and somewhere in there a brief fantasy relationship with Yahoo as an internet service provider and a general screwing to the taxpayers of the City of Irving and Dallas county being thrown in… but I once more digress.
CenturyLink “absorbed” Qwest’s facilities, employees and corporate debts in a process called merger where all duplicated or “redundant” jobs on both sides of the merger were downsized. Meaning XXX number of real people lost their tech and service sector jobs. That’s the way it looks on any prospectus of any merged corporations, in order to convince people to invest more capital in those corporations.
In reality the jobs created would be debt collectors and repossession crews and foreclosure agents.
BUT that’s what they tell the Money People. Those of us who are in the Peasant Majority are told that we should welcome CenturyLink along with the massive tax breaks given on top of the ones they already enjoyed PLUS extras for “Job Creation” in our communities… we’re told that these massive layoffs is somehow an opportunity for those “downsized” out of having a living wage job to get a job with a company who has just laid off about 20 percent of their workforce by eliminating redundant positions.

Firing people in other words. But “job creation” is their story, and they’re stickin’ to it. So when you hear a politician proclaim that his policies of deregulation and wage-cutting and tax breaks for the richest actually created jobs, now you know why it is that a lot of people have decided that he’s just full of shit all the way up to the nose and it keeps leaking out of his mouth.

Other questions for them would be, since Union Membership is under 20% of the workers now, for thirty years the right to organize, join or even mention the word “Unions” anywhere on or off the job has been slashed, safety health and environmental regulations slashed, the remaining shreds of those regulations routinely ignored, and the workers’ right to legal redress of grievances limited under “Tort Reform” plus the lowest tax rate since the last Great Depression, hasn’t created any “new jobs” for us even though the Corporations have had their way granted to them on a silver charger for 3 straight decades.

But you’ll only get half of the first part of the question asked when the TeaBag and RepubliKlan Morons shout you down.