DescentBB

Spidey wrote:Well, with friends like that…

Also the key to my statement was “livable wage and full bennies” most of the new businesses created these days don’t seem to provide those, regardless of who is starting them.

And who's fault is that? Corporations have been bleeding their workers dry for years now, while to top end gets fatter. The consumer has not been getting anything in return, except for cheap prices and chintzy products. Lining the pockets of these CEO's who tank their companies, like Carly Fiorina of HP, who got $20 million in severance payments and Vikram Pandit of Citigroup who got 6.7 million in payments is not doing business, it's plain legalized thievery. Why is this any better than giving workers some good benefits and a decent wage to actually do a job? What the hell is wrong with this picture?

As for Hostess, they mysteriously tripled the pay of their CEO from $750,000 to $2,555,000, just months before Hostess asked for their workers to take concessions and when they already knew they were so deep in debt, the likelihood of bankruptcy was almost a given. So who's at fault here? A CEO who couldn't figure out how to improve their product and get it marketed better, or some lowly workers who worked hard to make a living and had already made concessions once and who just couldn't stomach what their CEO was getting and for doing a lousy job at that.

No, if I was in their position, I would have done the very same thing.

callmeslick wrote:really, Spidey? Ever looked into tech and biological emerging companies. They pay very well indeed. Sure, start-ups are going to go on a shoestring,
IOU sort of basis. But, I have no clue where you come up with that last statement.

Again I have to qualify my own statement…what a bore.

I said "most"…the types of businesses you mentioned do not make up “most” of new businesses. If they did the middle class would not be in danger.

tunnelcat wrote:And who's fault is that.?

People who won’t buy products made by good middle class Americans.

For every business that is destroyed by corporate raiders and such, there are MANY examples of those that go out of business for other reasons, such as lack of customers, changing marketplace…etc.

You are totally headline driven and have absolutely no overall perspective, go read some real business statistics, instead of getting all of your information from the news.

Spidey wrote:

callmeslick wrote:really, Spidey? Ever looked into tech and biological emerging companies. They pay very well indeed. Sure, start-ups are going to go on a shoestring,
IOU sort of basis. But, I have no clue where you come up with that last statement.

Again I have to qualify my own statement…what a bore.

I said "most"…the types of businesses you mentioned do not make up “most” of new businesses. If they did the middle class would not be in danger.

what the hell do you mean, then? I am tired of citing examples of how you are wrong, and then have you come back with another diminished definition.
What are your 'most' new businesses? Landscaping and dining establishments? Geez, most 'old' businesses, if you look at it, pay near minimum wage.
Think WalMart, etc.

Damn, you’re impossible, I said what I said, and I meant what I said….MOST. I love how you miss the points that mean something and twiddle around with the meaningless, or try to paint a picture of me.

If you had actually cited examples of “most” new businesses than you might have had half a chance of “proving me wrong”.

Why don’t you address the point about the middle class, which you yourself and many others keep saying is doomed, and why all of those businesses you mentioned haven’t put a dent in it.

HUH?

Because there aren’t enough of them?

Why didn’t you answer my question about Ford, but no instead you try to infer that somehow I was implying we should accept the working conditions of that day.

Nice.

spidey,
If you look back, I addressed the Ford question(in that it was a reflection of enlightenment for it's time,but we expect far more today).
As to the disappearing middle class, that has nothing to do with 'new' businesses. The matter is all about ALL business in the US and how it is managed.
We have to go back in time for a comparison here, so bear with me. When I was in my teens, my dad was an executive for DuPont. A high level exec,
he made about $100k plus bonuses. The starting pay for professional workers was around 20K. The CEO made around 300K plus bonuses. The bonuses were reasonable, about 1/3 of pay if the company had a good year. Everyone did pretty well under that setup. Starting in the 1980s, Reagan and his buddies in Congress(both parties) altered the incentives that shape the economy. Our economy then started to reward short term profits and stopped taxing the upper brackets heavily. What happened? You get to today's DuPont. Professional workers start at around $36,000, but the VPs make upwards of $1,500,000, and the CEO gets around $10,000,000 per year. Non-professionals in a global economy(thanks once again to both parties in Congress for enabling this trend too easily)get squeezed into truly marginal incomes. This is how you lose a middle class, when a larger and larger slice of the economic pie gets forwarded to a handful, while the rest spin their wheels and at the bottom, go backwards. It isn't a problem of too few new companies picking up slack, it's far more an issue of the large, existing employers lining the pockets of investors and executives at the expense of the workforce. This further affects secondary(ie-small) employers, as the large company rank and file have less to spend on 'luxury' goods and services.
Couple this with the rise of technological advances that enable employers to hire less people to do the same amounts of output, along with a tax code that overwhelmingly favors investment income(cap gains) over labor income, and you have built a superhighway leading to a two-tier economy consisting of an upper echelon, serviced by peasants.

Spidey wrote:

tunnelcat wrote:And who's fault is that.?

People who won’t buy products made by good middle class Americans.

For every business that is destroyed by corporate raiders and such, there are MANY examples of those that go out of business for other reasons, such as lack of customers, changing marketplace…etc.

You are totally headline driven and have absolutely no overall perspective, go read some real business statistics, instead of getting all of your information from the news.

Not always. I've seen the trend and it's been driven by Walmart. They demand cheap prices from suppliers and manufacturers so that they can outsell their competitors. When Walmart's competitors lower their prices in response, Walmart further demands more price concessions from manufacturers to cut their prices even further. Manufacturers then start cutting costs and labor rates to keep Walmart's demand supplied. The quality of the product goes down, people stop buying that product because it's quality is bad, sales then drop off and more and more as the cost cutting continues and workers get draconian pay and benefit cuts or fired and their jobs offshored to countries that have a far lower wage rate than ours. We're essentially chasing a downward spiral to feed the 6 richest brats in the U.S.

I liked Hostess' products and used to buy them until they started shrinking the product in size and number per package and ruining the taste and quality. They shifted to soybean oil and I just couldn't stand the taste of it, or stomach it either for that matter. They never marketed their stuff in a good area of the store to entice better sales. You had to hunt for it. They didn't keep the product rotated and fresh. You were never guaranteed of getting something that wasn't stale unless the date of manufacture was on the package and if it was, it was almost always out of date. In Oregon, the selection sucked too. No, they died because they didn't bother to maintain their quality and taste or keep up with food trends.

Now I hear a Mexican company, called of all things (I am NOT making this up), "El Grupo Bimbo"! And guess where the new owner will probably make their product? Partially in Mexico of course. So if you want Mexican water making your Twinkies, better sidle up to your toilet.

this just in: Hostess agreed to arbitration, along with the baker's union, urged into such by the Bankruptcy judge. I suspect, the buying market wasn't shaping up quite as well as Hostess' money guys had hoped, so it might be better to keep making Twinkies for a bit longer. For the moment, no plants are shutdown, no workers locked out. I think they have 72 hours to make progress on a resolution, but the arbitration process might take longer than that, overall. Sucks for those people who paid $10 on eBay for a package of Ring Dings, but good news for the workforce.

from a bus'iness article on the matter, posted Monday.....

"The U.S. Trustee, an agent of the U.S. Department of Justice who oversees bankruptcy cases, said in court documents it is opposed to the wind-down plan because Hostess plans improper bonuses to company insiders.

The 82-year-old Hostess wants permission to pay senior management a bonus of up to 75 percent of their annual pay so they will stay on and help wind-down the business".


wonder how many bakers you could pay a decent wage with that coin?

That's just ridiculous. In what other field in life are you able to do a terrible job for years, and then wind up with a huge golden parachute when everything goes belly-up?

callmeslick wrote:The 82-year-old Hostess wants permission to pay senior management a bonus of up to 75 percent of their annual pay so they will stay on and help wind-down the business".


wonder how many bakers you could pay a decent wage with that coin?

Let’s see...

If that number was 20 million dollars, you could give all of Hostess’s 18,500 workers a fifty cent an hour raise.

Top Gun wrote:That's just ridiculous. In what other field in life are you able to do a terrible job for years, and then wind up with a huge golden parachute when everything goes belly-up?

The average lifespan of a fortune 500 co. is only 40-50 or so years and most businesses fail before 7 years, almost half before 5 years.

So considering Hostess made it to 82 is pretty freakin good.

Top Gun wrote:That's just ridiculous. In what other field in life are you able to do a terrible job for years, and then wind up with a huge golden parachute when everything goes belly-up?

in most major corporations it works that way, these days. The company I used to work for had a CEO who bolloxed up most everything he touched for years, and then got sent packing with a $12 million severance. Incompetence pays, once you get to a certain level.

Top Gun wrote:That's just ridiculous. In what other field in life are you able to do a terrible job for years, and then wind up with a huge golden parachute when everything goes belly-up?

Quite a few white collar jobs in any sector it seems.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-574538 ... im-ouster/

http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/12/snow-j ... parachute/

But if a blue collar worker does a lousy job, he or she is usually fired on the spot, with a thanks for nothing.

I dunno. I wouldn't mind the golden parachute Senators or the President gets even if they only serve one term.

woodchip wrote:I dunno. I wouldn't mind the golden parachute Senators or the President gets even if they only serve one term.

absolutely pales compared to CEO packages, especially given that NO ONE gets to be President or Senator, even for one term, without years of work
leading to that point, usually from local/state office up the ladder. Same can be said for CEOs,but the elected folks don't get quite so lucrative a package, and you DO want to incentivize public service at the higher levels to some extent, don't you?

I think Slick, you have to differentiate between CEO's of very large corporations and all the rest. Only a very small percentage of CEO's get any sort of grand bonus at the end of their tenure and of those there are a goodly percentage who deserve what they receive.

woodchip wrote:I think Slick, you have to differentiate between CEO's of very large corporations and all the rest. Only a very small percentage of CEO's get any sort of grand bonus at the end of their tenure and of those there are a goodly percentage who deserve what they receive.

I don't call the head of a small company a CEO, but in my use reserve the term for a Fortune 500 sized corporation. And, NO ONE deserves the separation packages currently given out at the size they are for the big corporations. NO ONE. Even more obscene are the buyouts of failed executives,
and, if you wish to examine public sector scams, I would question how School Superintendants seem to move from job to job, getting six-figure buyouts
at every stop, and half-million dollar salaries to run school districts and systems that lack money for books. Seems to be the least bang-for-buck productivity of any sector within public service, as I look around. Those in here that live near Philly can relate to what I'm saying.

I won't argue about school superintendents. Arthur Jefferson was one such for Detroit public schools. Seems he also needed a chauffeured limousine to haul his ass around for meetings all the while the schools were crumbling around him. As to CEO's, if they ran the company well, turned it around and made a profit then yes they deserve what bonus the board of directors allow.

woodchip wrote:I won't argue about school superintendents. Arthur Jefferson was one such for Detroit public schools. Seems he also needed a chauffeured limousine to haul his ass around for meetings all the while the schools were crumbling around him. As to CEO's, if they ran the company well, turned it around and made a profit then yes they deserve what bonus the board of directors allow.

but,given that in most cases, the Board of Directors is hand picked by the CEO, those bonuses tend to come with little regard to long-term profitablity,
as we live on an economic playing field that rewards short term thinking(see above the citation of current life-span of large companies). Further, CEOs
today tend to get signed on by those same friendly boards to contracts with built-in sweetheart clauses, which, in the most part, hurt the economics of the workers, at the expense of the stockholders(whom the Board represents). Hostess is a prime example, rewarding clearly incompetent management in order to maximize short term gain for folks who bought in on the cheap.

If one reading this thread substitutes for CEO's the Russian Aristocracy and the word workers for proletariat then you can see what comrade slickster is really shooting for.

woodchip wrote:If one reading this thread substitutes for CEO's the Russian Aristocracy and the word workers for proletariat then you can see what comrade slickster is really shooting for.

we'll get to that level of disparity eventually, if we keep on current path. Actually, what I advocate for is an intervention before some sort of radical intervention is necessary. A two-tiered America ends up being not particularly good for either pole of the divide. Once again, woody, you feel compelled to ascribe intentions that I have never suggested, nor desired. Best just to make ★■◆● up rather than analyze more critically, right?

Right, and with the president on down flaming the war between the haves and haves not, I suspect the throat slitting and bayonet banners to crop up sooner than later.

woodchip wrote:Right, and with the president on down flaming the war between the haves and haves not, I suspect the throat slitting and bayonet banners to crop up sooner than later.

no one's flaring a war, in fact, under the current set of rules, that 'war' is over. Pointing out that the trend to income disparity has to be reversed is stating the obvious, not raising hysteria. Choosing, as you seem to wish, to just ignore the issue, is playing right into the hands of those who would enjoy the development of an oligarchy.

woodchip wrote:Right, and with the president on down flaming the war between the haves and haves not, I suspect the throat slitting and bayonet banners to crop up sooner than later.

Let me get this straight. CEO's and other top corporate managers are getting sky high golden parachutes for doing lousy jobs, and YOU think the President is starting a flaming class war? What planet are you from woody. The wealthy are boldly taking so much for themselves now, class warfare can be laid squarely on their laps without the President having to point it out.

I read someone's research a little while ago (no, I can't find it at the moment, but I'll keep looking) that Great Depressions inevitably led to reactionary Communism. That's not something I'd like to see happen in this country either.

By the way, arbitration failed, so Hostess will go into liquidation. I'm guessing the workers said no and the management said no, to any wage and compensation concessions.

http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/n ... ation.html