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发帖数: 29846 | 1 by Jeffrey Lord
Twinkicide.
Death by Liberalism.
This time it's Twinkies.
In October it was Newsweek.
Who's next? What does this lemming-like liberal instinct mean for America?
What is it that bakers and editors had in common as they looked into the
abyss that would spell their own professional death? And then jumped?
Answer: They'd rather be dead than Not Liberal. Unfortunately for the rest
of us -- they are not alone. Worse, they are in charge.
Presented with multiple opportunities to survive in a jobless economy -- the
bakers and editors willingly jumped into the abyss that would kill their
own professional way of life. Forever.
With all the brio of Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid cornered by the law and yelling "Ohhhhhhhhhh Sh……………t" as
they presumably jumped to their deaths, both the Bakery, Confectionery,
Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union -- a.k.a. the 18,500 Americans who
make Twinkies and other Hostess company products -- and the editors who
produced the once economically viable newsmagazine Newsweek faced a stark
choice. Adapt to survive and prosper -- or kill businesses that are
respectively 85 years old and 80 years old. Thus killing their own jobs.
Either be fair and balanced in their union demands for baking and delivering
Twinkies. And fair and balanced for their editorial product in producing a
Newsweek magazine that once presented itself as just the news of the week.
Or die.
The bakers union and the magazine editors chose death.
Bye bye!
The bakers union chose to professionally execute their own members -- not to
mention James Hoffa's Teamsters -- taking with them a legendary baking
company's 18,500 jobs. The editors of a legendary magazine's still
unannounced "staff cuts" -- as the magazine does a physical vanishing act,
departing from newsstands never to be seen again -- chose non-physical
publication over editorial fairness.
Fittingly, one of Newsweek's last covers is a depiction of Barack Obama as a
post-election Emperor Napoleon. There not being a trace of irony about a
soon-to-be defunct magazine last owned by a 90-something year old rich
liberal white guy headlining the GOP as, no kidding : "You're Old, You're
White, You're History!" Nor is there a glimmer of irony about how exactly
the real Napoleon ended his career.
Do the names "Waterloo" and "St. Helena" ring a bell?
What to make of this lemming-like phenomenon?
Let's start with the bakers.
Our friends at the Wall Street Journal have laid out the basics.
A strike by one of a dozen Hostess unions, the Bakers, Confectionary,
Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union.
Hostess had "sales of $2.5 billion in 2011 but lost $341 million and
lacked the cash flow" to survive a strike.
One of the reasons for this was "a labor-rule burden that by comparison
makes Detroit look like Hong Kong."
·Hostess had $52 million in workers' comp claims in 2011, per an
earlier bankruptcy filing.
·Hostess had 372 collective bargaining agreements "to maintain 80
different health and benefit plans, 40 pension plans and mandated a $31
million increase in wages and other benefits from backrooms to shelves."
Union rules forbade cake and bread products from being delivered to a
store in one truck. There had to be two -- one for cake, one for bread. "
Drivers weren't allowed to load their own vehicles, and the workers who
loaded bread weren't allowed to load cake."
There's more but you get the picture.
When the company said they could do no more, especially after two
bankruptcies induced by all of this, the union refused to accept the latest
offer. (Note: Last night, a federal bankruptcy judge ordered both parties
into mediation.)
Result? Twinkicide. Death by liberalism. Some 18,500 employees are now out
of a job. Yes the brand has value, and someone else may pick it up. Small
consolation to the abruptly unemployed.
Then there's Newsweek. Folding (so to speak) after 80 years. Yes, it will be
online, but no more print version.
Once owned by the Washington Post, the magazine had so hemorrhaged
readership -- and as a result advertisers -- that the Post wound up selling
it for a dollar. You read that right -- a single dollar bill.
What happened to Newsweek? Doubtless 21st century technology took a toll.
But there was something else. A big something else.
Newsweek -- ironically founded by a former reporter for Time -- was
ostensibly begun with the goal of publishing the news and some commentary or
analysis to go along with it. Eighty years ago, like all manner of other
publications of the day, if it ran a news story it was a straight news story
. A "just the facts" kind of news story. With the commentary or analysis
elsewhere.
But as with its cronies elsewhere in the world of mainstream journalism, by
the 1960s Newsweek had begun to change.
There are two eerily similar incidents that have been discussed before in
this space which will serve to illustrate, both involving popular liberal
Democrats in the White House.
Incident One centered around President John F. Kennedy, and one of his close
friends, Ben Bradlee -- the latter then the Washington bureau chief for
Newsweek. Long story short, a year after JFK's death Bradlee's sister-in-law
, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was mysteriously found murdered on a canal towpath in
Washington. Bradlee and his horrified then-wife Toni went to Meyer's
Georgetown residence only to find a CIA agent -- a high ranking CIA agent
named James Jesus Angleton -- scouring Meyer's living quarters, having
staged a break-in. Confronted, he left. And came back later to Meyer's
studio -- again to be discovered (in the act of picking the lock) and depart
. Eventually Bradlee and his wife located what was being sought. Meyer's
diary. Bradlee and wife found the diary and read it. To Bradlee's shock it
turned out his separated sister-in-law, herself married to a senior CIA
official, had been having a secret affair with JFK. The whole tale was in
the diary, including revelations that Meyer and her presidential lover had
been smoking pot -- in the White House.
What did Bradlee do? Take this mammoth scoop and put it on the cover of
Newsweek? Nah. Instead his wife destroyed the diary -- and Newsweek readers,
not to mention the larger world, were none-the-wiser. Until 1976 when a
third party who had seen the diary gave the story to, yes, The National
Enquirer. In his memoirs Bradlee confessed that every word of the story was
true, that he detested the fact the story had ever seen the light of day and
had zero regrets about trying to kill it.
Incident Two revolved around President Bill Clinton. The famous story of
Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was a Newsweek
scoop, the result of the efforts of the magazine's investigative reporter
Michael Isikoff. The problem? Newsweek editors in 1998, employing precisely
the liberal instinct that seized Bradlee and his JFK scoop, spiked the story
. This time, however, the results were very different. Why? The Internet's
Matt Drudge got a hold of the fact that Newsweek had this explosive story
about the President -- and had spiked it. Drudge promptly ran it on the
Drudge Report -- and the rest, as they say, was history.
The point? Newsweek over time earned for itself the reputation not, as its
very name "Newsweek" implied, of being a magazine that would report the
truth and then analyze. To the contrary it started down a slippery path of
deliberately not telling the truth in order to protect its favored liberals
of the day, or just skewing the news against conservatives -- i.e., part of
its readership base.
Over time, this became understood by the general reading public -- and
conservative readers stopped buying Newsweek. Presented with innumerable
opportunities to right the ship, to restore the magazine to what might be
called a "fair and balanced" publication, Newsweek's editors simply insisted
on saying something no one believed: that they had no liberal bias.
Back in 2009, the then managing editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, appeared on
The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly grilled him about the magazine's decidedly
visible left-wing tilt, visibly incredulous at the response:
Meacham: "No, I don't -- We're not a partisan magazine. We're just not."
O'Reilly: "Come on."
Meacham: "We're not. We try to be provocative. We try to break news. We try
to contribute to the conversation. You can decide whether we do or not."
At the time, the magazine had made a big deal of actor Mel Gibson's marital
problems. As NewsBusters pointed out, when O'Reilly challenged Meacham on
this the pose of the non-partisan instantly vanished. Why was Gibson's
marriage fair game for Newsweek?
Meacham: "The -- Gibson's a literalist, he's a conservative. And he was part
of the popular culture, he put himself out there."
O'Reilly: " (Leftwinger) Sean Penn has had recent marital trouble, I didn't
see that on Sean....Don't you think that's a little unfair, Jon?"
Meacham: "No, I don't."
So Newsweek kept right on using the magazine advertised as straight news to
showcase the latest liberal personality or cause of the moment while not so
subtly sticking it to the leading conservatives of the day like Mel Gibson.
As the advertisers stopped coming back, as the readership plummeted, the
editors' effective answer to change, as Meacham personified in that O'Reilly
appearance, was not only "no" but "hell no."
Results: Twinkicide. Death by liberalism. Newsweek in print will soon be no
more.
Twinkies and Newsweek aren't the only American institutions to suffer from
this phenomenon in recent years either.
Take Mainline Protestant Churches. The Episcopalians, Lutherans,
Presbyterians, Methodists and United Church of Christ among others.
Once a central pillar of Protestant America -- not to mention of America
itself as we are reminded this Thanksgiving week with celebrations of the
Pilgrims -- these denominations have been in a slow but certain decline
since the 1960s. In the forty-five years between 1960 and 2005, the Mainline
denominations lost some ten million members. In 1970 they were 30% of the
American population; by 2009 they had dropped to 15% -- and are headed
slowly down, down, down. Individual churches struggle simply to stay alive,
when they aren't shuttering their doors outright.
What caused this? It's no accident that the denominational declines coincide
exactly with the rise of the far-left in America. Without consultation with
their own members, church leaders struck out on journey into the wilds of
far-left politics, confusing God with leftist politics.
Exactly as with the bakers and the editors, the men and women of the cloth
simply denied the facts, blaming their failures on anything but their own
liberalism, as seen here in this jewel from the Episcopal News Service.
Result: Whole liberal-led denominations -- hundreds of years old -- are now
headed down the path of Twinkicide.
Then there's the Twinkicide of the public school system.
Here we are in the 21st century. Technology and American innovation and
freedom have provided new opportunities for basic education in the form of
charter schools, school vouchers, home schooling and public schools.
What is the reaction of the teachers' unions? To throw themselves in front
of the progress train, demanding ever greater resources even as their own
union rules slowly strangle the quality of public schools, make it
impossible to fire incompetent teachers (can you say "rubber rooms"?) and,
most glaringly and unforgivingly, ruin the lives of kids trapped in these
hell holes through no fault of their own.
So the credibility of good teachers dwindle because of horrendous decisions
by their liberal union leaders. And meanwhile the public school systems
slowly tank.
Result: The Twinkicide of the American public school system.
Then there's the state of California.
The place is a disaster. Once a rich state, the center of the American
universe with California Dreamin' an anthem to the state's magnet-like
ability to draw people from not only around the country but the world to its
glamorous precincts, it is now busily driving people away as it slowly
sinks. Sinks into a morass of high taxes, out-of-control debt, lousy schools
and fleeing businesses. Only this month Governor Jerry Brown sold his tax-
addicted constituents that yes, what California needed was another tax! Up
went taxes -- again -- on higher incomes, while a sales tax increase was
approved for everyone. The state has a $16 billion deficit while carrying
the highest debt load of any state in the nation -- $618 billion. Notes the
Weekly Standard's Charlotte Allen:
That latter amount includes up to $500 billion in unfunded pension
liabilities for 220,000 state employees plus billions in unpaid bills,
delayed payments to schools, and amounts raided from dedicated funds to
cover general expenses.
All of these woes and more are sending the state headlong into a swan dive
in an empty concrete swimming pool. Will the liberals who have managed this
debacle change course? Admit liberalism is driving the state inevitably, nor
to mention faster by the day, into bankruptcy? Are you kidding? They would
prefer… all together now…
Twinkicide! Death by liberalism is the new California Dreamin'.
As if all this and more isn't cause for concern, there are the now familiar
Twinkicidal instincts that are surfacing in Washington.
Obamacare being the obvious example of the moment.
The other day, the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner focused on one unintended
consequence from Obamacare just in the New York City area alone. Writing in
the New York Post, Tanner told the story of one Zane Tankel, who runs forty
Applebee's in New York and environs. Right after the presidential election,
Tankel announced he was calling a halt to two things: hiring more employees
and building more Applebee's restaurants.
Why? Obamacare, of course. Applebee's just can't afford the costs. Writes
Tanner:
Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must
provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the
cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover,
the insurance must meet the federal government's requirements in terms of
what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer
insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive
plans.
He goes on:
Suppose that a firm with 49 employees does not provide health benefits.
Hiring one more worker will trigger the mandate. The company would now have
to provide insurance coverage to all 50 workers or pay a tax penalty….
Under the circumstances, how likely is the company to hire that 50th worker?
Or, if a company already has 50 workers, isn't the company likely to lay
off one employee? Or cut hours and make some employees part time, thus
getting under the 50 employee cap? Indeed, a study by Mercer found that 18%
of companies were likely to do exactly that. It's worth noting that in
France, another country where numerous government regulations kick in at 50
workers, there are 1,500 companies with 48 employees and 1,600 with 49
employees, but just 660 with 50 and only 500 with 51.
In other words, a lot of people are going to lose their full-time jobs, and
expansion -- building new Applebee's in this case -- will simply stop dead.
Tanner cites the growing number of restaurant companies that are doing some
version of what Applebee's is now doing, from Papa John's Pizza to the Olive
Garden to the Red Lobster. In addition to going this route, Denny's is
adding a 5% tax to cover its costs -- a tax that is quickly being tagged the
"Obama Surcharge."
So why is this happening? Why deliberately send the already unacceptably
high unemployment rate even higher? Because, as all remember, in the
maniacal push to pass Obamacare the consequences were damned. Liberals were
warned as to the results -- and they simply didn't care.
Which is to say, Applebee's, Denny's, Papa John's, the Olive Garden and Red
Lobster are now victims of the Twinkicide mindset. They may be among the
first -- but they most certainly are not going to be the last.
Which in turn raises the greatest concern of all -- the future of America
itself.
What America is confronting here with the lemming-like phenomenon that is
Twinkicide is a group of people who simply are obsessed with liberalism.
Addicted to it in just the fashion a crack addict is addicted to crack
cocaine.
Like a crack addict, they could care less about the consequences of their
actions -- even if it ensures their own death. Mesmerized by liberalism,
they march resolutely off the nearest cliff available, mass suicide be
damned.
They could be bakers or magazine editors. They could be Mainline Protestant
church leaders or public school teachers. They could be California
politicians -- and yes, even California voters. In Washington they are the
zealots behind Obamacare.
What all of these people have in common is that they will impose liberalism
no matter the consequences. Even if it means they march straight off the
cliff. And in the case of America, taking the rest of us with them.
Ironically, for all the hysterical shouts in foreign lands of "Death to
America," there is in fact a seriously growing threat to America right here
at home.
Twinkicide.
Death by liberalism. |
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