redrumloa wrote:
ummm one coment
Clear Channel <> Bush
That's right. Clear Channel is Tom Hicks and L. Lowry Mays who are not Bush, merely very good friends of Bush who were huge contributors to the Bush campaign.
How is Hicks connected to Bush?
quote:
So how does any of this relate to Bush? Let's go back to 1989. Bush has just invested $605,000 - money he borrowed - in a syndicate that bought the Texas Rangers. (He would later repay the loan with proceeds from the sale of Harken stock remember Harken?). Though Bush had a 1.8 percent share of the club, the terms of this deal with the Rangers specified that once his partners made back their investment, his share would jump to 11 percent.
The Rangers' stadium was on the small side, so the new owners decided a grand, new stadium was in order. A 13-acre parcel of land bought in Arlington, Tex., at below-market rates. "
ush and his partners used Arlington's [municipal] powers to condemn the land for the stadium, and relied on taxpayers to repay the bonds sold to build the Ballpark - receiving what amounts to a direct $135-million subsidy," wrote Robert Bryce of the Austin Chronicle. (Indeed, a jury later found that the ballpark property's original owners were owed more than six times what they were paid.)
When the new stadium was completed in 1993, the value of the Rangers immediately increased by $26 million, to $132 million. In 1997, Financial World magazine named the ballpark the most profitable stadium in major league baseball.
But it wasn't worth $250 million. Yet in 1998, Tom Hicks, a friend of Bush's, bought the Rangers for this enormous amount, making Bush - who walked away with close to $15 million - a very, very rich man. But then, Hicks had done pretty well for himself in previous years, thanks in part to Bush.
When Bush became governor in 1995, Hicks, who was then head of the corporate raider firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, was confirmed as a University of Texas regent. Hicks hired lobbyists to garner support for a bill - which Bush approved - creating the UT Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), a nonprofit corporation dedicated to managing public university money. The best part: Bush also got rid of the requirements to disclose "all details concerning the investments made and the income realized" and to have "a well-recognized performance measurement service" review the investments. UTIMCO was, in essence, left to operate on its own.
Hicks became UTIMCO's first chair and started handing out contracts to private investment firms to manage some of the endowment. He was aided by none other than Clear Channel's chairman and CEO, L. Lowry Mays, who was also on the board (and still is).
According to the Houston Chronicle, by March 1999, UTIMCO handled more than $11 billion of University of Texas endowment money, along with the state's higher education trust, the Permanent University Fund. Close to $2 billion was handed to private investment management companies - hundreds of millions of which ended up in the hands of firms run by associates of Hicks and major Republican Party donors. One of them, the Carlyle Group, is well known for its financial relationships with President Bush and prominent members of the Reagan/Bush administrations.
(excerpted from
http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/03/04/18_clear.html)
