Stop making stuff up. Hostess is going under due to corporate and union greed. Nothing more, nothing less. Please people, just read the history of Hostess that you can find through that thing, oh I think it’s called Google?

I spent about an hour or so last night researching Hostess’s internal problems that caused the downfall, a history that has spanned for more than a decade and none of those issues has anything to do with our government; in fact their problems have spanned over the rein of 3 Presidents so why skip the other two Presidents and just blame it on Obama?  Hard to believe I know!  I went into an entire discussion with this guy who I kept trying to tell him the same thing but he was so hellbent on it being “Obama’s fault” that  he was trying to convince me that  a union supporting Obama, foreign policy, the “Muslim brotherhood”, Hamas and Israel caused the downfall of the Twinkie. I can’t believe that there are people in this country that actually believe that.

But for those who are too lazy to Google it but keep spreading misinformation about it that Obamacare or Obama in general had to do with it, I’ll give you a really brief synopsis of why Hostess went down like a HoHo.

Hostess had filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and then again earlier this year 2012 and had already accumulated more than $1 billion in debt to its employees alone, not even including other debts & costs of production and just staying in business, while hostess only makes $2.5 billion. How can any business stay at full capacity while about half their revenue is nothing but debt; 97% of Hostess’ debt was nothing but employee and union related money.  But the CEO wasted no time giving himself a raise from $750k to more than $2.5million and his cronies from $330k to $660k a year for no reason at all. My guess is that once they saw the company had no way to recover, they cashed out with no intentions of reviving the company and that’s why they never met any of the union’s demands on the contract because they were letting the company die.  Hostess wanted the employees to work more hours, with less pay, and the whole nine-yards, so you see Hostess workers were kind of pushed into a corner to strike.  Meanwhile the union was doing dirt of their own, sucking the company dry probably with insane rates of raises, pensions, retirement plans, and benefits and then an untimely decision to strike when the company was already hurting. I’ve worked at a job with a union before so it would not surprise me at all that Hostess workers were getting overpaid and the company didn’t have the money to pay them as a result of not only of corporate corruption and the union, but also slack sales.

Slack sales resulted from people just not buying their products anymore along with too much competition that they couldn’t match up to, plain and simple.  I mean think about it, when’s the last time you have even bought a Hostess product?  I haven’t had one probably since I was a kid more than 15 years ago. Even so the grocery stores here don’t even carry Hostess products anyway.  There’s just no market for them.  People have stopped eating white bread in fact there have been entire documentaries about how Hostess White Wonder Bread is bad for you and contributes to child obesity so naturally people are not going to buy it anymore.  More Americans are eating healthy and there is nothing healthy about any of their products.  They did try a low calorie snack but 1 healthy snack when the other 99% of them are junk food isn’t helping much.  Also, since the company was near bankrupt, they couldn’t afford the technology to research on how to make healthier snacks.

So people there is no government conspiracy against the Twinkie.  It sounds to me that both Hostess and the union took advantage of the employees, knowing full well the company was a sinking ship and tried to take the money and run, although Hostess themselves were the real culprits and the union got stuck with the baggage but they probably could have found another method of negotiation if both sides had not tried to prove their points.  It’s a sad story about power on both sides.  The executives get paid anyway.  The union gets paid anyway.  And the lucrative Hostess items like Twinkie and Wonder Bread are likely to get bought by another company anyway so they will live too. The only  sad ending to this story is to the employees because now 18,500 of them are now out of a job in an already unstable economy.

Nowhere in this story does Obama fit in and even if Romney had been elected, the same thing would have happened.  So please people stop grasping for straws.

And that people voted for Obama just because they want “stuff”.  Then she goes on to tell me that she is married and has two kids … but hasn’t had health insurance in years because she can’t afford it.  Believe me, I am trying so hard to understand right-wing’s supporters’ methods of thinking, but most the time when they explain their reasoning , they either have this “what’s good for me is not good for you” attitude or it’s this whole subservience to the policies that got this country exactly where it is in the first place mentality. They even defend the right-wing to the point where they are attempting to justify policies to me that doesn’t even include them!  Some of them are even living out the exact problems that are plaguing many Americans, that Obama is fighting against, such as millions of Americans running around here with no healthcare.  How long are we suppose to wait on taking care of this healthcare problem?  How long do we keep it on the backburner?  How long has it already been on the backburner before politicians decided to do anything about it knowing full well this breach in the insured to uninsured was going to bust wide open?

At this point, universal healthcare or some kind of healthcare reform, should have happened after the Clinton administration when we had the surplus, but NOOOOO someone wanted to sling their dick over their shoulder, go to war and waste the money. Now we’re in a deficit and struggling to get the money we need to help our own people.  Other co-workers started ranting about other country’s national healthcare about how they suck, even though they have never lived there to even know, and saying that they have poor health conditions.  Jesus people, it’s not like the government is building new clinics and hospitals and sticking 3rd world doctors in them, morons.  We will have the same clinics and hospitals with the same doctors as before, just the policies are changing.

The prices for health insurance go up every year or so no matter who is in office,  so how long are we suppose to wait before we do something about it? There are about 48.6 million uninsured Americans right now.  Americans bitch and whine about the price tag for universal healthcare, but when there’s a war all of a sudden the money comes out the woodworks.  It’s like no one wants to spend money on their own country, they seem content on blowing other country’s  up. Do we wait until we have people dying in ER waiting rooms or people dying in their homes, etc?  Until we have an epidemic of the Bubonic Plague-like proportion because a handful of people couldn’t afford healthcare so they just walked around with it infecting everyone else?  Do we wait for some illegal to jump the border with a nasty bug that infects us all?  Or do we wait until there’s an outbreak of the super-flu that wipes out a small town?   Because that is exactly what is going to happen with the number of people running around without healthcare. No healthcare means you got people walking around with diseases and the last thing we need is for one to mutate and wipe out people.  Yes it does sound like something from a horror movie but it’s a very possible reality; it’s a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.

Left to the decision of Republicans, that is exactly what’s going to happen and they will not do anything about it and do what they do best, neglect the issue.  Neglect it until it explodes and becomes an epidemic just like they neglected the issues of Wall Street under the Bush administration until the crap busted wide open and America woke up the next morning to evaporated pensions, a balance of $.50 cents in their 401k’s, and a foreclosed sign on their porch.  I remember getting letters in the mail from 2 of the banks I had accounts with saying my accounts would be transferred to another bank because they were folding and were getting bought out; banks that now charge fees for their services mind you.  So when I see them say things like this, it makes me wonder if they have just  given up their dignity and submitted to this big business, plutocratic and oligarchic country, hoping that some way or somehow corporations, under their own vices, out of the kindness of their hearts, will just handover medical insurance to you and if not oh well or do they just love getting pistol-whipped by the wealthy?  Even when I was working for an employer it was only about $20 cheaper from individual health insurance; not a big difference.

As far as my co-worker, I don’t know if it’s her entire family with no insurance, probably because she also says she is in a single income family although she is married, but she is walking around with no health insurance because she cannot afford it. Do you not see something wrong with that?  Is this the new American patriotism?  To just neglect yourself because you don’t have the money to pay for it and thus walk around with no kind of medical insurance whatsoever but work 10 hours a day?  And if you ask for ONE thing, a.k.a. healthcare, you’re classified as wanting “stuff”?  If this IS the new America, then we need a better education system to make college part of our standard education system so everyone can go to college just like the Arab and Indian countries do, so we can make more money to feed the plutocrats while at the same time afford healthcare for ourselves.

But I guess it’s the American Way to just become an expendable pawn in this game to work hard for the plutocrats and spending your life doing it, and at the same time the money you earn that YOU worked for, once again just goes back into the hands of the plutocrats and then your kids are going to raised into a public school system that teaches them to be cooperative to the plutocrats and do the same thing in life? Well are you a human being or just a friggin Duracell battery because I don’t see much difference between the two. I mean unless you like being created predestined to never get ahead and just be drained by the plutocrats of everything you work hard for, and serving no other function in life.   Sorry, I value myself much more than that and I am not  going to continue to let the divide between the have’s and have not’s continue.

The 1% seems to have forgotten that they made their money off the sweat of the 99%’s backs.  Sorry plutocratic America.  We’re hurting out here so we’re taking some of it back.

I say let ’em; no sweat off my brow whatsoever.  In case you live under a rock, most if not all the states, have petitions on the White House web site to “peacefully” secede from the United States.  I live in Virginia in which there was a petition to secede from the U.S. … hello excuse me?  I am not seceding from anything.  I am not leaving my life behind because a few butt-hurt Tea Bagging pricks are mad that their candidate didn’t win the election.  If you want to secede from the U.S. then you pack your bags and gtfo; no one is stopping you.  Don’t let the Constitution hit you in the ass on your way out.  No matter how boring it is, I am still proud of my state and country through the good and the bad.  I tolerated Bush; I didn’t like him, but you didn’t see me or anyone else crying about they wanted to leave the Union.  No we all sucked it up and stuck through the fail.

Now mind you, nobody wanted to secede from the United States when Bush destroyed our economy.  Nobody wanted to secede from the United States when Bush set off on his witch hunt over weapons of mass destruction that were never found because they never existed in the first place, killing thousands in a fake war. Nobody wanted to secede from the United States, when Bush was making this country go into ginormous debt.  And where were the Tea Baggers through all this?  They were nowhere to be found because they were convenient and comfortable with all of it including starting a war based on emotions.

So now we have a President who wants to invest in our country and put a system in place designed for the future, to help those who are struggling and ignoring the fact that our President decreased our taxes at the beginning of his first term AND delivered Obama’s head on a silver platter AND saved our auto industry which would not exist today if he hadn’t AND provided immediate support for Hurricane Sandy victims AND getting new green jobs on the market so we can live cleaner for the future AND getting ways for us not to depend on foreign oil … and all some ungrateful American people can say is now they want to leave the United States?

This is all because the man is black; nothing more, nothing less.  All that other crap about Obamacare, taxes, welfare (of which I can guarantee there are thousands of Tea Baggers on) and everything else is just an excuse to cover up the REAL reason because taxes have been going up since America was created, welfare has been in the U.S. since the early 1800s government and welfare has been a constant argument since it was created in the 1930s.  People are scared of Obamacare because it is new, BUT at the same time we cannot continue health insurance on the same road because the number of uninsured people walking around is just going up and up every year because insurance is too expensive for everyone to pay for; we can’t continue on that route or we’re going to have insurance only the wealthy can afford.  The only reason they are against Obam is because he’s brown and the racists truly believe if he’s not white, then he’s not right.  They do not trust the country in the hands of a black man, despite his credentials.   If Obama were white it would be business as usual in the United States just like it was business as usual when Bush was raping it.  Sure there would have been a little protesting here and there, but it would not nowhere of this extent.  Obama could be the Pope himself and they would still believe he’s stupid.  They seem to believe that the color of one’s skin is a measure of one’s intelligence and character, even though he’s been in the government most his adult life, they believe he is incompetent. I see we still have white Americans who haven’t learned a  thing from history and they never will; we can only hope they die off and they haven’t poisoned too many of their children with their disease.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some Tea Party members that are truly honest people who just don’t agree with Obama’s politics and that’s cool, those are not the people who piss me off because they have an intelligent, logical argument against the President that they are entitled to, but  then there is another side to the Tea Party. A strong, dark lot of them, reminiscent of the 1950s, KKK, Neo-Nazis and other hate groups, and who are extreme  Christians and/or racists who have already shown that they will not stop by any means to stir things up and sabotage this country just to turn people against Obama. I would feel comfortable betting that the people who started the secession petitions were Tea Baggers.  In fact, a few of the secession petitions were created by the same person and they didn’t even reside in the state in which they created the secession petition for. The Tea Baggers preyed off of people’s emotions, bigotry and hate and turned it into a movement.   And we all know from history that religious driven hate is the worst hate of any kind on the planet because they feel they were “chosen” and it is their “divine” and “god-given” duty to become their god’s “hand of retribution” to protect something.  I am not talking about the civilized Tea Party members, I am talking about the handful of radical ones and personally, I believe those handful of radicals are just a stone’s throw from becoming home-grown terrorists. I mean seriously, you don’t see Mexican hate groups, Black hate groups, Asian hate groups etc, creating organizations across the country and having hate rallies; you see only the white people doing this.  Unfortunately, THESE particular radical white people are derived from centuries of hate that carried down through the generations, which white Americans that squashed the racist tradition at some point, never dealt with .  They just allowed them to fester and grow.  These particular white Americans,  never came to face their demons and now this is the white trash we are left to deal with in 2012.

By the way I know the secession would never happen in the first place in any of the states because just as there are people who want to secede there’s to be millions times more people who will not want to secede, so I know this will not happen.  But it’s just the audacity of some people who still haven’t gotten over the race card. Build a bridge and get over it.  You guys are the ones who are dividing this country and will make this country fall, not President Obama.

America herself will not survive in the 21st century unless she comes to tap into the diversity that is her’s and stop pursuing this kind of divisive policy. This is more of a threat to the future of America than anything ever posed by the old USSR. We will explode from within unless we all understand we have a stake in this system and that’s the compelling issue; not whether we like each other, not whether we love each other, not whether it ever started out right, not whether we should be angry with anybody. We won’t survive unless we understand we’re in it together.

– Mayor of Washington D.C. Sharon Pratt Kelly, The Issue is Race, 1992

On Monday, in Mississippi, there may be a teacher who’s going to have the worst case of The Monday’s ever recorded in human history.  On The Grio yesterday there was a comment made by a reader that was blatantly obvious was racist and full of hate.  Which is fine because The Grio is full of content like that from other users and people are certainly entitled to their opinions, however, there was a comment made by a single person who ignorantly had their Facebook profile attached to their The Grio profile and then posted something racist which was fine if you want to live your life balls to the wall … had she not also revealed her occupation.  So not only could everyone see her whole name but also her occupation and like a jackass, where she worked.  A 6th grade middle school teacher in Mississippi.  She made her Facebook profile public where you could see the other racist remarks she has made but when I went back to her site today, those remarks had also been deleted.

If the font is too small click the image to enlarge it

Now, a lot of people of all races, saw the comment and reported her to the school and knowing that she would probably erase the comment now that people said they reported her, of course I screenshot it; you cannot escape the Internet once you’ve posted to it. That is why I’ve always said be careful what you say on the Internet because you cannot erase it; ever. I went back to the article this morning and saw that she had indeed deleted her comment; but the damage had already been done because the post had already been up 8 hours at the time that I had seen it, so I’m sure that is more than plenty of time for the Internet to do it’s worst.

I did confirm said person is a 6th grade Language Arts & Reading teacher at a middle school.  It is located in Mississippi and when looking at their school pictures, it looks like there is an equal both White and Black population of students, so surely she has some Black students in her class; probably a lot. Now knowing this, putting race aside, how would one feel if you knew for a fact that your kid’s Language Arts teacher, is sitting there smiling in your face, telling you about your kid’s grades, but you knew she thought you and your kid was “an ape” and “a slave” and “too stupid” and that “evolution has not got to your race” as she says?  I don’t know about anyone else, but her words about my kid’s grades would not hold a weight of grain to me, because I would feel she has personal issues to deal with on her own, how do I know my kid isn’t being singled out from the other students, or ignored, because she hates him in addition, I would feel like she doesn’t need to be a teacher.

Sure this is a country with free speech, however free speech also comes with a level of responsibility and with that neglect in responsibility comes consequences.  She is totally entitled to her opinion of Black people no matter how wrong it is, but there is a degree of twistedness to it that the position of authority she is holding, does not match the level of responsibility that it takes; in other words, she’s a hypocrite.  You’re talking the talk but not walking the walk.  At the degree of conviction that the teacher said these remarks, it’s hard to wonder if she also spreads this hatred whether knowingly or subconsciously, to her students; it would be hard to believe that she doesn’t and even much less her kids if those are her kids in the picture.  As far as I am concerned, you can be racist all you want, it’s your entitlement, but don’t hold positions of authority working with the people you hate so much; especially not innocent children who have the right to develop their own opinions about the world through growing up, rather than being influenced by another adult’s completely wrong perceptions, thus continuing the vicious cycle that this county of the United States was built on but we are working so hard to eradicate.

We’ve worked so hard to accept our differences and work together as Americans, we don’t need adults such as this “teacher” throwing us back 80 years, unraveling all that we have worked so hard to achieve what makes this  country so great for all to live.  We are ALL immigrants here, except the indigenous Indians, so why can’t we all just get along.  For a language arts and reading teacher, I guess she forgot to “read” that part.

I love that my President is human & genuine and I trust that he’ll get this country back on its feet.  I feel that he believes alot in this country and in us, and I am proud that I voted for him.  It his his motivation that he also believes in us which makes us come together as Americans and fix what is broken.  We CANNOT let America’s history of bad blood of hatred, racism and ignorance tear us apart or we shall surely fail.