Ben & Jerry's Ben Cohen ( @YoBenCohen) joined Jim and Margery to discuss his candidate for president, Bernie Sanders.
JIM: Today the closest we're getting to feeling the Bern is feeling the freezer burn with senator Sanders proxy another Vermonter Ben Cohen co-founder of course of Ben and Jerry's.
MARGERY: Thank you so much for coming in. So tell us why Bernie Sanders?
BEN: You know there's never been a candidate like Bernie Sanders. He's a presidential candidate that comes along once in a lifetime. Truly, a candidate that represents the people. And you know I think the thing that is most indicative of what Bernie's about is that his is the only him campaign that is of the people, by the people, for the people. He has refused to take any money from corporate interests, from super wealthy, he's funded by millions of individual donations representing an average of $27 dollars.
BEN: You know what Bernie is saying is that the system isn't broken, it's fixed, it's rigged, there's a reason why the top 1% of the population owns as much wealth as the entire bottom 90%. I mean that the statistic that blows my mind every time I say it, but it's true. And it's, uh, the American dream for people who are in poverty or the lower middle class or even now in the middle class has turned into a nightmare. They're getting behind while corporations are making record profits.
MARGERY So you've known Bernie Sanders for years and years and Vermont, right. How much of this is your seeing him in action as a politician, mayor, Congressman, Senator?
BEN: It’s a 100 % seeing him in action. For the last 30 years, I've been his constituent and finally, a presidential candidate worth voting for. And that's why Jerry and I have been out stumping for him on the trails since he announced.
MARGERY: Didn't he try to step in or at least make some public statement when Ben and Jerry’s was taken over by Unilever and you were kind of forced into selling your ice cream company, right? Tell people about that.
BEN: Yeah I was trying to keep the company independent, it was a publicly held company at the time and a Unilever had offered so much money for the company that seemed like because of SEC rules, the company had to be sold. And yeah Bernie was doing his best to step in and talk about how the public good and the public benefit to be factored into the sort of thing.
JIM: You know Ben Cohen, we're talking to Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry's, Howard Dean was with us the other day on Friday, obviously somebody you know from back home. He's supporting Hillary Clinton. He says I like Bernie a lot, he's not a coalition builder. He said a variation of what Hillary Clinton says at every event—I won't make promises I can't keep— the implication being that he is making promises that HE, being Sanders, can't keep. Why are you convinced, where Dean is not, that Sanders can actually get done what he's promising as a candidate?
BEN: Well as Bernie says, most every time he speaks, is that it's not about him, it's about us. That the only thing that's going to overcome the stranglehold that hundreds of millions of dollars of political donations, which by the way Howard takes and so does every other politician, the only way we're going to overcome that is through a mass movement, a political revolution. The you know, that's what the country was founded on, large numbers of people working together to create a government of the people by the people for the people and we have to do it again.
JIM: But you know if as a non Vermonter, if I stop 10 of my neighbors and say so what do you think of Governor Shumlin, great on opiates, real progressive. Howard Dean, I supported him when he ran for president, they say. Patrick Leahy, the senator, they’re all, they know him far better, meaning Bernie Sanders, than we do. Maybe not better than you do. All three of them a clean sweep, supporting Sanders. What do you say to people, like Hillary Clinton did at the debate the other night, that people who know him best or at least some of the people who know him best aren't with him?
BEN: They’re establishment politicians. They are also taking money from those same corporate interests. And until we elect someone who's not beholden to them, the situation is just going to get worse and worse. I mean, how is it that we are the only made your country in the world that doesn't provide healthcare for all of our people as a human right? I'll tell you how it is. It's because of all the millions of dollars that the healthcare industry and Big Pharma pay to our politicians and a system that even John McCain calls legalized bribery. Until we end that, and the only candidate who's running who's going to be able to do that is Bernie.
MARGERY You know it's one of the weird bellows bedfellow things about this race is that you find people that are deciding between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is not taking money from the same Koch brothers type deals as other people are. What do you make of that?
BEN: What I make of that is that the huge majority of people in our country understand that the system is broken, that Washington doesn't work, and believe me, electing some establishment politician who is going to fiddle in the margins and make incremental change is not going to solve the problem, so people are angry, people want someone from outside the establishment. You can either go to our better nature with Bernie or you can go to our what's the other one, our worse, our more unfortunate, our darker nature with the Trumpster.
JIM: So let's assume Bernie Sanders doesn't make it, I know we talk before the interview and you’re one who believes he can clearly sell his brand around this country. Hillary Clinton is the nominee. Do you sit home? What do you do?
BEN: Uh I guess I'm going to have to decide at the time.
JIM You know I'm looking at you and I just realized, and I know you know this but it’s like a Brooklyn mafia, isn’t it. (laugh) I just realized it. You’re from Brooklyn I totally forgot that now Jerry's from Brooklyn you’re childhood friend and obviously we can tell every time Sanders opened his mouth, is there some of that going on Ben Cohen?
BEN: Well you know I lived in Brooklyn for a year and a half, but you know it's interesting what you say about Bernie's accent. You know I was out in Iowa campaigning for him and people in Iowa talked about his Vermont accent (laugh). They think that's how people sound like from Vermont.
JIM: You know what do you say to people who care deeply about gun control? Sanders has explained, listen I was a senator from Vermont there were very few gun control laws, and I'm paraphrasing, and I essentially represented my constituency. He doesn't deny how he voted on the Brady Bill and things like that, but they're sort of a new Bernie Sanders. Why should the voters trust the evolution and not think that it's just not a convenient turn on the part of your guy?
BEN: You know a Bernie’s got a D- rating from the NRA. You know maybe he hasn't done the same votes that Hillary has but he's certainly not a pro gun guy.
MARGERY: So we’re talking to Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Let's talk a little bit about ice cream. You have a flavor that you produced in honor of Bernie Sanders. Tell us about it.
BEN: Yeah it's the first time I've ever been inspired to make a flavor in honor of a presidential candidate. You know I was out on the trail stumping for him and everybody would keep asking me what's the Bernie’s flavor, what's the Bernie’s flavor, and I said you know Ben and Jerry's doesn't endorse candidates. There's never going to be one. And then I realized that well, I me, I'm a regular person, I'm an individual I can come out with a Bernie’s flavor. So under the Ben’s best label, I came out with Bernie’s yearning.
BEN: And it's a participatory flavor, you open up the pint lid and you see this huge disc of solid chocolate covering the entire top of the pint. And beneath it is just plain mint ice cream. And the huge disc of solid chocolate represents all the majority of the wealth created since the end of the recession that's gone to the top 1% and the mint ice cream is the rest of us. In the way you eat it if you take your soup spoon, you whack that chocolate disk into a bunch of pieces, you mix it around, and there you have it— Bernie’s yearning.
MARGERY: So the fact that you decide how much of the chocolate you want in your mint ice cream is very very nice. And the whacking of the 1% is very therapeutic as well.
BEN: Yeah, it’s therapeutic and it’s exercise (MARGERY: that’s right). You’re kind of pre-working off the calories that you’re gonna consume.
JIM But there are only 40 pints. From what I read that you made in your kitchen.
BEN: Right right you had to enter a contest. Originally the idea was that we were going to auction them off on Ebay to raise money for Bernie’s campaign. And then we discovered that you know there's campaign finance laws that get in the way of that and then other people that pointed out that that would not be very Bernie-like that the people who would be able to get the pints would be the ones who had the most money, so we just decided to have a contest, which was a drawing. And you entered it you went to Bernie'sYearning.com online and put in your name and if you win you win.
MARGERY: Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry's, you got lucky and a sense in one sense that Bernie did not come first in Iowa cuz you made this promise (laugh) about Bernie Sanders. You got let off the hook. What was that about?
BEN: I was thinking about that. You know that was kind of a spur of the moment a statement that I made that you know if the people of Iowa you know vote for Bernie in the caucus, if he wins the caucus, I'm going to come down there and make as much ice cream as they want. You know it just came out I don't know I was at some interview and I, you know at the moment I'm off the hook, but you say that there might be a recount (JIM: there may be a recount) so you might find me spending the rest of my life in Iowa making ice cream.
JIM You know we heard also that you had a name for what you would have done had you decided, which you won't, to have an ice cream dedicated to Donald Trump. What would it have been called?
BEN: Oh that was Trump’s Junk (Jim: Trump’s Junk). It was based on you know when Trump came and did his little rally in Burlington. There was a deli right next door to the rally, and they came out with a sandwich called the Trumpster, which was 3 pounds of Bologna between two slices of white bread.
JIM: You know Ben Cohen before we let you go, this is not a partisan thing, this is not a Bernie vs. Hillary thing, You are obsessed as I think a lot of Americans are with Citizens United, which many people think helped destroy democracy in this country. The reality is, I think, we're not about to amend the United State’s Constitution to get rid of it. So what's the strategy? Hope that a president is elected who picks a Supreme Court justice or two who decide to reverse this thing, is that the strategy on this thing?
BEN: Well I see the strategy as really three parts. One is yes working to amend the Constitution. There's already 16 states that have passed resolutions in favor. Two more states are due to pass it by ballot initiative this year. That would be the state of Washington, and one other one. And yes, we need to elect or we need to appoint someone to the Supreme Court that would be willing to overturn it. And then there's also legislation that can still be passed under the terms of the existing Supreme Court decision, both on the federal level and on the state level, to help the situation and get a bunch of money out of politics.
