No Twinkies For You

I'm a fan of snack cakes.  I absolutely love those horribly-bad-for-you, filled with sugar and a bunch of other ingredients not found in nature, sugar rush gems.  I always heard, and believed that there were two things on planet earth that could survive a nuclear holocaust; cockroaches and Twinkies.  Sadly, my beloved Twinkies couldn't survive the insanity that is the Hostess corporation.  When a product that is so deeply ingrained into the American pop culture dies, there are plenty of fingers pointing in every direction assigning blame.  

Farewell, beloved snack cake...

In the same way I like snack cakes that are ridiculously bad for my health, I also try to keep up with conservative news outlets (read, Fox "News" and Rushie).  That isn't very good for my mental health, but it's hard to refute an argument if you don't know what it is your opponent is arguing.  So I checked out their take on the Hostess Bakeries debacle and I was left with one question:  With Rush Limbaugh on the right, and Bill Maher on the left--how on Earth are the makers of Twinkies bankrupt?  

The sheer challenge of maintaining Limbaugh's enormous girth, coupled with Maher's open love of weed should be enough of a bipartisan force to keep Hostess in business for at least another 15 years. Two states have legalized pot and the Ding-Dong bakery is out of business?  How did this happen?

Fox "News" would have you believe that greedy workers who make around $20 an hour and get adequate benefits are to blame.  Any worker that has the audacity to sign up with a union is an enemy of free enterprise and are bankrupting good businesses.  What the bastion of "fair and balanced" isn't going to tell you is that since the late 1990's until now, the income of the bottom fifth of wage earners has decreased by about 6%, while the income for the top fifth of wage earners has increased by 14%.  

In the case of Hostess, while management was asking union workers to take pay cuts and decreases in benefits, they gave themselves huge pay raises.  There's something seriously wrong with this picture.  In the real world, where most of us live, we get raises based on work performance.  We do a good job, presumably we get a pay raise.  Most raises are between 10 cents to 50 cents an hour.  The bosses at Hostess tripled their pay while the company crashed and burned around them--while they asked the guy making twenty bucks an hour to get by with less.  

These are the same people who are trying their level best to avoid paying more taxes, while asking you to pay a little more to support the country and let me tell you, without some intervention things are not going to magically change.  These greedy jack-asses are not going to wake up one morning in their palatial estates and say, "You know what, I have enough money--let's give some more to the people who work for me."  That is never, ever going to happen.  For them, they will never have enough money and they don't care if you're starving in the street.  That is your problem. It's not their fault, it's your fault because America is the land of opportunity and if you only worked harder you could be as rich as they are.  

The income gap in this country is a much bigger problem than the budget deficit and no one is talking about it, nor are they going to unless we force them to.  Whether we like it or not, the people who represent us, as a rule, make a hell of a lot more money than we do.  Self preservation is instinctual.  They will protect their own financial interests first if we let them. If we want Congress to represent our interests we're going to have to make it a priority for them, because they're never going to do it themselves.  The income disparity is going to keep growing and growing until the country hits the tipping point where the other 95% of us can't afford to buy even cheap Wal-Mart crap and the entire economy is going to crumble under its own weight.  The CEO's of Hostess don't shop at Wal-Mart.  Neither do the CEO's of Wal-Mart for that matter.

The truth is that we should all be rioting in the streets demanding fair pay and living wages.  We should be screaming at the top of our lungs for affordable health care and even a fraction of the benefits that the CEO's of Fortune 500 companies enjoy.  Yet, we are not.  Our apathy enables their way of life and destroys our own future and the future of our kids and grand kids.  If we don't stand up for ourselves, no one else will.  If we don't do it soon, no one will be able to afford a Twinkie even if they are still around to enjoy.