John Nichols | The Nation

Courtesy: Kylie Hennagin/KOMU

What happens when vulture capitalism ruins a great American company?

The vultures blame the workers.

The vultures blame the union.

And vapid media outlets report the lie as “news.”

That’s what’s happening with the meltdown of Hostess Brands Inc.

Americans are being told that they won’t get their Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos because the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ran the company into the ground.

But the union and the 5,600 Hostess workers represented by the union did not create the crisis that led the company’s incompetent managers to announce plans to shutter it.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for more pay.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for more benefits.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for better pensions.

The union and its members had a long history of working with the company to try to keep it viable. They had made wage and benefit concessions to keep the company viable. They adjusted to new technologies, new demands.

They took deep layoffs—20 percent of the workforce—and kept showing up for work even as plants were closed.

They kept working even as the company stopped making payment to their pension fund more than a year ago.

The workers did not squeeze the filling out of Hostess.

Hostess was smashed by vulture capitalists—“a management team that,” in the words of economist Dean Baker, “shows little competence and is rapidly stuffing its pockets at the company’s expense.”

Even as the company struggled, the ten top Hostes executives pocketed increasingly lavish compensation packages. The Hostess CEO who demanded some of the deepest cuts from workers engineered a 300 percent increase in his compensation package.

“Wall Street investors first came onto the scene with Hostess about a decade ago, purchasing the company and then loading it with debt. All the while, its executives talked of investments in new equipment, new research and new delivery trucks, but those improvements never materialized,” explains AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

“Instead, the executives planned to give themselves bonuses and demanded pay cuts and benefit cuts from the workers, who haven’t had a raise in eight years,” said the AFL-CIO head. “In 2011, Hostess earned profits of more than $2.5 billion but ended the year with a loss of $341 million as it struggled to pay the interest on $1 billion in debt. This year, the company sought bankruptcy protection, the second time in eight years. Still, the CEO who brought on the latest bankruptcy got a raise while Hostess demanded that its workers accept a 30 percent pay and benefits cut.”

When BCTGM workers struck Hostess, they did not do so casually.

They were challenging Bain-style abuses by a private-equity group—Ripplewood Holdings—that had proven its incompetence and yet continued to demand more money from the workers.

“When a highly respected financial consultant, hired by Hostess, determined earlier this year that the company’s business plan to exit bankruptcy was guaranteed to fail because it left the company with unsustainable debt levels, our members knew that the massive wage and benefit concessions the company was demanding would go straight to Wall Street investors and not back into the company,” recalled BCTGM president Frank Hunt, who described why the union struck Hostess rather than accept a demand from management for more pay and benefit cuts.

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“Our members decided they were not going to take any more abuse from a company they have given so much to for so many years,” Hunt explained. “They decided that they were not going to agree to another round of outrageous wage and benefit cuts and give up their pension only to see yet another management team fail and Wall Street vulture capitalists and ‘restructuring specialists’ walk away with untold millions of dollars.”

On November 6, American voters rejected Mitt Romney and Bain Capitalism.

But that didn’t end the abusive business practices that made Romney rich. They’re still wrecking American companies, like Hostess.

Instead of blaming workers, we should be holding the incompetent managers to account and cheering on any and every effort to rescue Hostess from the clutches of the vulture capitalists.

Hostess isn't the only company squeezing American workers. Check out Josh Eidelson's coverage of the Walmart workers' nationwide strike.

The Republican Party has too rich and honorable a history to allow its future to be defined by fools like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

But it will have a future only if responsible Republicans distance themselves—rapidly—not just from the debacle that was the Romney-Ryan run but from the crude “47 percent” politics that have underpinned the party’s recent appeals.

Romney made the need of distancing more urgent Wednesday, at a point when defeated presidential contenders are supposed to be gracious or quiet—but certainly not bitter and bizarre.

Romney used a telephone conference call with big donors to claim President Obama was re-elected by 3.5 million votes and a 332-206 Electoral College margin because Obama delivered “gifts” to young voters, Latinos and people of color:

The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people. In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.

Specifically, Romney griped that

With regards to African American voters, ’ Obamacare ’ was a huge plus—and was highly motivational to African American voters. You can imagine for somebody making $25—, or $30—, or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare—particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 a family, in perpetuity, I mean this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus.

The defeated Republican candidate for president’s remarks display a shocking disregard for the seriousness with which tens of millions of Americans approached the 2012 election. And it parallels the very public whining from defeated Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who complained: “The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race.” (Emphasis added.)

With Romney and Ryan renewing the divisive messaging that so damaged their 2012 campaign—after Romney was recorded announcing he was unconcerned with almost half the American population and Ryan divided the country into “makers” and “takers”—the demand on responsible Republicans grows dramatically greater

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the incoming chairman of the Republican Governors Association, has stepped up and appropriately declared Romney’s latest outburst to be “absolutely wrong”:

We have got to stop dividing the American voters. We need to go after 100 percent of the votes, not 53 percent. We need to go after every single vote. And second, we need to continue to show how our policies help every voter out there achieve the American Dream, which is to be in the middle class, which is to be able to give their children an opportunity to be able to get a great education.… So, I absolutely reject that notion, that description. I think that’s absolutely wrong.

I don’t think that represents where we are as a party and where we’re going as a party. That has got to be one of the most fundamental takeaways from this election: If we’re going to continue to be a competitive party and win elections on the national stage and continue to fight for our conservative principles, we need two messages to get out loudly and clearly: One, we are fighting for 100 percent of the votes, and secondly, our policies benefit every American who wants to pursue the American dream. Period. No exceptions.

Jindal’s words are on target. But the shift must go deeper.

In Britain, there has long been a distinction between reactionary politicians such as Romney and Ryan and so-called “One Nation” conservatives who develop policies that recognize that need for their Conservative Party to care for all citizens.

This article is brought to you by The Nation Builders. Find out more…

During the 2012 Republican primaries, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman sought to offer up an American version of “One Nation” conservatism. He got some traction in New Hampshire—finishing a credible third—but he didn’t go much further.

Huntsman has been outspoken in his criticism of his party’s swing toward “47-percent” politics.

“If we used all that energy spent on the president’s birth certificate on tax reform or on Afghanistan, we’d be in a much difference place today,” says Huntsman, who decried right-wing media that keep pushing the GOP toward extremes:

We do have, you know, some (pontificators) in our party, we have a media elite in a sense on the right, they’re making millions and millions of dollars talking about all the incendiary aspects of public policy. We need solutions as opposed to people in search of a larger audience.

Huntsman’s message: “We maybe need to listen a little more than we speak sometimes, particularly as it relates to the younger generation.”

That’s right. But let’s go a step further: Republicans do need to listen a lot more (and respond a lot more) to young people, people of color and women—to begin a check list. But they also need to listen a lot less to the candidates that the American people overwhelmingly rejected on November 6.

Ben Adler writes, not all conservatives fall for the race-baiting rhetoric.

The 2012 election produced more than its share of ironic results, but there is one that will stand above all others: Mitt Romney is the candidate of 47 percent of the American electorate.

As the long count of ballots cast in last Tuesday’s presidential election nears completion, Barack Obama’s popular-vote margin over Romney continues to expand. The Democratic president’s percentage of the vote has been steadily rising. As this has happened, his Republican challenger’s percentage has fallen.

Whereas on election night conservative commentators could speak of the finish to the long and bitter campaign as “almost a tie,” Obama now has a 3.4 million popular-vote, and 50.57 percent of the total.

Romney has drifted down to… 47.84 percent.

Some websites are still rounding Romney to 48 percent, just as they’re rounding Obama to 51 percent. But those that are interested in precision have Romney in the 47 percent range. And his percentage is likely to keep dropping as the counting of ballots in Democratic-leaning states on the west coast is completed.

What that means is that the country is headed toward a final tally of the 2012 election that formally identifies Mitt Romney as the candidate of 47 percent of the American electorate.

Romney inserted the phrase “47 percent” into American politics as a term of derision, suggesting to wealthy campaign donors in Florida that “there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

Romney told his backers that his responsibility as a candidate—and, presumably, as a president—was “not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

The comments created a firestorm, especially as it was recognized that the 47 percent Romney referred to included the elderly, veterans, Americans with disabilities and the working poor. Indeed, the controversy grew so great that, even now, there are commentators who suggest that it cost the candidate the presidency.

Romney tried to correct himself as the campaign progressed. “Well, clearly in a campaign, with hundreds if not thousands of speeches and question-and-answer sessions, now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right,” he told Fox News. “In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong.”’

Maybe not completely wrong.

There was a candidate in the 2012 presidential race who had 47 percent of the electorate who would vote for him “no matter what.”

But it wasn’t the 47 percent Romney was trying to divide out of the American mosaic and conquer.

Mitt Romney is not the candidate of “the 47 percent.”

“He is, however, the candidate of the 47 percent that stuck with the candidate who chose—with his comments and his campaign—indicated a disregard for the principle that this is one nation and candidates for its presidency should reach out to the whole of the American electorate.

Conservatives have a different explanation for Romney’s loss—like blaming the media, or even Hurricane Sandy. Check out Ben Adler’s coverage here.

The vote count in national elections is never finished on election night. It takes days, sometimes weeks, to count all the ballots in fifty states, 3,077 counties and tens of thousands of local jurisdictions. So if Americans want to know the real results, they must wait a few days and add up all the numbers in order to get a clear picture.

That clarity is based on something we call “math.”

Former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour said on the morning after the election that it was “pretty close to a tie.” Barbour was echoing conventional wisdom going into the election: that it would be very close, that President Obama might win an Electoral College majority but lose the popular vote, that the United States was a closely divided nation that would send no clear signal.

Now we know that Barbour was wrong.

It was not “pretty close to a tie.”

By Friday morning, Barack Obama had a vote total well in excess of 62 million, as compared with Mitt Romney’s 58.8 million. The president’s popular-vote margin is now in excess of 3 million.

Obama has now won Florida with a margin of 75,000 votes. That’s more than 100 times the alleged margin of victory for George Bush in 2000 in that state. And, with Florida, Obama has 332 electoral votes, as compared with 206 for Romney.

When all is said and done:

1. Barack Obama has won an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College, a daunting majority of the popular vote and a majority of the nation’s states—including most of the country’s largest states and states in every major region of the republic: New England, the mid-Atlantic, the Great Lakes, the South, the Southwest, the Mountain West and the West.

2. Barack Obama has won more popular votes than any Democratic candidate for president in history—except Barack Obama in 2008.

3. Barack Obama is the first Democratic president to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote in a re-election run since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944.

4. Barack Obama is the only Democratic candidate for president since FDR to twice win more than 50 percent of the national vote.

5. Barack Obama has, in both of his presidential runs, won a higher percentage of the national vote than any Democratic nominee since Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 landslide victory.

Add it all up and Obama has a mandate from this year’s presidential election that is significantly greater than those afforded John Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1976 or George W. Bush in 2000 or 2004.

But wait, there’s more: It appears that Obama had coattails or, at the very least, led a ticket that ran remarkably well in congressional, state and local races. To wit:

1. In a year when Democrats were in the worst position in decades to make gains in their Senate majority. They came into the 2012 race with the seats of twenty-one Democrats, plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats, up for election, while the Republicans had only ten seats up for election. Every early calculation had the Democrats losing seats, but they gained two Republican seats (Massachusetts and Indiana), held the seats of targeted incumbents (Florida, Montana and Ohio), picked up open seats that were once presumed to be unwinnable (North Dakota, Wisconsin) and came close in states such as Arizona and Nevada. Of thirty-three Senate seats up nationally, Democrats (and independents likely to caucus with Democrats) won twenty-five. Republicans won just eight.

2.  Democrats won the most votes cast in contested House races. It can well be argued that only redistricting abuses and Karl Rove’s money prevented Democrats from retaking the US House. An analysis compiled the day after the election found that 53,952,240 votes were cast for Democrats seeking House seats, while just 53,402,643 votes were cast for Republicans. That 500,000-plus advantage for the Democrats has been steadily increasing as votes from Democratic states such as Washington and Oregon continue to be counted, along with provisional ballots. FairVote’s Rob Richie explains that because of the structural advantages created by Republicans through their control of state-based redistricting processes, the Democrats did not just need to win a majority of the votes—as they did. “Democrats would have needed to win 55% of the national vote to earn a House majority.”

3. Democrats won seven of the eleven gubernatorial races that were on the ballot Tuesday. And a switch of just 41,000 votes in Indiana would have given them an eighth victory.

The point here is not to suggest that Barack Obama, congressional Democrats or their gubernatorial compatriots should be celebrated as perfect political players. In fact, quite the opposite: they ran imperfect campaigns in a tough year. But the choice that was presented to American voters was stark: Did they prefer the austerity agenda of Paul Ryan and Republican governors who have attacked unions, public education and public services? Or did they want a more humane and equitable governance.

“After the most expensive election in our history, voters defeated the relentless efforts of billionaire bullies, voter-suppressing politicians, and political strategists who broke new ground with campaigns built on blatant falsehoods,” explained People for the American Way president Michael Keegan. “Americans re-elected a president who has offered a vision of an American community in which equality and opportunity are for everybody, a vision of government that is willing and able to advance the common good while protecting the rights of individuals, and a vision of society in which we embrace our growing diversity as a unique strength of the American Way, not a threat to it.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was just a little bit more blunt.

“My sincere hope is that the Republican Party now understands that the American people do not want a government pushing right-wing extremist policies. They want a government that addresses the needs of working families, the elderly, the children and the sick, and not just the wealthiest people in this country,” says Sanders.

If the Republicans do not get it, Sanders suggests that, instead of compromising away his mandate, President Obama should keep campaigning on it.

“My strong hope is that, on behalf of the American people, President Obama forcefully challenges the right-wing extremist agenda,” says Sanders. “My hope is that he visits states around the country where House and Senate members are defending the interests of billionaires at the expense of working families, and asks those Americans to demand that their members of Congress represent them—and not powerful special interests.”

That’s the right calculus. After all, while Obama got a mandate, Bernie Sanders secured a landslide—winning more than 71 percent of the vote and every county in Vermont.

For more on progressive hopes for Obama's second term, check out Robert Scheer's latest.