RIP Hostess

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

...Sorry, how do I make a thread?

Click on the forum that you want to post the thread in. Look in the upper left hand corner---you will "Post New Thread". Click on that, type in the thread title and your post, then hit reply.

Please use the search function before starting a new thread to see if there is a thread already started on the same topic.

 

[Joe Nuno]

That's what you get with a union workforce... Unemployed. Bring on July 2013! (This is 100 percent a trolling post for those too dumb to realize it)

Don't be fool by FedEx management that Hostess went out of business because of the union, the truth is The CEO of Hostess got a 300% bonus and 6 top rank management were hired to help fix Hostess, but instead of fixing things, they would pocket the profits. The Union members took a $10 million concession for the last 10 yrs, the members voted on wage reduction, benefits reduction and no pension contribution....who is really screwing who here? Is this another bad batch of management like Consolidated Freight? Or better yet, Bain Capital?

 

[vantexan]

Don't be fool by FedEx management that Hostess went out of business because of the union, the truth is The CEO of Hostess got a 300% bonus and 6 top rank management were hired to help fix Hostess, but instead of fixing things, they would pocket the profits. The Union members took a $10 million concession for the last 10 yrs, the members voted on wage reduction, benefits reduction and no pension contribution....who is really screwing who here? Is this another bad batch of management like Consolidated Freight? Or better yet, Bain Capital?

Ask the more than 50,000 employees of Staples how bad Bain Capital is. I imagine this Thanksgiving they are thankful for a job.

 

[MAKAVELI]

Don't be fool by FedEx management that Hostess went out of business because of the union, the truth is The CEO of Hostess got a 300% bonus and 6 top rank management were hired to help fix Hostess, but instead of fixing things, they would pocket the profits. The Union members took a $10 million concession for the last 10 yrs, the members voted on wage reduction, benefits reduction and no pension contribution....who is really screwing who here? Is this another bad batch of management like Consolidated Freight? Or better yet, Bain Capital?

Ask the more than 50,000 employees of Staples how bad Bain Capital is. I imagine this Thanksgiving they are thankful for a job.

Since you are so high on Bain Capital , why don't you tell us why they relocated a highly profitable Sensata Technologies to China? Why don't you ask the people of that town how they feel about Bain? This wasn't some company on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a growing, profitable company.

 

[vantexan]

Since you are so high on Bain Capital , why don't you tell us why they relocated a highly profitable Sensata Technologies to China? Why don't you ask the people of that town how they feel about Bain? This wasn't some company on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a growing, profitable company.

I could care less about Bain Capital, but I do care how liberals tried to smear Romney with misinformation about his "connection" to Sensata. As far as Bain and Staples, I'll use the same argument you used...you said we worry about 4 Americans killed when so many more were killed in Iraq. By that same reasoning you are attacking Bain over 170 jobs sent to China when Bain helped Staples become successful with over 50,000 employees. I don't have all the facts about Sensata but I bet you don't either. But a quick search on Google revealed that liberals claimed that Bain had replaced the American flag with a Chinese one at the plant in Illinois and yet the "proof" they offered was a stock photo of Sensata's plant in China. As far as shipping jobs to China goes, not thrilled with it at all. But the one sided view of Bain you present is irresponsible and disingenuous. And, as always, if one disagrees with you on anything then one is a rabid Republican ideologue. Sorry, I just like to poke holes in the hypocrisy out there, and most of the time that falls in the Democrats' camp. I've been critical of Republicans before, don't trust them at all with Social Security, but to agree with them on anything is to be labeled a far right ideologue. So I'm embracing that, mainly because I see Democrats determined to turn this country into a Western Europe Socialist State or run us into the ground trying. You don't seem to realize the terrible burden you are putting on future generations, and Republicans are the only impediment to your goals. So rant away, but I'll back the Repubs until they prove it more dangerous to back them instead of the Dems. And we are nowhere near that point.

 

[MAKAVELI]

Since you are so high on Bain Capital , why don't you tell us why they relocated a highly profitable Sensata Technologies to China? Why don't you ask the people of that town how they feel about Bain? This wasn't some company on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a growing, profitable company.

I could care less about Bain Capital, but I do care how liberals tried to smear Romney with misinformation about his "connection" to Sensata. As far as Bain and Staples, I'll use the same argument you used...you said we worry about 4 Americans killed when so many more were killed in Iraq. By that same reasoning you are attacking Bain over 170 jobs sent to China when Bain helped Staples become successful with over 50,000 employees. I don't have all the facts about Sensata but I bet you don't either. But a quick search on Google revealed that liberals claimed that Bain had replaced the American flag with a Chinese one at the plant in Illinois and yet the "proof" they offered was a stock photo of Sensata's plant in China. As far as shipping jobs to China goes, not thrilled with it at all. But the one sided view of Bain you present is irresponsible and disingenuous. And, as always, if one disagrees with you on anything then one is a rabid Republican ideologue. Sorry, I just like to poke holes in the hypocrisy out there, and most of the time that falls in the Democrats' camp. I've been critical of Republicans before, don't trust them at all with Social Security, but to agree with them on anything is to be labeled a far right ideologue. So I'm embracing that, mainly because I see Democrats determined to turn this country into a Western Europe Socialist State or run us into the ground trying. You don't seem to realize the terrible burden you are putting on future generations, and Republicans are the only impediment to your goals. So rant away, but I'll back the Repubs until they prove it more dangerous to back them instead of the Dems. And we are nowhere near that point.

This " burden" was started long before Obama. You act like the deficit happened overnight as soon as he took office. And its this corporate culture of profit anyway you can at the expense of the average citizen is at the heart of it. We are the largest consumers in the world but we dont make anything anymore. You can defend Bain all you want but the fact is they ship jobs overseas and that is un american and perpetuates the problems with the economy.

 

[Joe Nuno]

Since you are so high on Bain Capital , why don't you tell us why they relocated a highly profitable Sensata Technologies to China? Why don't you ask the people of that town how they feel about Bain? This wasn't some company on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a growing, profitable company.[/QUOTE

Do you not think Hostess was a profitable company too?
Of course it was, except management brought this company to the ground, you watch Hostess will be coming from the south (Mexico)...another outsource company

 

[vantexan]

This " burden" was started long before Obama. You act like the deficit happened overnight as soon as he took office. And its this corporate culture of profit anyway you can at the expense of the average citizen is at the heart of it. We are the largest consumers in the world but we dont make anything anymore. You can defend Bain all you want but the fact is they ship jobs overseas and that is un american and perpetuates the problems with the economy.

We make cars, jets, guns(!), and plenty of other things. Certainly not the manufacturing base we used to have. I've never said it happened overnight, only that Obama has exploded the debt. Bush ran up over 4 trillion in debt in 8 years, and until Obama got elected Bush was the biggest spender in history. Obama is at about 6 trillion in 4 years. And shows no real willingness to reign it in. What Republicans fear is a Cloward and Piven strategy that will overwhelm the country's safety net with runaway spending that will cause a crash. C and P were the 2 Columbia professors who were behind the near-bankrupting of New York City in I believe '74 or '75. The idea being if you bankrupt the system you can start over and build a more just society. They did it by convincing a well known black radical to sign up as many people as possible for every program New York offered the poor.

I've done my share of protesting on this forum, even offered a way to get back at the system to force businesses to be more generous to their employees. When push comes to shove no one is willing to do what I proposed and the system will continue to exploit the working man. Check out "Drop Out of Your 401k" for some very heated debate. The very lifeblood of the stock market is the 401k money of millions of workers pumped into it. Those quarterly meetings corporations have with Wall Street analysts are the big funds that manage 401ks demanding to know the what and why of whether they should invest their(our) funds by buying a company's stock. The corporations aren't trying to get them to invest directly into their companies. They want them to buy stock to drive up prices so that when CEO's and other corporate officers sell some of their own shares they can get a higher price. Especially important if one is exercising stock options. It's a symbiotic relationship between corporations and the big funds that feeds on 401k contributions. Want to know why your benefits and pay are squat? The corporations are trying to get your money by impressing the funds so in the end we contribute to the sorry state we are in. If everyone, heck if only a decent % refused to contribute until we started seeing better pay and benefits it would make a huge difference. I mean all companies, not just FedEx employees. But try to tell that to the average guy who thinks his 401k will make him rich and he'll say no way, you are crazy. So we do ourselves in and don't even realize it. When I mentioned this before I got screamed at by UPS guys who made good money when the market was good, especially since they are in a position to put the max contribution in. But this market is crap, except for the corporate and Wall Street honchos who benefit directly from our 401k money. Those of us who are eking out an existence can't contribute enough to really help ourselves, but notice how the corporations offer some matching funds to get us to contribute something. Does anyone really think they do that because they care about us?

 

[LTFedExer]

Do you not think Hostess was a profitable company too?
Of course it was, except management brought this company to the ground, you watch Hostess will be coming from the south (Mexico)...another outsource company

9 straight years of declining revenue....$1.43B of liabilities, $2B in unfunded pension obligations.

Read THIS

 

[MAKAVELI]

This " burden" was started long before Obama. You act like the deficit happened overnight as soon as he took office. And its this corporate culture of profit anyway you can at the expense of the average citizen is at the heart of it. We are the largest consumers in the world but we dont make anything anymore. You can defend Bain all you want but the fact is they ship jobs overseas and that is un american and perpetuates the problems with the economy.

We make cars, jets, guns(!), and plenty of other things. Certainly not the manufacturing base we used to have. I've never said it happened overnight, only that Obama has exploded the debt. Bush ran up over 4 trillion in debt in 8 years, and until Obama got elected Bush was the biggest spender in history. Obama is at about 6 trillion in 4 years. And shows no real willingness to reign it in. What Republicans fear is a Cloward and Piven strategy that will overwhelm the country's safety net with runaway spending that will cause a crash. C and P were the 2 Columbia professors who were behind the near-bankrupting of New York City in I believe '74 or '75. The idea being if you bankrupt the system you can start over and build a more just society. They did it by convincing a well known black radical to sign up as many people as possible for every program New York offered the poor.

I've done my share of protesting on this forum, even offered a way to get back at the system to force businesses to be more generous to their employees. When push comes to shove no one is willing to do what I proposed and the system will continue to exploit the working man. Check out "Drop Out of Your 401k" for some very heated debate. The very lifeblood of the stock market is the 401k money of millions of workers pumped into it. Those quarterly meetings corporations have with Wall Street analysts are the big funds that manage 401ks demanding to know the what and why of whether they should invest their(our) funds by buying a company's stock. The corporations aren't trying to get them to invest directly into their companies. They want them to buy stock to drive up prices so that when CEO's and other corporate officers sell some of their own shares they can get a higher price. Especially important if one is exercising stock options. It's a symbiotic relationship between corporations and the big funds that feeds on 401k contributions. Want to know why your benefits and pay are squat? The corporations are trying to get your money by impressing the funds so in the end we contribute to the sorry state we are in. If everyone, heck if only a decent % refused to contribute until we started seeing better pay and benefits it would make a huge difference. I mean all companies, not just FedEx employees. But try to tell that to the average guy who thinks his 401k will make him rich and he'll say no way, you are crazy. So we do ourselves in and don't even realize it. When I mentioned this before I got screamed at by UPS guys who made good money when the market was good, especially since they are in a position to put the max contribution in. But this market is crap, except for the corporate and Wall Street honchos who benefit directly from our 401k money. Those of us who are eking out an existence can't contribute enough to really help ourselves, but notice how the corporations offer some matching funds to get us to contribute something. Does anyone really think they do that because they care about us?

Do you think the deficit would be where it is if we never went into Iraq and went after Bin Laden 11 years ago?

 

[Lordtekk]

Do you think the deficit would be where it is if we never went into Iraq and went after Bin Laden 11 years ago?

By the way the deficit was more if you added those wars to it,they had an accounting trick where they funded the war with supplementals. It was never added to the budget hence only 4 trillion.

On Jan. 10, 2009, former Bush administration adviser Karl Rove wrote in the Washington Post that Democrats "will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years. (We checked his claim here.)

David Axelrod, chief adviser to President Barack Obama, fired back on Jan. 15 in Post that Rove had it all wrong and that Bush had been the big spender.

"The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus -- with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion," Axelrod wrote. "When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit -- and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade."

His point was that it was Bush, not Obama, who got the country in a financial mess. He said Bush approved big-ticket items during his tenure that included tax cuts, a new prescription drug benefit for the elderly, and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which allowed the government to spend up to $700 billion to shore up troubled assets and bolster various industries.

And now, Axelrod wrote, the Obama administration is stuck with the bill.

We wondered whether Axelrod's numbers were correct.

When we asked for his sources, the White House pointed us to several documents. The first was a 2002 report from the Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, that reported the 2000 federal budget ended with a $236 billion surplus. So Axelrod was right on that point.

The report provides an interesting trip down memory lane, when budget estimates were downright cheery: "The outlook for the federal budget over the next decade continues to be bright," the report said. "Assuming that current tax and spending policies are maintained, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that mounting federal revenues will continue to outstrip spending and produce growing budget surpluses for the next 10 years."

Yes, the word "bright" was in a budget estimate.

That meant big surpluses -- estimated to total about $5.6 trillion by 2011. So Axelrod was right on that, too.

Another cheery line: "Under current policies, total surpluses would accumulate to an estimated $2 trillion over the next five years and $5.6 trillion over the coming decade, and would be sufficient by 2006 to pay off all publicly held debt that is available for redemption."

The future didn't turn out like that, of course.

On Jan. 7, 2009, two weeks before Obama took office, the CBO reported the deficit was projected to be $1.2 trillion. The 10-year projection was estimated to be about $3.1 trillion. So Axelrod was slightly off on the 2009 deficit (he said $1.3 trillion) but substantially off on the 10-year projection (he said $8 trillion).

The White House said Axelrod's number was based on a budget overview published by the Obama administration shortly after Obama took office, when the 2009 deficit was estimated to be $1.5 trillion, totaling about $9 trillion over the next decade. The White House explained that the figure included the $787 billion economic stimulus package. But because Bush was not president when it was approved, they subtracted the appropriate portion of it for each year, to get $1.3 trillion and $8 trillion, respectively, that the Obama White House believed was approved under Bush.

Why the $5 trillion difference between the White House and the CBO's projections?

Josh Gordon, policy director for the Concord Coalition, said it has to do with fundamental approaches in how the two offices estimate the future. The CBO based its projections on the assumption that the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2010 and that a patch to fix the alternative minimum tax would expire, among other things. The White House does not; instead, it assumes that nothing changes in current law.

Gordon and another budget expert we spoke with, Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said they believe the White House approach is more realistic because it assumes current policy will continue.

"I think the president is correct to make the shift," said Riedl. "What current policy looks like makes more sense."

(However, Riedl disagrees with Axelrod's larger point, that Bush deserves the blame for the big deficit. "I'd argue that some of the TARP should be assigned to Obama," he said. There are only three parts of TARP that are losing money, he said, the auto company bailouts, AIG and the home loan program. Most of the auto bailouts and the home loan program were initiated by Obama, he said.)

Back to Axelrod's original claim. His overall point is correct that the government was enjoying a substantial surplus when Bush took office and had a big deficit when he departed.
Specifically, Axelrod is right about the surplus Bush began with, and the projected surplus at that point. Axelrod is very close on the deficit at the end of Bush's presidency, but there are two different ways to measure the 10-year projection when Bush left office. The CBO's estimate is $5 trillion lower than the White House numbers, though economists don't quibble with the White House methodology. So given that discussion, we'll take Axelrod down a notch to Mostly True.

Source Politifacts.

 

[bluehdmc]

Do you think the deficit would be where it is if we never went into Iraq and went after Bin Laden 11 years ago?

Maybe we would have saved a lot of money if we didn't go into Iraq, and spent that money on getting BinLaden. Probably would have spent less money and gotten him sooner. But Saddam threatened Bush's Daddy.

 

[DorkHead]

Maybe we would have saved a lot of money if we didn't go into Iraq, and spent that money on getting BinLaden. Probably would have spent less money and gotten him sooner. But Saddam threatened Bush's Daddy.

And there lies the big question. With all the intelligence information stating that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, WHY did go we go there and overthrow their government?

 

[bluehdmc]

And there lies the big question. With all the intelligence information stating that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, WHY did go we go there and overthrow their government?

Wasn't the original reason, "weapons of mass destruction"?

Then it became, "Freeing the Iraqi People from Tyranny".

 

[FedExRookie]

Some Mexican business man said he was considering purchasing the products to start making them.

 

[59 Dano]

Don't be fool by FedEx management that Hostess went out of business because of the union, the truth is The CEO of Hostess got a 300% bonus and 6 top rank management were hired to help fix Hostess, but instead of fixing things, they would pocket the profits.

How do you pocket the profit of a company that operates at a loss?

 

[59 Dano]

This " burden" was started long before Obama. You act like the deficit happened overnight as soon as he took office. And its this corporate culture of profit anyway you can at the expense of the average citizen is at the heart of it. We are the largest consumers in the world but we dont make anything anymore. You can defend Bain all you want but the fact is they ship jobs overseas and that is un american and perpetuates the problems with the economy.

Name a large manufacturing firm that doesn't have production facilities in other countries.

 

[59 Dano]

Do you not think Hostess was a profitable company too?
Of course it was, except management brought this company to the ground, you watch Hostess will be coming from the south (Mexico)...another outsource company

It was so profitable that it spent 5 of the last 8 years in bankruptcy.

 

[59 Dano]

And there lies the big question. With all the intelligence information stating that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, WHY did go we go there and overthrow their government?

We didn't overthrow him for alleged 9/11 involvement. We went in because intelligence sources from multiple nations indicated that he was developing WMD. I'm not sure how anyone managed to twist that into "We went into Iraq because Saddam was involved with 9/11."

 

[MAKAVELI]

And there lies the big question. With all the intelligence information stating that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, WHY did go we go there and overthrow their government?

We didn't overthrow him for alleged 9/11 involvement. We went in because intelligence sources from multiple nations indicated that he was developing WMD. I'm not sure how anyone managed to twist that into "We went into Iraq because Saddam was involved with 9/11."

Because the ones who twisted it were in the whitehouse. When Saddam was captured and no WMD were found the propaganda was that al-Qaeda was in Iraq and Saddam was working with them. Which was all proven wrong. Then the focus was " freeing the Iraqi people" Bush and his cronies lied so much that they couldn't keep up with the ever changing stories. Even Collin Powell regretted giving erroneous intelligence as the reasoning to invade Iraq. So you can try and twist the facts all you want. But it doesn't change them.