A familiar television personality is suing a U.S. unit of Kyocera Corp., alleging that the company backed out of a $300,000 agreement for him to appear in printer ads and to deliver a speech because of his global warming views, reports Bloomberg.
Ben Stein starred in Comedy Central’s "Win Ben Stein’s Money" from 1997 to 2003 and is known for his 1986 role in "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off." Stein claims in the lawsuit that Kyocera Mita America withdrew from the agreement because of what the company said was his position on "various policy issues," the story notes.
According to the complaint, Kyocera questioned in February 2011 whether Stein’s views on global warming and the environment were "sufficiently conventional and politically correct,” according to the article.
Stein told the company that he believed God, rather than mankind, controlled the weather and that he was "by no means certain that global warming was man-made," the story says. A representative for Kyocera had no immediate comment.
The lawsuit alleges that after firing Stein, Kyocera hired a University of Maryland economist and dressed him in an "astonishingly brazen misappropriation of Ben Stein’s persona." Stein is seeking $300,000 and unspecified punitive damages, the story adds.
Ben Stein has spent his whole career in service to the free-market system. Now the free-market system — well, one corporation — has decreed his views are too extreme for them.
If the claim is that they fired him for his political views, he should be out of luck. On the other hand, if they hired a lookalike to cash in on his persona, he’s got a great case against them.