When you stop into Sweet_ness 7, you never know what to expect. It could be a twist on food or drink, or an artist or poet working on a project, or something as simple as a message stamped on a dollar bill. “I thought that you would appreciate this one,” owner Prish Moran told me as she handed me back my change. “Look at the dollar. It’s a stamped message that reminds people to always do the right thing.”
In this case, my stamped dollar read, ‘Not to be used for bribing politicians’. As I mentioned earlier, nothing surprises me at Sweet_ness 7 because I know Prish, and she’s not afraid to wear her convictions on her sleeve… or print them on her dollar bills. “It’s a great way to get a message across,” Prish stated. “The stamp campaign was started by Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. Another stamp reads, ‘Stamp Money Out of Politics’. This is an excellent way to spread the word to people that corporations should not be able to buy votes.”
Learn more about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
One of the things that I learned about this campaign, is that it’s actually legal to stamp dollar bills… something that I always thought was illegal. Instead of the ‘power of the pen’, grassroots activists have realized the ‘power of the stamp’, and how a different form of hand-to-hand-combat can be waged by spreading messages on something as handy as United States currency. In this case the battle is in favor of an amendment that would overturn the action that allows corporations to sway elections through limitless spending of their own dollars.