What do an upside-down school bus and a stack of Oreo cookies have in common with U.S. military spending?

It’s not the start of some random joke — it’s “Topsy,” an “art bus” created by Ben (as in Ben & Jerry’s) Cohen — and it’s following candidates along the Primary Trail this election season.

Part of a campaign co-sponsored by True Majority and Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, the Topsy bus takes aim at the U.S. government’s upside-down budgetary spending. Bearing the message “The U.S. Budget is Topsy-Turvy,” Topsy follows in the tracks of earlier Cohen projects, like the animated flash “Oreo cookie video” which made web rounds in 2004. In the video, a cartoon Cohen stacks Oreo cookies representing the U.S. budget. A 40-cookie tower equates the Pentagon’s share of the federal pie, an annual allocation of $463 billion. The tower dwarfs the 4 cookies allotted for K–12 education, the single cookie allocated to world hunger, and the piddling quarter of a cookie parceled out to alternative energy projects.

The total annual cost for American “security,” including defense expenditures for the Departments of Energy, State, Justice, Veterans Affairs, Treasury and NASA, is a whopping $934.9 billion — more than the total defense expenditures of all other nations combined. This incomprehensibly large sum still does not include the cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan — an amount which, growing by the minute, has already surpassed half a trillion dollars.

Cohen and his coterie propose that the “cookies” allocated to defense spending are supporting outdated and ineffective measures. “A bunch of the candidates [on the campaign trail] have admitted that there is a tremendous waste in the Pentagon and that they would seek to compact that waste,” says Cohen, who is marshalling 8,000 volunteers to spread the word in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire. “People are talking about how the military is so stretched now. It’s beginning to become mainstream.”

“Wars of the future,” according to Cohen, “are not going to be against other countries — they’re going to be against guerillas and terrorists. Nuclear submarines don’t really play a roll in that.”

The Sensible Priorities campaign proposes to take that $60 billion (or 6 cookies) and rebuild schools, eliminate need for Middle Eastern oil, feed the six million starving children worldwide, provide all children with health insurance, and give Head Start to every kid who needs it.

To find out when Topsy rolls into your town, check out www.sensiblepriorities.org/topsy.php. Watch Cohen in the cookie flash movie at truemajority.org/oreos.

— Jessie Tierney for Conscious Choice Magazine