'Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America'

From Daily Kos:

These union members had faced a slow bleed for years. The only question for them was whether to accept an accelerated bleed and hope it would stop in a few years—but hope that in the knowledge that that was not a priority or even necessarily a desirable outcome to Hostess' private equity owners—or to fight for what they earned. We're hearing, and can expect to keep hearing, a lot about how it's so unreasonable of union members to expect to get the pay and benefits they negotiated and worked for, the pensions they've planned their retirements around. Because this is coming after a generation-long war on pensions and unions and middle-class wages. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement, "What’s happening with Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America, as Bain-style Wall Street vultures make themselves rich by making America poor."

More here.

Greedy unions cause a bedrock American company to go out of business?  Not even close.

It strikes me as great luck that Romney's Bain Capital became a focus in the recent presidential election.  We all got a lesson in how these venture, or, if you prefer, "vulture," capital firms function.  That is, Hostess wasn't owned by mom and pop: rather, it had been bought by Wall Street investors who, as usual, were treating the company as an ATM for the purpose of lining their own pockets.  To them, it doesn't matter if they turn the company around and make it profitable or if they have to liquidate it and feast on the carcass.  As long as they make a good return on their investment, all is well.  Employee pay, health care, and retirement don't matter.  Jobs don't matter.  The overall economic health of the nation doesn't matter.

I mean, seriously, these guys will buy a company, take out massive loans in that company's name, pocket the cash, and leave their new purchase holding the debt.  And that's just one strategy for bleeding their victims.  Another is to squeeze the workforce, demanding concession after concession, taking back retirement money that has already been earned, turning good jobs into McJobs.  Again, profitability just doesn't matter: if the vulture capitalist can get a return on his investment with a company that ends up being solvent, then fine, and if not, as long as there is a return, then that's fine, too.  That is, as far as I can tell, Hostess didn't have to tell its workers to go to hell in order to survive.  This happened just to make some fat cats rich.

Blaming it all on the unions is just icing on the cake.  Profit and a propaganda triumph.  Makes me sick to my stomach.

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