Remember those luxurious tax cuts the Republican Party gifted the tippy-top Americans and corporations? The one that has helped to blow out our deficit while allowing top companies to basically pay nothing in taxes? Of course you do! I mean, you are probably swimming in job opportunities and wage increases as we speak! That was the promise from the GOP and their wealthy overlords, overlords such as telecommunications giant AT&T. AT&T has reportedly been able to save $42 billion because of the GOP tax break, but has also been making big cuts and layoffs since 2018. It has also been slowing down spending on infrastructure during that time.

This, of course, is the opposite of what the American public was promised by big businesses and their Republican cronies. A big part of the issue for AT&T is the debt created by its acquisitions of DirectTV and Time Warner Inc. Those acquisitions haven’t worked out the way AT&T had hoped, and the company has begun moving into the online-only streaming sector and away from the satellite services that DirectTV offers. The debt acquired by AT&T, according to Ars Technica, is almost $200 billion, and the telecom has been cutting costs and jobs ever since to get out from under it.

On Tuesday, during an investors event at Morgan Stanley, AT&T president and COO John Stankey told the audience that part of the exciting new moves for the company will be cutting costs. “In the near term, things that fall in that short-term bucket, I already talked to you about some of them, some of the headcount rationalization work we're doing on overhead, some of the benefit restructuring that we've done that we've already communicated out that get us a good way to some of our objectives this year.” “Headcount rationalization” is a brand new way of saying “firing people.”

Published with permission from Daily Kos