My Grandmother Lillian Kernan and her sister Margie were teenagers when they joined a hot new technology company called AT&T as telephone operators. I used to love to hear them say the mantra of the early technology age “number ple-ase”. Lillian left after a few years, but Margie stuck it out for 48 and retired a millionaire thanks to AT&T stock.
In June 2001, before the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation of the U.S. Senate, Michael Armstrong, then the AT&T Chairman stated; “In reliance upon the promise of the Telecommunications Act we have invested over a hundred billion dollars in local telecommunications and Cable Networks and now serve over 2 million local residential customers”.
Over a hundred billion for 2 million customers, you do the math.
This is the Great American Telephone and Telegraph Robbery.
I would like to see a full disclosure of all the PR firms paid to transmit the message that SBC has acquired AT&T for 16 billion. AT&T stock holders are the owners of the company, has everybody forgotten that? The deal done late on a Sunday night “number ple-ase” a token one billion dollars and 15 billion in SBC stock, but what is SBC stock worth, who knows?
There was a “power failure” in downtown Manhattan late Sunday night as these sleazes in suits cut their dirty deal, could it have been the ghost of Thomas Edison that pulled the switch?
AT&T is much, much more then just a long distance phone company, they built and control a fiber optic network that circumnavigates the globe, Global Crossing went broke trying to replicate it. The value of the fiber optic network is what it would cost today to build “number ple-ase” could be in the trillions of dollars.
AT&T created the telecommunications industry by innovation, switches, relays, the vacuum tube, the transistor, the UNIX computer OS, the C computer programming language, the communications satellite and Universal Service.