Ben Cohen, businessman, activist and philanthropist, joined Steve Jaxon on The Drive last Tuesday, calling in from Iowa where he was stumping for Bernie Sanders with his friend and business partner Jerry Greenfield. With the Iowa caucuses a few days away, Steve started by asking Ben how he feels the campaign is going, from his perspective.
Ben Cohen began, “Jerry and I are both here. It is a neck-and-neck race between Bernie and Hillary. It’s amazing how passionate the Bernie supporters are, but we need all the help we can get. Time to suck it up wherever you are, contribute some money, volunteer some time, phone bank, whatever it is. Bernie is the most incredible politician that I’ve ever been in contact with, and, you know, Jerry and I have been his constituents for the last 30 years. We’ve never gone out campaigning for any other Presidential candidate. I mean, this guy is the real thing.”
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.
When Steve said it sounded brilliant, Ben replied, “Well, I don’t know how brilliant it was, but it turned out to be!” Then Steve asked Ben to tell all about the new ice cream flavor that he created.
Ben explained, “It’s called Bernie’s Yearning. When you open up the pint, take the lid off, what you see is this huge disk of solid chocolate that covers the entire top of the pint, and below that is plain mint ice cream. And that huge chocolate disc represents all the wealth that’s been generated since the end of the recession that has gone to the top 1% of our country and the mint represents the rest of us. And the way you eat it is, you take a big soup spoon and you whack that big chocolate disc into a lot of little pieces, you let the ice cream soften up a little bit, and you mix it all around and there you have it, Bernie’s Yearning.”
The Bernie’s Yearning package.
With the ice cream news covered, Steve asked how long he planned to be in Iowa on the campaign trail. Ben explained that he and Jerry would leave Thursday for Minneapolis, to ride on the Bernie Sanders float in the big winter parade and carnival there, and then they would head to New Hampshire.
The Steve asked how far back Ben and Jerry go with Bernie, which is quite a while: “We were in Burlington about 30 years ago when he ran for mayor, and everybody said this guy’s never going to get elected, and he won. And we were there when he ran for Congress, everybody said the same thing, he’ll never make it, and we won, same thing in the Senate. It’s amazing to have been represented for 30 years by someone that actually represents my views and what I believe in, and essentially what that is, is the vision of fairness and equality and justice that we all heard the country was supposed to be about in public school and he’s really making it happen. If you look at his votes in the House and the Senate and the bills that he’s introduced, he’s not the usual politician. He’s saying we’re the richest country in the world and our people deserve what other advanced democracies have around the world, which is universal health care, college education regardless of your income, paid vacations, medical leave, parental leave, and he’s offered ways of financing it that make this revenue neutral just by cutting all these tax loopholes on the corporations and the ultra-wealthy.”
Steve asked what Ben thought of Bernie’s chances. “Things are getting better and better. He is surging. If you look at the trend, Hillary’s going down and he’s going up. So right now it’s all about Iowa and New Hampshire. If he wins one and does great in the other, even if he doesn’t win, he’s off and running.”
Steve mentioned that he was looking at an article about the ice cream on Politico.com with a great shot of Ben in his kitchen actually making the ice cream, and Ben suggested, “Yeah, you should check out the video, there’s video of it too. A friend of mine did it.”
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Ben repeated his tweet, “What I’ve said is, there’s nothing so unstoppable as a flavor whose time has finally come. That’s the way it is with Bernie’s Yearning and that’s the way it is with Bernie’s campaign.”
In closing, Steve suggests listeners can go to the website to sign up to win one of the few pints of Bernie’s Yearning. Ben agreed, saying, “…get a pint, sock it away, put it in your freezer vault for a few years and sell it on eBay and you can be part of the 1% yourself!”
For more information about Bernie’s Yearning Ice Cream and to watch the video, visit Ben Cohen’s special website http://www.berniesyearning.com.
Follow Ben Cohen on Twitter @YoBenCohen.
Here is the link to the story on Politico dot com, which Steve mentions:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/bernie-sanders-ben-and-jerrys-bernies-yearning-218185