Pigs Parade Through Harvard Square

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 website, 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 spokesperson Jeffrey X.E. Galusha.

For nearly six years, Cohen has worked with the non-profit group Priorities, a group of business leaders that is 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,” he says.

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

“There’s nothing wrong with defense,” Cohen says. “We believe in defense and we believe in America, but we’ve got a staff of military admirals and generals who say the amount of money spent on it is absurd.”

“We’re anti-waste,” Galusha says. “We’re not anti-government at all.”

TrueMajority has a board of military advisers that includes retired admirals and generals as well as a board of business advisers, both of which are featured prominently in the organization’s website and informational literature.

“We actually had some focus groups done that indicated that the only two players in our society that would have credibility to the general population on the issue of putting more money into social needs and reducing Pentagon spending would be retired military people and business people,” Cohen says. “So we tried to play to those strengths.”

On the Road

Rolling down Mass. Ave. on a sunny afternoon, pedestrians stop and take notice of these strange cars.

“It’s a nice visual presentation, and that’s just to get the people who aren’t exited about politics involved,” says Galusha, who drives the pig van. “You need something that goes over the top, that wows people.”

“Basically everything came out of the numbers,” says Stefan Sagmeister, the New York artist who designed the TrueMajority parade vehicles.

The parade began with test runs in Cohen’s hometown of Burlington, Vt. and continued through Portland, Maine, and around Massachusetts to Boston, Cambridge, Hyannis and Provincetown.

While in Maine, the group stopped in Kennebunkport to visit the vacation home of the Bush family.

“We wanted give [President] Bush a ride in the pigs, but he couldn’t come out to play,” Galusha says.

This weekend, TrueMajority will take its parade to New York City and then will travel out to the West Coast, stopping in cities along the way.

Besides the parade, another way TrueMajority has promoted itself is through carnival-style game booths that give information about government spending. The carnival has toured with the Warped Tour, the band The String Cheese Incident and several other outdoor musical performances.

The organization was partly inspired by sociologist Paul H. Ray’s theory of “cultural creatives”—50 million people in the U.S. who are concerned with environmental issues, sustainable development, peace, social justice and interpersonal relationships.

Although these “cultural creatives” share many similar political views, but tend to focus on issue-based activism without any coalition to represent this constituency, Cohen says.

“People think, ‘I can’t deal with 10 issues, so I’ll only deal with one or two,’” he says.

Since TrueMajority began publicity in June, about 30,000 people have signed up on its website. Their goal is to get 100,000 people signed up by the end of the year, Galusha says.

TrueMajority has formed partnerships with various progressive organizations, including Physicians for Social Responsibility, the National Head Start Association, La Raza, the Service Employees International Union and Greenpeace.

—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.