Farm Broadcaster Ousted After Ripping Monsanto’s Goon Squads

[Joanne98]

by Russell Mokhiber
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.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/01/8634/

[Fridays Child]

1. k/r

[PDJane]

2. Corporate fascism............

[Peace Patriot]

3. Thank you for posting this VERY important information.

We are paying dearly for having allowed the capitalistic system to become monopolistic, predatory, mafia-like and cruel, and dominated by fascist powermongers. In its ideal form of "FAIR trade," capitalism can be progressive; it can facilitate multi-cultural understanding, and it can be fun. From native potlatches and trade in beads, to the bringing to the Greeks of red cloth and an alphabet, to medieval trade fairs, to the great ports and cities of history, and of today, trade brings variety and color into peoples' lives, and fosters creativity and a sense of adventure. It is a basic human activity and need. It stimulates our brains. It brings new thoughts and ways of being. Capitalism accelerates trade. That is not a bad thing, necessarily. But when monopolies and evil cabals take over trade, it starts to have the OPPOSITE effect--it stifles creativity and adventure, it retards progress, it shuts down (or tries to shut down) our brains with propaganda, and cages the human spirit.

That is what corporate giants like Monsanto, and Exxon Mobil--and Bechtel, and Halliburton, and Diebold, the lot of them--are doing now. They are the enemies of democracy--a form of government that frees the human spirit, and fosters healthy, competitive trade--REAL trade--while protecting the weak against the predatory. Fair trade cannot be based on slavery, cruelty or lies. It must be a fair exchange. These global corporate predators have taken the fairness out of trade--all the liberality and progress--and have inserted the word "free"--"free trade"--by which they mean LAWLESSNESS and PIRACY. The "freedom" to be thieves. The "freedom" to cheat and lie. The "freedom" to control the very basis of life--the seeds of our food--for the profit of the rich and powerful.

They need to be broken. They need to be busted. We need to assert our collective, democratic power against them, and repair the damage they've done, and restore FAIR trade.

[glitch]

4. This needs to be seen by more people - k & r nt

[JAbuchan08]

5. there's that word balance again