Verizon’s phone customers paid more to Uncle Sam than the telecom giant

Pay no taxes and lay people off ,  are companies like Verizon the the type of entities we need leading our economy?   As long as we allow this type of shit, working people are doomed.  The information below about Verizon comes from a report on executive compensation and tax dodging from the Institute for Policy Studies.  Read more

• CEO compensation: $18.1 million
• U.S. federal income taxes: $705 million refund
• Verizon received a massive tax refund last year – despite earning $11.9 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits –the highest among the 25 firms highlighted in this report. Quite a feat for then Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg.
• In effect, every Verizon phone customer paid more in federal telephone excise taxes than Verizon paid in federal income taxes.
• Verizon also has a heavy political presence in Washington. Last year alone, the telecom giant spent $16.7 million on lobbying — and deducted these outlays off its taxes.
• Despite its hefty profits, Verizon last year announced 13,000 job cuts, the year’s third-highest corporate layoff total.

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We Salute Tim DeChristopher

Tim DeChristopher is a young man with great courage.  He is a climate activist who while studying in Utah attended a gas lease auction for public lands.  He bid $1.8 million on 14 parcels of land.  He didn’t have the money to pay of course.  He did it as a form of civil disobedience to ensure that the land would not be sold that day.  It worked and before the land could be sent back to be bid on again the Obama Administration took over from Dubya and little Dick and cancelled the sales.

Tim got two years in prison. He’s locked up right now.  In his letter below,  he says the judge would have given him 30 days if he knuckled under and apologized for what he did.  He refused.  He’s in jail because of his political statements after the incident.  The government punishes acts of civil disobedience harshly.

The labor movement needs tens of thousands of DeChristophers willing to commit creative acts of civil disobedience against the myriad of unjust labor laws that make effective organizing and strikes nearly impossible.  We also need to hook up with all these young people in the environmental movement.  Labor, economics and the environment are all connected.  What good is having a good job if our planet is poisoned.  I’ll have more on this later.  For now read Tim’s letter published in Alternet.  It might inspire you.

A Letter From Prison: Tim DeChristopher Speaks Out

By Tim DeChristopher, Grist.org
Posted on August 30, 2011, Printed on August 31, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/152222/a_letter_from_prison%3A_tim_dechristopher_speaks_out

The following text appeared in a handwritten letter from Tim DeChristopher addressed to Grist’s Jennifer Prediger.

If I had ever doubted the power of words, Judge Benson made their importance all too clear at my sentencing last month. When he sentenced me to two years in prison plus three years probation, he admitted my offense “wasn’t too bad.” The problem, Judge Benson insisted, was my “continuing trail of statements” and my lack of regret. Apparently, all he really wanted was an apology, and for that, two years in prison could have been avoided. In fact, Judge Benson said that had it not been for the political statements I made in public, I would have avoided prosecution entirely. As is generally the case with civil disobedience, it was extremely important to the government that I come before the majesty of the court with my head bowed and express regret. So important, in fact, that an apology with proper genuflection is currently fair trade for a couple years in prison. Perhaps that’s why most activist cases end in a plea bargain.  Read the rest

Posted in Climate Change, enviromental movement, unions | No Comments »

Say no to Walmart

After reading this  Labor Notes story about what it’s like to work at Walmart.  I’m glad I stopped shopping there.

How Walmart Trains Managers

By Adrian Campbell Montgomery

Created Aug 31 2011 – 3:07pm

The brave Walmart workers who belong to OUR Walmart [1] say fear is the main thing stopping their fellow retail workers from organizing. As an assistant store manager at Walmart, I saw how managers were trained to put that fear into hourly workers’ heads.

When I was hired four years ago, new assistant managers had to complete eight weeks of training. We got a $500 prepaid credit card for meals and were thrown into a hotel, with weekends off to go home.

I thought we would get a crash course in Walmart history and then get into learning the computer systems, the policies, how to schedule people. I was far off track. I was now in an eight-week indoctrination into how Walmart is the unsurpassed company to work for, and how to spot any employee who was having doubts. I was supposed to be happy at all times.

The training was done at “Stores of Learning.” The assistant managers were new hires to Walmart, like me, or about one-third had been promoted from within.

Training activities included the Walmart cheer. Every morning, as store associates do, we would participate in the cheer. A few people stood up to read the daily numbers, then break out into a chant—“Give me a W-A-L-M-A-R-T,” with the rest of the people in the room shouting back the same letter. Back then, Wal-Mart still had a hyphen, so between the L and the M they would yell, “Give me a squiggly!” and everyone would do a butt wiggle.

Whenever it was my turn to lead, let’s just say I was less than thrilled, an early warning system for upper management on who was not Walmart material.  Read the rest

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That wasn’t the fat lady. It was #Chris Christie in drag.

Hey Verizon bosses, this fight ain’t over it’s only just begun. That wasn’t the fat lady you heard singing it was Fatso Christie in drag.  The fat slob governor and Verizon’s effete elite exec Lowell McGreedy are neighbors who live in, that cesspool of ruling class vermin, Mendham, NJ.

Fatso Christie in drag singing to Lowell McGreedy @ Mendham, NJ Opera Night

Posted in Bankers, CEO's, Strike, verizon | No Comments »

Verizon Bosses say, “Divide and Conquer.” We say, “Please Don’t Duck.”

Verizon ad tries to divide workers

With the “great power” of their “superior” intellect and  imaginations — diluted, unfortunately, by blue blood inbreeding — the Verizon bosses have  reached into their billion dollar bag of tricks and come up with a brilliant plan –  divide and conquer.  (For more examples of genius see Big Ideas x 0 = 0).

They think that they can take out ads to convince the rest of the working class that the union workers at Verizon should pay for health care because so many other workers have been forced to do so by the insatiable greed of the corporate rulers.  Now this may work on some, because too many workers are blinded by their own greed and the brainwashing of the corporate media and school systems.   But many of the rest of us know that it’s the bosses who should be forced to pay for the health care of the working class — the productive class.  We produce wealth.  They steal it.  The chart below shows the increase in the percentage of net income per household from 1970 to 2005, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

So at a time when the income of the bottom 95% is barely growing and the top 1% has seen their income rise by 175 % the representatives of the 1% at Verizon think that union workers should pay for more of health care and  and health care insurance costs.  Over the past decade, the annual cost of family coverage has risen 131% and the annual cost for single coverage is up 120%.  In each of the past 10 years, insurance increases have outpaced inflation — sometimes by as much as 11 percentage points.  The USA spends more on health care than any other industrial country.

The reason for this disparity is that all other countries on this chart have some kind of single payer system.  What we need in the US is Medicare for all (See previous post) and if the Verizon honchos really cared about saving money on health care they would support that.  But they don’t.  They simply want to take more money from us and stick it in their already overstuffed pockets and dish more out to Wall Street.

Call me a crazy conspiracy nut (You’d be wrong,but that’s your right), but it sure seems to me like I’m starting to see a lot of policies, political strategies and corporate demands that make me believe that the powers that be think a whole lot of  us are expendable.

• cutting pensions and Social Security
• cutting health care
• cutting retirement health care and Medicare
• sending more and more jobs to other countries
• high unemployment combined with a “permanent” decrease in jobs and job growth (too many workers and too few jobs)
• destructive environmental policies
• the continuing reliance on fossil fuels
• what seems to be becoming a permanent state of war

The list could go on. “Work until you die and, we don’t want to pay anything if you get sick.  If you can’t afford health care, it’s not our problem,” the bosses say.  These bastards are always doing their calculating, and they have figured out they don’t need so many of us around.  We’re too big a threat.  They’re looking to get rid of as many of us as they can before we wake up and get rid of them.

We need to get busy organizing a labor movement that fights for the rights of all workers.  Today is the day; tomorrow is too late!

Posted in Bankers, CEO's, Corporate Profits, Health Care, Wall Street, unions, verizon | No Comments »

Reviving the Strike is the only way to build a Vibrant Labor Movement

Here’s a Labor Notes review of a new book  Reviving the Strike by Joe Burns.  Also watch interview with Thom Hartman from YouTube.  Burns argues that we must go back to the traditional strike where labor shut down production even if that requires mass civil disobedience against unjust labor laws.

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REVIEW: Reviving Labor’s Last, Best, and Final Weapon—The Strike

Joe Burns argues that for unions to win again, they need to wage strikes that shut down production. A test case is underway: will the 45,000 CWA and IBEW members who have struck Verizon be able to stop enough work to cause the company pain?

In a refreshingly straightforward style, Joe Burns argues persuasively that the cause of union decline is our inability to wage a successful strike. That is, one which shuts down production and compels the employer to accede to union demands.

His new book, Reviving the Strike [1], details the decades of anti-union legislation, National Labor Relations Board decisions, and Supreme Court rulings that have outlawed everything that works: sympathy strikes, bans on replacement workers, secondary boycotts, and other muscular tactics that gave unions a fighting chance.  Read the rest

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