Some cool debt consolidation images:

Empty Big Bear offices on 851 West 3rd Avenue


Image by TheeErin
Former execs say Big Bear mauled by parent firm
Business First of Columbus – May 16, 1997 by Kathy Hoke

Big Bear’s recent troubles point in one direction — to New York and the investment banker who controls the supermarket chain’s parent company, say two former Big Bearexecutives.
"When I left eight years ago, we had the best team in Columbus, and this guy from New York has absolutely decimated the company," said Michael J. Knilans, president and CEO of Big Bear Stores Co. from 1976 to 1989.
"This guy" is Gary D. Hirsch, chairman of Syracuse-based Penn Traffic Co., which bought Columbus-based Big Bear in 1989 in a hostile takeover.
Knilans and former Vice President of Operations Richard Vogel were interviewed May 13, the day Penn Traffic announced the sacking of folksy Big Bear President Stephen Breech, 141 other Big Bear employees in the company’s Grandview offices and four other Penn Traffic division heads as part of a corporate restructuring.
"He bought a jewel and proceeded to run it into the ground," said Knilans, an Upper Arlington resident who serves on two supermarket boards. "He has micro-managed a company that didn’t need to be micro-managed. When I left we had million in the bank. Now the company has 1/2 billion in debt."
The problems at Big Bear, Knilans said, include declining sales and rising prices aimed at helping Penn Traffic pay its debt.
Hirsch, he said, "did everything contrary to good business practice."
Knilans’ criticism of Penn Traffic and Hirsch were echoed by Richard Vogel, who was vice president of operations for Big Bear under Knilans.
"The man who took over never understood the business or the market and proceeded to ruin the company," Vogel said of Hirsch. "An awful lot of good people are losing their jobs through no fault of their own. It upsets me to no end."
Attempts to reach Hirsch were unsuccessful, but Penn Traffic spokesman Marc Jampole said the company would not respond to criticisms of its chairman.
Jampole, based in Pittsburgh, said Penn Traffic has helped modernize Big Bear operations with a centralized computer system and the creation of a nonfoods warehouse system in Columbus for the entire chain.
In addition, he said, Big Bear has benefited from Penn Traffic’s new low-price advertising campaign, featuring red and yellow tags in the stores.
Consolidation in the grocery industry over the last 10 years made Big Bear’s independence unlikely.
"No one could predict what could happen," Jampole said, "but it’s pretty clear Big Bear as an independent company would have had a hard time competing and has an easier time competing as part of Penn Traffic."
Supermarket chains and other retailers have been moving toward centralized management, says Mark Husson, a supermarket analyst for J.P. Morgan in New York. American Stores buys national brands for its Acme stores from its Salt Lake City headquarters. Wal-Mart also has centralized its buying and management.
"You can get much better prices, and you can buy in bulk," Husson said.
The layoffs, part of a restructuring announced by Penn Traffic May 13, end a 63-year history of Big Bear as Central Ohio’s only locally grown and managed chain. Four other units of Penn Traffic in New York and Pennsylvania also lost local management and support staff in the centralization of the company.
In 1934, Big Bear founder Wayne Brown opened the first full-service supermarket in the Midwest on Lane Avenue near Ohio State University. By the late 1980s, the company had annual sales of more than billion.
But as a publicly traded company with more than 80 percent of its stock owned by banks and other institutional investors, Big Bear could not stave off a buyout of the company in 1989, Knilans said.
When Penn Traffic bought Big Bear in 1989, Knilans and Vogel had three years remaining on their contracts, but said they gladly left when Hirsch offered to buy them out. Both said they declined to buy shares of Penn Traffic, then trading around a share, but trading at .38 a share at the close of May 13.
"He’s a banker, not a retailer," Knilans said.
Breech was a district manager for Big Bear when Knilans and Vogel left the company.
"He is one of the finest men I’ve ever worked with," Vogel said of Breech. "To treat a talent like that and not be able to use it, it really upsets me."
For Vogel, who started as a carryout boy at a Big Bear in Lancaster in 1950, the company he knew ceased to exist several years ago.
"I said a long time ago: It was Big Bear in name only," he said. "The signs up there say Big Bear, but it’s not the Big Bear the customers knew."
Breech said Big Bear was among the top 10 grocery chains in the late 1980s, but it and the other grocery chains Penn Traffic acquired in recent years have floundered.
"What’s really wrong with them is they have too much debt. When your number-one focus is how to pay the mortgage, it changes the way you do business," Breech said. "There’s no trick to this business. You just have to sell groceries."

Amerikan Hero – Thomas Jefferson


Image by Think-N-Evolve
While that is truly a powerful quote, and one that offers inspiration to contemporary "Tea Partiers" and "Libertarian’s", the reality of what Jefferson stood for, is far from the confines of this one quote.

It was also Jefferson’s intent, in dealing with the Indians, to violate by “hostility”, the very oath made before his god. Jefferson thrived on instilling fear and boasting in the arrogance of his European superiority over the perceived inferiority of the Indians.

=======================================

American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, pg.120

"…Jefferson, for example, who in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with ‘the hatchet.’ ‘And…if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,’ he wrote, ‘we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi,’ continuing: ‘in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them." These were not offhand remarks, for five years later, in 1812, Jefferson again concluded that white Americans were ‘obliged’ to drive the ‘backward’ Indians ‘with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains’; and one year later still, he added that the American government had no other choice before it than ‘to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.’ Indeed, Jefferson’s writings on Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be given a simple choice—to be ‘extirpate[d] from the earth’ or to remove themselves out of the Americans’ way. Had these same words been enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at European Jews, they would be engraved in modern memory. Since they were uttered by one of America’s founding fathers, however, the most widely admired of the South’s slaveholding philosophers of freedom, they conveniently have become lost to most historians in their insistent celebration of Jefferson’s wisdom and humanity." [1]

President Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, 1803

"You will receive from the Secretary of War…from time to time information and instructions as to our Indian affairs. These communications being for the public records, are restrained always to particular objects and occasions; but this letter being unofficial and private, I may with safety give you a more extensive view of our policy respecting the Indians…To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses, too, we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges, so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they must gain; they will consequently retire from the competition, and we shall thus get clear of this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians…As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation." [2]

=======================================

When it comes to the Founders, I concede to their eloquence of pen. But, I do not acknowledge their humanity in works. Thomas Jefferson was a revolutionary. However, "We the People" need an evolutionary mindset. Thomas Jefferson was well equipped at building the case, but failed at evaluating the hypocrisy of that case.

Where do we find perfection though, in an imperfect world? The point here is not to pound the dead horse, but to encourage less Founding Father idolatry. It’s not simply that these men were products of their time; they were guilty of instituting the very policies they aligned at the Kings feet.

As a slave owner, as well as an enemy to the peace of Indigenous people, Jefferson cared only for the equality and liberty of Colonial European posterity. However, an empire cannot promote peace within itself if it also lays a yoke of slavery on a portion of its population and uses the cover of night to subvert peace outside itself. The fact that Jefferson is celebrated as an "Original American", and "Libertarian" of the first order, is indicative of the willfully self-imposed confusion continuing to reign over the American mind.

The founders had the conviction to kill for their freedom, but who among them, had the moral conviction to free the Africans, or cease from hunting Indians? I’m not speaking of words, show me the actions. The days of slumber are ending.

1. books.google.com/books?id=RzFsODcGjfcC&dq=AMERICAN+HO…

2. courses.missouristate.edu/ftmiller/Documents/jeffindianpo…