Click on the links below to read articles about True Majority. Some are full text right here, others are links to newspaper web sites. Each new article begins with a to make it easier for you to scroll down to.

Below is a story about TrueMajority in the Burlington Free Press by Molly Walsh. It talks about the start of our campaign in Burlington.

Social mission goes on parade
June 8, 2002
By Molly Walsh
Free Press Staff Writer

As caravans go, it was hard to miss the one tooling around Burlington this week. A piggy bank on wheels symbolized budget bloat at the Pentagon, and a double-decker school bus hustled for increases in K-12 federal school funding.

It was the sedan cranking out parade music that attracted the notice of Burlington police.

A Burlington officer pulled the car over Wednesday as the motorcade dreamed up by political activist Ben Cohen of Williston, a founder of the famous ice cream company, was warming up for a cross-country road trip.

It seems the music blaring from the car was too loud to be tolerated under the city's noise ordinance.

"They stopped us; they pulled us over and said, 'You're louder than you should be,'" Cohen explained Friday. "So we turned it down. They're happy. We're happy."

No ticket was issued and the crew drove off at a lower decibel level to promote clean cars, reduced military spending and increased aid to the

world's hungry. The caravan, dubbed the TrueMajority Parade, will travel coast-to-coast for 10 months to recruit like-minded cyber activists.

People who sign up for TrueMajority.com receive two e-mail alerts each month with a "reply" option to fax their congressional delegation. The membership pitch: Spend two minutes for a better world. Cohen came up with the caravan concept and hired a New York designer and the Massachusetts company that designed cars for the film "Monsters Inc." to make it happen. Friday, he beamed as cars honked and motorists gawked at the pig-rig and school bus parked along U.S. 2 in Williston. Whether it's politics or ice cream Cohen's selling, he leans toward wacky marketing.

The media gobbled up the story of how Cohen and business partner Jerry Greenfield -- two fat kids from Long Island -- moved to Vermont, opened an ice cream shop in a former Burlington gas station and built it into a multimillion-dollar company. The duo sold Ben & Jerry's Homemade to the British-Dutch conglomerate Unilever two years ago, but Cohen hasn't forgotten how to make a flaming jubilee sundae for 2,000 or how to get publicity on a tight budget.

"We just have to do something that's weirder to get noticed," he said.

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Read about the Rolling Thunder Democracy Tour in Chicago. TrueMajority is one of the national planning partners of this program.

Read the AP story below about TrueMajority in the Burlington Free Press. It talks about the Parade, Festival, and our campaign to change the way Washington works.

Social mission goes on parade
June 8, 2002
By Anne Wallace Allen

MONTPELIER -- Ice cream mogul Ben Cohen's newest venture isn't fruity, swirled or studded with walnuts.

It does have a giant steel-and-fiberglass Earth on wheels that shakes hands with a huge United States as it rolls down the street.

There's also an 11-foot pig, part of a trio illustrating what the federal government spends on the Pentagon, education, and foreign aid.

There's also a natural-gas-powered Ford with 20,000 1-inch-tall plastic people glued to every surface, and a double-decker bus painted a school-bus yellow that calls for doubling federal aid for education.

It's all part of TrueMajority, an enterprise aimed at reducing world poverty and hunger, promoting renewable energy and closing the gap between the rich and poor in the United States.

Even though Cohen sold his company, Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., to Unilever two years ago and could retire with a lifetime supply of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, he's still using his creative powers to change policy on the issues he cares about.

"If you're aware of injustices and you're aware of people that are getting screwed through no fault of their own, you have three choices," said Cohen, of Williston, who keeps an office in Burlington with co-founder Jerry Greenfield. "You can ignore it; you can say you care about it and not do anything about it; or you can do something about it."

Cohen, 51, is doing something about it, as he has for years. With TrueMajority, he plans to use the Internet, impromptu parades and several rock concert sideshows to sign up hundreds of thousands of e-mail users who care about the same issues he does.

Cohen hopes his new nonprofit will draw the power of some 50 million Americans who are too busy to follow each and every issue in Congress that concerns them.

"You start off with this huge number of people who share the same beliefs," Cohen said. "Until now, we'd been ineffective. But now with the technology, you are actually able to make your voice heard on all those issues."

The idea for Cohen's latest venture was born when he read the works of California sociologist Paul Ray, who estimates 50 million people in the United States hold views similar to those of Cohen on social issues.

Ray calls this group the "cultural creatives," a phrase that Cohen uses frequently when he talks about TrueMajority. The cultural creatives support things such as civil rights, environmental protection and feminism.

They tend to put their energies into only one issue, and that diminishes their overall power, Cohen said.

"If you don't hook up with the rest of those people ... no one is going to get anywhere," he said.

To give those cultural creatives more of a say, TrueMajority will monitor issues in Congress and send e-mail alerts to people on its list. By clicking "reply," the recipients can authorize TrueMajority to send a fax in their name to their representative.

"We're going to switch our strategy from trying to convince the middle-of-the-roaders to activating the converted," Cohen said.

Today, the group launches a multistate tour of its five-vehicle parade.

TrueMajority also has a carnival sideshow with ten booths traveling to music festivals this summer. The campaign's goal is to get several hundred thousand people signed up over the next 10 months.

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Here is an article about the Parade from our visit to Boston from the Boston Globe

The Boston Globe
August 4, 2002, Sunday
SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 4


HEADLINE: THIS LITTLE PIGGY MOTIVATIN' ROUND TOWN

BYLINE: BY AGNES BLUM

Blaring banjo music and wafting bubbles accompany the procession, but it's the pink pigmobile that people notice. For the past month, the porcine van and accompanying trailers have cruised through the streets of Boston and vicinity - circling the Common, winding through Jamaica Plain, and tooling across Cambridge. The pig van - with a transparent belly full of mock million-dollar bills - represents the Pentagon's budget. Two smaller pigs towed behind it symbolize the country's spending on education and ending world hunger. With the flick of a switch, speakers attached to the pig emit loud grunts.

While some befuddled drivers miss its message, the van's goal is to publicize TrueMajority.com, the Web site of TrueMajority, the nonprofit started by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream to boost grass-roots activism. The site offers a service that alerts users to issues in Congress and allows them to contact their representatives directly with the click of a mouse.

The procession will travel the country over the next 10 months, said Jeff Galusha, who drives the pig.

During a recent drive down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, pedestrians stopped in their tracks and stared. A school bus filled with kids pulled up along side the pig and the children pressed their faces against the windows, screaming.

"Yeah, kids just love us," Galusha said. "So do cabbies. And construction workers - they go nuts! People have been very receptive to our message."

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One of the authors of this piece, Vice-Adm. Jack Shanahan (Ret.) is a military advisor to TrueMajority. This piece appeared in Defense News.

Bury Cold War Mindset
Fourth-Generation Warfare Rewrites Military Strategy
August 5, 2002
by Jack Shanahan, Chet Richards and Franklin Spinney

The pay phone may be the ultimate counter to our arsenal of fighters, tanks, nuclear aircraft carriers and stealth bombers.

For a total cost of 35 cents, any terrorist can bring traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge to a stop or empty an airport. The result is a pervasive climate of fear. In Alexandria, Va., for example, people are afraid to buy condominiums near the new federal courthouse.

And Americans are still so afraid of airports, or tired of all the security hassles, that they are using their cars for short trips or not going at all.

All this would be amusing, though a little inconvenient, if it were not a clear indication that our enemies are discovering our weaknesses and obsessions and using them as levers to unhinge us.

What America faces today is sophisticated guerrilla warfare, called fourth-generation warfare (4GW) by military experts. It represents the culmination of more than 300 years of development and experimentation in the art of war, since the Peace of Westphalia ended Europe's wars of religion in 1648 and granted the emerging nation-state system a monopoly on the use of organized violence.

At its best, fourth-generation warfare pits nations against non-national organizations or networks that include not only fundamentalist extremists, but also ethnic factions, mafias and narcotics traffickers.

Unlike the guerrilla warriors and terrorists of the past, today's sophisticated guerrilla warfare is rendered more ubiquitous, intrusive and lethal by computers, mass communications and high-speed transportation systems.

These tools allow highly motivated small groups like al-Qaida to bypass the capacity of a nation state to protect itself through the use of conventional military means. They focus their attacks directly on centers of culture and political power.

The aim of the 4GW guerrilla warrior is not specifically directed at defeating his adversary's army, but at penetrating his political system and ultimately inducing him to conclude that continuing his state's policies is not worth the cost.

How well will our military cope with this new form of warfare? Not well, if we consider the lessons of Vietnam, Mogadishu, Beirut and even Afghanistan, where we failed to capture either Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden, or for that matter, most of the leaders of al-Qaida.

Unfortunately, the Pentagon is still dominated by Cold Warriors, obsessed with big, expensive weapon programs. Congress is still addicted to the jobs and political contributions that can only come from defense contractors with massive hardware programs.

Programs that truly increase our effectiveness, including tough and highly realistic training, cannot compete in either votes or political action committee money.

There are solutions, but unfortunately no easy ones. Adjustments at the margin are not going to do the job, and some solutions may even require constitutional changes.

One of the main forces locking us into an outmoded defense posture is the jobs, money and votes generated by military industrial welfare programs. To begin to address this problem, we need to reduce the amount of money needed for political campaigns.

At the Pentagon, specific personnel changes are required, in particular closing the revolving door that rewards senior military leaders with the promise of future civilian employment if they "play the game."

It is wrong to force honorable officers to choose between doing their duty to their country and then supporting their families on retirement pay, or playing the game and perhaps supplementing their pensions with a six-figure position at a defense contractor or serving as a consultant to one.

As for the organization of the Pentagon itself, only one mechanism for transforming large organizations has shown itself to be effective is the one used by Jack Welch, former chief executive of General Electric, that earned him the nickname, "Neutron Jack."

Welch shed entire divisions and reorganized the company from the ground up. Such a process, while unlikely to happen, would be the best way forward for the Pentagon.

It is not unreasonable to expect that 50 percent or more of our current forces need to be retired or radically changed. In fact, it would be a righteous miracle if the military establishment we created for rapid mobilization against massive Soviet armies on the plains of Europe turned out to be well-suited to run to ground a shadowy 4GW enemy in the jungles and teeming cities of the Third World.

We can either do the hard work of dismantling our Cold War weapons, organizations and mindsets, or we had better get used to long evenings cowering under our beds.

Retired U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Jack Shanahan is an adviser to TrueMajority.com, a project of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, New York. Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Chet Richards is a strategist with Tarkenton & Addams, a public relations firm in Atlanta. Franklin Spinney is a civilian analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. These views do not reflect a position of the Department of Defense.

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This story about the Parade appeared in the The Patriot Ledger and talks about when the Parade was in the Boston area.

Group parades through Quincy to promote activism
July 31, 2002
By Gillian Reagan

QUINCY - Parade crew chief Jeffrey Dolan, 37, waved to Quincy Center bystanders from a hybrid gas-electric car, with its giant plastic tree glowing on the roof.

As the vehicle switched from electric to gas power, images of oil barrels and missiles appeared on the sides of the vehicle and loud construction noises emanated from its speakers.

The "Energy Independence" car represents one of the principles of TrueMajority, an organization that claims 30,000 members and held the parade yesterday to promote activism. Dolan, formerly of Hanover, is a member of TrueMajority, which was founded and funded by Ben Cohen, former co-owner of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. "The true majority of Americans want the country to be going in a different direction than it's going in," Cohen said. He said people want to make a difference, but time constraints discourage activists.

"It's a crazy world out there, and we're all busy people, and nobody has the time to follow those issues of Congress," he said. Cohen said the power of technology and the Internet open a door for activists.

Once registered, TrueMajority members receive two E-mail alerts each month about Congressional action on issues ranging from nuclear safety to passing the Treaty for the Rights of Women. The E-mail includes a reply option to fax their congressmen about the issues.

"We feel that our members' voice could be important," Dolan said.

Cohen dreamed up the idea for the "offbeat" parade to help promote the organization and hired a New York designer to create the festive vehicles.

Dolan joined four other TrueMajority members to devote the next 10 months to the parade, which began June 8 in Burlington, Vt. The vehicles will trek to nine other cities before returning to Vermont in March.

"We're trying to make politics fun with this parade and give people who are perhaps dissatisfied with our political power a little hope," Dolan said.

Along with the "Energy Independence" car, the "America Greets the World" car pulls a 12-foot Earth, made of giant steel and fiberglass, shaking hands with a cut-out outline of America, symbolizing the U.S. role in globalization. The car generates bubbles and plays organ music.

The "Double Up for Education" double-decker school bus broadcasts the sound of kids playing and promoting the increase of federal aid to education.

Three little piggies also roll in the parade. The "Rolling Piggies" include a 12-foot bright pink piggy bank labeled "Pentagon," two smaller "education" and "world hunger" piggy banks, representing the U.S. humanitarian foreign aid budget.

In conjunction with the parade, 10 TrueMajority carnival booths will travel to music festivals this summer with games and voter registration available.

Cohen hopes to have 100,000 members by the end of the campaign.

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Read the story below about TrueMajority in PR Week, the industry magazine about Public Relations. It talks about what a creative campaign TrueMajority is.

BEN & JERRY'S FOUNDER LAUNCHES POLITICAL ACTIVISM SITE
August 19, 2002
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

WASHINGTON: Famed ice-cream maker Ben Cohen has entered the world of internet political activism with a website called True Majority, and his efforts to promote the new venture bear the distinctively eccentric Ben & Jerry's signature.

The free site operates on the principle that millions of citizens feel strongly about the same issues, but lack the time to take action to support them. True Majority users, who agree on 10 basic principles, are periodically sent e-mails that give them the opportunity to send a fax to their congressmen with a single click.

Those principals include championing human rights, ending American dependence on oil, renouncing the militarization of space, and getting the money out of politics.

'There are at least 50 million people who agree with us about these principles,' Cohen told PRWeek, 'but in the age before the internet, if you were concerned as an individual, it was impossible for you to be involved. True Majority takes advantage of the political potential of the internet.'

Traveling around the country this summer in support of the new venture is a parade consisting of four wildly decorated vehicles, each representing one of the 10 principles. One is a giant piggy bank representing the Pentagon's budget, followed by two tiny pigs representing America's financial commitment to world hunger and education, respectively. Another is a giant America shaking hands with a giant globe.

True Majority is also sending out entertaining e-mails in hopes of starting a viral e-mail campaign, as well as sponsoring a recently completed festival that toured with jam band The String Cheese Incident.

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This story, from the Providence Journal-Bulletin talks about the Parade's visit to Providence, RI.

A swan song for Cianci at annual picnic -for seniors
August 12, 2002
by Liz Anderson and Mark Arsenault

A liberal road trip

It's a wild and wacky road trip where the choices of wheels are a natural-gas-powered taxi, a tree-adorned hybrid car, a Winnebago, a double-decker bus and a pig.

Actually, the double-decker bus was in the shop. But the other vehicles made a quick pit stop Friday outside the Rhode Island State House after parading through downtown Providence to draw attention to a left-leaning political action campaign.

Truemajority.com - founded by Ben & Jerry's ice cream magnate Ben Cohen -- aims to sign up thousands of concerned citizens who agree to receive e-mail alerts once or twice a month about key issues, among them the environment, civil rights, reducing the country's dependence on oil, getting money out of politics, and renouncing "Star Wars and the militarization of space."

The e-mail alert will also allow recipients to send a message to their members of Congress or the president with one click.

The five members of the True Majority team live in the Winnebago while they tour the country spreading the message and signing up interested voters. They've been on the road for the past month, and are scheduled to continue through March.

They've already been to Portland, Maine, and down through Boston -- eventually the trip will take them to San Francisco and along the West Coast.

The effort has 11 "target markets" home to people they call "cultural creatives," with an "urban dynamic and university influence."

Targets include the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Madison, Wis., and Philadelphia.

Sorry, Providence, you did not make the list.

The five members of this socially conscious "Road Rules"-style adventure sleep in the RV when they're not rolling down the highway. They range in age from 24 to 37, and hail from all over the country.

Jeff Dolan, the crew chief, comes from just up the road, in Hanover, Mass. The other four are Joel Baier, from Warren, N.J.; Susan Brown from Burlington, N.C.; Wendy Wu from Silver Spring, Md.; and Jeff Galusha of Ramona, Calif.

Galusha gets to drive the pig, a converted Chevrolet Express van shaped like a piggy bank to reflect national spending. Its side reads "Pentagon" and $369 billion; two smaller trailers represent education, at $34 billion, and world hunger and poverty, at $10 billion.

Baier gets to drive the Toyota gas-and-electric hybrid -- the one with the tree on top. While passing through Boston recently, he recalled, two 20-somethings came up, knocked on the window and pressed a pepperoni pizza into his hand.

As they left, he heard them say, "I feel really good about myself. I just did something for the environment!"

"Well at least they did something for the driver of the environment," he quipped.

The RV is adorned with a drawing of the United States reaching out to shake hands with the world. The taxi, which plays parade music, is affixed with plastic people to represent the voters with whom the group hopes to connect. The MIA bus has a message telling people to "double up" on education spending.

The crew hoped to pick up its bus from a Connecticut repair shop later Friday afternoon, en route to New Haven and then New York City. But first they were off to New England Gas -- to fuel up the taxi.

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The Harvard Crimson wrote this erudite piece on the campaign.

Pigs parade through Harvard Square
By Stephanie M. Skier, Harvard Crimson
Cambridge, Mass.

Giant piggy banks showing disparities in U.S. government spending have been rolling down Mass. Ave. with bellies full of play money for the past several weeks, drawing notice from amused and confused onlookers in Harvard Square.

One large pig van leads the chain of vehicles, with "Pentagon. $ 396 Billion" painted on its side. Two smaller piggy banks follow, reading "Education K-12. $ 34 Billion" and "World Hunger and Poverty. $ 10 Billion." The pig van -- along with a hybrid Toyota Prius with a tree seemingly growing on the roof and an RV with charts of military spending -- were driving along the Harvard Square leg of a national "parade" to create awareness of government spending priorities and get more people involved in progressive politics.

"One of the problems with politics is that it's been kind of dry, especially these issues on the left," says Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, who also founded the organization behind the pigs on parade, TrueMajority.

Since June, TrueMajority has been publicizing its Web site, www.truemajority.org, through its parade, a traveling carnival and an e-mail campaign.

The "one-click activism," in which TrueMajority sends e-mail alerts to members about issues in Congress and members can generate a fax to their representatives by just clicking "reply," will allow voices of alienated or uninformed progressives to be heard, says TrueMajority spokesman Jeffrey X.E. Galusha.

For nearly six years, Cohen has worked with the nonprofit group Priorities, a group of business leaders concerned with how the national budget is allocated. TrueMajority grew out of discussions of what business leaders could do to contribute to progressive politics.

"The things we could add would be a business marketing mentality and the credibility that business people have in terms of budgeting and big numbers of money and large organizations," Cohen says.

The many graphs, charts and other visuals that TrueMajority showcases in its publicity is part of an effort to make people aware of the large difference between millions and billions, Cohen says.

"You see these newspaper accounts. It all seems the same," he says. "When it says the president gives $ 5 million for education, it pretty much runs the same way as when it says the president gives $ 10 billion for some weapons system."

Shifting spending from the military to other programs is a central message of TrueMajority's campaign.

"We need to move money out of Cold War era expenses and into social needs," Cohen says.

Shifting a fraction of the defense budget to social priorities such as education, health care and world hunger could have a significant impact on these social issues, according to Cohen.

"For $ 20 billion, you can take care of health care for every child in the U.S. and take care of 50,000 kids around the world who are dying every day from hunger and malnutrition," he says.

TrueMajority is concerned with wasteful spending, particularly on military weapons systems that it claims are no longer needed given the current geopolitical situation.

"[Pentagon officials] misspend a lot of the money. It's $ 396 billion with no accountability," Galusha says. "The World Trade Center [attack] just demonstrated that you don't need advanced weapons to bomb us."

Cohen and Galusha say TrueMajority is neither anti-military nor anti-government.

"There's nothing wrong with defense,"