Ben & Jerry’s co-founder: The ‘ultra-wealthy’ fuel Clinton’s campaign

Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen said Tuesday that the “ultra-wealthy” favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“If you’re looking for incremental change, fiddling around the edges, Hillary will do that,” Cohen said on The Boston Herald Radio’s “Herald Drive.”

{mosads}“If you realize the government is seriously flawed, that the system isn’t broken but rigged, it’s no accident that all this money is going up to the very top when the rest of us are struggling harder and harder to get by.” 

Cohen announced Monday that he is releasing a limited edition ice cream flavor championing Sanders’s White House run. The flavor, called “Bernie’s Yearning,” is a limited edition treat that is available via a contest and is not an official Ben & Jerry’s product.

“You’ve got to have fighter, a passionate guy like Bernie, who’s not in the pocket of major corporations and the ultra-wealthy that are fueling Hillary’s campaign,” Cohen said. 

“Bernie is not a guy who’s reading polls and deciding what he should say. This is what he believes in.”

Cohen said corporations are taking advantage of campaign finance laws to tilt the political process in their favor. That dynamic has enriched the top 1 percent, he said.

“There’s only one reason that these corporations are making these political donations — it is not out of the goodness of their hearts,” Cohen said. “They want something for it.

“The top 1 percent of our country owns as much wealth as the bottom 99 percent. That’s un-American.”

The Ben & Jerry’s co-founder said Donald Trump is tapping into the same frustrations that are fueling the rise of Sanders, though he said the candidates differ in their approach.

“Personally, I think Bernie is choosing the high road,” Cohen said. “Trump is choosing the low road of hate and blame.”