So much for that ray of hope for the Twinkie. Today, the bankruptcy judge in the Hostess case gave approval for the company to liquidate. The mediation suggested by Judge Robert Drain failed; as Drain stated, “Sadly, the parties were not able to come to an agreement. It’s a free country. People are free not to agree.”

A full 15,000 employees will be terminated; another 3,200 will stay on to help wind the business down. The company has decided to liquidate even though expected bonuses for executives, which range from $7,400 to $130,500, could be slashed by the bankruptcy judge. Those bonuses were the fodder for an Obama Department of Justice appointed trustee attempting to leverage Hostess into new negotiations with the Bakery Workers union earlier this week.

The Teamsters refuse to say whom they blame for the outcome of negotiations – which means that they blame the Bakery Workers’ union, since, after all, they would tend to side with the other unions barring cataclysmically bad decisionmaking by their allies.