The Moment You've Waited For! Imitation Food Returns to Store Shelves!

If you stocked your freezer to preserve this sad reminder of nutritionless food and lost sleep envisioning a future without Twinkies, your anxiety is over!

Start the countdown! Twinkies return to shelves July 15

By Chris Isidore @CNNMoneyJune 24, 2013


Twinkies will return to store shelves on July 15.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

The announcement was made by Daren Metropoulos, principal of Metropoulos & Co., one of the two companies that bought the rights to Twinkies and other snack brands from the bankrupt Hostess Brands earlier this year.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/news/companies/twinkies-return/

Hostess: The Case Of The Missing Wages

Betrayal Without Remedy: The Case Of The Missing Wages

By Thomas Riggins

15 December, 2012
Countercurrents.org

Monday's Wall Street Journal tell's the story of how Hostess Brands, Inc., took its workers wages and used them to cover its own expenses ("Hostess Maneuver Deprived Pension" WSJ 12-10-12).

Hostess Brands (famous for Twinkies and Wonder Bread) has gone out of business after a lengthy bankruptcy process. During this process information has come out about how corporations can break their contracts with and steal from, their workers and yet escape prosecution for their actions. It is an object lesson on how the laws are written to benefit private property and capitalists at the expense of working people who are often denied equal protection.

Here is what Hostess did. It signed contracts with workers in which it was agreed that part of their wages would be diverted from their paychecks and be invested in their pensions. This was a contribution made by the workers independently of the contractual payments made to the pension funds by the company.

In 2011, due to the company's financial problems, Hostess announced that it would end payments to the pension funds. OK, that is one problem for the unions to deal with. But what happened to the worker's wages that Hostess was supposed to be putting into the funds? These wages were not payments coming out of the pockets of Hostess per se.

Well, Hostess did not start to include these payments in the worker's paychecks. Instead they just kept their wages for the company and used them to pay for their own expenses. During an interview the new CEO, brought in to oversee the liquidation of the company, said this was "terrible" but , "I think it's like a lot of things in this case. It's not a good situation to have." As to getting the money back-- C'est la vie.

The WSJ reports that "experts" say that since the money didn't come "directly" from the workers [?] no federal laws were violated ("probably"). Huh! The company says they will put the wages I earned into X and they divert it to Z and since I didn't have it listed as "deducted" from my paycheck it didn't come "directly" from me therefore it is really theirs!

The WSJ quoted a lawyer not involved in the case who said, "It's what lawyers call betrayal without remedy. It's sad, but that stuff does happen, unfortunately." Why then would any union sign contracts with companies to co-contribute to their pension funds and allow the companies to oversee the payments if they can just keep them and the workers are "without remedy." Is this gaping hole in federal law being addressed?

This betrayal only affected one of two major unions at Hostess: the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and Grain Millers International Union. The Teamsters did not have this kind of arrangement with the company. The baker's union did because "This local was very aggressive about saving for the future," according to a union officer. This is just another example of the truth of the socialist adage that any future for workers under capitalism is problematic.

Update 1: The Kansas City Star reported on 12-10-12 that the National Labor Relations Board has found "that Hostess had failed to bargain collectively and in good faith with a union."

Update 2: Hostess Brands issued the following statement on 12-11-12: “At no time were these pension contributions paid as wages, so no funds were ever ‘deducted from paychecks,’ as one news outlet erroneously reported. Hostess Brands has at all times continued to pay its union employees' current wages in full compliance with its collective bargaining agreements.''

This statement from Hostess is a new low in the metaphysics of mendacity: since the wages were not first paid then deducted but went directly to the pension funds they were not wages. Caveat faber.

Thomas Riggins is the associate editor of Political Affairs and also writes for People's World, both online.

 

http://www.countercurrents.org/riggins151212.htm

Putting reality in perspective

A family in Gaza. (photo: Reuters)

 

No Twinkies Please, We're Dying

By Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle

22 November 12

urely you must see. Surely you must understand. Don't you know rockets are falling all over Gaza and Israel? Do you not read that more than 100 people have died already in brutal and insidious fighting that's been going on since God was knee-high to a bogus misconception?

 

Jesus Christ, quit whining about Twinkies already. Stop anonymous commenting about your little pet peeve social issue tech glitch culture itch fashion bitch. You do not have it so bad. You have never, comparatively speaking and with the proper sort of lens in place, had it so bad.

 

Don't you understand the planet is ever at peril? Surely you're aware that we've had 332 straight months that were warmer than average, and even the notoriously heartless World Bank is a nervous wreck about it?

 

Surely you know diseases and wars are ravaging Africa, that factory pollution in China is causing cancer rates to skyrocket, that it is just slightly pathetic that American teenage girls hate on each other so violently on Facebook, when a 14-year-old girl in Pakistan just got shot in the face for suggesting that teenage girls are actually human in the first place?

 

You gotta keep it in check. Should there be a note of shame attached to any CEO bitching about health care reform by threatening to add eight cents to the price of barely edible chain pizzas? Maybe.

 

Should anyone feel a little stupid spending two hours writing raging diatribes about how the iPad Mini does not having a Retina display? Probably. Are you upset that someone who has better taste than you dared to suggest that "Twilight" is unwatchable swill best tolerated while completely smashed drunk? Hush now. First World problems are no problems at all.

 

Or are they? See, there is a strange relativity clause in American culture whereby we, being a comparatively isolated social and ideological landmass, being wildly solipsistic, being all up in our own s-t every single day because we think we're the noblest and greatest country that ever was, when, historically speaking, we're really more like 137th, think we have serious troubles. Life-threatening troubles. Dead-serious troubles.

 

And in some ways, we do. Our economy is struggling. People are going without jobs for a long periods of time. Health care is still a mess. Old white guys are running more scared than ever.

 

Obesity is a plague. Young, insipidly kowtowing Republicans still claim they don't know how old the Earth actually is. Black Friday is now Black Thursday Evening, beginning right after Thanksgiving dinner, where you gave thanks for not getting trampled to death by rabid shoppers at Walmart trying to save 20 bucks on a crappy $69 Blu-ray player that will quickly find its way into a local landfill you have no idea exists but which is right now poisoning the groundwater and giving your kids cancer because we have no concept of what's really going on, and never really did, and that's just the way the PTB at monoliths like Walmart like it. See? Now that's a problem.

 

Do you ever pause to collect yourself, widen your personal lens, compare your ills to the horrors of the world? Do you ever take a deep breath and realize it's not really so bad, that life is a messy chaotic funhouse of beautiful, nonsensical madness it's just all kinds of freakish joy that we get to enjoy the various polarities, horrors and orgasms of it all for such a short ride in the first place?

 

Do you express any fundamental awe every morning that you are fed, clothed, warm and you have instant and immediate access to clean water, good coffee, endless love, happy dogs, fine cameras, good porn, sweaty yoga, free books, decent pens, excellent stemware, stretch denim and reading this very column on wildly advanced technology that's pretty much indistinguishable from magic?

 

Of course you do. Anyone with a functioning soul knows that reality checks are always helpful things, that in moments of giving thanks and bowing before giant platters of turkey meat, stuffing, wine and excess everything, slapping awake one's tired and spoiled-rotten perspective is essential to understanding just how good you've got it.

 

So let us be clear: The silly outcry over the potential end of Twinkies? Amusing and ironic. Genuine rage and tears over the possible end of one of humanity's most disgusting foods? Disturbing and sad.

 

These are not real problems. These are only irritating little beach balls of white noise to toss about and squeal. These are tiny intellectual cysts, spiritual rashes on the pinkie toe of your id. You know, just like most problems.

 

Count your blessings, they say. But that doesn't feel quite right anymore. In the end days of 2012, in the age of a priori cynicism and myopia, we must modify the maxim: Understand that you have blessings in the first place, work toward cultivating more, and lick the hell out of the ones you have like a divine sucker made of sunlight and flowerspit and God. Better?

 

Oh, and it wouldn't kill you to give a bunch of them away. For free. Blessings are sort of infinite that way.

 

Not that I want you to feel guilty. This is not about shaming ourselves into silence for caring too much about seemingly mundane, pointless effluvia. Far from it.

 

It is more about calibration, fine tuning the spiritual filter. All problems, illnesses, joys, bouts of sadness over even the most commonplace of things, these have a decidedly potent charge, a valid role to play. All issues of the day, whether it is the death of a relative, a bloody war in a faraway land, all the way on down to feeling upset that one of the cast of "Real Housewives" might reduce her breast implants, these all have a spot on the continuum.

 

But as the wise ones say, you gotta discern. You gotta choose wisely. What constitutes a real problem? What is true tragedy? This is where the trouble starts. This is the decidedly American affliction. We confuse actual issues of our soul's health and path with bogus issues of pop culture, fashion, politics, fickle emotional fluff. We swap in emotional and ideological bullsh-t for deep spiritual truth.

 

Why? Because truth is hard. Because bowing down and offering real gratitude, seeing life, your world, the Self for what they really are, this means the ego has to shut the hell up for a few seconds. It really hates that.

 

Here's the thing: Gratitude is not necessarily about offering thanks that you are not in as much pain as someone else, or that you're happy you're not more sick, more miserable or more dead right now. It is maybe about offering thanks in the form of healing, support and love to those who are in pain, in darkness, locked into some false and ugly belief, anywhere and everywhere. As the New Age kids say, gratitude means upping the vibration in the world. No wallowing. No simpering. Be grateful you get to choose. Between high and low, between hate and love, between ignorance and insight.

 

But most of all, be grateful you are, with any luck and more than a hint of grace, wise enough to know the difference.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/11/20/no-twinkies-please/

Hostess: What will you believe?

Keith Olbermann Fan Page shared The Peoples Boycott's photo.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=496775837023433&set=a.163732533661100.33843.162657530435267&type=1&theater

Hostess

American Women United shared Bill Maher Unofficial Fanpage's photo.

Hostess: Don't Blame Labor for Management Incompetence!

From: John M. Walsh This IS what's wrong with America-as the company was preparing to file for bankruptcy earlier this year, the then CEO of Hostess was awarded a 300 percent raise (from approximately $750,000 to $2,550,000) and at least nine other top executives of the company received massive pay raises. One such executive received a pay increase from $500,000 to $900,000 and another received one taking his salary from $375,000 to $656,256.

Republican Bigotry Hate Fear Lies and Distortion's photo.

Hostess Salaries

From: Keith Olbermann Fan Page

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Hostess-Brands-Salaries-E329177.htm

Here is a list of average salaries enjoyed by Hostess employees.

Hostess: Don't blame labor for piss-poor management

At least tell the truth --

Thomas Connors shared The Blue, the Proud, the Liberal Corps's photo.

 

Hostess Brands is in bankruptcy for the second time in eight years. Since the first bankruptcy in 2004, BCTGM members across the country have taken dramatic wage and benefit concessions and watched as 21 Hostess plants were shut down and thousands of jobs were lost. At the time of the first bankruptcy, Hostess workers were assured by management that money saved via concessions and plant closings would help make the company stronger, more vibrant and more competitive.

Six CEOs in 10 years have failed to turn the company around. Since 2001, plants were closed and thousands of workers laid off, yet the company still isn't viable. Now, 18,000 workers will lose their jobs.

 These new infographics show the pattern of mismanagement over the years and the amount of debt Hostess Brands owes to lease obligations, trade creditors, accrued workers' compensation liabilities and more.
http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Organizing-Bargaining/Hostess-Pattern-of-Mismanagement-and-Debt-Caused-Its-Collapse

Hostess Blames Union For Bankruptcy After Tripling CEO’s Pay

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Nov 16, 2012

 

Today, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet desert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be shuttering after more than eighty years of production.

But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.
At the time, creditors warned that the decision signaled an attempt to “sidestep” bankruptcy rules, potentially as a means for trying to keep the executive at a failing company. The Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers International Union pointed this out in their written reaction to the news that the business is closing:

 

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/11/16/1203151/why-unions-dont-shoulder-the-blame-for-hostesss-downfall/

The Truth About Hostess

From: Occupy Austin and 3 others shared AFL-CIO's photo.

Want the real scoop on the Hostess story?

While Hostess management wants to blame BCTGM International Union members for its demise, the truth is that had it not been for the valiant efforts of BCTGM members over the last 8 years, including accepting significant wage and benefit concessions after the first bankruptcy, this company would have gone out of business long ago.

Please SHARE to spread the truth.