TeamsterGrrrl

Sounds like you're prejudiced against everybody, but I can't let your lies about my union stand. You accuse my union of being violent... Truth is, my local has never even gone on strike!

Actually, it's a representative democracy.

Why should you have more say than any other voter?

1 man or woman= 1 vote.

After 6 years of living in the country I'm still shopping for my first tractor. My favorite is the N series Fords, but they're too heavy for my Ranger pickup with it's 3500 pound tow rating to haul around. Then I saw the little Japanese built Ford 1100s and 1200s that Ford sold during the 80s and 90s, and fell in love- Lighter than an 8N, diesel power, and all wheel drive wrapped in Ford blue! Then I saw the prices... Half the price of a new Kubota or Yanmar powered Deere for a quarter century old tractor? I'm running into the same outrageous pricing for most all the old tractors, other than the really too big tractors or the 8Ns- Heck, I've seen a ratty Kubota that wouldn't even start go for $2K! The IH Cubs are light enough for my pickup to haul, but the implement options are limited. So looks like I'll finally have to break down and buy new, hard to justify spending $5k on a two or three decade old Ford, Kubota, or Yanmar/Deere when I can get a new BX18 Kubota for $9k or a Deere/Yanmar 1 series for not much more.

Your party won by "working the system", in this case the Electoral College. Why is that OK, but when I collect the pension I earned it's not?

David, "we" elected Hillary- She won the popular vote.

Hijack away! I first wrote this for a gearhead blog, then submitted it to a big very "liberal" website just for shits and giggles... They loved it and kept it on their front page for two days! Just goes to show that folks across the political spectrum are tired of the Chinese junk and rebuilding the old stuff instead.

Again you don't know what you're talking about. Have you read Hostess and the prior company's financials going back to the company's founding in the 1920s? I have. Have you read thousands of pages of bankruptcy filings? I have. Hostess was done in by a variety of factors- poor management, unfair trade, a failed bread reformulation, etc.. There is also the matter of Walmart being several months behind in paying for product delivered while Hostess paid millions in kickback "slotting fees". Haven't had time to fully investigate that, but given that Walmart has about 20% of the U.S. Bakery market, Walmart's slow payment alone may have finally driven Hostess to discontinue operations. As far as pension costs killing Hostess, they made no pension payments for their last year of operation and still couldn't survive, and the unions gave them several years of wage and work rule givebacks as well. So your blaming the unions for Hostess demise has no basis in fact, and I've found no authoritative business scholar who blamed the unions for Hostess demise. Throw in the fact that Hostess competitors are profitable with union workforces and the fact that U.S Bakeries has bought and restarted production at two former hostess bakeries and is making a profit where Hostess couldn't, and your assertion in robustly disproven. But I expect you'll as usual ignore the facts and rely on your usual bigotry to blame whatever has gone wrong on unions, etc....

But first, they need to pay the people who've been working for them.

The MH always inspired much more confidence that the aluminum Freightliners cabovers- I've seen a whole Freightliner cab twisted out of shape just from hitting a deer, and hooking a mirror would often result in the mirror arms bring unbent but the whole Freightliner door bent up.

Here's how you trashed Indians: "Sounds as bad as it is here when companies have to follow Tero laws on the Rez. You have to hire so many Indians per capita to get anything done on the Rez including state highways. The trouble is getting any of them to show up for more than a day much less after they get their first paycheck. So it's easier to pay them to sit and not screw anything up and even then they rarely show up." I know plenty of hard working Indians. But you have labeled entire ethnic groups as lazy, and in this case ethnic groups which provided the model for our own democracy. You are fortunate that they have been much more tolerance of immigrants than you...

The 8 plants were bought by 3 different buyers. US Bakeries accepted the union contract at 2 and 2 New Hostess plants voted to unionize after reopening.

Black Friday gets more depressing every year... I soldier through several hardware stores, Home Depot, Sears, etc. in search of serviceable tools and stuff that ain't junk that won't last the winter, never mind till next black friday. The only thing approaching a good deal was an american made needle nose pliers, hammer, and saw blades. Sears had nothing but acres of imported Craftsman tools, a sad fate for such once respectable brands. Homer's provided free Wi-Fi and little else. I've had it with "new"... I've got enough cars and just about everything else to last the rest of my life. We're a nation that has reached "peak stuff", and our garages are too full of stuff to fit a bike never mind a car. Spare bedrooms, attics, and basements full of stuff are further testimony to that. To say nothing of all the stuff that drives the booming storage rental industry... Where the heck did all this stuff come from? A century ago we couldn't afford much stuff and there was no "easy credit", so we bought what we needed and made it last. Come the twenties and banks started financing houses, and we overextended ourselves into a depression. Fast forward through the depression and second world war, and the politicians were worried that the returning soldiers would find no jobs and we'd be right back in a depression. So they juiced the economy with GI and FHA home loans, while GM had invented whole social stratas of car makes with planned obsolescence to market them and GMAC to finance them. 'Bout as soon as someone figured out how to put magnetic info on a plastic card, the big banks got us junkied out on credit cards, to the tune of about $10,000 of debt for the average american today. So here we sit a century later, a western world with more bedrooms than we got people, a big screen TV in every one of those bedrooms and a 'puter too. We've got more cars than drivers, and hordes of computers in all sizes. Same with our lives- We've paid for college degrees we'll never use, and we're struggling to pay them back on low paid jobs that require little more than a pulse and not too much attitude. The mantra of blind consumerism plays on, long after the jobs we were trying to save left, and we're left to clean up all the dead electronics and abandoned inner cities. Black friday was a flop, small business saturday was a step in the right direction, now lets celebrate sustainable sunday. Let's fix something... The LEED standards tell us that the greenest house is a rehabbed house, with as much of the original house reused as possible. The GREET standard developed by Argonne National Laboratory which takes into account the total carbon footprint of a vehicle from production through scraping tells us that even the greenest hybrid or electric car accomplishes nothing for the planet unless it replaces one that is totally, utterly, and completely worn out beyond repair. Same for education- I got a bachelors degree, but the knowledge I used most was DIY skills I've picked up through life. And while they can move manufacturing jobs to the other side of the planet, repairing, reuse, rebuilding, and rehabbing creates jobs here that can't be exported. So hell with the mall... Let's fix something!

Again, get your facts straight- USPS is not subsidized by the government. If anything, USPS is subsidizing the government by being forced to prepay a lifetime of health care for each new hire.

No, just putting it in perspective, and I think NAFTA was a mistake and will always oppose the loss of union jobs to low wage countries. And unlike most of you, I've been on the frontline of bakery closings... I had to do an impromptu news conference in front of Hostess Minneapolis bakery on the day they announced the closing, while on my break. We fought that closing with everything we had, got some useful concessions and saved the distribution jobs but couldn't save the bakery. Like I said, a lot of you guys haven't been on the inside and don't know what you're talking about.

Nabisco has closed a ton of plants, used to have one in Minneapolis too. That's nothing compared to the list of plants Hostess closed, the major companies merged into Hostess (Continental and Interstate) had well over 100 bakeries three decades ago. When they shut down their were only 35 still baking, and only about 8 have reopened under new ownership.

You guys think too small and narrow. The american truck market is too small and oddball to support 4 manufacturers, and the export market for conventionals is even smaller... That's why Signal sold Mack and Renault got out of the big truck biz. None the less, would be interesting to start a separate thread to develop a viable business plan for Mack if Volvo spun it off...

You're racism is showing. And being that we're their guests, we ought treat them with respect.

That's a smaller plant that shut down a while ago, the big one that's drawn all the attention in Chicago. As far as my being a "communist", you're dating yourself...

Guy who replaced me at Hostess put my assigned truck in a lake, he's lucky to have survived. Looks like my job at the Postal Service was never filled, when I retired we had a bit over 100 drivers in our unit, last I checked they were down in the 60s. And the union definitely did me a favor... If it wasn't for my union pension I'd still be working like you folks. The overtime pay our union got (truck drivers are exempt from FLSA) went straight into my IRAs, haven't even touched them yet.

Closing Natick and similar plants helped sink Hostess- Management thought they could build a new non union bakery in Maine and turn a profit selling the Natick site which was across the street from a shopping mall. The deal was a disaster- They ended up paying union wages in Maine, transportation costs went through the roof, and the Natick site took years to sell. They made the same mistake closing East Brunswick and Pomona bakeries and didn't get much $$$ for those sites either.

And as much as you guys hate unions, why do you waste your time on a website dedicated to union made in America Mack trucks?

That plant is in Chicago, not Philly... You guys need to get your facts straight before you spout off.

You don't know the bakery biz, Twinkies were but a small portion of Hostess' business and the Devil Dogs were a regional product. Hostess had to compete in the U.S. with products from Mexico. On the export side, Hostess faced barriers exporting to Europe and the Middle East. Heck, even Canada was such a hassle that they shipped everything for Canada west of Ontario from the Seattle bakery so they only had to cross the border at one point. The Labor department verified this and decided the Hostess workers were eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance.