Ben of Ben & Jerry’s Exposes the Motives Behind War With Russia & the Politicians That Sold Out

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Ben Cohen moved to Vermont in 1977 and co-founded an ice cream company that bears his name, Ben and Jerry's.

They made great ice cream.

They still do.

Ben Cohen became famous for his liberal political activism.

The ice cream was great.

His political opinions were deeply offensive to most conservatives.

Fast forward to 2022, and Ben Cohen was one of the only liberals in the United States to come out against the war in Ukraine.

It seems like a good moment to pause and reconsider whether some of Ben Cohen's views on war

are maybe not insane.

Maybe they're worth hearing.

Here's Ben Cohen.

So that you brought a book by Smedley Darlington Butler, the most decorated Marine in World War I.

He's a Marine general.

He won two Medals of Honor.

And he wrote a book called War is a Racket.

And for some reason, it's not the most famous book ever written in English, but it probably should be.

What is that?

And why'd you bring it?

Well,

I've been kind of inspired by this quote of his.

I think

he encapsulates what's been going on in terms of how our military has been used.

And,

you know, he's been there, done that.

That's for sure.

And

I think about it a lot in terms of,

you know, all these

refugees, immigrants that are trying to get to the U.S.

And

why are they trying to get to the U.S.?

A lot of times it's because the U.S.

at some point in history

overthrew or invaded their government or,

well, I'll tell you what Smedley says here.

Can I quote?

Please.

So he says, I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period, I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for for big business, for Wall Street, and the bankers.

Butler wrote in 1955.

Then he goes on, in short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for national city bank boys to collect revenues.

I helped in the raping of a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902 to 1912.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.

I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.

In China, in 1927, I helped set it up so that standard oil went on its way unmolested.

Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints.

The best he could do was to operate in three city districts.

We Marines operated on three continents.

So this was a major general of the United States Marine Corps, the single most decorated Marine when he wrote that.

And I think he's pretty much forgotten now.

Yeah.

And he was much maligned after he said that.

Yeah, very much.

So you think, I guess another way of saying you think that our military heroes are the most revered people in our country?

You can't, you can't criticize a man who's received two medals of honor, and yet he crossed the line and they hated him for that.

Yeah, but he told the truth.

So

how do you, how is that relevant to right now?

I think that

those actions that the U.S.

has done over the years back in his time and pretty much continues to do to essentially run the world in a way that benefits the elites in the United States, ends up causing a lot of resentment, ends up being the cause of a lot of wars, ends up being the cause of a lot of immigration and

people trying to flee countries that are

economically or politically

unlivable.

And if you go back to the root causes, you find out that there were

some great liberation struggles in these countries, and the U.S.

was on the other side.

Yes.

What's interesting is that

Spedley, General Butler wrote that years after he left the Marine Corps,

he was a hero in World War I when we were working to stop the Kaiser.

Many Americans killed to stop the Kaiser.

No one even remembers what a Kaiser is, but that was a war.

The First World War was a war for

democracy and freedom.

It didn't work, of course.

But we're hearing the same slogans now with Ukraine.

And as then, a lot of really decent, you know, good-hearted people with the right motives are buying it completely.

It's not just warmongers who are in favor of these wars.

It's like your next-door neighbor who's a good person.

Yeah, I think that's really true.

the way a lot of people see it is,

you know, this little country, Ukraine, got invaded by this big giant Russia.

Uh,

but I think what you need to understand is what provoked that war and how it could have been prevented.

Um,

you know, at the end of the Cold War, the U.S.

made promises to Russia that they're not going to expand NATO eastward.

And then

we

proceeded to expand NATO eastward.

As a matter of fact,

you know, there was the government was not going to do that until

the weapons manufacturers set up this committee to expand NATO, which was essentially the CEOs of the weapons manufacturers,

lobbying Congress to expand NATO.

So, I mean, geez, if you're a weapons manufacturer and you expand NATO, they're going to buy a lot of your stuff.

Why would the well, first let me ask, do you think it's a reasonable request by Russia not to have NATO expand to its borders?

Aaron Powell, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in the same way that, you know, the United States says that

what, there's our sphere of influence.

Yes.

You know, I remember learning about this in uh was it elementary school or middle school uh

that uh the monroe doctrine yes uh

it's our divine right

from god to control our hemisphere to control our hemisphere and it sounded crazy to me then

and i you know it i i can see making sure that there's not enemies right on your borders But in terms of controlling the whole hemisphere,

I don't buy it.

And

the U.S.

has now expanded its sphere of influence to include the entire world.

I mean, it's amazing.

We have military commands that cover

every portion of the globe.

And we have 800 military bases around the world.

You know, when I was growing up,

you know, I heard we had a bunch of overseas bases.

I figured, you know, that's cool.

You know, every country must have overseas bases.

And then, you know, I find out that the country who has the next most overseas bases

has like five.

I mean, it's the U.S.

that is using its military power to control the world.

And

the fact of the matter is that the United States is 5% of the world population.

So having 5%

dominate the world militarily, that doesn't sound democratic to me.

No.

And it doesn't sound like it helps the United States very much.

No,

I think it's incredibly harmful to the United States.

First of of all we're not we're making a lot of enemies people don't like us uh being the big bully uh on the hill uh telling all these other countries what to do uh

and

it sucks a huge amount of money out of our country it's stuff that can be used for things that people really want and need.

You know,

we could have more affordable housing.

We could make it

so that the American dream could actually still happen, that people could afford a house,

that you can get a decent education,

and

that you can get child care, that it doesn't have to cost you so much money to go to college.

I mean,

these things can all be done.

And, you know, most other developed countries are providing that for their citizens.

But the U.S.

chooses to spend.

I mean, look at this.

This is a chart of the federal discretionary budget.

That's the amount of money that Congress has each year to allocate to the various departments.

So the big red one on top

that gets over half, that's the Pentagon.

And these little slivers are like, you know, USAID, the Education Department, the Health Department,

Community Development, whatever else the country does.

But in terms of stuff that would actually be helpful to people living in their daily lives,

it's all sucked out by the Pentagon.

You know, Martin Luther King gave this speech and he talked about

the Pentagon being this huge demonic sucking tube that sucks out the the lifeblood of

things like housing, schools.

You know,

everybody's school budget is always

in the red or can't raise enough money, got to get rid of teachers or whomever.

I think that's when they shot him is when he said that.

The race stuff was fine.

That was no problem.

But it was

true.

It is true.

That was the end of his life.

He was assassinated a year to the day after he made that speech.

So a year to the day.

To the day.

April 4th, 1967.

He must have given that speech.

Amazing.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah,

it's one thing, you know, the people in charge, I am convinced, would like Americans to hate each other on the basis of race.

They don't want you to talk about the banks or the panic.

I think that's really true.

I think it is true.

Okay, so back to Ukraine.

You said that there was an association of weapons manufacturers that were lobbying Congress to expand NATO.

That

seems a little bit crazy that weapons manufacturers would be allowed to dictate foreign policy because the conflict is so obvious.

Well, it's just money.

So they're lobbying.

They're giving political donations to the legislators, legalize bribery.

And

yeah, it's definitely a conflict of interest.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So that the pie, if I were to look at the, if you didn't tell me what country that was, and you said, here's a country that spends half of more than half of its entire discretionary budget on weapons and troops, I would imagine a small country surrounded by enemies.

I would not imagine a continental-sized country with totally with independent resources, enough energy, enough food, doesn't really need anything, that's separated from the rest of the world by the two biggest oceans.

Yeah.

That doesn't make any sense, actually.

No, it totally doesn't.

Has the U.S.

been invaded before by a foreign army since 1812?

I don't think so.

No?

No.

Yeah.

It's a little weird.

Yeah.

I mean, and they keep on justifying these

huge expenditures by coming up with enemy after enemy after enemy.

So, you know, first it was the Soviet Union.

So the Soviet Union collapsed.

And,

I mean,

Gorbachev said at the time, we will deny you of an enemy.

And,

you know, I assumed that the Pentagon budget was going to, you know, drop hugely because that was the whole justification for it.

But

what the Pentagon did was that they came up with what was called the two-war scenario.

So now instead of the Pentagon budget being structured to

defeat the Soviet Union,

now what they said is it needs to be structured to fight two medium-sized wars in two different places at the same time.

And what do you know?

That's going to cost just as much as we were spending on preparing to fight the Soviet Union.

Who are the wars going to be with?

Well, I think at the time there was the axes of evil.

What was that?

Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba,

probably another one.

Yeah,

it's interesting because

Russia collapses, the Soviet system collapses after seven years in 1991, the summer of 91.

And I kind of assumed, I think everyone assumed that we would take the win.

Like we were having this Cold War all these years,

and they collapsed, we won, and then we could be friends

and move forward because there are no more Soviet communists left.

They're gone.

Right.

And they wanted to be our friend.

I mean, I was walking on the Arbat in Moscow.

People were joyful and they were all wearing these pins that showed a U.S.

flag crossed with a Soviet flag.

They wanted to be friends.

Why didn't that happen?

Because

our

Cold Warriors,

who for their whole life,

fighting the Soviet Union, that's what they were about.

They wanted to continue the Cold War.

They wanted to continue having Russia as this enemy.

So fast forward to 2022,

February, and the conflict in Ukraine starts, and we're told that this is just like out of nowhere, like who could have known.

And Putin wants to expand the Russian border, you know, all the way to Vienna or all the way to London or who knows?

But he's just an expansionist power.

He's Hitler.

And Ukraine is like the backstop against his expansionism.

And we need to fight Russia.

You're saying that that's not actually what happened?

Right.

You know, starting with the end of the Cold War,

there was a promise made to Russia that

kind of in exchange for, I think it was taking down the wall in Germany, that

we're not going to expand NATO eastward.

Yes.

And I think it was James Baker, the Secretary of State, that made that promise.

And

then

we proceeded to expand it eastward.

There was one tranche of countries, and Russia was up in arms, and they objected in the most strenuous language, but

we did it.

And then we added more countries a bunch of years later, and Russia was up in arms, objected in the most strenuous language.

And, you know, there might have been a few more.

And then there was a statement that Ukraine was going to become part of NATO.

And

Russia objected in the most strenuous language.

And then

Russia started gathering some troops.

on the border and again said in the most strenuous language that we will not tolerate having Ukraine part of NATO.

We want to negotiate.

They sent overtures to the U.S.

I think the overture, I think the U.S.

did not respond.

We ignore you if we don't like you.

We don't talk to you if we don't like you.

And then they invaded.

And,

you know, I don't think they anticipated that they were going to end up in a proxy war with the United States.

what's crazy about it, what drives me crazy, is that this is war.

War.

I mean, we're, you know, I'm shooting my machine gun at you.

You're dying.

You're dead.

Hundreds of thousands of people on both sides have died in this war.

For what?

I mean,

eventually the war is going to be over.

And there's going to be some settlement.

And why can't we just skip to that stage?

Well, because you don't expend missiles doing that.

I really do think that's what it's about.

That's what Smedley Butler came up with.

I mean, you read the whole rest of his book, and he says at the end,

you know, I, you know, these anti-war protesters, they're really good people,

but you're never going to

stop

the military-industrial congressional complex until you take the profit out of it.

That's what's driving all this shit, is the profit that these corporations are making

on making

weapons,

which are more and more lethal.

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So Smedley Butler, I know you know this.

I think he first gave that speech

1935-ish.

And he was later kind of lumped in with bad people as somehow pro-Nazi.

You must be for Hitler.

You know, it was like the worst slander you could level against somebody.

And that's why he's forgotten now.

Something very similar seems to be going on, where if you say what you just said, you're pro-Putin.

Yeah, which is bullshit.

I'm not pro-Putin.

I'm not pro-Zelensky.

I'm pro-peace.

I'm pro-cease fire.

I'm stop killing each other.

So you've been that way.

I mean,

we're coming from different points of view, but we agree, I agree strongly with everything you've said.

But you're the one who's been saying the same thing for a long time, like ever since for the 40 years I've been eating your ice cream, which is fattening.

Sorry, I hate to say it.

Thank you for consuming.

You wear it well.

I've got to stop eating that stuff.

It is delicious.

Never trust a skinny ice cream.

and excuse me so i've been um i've been you know listening uh to your views on this for a long time and they haven't they haven't changed uh do you think they've your views have changed no my my view hasn't changed and bernie's views certainly haven't changed you know i've been listening to him for a long time i tell you it is the same freaking speech yeah uh people say you should change your speech he says when the when the country finally finally acts in a in a decent way i'll change my speech.

So what, but Ukraine feels a little different.

Like all of a sudden, you know,

there was always this

persistent, enthusiastic, anti-war caucus on the left, where you're coming from,

not quite mainstream Democrat, but sort of more old-fashioned Democrat.

They like evaporated.

Maybe Chris Hedges,

Jeff Sachs, Jeffree Sachs.

You like, where's everybody else?

Yeah, it really, it really split.

I guess people,

I mean, you're talking about people on the left.

I guess we could talk about people on the left.

I mean, anti-war people in general.

Yeah, whatever.

I think left, right.

I don't know.

Yeah, I think there's people like that on the left, right, and center.

That's 100% true.

You're exactly right.

And in fact, there are a lot of them on the right, whatever that is.

I don't even know.

Those are fake categories at this point.

It really is.

Well, let's say it was 1985.

Okay.

It was 40 years ago or 1988 when I lived in Burlington.

That was considered like a lefty view.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you're saying, right.

So some of that group is,

you know, behind Ukraine.

Let's defend Ukraine.

And some of that group is saying, no, we shouldn't be involved in this war.

You know, I think the people who are saying, let's define, let's defend Ukraine,

I can certainly understand it from their point of view.

And their point of view is that

Russia made an unprovoked invasion, and Russia therefore started this war, and they're trying to take over this country, and

we should defend that country.

people don't understand what led up to it.

I mean, as a matter of fact,

the Eisenhower Media Network, this group of retired admirals, generals, and colonels,

we took out a full-page ad in the New York Times at the very beginning of that war calling for a ceasefire.

And

the headline

of the ad was supposed to be, the U.S.

provoked the war in Ukraine.

And the New York Times would not allow us to run it as an ad.

What?

They would not allow us to use that headline.

Why?

But it's an ad.

Right.

It

doesn't seem right.

But I mean,

so that was on that thing.

But I mean, in the run-up to the.

Wait, can I say, wait, what?

So this is another...

Like, I don't think North Korea has a propaganda initiative as comprehensive and aggressive as the one I saw after.

the Ukraine war started.

Like it was just like, you know, the New York Open was taking Russian names off the scoreboard.

New York Times was

editorializing in other people's advertisements.

Like, what was that?

Yeah.

War fever?

I mean,

the reality is that

you can kind of control what the population thinks by

the information that you give to them.

So, you know, the U.S.

is propagandizing its own people.

You know, every country does that.

But,

you know, there's a lot of

sins of omission in terms of the news that

people get.

And

you never hear

Russia's point of view.

I mean,

it's amazing to me.

You know, they wouldn't let us hear what Osama bin Laden was saying after, you know, 9-11.

I noticed.

I mean, they don't let us hear what

the people in China are saying.

I mean, I, you know, I, so I, I dug around.

A friend of mine sent me,

you know, a speech by the defense minister of China, and he's saying,

we're not looking to be enemies with the U.S.

We're looking to develop our country and grow.

And

we can peacefully coexist together.

The world is big enough for both of the U.S., but

the

explicit policy of the United States, if you read these, I mean, I don't know, what the hell is this ice cream guy doing reading these national security documents?

I don't know.

But anyhow, I read them.

And

it is the policy of the U.S.

to maintain hegemony.

And I didn't know what that word meant.

But it's the policy of the U.S.

that if any country begins to develop economically or socially,

you know, toward the level that the U.S.

is at,

that country is by definition an enemy.

The policy of the U.S.

is that we must have full spectrum dominance.

And

why should 5%

of the world control what's going on in the world?

The Eisenhower Institute.

Eisenhower Media Network.

Media Network.

My apologies.

So I've never heard of it.

Yeah, I didn't think you had.

Well, I just want to pay attention because most people

know that.

Well, it just, no, I'm admitting that both because I want to be honest, but also because it tells you a lot.

So this was a group you were involved in that had flag officers and had, you know, generals, admirals, other officers

who worked at the Pentagon, worked in the military.

Right.

And I've never heard of it.

That's kind of interesting.

What was their, what, what kind of people were in it?

What was the goal?

Well,

originally,

during the Cold War and after, there was the Center for Defense Information, which was a home for retired,

high-level military officers that were critical of the Pentagon.

And

that organization kind of fell on hard times and kind of Twittered away.

So

myself and a veteran, Danny Surson,

decided to start up the Eisenhower Media Network as a home for

higher level

former military people to use their credibility

on the issue of critiquing the Pentagon, because what usually happens when you critique the Pentagon is that you don't have the credentials.

You say that, well, the Pentagon is doing this weird thing or that screwed up thing.

And, you know, and then

the Pentagon, you know, general gets up there in uniform with all his medals and stuff and says,

those guys have no idea what they're talking about.

I'm the military expert.

So the idea of Eisenhower Media Network is to have those military experts that can support a different point of view than what the Pentagon is putting out.

What kind of response have you had for the media?

You know,

those guys are in the media sometimes, but they're certainly not in the media, despite our efforts, as much as the former

high-level military guys that uh are now being paid by weapons manufacturers i mean so they're brought on these tv shows tv talk shows as experts uh and they're never identified as in the employ of

essentially war profiteers.

That's actually happened?

I speak the truth.

I shit you not.

I mean, that's disgusting.

Yes, sir.

Huh.

I've known a number of them, of course, because I worked at a TV channel.

I worked at a bunch of TV channels with a bunch of retired military officers,

you know, on the air letting their expertise to this or that.

And some of them are impressive.

Some of them are utterly fraudulent and stupid.

Well, I'm thinking of one in particular who's like, doesn't know anything.

I don't know how he was a general.

But

sorry.

I didn't realize they were being paid

by defense contractors to do that.

That's really

and it's not revealed.

Well, I didn't know I mean, and I know them.

You're right, right.

Huh.

So, who was in the Eisenhower Media Network or is in it?

What kind of people?

Larry Wilkerson.

He was a former assistant to Colin Powell.

I remember him well.

Matt Ho Dennis Fritz was

the the head of Space Force, actually, for a while.

Are these older guys, younger guys?

We have a range.

Yes.

I'm happy to say.

How hard is it for them to join a group like that?

Because

it seems like one of the structural problems is that, you know, if you're a one-star and you fail to make two-star, you just like seamlessly move over to the defense industry, to a weapons manufacturer.

There's like a place for you yeah i mean especially for the guys with even more stars exactly right so the higher you go the more you make when you leave so the incentive doesn't end with your military service you get paid after you leave

exactly and you get paid by the corporations whose contracts you were supposedly supervising

when you were in uniform.

So when you were making ice cream, would you ever allow a contract set up like that to exist in your company?

Never.

Never.

I mean, the conflicts of interest that go on in terms of our government are,

you know, would be illegal in a publicly held corporation.

They'd be illegal.

Yeah.

It, yeah, I'm just, I'm asking these questions, dumb questions, because I feel like I'm maybe missing something.

So it must, so the guys who are, have signed up, the retired officers who signed up for the Eisenhower media project are turning down a lot of money in order to do that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Huh.

And what's their view, would you say?

Like, what did they believe that these conflicts are driven by profit?

Well, they're driven by profit.

Sometimes they're driven by

politicians

not wanting to appear so-called weak on defense.

Right.

And

the only way we judge whether a politician is weak on defense or not is how much money they are willing to give to the Pentagon.

So you have two politicians that are running for election

and

usually they're trying to out-compete the other guy in terms of who's trying you know, who's who's willing to raise the Pentagon budget?

Because I'm strong on defense.

And

that's so this is like the one area of bipartisan agreement.

Let's give more and more money to the Pentagon.

And, you know, there's this other aspect of so-called political engineering that,

you know, earlier,

you know, I don't know, back in

the 90s, I guess,

you know, military contractors

would,

these weapons manufacturers would deliberately spread out the

jobs for a particular weapon system

in as many congressional districts as possible.

And

so, you know,

that that creates jobs and,

you know, the the politician from that area that that's what they you know that gives them a lot of credit i brought jobs to my district and so

you know for say the f-35 you know it's probably made in over 400 uh you know congressional districts and uh

you know if you say some you know if you try to say this is a shitty airplane which you know john mccain said it was the worst thing he ever saw uh

You can't stop it because they've politically engineered it.

And

so if you

I don't know, that's kind of how it works.

So when you tried to put this ad in the New York Times, or did put the ad, but with a different headline, by the way, what did they change the headline to?

I don't remember.

But something that didn't tell the truth about how this war started.

Yeah.

Well,

the body did.

Yeah.

The body copy.

Yeah, they're assuming most people read the headline.

Right.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Um,

nobody was saying anything like that then.

I mean, that's right.

I know.

Um, I was saying it, got in a lot of trouble for it.

All right.

Yeah, it just seemed obvious to me.

But, um,

but very few people were saying anything like that.

What kind of response did you get from people you know?

Uh, mostly positive.

Uh,

and and and there were a bunch that disagreed.

You know, I actually have...

My wife

was born in Kyrgyzstan,

which is one of the countries

that the Soviet Union had kind of taken over.

She's never lived in Russia, but she's a Russian speaker.

Yes.

And

she lost some friends because of the stand that I took

against that war in Ukraine.

Really?

Because they were offended.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I think for

countries that

live,

you know, that are located around the borders of the Soviet Union, countries that had been invaded by the Soviet Union.

And mistreated.

Right.

They are

really down on Russia.

For sure, they are.

And they're very down on

socialism and they're very down on

and they believe, you know, they have a history.

They've been invaded and they're scared that

they're going to get invaded.

And, you know, and

you know, their feeling is, you know, if we just let Russia Russia go and

have its way with

Ukraine, that, you know, they're going to be next.

Of course.

And

I don't think there is any truth to that.

I think, you know, clearly

Putin is not

doing very well, you know, invading one country.

I don't think he's looking to go invade another one.

He already runs the biggest country in the world.

So, yeah.

No,

I agree with that.

It's not, you know, praise of Putin to note that there's no evidence he wants territorial expansion at all.

Were there any politicians?

So that was like in the first few months after the war started that you said this.

Yeah.

Were there any politicians who were saying anything like that that you saw?

That's interesting.

Because a lot of people,

I don't really remember any politicians being on our side.

No,

including ones you knew personally and had supported in the past.

They weren't saying that.

So that raises the question.

And some of those politicians, because you've always been against war

for the 40 years I've paid attention,

you were supporting anti-war politicians, but they made an exception for Ukraine.

Yeah, that's true.

What I noticed, what was that about?

Maybe because

there was so much public

kind of empathy for the people in Ukraine.

And I think that

a lot of it has to do with

what information do people have?

The only information people had is

Russia came in and invaded with its army.

Yes.

And they didn't hear what happened before, what led up to it,

and they didn't think about

you know, which this ad that we ran did,

what would the U.S.

do

if

there were

Russian missiles lined up along the Mexican border aimed at the U.S.

I mean,

it is the same situation.

Of course it is.

And

I've got no question that the U.S.

would invade and get rid of them.

Of course.

We'd be occupying Tijuana right now.

Yeah.

And I can see why, by the way, you don't want other people's missiles aimed from your border.

That's pretty close.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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Interesting.

So did

you have access to information other people didn't?

Well, because you said that

most people had this view because they didn't know better, because they didn't have access to other perspectives, to the truth, to the history of this.

What were you reading that they weren't?

I just been following the issue over time

since the fall of the,

you know, since the end of the Cold War.

Yes.

You know,

so I, yeah, so I where do I get the information?

Well, this, the stuff about the committee to expand NATO,

that was in the mainstream press.

But you already had the framework for understanding this because you've been paying attention to this issue.

Yeah.

And, you know, you think about,

you know, most people,

it's kind of a luxury to

have the time to pay attention to an issue like this.

I mean, most people are,

you know, focused on the day-to-day,

you know, just trying to get through the day.

And,

you know,

the messages that you get

are essentially the messages that the government wants you to get.

Man,

that was not the way it was supposed to work.

No, it wasn't.

We were supposed to have freedom of the press.

But I mean, even when there,

I guess even when there was a free press,

it was still

very

controlled.

I mean, so

I say there was a free press,

not

that free.

You know, there's the, I think a lot of times the press is self-censoring.

Yes.

I don't know.

How can you have a democracy without access, free access to information?

Yeah, I don't think you can.

I mean, now,

you know, with the Internet, I mean, you could say that there is free access,

but

you really need to kind of dig.

And,

you know, you get a very different perspective if you read the news

in the U.S.

versus if you read the news in some other country in the world, you know, talking about the same situation.

So

we get a U.S.-centric view.

U.S.

government-centric.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't personally know anyone who's volunteering to fight Russia in Ukraine.

I don't personally know anybody.

I've never met anybody

outside of D.C.

who wants another Middle Eastern war.

So in other words, the priorities of the government bear no resemblance to the priorities of the population.

Yes.

There are

well-done, rigorous

studies on that issue.

That

you look at

the line of

what do regular old people in the country want versus what does the country do,

and

they're not congruent

very much.

Then you look at the line of

what do

the elites want?

What do the really wealthy people and corporations want?

And what does the country do?

And it's much more aligned.

So on Ukraine, your position, I'll just be totally blunt, is like totally unfashionable.

It's like the least fashionable position you could ever take.

Yeah, well, I was never really a fashion maven.

But this is

anti-fashion.

This is like, this is a way to get called really pretty slanderous names.

It's a way to break up friendships.

As you said, your wife lost friends over this.

So it's like,

why would you do that?

Why not just sit this one out?

Do I want?

Well,

I don't know.

It's about

standing up for what you believe in.

I mean, I'm for a ceasefire.

I'm for,

you know, you would think

most people would be in favor of a ceasefire.

I mean, we don't want to keep on killing people.

I'm not a Putin supporter.

I'm not a Zelensky supporter.

I'm a supporter of

not

killing each other and not

using

our resources to

have actual wars, to supply weapons for wars, or

to settle our problems through that means.

I mean,

it just,

why can't we cut to the chase and assume the war is over and have a negotiated settlement?

Why do we have to kill a few hundred thousand mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters

in the process?

Aaron Powell, there's also a sense in which there's like a suicidal impulse at work here because for most of three years, we were closer than we've ever been to a nuclear conflict, like an exchange of nuclear warheads where the most of the Earth's population dies.

That's factually true, I think.

And

I think the planners of the Pentagon understood that, and they pressed forward anyway.

Do you think that the average American understands how close we have been to nuclear war?

No,

I think they've heard that we've been close, but they don't have the details.

Why do you think that people who plan these things and push these things don't seem to care about the risk of annihilating everyone on the planet?

I think

most people people involved in the process are not

playing little roles in the process.

They're just trying to do their small part well.

Yes.

And

they're not,

you know, they're not looking

at the bigger picture.

I think that's exactly right.

They're just cogs.

Yeah.

But the machine itself is moving towards something awful, but they don't have that picture.

They just know their role.

Yeah.

Huh.

Who do you admit?

You said there are no politicians who are saying what you believe.

Is there who whose opinion on this do you respect on the Russia-Ukraine question?

Larry Wilkerson, Jeff Sachs.

Yes.

I guess

those are the two that come to mind.

Given that I think we're right about Russia-Ukraine, clearly, if there had been a ceasefire in the spring of 2022,

probably a million people would still be alive and Ukraine wouldn't be destroyed and we'd still be in the same place.

So, like, why didn't we do that?

Given that you called that correctly, I think where do you think we're going on Iran?

It sounds like we're kind of headed toward war.

Why do you think that is?

Well,

there seems to be

some

kind of

strange relationship between

Israel and the U.S.

where

I don't know, Israel now

has the U.S.

supplying weapons for its genocide.

And

what I'm told is that Israel wants some concept of greater Israel.

I mean, I don't really know much about that.

Do you think the U.S.

faces a threat from Iran?

No, I don't.

No, I think that's absurd.

I think, you know, Iran has a Pentagon budget.

Well, not a Pentagon.

Their military budget is like $7 billion.

Our Pentagon budget is darn close to a trillion.

So

I don't think that,

I mean,

what, is Iran going to

invade the U.S.?

I don't think so.

Why

you sold your company?

It was bought by Unilever, I think, like 25 years ago.

Yeah,

um, did you consider buying a vineyard?

No, no,

how about you?

No, I can't afford a vineyard.

No vineyard, I don't even drink, so kind of out of the vineyard business.

But, um, why did you decide to spend the last 25 years on the issue of war?

Uh,

it's more on the issue of

kind of the

the spirit and the soul of

our country.

Uh

you know

there was a pope who said that

even if the weapons are never used, the arms race kills the poor by causing them to starve.

I'm

amazed at

how much money money the United States has.

We have a shitload of money.

Is that a technical assessment?

Yeah.

We have enough money

to

solve health problems for people in our country and all over the world.

We have enough to end hunger in our country and all over the world.

We have enough to get rid of lead poisoning.

The gargantuaness of the amounts of money that we have,

you can't fathom it.

And

we're choosing to spend it on

creating more

and better ways to kill more and more people.

It's such an incredible waste.

It's,

you know, I believe that we are all interconnected.

As we help others, we actually help ourselves.

And

all this money that's going into the Pentagon is sucking money out of things that people really want and need.

It could be improving your libraries, your schools,

your sports arenas.

It could be paying for college for your kids, trade school for your kids.

You have a better car.

I mean, what is it that

do people want?

It's not more weapons.

No, it's not.

And

our country needs to start measuring its strength by

how many people it can help as opposed to how many people it can kill.

And I would say it would actually

make our country more secure.

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Some people think nature is like this, but actually, it's like this.

That's why Columbia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you.

Columbia engineered for whatever.

You saw people, you know, just as recently as a few months ago say,

we actually benefit from sending billions to Ukraine because that money goes first through American companies.

Right.

I've heard politicians say that,

yeah, this is great, man.

We're employing our people.

We're keeping our weapons production lines humming.

And we're degrading the military of our enemy, Russia.

And

it is such

sacrilegious reasoning.

You need to think about our spirit and our soul, what it means to be an American.

You know, right now, what it means to be American is that we are the world's largest arms exporter.

We have the largest military

in the world.

We support

the slaughter of people in Gaza.

If somebody protests the slaughter of people in Gaza, we arrest them.

What does our country stand for?

I don't know.

I mean, you know, people say the budget is a moral document.

See where you're spending your money, and that's what your values are.

It hurts me to say that

the values of our country seem to be

military domination.

Well, that's it.

Impulse that drives this

is money, right?

People want money.

So you're an interesting person to ask since

you didn't grow up rich.

You've had times when you were poor, then you got rich, selling the best ice cream there is.

So you've kind of seen the money thing from both ends.

Do you think that

people put too much emphasis on money?

Well,

part of what got me

interested in this issue is that, you know, you talk about these large numbers like

uh

300 million uh

500 million a billion uh

a hundred billion

uh 800 billion nobody has any idea what the size of that is it's it's just like more money than you could ever imagine yeah i have no perspective at all on that and And so

when Ben and Jerry's was sold,

it came up to a level of $300 million in sales.

And so I started having a feeling for how much money that is.

And then I realized that three times that,

that's about a billion.

And so I vaguely got a

handle on

what quantity that is.

And,

you know, a billion is

an unfathomably large number.

If you counted every second since you were born,

you would be thirty-two years old before you'd lived a billion seconds.

It is a lot of seconds.

And

that's just one billion.

So

the Pentagon budget is now

a trillion,

a thousand billion.

You know, when you in Pentagon speak,

well, I don't know, it's a few aircraft carriers, it's another fighter jet,

generation of fighter jets,

whatever, whatever.

But

in regular speak,

here's a good example.

I wrote it down because I thought you might be asking.

There was recently

a fighter jet that fell off

an aircraft carrier.

So it was a $70

million

fighter jet.

So,

you know, that sounds kind of dramatic that a $70 million fighter jet fell off an aircraft carrier.

But if you think about the Pentagon budget as a box of Cheerios,

that $70 billion

would be one-tenth of one Cheerio,

which is enough money if you take it out of the Pentagon to build two new hospitals in West Virginia.

So

what's crumbs to the Pentagon

can can really provide some real stuff that we need here in the U.S.

Why?

I mean, so you're describing a system that like basically can't be changed because I don't know.

No, I'm in the process of changing it.

Okay.

So you think that democratic levers still work in a non-democratic system?

Well,

I think that the only lever that works is

public opinion.

So

I'm in the process of starting up a campaign, which is called Common Sense Defense at the moment.

We're going to get a flashier name later, but right now it's Common Sense Defense.

Very flashy.

Thank you.

Common Sense Defense.

Yeah, it'd be a nice change.

And

it is a campaign that's aimed

just directly at the public.

We're not trying to lobby Congress.

We're not trying to influence that.

We're trying to change public opinion in terms of

what we want our government to be spending its money on, or at least not spending its money on excessive

weapons.

Yeah.

So,

yeah,

I believe that the thing that can change it, and you know, and this is from

my experience of my time going around lobbying on Congress in on Capitol Hill about this issue,

you know, I think that's hopeless.

I mean, I think all we can do is.

We think it's hopeless to lobby the Congress.

Yeah.

You know, hopeless for a guy who's not handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What was your experience?

You actually went to Washington and and talked to them?

I went to Washington.

I talked to those politicians.

You know,

they smile and they say nice things and they take a picture and then they

and then they just vote and rubber stamp whatever Pentagon bill comes in because

they don't want their opponent to call them weak on defense.

Hmm.

So there were none that you would trust?

I wouldn't say that.

You know,

I think there's a guy, you know, there's

no, I wouldn't say there's none.

I mean, I think there's, I don't know,

20, 30.

Yeah.

Do you think that part of the problem with the Ukraine war was Trump was against it,

and that made it hard for people who hated Trump to say, I'm against it too?

I wasn't,

I don't really know about that.

I mean, I didn't I wasn't conscious of that myself.

I mean, I know that

you know for I know I know that for some

Democrats, you know, anything that Trump supports, they don't.

Yeah.

But I'm not aware of that as being an issue with related to the Ukraine war.

You were saying that you think there's something sacrilegious about basic anecdote on weapons?

Yeah, I really do.

So

are you driven by your spiritual beliefs?

I'm mostly driven by,

you know, just

a concern for people.

I mean, I don't,

in terms of a spiritual belief, I mean, I don't practice a religion.

I was born a Jew.

I love Jesus Christ.

I think the words that he said are

wonderful,

are amazing.

And,

you know,

I'm kind of distressed that

a lot of organized Christian religions are not really,

I don't know, abiding by the words of Jesus Christ.

I am too.

I'm friends with a guy named Shane Claiborne, who's

a theologian.

And

a Christian.

Well, he calls himself a red-letter Christian, and he's got a group called Red Letter Christians.

There's other theologians.

Red Letters refer to the red letters of the New Testament connoting Jesus' words.

exactly uh

and you know he lives and works in uh in an inner city philadelphia in a really low low-income area and he's

you know that's his work he's he's working to help people there but

yeah i i

i think if if we could follow the words of jesus christ and and

take

you know think about the sermon on the mount and uh

you know, take his words seriously.

We wouldn't be doing the stuff we're currently doing.

No.

I don't know if I can improve on that.

Ben Cohen, thank you very much.

All right.

Thank you, Tucker.

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