanings. Politicians, for all their numerous faults, were capable of rising above their tribal affiliations when important matters were at stake.
That world seems to no longer exist, and tempting as it may be to lay the blame at one person’s feet, that would surely be wrong. You have to ask where the US lost its way, and I suspect the answer begins decades ago, when the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else first began widening. Democracy, it seems to me, is only strong when most people feel they’re getting a fair shot at success, and that no single group has a disproportionate advantage over everyone else.
Those conditions don’t apply in the US - or in New Zealand for that matter. That’s inviting politicians to emerge whose whole ethos is based on self-righteous anger and a desire to tear down a system they claim is rigged.
Whether they believe it themselves or not doesn’t matter. Many of those they appeal to do believe it. And - something those on the left have been slow to recognise - they have some justification.
Donald Trump will, sooner or later, disappear. But the forces that have given rise to the Trump phenomenon aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. His detractors, among whom I count myself, would be naive to think that no Donald Trump means a return to non-tribal politics. There are plenty of others to take his place, and as long as we tolerate a world of massive disparity, they’ll always have a ready audience.
Bits and specious
The name Venezuela is a Spanish diminutive of Venice.
Baptism by sprinkling is aspersion, by dipping is immersion, by pouring water is affusion. And I don’t care what religion you are, you do not ever want to get baptised by infusion.
Arguably the most famous movie line of them all, “Play it again, Sam” from Casablanca, never got spoken. Neither did Captain Kirk ever say, “Beam me up, Scotty” in the original Star Trek tv series (though some spoilsport did insert it into the dialogue of the animated series). Equally, Bones never said “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it,” but the man who played him, DeForest Kelley, used the phrase as the title of his autobiography. Dorothy never said, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas now, Toto,” and Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
Nachos are named after the restaurant cook Ignacio Anaya, who invented the dish in the Mexican town of Piedras Negras in 1943.
Quote of the week
If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court. And we will ask the judge to seize his assets.
New York Attorney General Letitia James