Rush Limbaugh Is Employed by a Subsidiary of Romney’s Bain Capital
The chances that Rush Limbaugh will be fired for disparaging women whose insurance covers their contraceptives as “sluts” last week have always fallen safely within the range of slim to none. Limbaugh is, hands down, his employer’s biggest revenue producer, and even if he were caught with the proverbial live boy or dead girl, his bosses at Clear Channel Communications, a multi billion-dollar right-wing radio network based in Texas, would be hard-pressed to send him packing.
But as the controversy over his lies and smears has played out, a key factor related to the politics behind the scandal has generally been overlooked. Clear Channel is a subsidiary of Bain Capital, the firm founded by GOP presidential frontrunner, Mitt Romney in 1984. And although Romney officially resigned from Bain in 1999,he left the company with a deal in place that continues to add millions in income to Romney’s fortune every year. (These millions in revenue were the subject of a campaign controversy earlier this year when Romney was forced to admit he only pays around 15 percent in taxes on his income from Bain.)
In 2008, Bain bought Clear Channel, whose on-air roster includes such heavyweights in right-wing broadcasting as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and, the heaviest weight of them all, Rush Limbaugh.
Earlier this year, allegations surfaced on the far right that Clear Channel’s influential on-air personalities, including Limbaugh, were in the bag for Romney and so were marginalizing fringe candidates like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul:
