http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowry_Mays
Excerpt:
Lester Lowry Mays (born 24 July 1935) is the founder and current chairman of Clear Channel Communications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_McCombs
Excerpt:
Billy Joe "Red" McCombs (born 1927) is the founder of the Red McCombs Automotive Group, a co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, a former owner of the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, and the Minnesota Vikings, and the namesake of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He was named one of Forbes magazine's top 400 richest Americans in 2005.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Arent_Fox_PLLC
Excerpt;

Excerpt:

Tom Hicks
Born	Thomas Ollis Hicks, Sr. February 7, 1946 (1946-02-07) (age 65) Dallas, Texas
Nationality	American
Known for	Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst Sports investment and management

Thomas Ollis Hicks, Sr. (born in 1946), is an American 'leveraged buyout' businessman living in Dallas, Texas. Despite Forbes Magazine estimating Hicks' wealth at USD 1 billion in 2009,^[1] Hicks was unable to pay off joint loans of circa £200 million the following year. Hicks co-founded the investment firm, Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, previously owned fifty percent of the English football club Liverpool FC, and is chairman of Hicks Holdings LLC, which owns and operates Hicks Sports Group, the company that formerly owned the Texas Rangers and currently owns the Dallas Stars and Mesquite Championship Rodeo.

http://www.thenation.com/article/rudys-dirty-money?page=0,2
Excerpt:

Giuliani Partners's Roy Bailey introduced the candidate to GOP billionaires and major Bush supporters like T. Boone Pickens and Tom Hicks. Pickens got to know Rudy after dinner one night at Bailey's house. Hicks had committed to McCain's campaign, but after Bailey "went to see him and rib him about it," he changed his mind and became Giuliani's Texas chairman. The three hosted a fundraiser for Rudy last March in Dallas.

Pickens is a legendary corporate raider from West Texas who terrorized Wall Street by threatening to take over oil companies and grew filthy rich in the process. Since launching a hedge fund specializing in energy investments in 1996, Pickens has become even richer, making more than $1.5 billion in 2005. That same year he gave $165 million to Cowboy Golf, a small charity connected to his alma mater, Oklahoma State, and on whose board Pickens sits. Within an hour, the tax-deductible donation was invested back into the Pickens hedge fund, BP Capital. Critics who objected to the transaction, and Pickens's influence at OSU, began calling the school "Boone State."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-05-24-folgers-dunkin-donuts-smucker_n.htm
Excerpt:

Folgers, Dunkin' Donuts brand coffees to cost more

ORRVILLE, Ohio (AP) — The company that sells Folgers and Dunkin' Donuts and several store-brand coffees has announced its second double-digit price increase this year.

J.M. Smucker (SJM) said Tuesday the list price for most of its U.S. coffee products will go up 11% on average.

Smucker blames a continuing rise in what it pays for unroasted beans, known as green coffee.

Coffee companies and analysts say speculators may be causing most of the increase, though demand is rising in emerging markets and harsh weather in some major coffee-growing regions shrank supply. Green coffee prices jumped 77% last year.

Smucker said its latest price increase also affects Smucker's Millstone and Folgers Gourmet Selections packaged coffees. For the Dunkin Donuts brand, the increase affects only packaged coffee sold in grocery, club, drug and general-merchandise stores. Items sold at Dunkin at Dunkin Donuts shops are not Smucker products.

The Orrville, Ohio, company said in early Februrary it was raising coffee prices an average 10%. Last August, it announced a 9% price hike, which followed a 4% increase in May 2010.

Smucker, whose other products include Jif peanut butter, Crisco and its namesake jams, is not alone. Sara Lee, which sells Maison du Caf, L'Or and Caf Pilao, said this winter that rising green coffee costs led it to raise its prices. Kraft cited rising coffee prices in a broad price hike it levied this winter. Peet's Coffee and Tea has raised its retail prices twice recently in response to raw costs.

And in March Starbucks, the world's biggest coffee chain, raised the prices it charges retailers for packaged Starbucks and Seattle's Best coffee by 12%, citing higher bean costs. Starbucks left up to grocers and other retailers whether they passed along the increase to consumers. But it said it had locked in the prices it pays for beans the remainder of the fiscal year.

The U.S. Labor Department said the prices consumers pay for coffee rose 3.5% in March, part of a 0.8% increase in food prices overall. In April, consumer food prices rose half that much.

The cost increases haven't deterred Smucker from expanding its U.S. coffee portfolio. It announced last week that it purchased privately held Rowland Coffee Roasters Inc. for $360 million in cash. Rowland, based in Miami, sells Cafe Bustelo and Cafe Pilon, which are sold primarily in the Northeastern U.S. and South Florida and target Latino shoppers. Rowland is a leading producer of espresso coffee in the U.S.

http://coffeepods.com/?p=73
Excerpt:
Dunkin’ Brands Inc., which is owned by private-equity companies Bain Capital LLC, the Carlyle Group, and Thomas H. Lee Partners, currently distributes its packaged coffee in grocery stores through J.M. Smucker Co.. It said the deal with Smucker is still going strong.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/private-equity-and-efca.php
Excerpt:

Private Equity and EFCA

By Matthew Cooper - January 27, 2009, 2:22PM

The Employee Free Choice Act has galvanized business lobbies like nothing else in recent years. After all, most issues--say, trade--pits one business lobby against another but few issues unite them. So it's interesting and notable to say the least that one of the most talked-about parts of business is staying out of the EFCA debate: the trade group representing private equity firms like the Carlyle Group and BlackRock. On one hand you would think that private equity firms would have a particularly big stake in fighting EFCA. After all, they often buy businesses under the assumption that they keep the unions out. The Service Employees International Union, for instance, fought the Carlyle Group's takeover of Manor Health Care, a chair of assisted living facilities. . It ultimately failed but it's still trying to organize the chain's workers. Dunkin Donuts is owned by a partnership of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's old firm, the Carlyle Group and Thomas H. Lee Partners. But the main voice of private equity firms in Washington, the Private Equity Council, has stayed out of the fight and the answer would seem to be owing to the fact that unions provide so much capital to private equity. In fact, the Private Equity Council's own research shows in 2007 alone," the top 20 public pension funds, representing nearly 10 million retirees in states including California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, had a collective private equity investment of nearly $140 billion." This is a long way, of course, from getting Steve Schwarzman or Henry Kravis or David Rubenstein to support EFCA. But at least, as unions press forward with EFCA, they don't have private equity's trade group joining the rest of the business lobby.

http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jhayesboh/coffee/coffee-hell.html

Excerpt:

Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan Coffee Maven and Professor
Department of Geography -- Bridgewater State College
Bridgewater, Massachusetts USA / EEUU / EUA
Affiliated Scholar, Institute for Coffee StudiesVanderbilt University
508-531-2118
jhayesboh @ bridgew.edu

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200804110009

Excerpt:

And that same AP article also reported that Mitt Romney doesn't drink coffee at all -- but "has been known to have hot chocolate." Try to imagine how Chris Matthews would react if he found out that Barack Obama doesn't drink coffee -- and that, instead, he drinks hot cocoa.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/politics/2008/08/straight_talk_crunch.html

Excerpt:

by Scott Horsley

Baskin-Robbins is introducing two new flavors of ice cream in honor of the presidential election: "Straight Talk Crunch" and "Whirl of Change."

Reporters traveling with John McCain got to sample the former today: a tasty blend of white chocolate, caramel, crunchy nuts, and a bit of red hot peppermint.

(No Whirl of Change was served on McCain's campaign plane, so I can't offer an informed opinion of which is better. )

Baskin Robbins is partly owned by Mitt Romney's old firm, Bain Capital, but that may not be a signal of McCain's upcoming VP announcement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_H._Lee_Partners

Excerpt:

Thomas H. Lee Partners

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

This article is about the private equity firm. For private equity investor, see Thomas H. Lee.

Thomas H. Lee Partners

Type	Private Ownership
Industry	Private equity
Founded	1974
Headquarters	Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Products	Leveraged buyout
Total assets	$22 billion ^[1]
Employees	50+ (2007)
Website	www.thl.com

[edit] Investments

The firm has raised $22 billion since inception and is currently investing out of its $10 billion sixth fund:

1984 - Fund I($66 million)
1989 - Fund II ($568 million)
1996 - Fund III ($1.4 billion)
1998 - Fund IV ($3.4 billion)
2001 - Fund V ($6.1 billion)
2006 - Fund VI ($10.1 billion)

Source: Preqin (Formerly known as Private Equity Intelligence)^[3]

Notable transactions sponsored by the firm include Dunkin' Donuts^[4], Nielsen Company, Michael Foods^[5], Houghton Mifflin^[6], Fisher Scientific, Experian, TransWestern Publishing^[7], Snapple Beverage^[8] and ProSiebenSat.1 Media.

Thomas H. Lee Partners is also known for its investment in Refco a financial services company specializing in commodities and futures contracts that collapsed suddenly in October 2005, only months after its IPO. Thomas H. Lee Partners as the lead investor was named in a class action shareholder lawsuit against Refco, along with Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Bank of America and Grant Thornton.^[9] Despite the issues caused by Refco, Thomas H. Lee Partners was able to raise $10.1 billion for its most recent private equity fund, its largest fund to date.

Thomas H. Lee Partners operates in a highly aggressive large-cap buyout space in which other private equity firms often compete for the same deals. For example, in the 2010 proposed buyout of CKE Restaurants, Thomas H. Lee Partners was outbid by Apollo Management. Thomas H. Lee Partners' most recent fund has performed well, according to CalPERS^[10].

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Clear_Channel_Communications

Excerpt:

"More unified were the actions of Cumulus Media, which owns 262 stations, and has at least temporarily stopped all 42 of its country stations from playing the Dixie Chicks."

Pro-War Rallies

The Clear Channel's activities go beyond radio. In March 2003, its affiliate stations throughout the United States organized pro-war rallies, under the name of Rally for America, to coincide with the Bush administration's launch of war with Iraq. "Experienced Bushologists let out a collective 'Aha!' when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company's top management has a history with George W. Bush," reported Paul Krugman in the New York Times. Although Clear Channel denied sponsoring the rallies, "they were promoted repeatedly by the company's widely syndicated radio personality, Glenn Beck."[5]

To counter negative impressions resulting from the post-9/11 playlist and "Rally for America" debacles, Clear Channel hired the crisis-management firm Brainerd Communicators. According to the New York Times (March 31, 2003), part of Clear Channel's damage control included an op/ed article by Glenn Beck in which "Mr. Beck described the [pro-war] rallies as a grassroots response to his personal broadcast call to 'Mr. and Mrs. America' to urge their local radio stations to hold rallies."

Breaking the Law

In their "Ten Worst Corporations of 2003" list, Robert Weissman and Russell Mokhiber report that Clear Channel has "compiled a record of 'repeated law-breaking' ... violating the law -- including prohibitions on deceptive advertising and on broadcasting conversations without obtaining permission of the second party to the conversation -- on 36 separate occasions over the previous three years."[6]

Bush Connections

"The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks. ... When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel's chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university's endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire." [7],

"In addition, Hicks steered a controversial scheme to use the University of Texas' $13 billion endowment for private investment. Among the beneficiaries were the Carlyle Group, the arms investment firm tied to both George Bush Snr and the bin Laden family, and George W Bush's controversial Harken Oil drilling project in Bahrain."[8]

What's Happening with the Pension Fund? -- Part 10

by Charles Schwartz, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
schwartz@physics.berkeley.edu June 6, 2001

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/WHPF10.html
Excerpt:
R. Steven Hicks and his brother Tom both founded major radio companies that merged in '99 into AMFM, Inc. After Clear Channel Communications devoured AMFM later that year, Tom Hicks became its vice chair. Tom Hicks made Bush a millionaire 15 times over when he bought the Texas Rangers in '99. Just as local taxpayers enhanced the value of Bush's Rangers by paying $135 million for their stadium, Hicks and Ross Perot, Jr. got Dallas taxpayers to spend $125 million on a stadium for their Dallas Stars and Mavericks in '98. Tom Hicks heads the corporate raider firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst (Bush's No. 4 career patron). Hicks Muse long wanted to tap the $13-billion University of Texas (UT) endowment for its takeover deals. As Bush assumed office in '95, Hicks was confirmed as a University of Texas Regent and hired lobbyists to push a bill creating the UT Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO). With Hicks as its first chair, UTIMCO began doling out contracts to private investment firms to manage portions of the endowment. A scandal blew up when the media discovered that UTIMCO awarded many of these lucrative contracts to firms tied to Hicks and Bush - including one that former President Bush reportedly owns a piece of. The UTIMCO board doling out these contracts included Clear Channel Chair L. Lowry Mays and the Pioneers Tom Loeffler, A.W. Riter, and A. R. Sanchez. Ed Bass and Pioneer Charles Wyly owned two firms that landed some of these contracts.

http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/332
Bill Mahr interviews the Dixie Chicks video

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/13639818/ns/today-today_entertainment/t/clear-channel-boycotting-madonna/
Excerpt:
Clear Channel stations were said to be key in keeping the Dixie Chicks’ music off the air after one of them made highly publicized comments about being “embarrassed” to be from the same state as George Bush.

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/10/clear-channel-republican-propaganda.html
Excerpt:
uesday, October 30, 2007

CLEAR CHANNEL, REPUBLICAN PROPAGANDA NETWORK, OUT TO KILL SPRINGSTEEN'S MAGIC?

If you look for Springsteen in Google News, you get one rave review of his live sold out tour after another. Last Thursday and Friday he wowed 'em at the Oakland Coliseum. Last night he was in L.A.

At 58, Springsteen certainly can't call himself young any more-- at least not chronologically. Despite the hurricane force he and the E Street Band frequently mustered during their two-hour show, plenty of fans cheering them on no doubt recall the nights of yore when this fabled group was just starting to break a sweat at the two-hour mark.

Still, what this outfit does on stage each night remains fairly daring, and the older they get, the greater the risk of the without-a-net abandon with which they administer the sacrament of rock 'n' roll.

The invigorating thing about the New Jersey bard is the way he and his merry band embrace their coming of age. For all the kudos Springsteen's new Magic album is earning for the joyful rocking it delivers, it's rife with self-doubt, disillusionment, anger and acceptance of the disappointments and compromises life inevitably presents the thinking person.

A couple weeks ago the new album was #1 on the Billboard album chart. Kid Rock's new album knocked it down a peg and this week, Springsteen disposed on Kid Rock and is back at #1. The album is already gold and headed right towards platinum and he's got a great shot to win a Grammy for Best Album of the Year. Magic's reviews virtually everywhere are over the top and the intro to his latest interview in Rolling Stone refers to the album's subject matter as "weighty stuff like the direction of our democracy and party stuff that recalls the days when sparks first flew on E Street more than three decades ago."

Republican radio network Clear Channel, a monopoly in many cities and a dominant player in most of the rest, isn't interested. Is it because Springsteen has been an outspoken campaigner for Democrats and progressives? Clear Channel has taken a political stand with its programming in the past. Just think back to their boycott of the Dixie Chicks. Oh, no... not way back, just back to when they released their most recent album. Despite being one of the top 10 best-selling American albums of the year-- across all genres and demographics-- radio studiously ignored it. There were maybe half a dozen country stations that even played it at all. What Clear Channel did to the Dixie Chicks is a watertight case for the need to break the media companies up into a thousand pieces. (John Sununu disagrees; he's pro-censorship.) I spoke with an old friend who heads a record company and preferred to speak off the record.

"When you have artists like the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen who have overtly spoken out against this Administration, they are taken to task in spite the clear and undeniable indications from the marketplace that people want to hear their music. What seems to be happening-- if sales are any kind of a barometer of what the marketplace is-- is that these politically-connected radio networks like Clear Channel are not looking to succeed as radio stations as much as pushing forward some political agenda.

Another friend of mine distinctly recalls the Senate hearings on radio consolidation in light of the Dixie Chicks boycott where Barbara Boxer and John McCain heard testimony including an internal Clear Channel memo threatening "Just wait and see what happens if Springsteen tries this." I guess we're seeing that right now.

Of course, Clear Channel hasn't publicly said they are boycotting Springsteen's music. But they are. Fox News, hardly a hotbed of liberal alarmists, reports that "Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from Magic... no new songs by Springsteen, even though it’s likely many radio listeners already own the album and would like to hear it mixed in with the junk offered on radio."

Clear Channel seems to have sent a clear message to other radio outlets that at age 58, Springsteen simply is too old to be played on rock stations. This completely absurd notion is one of many ways Clear Channel has done more to destroy the music business than downloading over the last 10 years. It’s certainly what’s helped create satellite radio, where Springsteen is a staple and even has his own channel on Sirius.

I don't buy it. Clear Channel is a big-time and very consciously right-wing power player with a goal of changing American pop culture. They have done all they could to stifle progressive voices and to dumb down and trivialize the culture. Meaningless, offensive and inoffensive drivel by Fergie, Britney Spears, Nickelback, and Rihanna you'll hear. But not Springsteen. Clear Channel even has its very own rubber stamp Republican congressman to look out for it's interests, the boss' (not The Boss') son-in-law, the overly right-wing Michael McCaul (TX). You want to see Bruce back on the radio? Stop listening to Clear Channel stations-- and stop voting for Republicans. If there was no Clear Channel-- and no Republicans-- this is what would be on the radio instead of Britney Spears:

UPDATE: SOME ADULT-ORIENTED CLEAR CHANNEL STATIONS ARE PLAYING IT

The Fox News report I linked to isn't exactly right. Some Clear Channel stations are indeed playing it, although mostly Clear Channel stations with independent-minded programmers like KBCO in Denver. Overall, Clear Channel isn't giving it the kind of exposure a #1 record would normally get.

UPDATE: CLEAR CHANNEL BUYING FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE

In 2006 Clear Channel Communications ponied up almost $800,000 in legal campaign contributions, 65% of which went to Republicans. The two top dogs at the company are long-time Bush family retainers and cronies, Tom Hicks and Lowry Mays. Mays has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates for office over the years. A few: $69,500 for the Republican National Committee, $21,000 for the NRCC, $14,200 for Michael McCaul (TX), $2,500 for James Sensenbrenner (WI), $2,300 for Duncan Hunter (CA), $16,300 for Lamar Smith (TX), $6,500 for Kay Bailey Hutchinson (TX), $3,000 for Tom DeLay (TX), $13,000 for Henry Bonilla (TX), $10,250 for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, $2,500 for Heather Wilson (NM), $6,000 for John Cornyn (TX), and $2,100 for Flip Flop Mitt and grudging grand for Giuliani (NY). And there were tens of thousands more from other family members. Hicks was a similarly huge donator to Republicans: $65,000 to the RNC, $50,000 to the NRSC plus another $300,000 or so scattered around to grateful Republicans who have made it very worthwhile for have been so generous. When people talk about the need for campaign finance reform and public financing of elections, this is exactly what they're talking about.

Labels: Clear Channel, McCaul, media, Springsteen

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Constella_Group
Excerpt:
In April 2007, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the Constella Group, "hired by the federal government four years ago to update its list of carcinogens moved quickly to add a virus to the list while two of its clients," Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, "were developing vaccines to combat that same virus." ^[3]
Sidney Wolfe, of the national consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, said tougher conflict-of-interest rules are needed for federal contractors in the health arena. "Otherwise the decision-making is tainted. And even worse than being tainted, it could be the wrong decision - which could have an adverse health impact," said Wolfe, a physician who heads the watchdog's Health Research Group. "There are plenty of contractors out there that don't have financial conflicts of interest." But Don Holzworth, Constella's founder and chief executive officer, denied in a letter to the Journal Sentinel that there is even a hint of a conflict. " The work that we did on behalf of Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, and any other pharmaceutical or biotechnology clients, does not conflict with any work that we have previously done, or are currently doing, on behalf of our government contracts," he wrote. ^[4]

http://www.arentfox.com/newsroom/index.cfm?fa=pressReleaseDisp&content_id=2947
Excerpt:

Contact Information

1050 Connecticut Ave N.W.
Washington, DC 20036-5339
Phone: 202 775-5791
FAX: 202 857-6395
Web: http://www.arentfox.com/
Other contact info: http://www.arentfox.com/contact/

http://engforum.pravda.ru/index.php?/topic/175411-gallery-of-infamy-the-jews-that-perped-911/

Excerpt:

Heavens Task Force

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Privatization was groomed well before 9/11

Folgers, Dunkin' Donuts brand coffees to cost more

Private Equity and EFCA

Thomas H. Lee Partners

[edit] Investments

Pro-War Rallies

Breaking the Law

Bush Connections

What's Happening with the Pension Fund? -- Part 10

CLEAR CHANNEL, REPUBLICAN PROPAGANDA NETWORK, OUT TO KILL SPRINGSTEEN'S MAGIC?

Contact Information

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