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• Q & A with Mr. Cohen
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• True Majority
• Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities
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Tavis: I got a bowl and a spoon because I'm talking to Ben Cohen who just happens to be the co-founder of the Ben & Jerry's empire which began in a renovated Vermont gas station with an investment of just twelve thousand dollars. In 2000, the company was sold for over three hundred million dollars.

He's also the founder, though, for our purposes tonight, of the nonprofit group, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities whose aim is to change - hey, that's not fair, man. Come on, give me some of this. Hold on y'all, one second. Get right back to the introduction in just a second. Before we start, thank you - whose aim is to change federal spending priorities. Ben Cohen, nice to have you here.

Ben Cohen: Great to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you.

Cohen: Always nice to be here with a fellow ice cream lover.

Tavis: Oh, I love ice cream. I want to get to this serious issue of defense spending in just a moment. You have always been one who has a social conscience. Ben & Jerry's started, as part of its mission, social awareness on a variety of fronts. We'll come back to that in just a second. But for those who don't know - it's a great story - about how Ben & Jerry's got started, tell me the story right quick while I taste this ice cream. By the way, what flavor is this?

Cohen: That's Cherry Garcia. That's my personal favorite.

Tavis: You go ahead and talk then (laughter).

Cohen: Jerry and I are friends from junior high. We met in seventh grade gym class. We were the two slowest, fattest kids in the class.

Tavis: Eating too much ice cream.

Cohen: Pretty much, yeah. You know, the whole class would be running around the track and Jerry and I would be half a lap behind. You know, you get friendly with whoever else you can find there at the back of the pack (laughter). You know, we went through high school. I dropped out of a bunch of colleges. I was trying to make a living as a potter, making pottery out of clay. So Jerry was trying to be a doctor, but he couldn't get into medical school.

Tavis: That's a problem.

Cohen: Yeah. And nobody would buy my pottery, so we both had a lot of problems. We said clearly we're not going to get anywhere working for anybody else. Let's try starting our own business. You know, the only thing we really liked doing was eating, so we felt like it should be a food business. You know, homemade ice cream was just starting to take off in the big cities and we wanted to live in a rural college town, so we kind of - we were looking for a warm rural college town, but -

Tavis: - struck out on that front in Vermont.

Cohen: All the warm ones already had homemade ice cream parlors, so we went up to Burlington, Vermont and opened up in an old converted gas station in 1978 on an initial investment of eight thousand dollars. You know, that's all we were ever planning on doing was just having that one homemade ice cream shop.

Tavis: Fast forward from the seventies to the nineties and you sell the thing for over three hundred, almost four hundred million dollars.

Cohen: Yeah, pretty amazing. Well, the company ended up going public. It was publicly held. You know, I tried to keep it independent. I didn't want the company to be sold, but it got sold.

Tavis: Tell me - first of all, could you pass me some ice cream, please?

Cohen: Yeah, sure. No problem.

Tavis: Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me why this whole notion of social consciousness was part of the original theory of the business.

Cohen: Well, you know, Jerry and I had strong feelings about social justice. We found ourselves owning a fairly large business which was something that we didn't really expect to do and we figured, as long as that's what we were doing, we needed to find a way to use that business as a force for progressive social change.

You know, originally when we noticed that the business got really big, our first reaction was to sell it because, you know, we felt like business was the thing that was creating a lot of problems in the society. But then someone said, "Well, you know, if you don't like the way business is run, why don't you just change it?" So that's what we just started to do.

You know, we had no idea that we would be successful doing it. We thought it was a real long-shot. You know, it turns out that, when you make a connection with your customers based on shared values, you know, a spiritual, soulful connection based on common beliefs, that's an incredibly strong tie.

Tavis: You know, I come to believe that and understand that and accept that in part because of a company like Starbucks. I admit that I'm not a Starbucks drinker. I'm not really a coffee drinker and, as my friend jokes, I can't afford the four bucks for the Starbucks coffee (laughter). But that said, you got to love the consciousness of the company and the advertising campaign they're always engaged in and raising issues.

I mean, I do wear Kenneth Cole sometimes. Kenneth Cole, the statements they make about the world we live in. I'm always turned on by companies who have that kind of social misery index that they keep their finger on and weave it into the work that they do and, to your point, touch their consumers with very real issues.

So tell me right quick how then - I know you've always been very much involved in social justice issues, as we've established - but tell me how a guy that starts an ice cream franchise ends up being connected to this kind of defense spending issue before we get to these props that you have here.

Cohen: Well, really the major issue that our organization is concerned with is national budget priorities in general, essentially the way Congress divides up our tax money. You know, we started from a group of business people who said, "How is it possible that, in the richest country in the world, we have the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world, our schools are in financial crisis, our health care system is in a crisis, and we have all this money? How is that possible?"

So as business people, we started by looking at the federal budget and it doesn't take you long once you start looking at the discretionary budget the amount of money that Congress has available to spend as it wishes. You know, after all the mandatory expenses. You look at that budget and you see that half of it, fifty percent, goes to the Pentagon.

Tavis: Some would argue, though, Ben, that in the world we live in today, I mean, look at what's happening around us as we speak to say nothing of what we're engaged in in this country - I'm not one of these persons, but some would say that defense spending ought to be our priority in a very, very unsafe and tenuous world.

Cohen: Well, I mean, it definitely is an unsafe world, but there's a certain level of spending that actually is beneficial. Once you spend beyond that essentially to make weapons that were designed to defeat the former Soviet Union that have no effect on protecting us from terrorism, then it actually makes our country weaker when we take our resources and use them for things that they're not needed on while our kids are suffering.

Tavis: So there is about sixty billion dollars you and the organization have earmarked, highlighting the budget.

Cohen: It was a study that was done by Larry Korb, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, and signed onto by, you know, a whole host of military advisers that we have, including the former head of the CIA, the former head of the North Atlantic Fleet.

Tavis: What got my attention was when a Reagan guy says that, then it gets your attention.

Cohen: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Dr. Korb got involved in this because he was part of the Reagan White House and he was privy to their strategy. Their strategy was to pump up our Pentagon spending in order to spend the Soviet Union out of existence and then the plan was to drop it and be able to fund all these other domestic needs. He got so upset because they never dropped it as per the plan.

Tavis: Back to your original point, you love food, obviously, ice cream. You have - I'm not going to say wasted until I hear what you have to say. But this presentation better really be good (laughter). There's like a whole bag of Oreos that you have used that are standing next to this chart that you have here. Let's go to the props and explain to me what this is.

Cohen: Tavis, you can eat the Oreos after I'm done.

Tavis: Okay.

Cohen: All right. On this chart, each cookie equals ten billion dollars. What I've got here is a stack of forty-four cookies, four hundred forty billion dollars, and that is what we currently spend on the Pentagon not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Compared to that, I want to show you what we spend on some of these other areas.

The federal government spends four Oreos, forty billion dollars, on K to 12 education. They spend one Oreo on world hunger. They spend five Oreos, fifty billion dollars, on children's health care. A quarter of an Oreo on energy independence and renewables.

Tavis: That's pretty worthless, a quarter of an Oreo.

Cohen: There's not much there. It happens to be two hundred fifty million dollars. I mean, you know (laughter). Three-quarters of an Oreo on job training and, of course, zero on deficit reduction. All we're saying at the Priorities campaign is that let's take one Oreo off the top and put it on K to 12 education and, over twelve years, that's enough money to rebuild all of the schools in the United States. Take another Oreo off and put it on world hunger. Take another one and split it in half - you've done that before, haven't you?

Tavis: They taste good like that.

Cohen: Put that half on world hunger, so that's an Oreo and a half, fifteen billion dollars a year. For that amount of money, you could provide food self-sufficiency for all of the six million kids around the world that are dying of starvation every year. Take another Oreo off and put it on children's health care and that's enough to provide health care for every kid in the United States who doesn't have it.

Take another Oreo off and put it on energy independence and that's enough to reduce our need for oil by fifty percent over the next ten years. Take one more Oreo off and put it on job training and that's enough to provide job training for another half a million people that get laid off. Take that other half we had and put it on deficit reduction and at least that's a start in bringing the deficit down.

Tavis: You know what's amazing about this? The Oreo display notwithstanding, on a very serious note, when you see something like this, it kind of reminds me of my grandmother. We called her Big Momma, God rest her soul. Big Momma used to say to me that "that idea is too much like right". It's too much like right.

Cohen: (Laughter) It's common sense.

Tavis: It makes too much sense. I raise that only because, when you lay it out like this in a display that even kids watching right now understand because we're using Oreos in the display here, why is it that it makes sense to us and we get it as part of this conversation and watching right now, but the folk in Washington who make decisions about our spending don't get it?

Cohen: I think that they are caught up in the Pentagon bureaucracy. They're deathly afraid of being called weak on defense and, of course, you've got all that money that's coming in from the defense contractors. But the reality is, even after you take off those six Oreos, compared to what the other potential adversaries are spending, you know, we got more than enough.

Here's what Russia spends: seven Oreos. Here's what China spends: six Oreos. Here's what the remainder of the Axis of Evil spends, Iran and North Korea: one Oreo. So as you can see, it just doesn't make any sense. It's going on because of the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and, you know, the issue of politicians being afraid that, you know, people are going to lose their job if you stop making some of these weapons.

Tavis: I don't mean to ask this question out of any naiveté, but with this Oreo over here spent on the Axis of Evil - we've obviously heard so much about this phrase, of course, courtesy of Mr. Bush and all he's had to say about these three countries, this Axis of Evil - with this one Oreo representing what they spend as compared to what we spend minus what you've taken away -

Cohen: - exactly.

Tavis: So with what we spend versus what they spend, why does the threat - I don't know how to phrase this - this is disproportionate.

Cohen: It is absurd (laughter).

Tavis: But that's not the way the threat gets presented to us. Do you follow me?

Cohen: That's it.

Tavis: The threat doesn't get presented at this proportion. It gets presented that if we don't do this right now with these three countries, forget diplomacy, we got to do this, we got to - which is another issue, diplomacy - but why does the threat seem so disproportionate? That's the question.

Cohen: You know, like I say, there's a lot of entrenched interests. I mean, I really think it's the Pentagon and the defense contractors. You know, there's a revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense contractors, so once somebody leaves the Defense Department, you know, they then go to work for the defense contractors.

Tavis: I'm almost out of time. You got one more exhibit here you want to show us? Can I push this back?

Cohen: Yeah, sure, why not. Sometimes people want an example of, you know, what kind of weapons we'd be eliminating for that sixty billion. What I've got here is a demonstration that involves dropping some BBs into this container. You know, we currently spend twenty billion dollars a year on maintaining our nuclear arsenal and I want to show you what we get for that twenty billion.

Tavis: Okay.

Cohen: Here's one BB. That represents the equivalent of fifteen bombs the size of what blew up Hiroshima. Now here's six BBs and that would be enough nuclear weapons to blow up all of Russia. Now what I'm going to do is pour in the amount of BBs that represents our total nuclear arsenal.

Tavis: The United States?

Cohen: Yep. That was ten thousand BBs, the equivalent of a hundred fifty thousand Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs. I mean, we just don't need that many. Our military advisors say that we could cut our nuclear force down to a reasonable deterrent force and save ten billion dollars a year.

Tavis: Let me ask you, again back to that notion from my grandmother that it's too much like right, how would a groundswell in America ever start to grow, given that it makes so much sense, so that Washington would start to pay attention to it? I mean, with all due respect, I get this in a way that I never have. I'm sure others watching are like, wow, I never quite thought of it in those terms. So once we understand it in these terms, how do we start to build that kind of groundswell where it gets heard in Washington?

Cohen: Well, the Priorities campaign that's comprised of True Majority and Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities has introduced a piece of legislation called the Common Sense Budget Act that essentially makes that transfer of money. We're working with people around the country to start passing resolutions at the local level, advocating for this law to be passed. We're focusing on Iowa and New Hampshire in terms of getting a critical mass of people who are going to force the presidential candidates to talk about it.

But I would say that, you know, for now the best thing that people could do who are listening would be to sign on to truemajority.org or, if you've got a business, sign on to sensiblepriorities.org.

Tavis: Let me ask you - I'm not asking you this as an attempt to get you to endorse somebody. That's not my point here. Is there anybody, though, on the political scene - speaking of people running for office in 2008. Everybody wants to be president, it seems, on both sides. This isn't Republican or Democrat. Everybody's running for president, it seems, in 2008. Have you heard anybody talking about this in anywhere near the kind of language that makes you remotely pleased?

Cohen: Yeah.

Tavis: Elected officials, I mean.

Cohen: Yep. Tom Vilsack, who is the current governor of Iowa, is planning on running for president. He has endorsed the Common Sense Budget Act. He's endorsed exactly the transfer we're talking about.

Tavis: He was on this program not too long ago.

Cohen: I talked to John Edwards and, you know, he couldn't get on board with the whole thing, but he said he would do some of it. Then in terms of the 2006 elections, there's a targeted swing race in Iowa that Bruce Braley is running in and he has endorsed the Common Sense Budget Act. And in Vermont, there's actually another swing race for the House of Representatives and Peter Welch has endorsed the Common Sense Budget Act. So, yeah, we're making some headway.

Tavis: So there are two tracks here. One is, as you mentioned, for individuals, everyday American citizens.

Cohen: Right. Truemajority.org.

Tavis: Right. The other is for businesses.

Cohen: Right. Sensiblepriorities.org.

Tavis: Got it. So how does a business support something like this? As an individual, I totally get it. I can support it with my vote of those persons who endorse a philosophy like this. There are a lot of things I can do as a person. What does a business do to support this notion?

Cohen: Well, it's not the business itself that joins. It's the individual business leader. It's essentially using that person's voice and their credibility and the power that they have from having been, you know, running a large corporation or running a business and met a payroll.

Tavis: What did co-running Ben & Jerry's for all those years do to you or for you in terms of increasing your sensitivity about issues like this, issues that are important to everyday people? I ask that only because you made so much money when you sold this ice cream franchise that you ain't got to be on my talk show or anywhere else talking about stuff like this. You could be in Hawaii or Vermont or wherever it is you want to hang out these days and not addressing issues. So what was it that got you during those years that convinced you to spend your time doing this even after you sold the company?

Cohen: You know, I think the tremendous support of people and our customers and the community for making these changes, for solving these social problems. You know, we're brought up to believe that the problems that we face are so huge that there's no way we can possibly solve them. You know, ever since I was little, I was told there's these millions of kids dying of starvation around the world, but we just can't possibly do it. You know, for one and a half Oreos, you can take care of all of them.

I mean, what I guess Ben & Jerry's has taught me is that you can do seemingly impossible things. You know, once you take a look at it and once you analyze it, a lot of the conventional wisdom just ain't right. If you plug away at it, if you persevere, you can change it.

Tavis: I wanted to find out whether or not you're hopeful - I've expressed a sense of hope, but I wonder, more importantly, whether or not you're hopeful that the American people can get this at a time in which many of us are turning more nativist and doing so, I think in a large measure, because we are fearful in the world that we live in.

Cohen: Yeah. We've done surveys nationally and surveys just in Iowa and New Hampshire and they all show the same thing. Once people see how the budget is split up, they want to shift even more money than we're talking about. I mean, the general population wants to shift an average of a hundred twenty billion dollars a year. You know, we couldn't get our military advisers to sign on to that, but they said with sixty, we would definitely be safe doing that. You know, you just think about in terms of terrorism, building the next generation of the greatest fighter jet in the world doesn't help. The terrorists don't have an air force.

Tavis: I have been thoroughly empowered and enlightened by this conversation to say nothing for my appreciation for the ice cream and for the Oreos that you did leave in this bag (laughter) that I'm going to masticate on.

Cohen: Oreos and ice cream. Sounds like you're going to have yourself a good time, Tavis, but not before I get my spoonful.

Tavis: And gain a few calories in the process (laughter). It's an honor to have you on the program. Nice to meet you.

Cohen: It's been a pleasure to be here.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.