THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Clear Channel provided a loyal narrative of the great businessman Mitt Romney during the election. All the while, Mitt's alleged former company was killing the company for profit.

Clear Channel helped Romney’s campaign in more ways than just having conservative talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity touting his qualifications, because as the company struggled to repay $16.4 billion in debt, they did not announce widespread layoffs, and instead, eliminated jobs in small increments over the course of the past year. An industry observer writing about radio companies, Jerry Del Colliano, said Clear Channel has “strategically fired employees in small numbers so it doesn’t appear that the company is undergoing large-scale layoffs that would have looked bad for Romney if his former company fired Clear Channel’s workers en masse.” Del Colliano continued that “They’ve been nipping and tucking a lot since last November. There has been a substantial number of people let go every week for 52 weeks, and it’s my belief that what they wanted to do was keep attention off of their Bain founder, Mitt Romney.”

Obviously, news of a mass layoff by Clear Channel to “pay down their monster debt with Bain Capital,” would have reflected negatively on Romney’s contention that Bain created jobs and helped build up struggling companies, and a long time employee opined that “obviously, they are trying to fire their way to pay that debt down.” Two private equity firms, Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners purchased Clear Channel in 2008 and loaded the company with debt to the tune of $16.4 billion that comes due as soon as 2014. When Clear Channel was restructured in 2008, they laid off thousands of employees, and they were anxious to avoid another mass firing while Bain’s former owner was running for the presidency on his record as a job creator. Former employees recounted similar stories of being fired in brief meetings with little or no explanation.

And when Bain has sucked all the liquidity out of Clear Channel, they will try to sell the dried up husk of the company to someone. If that fails they will throw it into bankruptcy and walk away with most of the value transferred to Bain accounts. And let the court put Clear Channel to sleep.