After a mad dash sprint toward the election, I took a well earned break from politics and instead spent all my free time at my normal job filling in while my co-workers went out in search of Bambi's now grown grandchildren. So in the 11 days since election day, I have worked just over 110 hours, with little time for any thing else except coaching my son's basketball team.
But you will not see me complain even one iota about working too much, since at the very least I still have a job post-election. In the early days following President Obama's re-election victory, all hell has broken loose.
In the past 11 days, we've seen dozens of companies announce layoffs, Europe has gone into recession, with the US to soon follow and our economy still sits at the edge of a fiscal cliff. Our nation's top military figure and intelligence chief has resigned in scandal as we continue to seek information regarding the Benghazi coverup, precious energy land resources have been closed off from production by the government and Israel and Hamas have seen hostilities escalate again.
The census bureau's new report shows that an all-time high 49.7 million Americans are now living in poverty. In addition, first-time jobless claims surged by a mult-year high of 104,548 for a weekly total of 466,348 new jobless claims.
The Latinos that voted in record numbers to keep Obama and his policies, should also note another record milestone for Latinos - their poverty rate has now reached a high of 28%. Bienvenido al 'Merica.
Denny's, Papa Johns, Applebee's and many other eateries and dining establishments have announced that keeping the Healthcare reform law intact will cause price increases on the menu and job cuts among their staff to remain profitable. Employers across many industries have intimated that they may drop all health coverage for their employees.
It has now even reached the point that in 'Merica, the land of the massively obese, Hostess, maker of the Twinkie, can no longer make money and will close its doors, taking its 18,500 jobs with it.
Even as this is happening, my friends on Facebook are clamoring for a bailout for Hostess. All I can say is, "Have we learned nothing?"
And I can sum up the mindset of everyone who has just read everything I just wrote and are thinking to themselves, "Yep, that's just like them greedy companies and Republicans. Take from the workers to keep making their profit". I will simply quote one of the soon to be unemployed Hostess workers. Roger Harrison, a 56 year old who bags buns had this to say,
"The people who are running this company are not interested in making bread...They are not in the baking industry; they are just interested in the money."
Uh, yeah, you think so?
Well, of course they're just interested in making money. That's why they took their own money, $130 million of it, and invested it in the company to salvage it from bankruptcy just a few years ago. If there was no hope of profit, they would have found a better place to invest their $130 million and Hostess may have folded at that time. What Rex Harrison doesn't understand is that he kept his job an extra three years because a company that was not in the baking industry saw Hostess as an opportunity to make money and invested $130 million to do just that.
I mean, if someone had $130 million sitting around and an interest in baking but not making money, they could have just stayed home, grabbed an apron and a mixer, turned the oven on and let the flour fury fly. And they could have done that while living on the interest for their $130 million. So, no, they didn't buy Hostess because of a deepseated desire to be bakers; they did it to make money.
But alas, that effort has failed due to many reasons - a poor economy, stricter food standards in schools, more health conscious eating habits, high union labor costs, etc. Businesses fail for many reasons. Yet, I can tell you that the one thing that didn't cause Hostess to go under is that ownership was trying to make money. I don't care how interested or vested one is in the baking industry or in the process of making bread, if one fails to understand that making money is the chief objective at the end of the day, then one will not be in business long.
My wife and I owned and operated a florist/gift shop a few years ago that ultimately failed to make money. It didn't matter how much my wife was interested in flowers. Because it was unprofitable, we closed it. This made my wife jobless. (There were no newstories written about my wife's jobless situation, that I can recall.)
A few months back, we began a home based business promoting the ViSalus Body By Vi 90 Day Challenge that we feel very strongly about. Our life has been transformed by the 90 Day Challenge, so we are very motivated to share our experiences with as many people as we can and hopefully, help facilitate the personal transformation of as many people as possible. (For info on our transfomation click here or for more info on the 90 Day Challenge, click here)
But its a business. We need it to make money. If it ever stopped being profitable, we would quit doing it. As much as we may be helping people, we still have bills to pay at home. We have children to feed, a mortgage to pay off. If our business was not a profit making venture, we could not afford the gas to get to our appointments or the phone to make our calls or even the computer to take our orders and run our business.
In a business, you either make money or you don't. When you don't, you don't stay in business long. People once understood that. Today I don't think they do. Which I feel is a big reason why we had the election results we had last week.
Once upon a time in America, any person could work and save his/her money and one day investe this money into a business, where he/she would scrimp and save and work to make it profitable. But I'm not sure we live in that America anymore. We seem to be living in a cheap knock-off country - 'Merica. The American Dream is being shortchanged by a people who don't even understand what it is anymore. Instead we are left with the notion that business is a government partnership where we all work together to make a better life and making money is optional. But that doesn't work. It can't. Businesses exist for one reason - to make money. That's it.
So even as the avalanche of bad news is falling around us, too many will fail to see the underlying truth. Instead, we are a nation where nearly 50% of the voting electorate would agree with this poor misguided woman as she marched on the picket line Thursday outside a bankrupt Hostess factory in Indianapolis,
"Do it. Shut it down."
Well 'Merica - you just got what you asked for.