The Ubiquitous Grammar Cop

For the last two weeks, everyone in the mainstream corporate media has been bleating about the dire straits our economy is presently in as if it's a big surprise that it's come down to this. For some people who actually follow such things, this present crisis is simply the culmination of several things that has happened over the last thirty to forty years of plutocratic policies wearing a fiscally conservative mask. Our government, egged on by lobbyists who abuse the power afforded them by the First Amendment, allowed the deregulation of the rules that oversee the activities of corporations (trading, speculation, et cetera). They removed our currency from the gold standard, weakening the dollar against other currencies. One of the first things they did, possibly under the notion that it was no longer needed, was remove the 0.25% tax on all stocks and commodities bought and sold in our markets in the 1960s. For example, if I purchased $10,000 in Apple Computer stock, I would pa...

I work in retail in order to pay my bills. It's not my first choice of vocation (I am presently working to get into my preferred choice of work: academia). Invariably every Monday and Tuesday my coworkers and I in the Big Blue Box (IKEA) will put away unopened and unused merchandise returned to our store after the customers purchased these items during their frenzied shopping on Saturday and Sunday. They will return these items for different reasons: the color didn't go with their existing decor, it didn't Glade well, the eight foot wardrobe couldn't fit into the back of the Honda Civic, whatever. I posit the true reason behind a sizable portion of these ill-conceived purchases returning to us come from the fact that some people simply could not afford to make a large furniture purchase on a whim. The economic situation that many of us find ourselves in does not warrant us to make snap decisions about large purchases that take up, in some cases, an entire pay period...