A mother's plea evolves into a cause (Ben and Jerry creator backing and coordinating media coverage)

....TrueMajority, an antiwar group founded by Ben Cohen -- one of the creators of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream -- hired Fenton Communications, a Washington public relations firm that has worked intermittently with Sheehan over the past year to coordinate media coverage.

With this help, Sheehan has courted coverage from the traveling White House press corps with a news conference. A schedule of when relatives of other military casualties in Iraq are expected to join Sheehan in Crawford was distributed to reporters. Her team coordinated an antiwar rally attended by hundreds in Crawford yesterday.

Sheehan also launched a television ad campaign yesterday, hoping to achieve what her roadside vigil so far has not: a second chance to directly tell Bush about the devastation she has experienced since her son's death.

''Mr. President, I want to tell you face to face how much this hurts," Sheehan says in the ad, which will air in Waco, the nearest broadcast market to Bush's 1,600-acre ranch. ''How many more of our loved ones need to die in this senseless war?"

Bush has been publicly respectful, telling reporters that he has thought ''long and hard about her position," even though he disagrees with her about the war.

''Withdrawing our troops from Iraq prematurely would betray the Iraqi people, and would cause others to question America's commitment to spreading freedom and winning the war on terror," Bush said in his weekly radio address yesterday. ''So we will honor the fallen by completing the mission for which they gave their lives, and by doing so we will ensure that freedom and peace prevail."

****.......United for Peace is nonetheless flogging Ms. Sheehan's story in the run-up to its big weekend of "civil disobedience" and "direct action" next month in Washington. That protest is timed to coincide with World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, so that the people who were throwing rocks at Starbucks in Seattle to protest free trade back during the Clinton administration can now make common cause with the anti-war folks.

The news that Congressman Conyers and Congresswoman Waters are involved fits with the rest of the picture. Mr. Conyers was the host of a Democratic "hearing" in June on the Iraq war that his fellow Democrat, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, protested was a forum for "people motivated by anti-Semitic or anti-Israel animus." And Ms. Waters is still best known for having endorsed the conspiracy theory that the CIA caused the crack epidemic in American cities.

This whole crowd probably gains more from its association with Ms. Sheehan than she gains from her association with them. But all together, it's not a pretty picture. ........***

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1462577/posts?page=180#180

Thanks for the information.

I'm glad I put "creator."

All those nice ice cream profits went into an anti-American's pocket.

From the leftist site "Common Dreams:"

***So Unilever has gobbled up Ben & Jerry's. The $45 billion megacompany that rose from the British and Dutch colonial empires (turning palm and coconut oil into soap and margarine) has acquired Vermont's outrageous little ice cream maker for $326 million. The American dream at work. A couple of hippies invent wild new ice cream flavors in their garage and end up multimillionaires. ........

What will happen to the Ben & Jerry's Foundation? (As a condition of the deal, Unilever will continue giving away 7.5 percent of all pre-tax profits and will contribute an up-front $5 million to the foundation -- plus another $5 million for minority-owned business startups and yet another $5 million to employees. What the Foundation will fund in the future remains, of course, to be seen.) ........***

http://www.commondreams.org/views/041300-106.htm

___________________________________________________

"Scotsman": ***REVENGE, for the shock troops of the anti-globalisation movement, is a dish best served cold - preferably in the form of ice-cream, marbled with chocolate-chip cookie dough or fudge-covered, peanut butter-filled pretzels. Last year, the Ruckus Society, which trained the activists who were instrumental in shutting down the 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle, received $100,000 from The Ben & Jerry Foundation. The foundation’s own coffers had recently received a $5 million donation from Unilever, the company that sells a range of goods, from Lipton tea to Dove soap, in 150 countries.

The gift, along with a $5m venture capital fund for "ethical start-ups" and a commitment to donate $1.1m annually to groups campaigning for social change, was part of a deal wrung from the Anglo-Dutch concern by the ice-cream company founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield when they sold to the multinational. That and the $326m asking price for the business they had begun as a happy-hippy culinary whim.

"It’s great that it’s Unilever money," John Sellers, the Ruckus Society’s director, told the Financial Times. "There’s no better way to launder corporate multinational largesse than by giving to the movement that is confronting it."

Unilever was well aware where the money was headed; during negotiations over the sale of Ben & Jerry’s, Cohen and Greenfield had many forthright discussions with the company’s directors about ethics in business. Obviously, Unilever thought that the donations represented a price worth paying for such a strong brand; in the debate - sometimes violent conflict - over the pros and cons of global trade, irony is layered upon irony, upon marshmallow pieces, upon caramel swirls. ....***

***.....If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints. ...

...It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself. ...*** Source

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.