I'm hearing way too much whining from people like John Schnatter et al about what difficulties they find themselves in, now that Obummer's been made King of Fuckamericastan. Poor Papa; it's quite possible he'll be unable to afford the upkeep on his richly deserved 40-room house and personal golf course. To that we can add the increasing volume of grumbling from those accursed unions and the under-employed. Here's a shocker: I can't help but feel more inclined toward the people who're actually doing the work.
BTW - a brief aside: Papa John's stock has been dropping since his little public tantrum - down something like 9%. So lemme see.
9% of a company worth $1.09 Billion is $98,000,000.
Papa John's "Obamacare cost" = about $6,500,000.
Question: Why are stupid people like John Schnatter in charge of these things?
I've posted before about an American Working Class that continues to get beat down while the Owner/Investor Class fattens up by getting a shrinking Management Class to work ever harder to maintain the status quo (ie: a continuation of the siphoning upward of as much wealth and power as possible). And my only problem right this very second is that I can't find those posts, so maybe I just dreamed how great a thinker I am - not that my talking about the whole Class-Fuck thing makes me a great thinker in any case; shit,
everybody's talked about that one.
So any-old-way. I'm coming to realize that the overarching failure of US Government in the last 30 years is that they've done almost literally nothing to protect the American worker's standing as a major contributor to the success of American business - even while they've
said almost nothing except how great the American worker is. Really? If you love us so much, why do you treat us like such shit?
Here's CNN/Forbes trying to spin the death of Hostess Brands into a cautionary tale about what happens when "the unions" are all intractable and/or stuck in the 70s or whatever. It tries hard to do the Plenty-Of-Blame-To-Go-Around thing, but it's all about how the bad guy unions wouldn't let poor old Hostess
continue to poison Americans with food that isn't really food do what a good entrepreneurial business knows it should do in a truly moral free market universe - which of course is ship all the jobs to Mexico blah blah blah. And the kicker is that they use this one case to illustrate how nice it is for a Democrat Hedge Fund guy to try to help out and all, but he's just being too touchy-feely and the grownups need to step in to get it straightened out.
So far, in a courtroom near Manhattan and in a negotiating room in downtown Washington, they haven't come close, although a deal could happen even as you read this. The dramatis personaeare impressive: the Teamsters; two large hedge funds, Silver Point Capital and Monarch Alternative Capital; and the private-equity firm Ripplewood Holdings. In an acrimonious behind-the-scenes war -- refereed by a federal judge -- they wage hostilities over who will get what crumbs from a disintegrating corporate cookie; whether that business can and should be resuscitated; the degree to which fabulous pension plans are anachronistic; whether promises made in collective bargaining ought to be sacrosanct; and just how important it is to save 15,000 union jobs. "There aren't great options here," former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt told Fortune. Gephardt is now a lobbyist and consultant with connections to Hostess and the Teamsters. "People will have to pick the one that's a little bit better."
For me, Obama's whole tenure will be a ridiculous success if he does nothing else in the next four years but get our thinking turned around on how to bolster the fortunes of American labor while not flipping over into full-blown Protectionism.
