Last year, AT&T recorded $12.8 billion in profits. This year they’re planning the layoffs of 10s of thousands of employees. Their struggle not to remain profitable, but to remain obscenely so at the expense of workers who built the company, and the economy on which it depends, should come as no surprise to anyone. These are the people after all, who plead before Congress that if they were to be held accountable for breaking the law and helping w spy on American citizens BEFORE the Patriot Act was signed, BEFORE 9/11/2001, that surely they would go bankrupt. Immunity, they claimed, was essential in preserving the most fundamental of infrastructures in the U.S. – The Phone Company.
So how obscene is $13 billion in profits? It’s more money than the porn industry generated in whole (pun intended) last year - $11billion – which turns out interestingly enough to be more than Hollywood generated last year in both box office receipts and rentals combined.
It’s enough to keep GM afloat for another year.
Or the War in Iraq going for another 2 weeks.
Or enough to pay for 10s of thousands of employees to keep their jobs – and then some.
Well we can say the same for the Railroads, when asked if upper mnfgnment would suffer along with labor the resonse was "we have lost our equity in the stocks " failing to take into account that no money is lost on stock optoions.
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