The fall into bankruptcy court by the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. is the culmination of years of decline but creates an opportunity for its competitors and could mean further consolidation in the supermarket industry.
The nation’s oldest grocer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday after years of struggling with enormous debt, falling sales and rising competition from low-priced peers.
[…]A&P, like most grocers, is struggling with the weak economy, reduced spending by consumers and intense competition. The company said aggressive competition from nontraditional food retailers like warehouse clubs, discount chains such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and dollar stores have compounded the problem.
[…]It is also struggling with pension costs, lease costs for store locations it has closed, and a contract with C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc., which provides the majority of its inventory, which it has been unable to negotiate down to lower costs.
[…]A&P also has one of the most heavily unionized work forces in the business, with 95 percent of its workers covered under collective bargaining agreements. It said in its filing it would seek to work with the unions to lower those costs.
I wonder why Wal-mart is doing so well compared to A&P. Oh I know – Wal-mart isn’t 95% unionized. In fact, Wal-mart opposes unions, because employers should not be forced to pay dues to Democrat union bosses in order to keep what they earn by the sweat of their own brow.
The parents of a 14-year-old girl were sentenced each to 10 days in jail plus a $500 fine on December 9 for using a belt to spank their daughter. They had been found guilty of assault in June of this year, but sentencing was put off until a later date.
The jail time was remitted due to the five days the couple spent locked up after being arrested, according to Quebec Media Inc.
Lawrence Zachow, 60, and his wife Aida Calagui-Zachow, 54, were originally charged with assault with a weapon for the Jan. 15, 2008 spanking. However, Judge Michael Stevens-Guille found them guilty of the lesser offense of assault, saying he understood the parents were disciplining the girl according to their religious beliefs, and not just reacting in anger.
“Whatever one’s belief in higher authority, if you live in Canada you are subject to the laws of Canada as interpreted by the courts, in this case the Supreme Court of Canada,” Stevens-Guille said in the ruling. “Spare the rod and spoil the child is not the byword of the discipline of children in this country in 2010,” he added.
According to QMI, the court was told that the spanking was the result of a confrontation between the parents and the daughter, in ninth grade at the time, over the girl’s admission that she was having sex with her boyfriend. She refused her parents’ request to break off the relationship.
Following the spanking, which the girl told the court did not hurt, she reported her parents to a school official who called the police.
[…]In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada banned spanking of children under 2 and over 12 and criminalized it at any age with an implement such as the common wooden spoon.
I do not agree with spanking a 14-year old. My point in posting this is to show how social engineers in Canada’s most liberal province do not really believe that parents are the authority over their own children. And I think they are especially annoyed by the idea that fathers should be able to push their morality on children because of their authority as provider and moral leader. What incentives does this create for fathers who want their daughters to not act immorally? Does being overridden by the state make men more likely to marry? Does it make men more likely to want to have children? What man takes on a marriage and children when he can be overruled and regulated by the feminist state at any time? Why bother to have children at all, if the state decides what vision of morality the children will be raised with?
Don’t forget the previous story of the daughter who took her father to court for grounding her – and won! She was sending naked pictures of herself on her father’s computer. Is that what fathers can look forward to? And with government approval, no less? Why should a man sign up for that? What is the point? Why bother? Why not just stay single, stop working so hard, and enjoy the freely available sex that is available as the number of fatherless women increases as feminism dominates society more and completely destroys the institution of marriage?
Women think men want to marry as much as they do and for the same reasons, but it’s false. Men marry for respect, and to be recognized as essential, and as the moral and spiritual leader of the home. ALL THESE THINGS are taken away by the feminist state’s regulation of the family. Men today get no respect, no special role as provider, and no authority as leader. They have been replaced and marginalized from their traditional roles, by design. There is really no reason for men to MARRY any more, and no reason for them to take on the burden of parenting. There is nothing in it for men. Women don’t value men, and women vote for social policies that discriminate against men and marginalize them for their traditional roles – substituting government social programs and welfare for husbands and fathers. Imagine – courts overruling the judgment of parents about a 14-year old having sex! Unbelievable! What man wants this? NONE.
This is a question that women today never ask: What is the value proposition for men to marry and raise children?
And there even more to it than that. Presumably, these parents worked for 30 years each paying 40% of their income to the government. That would involve scholarships for these judges and lawyers to got the school. And funding for the courts and the prisons. And funding for public schools to teach their daughter sex education. And funding for public school teachers to call the police on them. Police that are funded by their taxpayer dollars. They literally paid the state to incarcerate them for the crime of disciplining (in an excessive way, granted) their own daughter, who had been indoctrinated by the state’s sex education programs to think that pre-marital sex was normal.
There is something deeply, deeply disturbing about paying for your own execution. And it brings to mind that old sick pre-occupation of the secular left to avoid being judged morally at all costs – the same sickness that causes them to reject the objective moral law. In fact, they would probably find everything that I am saying to be quite odd. Morality? What is morality? These people don’t understand what morality even is. The purpose of life, on their view, is to be happy in whatever way feels right to you. And anyone who tries to form your character to any end should be arrested and put in jail.
Before this recession, most economists probably thought that some amount of unemployment benefits were just and compassionate, and offered a sense of security even to people who were lucky enough to retain their jobs, despite the fact that the program would raise unemployment rates and reduce both employment and economic output.
In other words, unemployment benefits shrink the economy to some degree, but shrinking the economy a bit may be a price worth paying.
Unemployment benefits were thought to reduce employment and output because, by definition, working people were ineligible for the benefits. In particular, an unemployed person who finds and starts a new job, or returns to working at his previous job, is supposed to give up his unemployment benefits. Economists had found that a large fraction of unemployed people delay going back to work solely because the unemployment insurance program was paying them for not working.
Fewer people working means a lower employment rate, and less output because unemployed people are not yet contributing to production.
The recession has seen a number of economists ignore prior findings on unemployment insurance, at least as long as this recession continues. For example, in evaluating the stimulus law economists at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office assumed that the law would raise gross domestic product, and took no account of the fact that the unemployment insurance and other provisions of the stimulus law give people incentives to work less.
Here’s a new study explaining how the “generosity” of the radical left actually encourages people to avoid working, and to remain dependent on the government for their income.
A study published by two labor economists, Stepan Jurajda and Frederick J. Tannery, looked at employment histories for unemployment insurance recipients in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. Unemployment rates got quite high in Pittsburgh in those days, reaching 16 percent at one point, and staying over 10 percent for two and a half years.
The chart below summarizes their findings for Pittsburgh.
The chart displays the fraction of persons (in Pittsburgh) receiving unemployment benefits who began working again, as a function of the number of weeks until their unemployment benefits were scheduled to be exhausted. For example, a “hazard” value of “0.04″ for week “-14″ means that, among unemployed persons with 14 weeks remaining until their benefit exhaustion date, 4 percent of them either began working a new job or returned to their previous job.
The chart:
Unemployment offers a disincentive to find work
That chart basically shows the breaking down of the American working spirit by the radical left – making large segments of the American population dependent on government. This isn’t good for the producers, and it isn’t good for unemployed people to be out of work by choice. (Although to be sure, many many unemployed people are not unemployed by choice).
WINTERY KNIGHT 