The Concord Monitor has a story on Ben Cohen (as in “Ben & Jerry’s”) and his misguided “stampede” to quash Free Speech. Just like NH Rebellion and the Mayday PAC, he wants tax monies used to pay for campaigns. Yeah, once again, we’d have to petition Government to provide money just to be able to get elected. Gee, “what CAN’T government do for YOU??” seems to be their mantra – in direct opposition to our Founding Fathers that wanted to keep government out of most things unless expressly permitted. Reformatted, emphasis mine:
Setting aside the ice cream, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s spends his time these days working on solving an issue that he says has a chance to send the government as we know it “down the tubes” and replace it with a plutocracy.
So, he wants to replace the Founders’ philosophy on governance all together? Plutocracy:
1. the rule or power of wealth or of the wealthy.
2. a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.
3. a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.
Why is it that Liberals / Progressives hate the government “by and for the people” except when they are the people at the top? After all, that’s what these incremental Socialist want. So here is what he’s trying to do:
His method is a petition on steroids: stamping dollar bills with messages like, “Not to be used for bribing politicians,” that he estimates have already made 87 million impressions across the country. The focus for the next year is on New Hampshire, where 800 people have purchased stamps. Cohen and the rest of his nonprofit, the Stamp Stampede, intend to mark 10 percent of the bills in the state before the 2016 presidential primary, and to do so they’re looking to get an additional 6,000 stampers on board. The Stamp Stampede is organizing with local businesses, like the Common Man Restaurants, to have booths where you can stamp your bills, and with a church to stamp all the money that lands in the collection plate. In an interview with the Monitor on Thursday, Cohen said he’s soon headed to Los Angeles, among the other appearances he and Jerry Greenfield make around the country, to attempt to get TV writers to have your favorite characters stamping bills as they progress the plot with dialogue.
What he wants is top lawmakers talking about ways to reduce the corrupting influence of money in politics and a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, the controversial Supreme Court decision that found the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation.
Every time I hear this line of reasoning, it is clear that the mantra that Progressives have (the misguided one that they can “evolve” the rest of us to their standard, to change our basic nature even as basic human nature has not changed a whit over the eras, especially that of wanting to control others) is morphed into campaigning. They can’t leave well enough alone – just leave us alone!
And even at that, Cohen is being just like Lessig – spending lots of money in a campaign effort to decrease the amount of money used in campaigns; the irony just drips. But this next one, just like what Lessig and his Mayday PAC wants to do, just makes my pints melt:
Merely returning to a pre-Citizens United environment isn’t enough, Cohen said. He supports a system like that in New York City in which if a candidate agrees to accept only small-dollar donations – $100 or $200 – those donations would be matched six times over by the government. A candidate with big donors could opt out, but “what’s happened in New York City is that the match is so rich, just about everybody opts in.”
So, let’s have Government bribe you to campaign the way it wants to – such a SPLENDID idea in having government already shaping those that want to run to control it. Pavlovian, eh?
Actually, the worst part of this is WHY would I want to cooperate with such a system? WHY would I want to have MY tax monies given to a candidate, or a gaggle thereof, to those whose stances and philosophy are radically different than mine. This, at its base level, is forcing me to supply my political enemies with the ammo with which to defeat me and the messages I wish to put out. And yes, they should be equally as mad over the opposite. But that is what happens when “Free Money!!!” from Government enters the scene – while Cohen and Lessig rail against the influence of private money, they NEVER wish to talk about the same problem when Government is in charge of the money.
That’s the most important part – once again, people looking to Government to be more in control of more things than what they already are. This next part is just one more annoying example of hubris of over-moneyed Liberals who believe the world exists to not get in their way:
…Contrary to the belief of half the public, Cohen said, stamping bills isn’t illegal unless you intend to distort the bill to the point that it’s “unfit to be reissued,” according to federal law. Stamp buyers are instructed on best stamping practices, including a tip to avoid the center third of a bill, since that’s where Cohen believes federal money scanners are searching for points of altered light reflectivity and taking offenders out of circulation…To the best of his knowledge, Cohen said, the bills aren’t being taken out of circulation “if they’re stamped properly.”
Heh!
On stampstampede.org, almost all the prominently displayed bills are stamped improperly. “We have to change that,” Cohen said.
Details count – especially when you are defacing US Currency. But here’s the good part:
Using the website’s assumptions – that each stamp sold, or about 32,000, is used to mark about three bills a day all year – about 35 million bills a year would be marked. Assuming those are all $1 bills, which are the cheapest to produce at about 5 cents apiece, if every bill were kicked out of circulation by federal money-scanning machines, the cost would be $1.75 million a year to replace them.
Cohen said if that’s happening, “They should recalibrate their machines. They shouldn’t kick them out.”
Yeah. It’s just so silly to have standards for stuff, including money, that just get in the way of Liberals’ hissy fits. And Ben Cohen just isn’t happy when he can’t have our money his way.
