Ben Cohen is the co-founder, along with Jerry Greenfield, of the Ben and Jerry's ice cream company. But he has also been involved throughout his life with a number of major activist efforts on issues of peace, social justice, anti-racism, and climate change. He is currently leading the Up In Arms campaign to rein in military spending. Other initiatives he has played a major part in establishing include the People’s Power Initiatives, the Eisenhower Media Network, the Pierre Sprey Award for Investigative Journalism, and the Stamp Stampede campaign for campaign finance reform. Cohen was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. He has been arrested multiple times in the course of his activism, including disrupting an RFK Jr. Senate hearing to protest the war in Gaza. He is the author of the book Above The Law: How Qualified Immunity Protects Violent Police (OR Books, featuring an introduction by Killer Mike) and he is currently running a campaign to “free Ben and Jerry’s” from its corporate overlords to protect its social activism.

NATHAN J. ROBINSON

You are an ice cream man by trade, but one of the very common threads that runs through the "extracurricular work" you have done outside the ice cream business has been issues of war and peace. And recently, people might have seen the conflict with Ben & Jerry'sover creating a flavor for Palestine. You have been arrested. People might have seen you in front of the White House chainsawing a mockup of the Pentagon filled with dollar bills. So let me start by asking you, why have issues of war and peace been so central to the work you've done?

BEN COHEN

I think it really resonated for me when I saw this quote from Cornel West that "justice is what love looks like in public." That's where it's coming from for me. I just see people—myself, I'm one of them—as wanting to have a decent life, wanting to have a good life for themselves and for people like them. And I believe people hate war. People have no desire to kill other mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, and families just like them in other countries that they have nothing against. The thing that drives me crazy about it is that it just sucks up so much money, so much energy, and so much of our spirit.

Nobody expressed that better than General and President Dwight Eisenhower, where he when he talked about how “every gun that is made, every warship launched, ever rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

It's just incredible to me that there's no limit to the amount of money that the government decides to spend on the Pentagon, and yet, when mothers and fathers come to Congress and say, "We need more money for our schools—I can't afford childcare, I can't afford housing," congresspeople look at them and are just so sympathetic and say, "Oh, I really care about your kids. That's just horrible, but there just isn't any money."

And it is a crock of shit. It's bullshit. It's a lie. If we could just spend the money on taking care of people instead of preparing to kill literally tens of millions of them, there'd be all the money we need. 

So Trump decides, "We can't afford anything else, but I think I can squeeze out another 500 billion. I think I can find half a trillion dollars that we didn't know we had, and I know exactly what to do with it. Let's build more weapons!" Agh!

ROBINSON

You have been an activist in pointing out the colossal, ludicrous size of the military budget for so long, and now, the consensus among the Republicans is it'snot big enough. We need to get even higher. Our military is, you hear, totally unprepared. We need to add hundreds of billions of dollars more. It's going in precisely the opposite direction. And as you point out, the phrase that is heard when someone like Bernie Sanders proposes Medicare for All is, How are you going to pay for that?

When people hear you say this, the line that is used is, Well, that's not realistic, he doesn't understand defense; in the real world, we need these things to protect ourselves. But what you pointed to there was the words of Eisenhower himself. Nobody understood defense better than Eisenhower—I take it this is one reason why the Eisenhower Media Network is named after him. There you have someone who had a better grasp of issues of war and peace than perhaps anyone else in history, and he comes out at the end of his presidency with this remarkable speech.

You cited his idea that it is not just waste but theft. And I think that is such a crucial distinction. It's not just like setting the money on fire. It's even worse than that, because we are taking things from people that they could have if we spent this money differently.

COHEN

Yes, and another effect that he also talked about was the effect that it has on our spirit, our soul as a nation, that we're using people's energy, people's life force, to build these weapons instead of using that energy to improve the quality of life for people. And so, yes, I helped to found the Eisenhower Media Network because we need people who have the credentials to support this argument, and the Eisenhower Media Network is all former high- and mid-level military and national security experts who are all backing this up.

It's easy to see. If you just look at how much other countries are spending on their militaries—parenthetically, just the budget of ICE is bigger than the military budgets of most countries. But the country that spends the next most, besides the U.S. currently, is China, and we spend three times more than they're spending already. So the argument that we need these expenditures to protect ourselves is absurd.

ROBINSON

And even when people see stories in the press, for example, that China is working on building up its nuclear arsenal, they may think the United States has to respond by  increasing as well. But one of the points that's incredibly important is that they are responding to us. We create the threats that we then feel menaced by through what we are doing. By menacing the world with our vast nuclear arsenal, we invite a response.

It was very interesting to me going back to the 1990s and the group that you founded called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, where you took out a full-page ad in the New York Times called "Hey let’s scare the Russians!" and you pointed out that U.S. policy was making conflict with Russia more likely. At the time, there were those that were warning that the expansion of NATO, the failure to try diplomacy with Russia, was risking this spiraling geopolitical conflict, that in this post-Cold War moment, it was really important to take advantage of that to build a lasting peace. You and some others were warning that our own policy was going to lead to this kind of catastrophic escalation and a renewal of arms races and mistrust. And I believe you would say that partially kind of came to fruition in the current conflict over Ukraine. So it's important to see that it's not just that we spend more than other countries, but also that our vast nuclear arsenal and our insistence upon keeping it create a response from other countries that we then feel necessitates another response from us.

COHEN

Yes, I think that's exactly right. The U.S. drives the arms race, and the other countries are just trying to catch up. The other countries are just trying to not get invaded or bombed by the U.S. And yes, it is very true that the war in Ukraine was a direct result of NATO expansion. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. agreed not to expand NATO, and then they continued to do it in several tranches. Russia objected in the strongest possible diplomatic language. And the war in Ukraine was because they were about to accept Ukraine into NATO, which essentially totally surrounds Russia, or at least one border with Russia, with nuclear weapons that are aimed right at Russia. If the situation were reversed, the U.S. would be apoplectic. If some other country put a bunch of nuclear weapons on the Mexican border aimed at the U.S., what would the U.S. do? The Cuban Missile Crisis—that's what it was.

ROBINSON

Yes. So we know exactly what would happen. We threatened to blow up the world.

COHEN

Yes. The reality was that the whole purpose of NATO was to defend Europe from the Warsaw Pact. When the Soviet Union dissolved, there was no longer a Warsaw Pact. There was no purpose for NATO to continue. And as a matter of fact, there were talks about ending NATO. What ended up happening was that a bunch of weapons manufacturers got together and formed the committee to expand NATO and showered Congress with lobbying, campaign contributions, the whole works, and then the discussion was, okay, let's expand NATO.

ROBINSON

Well, you mentioned there the role of lobbyists and the weapons industry. I read an interview with you where you mentioned at a very early age being very struck by the lyrics of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" about the men who hide behind walls and hide behind desks. He sang:

You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy

In our glorious capitalist system, there are some companies that make their profits by making ice cream, and there are companies that make their profits by making bombs. And if you are a company that makes ice cream, one might say there is a dangerous incentive to make people fat, but you might also say that the incentives are fairly aligned with giving people something that they find delicious and brings them happiness. But if you are a weapons company, the incentives are so terrifying, which is to say that unless there is continued conflict and the threat of continued conflict, you cannot prosper. 

COHEN

Yes, you got it exactly right, Nathan. The weapons industry provides two lobbyists for every member of Congress. They are driving the legislation and who gets elected. And they keep on saying, "Well, it's jobs; we provide jobs. That's our social responsibility." But the reality is that for a given amount of money spent by the government, you could create a heck of a lot more jobs in almost any other area than producing weapons—building houses, teachers, nurses, you name it.

ROBINSON

Yes. I want to talk about lack of accountability briefly, because you mentioned the Eisenhower Media Network. We had the wonderful Dennis Fritz of EMN on the program to talk about his book on the Iraq War. One of the striking things about reading that is he really documents how deceptive and mendacious the Bush administration was. Nobody was held accountable. No prosecutions. And I think there's a related point in that you wrote a whole book about qualified immunity, which is a case in which police abuses of power are not held accountable. You're writing about how even in the worst cases of injustice, cases of basically police murders, no one is held accountable. 

COHEN

Yes, I think that's absolutely right. They have immunity—a legal decision, a precedent that's been set for the police, and now the boss of ICE is claiming it for ICE. All a police person needs to say if they want to get off is, I feared for my life. They just say those words, and it's like magic. It could be, well, the guy was reaching for his cell phone, and I feared for my life. He looked at me with wild eyes; I feared for my life. It's horrible.

ROBINSON

We were talking about the military budget and how outlandish it is, the number of nuclear weapons the United States has, and the effect of that on global stability. You have talked about before the BB demonstration and the Oreo demonstration, and I wondered if you could describe those for us, because I think they're very vivid ways of driving these home.

COHEN

Well, they're certainly better as actual demonstrations, but in terms of trying to describe it, the BB one is actually an audio demonstration, which sometime in the future, we'll have to actually do on the radio. It works on a podcast. But with theBB demonstration, what I say is, I'm going to show you the size of our current nuclear arsenal. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drop some BBs into this bucket, and I drop one BB and I say that represents the nuclear bomb that blew up Hiroshima. Now I'm going to drop in 25 BBs—that's enough to blow up every major city on earth. And then I say, Now I'm going to drop in the amount of BBs that represents our total nuclear arsenal, and it's 10,000 BBs, and it makes a heck of a racket for a pretty long period of time, and it is absurd. Conservatively speaking, people I work with say our current nuclear arsenal is enough to blow up the entire Earth 10 times over. Trump says it'll blow up the entire Earth 100 times over. And then he says, But I'm going to spend another $2 trillion on creating a whole new generation of nuclear weapons. It defies rationality or logic, and it's just totally immoral.

ROBINSON

"And I want the Nobel Peace Prize."

COHEN

Well, I think what he said recently is, "I didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize, so I'm going to stop going for it. I'm going to be the war president."

And the Oreo demonstration. The problem when you hear about these huge numbers is that you hear about them in isolation, and you don't have any conception of how much they are and how much they are in relation to the rest of it. So when they're dealing with the federal budget, they deal with one department at a time, and you hear they're planning on spending, I don't know, 10 billion on the Department of Education; they're thinking of spending 20 billion on housing or whatever; 30 billion on health care. But you don't hear about it together. You hear about it one at a time, and then you hear they're going to spend 800 billion on the Department of War. And so what this Oreo demonstration does is we say that each Oreo represents $20 billion, and there's one or two Oreos spent for anything else that we do. And then you get to the Pentagon, and there are 40, or now 50, Oreos.

Then what I demonstrate is that you take a few Oreos off the top of that big Pentagon stack, and what do you know? You can fully fund our schools. You can make it so that housing is affordable for people, and you can make it so you can get child care at a rate that's not going to break you. And then on the other side, we take those Oreos off, and then we say, well, what about these adversaries, these countries that also have military budgets? Isn't that going to make us vulnerable to them? And then we show how the country that spends the next most is China, which spends 300 billion, and the amount of money that we still have is like three times what they're spending. Then you get to countries like Iran; they're spending like half an Oreo. It's absurd.

It's mostly immoral. I think that the answer is in the spiritual realm. I'm a Jew, and even I know this is not what Jesus would do.

ROBINSON

I saw that headline that said Ben Cohen says he loves Jesus or something.

COHEN

Yes, that was from an interview I did with Tucker Carlson where we agreed on everything. We only talked about the Pentagon and militarism. We agreed on everything. And at the end, he says, Well, do you have some kind of spiritual path that you follow? I say, not really, but I love Jesus Christ, and that was the bit that the Israeli newspaper took as the headline.

ROBINSON

Yes, "Ben Cohen converts!" New recruit!

COHEN

I mean, Jesus was a Jew, man! They ought to own him.

ROBINSON

I don't know how you feel about it being called the Department of War, but I feel like I'm all for it because it's at least honest.

COHEN

Totally, it's the only honest thing he's done. I appreciate it, because people should know that that's what it's about. It's not about defense.

ROBINSON

Yes, abandoning the pretense.

I want to get to your current fight against the owners of the company you founded. I discussed the usual capitalist model of the company existing to maximize profits for its shareholders. That's why it exists, and it must do anything, according to the Friedman doctrine, that contributes to the increase in benefits for those shareholders. Now, you are an entrepreneur. Obviously Ben & Jerry's is a business, but you, from the start, did everything you could to try and have a model that departs from that, that incorporates a social mission into Ben & Jerry's. So what did that mean up until now? What historically has it meant for Ben & Jerry's to have a social mission embedded into its work along with the making and selling of ice cream?

COHEN

Well, originally, Jerry and I were not planning on becoming businessmen. We were planning on becoming shop owners, and we opened up a little homemade ice cream shop, and that's all it was going to be. And then, as the business grew and we realized that we were becoming businessmen, that was not a pleasant realization, because we realized that business tends to have a negative impact on communities. It tends to exploit workers. It despoils the environment. And that wasn't what we wanted to do. Our immediate reaction was to sell the business, and then I ended up talking to this guy I had gotten to know, a kind of eccentric restaurateur, and I was telling him we were going to sell the business. And he said, "Ben, how could you possibly do that? The business is your baby. It has so much potential." I said, "Maurice, you know what business does. It destroys the society." And he said, "Well, if you don't think that's the way business should be done, why don't you just do it differently?" And that hadn't really occurred to me, and so we decided to see if it was true that business is essentially a neutral tool, like a hammer, and you can use it to either destroy things or to build things up.

So we set out to use our business as a force for progressive social change, and it hadn't really done that before. We thought the odds were that we were going to fail, but we didn't. It turns out that there's a spiritual aspect to business, just as there is to the lives of individuals, and as your business supports the community, the community supports your business. Most people are buying stuff from corporations despite the values of the corporations, and when they have a chance to buy something from a corporation whose values they agree with, they love it, and it forms the deepest possible relationship that you can have with your customers, which is a relationship based on shared values.

 It used to be, in terms of what we called the social mission at Ben & Jerry's, that there was a feeling that if we put money and time and resources into improving the quality of life for people, that was going to take away from money and time and resources we could put into increasing profitability. And what we discovered was that you can find ways of doing business that are profitable and improve the quality of life for people, and that's what Ben & Jerry's has been doing, and people seem to really like it.

ROBINSON

It was interesting seeing that there have been all these news stories about how, under pressure from the right, many companies are abandoning their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And then, on the other hand, Ben & Jerry's went entirely in the other direction and said, "We're doubling down on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and fighting white supremacy is an important principle of Ben & Jerry's." It's kind of refreshing to see statements from the company that are not responding in a very cowardly way to whatever pressures the market is putting on corporate America at any given time.

But you have had a great deal of struggle, especially recently, in maintaining that unique model of a company that embodies progressive values. I know there was a fight during the effort to stop selling in the occupied Palestinian territories, and there was a fight when you tried to introduce a flavor for Gaza. And now, Magnum, which owns the company, is really pulling out all the stops to end that model forever by eliminating the structure that keeps Ben & Jerry's independent. That's how I understand it. But perhaps you could explain to me what the current Free Ben & Jerry's struggle is about.

COHEN

That was a pretty good description of it. Ownership recently transferred. Unilever was the owner, and they spun off their ice cream division into its own publicly held company, the Magnum corporation. And as soon as that happened, the Magnum corporation set about dismantling the Ben & Jerry's independent board of directors, which is a legally constituted entity that exists in perpetuity, and that entity has responsibility over the social mission of the company, the quality of the product, use of the trademark, etc. And the Magnum corporation didn't want to deal with that. They own 100 brands around the world, and none of them have an independent board. They don't have to get any approval from anything. And they decided they want to get rid of this independent board.

First they tried character assassination on the chair of the board, publishing a public statement in a legal document saying that she's "not fit to serve" and then they expected the rest of the board members to, therefore, depose her. Instead, the rest of the board members supported her. So the next thing they did was say they're retroactively instituting term limits, and all of these guys have served too long, so we're going to kick them all out. They're no longer meeting with the board. They're ignoring the board. They're trying to dismantle the board, which is illegal.

And so Jerry and I have been familiar with the situation for a long time and came to the conclusion that there's no way that the social mission of Ben & Jerry's will survive under the ownership of the Magnum corporation. So we put out a call for socially aligned investors to buy the company. Those investors have made themselves known to us, and they're ready to do it, but the Magnum Ice Cream Company refuses to sell. So that's why we have started the Free Ben & Jerry's campaign—that's freebenandjerrys.com, #FreeBenandJerrys—to pressure the Magnum corporation to do the right thing. And financially speaking—which, as you say, is the only thing they care about from an investor's point of view—what they're doing is they've raised money and gotten investments based on the power of Ben & Jerry's brand while they are destroying the brand, and so it's a shitty investment.

ROBINSON

That is one of the remarkable features of what is happening. If we're trying to sort of understand how corporate America works—I gave that simplistic model, the Friedman model of profit maximization. But this isn't quite that, because if you cared about getting the best out of Ben & Jerry's financially, it wouldn't make sense to drive away the very people who have come to love Ben & Jerry's because of that social mission. It's very odd that they're willing to, basically, drive away Ben and Jerry from Ben & Jerry's, drive away the customers, and really hurt the brand itself for the sake of crushing that independence and ensuring that the company cannot do anything political.

How do you understand why they're doing what they're doing? Because it doesn't really make sense from a purely financial perspective.

COHEN

I think, first of all, they don't understand it. They don't have it in their heart, in their soul. They, like most every other corporation around, don't want controversy. They don't want to take stands on controversial issues, and they don't like getting pushback from people in high places or low places that don't agree with the stand that's being taken. And I think they think that if this Ben & Jerry's brand, which is one of the top three brands that they own, goes and creates this controversy, it's going to rub off on the rest of their brands. T

he other part of it is that they don't understand how to do it. The way they run all their other brands is, "We want more people to buy stuff. Okay, let's hire some ad agency to come up with some ads, and let's hire a PR agency to push it," and it's not about values. They don't understand the concept of values-led business. The normal business model is you hire an ad agency, and they make up a story that people like. It's cute, funny, and emotional, and so they like it, and they are more likely to buy your stuff. That's what they want to do. That's what they know how to do.

ROBINSON

The people who love your ice cream may be wondering, should they stop eating it?

COHEN

No, they should not stop eating it.

ROBINSON

Are you asking them to boycott Ben & Jerry's?

COHEN

I am not asking them not to buy Ben & Jerry's. Ben & Jerry's is the victim here. It's essentially under occupation, and we want to rescue Ben & Jerry's from the occupation. There are a bunch of other brands that the Magnum company owns. If you don't want to buy them, that works. We don't want to hurt our employees. We want the company to be strong for when eventually enough people put enough pressure on Magnum and they do agree to sell it. We want a strong company.

ROBINSON

It is remarkable how the story shows just how strong the pressure is from something like having a company that stands in solidarity with Gaza as it's being bombed. You did everything you could when you sold the company to insulate it legally from this kind of pressure. That's the whole point of having this independent board.

COHEN

Yes, and I just want to be clear that it was a public company. We were forced to sell it by SEC rules. Jerry and I were highly opposed to the sale. So go on. It's a misconception.

ROBINSON

But you tried to ensure that this very kind of situation couldn't happen, but they've really gone to war with the company. They're doing things that are plainly in violation of the legal agreements that were made, but it doesn't seem to matter.

COHEN

Yes, and there is litigation. There is a lawsuit, and we'll see what happens. But those things take a long time to wind their way through the courts, and they're not going to solve the problem. We need to find an owner that actually supports the social mission and will not be forced into it.

ROBINSON

Ben Cohen, thank you so much for joining us here on Current Affairs today.

COHEN

Nathan, it's been great talking with you. Thank you for allowing me to rattle on for a bit.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.