Slashdot Mirror
Charter Files For "Prearranged Bankruptcy"
jamie points out news that Charter Communications filed for "prearranged" Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, primarily to reorganize some of the $21.7 billion in debt it has accrued. Quoting:
"The St. Louis-based company seeks to emerge from bankruptcy as early as the end of summer and doesn't plan on selling any of its assets to competitors. After Chapter 11, interest costs at Charter, which has never posted a profit since going public in 1999 due to massive debt interest payments, will be cut in half to $830 million a year. The filing restructures about $8 billion of debt at Charter, which is controlled by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, but leaves about $13 billion of debt on its books. Allen will control 35 percent of the votes in the reorganized company. In the bankruptcy, Allen's 51 percent equity stake in the cable operator will be wiped out, along with shares of other stockholders. Allen also holds some debt and preferred stock."
Hell, some people were lucky if they even got shitty service. My grandmother's really getting into the whole technology thing with gusto, and was after HDTV and high-speed internet. Guess what? Charter did not offer either option to her entire town (a close-in, well-established suburb of Dallas). In fact, they had no plans to EVER offer either one in "that market" as they put it. Suddenly I realized why so very, very many houses around there had sprung up satellite dishes.
She even went up to the Charter office, and the girl that she talked to there actually said she was telling customers to get satellite. So that's what my grandmother did. She'd been a Charter customer literally since they became available in her area, even before they ever went public. Decades. Not anymore. She's a happy DirecTV customer now, with all her HDTV and her DVR. Loving it.
She got AT&T DSL too, not the greatest choice but it's pleased her.
Looking around at all the other dishes in the area (a lot of them are DISH network, I notice, which is owned by AT&T, so probably a lot of DSL customers too), it's not at all hard to see that Charter is hemorrhaging customers in that market, and I have little doubt that it is by far not the only place where they're making such stupid, asinine decisions that are forcing customers to leave them in order to get the service they clearly want.
Because our brand of capitalism is based on borrowed money.
Just about every company who employs more than 100 people is borrowing money daily in the commercial paper market just to pay its vendors and employees.
That, coupled with the notion that there has to be constant, accelerating growth, that having a company that makes a profit and employs people that are happy just isn't enough, and you get a system that's made of borrowed money and workers who are exploited.
One bright spot in this recent economic turmoil is that more people are learning a lot of surprising things about the way our "free-market capitalist" system really works. More of them are realizing that it's not "the immigrants" or "the blacks" or "Wall Street" or even "the government" that is destroying our way of life, it's something a lot more systemic.
You are welcome on my lawn.