Mr. Ice Cream Sticks It to the Pentagon

By Deanna Zandt, AlterNet. Posted May 22, 2006.

Ben Cohen has an ax to grind with the Pentagon. Or an Oreo to grind, as it were. The man who co-founded Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream thinks there's a better way to spend $60 billion of the country's money than on Cold War weapons systems, and he has the numbers to prove it. Over a million people have downloaded the Oreo Cookie Budget animation that demonstrates the reorganizing of that cash, with each cookie representing $10 billion. Since its launch two years ago, legislation with 28 co-sponsors establishing the rearranged Oreo budget has been introduced to Congress. Not bad for a guy who started out trying to see if business could be used to promote progressive values.

Since departing from Ben & Jerry's after selling the company to Unilever in 2000, the ice cream magnate has spent his days building out True Majority, a nationwide grassroots coalition with over 500,000 members calling for everything from a sensible national budget to withdrawal from Iraq. He also founded a resource organization for business owners who are socially conscious called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. Together, they comprise the Priorities! Campaign.

AlterNet caught up with Cohen earlier this month.

What are some of the successes that you guys have had with True Majority? There have been a number of campaigns recently with taking back Ohio, Neil Young, getting out of Iraq …

Well, the question of Iraq is finally going to be debated on the floor of Congress, which is a victory of sorts. (Four House Republicans have recently signed a Democratic-sponsored discharge petition that would begin 17 hours of debate over Iraq on the House floor.) There's just a tremendous building of resistance to the Bush agenda, as evidenced by Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. The big hope is that we're going to turn Congress around. That's certainly what I'm planning on, taking back at least one house. That should at least put a stop to any worse damage.

The thing about the Bush administration is that every time they do something, I used to say, "Oh, God, they couldn't possibly do anything worse than this!" And then the next week, they top it.

It's dumbfounding to watch.

It is, and what we've got is "outrage fatigue." There's just so many totally outrageous things that are happening -- there's so many violations of the Constitution, violations of bedrock American principles in terms of torture, and every time you hear about one of these things … It used to be that people would get outraged. And now, it's just old news, it's the same old thing. "Oh, look, they're going after the Constitution again!"

It's impossible for people to deal with it all. You have a fairly united group of people that are resistant to what he's trying to do, but how many horrible things has he done? 25? 50? I don't know. Nobody can keep focusing on all of those. So you have different groups focusing on different things, and you need to be able to focus on one issue for a while. But while you're dealing with one outrage, the next one comes along, and you have to drop what you were doing with the last outrage and go on to the new outrage … It's enough to run a person ragged!

Where do you see the areas of opportunity?

It's really about turning Congress around. I really think that the strategy of the Bush administration is to grab everything that they possibly can, because they know that once they're out of power, there's no more grabbing they can do. They know that some of the stuff they grabbed is going to be taken away once the other party gets into power. They're setting things up in a way that they're creating a huge deficit and decimating social programs, so that the Democrats will have no choice when they're back in office but to raise social spending. That's exactly how the Republicans want it, and that's how they're going to paint the Democrats. It'll be "tax and spend Democrats" all over again.

Are there ways progressives can counteract that?

I think we have to pin the tag of financial irresponsibility on the Republicans. W, the current Bush, isn't the first Republican to totally screw up the budget. Reagan screwed it up, Bush I screwed it up and Clinton finally made it right. Yet despite that, the Republicans still have a reputation for being more financially responsible, conservative, call it what you will. The Democrats have not taken on the mantel; they have not got the reputation of essentially being financial saviors.

Deanna Zandt is a contributing editor at AlterNet.

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