The election is over and it went exactly like Nate Silver and I told you it all would. Needless to say I get less attention and affection than Nate Silver. I became specially active trying to quell the irrational fears raised during Andrew Sullivan's Big Gay Freakout, after the first round of debates, when Obama "rope-a-doped" Romney (before bouncing off the ropes in the second round and going all "Please proceed Governor" on Mitt's ignorant lying ass).
With Obama's landslide reelection, Big Bird experienced the joys normally available only to holiday foul given Presidential pardons. But the Romney Republicans are devious bastards. As they belatedly pretend to kiss Nate Silver's ring, they are simultaneously attempting to gut another American icon. As if calling the President a Muslim foreigner wasn't far enough anarcho-treason-terrorist for us all, the 1% are now poised to rob us of something almost as precious as our Red Ryder BB guns. Twinkies. Ferchrissakes, what's next? Apple pie?
This one is a lot easier to break down than the derivatives markets Romney and his crony Republican buddies set up to simultaneously cripple the world economy, while personally enriching themselves. That ripoff scenario is simple to see but difficult to graph. Twinkies is really simple.
American management took an iconic product with a HUGE profit margin and then pawned the company off to line their pockets with gold while screwing over the workers. There's no other honest way to portray bungling up something so fundamental as taking two cents worth of sugar and selling it for a buck while going "bankrupt" in the process. I would be willing to bet that there is less than two cents actual "baker's union" cost in each Twinkie, given that each baker probably is responsible for machinery that makes 100's of thousands per day. Machinery BTW, that couldn't have changed that much over the Twinkie decades and ought to be fully paid for, (and in the final instance certainly isn't anything cutting edge like chip manufacturing). There are only two ways for Twinkie to have failed. Total incompetence or outright fraud. I suspect the latter, although US law allows for torture at the CEO levels, so it probably also makes exceptions for fraud and highway robbery.
Enjoy.