sizing. For example, after reporting that AT&T had announced a cut of 40,000 jobs, CNN's World News went on to say that "The latest rounds of corporate cutbacks have left many people fearing that they may be the next to be fired."6 NBC's Tom Brokaw predicted that "if what hap- pened today to 40,000 workers at AT&T is any kind of barometer of what's ahead, it will be another long, anxious year for the American Tough Calls middle class."7 The television news anchors tied AT&T's downsizing to the feelings of insecurity and fear that were rattling working people in every community. On one level, objective economic data suggested that everything was fine-inflation was at historically low rates (2.7 percent), and un- employment, which had declined in the last four years, was at rela- tively low levels (5.8 percent). But what the statistics could not show was that many Americans were feeling increasingly worried, frus- trated, and angry. In the previous ten years, more than one-third of Americans (35 percent) either had lost their own job or had an imme- diate family member who lost a job. Almost one-quarter (22 percent) of Americans worried that they would lose their job in the next twelve months. Despite low inflation, real incomes were being squeezed; all but the top IO percent of wage earners had seen their real income decline. Optimism about the national economic outlook had taken a negative turn in December of 1995, and only three out of ten Ameri- cans believed that their children would be better off then they were.8 In addition to coming on the first business day of a new year, the AT&T downsizing touched a nerve. As then Secretary of Labor Robert Reich put it in a New York Times op-ed just two days after the an- nouncement, AT&T "is but one in a long list of companies that have delivered large numbers of pink slips in recent years, despite record profits." (Emphasis added.) People could understand why companies in trouble had to let people go. But AT&T was recording its most profitable year in history. What was