As I already admitted, I didn’t do any research to see if the management bore a substantial part of the responsibility for the problems Hostess is/was having. Perhaps I should have, as this article presents a pretty damning picture against the management:
Vulture capitalism — not unions — killed Twinkies
Hedge funds took profits and piled on millions in debt at Hostess. They created this bankruptcy, not unions
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/20/vulture_capitalism_not_unions_killed_twinkies/
I pretty much took sides against unions so feel obligated to present a post from the union perspective. Reading the article it does appear quite plain that this was a case of vulture capitalism at work here and while the union workers are now out of work, one of them put it this way:
… “Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in five years if I took their offer. It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.”
The whole article is interesting in a ‘how not to run a company’ point of view, that is, if you are interested in its long-term health. However, as regular reader(s) know, the average management doesn’t give a damn about the long-term health of the company and are in it pure and simple to rape and pillage and get their million-dollar parachutes leaving a devastated wasteland behind. One of the most interesting points of the article, though, is the media’s almost absolute focus on the ‘unreasonable unions’ rather than the miserable management that forced the company into this position. Nearly uniform reporting (including mine, if you care to dignify what I do with the moniker of ‘reporting’) took the view point that an unreasonable union was forcing a going-concern to go belly up. Presuming the facts reported in this article are true (once again, I am too lazy to investigate) it is unambiguous that the failure was all in the management, appointed, naturally, by the ‘vulture capitalist’ investors who all, just like how we all learned Bain capital operated, made out like bandits via their ‘management’ fees. That you have to go to an ultra progressive site like Salon to get any of this info (which, by rights, should be on the Wall Street Journal as a case study on how to drive a company into the ground) just shows you how clearly tilted our media is in favor of the oligarchy.
If I were a God fearing man I would exclaim “Thank God for the Internet”, but of course, I am a heathen polytheist who believes humans are the architects of their own future, so it is just with humble (yea right!) gratefulness that I acknowledge DARPA and their great invention.
Long live the Internet!
