Cellular mergers and the concentration of wealth

Title: Merger lucrative for cellular execs
Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: March 6, 2004

From the article:

The directors and top five officers at Redmond's AT&T Wireless Services Inc. will get $85.7 million in cash if that company is bought by Cingular Wireless LLC, according to federal documents filed yesterday.

Keep in mind that there will be approximately 46 million Cingular subscribers after the merger [ref]. To pay this tiny handful of executives $85.7 million, Cingular will add an extra fee of $1.86 to the bill of every one of those 46 million subscribers.

That is how the concentration of wealth works. The gigantic amounts of money being concentrated by these executives has to come from somewhere. It comes from all of us in the form of inflated prices on nearly everything we buy from corporations.

If you are a Cingular subscriber, think about this: do you want to pay that extra $1.86 to these executives so that they can become obscenely wealthy?