What You’re Paying For With AT&T Phone “Service”

That is, when you can even make a normal call on your cellphone.

One thing you’re paying for is millions of dollars for bogus, self’serving “advice” to the company boss from “investment bankers” (finance capitalist vampires) and corporate lawyers to tell him what he wants to hear, namely that buying T-Mobile is a slam dunk, no anti-trust problem at all, which is exactly what he wanted to hear, validating his own genius. (And generating fat fees for the advice-givers.)

Turns out that was dead wrong. The FCC is opposing the anti-competitive merger, and the “Justice” Department is suing under anti-trust law to block it. Oops!

Guess just because something is very very expensive, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s of high quality, including advice.

So here we have exorbitantly expensive “investment bankers” and corporate lawyers who provided a gold-plated vanity mirror to reflect Chairman and CEO’s Randall L. Stephenson’s brilliance back to his face.

But “consumers” never feel robbed by the extravagant wastefulness of corporations, or their stock buybacks, or dividends, or profits. And workers too accept their wages as “fair.”

But when it comes to taxes, somehow that is perceived as stealing. That’s “my” money that’s being taken.

Whose money is taken when you give it to a corporation? And it’s not as if you don’t get anything in return for taxes. You get a government. You get a fire department, a police department (a mixed blessing, to be sure). You get Social Security and Medicare (despised by the GOP and corporate media).

Point is, people are conditioned to see tax as theft, government as waste. As if the trillions of dollars corporations have amasses don’t come from the people too.

But the official ideology holds that the rich magically “create wealth.” Like magicians. Has nothing to do with workers working!