Hostess Executives’ Earnings Revealed as They Blame Bakery Workers for Company’s Demise

Twinkie workers already suffered pay cuts when
management blamed them for the company's
demise. (Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

Executives continue to point the finger at 'employee greed' while trying to collect almost $2 million in bonuses for themselves.

By now everyone’s heard much about  the demise of Twinkie-maker and sugar-enabler, Hostess Brands. This week, a bankruptcy court granted permission to the company to initiate the selling of its assets, a move that punctuates 10 years of economic decline for the company. And though executives like CEO Greg Rayburn have been quick to blame the bakers' union in particular for its financial difficulties, recently revealed numbers about executives' money management choices tell a different story.

According to WSJ, in 2011 when the company was mired in almost a billion dollar debt, then-CEO Brian Driscoll tripled his own salary, while other top executives received 35-80% raises as well. Creditors griped that it was the company's way of "side-stepping" bankruptcy laws. Though Driscoll was replaced by Rayburn earlier this year, workers complain that this type of money mismanagement was par for the course at the snack manufacturer.

As if trying to prove that fact, the Washington Post reports that this week the company not only asked the bankruptcy court for permission to immediately liquidate 15,000 factory workers’ jobs, but also for permission to grant its current executive board $1.75 million in bonuses.

In contrast, according to Reuters,  full-time bakers, including those who've been at the company for decades, were as of late, making $35,000 per year (with overtime), which was down from the $45,000 they were making five years prior.     READ MORE

The Hitler gun control lie

Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong

By Alex Seitz-Wald

This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.

The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”
And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.    READ MORE

'Stand Your Ground' Repeal Bill Filed

Rep. Alan Williams | Credit: myfloridahouse.gov

By: Margie Menzel News Service of Florida | Posted: January 11, 2013 3:55 AM

    The controversial "stand your ground" self-defense law would be repealed under a bill filed this week by a House Democrat.

The law, which allows those who feel threatened to shoot back at assailants out in public, seized the national spotlight last year with the February shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford.

Rep. Alan Williams, D-Tallahassee, filed the measure (HB 4009) on Wednesday.

The death of the unarmed 17-year-old Martin at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer under disputed circumstances raised questions about when and where Florida residents are allowed to shoot each other in light of the law, which says force can be met with force with no duty to first retreat.
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Men tote rifles around town to 'educate'

The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck

The online peanut gallery can get you so riled up that your ability to reason goes out the window, a new study finds.

—By Chris Mooney

| Thu Jan. 10, 2013 3:06 AM PST

 

Everybody who's written or blogged about climate change on a prominent website (or, even worse, spoken about it on YouTube) knows the drill. Shortly after you post, the menagerie of trolls arrives. They're predominantly climate deniers, and they start in immediately arguing over the content and attacking the science—sometimes by slinging insults and even occasional obscenities. To cite a recent example:

What part of "we haven't warmed any in 16 years" don't you understand? Heh. "Cherry-picking" as defined by you alarmists: any time period selected containing data that refutes your hysterical hypothesis. Can be any length of time from 4 billion years to one hour. Fuck off, little man!

It was reasonably obvious already that these folks were doing nothing good for the public's understanding of the science of climate change (to say nothing of their own comprehension). But now there's actual evidence to back this idea up.    READ MORE
 

Are Big Cities More Dangerous Than Small Ones?

—By Kevin Drum

| Fri Jan. 11, 2013 3:01 AM PST

 

Are big cities more dangerous than small ones? Of course they are. This is so obvious that it's not even a question most people would think of asking.

And yet, if you'll bear with me for a bit, it turns out there's more of a mystery here than you might think. In 1996, for example, Ed Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote wrote a paper trying to figure out why there's more crime in big cities. They came up with a couple of reasons. First, there's more valuable stuff to steal in big cities, so robbery is more profitable. Second, it's easier to be anonymous. If you mug someone in Mayberry, there's a good chance your victim will recognize you and report the crime. Beyond that they threw up their hands, suggesting that perhaps the rest of the difference might be due to the fact that families are less intact in big cities. But even after running batteries of statistical tests, they were still left scratching their heads. Sure, there are more broken families in big cities, but that "still leaves unanswered the question of why this variable is so important in leading to criminal behavior." What's more, "the results on higher benefit levels and lower arrest rates are intriguing but also not entirely satisfying."

Well, if that's not satisfying—and it isn't—how about an answer out of left field? Maybe the real answer is that big cities aren't much more dangerous than small ones. Let me explain.
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Powerful Tea Party Group's Internal Docs Leak—Read Them Here

Right Wing 'Astroturf'  Org.

FreedomWorks bills itself as a grassroots outfit, but it's bankrolled mostly by big-money donors.

—By Andy Kroll

| Fri Jan. 4, 2013 3:02 AM PST

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This story has been updated. Click here for the latest.

FreedomWorks, the national conservative group that helped launch the tea party movement, sells itself as a genuine grassroots operation, and for years it has battled accusations of "astroturfing"—posing as a populist organization while doing the bidding of big-money donors. Yet internal documents obtained by Mother Jones show that FreedomWorks has indeed become dependent on wealthy individual donors to finance its growing operation.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Richard Stephenson, a reclusive millionaire banker and FreedomWorks board member, and members of his family funneled $12 million in October through two newly created Tennessee corporations to FreedomWorks' super-PAC, which used these funds to support tea party candidates in November's elections. The revelation that a corporate bigwig like Stephenson, who founded the Cancer Treatment Centers of America and chairs its board, was responsible for more than half of the FreedomWorks super-PAC's haul in 2012 undercuts the group's grassroots image and hands ammunition to critics who say FreedomWorks does the bidding of rich conservative donors.
   READ MORE