Today's Stories

April 30, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

April 30, 2008

William P. O'Connor
The Day I Lost My Innocence

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Did the Supreme Court Just Elect John McCain?

Tariq Ali
Storming Heaven: 1968 Revisited

John Ross
Bad Jazz in NOLA: Three NAFTA Leaders Sit It for the Last Time

Glen Ford
Pop Goes the Race-Neutral Campaign!

Joshua Frank
Election Season Piffle: Thinking Outside the Voting Booth

Ashley Smith
Iraq After Basra

Robert Weissman
Medical R&D That Works in the Developing World

Sen. Russ Feingold
Bush's Shroud of Secrecy

Website of the Day
Richard Nixon, April 30, 1970

April 29, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Military Option

Roedad Khan
Why Gen. Musharraf Must Go

Chris Floyd
The Torture Election

Paul Craig Roberts
The Iraq War Morphs Into the Iran War

Dave Lindorff
Invasion of the Pumpheads

Mats Svensson
Mental Barriers in Palestine

Peter Morici
Will the Fed Broaden Its Focus?

Mike Ferner
Inside American Royalty's Security Bubble

John Weisheit
Towing Icebergs to San Pedro

Amit Srivastava
China Olympics, Tibet Crackdown, Coke Profits

Website of the Day
Tom Friedman Gets Creamed

April 28, 2008

JoAnn Wypijewski
On Queen's Boulevard, the Night Sean Bell's Killers Got Off

Mike Whitney
Jeremiah Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch: But Will It Topple Obama?

Iris Keltz
The Fruiting Fig Tree: Memories of East Jerusalem

Steve Niva
The New Walls of Baghdad: the Israeli Model Surges Toward Iraq

David Macaray
CAFTA's Bloodtrails

John Ross
"Adelitas" Shut Down Mexico's Congress

Stephen Lendman
The Politics of Green Scare

Malou Innocent
On "Withdrawing Responsibly" from Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Want to Learn the Ins-and-Outs of the Slumping Economy? Just Ask Ashley ...

William Kaufman
Michael Moore's Embrace of Obama: a Polemic Devoid of Politics

Website of the Day
Get Your Fix

April 26 / 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Nothing Will Get Hillary Out of the Race

Ralph Nader
A World of Hunger

Peter Camejo
A Crying Shame: the Wages of Left Capitulation

Harvey Wasserman
Making You Pay for the Next Chernobyl--in Advance!

Franklin Lamb
Will U.S. Policy in Lebanon and the Middle East Ever Change?

Wajahat Ali
Fisk Fighting: an Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk

Mike Whitney
Food Riots and Speculators

Andrew Wimmer
Obliterate Them!

David Yearsley
Nero, Frederick the Great, Nixon ... They All Did It Better Than Clinton

Greg Moses
Chicago: the Stupid Experiment

Ron Jacobs
Walking the Lonely Road

Robert Fantina
Bush v. Carter: Let History Judge

Missy Comley Beattie
Introducing President McCain

Linn Cohen-Cole
The Criminalization of Raw Milk: a Mennonite Farmer is Hauled Away

Paul Krassner
Remembering Ruben Salazar

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Buknatski, Khaiyat, Lair, and Kowit

Website of the Weekend
Justice for Sean Bell

April 25, 2008

George Ciccariello-Maher
Embedded with the Tupamaros

Dave Lindorff
The Bitter and the Biased: How Clinton Courted Racists in Pennsylvania

Franklin Lamb
The Israeli Project Has Failed in Lebanon

Alan Farago
Hacking the Development Code: the Politics of Zoning in Florida

John W. Farley
Syiran Nukes: the Phantom Menace

Kathleen M. Barry
Some Questions for "Femininists for Clinton:" Is There Really Any Difference Between Hillary and Condi?

Mohammed Alireza
Cowboys and Iranians

Nick Dearden
Haiti and the Black Hole of Debt

Carmelo Ruiz Marrero
Why Biotech is Betting on Biofuels

Bruce Springsteen
Farewell to Danny

Website of the Day
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop

April 24, 2008

Linn Washington, Jr.
Duplicity Demeans Clinton Campaign (or When Bill Praised Farrakhan)

Franklin Lamb
Bush to Nasrallah: an Offer Hezbollah Cannot Refuse?

Jennifer Van Bergen
The High Crimes of John Yoo: the President's Executioner

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Hypocrisy and the Malaysian Guantánamo

Mark Engler
Trade Politics and the Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Dave Lindorff
The Politics of Obliteration: Hillary's Monstrous Threat

John Blair
Obama's Missed Opportunities in Evansville: Did He Even Know It Was Earth Day?

De Clarke / Stan Goff
Politics is Food is Politics

Binoy Kampmark
Bowling for Boris: the Tories, Red Ken and the London Mayoral Race

Philippe Marlière
Sarkozy and the Specter of May 68

Peter Morici
The Bank of England Misses the Point

Website of the Day
Fair Food Nation

April 23, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
Straggling to Denver

Vijay Prashad
McCain's Mask

Paul Craig Roberts
What the Iraq War is About

Stephen Soldz
The Involuntary Drugging of U.S. Detainees

Laura Santina
Hillary: Another Feminist Perspective

John Stauber /
Sheldon Rampton
Pentagon News Networks

Dave Lindorff
What Double Digit Win? Media Round Up in PA

George Ciccariello-Maher
Radical Chavismo Growls a Challenge

Ralph Nader
Andy Stern's Rackets

John Weisheit
Rearranging Deck Chairs at Glen Canyon Dam

Website of the Day
Wal-Mart's "Cost of Admission"

April 22, 2008

David Isenberg
Spinning Saddam's Linkages

Stan Cox
The Political Economics of Greenwashing

David Macaray
Memo to the Clinton Campaign: They Are Still Murdering Labor Unionists in Colombia

Jeff Birkenstein
Playing the Opposite Game: Or Why Can't I Sell Out?

Mike Whitney
Memo to Bernanke: Enough With the Rate Cuts, Already!

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush's Paraguayan Fiasco

Floyd Rudmin
From Lhasa to Bilbao: Journey of a Double Standard

Carlos Villarreal
Why John Yoo Should be Dismissed From Boalt Law School--And Prosecuted

Ray McGovern
What About the War, Pope Benedict?

Michael Gould-Wartofsky
El Barrio Fights Back Against Globalized Gentrification

Robert Ovetz
A Fish Tale

Pat Wolff
Rightwing Power Grab in Cornhusker State

Website of the Day
Defend the Rutgers 3!

April 21, 2008

Bill Quigley
The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

Uri Avnery
The Lion and the Gazelle

Dave Lindorff
The U.S. Economy and the Costs of War

Wajahat Ali
Finding Osama Bin Laden with Morgan Spurlock

Andy Worthington
Hollow Gestures at Guantánamo

Robert Jensen
The Sorrows of Race and Gender

Ron Jacobs
Clampdown at Evergreen

Dan Bacher
The Great Salmon Closure

Harvey Wasserman
Where's George?

Danny Alexander
Remembering Danny Federici

Website of the Day
Save Our Taco Trucks!

April 19 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
McCain: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

Patrick Cockburn
A New Struggle is Beginning in Iraq

Wajahat Ali
Zinn Speaks

Andrew Wimmer
Papal Benedictions

Rev. William E. Alberts
Jeremiah Wright and America's Continuing "Separate and Unequal" Societies

David Rosen
Texas Two-Step: The Polygamy Raid and the Regulation of Sexual Life

Robert Fantina
McCain Detests War?

Ramzy Baroud
The Politics of Armageddon: McCain's Pastors and the Middle East

Saul Landau
The No Escape Clause on Iraq

Dr. Susan Block
Raelians, Aliens and Evolution

David Yearsley
Suitcase Arias and Ithacan Jazz

Phyllis Pollack
On the Red Carpet with the Rolling Stones

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Hartz, Newberry and Khaiyat

April 18, 2008

John Ross
The Bush Legacy: Losing Latin America

Dave Lindorff
Courage and Conviction: In Praise of Bill Ayers

Dan Glazebrook
An Interview with Robert Fisk

Carl Finamore
A Look Inside the Hangars

Rannie Amiri
J Street: Do We Really Need Another Pro-Israel Lobby?

Richard Morse
A Creepy Roadblock at Midnight

Ko Young-dae
CONPLAN 8022: Inside Bush's Nuclear War Plan for the Korean Peninsula

Farooq Sulehria
A Himalayan Surprise

April 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Hillary Joins the Vast Rightwing Financial Conspiracy

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Apologists

Kathy Kelly
Weary of War? Don't Collaborate

Madis Senner
The Carrion Feeders' Ball: How Hedge Funds Reap Billions Off Economic Misery

Peter Morici
The G7, the Banks and GE

Ron Jacobs
Washington, al-Maliki and the Militias

William S. Lind
A Confirming Moment in Basra

James Murren
Obama's Disconnect with Small Town America

Ben Terrall
Losing Haiti

Walter Brasch
Political Log Rolling in Clinton County, PA

Website of the Day
Stealth Attack: Homegrown "Terrorism" Bill

April 16, 2008

Bill Kauffman
The Candidates from Nowhere

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Colonization and Massacres

Saul Landau
How to Leave Iraq

Peter Morici
McCain's Economic Plan: GOP Out of Ideas (But So are the Democrats)

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Bankers Saved, Human Rights Sacrificed

Jeff Ballinger
Inside Nike's Asian Sweatshops: Squeezed Vietnamese Workers Strike Back

David Macaray
Union Strikes and Replacement Workers

Gary Leupp
Electoral Revolution in Nepal

Richard Morse
The Food Riots in Haiti

George Ciccariello-Maher
Einstein Turns in His Grave

Dave Lindorff
Letters from the Bitter Belt

Website of the Day
Surviving Prozac

April 15, 2008

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Distraction in an Age of Gotcha Capitalism

Uri Avnery
Manifest Destiny and Israel

Brian Cloughley
Arrogant Lies

David Price
Outrageous Pre-Tour de France Ban

Joe Bageant
Bitter America: Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality

Steve Early
The Purple Punch-Out in Dearborn

Mats Svensson
To Create Something from Nothing: the Making of a Palestinian State

Michael Donnelly
Dead-Eye Hil and the Elitist

April Howard /
Benjamin Dangl
Dissecting the Politics of Paraguay's Next President

Laray Polk
Let's Not Put the Torch in a Bubble

Charles Modiano
What Does a Woman Have to Do to Get on the Cover of Sports Illustrated?

Website of the Day
The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree

April 14, 2008

Carl Finamore
Airline Deregulation Makes a Hard Landing

Michael Hudson
A Trillion Dollar Rescue for Wall Street Gamblers

M. Shahid Alam
Hizbullah's Big Win: Has Israel Finally Met Its Match?

Patrick Cockburn
A Cleric, a Pol and a Warrior

Paul Craig Roberts
Petraeus Sets Up Iran

Joanne Mariner
Redition to Jordan: What Happens When the Gloves Come Off?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide and Cymbalta

Dave Lindorff
The Bitterness Thing: Is Obama Channeling Nader

P. Sainath
Hot Messages to Sex Dancer Doom Condi's New Finnish Pal

John V. Whitbeck
On Hypocrisy Over Tibet: a Personal Reflection

Website of the Day
Spying on Environmental Groups

April 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Olympic Torch Toasts US Candidates

Patrick Cockburn
Warlord: the Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Mike Whitney
Want to Save the Economy?

David Yearsley
Film Scores and Westerns: the Stealth Cavalry of Empire

Robert Fantina
Bush's Brand of Morality

Conn Hallinan
Another Defining Moment in Iraq

Bill Hatch
In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture

Ramzy Baroud
The Basra Battles

George S. Hishmeh
Back to Square One

Ron Jacobs
The New New Left in Latin America

Nikolas Kozloff
Olympic Torch in Buenos Aires

Charles Thomson
The British Prime Minister and the Tate's Tin of Shit

Alexander Billet
The Disney-fication of CBGB

Missy Beattie
Huffing and Puffing to Failure

David Michael Green
America's Jones for War

Seth Sandronsky
Education Entrepreneurs

Prairie Miller
Meeting David Wilson

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Ko Un, Ibn Salma and Greaves

Website of the Weekend
Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights

April 11, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Clintons and Their Sordid Colombia Advocacy

Wajahat Ali
Revenge of the Ghetto Nerd: an Exclusive Interview with Junot Diaz

Sharon Smith
Let Them Eat Ethanol!

Yigal Bronner / Neve Gordon
Digging for Trouble: the Politics of Archaeology in East Jerusalem

Alan Farago
Eating South Florida

Dave Lindorff
On Waking Sleeping Giants: Lessons for America from China

George Wuerthner
Money for Nothing? The Problems with the Conservation Reserve Program

Christopher Brauchli
Prostitutes Don't Do Funerals

Website of the Day
Animals Explain the Insurance Industry: a Health Care Video

April 10, 2008

Mathieu Vernerey
Tibet for the Tibetans!

Elizabeth Schulte
Slavery in the Fields

David Macaray
Labor Unions Will Never Get a Fair Shake

Ashley Smith
The Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Peter Morici
Driving Up Debt and Dragging Down Growth

Jacob Hornberger
The Military's Distintegrating Family Life

Harold Austin
Snitch or Else: Prison Officials Threaten Gang Drop Outs

Website of the Day
Hillary: the Wal-Mart Videos

April 9, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Fading American Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congressional Theater: the Petraeus / Crocker Hearings

C. Hand
Why Dave Marash Left Al Jazeera

Paul Krassner
Sex and Violins

Paul Wolf
Colombian "Magnicidio" Remains a Mystery After 60 Years

Wajahat Ali
Alien Invasion!

Karyn Strickler
Lost in the Fumes: the Sierra Club Sells Out to Clorox

Dan La Botz
Confronting the Economic Crisis

Eric Walberg
The Shadow of Munich: Another NATO Flop

Robin Millenthal
Enough Already! Growth and the Tar Sands Economy

Website of the Day
Conservative Nanny State

April 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
Should Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be Set Free?

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush Bullies Congress on Colombia Deal

Greg Moses
Migrant Detention in South Texas

Joshua Frank
The Other Military Draft

John Ross
Mexico City's Urban Tribes Go on the Warpath Against EMOS

Michael Donnelly
Hillary's Western Swing

John V. Walsh
Why Obama Lost Massachusetts

Jeff Nygaard
Health, Security and Mandates

Bill Piper
Last Shot for a Bush Legacy?

Sen. Russ Feingold
Legal Representation and the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Catonsville 9, Forty Years Later

April 7, 2008

Ishmael Reed
The Irish Black Thing

Harry Browne
Irish Peace Activist Acquitted; Deported

Uri Avnery
Tibet and Palestine

Lenni Brenner
Obama's Constitution, His Pastor and His Unbelieving Mom in Heaven

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
America Must Respect Pakistan's Democracy

Robert Fisk
Fearful Lives in the Land of the Free

Edwin Krales
Ensuring the Success of Fascism in Spain: the US Corporate Role

Chris Genovali
Vancouver Island's Dwindling Ancient Forests

Website of the Day
LA Artists Against War

April 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Did the Elites Want MLK Dead?

Ramzy Baroud
There are No Checkpoints in Heaven

Ralph Nader
Runaway Bailouts

David Yearsley
How Scott Joplin Had Wall Street Down

Saul Landau
Sex Politics in America

Paul Craig Roberts
The Petraeus and Crocker Show

Lawrence Korb / Ian Moss
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a True Patriot

Seth Sandronsky
Meet America's Promise Alliance: Colin Powell's New Gig

John Ross
La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush: Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students in Ecuador Bombing

Robert Fantina
McCain, Republicans and Family Values

David Michael Green
Back to Disaster: Hoover at Home, Tet Abroad

Missy Beattie
McCan't

Patrick Bond
Vultures Circle Zimbabwe

Dr. Susan Block
The New American Pot Dealers

Phyllis Pollack
The Stones Meet the Press

Adam Engel
The Boobus in the Lie

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Diamand and St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
Richard Pryor Goes to the Gun Shop

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"Lay Off This Monsanto Thing. I'm Getting a Lot of Complaints"

Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

By CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER

If you have heard of Learfield Communications, it is probably from listening to college football and basketball games.

The Jefferson City, Missouri based Learfield is one of the nation’s largest broadcasters of college sports.

But it also produces news programming heard throughout the farm belt.

Learfield was started 35 years ago by Clyde Lear and Derry Brownfield.

Lear went on to be the chairman of the company. He bought out his friend and partner Brownfield in 1985.

Brownfield went on to do market news reports for the Learfield news division until 1997 or so, when he started broadcasting a daily call-in show called The Common Sense Coalition.

Derry Brownfield would broadcast The Common Sense Coalition from the studios of Learfield Communications.

Learfield would subsidize the program and allow Brownfield to use its studios and satellite hook-up.

Monsanto happens to be a big advertiser of the Learfield news division – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Brownfield happens to think that Monsanto is an evil corporation.

Therein lies the rub.

For weeks, Brownfield had been ripping Monsanto on air for its policies of enforcing its seed patents against farmers.

On the April 16 show, Brownfield’s topic was seed industry concentration in America.

His guests were Fred Stokes, president of the Organization for Competitive Markets, and Michael Stumo, general counsel of the group.

Stokes and Stumo were promoting a new project to study corporate concentration in the seed industry.

Monsanto is the dominant player in the global seed industry and has a reputation for playing rough.

On air, Brownfield quoted from a newly published Vanity Fair article titled “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear” by Donald Barlett and James Steele.

“Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country,” Barlett and Steele write. “They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops, infiltrate community meetings, and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the ‘seed police’ and use words such as ‘Gestapo’ and ‘Mafia’ to describe their tactics.”

After reading from the Vanity Fair article, Brownfield then begins to riff on the Mafia theme.

“Multinational corporations are doing everything possible to change agriculture – and not for the better,” Brownfield says on the show. “I know a little bit about this – not a lot, just a little bit – but Monsanto literally they have Mafia goons out, do they not? They show up on farmers’ property, they try and harass them, they say if you don’t sign this, we are going to take you to court. They have literally tried to destroy agriculture as we know it. They have a goon squad. Maybe that’s not what they like to be called. But if it was the Mafia, we would call them the goon squad.”

Calling Monsanto’s patent enforcers goons was apparently the straw that broke this camel’s back.

Brownfield’s stint at Dearfield was about to end.

Last week, Brownfield was told that he could no longer broadcast out of the Dearfield studios. His buddy, Clyde Lear, posted a blog on the Learfield web site saying that Brownfield’s last show will be in mid-May.

“The Common Sense Coalition grinds to a halt on our system,” Lear wrote.

“Most of his listeners loved him as did his affiliates,” Lear wrote about his buddy. “He didn't mind controversy or taking on giants like the Monsanto Corporation. He thought they were bad for farmers, too big for their britches and generally bad for America. Increasingly he's been saying so, without seeking balance, in my opinion.”

And then later, in response to listeners who were upset that Brownfield was being let go, Lear wrote:

“Some seem to think the reason Derry is leaving is because Monsanto threatened to stop advertising if we didn’t put a gag on him. If that were the only reason Derry was asked to leave, then I can see why they think we are selling out. We've parted ways because accusations being made about not only advertisers, but individuals, corporations, government, (fill in the blank) were based on fear and lies with absolutely no truth to back them up. I abhor radio talk shows like Rush Limbaugh...and Derry Brownfield where half-truths are articulated. I won't be a part of them. And, that's my right.”

But in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter, Lear admits that the Monsanto issue is what drove his buddy Brownfield out. “If the Monsanto issue had not come up, we would not be here today,” Lear said.

Lear said that the President of Learfield Communications, Roger Gardner, talked recently with John Raines, Monsanto’s director of public affairs.

“John Raines talked to Roger Gardner about the difficulties they felt Brownfield is giving them,” Lear said. “(Gardner) told me he talked to John Raines about the Vanity Fair article.”

“The pressure I got came from the president of the news division, Stan Koenigsfeld,” Lear said. “Stan is the guy that has responsibility for selling and maintaining the financial viability of our news division. Stan is a no nonsense guy. So, Stan comes in and says – why are we doing this? Why do we continue to do this? We give him all of these things and he spits in our face by lambasting our good advertisers, without giving them an opportunity for fair and balanced reporting. And it is not reporting – it’s just entertainment. Why do we continue to do this?”

Lear says that the complaints have been mounting over the past five years about Brownfield.

“And I’ve been saying to Stan, settle down, it will all be alright,” Lear said. “But I imagine Stan is getting a lot of pressure from his sales executives. We have three that call on Monsanto for different products. And I would assume that he is getting pressure from those sales executives. When those sales executives call on Monsanto, Monsanto is complaining to the sales executives. That is where the connection happens. But you would have to talk to them about the kind of leverage Monsanto is putting on them. They have never to my knowledge threatened to pull any advertising.”

Lear finally confronted Brownfield.

“I went to him and said – Derry, look, lay off of this,” Lear said. “Lay off of this Monsanto thing. I am getting a lot of complaints.”

Lear said he was the only one in the company who could approach Brownfield.

“I’m the only one who can talk to him,” Lear said. “No one else in the company will go to him. He is kind of persona non grata. He is one of the guys who helped start the company years ago. He was my partner for years until 1985 when I bought him out. He is a dear friend of mine. So, there is no one else – all of the rest of the guys are half my age. They won’t go to him. They are afraid of him. They just won’t go and talk to him.”

“They all came to me and said – go talk to Derry,” Lear said. “We’ve got to quit doing this. Plus, it came at a bad time. It came during the same week that the National Association of Farm Broadcasters national convention was being held in Kansas City. And at that convention, of course, Monsanto was omnipresent. They are there trying to woo farm broadcasters, because they want them to say nice things about them, right? So, here are all of the Monsanto people at this convention. And their advertising agencies – Osborne & Barr out of St. Louis – among others. They were all there. And it was embarrassing, because all of that week, Derry is lambasting Monsanto.”

“We have explained to Monsanto, in any way we can, that the Brownfield Network has nothing to do with Derry’s show,” Lear says. “This is a completely independent show that he puts on. Well, Monsanto says – he’s doing it from your studios, isn’t he? And we say yes, we give him space because of the history.”

“And they ask – how else do you help him? If he weren’t doing the show, would this problem disappear?”

“So my guys came to me and said – we’ve got to do something about this.”

“So, I went in to Derry and I sat down with him,” Lear said. “It was very good natured. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t planning on doing anything. I said – let this Monsanto thing go for awhile. Just let it go.”

“He said – ‘Clyde – Monsanto is an evil empire,’” Lear recalled.

“‘This is evil. He said – every farmer hates Monsanto. You know what they have done – and then he would lambast Monsanto and lay out this litany of stuff that they do. It included milk. Apparently there is a human growth hormone that they put in the milk. I don’t know a thing about it, but apparently they won a court case that prohibited milk retailers from putting on the milk carton the label – hormone free. I didn’t know anything about this, but Brownfield was complaining about how the liberal judges of America are siding with the evil empire. And Monsanto pays them off. All kinds of allegations which I’m sure are not true. But Derry believes them.”

“So, I said – will you let Monsanto be on the air? And he said – I’m not going to give them a forum. But then he changed his mind and said – yeah, bring them on. I'll let them on the show.”

Lear then went to hole up with his executives. And his execs told him – “It’s bigger than this now. We just don’t need to be associated with him.”

“So, I just walked back there and said to Derry – you say you are not going to lighten up. And he said no, I’m staying the course. And I said – not with us you are not. You are going to have to find some other way to distribute your program, and you are going to have to find some other office to do it out of.”

Given that he was willing put Monsanto on his show, why not keep him on?

“Maybe we should have,” Lear said.

Would you reconsider your decision?

“I don’t think so,” Lear says. “It is just not a business I want to be in anymore.”

Lear says he feels sad about parting with his old buddy, but he wants to help set up an internet radio studio for Derry out of Derry’s home office.

“We are helping him build a new facility in his home,” Lear says. “But we won’t have a connection to him. Then we can easily say to Monsanto – we don’t have a thing to do with Derry. We don’t have a thing to do with him. He’s not on our property. We can’t control him.”

Brownfield said he couldn’t comment on the situation.